Synopsis: Lilith, a Caseworker for the Interdimensional Oversight Commission, has been assigned to administrate all affairs pertaining to the Time Lords. Her client race may only be one being, but he provides enough work for a whole planet as Lilith comes to personally find out on the day he walks through her office door. As anyone who knows the Doctor could tell you, no one escapes an encounter with him untouched or unaffected, and the demi-godlike business-suited Sidra is no exception.

Warnings/Disclaimers/Other Info: I was introduced to the Doctor shortly after the new series began its run by a friend of mine with noble intentions who thought I might like it. Thanks to him, I will never look at department-store mannequins the same way. As I am a relatively new fan to the series, you will find some glitches. Please don't flay me alive. I don't own the series or lay any claim to it, and no money is being made from this effort - if you paid for this bit of fluff, you've been had. Anything that you don't recognize from canon probably belongs to me, though, so please don't take it without asking. I don't see why you'd want to, but the request has been made.

Oh yes - in case the above paragraph didn't give it away, this is a 9th/10th Doctor fic, beginning pre-Rose and paralleling the events of the series as it goes. That said, on with the show!

1 - Lilith

"And here is the list of damages. The Coreet civilization will never be the same!"

Neatly manicured hands accepted yet another sheet of paper from the speaker, a spindly and hysterically trembling man in an ill-fitting, patched and nearly threadbare suit. "Twelve fields, nine cowsheds, two granaries and a ziggurat? Impressive."

"Impressive? You call that impressive? That man committed the gravest of sacrilege… and then there is the matter of his ship. The Coreet have never seen a call box, much less even heard of a telephone. It took a supreme effort to convince them that it was a mass hallucination. All of this from one man, Miss Lilith! And they say the Time Lords are a dead race – well, this one more than makes up for the rest of them."

"So I keep saying." Once assured that no more papers were coming, one of the manicured hands pulled a desk drawer open and withdrew a rubber stamp and a blue inkpad. Dials set into the handle of the stamp were rotated to the correct display, after which the stamp was dabbed once into the inkpad and then pressed down onto the topmost of the assembled forms. This was repeated for each of the papers, after which the stamp and inkpad were returned to their place. "Is that all, Mr. Galion? There is much for me to do…"

"Er, no. Just give me a call when you've finished and we can go over the whole mess." Galion glanced up at the wall clock and gasped. "Oh my! If I don't hurry I'll miss my end-of-cycle review – and this just threw a wrench into the works. Good day, Miss Lilith."

"Good day, Mr. Galion." Murk-green eyes watched the spindly man scurry out, almost slamming the door closed behind him in his haste to make his next appointment, and then squeezed shut as a headache began to gather in the cranial space behind them. "Now I know a little bit of how you felt, Father." A quiet sigh and brief forehead-rub, and then the woman reached into another desk drawer for a pen. After checking to make sure that the ink in the pen was a blue to match that of the stamp Lilith began to fill in the blanks left by the stamp to ensure that her paperwork would be filed correctly. She had been schooled in her trade by the Caseworker before her, her father Cameron, and had learned early on that only a novice would deliberately use the wrong ink where blue would be proper. But why should I use blue ink, Father? Red ink would look so cool, she remembered asking him as a young girl of three hundred. Cameron had merely smiled in the patient manner earned through millennia of office work and replied, Because our work is not meant to be 'cool' or trendy, my dear. It is an exact science, one that has been honed by billions of years of trial and error. If blue ink is what is needed for a task, then leave it that way. It is obviously there for a reason.

"Why?" Lilith found herself muttering under her breath as she worked through the two-inch-thick stack of papers. "Is or is not, there is no 'why'," she continued, providing her father's stock answer. "It's that way because that is the way it has worked for billennia. Why rock the boat?" 1030 in the hour of Lint-roller, she thought, glancing up at the clock in the same way her co-worker Galion had. Only half an hour before lunchtime.

Lilith thumbed through the papers once more to form an adequate synopsis of the current situation, then woke her workstation from its electronic hibernation to make her report. After bringing up the correct program, she cleared her throat and then keyed on her microphone in order to dictate her summary for the system's records. "1040 Lint, Day 37, Year 13, Cycle 4995 Sarien. According to documentation provided by Galion, Caseworker for the Coreet, the figure known only as the Doctor has once again made a memorable visit to a less-advanced civilization. To summarize, the Coreet are primarily an agrarian society, tribal organization with strong theocratic leanings. The Doctor arrived just in time to prevent the rightful leader from being slain as a blood offering to ensure fruitful crops, guaranteeing the removal of a corrupt regency and a return to relative order. A civil war has since followed, but of course our good man made himself scarce before violence could erupt. Damage report following…"

Twenty floors down from where Lilith sat recounting her subject's latest debacle, partakers in the First Lunch of the day had finished their meal and now trickled out of the cafeteria on the return trip to their various jobs. Almost no one noticed the strange mechanical noise that now emanated from one of the storage rooms, and the few that did passed it off to some flaw in the ducting that Maintenance would get to sooner or later. No one batted an eyelash when a man emerged from the room looking ever so slightly confused; he was no doubt working on the source of the noise and had left his work to get a more expert opinion. One by one the workers made their farewells and vanished in small flashes of golden light, leaving the stranger alone in the hallway and no less confused than he had been when he'd first walked out. "That was different," he muttered, looking first to one end of the corridor and then to the other. "Hello?"

No one answered.

"Guess I'd better try the lift, then," reasoned the stranger, moving down the hall towards the only moderately hope-inspiring door that he could see. It slid open as he approached it, revealing a small chamber that did indeed resemble an elevator until he stepped inside and the doors shut again. The interior walls of the chamber distinctly lacked the instrumentation one would expect in an elevator, save for a featureless black panel placed at about eye level where the door had been only moments earlier.

"Welcome, guest," interjected a polite voice, the words illuminated in a soothing green upon the panel as they emerged from somewhere in the vicinity of the ceiling. "Our records indicate that this is your first time visiting our headquarters. How may we be of assistance to you?"

The stranger stood silently for a moment, considering the words on the panel. "I need someone to answer a few questions. Can you do that?"

"I cannot, sir, but if you will give me one moment I will attempt to direct you to the nearest applicable representative." A quiet hum, then a startled noise from the disembodied speaker. "A Time Lord! One more moment, please." This time there was no sound, only darkness and a faint tingling sensation, and when the stranger became aware of his surroundings again he noticed that the door had reappeared and now opened out onto a new corridor. "You'll be looking for Curator Lilith, sir. Her office is the third door on the left."

The door chimed once more, this time yanking Lilith from her trancelike state and causing her to drop her pen onto the still-blank page of the records book where she was preparing to scribe the narrative form of her latest report. A quick glance down at her appointment calendar showed nothing for the rest of the day, and she glared at the door and the unseen visitor behind it. "Yes, what is it?"

"I'm looking for… Lilith. Is this the right office?"

"Of course it's the right office, my name's only written in ten different universally-accepted languages on the doorplate," she answered sourly. "And who is this?"

"It's the Doctor."

Lilith blinked once, twice, then let her glare deepen as she pushed herself up from the cushioned confines of her chair and made her way over to the door. "If this is another joke, Sidney, I'm going to punch you in the face," she hissed, flinging the door open and readying her arm to swing. Instead of the bespectacled, sniggering Sidney, Lilith beheld a tall, rangy man in a battered leather jacket who now narrowed pale blue eyes at her in puzzlement. "You're not Sidney."

"Nope. As promised, I am the Doctor… am I interrupting something?"

Lilith retracted her fist and stepped back into the office, waving her guest inside. "No, not at all. In fact, I was just finishing up another report about you. Please, Doctor, have a seat – I've been waiting for you for a very long time."

"Have you, now." Nodding once in gracious acknowledgment of his hostess, the Doctor walked through the open doorway into the waiting office. Once inside, he stopped to look around once more and let out a small whistle at the spacious, muted elegance of the room, from the understated functionality of the furniture to the stacked bookshelves that lined two of the walls. Behind the desk stood the third wall, curiously blank save for a thin metal border, and it seemed that this wall and the desk formed the centerpiece of the office. "Nice place you've got here, if you don't mind me saying so. The pay must be killer."

"The work itself is pay enough," murmured Lilith, sizing up her guest out of the corner of her eye as she returned to her seat. "Now sit down, if you would. We have much to discuss."

Her studying gaze was returned in kind as the Doctor sat, giving Lilith the impression that she was a bug under a microscope that the man's pleasant expression did little to dispel. "I see my reputation's gone ahead of me, even here," he was saying with a baffled blink, "wherever here is. Whenever here is."

"You mean to tell me you don't even know where or when you are?" Lilith sighed, rubbing her forehead. "Almost makes me wish you were another one of Sidney's jokes." When this too was met with a puzzled stare, she lowered her eyebrows darkly and muttered, "Are you sure you're the Doctor?"

"Yep." A hopeful smile, then, "At least, last time I checked. Who's Sidney?"

Lilith squeezed her eyes shut briefly in exasperation before answering. "Sidney is this charming fellow in Accounts who sees it fit to tease me endlessly over the antics of my one constituent – that's you – and one of his favorite jokes is the 'false Doctor sighting'. It gets old."

"I could see how it would." A careful pause, then, "It never occurred to you to get a hold of some pictures or something so you could spot a fake, now did it."

"With all of the paperwork you generate, I barely even get time to have a pee. Figuratively speaking, of course." Lilith cleared her mind once more and picked up her pen, attempting to resume her earlier train of thought. "So now comes the fun part. Fortunately it doesn't require much embellishment." She then set pen to paper, scribing out a narrative account of the report she'd fed into her computer moments earlier.

"An accounting of my recent adventures with the Coreet civilization, hm? Charming folk, if a bit bloody-minded."

"One of many reports about it, yes. This one is for public record."

"Ah." Another pause, then, "Is it flattering?"

Lilith frowned and dug her mind deeper into her task, refusing to be diverted. "Not in the slightest."

A few seconds' silence lapsed before the next question. "Does it mention my unflagging bravery or dazzling feats of genius?"

A sour grumble from the Curator. "Creative destruction of life and property, yes."

The Doctor made a small, disappointed noise but refused to desist in his inquiries. "What about my devastating charm and rugged good looks? Perhaps my razor-sharp wit?"

Slamming her pen down on the desk, Lilith glared up at the source of her aggravation and twitched to behold the stranger's face mere inches from her own, grin turned up to full magnetism as he awaited her reaction. Shaking her head, she muttered, "Don't count on it."

The smile turned sheepish as the Doctor sank back into his seat in the manner of a chastised schoolboy, thoughtfully considering the figure on the other side of the desk. "Well then, my apologies if I offended. What might I need to do for you to answer a few serious questions?"

Finishing her written paragraph with a flourish, Lilith set the book aside for a moment and sat back to consider this. "Try saying 'please', maybe?"

The barest hint of an eye roll flashed in response to this and was met with a flat stare from Lilith. "Okay, you've got me there. Would you please tell me where – and when – I am exactly, miss?"

Lilith allowed herself a small smile as she reached into an inner pocket of her blazer and withdrew a brushed metal case. She opened this case and pulled out a slip of embossed paper which she then held out to the Doctor. "My business card. Take it; you'll be able to get back to me as long as you have it on you." Placing the case back in her jacket, Lilith sat back in her chair and watched as her visitor read over the card. "And I know this phrase is much overused, especially when used in reference to you, but the answers you want really aren't that simple."

"Should've expected that," grumbled the Doctor, "especially coming from you, Miss Curator. Let me have it."

"Simply put, you are here and now." Lilith glanced up at the clock once more, breathing an inner sigh of relief when she saw that she only had a few seconds left to go. "We live outside of space and Time as you know them, Doctor. You figure it out – it's time for me to go to lunch."

The business card went into a similar inner pocket in the Doctor's leather jacket, and he made to rise eagerly from his seat. "Lunch sounds great! What's on the menu?"

A petite but firm hand shoved him back down into his chair. "You'll be getting the take-out if I have anything to say about it," decreed the Curator, moving for the office door. "And before you complain, I don't want anything to happen to you while I'm out. For one, the Earth-Human office is in an uproar trying to update their records – they only just now realized they've got a gap dating back to around their Cold War and are running around like you wouldn't believe. They're one of the offices that want you dead on sight, by the way."

Putting a hand to his chest in a pantomime of wounded pride, the Doctor brought out his best pout and retorted, "Why? I've lost track of the number of times I've saved their skins…"

"Oh, be still your beating hearts," snapped Lilith. "For every thing you fix, you break five more. Caretaker Paxmida of the Queem wants to vivisect you, Caretaker Arulos of Kashmera wants your hide for new seat covers, Caretaker Yvenda of Earth has suggested something vile involving a kind of small indigenous rodent, and Caretaker S'shalish of the Lhulian Frebes wants to stuff you and put you up on display as a trophy. Were it not for my duty as your Curator to protect what is left of your race – namely you – I would be inclined to see what form of compromise I could come up with and just be done with the whole thing." The amused smirk she spotted tugging at the corners of the Doctor's mouth only fanned the flames of her wrath. With a growl of anger she wrenched the office door open and stormed out, only pausing long enough in the doorway to turn back and snarl, "You make my brain hurt, Doctor, a pain that grows worse with each stupid stunt you pull. No wonder my father's head exploded when your people were wiped off the map in that nasty little war with the Daleks! In fact, praise to all gods that the rest of your race is gone because if they were all as bad as you I'd say 'hell with it' and exile myself to the Waste Disposal Division!"

All mirth drained from the Doctor's face at this last pronouncement. No sooner had Lilith slammed the door behind her with the percussive force of a gunshot than he was up out of his chair and dashing after her, throwing the office door open again to yell, "Now you just wait one minute – "

– and found himself shouting at empty air as the corridor was completely uninhabited. The only evidence to betray Lilith's passage now crunched underfoot, and the Doctor looked down to see a faint trace of what looked to be fine ash sparkling on the otherwise flawless stone floor. His anger was momentarily displaced as he recalled the vanishing office workers he'd seen earlier and put two and two together, muttering, "Neat trick, but I guess it's back to the lift for me…"