It started with go-karts and a cat, and ended with charges of sedition and near execution. Which is all to say, Jenny went on a vacation and it ended badly, to no one's great surprise. It was, however, to Prentice's great disappointment.

"I really am sorry about this," Jenny said. "I know you were having a good time, and I kind of, well-"

"Ruined the whole thing? No, honestly you didn't," said Prentice. "This is how I end all my holidays. In a dungeon. Over a cat."

The cat in question, lounging contentedly in Jenny's arms, meowed.

"Roger thinks you're being a prick," said Jenny. Roger meowed again. "He says he'd do the same for you."

Prentice glared. "Jenny, we're in a dungeon. I'm not being a prick. I'm being justifiably angry!"

"Alright, alright! Don't get mad at me then!" Jenny said.

"You're the one who called me a prick!"

"That was Roger! Honestly Prentice, it's like you're not even paying attention!"

Prentice groaned, throwing his hands up in a familiar mixture of hopelessness and frustration.

"You know what? Fine. I don't care. I'm going back to my corner of the dungeon. If you need me, I'll be sulking. If you see tears, it's because I'm upset. If you want to apologize, buy me a fruit basket. Lots of strawberries. No peaches. Or better yet, figure a way out of this bloody dungeon!"

Jenny looked at Roger. "He's normally very nice," she said. "Might be a stress headache coming on, he always gets those when we've been arrested."

Now at this point, you may be asking yourself, who is Prentice? A valid question, as Prentice is largely unimportant, and some might say uninteresting. But if you do want to know who Prentice is, these are the facts both most interesting and most relevant about him, though not necessarily in that order.

Prentice is a Time Agent. He's a very good Time Agent. He's smart, loyal, and efficient. He follows rules to their very letter, and is respectful to his peers and commanders alike. He's also very punctual, which is remarkably rare for a Time Agent. Actually, all of these traits are rare for a Time Agent. The Agency itself is usually an utter mess, filled with crude, self-interested individuals who come for the promise of time travel, and stay for-well, quite few of them do. But another important fact about Prentice is that he wants to change that about the Time Agency.

Prentice takes his tea with milk and no sugar. He prefers dogs to cats, and hot to cold weather. His favorite soup is french onion. These are interesting facts. Perhaps we should stick to relevant ones. The fact of the matter is, trying to enforce rules in an Agency allergic to responsibility will only make a person unpopular, which is exactly how Prentice got stuck with the worst task a Time Agent can be handed. Hitler Duty.

Adolf Hitler was a German head of state in the 20th century who did many terrible things to make people dislike him. Some of these people lived hundreds of years after him, and thought it might be a good idea to kill Hitler before he had the chance to do all those awful, awful things. Some more of these people had access to time travel, and you can probably guess the rest.

Now, the Time Agency had no problem with letting people kill one of history's greatest mass murderers. Except apparently they did. It turned out, killing Hitler changed Earth's time line drastically. So drastically, in fact, that it threatened to tear a hole in the universe, and, after waiting a bit to see if someone else would fix it, the Time Agency was forced to act.

The entire ordeal was really hard to sort out, and the agents involved had to fill out paperwork afterwards, which Time Agents famously hate to do. So it was that the Time Agency appointed a permanent guard to the truly terrible, abhorrent man that nearly every other time traveler in the universe would at some point or another try and kill. Prentice once tried to tell a commanding officer that taking a selfie with Marie Antoinette went against Agency protocol, which is how he ended up in Berlin, 1938, on Hitler Duty.

Those are enough facts about Prentice for now. Here's a fact about Jenny. She was also in Berlin in 1938. She, like Prentice, had not wanted to be there. However, Jenny was there because she had just stolen a vortex manipulator and still wasn't quite sure how it worked. Unknowingly imitating her father as a much younger man, she had been traveling at random, assuring anyone who asked, and several who didn't, that of course she knew exactly how to work her time machine, as it was after all her time machine. Except for the fact that it was stolen. One fact about Jenny is that she is really remarkably like her dad.

But here's a fact about 1938 Berlin. Prentice and Jenny weren't the only time travelers there. There other time travelers aside from them. And the Doctor. And Amy, Rory, and Mels, who turned out to be River. And aside from the shape-shifting alien punishment robot driven by miniaturized people. Yes, high above the city streets, hovering in an invisible spaceship, were nefarious ne'er do wells ready to make life miserable for the people of Earth. They were led by a megalomaniacal demagogue with ambitions of planetary conquest, to add to the many other megalomaniacal demagogues with ambitions of planetary conquest living on Earth in the 20th century. Before too long, Prentice and Jenny had discovered the spaceship, and were working together to thwart their plans.

Prentice and Jenny were ultimately successful, thanks in no small part to Jenny's ingenious use of some twine and an old boot. But, by technically abandoning his post Prentice ended up in a whole bunch of trouble. Now usually, his superiors wouldn't have minded. They abandoned their posts more often than they manned them. In this particular circumstance, however, they were furious. Apparently some time travelers had come close to killing Hitler while Prentice had been away. It was just good luck they'd only given Hitler a black eye and locked him in a cupboard before leaving. If they'd done much else, Prentice might have lost his job then and there.

As it was, he was let off with a reprimand and an assignment. Jenny was now considered a "potential asset of substantial value" by the Agency. Prentice was now considered her handler. It was his job to show her the ropes, and keep her out of trouble. However, it soon became apparent that Jenny had no interest in ropes, and a great interest in trouble. This resulted in the eventful weeks the two had spent together, in which they'd been arrested 23 times, nearly killed 46 times, and had overthrown at least five governments. Prentice thought it was about time for a break.

He scoured magazines, travel guides, and brochures, finally settling on Izod, the twelfth moon of Zoop in the year 4932. It was listed as the forty-third most popular tourist destination by that year's Universal Geographic's annual Intergalactic Traveler issue. "Originally a trading post on the outskirts of the Anhari System," the issue's description ran, "the moon's sandy beaches, fair climate, and exotic forests make it among the most pleasant relaxation destinations in the known galaxy, outside of Space Hawaii(see #13 on our list). Its resorts boast at least four star ratings or higher, so for those of you out there who are overworked, or just overstressed, this is the place to put your feet up and relax!"

It was safe, small, and out of the way. That should have been Prentice's first clue that something would go horribly wrong. The second should have been his attempt to explain the concept of a vacation to Jenny, which went something like this.

"So you just go somewhere nice and do nothing?"

"No, you go somewhere nice and relax."

"Isn't that the same thing?"

"No. You don't do nothing, you just do the things you like."

"But I do that anyway."

"Right, you do things you like that don't involve explosions, imprisonment, overthrowing despots, or stopping unethical genetic experiments. And you especially avoid doing all of those at once."

"But those are the things I like!"

"They have go-karts here."

"So vacations are go-karts?"

"For you, yes."

It's not that Prentice was blind to those first hints of trouble. But it had been a day, a full 21 hours, and the vacation was actually going quite well. Jenny had really taken to go-karting, and Prentice had found a nice spot on the beach very, very far away from the resort's race track. He finally had the chance to kick back, put his feet up, and review the finer sections of the Time Agency's Approved Field Manual, fourth edition. He didn't dare voice it, but he had a hope, rather an inkling of a wish that possibly, even plausibly, he was going to pass an entire vacation in peace. He really, really should have known better.

Jenny had found a cat. That wasn't the first thing that happened. The first thing was go-karting. Jenny liked go-karts very much. It was just like trying to outrun bad guys, but she didn't have to worry about getting shot. She didn't much like getting shot. She also didn't like how slow go-karts were, but that was easy. All it took was a bit of tinkering and a jet engine she'd acquired at a local salvage yard, and viola! Fun go-karts. Or so she assumed. Jenny didn't actually get a chance to try it out before management cornered her with a lecture about safety, destruction of resort property, and some other boring words. Jenny stopped paying attention about halfway through, but did catch the bit at the end where she was banned from go-karting for the rest of her stay. She crossed her arms, frowned, and then said,

"Well what else am I supposed to do here?" And slumped out of the race track and onto the street.

One thing was clear. Prentice must not find out about this. He'd given very clear instructions at the start of the trip that she mustn't get into trouble, and while Jenny didn't care much for instructions, she was beginning to care about Prentice. Truth was, ever since Messaline Jenny had been feeling rather lonely. It wasn't something she'd had time to consider before she ran away to follow in her father's footsteps (or was it time-tracks?). Since then, she'd had plenty of time to reflect, and came to realize why the Doctor didn't travel alone. Jenny could have the most spectacular adventures, but when she returned to her ship, she returned only to the silence of her own company.

So when she'd met tall, twig person with the bushy brown hair, when he helped her save the Earth from funny purple aliens, and when finally he insisted on tagging along with her, Jenny had accepted the arrangement quite easily. There was, of course, a caveat. Jenny wasn't about to follow orders, not from Prentice, and not from any Time Agency thing-y. She already had orders from the Doctor. Those were the only ones worth following. But Prentice, bless him, was very by-the-book. Quite literally in fact, as he seemed to always carry with him his bloody Time Agency manual. He was never comfortable breaking protocol, even when it was more effective, or more fun. He was therefore chronically uncomfortable traveling with Jenny. He deserved a rest, that much was clear, and she had made it her mission to give him one.

So Jenny was walking. Down a street. A normal street. Boring. Jenny was bored. She was passing an alley (small, clean, well-lit, not even a hint of danger, how dreadful), and heard a noise. The noise went a little something like this. Rustle rustle, meow. Jenny paused and looked down the alley.

"Who's there?"

More rustling, and another meow.

"You're not trying to take over the world, are you?" Jenny asked, making her way slowly into the alley. "Please say yes, this place could do with some excitement."

There was no answer. There was a cat. It was inside a trash can, which Jenny discovered when she lifted its lid.

"Now what kind of creature are you?"

To say Jenny was smart is a vast understatement. It's like saying ice cream is just 'okay'. It would be far more appropriate to describe the towering deliciousness of ice cream, the way nearly every food in the universe fails to compare to its exquisite taste. In other words, Jenny was a genius. Problem was, she was a young genius, and very inexperienced. Part of the reason she enjoyed having Prentice around was that he could explain to her the things she really ought to know. Like, for instance, what a cat was.

The cat meowed again.

"That's not a threat, is it?" Jenny said, inspecting the trash cat more closely. "No, I don't think so. You're very tiny, aren't you? And fluffy. I don't think tiny fluffy things threaten people much." She leaned over and picked up the cat. It meowed again. Jenny meowed back, hoping it was some form of greeting. "Are you lost? Do you need help finding your way home?"

"Actually, I rather need to get away from it."

Jenny spun around, hoping to see who'd spoken. It couldn't have been the cat, she thought, its lips hadn't moved. But there was no one else in the alley, and if there was no one in the alley, there hadn't been anyone close enough to have said that. Jenny looked, eyebrow raised, back to the cat.

"Was that you?" She asked.

"Who else?" Again, the cat's lips hadn't moved, but no one else could have spoken.

"Hang on, are you inside my head?" Jenny said. She was familiar with telepathy as a concept, but had yet to come across it in person. Of course, she hadn't come across cats either, so she was open to new experiences.

"No, it would seem that you're in mine," the cat replied.

Well that's new, Jenny thought to herself. Always nice to learn new skills, especially when it allowed her to communicate with small fluffy creatures.

"Most would simply call me a 'cat'. Though personally, I prefer Roger," said the cat.

"Roger the cat," Jenny said, and Roger purred in response. "I'm Jenny. It's a real pleasure."

"Jenny the human," said Roger. "Likewise."

"Sorry, not human. Just Jenny."

"Not human?" Roger said curiously. "Then what sort of creature are you?"

"Better question," Jenny said. "Why are you trying to get away from home?"

"Well it's not so much my home as it is my dreadful owner." At the word owner, Jenny frowned.

"You're being kept against your will?" she said. Roger purred in the affirmative.

Jenny felt her blood surge with righteous anger, and just a bit of excitement. Perhaps slightly more than a bit. But this was perfect! Roger needed help liberating himself from a malicious master, and Jenny had the day wide open. She'd taken down whole governments in an afternoon, so this couldn't possibly be much trouble. She'd simply help Roger escape, and then make it back to the resort to meet Prentice for dinner. He wouldn't need to know about this little adventure, and could continue enjoying his vacation in peace. There was just one thing.

"So who's your owner then?"

"Well I suppose it's only fair you know, if you do intend to help me," said Roger, licking his paws. "Her Majesty Grenda, Queen of Zoop, and Protector of Its Many Moons. And, come to mention it, that seems to be her Royal Guard."

Jenny turned around to see three people in ridiculous clothing eyeing her and Roger. They started walking down the alley.

"Well then," Jenny said to Roger, a smile creeping its way onto her face. "Seems like it's time to run!"