1) Donna Noble becomes the Doctor-Donna.
2) Donna loses her memories.
3) One year, seven hours, and thirty two minutes later, Donna begins messing around with kitchen gadgets. The toaster disappears from her hand and reappears 5 hours later and 3.147 inches to the left with the toast still cooking inside it. As soon as it pops, the toaster bursts into flames.
"Why is there a burn mark in the counter?"
"Oi, none of your business!"
4) Next time it's a car.
The dog is in the back seat, and when it reappears the mangy old cocker spaniel is now a glossy young puppy. And no longer house-trained.
She just barely gets it out of the vehicle before the interior spontaneously combusts.
"Honey, why is there a scorch mark on the driveway?"
"Oi, none of your business!"
5) The next time, it's the dishwasher. When Donna crawls inside, it's mid-afternoon. When she crawls back out (seemingly five minutes later), it's two in the morning.
This time, there is no explosion. The next time she looks in the mirror, however, there's a smudge of ash where her eyebrows used to be.
"Why is there smoke in the kitchen?"
"Oi, none of your business!"
6) The next time, she figures she may as well go whole-hog and purchases a golf cart for the sole purpose of experimenting on.
Aside from a single setback in which it vanishes for three months, resurfacing on top of the guest bedroom ("Honey, why is there a -" "OI, none of your business!"), it goes quite well.
It's a good thing she remembered to install the anti-combustion filter.
"Wait. The anti-combusto what-so?"
"Oi, none of your -"
7) It's six weeks later that she creates what seems to be a working time-machine, cleverly disguised as a dryer. It seems to go quite well - until she looks through the glass window and realizes she's on the moon.
She's curled up inside it for a good two hours, laying on her back as she reaches up and taps random wire ends together as though trying to hot-wire a car.
By the time she makes it back to her laundry-room/lab, it's just in time to watch herself take off.
"Honey, why are there burn marks in the clothes?"
"Oi. None of your -"
8) By now, her husband is seriously concerned.
9) Two months later, the dryer takes off again with Donna inside it. Try as she might, Donna can't figure out how to go back.
And then she realizes she's been dropped on Raxacoricofallipatorious on the eve of the outbreak of the Civil War, and there are much bigger problems to deal with.
(Back home, her husband begins to believe all those crack theories about supernatural occurrences that come from living on electric-magnetic hot-spots.)
10) After retrieving a missing set of royal tiaras, bullying several prominent diplomats into baking apology cookies, and winning an excellent drinking contest, Donna decides that she is good at averting Civil Wars.
11) The dryer next takes her to the Australian outback in 1885. She's not so fond of the heat. The men, however, are a totally different story. Which reminds her -
(Back home, her husband invites a specialized psychic to seek Donna's presence. "She is far, far away," the woman says, and refuses to come back the next time he calls.)
12) "Clom? What kind of a name for a planet is Clom?"
13) It's a bit of a problem when the dryer starts taking her to planets with a different atmosphere, until Donna fiddles with the dryer to extend the air shell. She almost calls it the Atmos-shell, but something about that sounds much too wrong.
14) Donna doesn't know exactly who decided to build a planet entirely composed of living fat cells, but she can safely say it is the grossest thing she has ever encountered. Like walking around on a giant, giggling trampoline. Familiar, somehow, but still quite gross. Easy enough to sort out their lineage issues, but then -
One of them waves goodbye.
15) She remembers. "OI!"
16) She hits her head on the top of the dryer from sitting up after the shock. Somehow, it sends the dryer tumbling through the time vortex ("oh, THAT'S what it's called!"). By the time the rickety machine has landed, her mind has begun to heat up again. Her last cry before she loses consciousness is, "OI - DOCTOR!"
17) The Doctor-Donna sits up, and something is different.
18) It takes a while for Donna to come into contact with a mirror. She nearly passes out.
"NO. WAY."
(at least her eyebrows are back, she reflects after recovering from the shock)
19) Finding the Doctor is no easier the second time around, even with a massive time-lord-y brain.
It takes her fourteen different planets, seven different asteroids, and one oddly shaped moon, and even then she doesn't recognize him. The TARDIS, thankfully, hasn't changed.
"Hi, I'm John Smith."
"OH."
It's a good thing she's been wearing a helmet the entire time (her hair truly IS impossible now), because she isn't quite sure how to react. And by the time she thinks of how to explain, the Doctor is gone.
"OH NO YOU DON'T. NOT THIS TIME, SUNSHINE!"
20) As she falls through the Time Vortex in her new and improved dryer-time-machine (it's bigger on the inside, now, and much easier on her back!), Donna supposes she should find something to properly call herself. After all, she isn't really "Donna Noble, temp" anymore, and "Jane Smith" doesn't have a very nice ring to it.
(Back home, her husband has moved on and married a rather respectable secretary.)
21) Finding the Doctor the third time around is even more difficult. In the time between, she stops four rebellions, restores two alien princes to their respective thrones, reunites a pair of twin siblings separated at birth through an unfortunate accident involving an unlikely amount of bratwurst, and takes up fencing.
22) Donna stops by America in 1998 just in time to watch the midnight premiere of the Disney Animation Mulan, and manages to prevent an explosion at the same time.
"You're just like the song," says a little girl as they leave the theatre. "Swift as a coursing river."
"River," says Donna. "Song," she adds, and wonders why it sounds familiar. "I like it."
23) "If you live long enough, you'll try anything once," says the dashing, young, immortal, ex-Time Agent-turned-conman.
"Hallucinogenic lipstick," she muses, and turns the tube over in her hands before passing it back to Jack.
On her way out, she picks his pockets.
24) By the time she finds the Doctor again, she's almost stopped looking for him.
"River!" is the first thing he says, and kisses her passionately on the mouth.
"Hello, sweetie?" she replies in bemusement, before slapping him soundly.
25) As the TARDIS takes off, with that same impossible sound and a teary Doctor inside, River waves goodbye and decides that she really should be writing all this down.
26) The perfect journal is waiting for her in the window of the little shop.
Author's Note: This is posted on my account because it was my crack theory, but really, this fic was a team effort with the impossibly brilliant WingedFlight.