As Time Goes By - Chapter 1
Dimension Hopping was the worst name for the travel that Rose was becoming all too accustomed to. It was more like Dimension Charging or Dimension Battle-Ramming since every trip involved breaking through the walls between dimensions. And because Rose was the one being thrust through the dimensions, she felt as if she were the battering ram. The sensation was like being slammed through a brick wall twice: once to enter the void, and again to enter the destination dimension. And then she had to do it again to return.
Rose pondered this fact as her feet hit the ground and she tried desperately to balance without falling. No such luck. She executed a couple of awkward steps then fell forward. She only managed to keep from hitting the ground because she grabbed for a tree on the way down. It was one of those trees that lined walking paths. Which meant people strolling by caught her less-than-graceful entrance into their world. It still amazed her (as similar things had happened before) that none of them seemed to notice that she appeared out of nowhere, only that she almost spilled face-forward onto the pavement.
"Nice day," she said as she waved nonchalantly to one of the passers-by who stopped and stared longer than the others. The man just shook his head and kept walking.
She really had to work on her entrances! Not only was it potentially dangerous to fall upon entry (what if she had been on a cliff?), it was downright embarrassing. She had never been known to be an example of poise and grace (which did not change when she suddenly found herself the heiress of the Vitex fortune), but neither was she naturally clumsy. Therefore, she blamed the delivery system. The device that made her jumps possible was a Dimension Cannon, so perhaps Dimension Bombing was the best term for her travels. After all, the process was very much like being used as an unwieldy weapon that so far had done more damage than it had fixed. Not only did she enter parallel universes with a lack of decorum, she was also creating gaping holes between the universes taking a risk that could cause the entire fabric of reality to be torn asunder. But at least she had good intentions, right?
Rose frowned and loosened her grip on the tree. She had to remind herself of her purpose quite regularly, or she would find herself overcome with shame. It was rather poetic for someone to say they would tear heaven and earth apart to be with the person they loved, but it was quite selfish to actually do so. Rose wouldn't have done it if that were the only reason, no matter how tempted she might have been. She had no choice. She had dusted off then re-shelved Torchwood's Dimension Cannon project several times before she had finally approved it. They were taking an incredible gamble, but the stakes were really high: The stars were going out. All of reality in all of the dimensions was disappearing.
And of course, she was the one who had to lead the program and volunteer to be the battering ram because she was the one with the connection to the Doctor. The fact that she had professed her love, and that he had not quite done the same when she last saw him, was a side issue. She had to be the one to find out what was happening and tell him.
Danger had been her only concern when Rose jumped the first time. But soon the whole mission became nothing but a giant heartache, and she would have loved to pass the job on to someone else. In world after world, she witnessed the same heartbreaking image of the man she loved (or at least some parallel version of him) laid out on a stretcher after his death being carried away as his sonic screwdriver fell from his hand.
Rose shuddered at this memory as she looked around and tried to get her bearings. At least that part of the nightmare was over. After more research and more jumps, the Torchwood team had discovered that the incident centered around one ordinary decision by a woman named Donna Noble, a companion of the Doctor's after Rose. By teaming with UNIT in her original home world, Rose had managed to use the abandoned Tardis to add rudimentary Time Travel to the Dimension Cannon. The focus shifted to finding Donna and convincing her to go back and choose the turn that would allow her to cross paths with the Doctor.
The mission with Donna had been completed four jumps ago. Rose was now on a mission to find the Doctor in his restored timeline and enlist his help. A few jumps before Rose had found Donna, the Torchwood team had been able to restrict the jumps to Rose's original world. That meant that wherever Rose had currently landed, she was home. It was true she had lived in the parallel world for three years, but it was not her home. It was just the place she resided.
Of course, "home" was a relative concept. She was in her universe and on her Earth. But she still had to determine the date and specific location of her landing. That didn't prove too hard. Once she turned around completely, she realized that the tree she had been hugging was at the edge of a park directly across the street from the Eiffel Tower. Rose walked a few paces to a rubbish bin marked specifically for paper and pulled out a newspaper. Assuming it was today's paper, it was the eighteenth of July, in the year 2008. The page she was holding appeared to be the sports section. Though in French, the headline and full-color photographs of bicyclists let her know that she was there in the midst of the Tour de France.
Another look at the paper made Rose's head spin. The words had changed and now appeared to be written in a mix of French and English. That meant that the Tardis was somewhere nearby and at least somewhat recognized her. And if the Cannon was working properly, the Doctor should also recognize her when she found him. Torchwood had incorporated the technology from a sonic screwdriver into the Dimension Cannon. Rose had confiscated it after she witnessed yet another Doctor laid out on a stretcher. With it they were able to program the cannon to look for its twin.
During early jumps, Rose had had some odd encounters with Doctors that she had not recognized, and she had been forced to think on her feet to avoid any paradoxes. After the third incident, the Torchwood president (Pete Tyler, her adopted yet genetically-matched father) insisted that Rose carry a quick disguise to make things run more smoothly. However, new programming ensured that Rose would only encounter the Doctor that she had traveled with, and therefore made the disguise unnecessary.
Unfortunately, the Time Travel technology was shaky, and she was never sure where in the most recent Doctor's timeline she would end up. At least the team had narrowed the proximity range to about two city blocks of his Tardis. The only problem was, the Tardis could leave so quickly, that by the time Rose had oriented herself to her surroundings, the Doctor could already have left. Or he could simply be lost in the crowd.
The last complication in her search for the Doctor was she did not have control over how long she had to search for him. Out of urgency to solve the crisis at hand, the Dimension Cannon project was put into action before all the bugs could be worked out. One of these was that the Torchwood team had not determined how to control the duration of each jump and they fluctuated with no sort of predictability. She could have as short as ten minutes or as long as twenty-four hours.
Rose pushed a button on one of two watches that she wore on her left wrist. The face swung open on a hinge and revealed another face. It looked like a multi-colored pie with only one watch hand. The hand currently pointed to a green pie piece at the location where the six should be on a normal watch. And though it did not appear to be moving, Rose knew it was moving anti-clockwise toward the mauve piece at the twelve position. According to her timer, she had twelve hours before she would be thrust back into the parallel world from whence she had come.
Rose closed the watch face and consulted the slightly larger wristwatch which she wore just below the first one This one, like the Cannon, was programmed to seek out the sonic screwdriver. A glow behind the face of the otherwise normally-functioning watch would indicate how close she was to technology that matched the sonic's. Right now it was glowing amber, which meant that the Doctor was "relatively nearby." The color coding had been Rose's idea: She wanted technology that, if apprehended by someone she did not trust, would not spell out her intentions. However, the Torchwood techs never told her an actual measurement for each color. She just knew that the blue of "in the immediate vicinity" was better than amber, that the mauve of "quite far" was worse, and that no glow meant that no signal could be detected at all. Rose now had to begin her one-sided game of "hunt the thimble" and hope nobody thought she was nutters for checking her watch every few seconds.