Note: The re-establishment of Gallifrey as actually not being blown up offers a whole host of new possibilities, both for the writers of the show and for overzealous fanfic writers. Here's a story from one of the latter.

Chapter 1: A Way Out (Day 1, Part 1)

Day 1

I intend to keep this journal as a record of my travels, the things I will see, the places I will go, the people I will meet.

For the purposes of this journal, each "Day" is a 24-hour cycle. I am choosing to count time by way of Earth Days in order to emulate an idol of mine, the Doctor, who I believe would approve of such things.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Because I enjoy stories, I will tell this journal as a story. I do not expect it to be read. In fact, I think I would be rather annoyed if it were read. Nonetheless I will tell this as a story, and I imagine that there is a reader. Reader: shame on you, going through my personal things. I was the only one who was supposed to see this.

Therefore, this will require an introduction. My name is Leanna. I am a Gallifreyan.

Since that probably means very little to you, imaginary reader who I have decided for some reason is human, allow me to clarify.

Gallifrey is a planet, which once upon a time orbited the twin stars Selas and Sulas. Nowadays, of course, it doesn't orbit much of anything at all, but is rather suspended within a bubble universe, which is self-sustaining. We get energy; we even get simulated day and night, but Selas, and Sulas we do not get.

The native people of the planet are typically assumed to be "Time Lords" which is rather like saying that the native people of Earth are actually called "Presidents". Instead we were once, in the long distant past referred to as "Olecians" but are nowadays simply called "Gallifreyans".

The Time Lords are a subspecies, of which I am not a member. This subspecies is artificially created, rather than via the traditional means of creating a subspecies via population split and natural selection. What makes them different is a discussion for another time, but they are actually made up of the best and brightest of the planet. Graduates who pass several rigorous exams and prove themselves to be fit are changed into Time Lords by the High Council of Gallifrey. Graduates educated at Universities like the Citadel Institute. The Citadel Institute where I teach.

Taught. Must keep reminding myself that the past tense is a very real thing for me now. So much of what used to be my day-to-day life is now told in the past tense.

Regardless, my field of expertise is temporal physics. And my story begins in a lecture where I was explaining just exactly what had happened to us.

I was going through the basics, explaining how the 13 Doctors had sealed us in a bubble of pure time energy then transported us all to this bubble universe. And then I opened up the floor to questions.

I had no idea I was opening up the floodgates.

Most of the questions were about stuff we'd cover later in the unit. But then there were the questions about potential ways out of our situation. Most of them were awful.

Could we surround the planet with TARDISes to get Gallifrey out the same way it got back in? Of course not. That would just put us in a new bubble universe.

Could we possibly use an efator beam to cut a hole in the bubble universe and travel back to our own? Sure. It wasn't technically impossible. But we'd have no way of telling what universe we were cutting in to. There were infinite universes we could end up transporting to, and we'd have to find the right one, singular. And if we found the wrong one, there was a non-zero, probably significantly more than half possibility that we end up in a universe that cannot support our form of life. And you can guess what happens next.

Couldn't a TARDIS get someone out of this bubble universe? TARDISes had been used for inter-universal travel before after all, and they were technically attracted to our home universe. Except of course all of the TARDISes were locked into the bubble universe by a time-lock.

Except that that last idea? It wasn't exactly terrible.

TARDISes exist outside of time. Maybe that's not the proper wording. Maybe it's better to say that they can travel freely along their own timestreams. In theory, emphasis on the word "theory", a TARDIS could traverse its timestream with someone inside to a point before the Time War, then veer off in another direction.

The pilot would have to maintain absolute precision however.

I spent three days straight on the calculations. Three days, locked in my room, not taking visitors, not so much as saying "hello" to anybody working on the calculations. I did make sure somebody else would cover my classes, so there was that. I also managed to eat. It's very important to eat. Dear imaginary reader, if you ever have a project so important that you lock yourself in a room to complete, make sure you have a well stocked cupboard first.

By the end of day three I was tired, having slept very little, hungry, having eaten very little, but the end was in sight. And that was when there was a knock at my door.

What the hell, I thought, and opened the door. It was one of my students. Not one I terribly liked either.

"Hescallion," I grunted, "I'm in the middle – well technically closer to the end – of a key project here. If you could come back in a day or so."

"Professor Leanna," said Hescallion, "you haven't been in the classroom in three days."

"Like I said, key project."

Hescallion then launched in on me. He was an aspiring Time Lord, a position I hope he never achieves, and I was his temporal physics professor. By not showing up to class, or so he claimed, I was directly impacting his chances of passing the Time Lord exams. He also, in the same breath I might add, claimed that I was incapable of preparing him to pass the Time Lord exams, since I had failed them.

This is what I wish I had said to him:

"Hescallion, you might think you're smart. Hey, maybe you even are. But I'm your Temporal Physics professor. When I took the exams do you know how I did on temporal physics? I got a perfect score. A perfect score do you hear me? Do you know how often that's happened? In history? Three times. Counting me. In fact, I passed every exam except for one. That's better than 90% of anyone who takes the Time Lord exams does. So tell me, am I qualified to teach you Temporal Physics?"

That would have shut him up. I wouldn't have told him which exam I failed. That would have only convinced him more that I wasn't capable of teaching him.

Unfortunately, I was working on severe sleep deprivation, among a half dozen other barriers to forming lengthy arguments. So instead I muttered something about hypocrisy and shoved him out the door.

Besides, truth be told, Hescallion's words didn't phase me much. Normally they would. I hate that I didn't make Time Lord. It eats away at me, to this day. But I was on the verge of something huge. I knew it. It was possible, all I had to do was complete the equations.

I could tell the High Council of Gallifrey how to get back to our home universe. I could give us a way out.