Jethro leapt over the railing and turned to face the Doctor.
"Why are we moving?' he asked cautiously. "You said we were going to stay here another day."
The Doctor looked at him, hesitated, and said, "I don't know." The TARDIS was spinning through the Time Vortex, out of control, and the Doctor had no idea why. She guessed that maybe the TARDIS had picked up a disturbance that hadn't shown up on the scanners, and decided to follow it. Sexy did that sometimes.
Wait, sorry. Introductions. The Thirteenth Doctor: Regenerated after both hearts failed when electrocuted by the Silence. And yes, a girl. Jethro: Met Ten on a tour bus on the planet Midnight shortly before the tour bus was attacked by an unknown creature. Stood up for the Doctor and seemed much more open-minded, intelligent, and interested in the unknown than almost everyone else on the bus, although he was later pressured by his father into trying to throw the Doctor off the bus and to his death. He felt really bad about it afterward. Met Thirteen when the creature on Midnight struck again and he helped stop it with the Doctor, then became her companion.
The TARDIS landed, to her passengers' surprise, on Skaro. "Stay in the TARDIS," the Doctor told Jethro. "I'll try and sort this out." She snuck out, found herself in a corridor, walked along the corridor, to where it opened out into a room that served as sort of the Dalek Parliament room. She hid behind some machine, where she was joined by Jethro.
"I told you to stay in the TARDIS!" she hissed.
He looked at her. "You honestly expect me to stay in there while we're on Skaro?" he breathed. "I always wanted to go to Skaro!" The Doctor tried to keep a straight face, but she couldn't help it: his childish excitement was just so cute and funny. She gave Jethro a small smile, then turned her attention to the Dalek at the center of the room. They were focused on a machine, but the Doctor couldn't see it- her view was blocked by a Dalek.
She turned to Jethro. "Can you see that thing?" she asked.
"Yes."
"What does it look like?"
"I'd say it's a quantum temporal event-specific recalibrator."
"How the hell did you know that?"
"History class was always my best subject. The Daleks invented those in the year 2473, right?'
"Yes," the Doctor whispered, duly impressed and wishing all her companions could recognize a quantum temporal event-specific recalibrator on sight. "But, of course, they're incredibly difficult to make, they require a load of time energy and if you get it wrong, the entire galactic quadrant you're in could implode. However, if you do get it right, they can be used to rewrite a specific event in the past in one specific way. Even a fixed point. But it can only be used once and god, I don't even know if I could make one in less than a hundred or two years. The Daleks must have been working on it for at least two centuries. So the question is, what point in time is important enough that the Daleks would spend two centuries working on a machine to change it?"
"Maybe the Time War?" Jethro offered. "They might want to change it so the Daleks would win."
"No, the Time War is time-locked. And even then, there's too much room for unwanted change. See, you have to pick one fairly small decision or seemingly insignificant person to change, and hope that the outcome is what you wanted. The Daleks don't want the Time Lords surviving."
"So it has to do with you, then." "That would seem the logical assumption."
At that moment, one of the Daleks spoke. "IT IS READY," it said in its scratchy, metallic voice.
The big white Dalek, the leader, said, "THEN BEGIN." It turned to the watching Daleks and said, "TODAY THE DOCTOR IS EXTERMINATED. WATCH AS HE FALLS."
"Bit dramatic," the Doctor said.
"Doctor," Jethro whispered. "They said he. That means they don't recognize you now. That's good, right?"
"You're smart," the Doctor observed.
"So what do we do?"
"Er... we wait. There's not much we can do right now. Then once they're done, we see if it worked and if it did, we figure out where and when the change happened and go fix it before I die."
"So... the usual then."
"Very funny."
Finally, the Daleks left the room, announcing, "THE DALEK EMPIRE STANDS VICTORIOUS!" and the Doctor and Jethro stood up.
"Nothing's changed," Jethro said. "Doesn't that mean it didn't work?"
"No. When you're me, you affect the universe a lot. So, when me ceases to exist, it takes a while for the changes I've made to be unmade and for the universe to figure out what it's like now, how civilizations and conspiracies and empires developed without me to stop them and how civilizations and species and galaxies fell without me to save them, and finally for me to cease to exist. But not long. We need to work quickly."
She ran over to the machine and soniced it. "Oh, this is bad. This is very, very, bad."
Jethro went to her. "What? Or, when?"
The Doctor sighed and looked up at him. "England, 1913."
"What happened then?"
"For very complicated reasons, I was being chased and the only way for me to hide was to become human so I put my Time Lord identity into a stop watch that I gave to Martha Jones, my companion, to keep safe and I became a human professor at a boarding school for boys- I mean, that's the only sort of school they had in 1913- but the Family of Blood- thats who I was hiding from, by the way- tracked me down but I didn't remember being a Time Lord except in my dreams and then a little boy stole the stopwatch and the Family attacked the school because they wanted me so they could become immortal and I didn't want to be the Doctor because I liked my human life and so I wanted to just give the Family the stopwatch -this was after the little boy gave it back- so they'd maybe leave but then I was convinced to become the Doctor and I defeated them."
"So the Daleks made it so you stayed human."
"Exactly. Then I never did anything to stop them after that, and I never regenerated because I was human so I don't exist."
"Then we should go to England."