Disclaimer: do not own Doctor Who

Note: crosses a genre-savy D&D character and the episode "Rose." There is no Rose Tyler is this fic.

Crack!Fic. Written for LJ comm Writerverse.

Feet sound on metal grating and Henrietta looks up the stairwell. The racket that she's trying to translate into language doesn't stop, but neither does it speed up or shift in cadence. Whoever he was, the gelatinous life form must have noticed it long before he had the chance to wander into its lair.

Make that two someones, she thinks and quickly checks the jerry-rigged doodad monitoring frequency. It wasn't built to decrypt sound waves into anything other than mathematically complex symbols that were too arcane to read, but she was a bit too stubborn to give up entirely. She just needed to identify patterns, something beyond the rudimentary 'yes' and 'no' they've established.

It understood her, at any rate, and was humoring her with extended speech. That, or what she was trying to make into words is nothing more than involuntary jiggles and shrieks that came from its breathing- and everything she thought they agreed on was entirely one-sided.

Which, now that it's come up, could be a problem.

Henrietta forces herself to not think of her strange situation and how many ways it could go wrong (and she's half successful; she's got three exit plans and she's rather proud that only one of them is stupidly suicidal). When the two make it down the overly intricate spiral staircase and come to view, she's already looking, hoping to see the easier to read mannequins with her requested lunch. What she gets is one man, one mannequin, and no lunch.

Skip lunch, she hasn't seen a living breathing person in four days.

"Please tell me you have a universal translator scroll," she asks the man. And he's definitely a man, because that's definitely skin not plastic. He's even wearing a leather jacket. A change given that the mannequins were all a bit more summer/spring edition and the Greater Gelatinous Cube was so nude it was a see-through.

"I," he says, not quite stumbling on his feet at her or her question or the creature looming behind her, "I do. Yes. Not a scroll, but, yes. I can understand over a thousand languages and-"

"-Stop. That's all I need to know. Splendid." And it is, it really truly is. "Could you please tell him-her-it," and she ignores the jiggly lurch behind her because it's amusement (at least, it doesn't seem like a jiggly tell for impending attack; she also ignores its amusement because, at this point, she feels she's ignored quite a lot of it) "that it's been swell, honest, but I'm so late only the most revered Chronomancer could possibly save me the impending lecture and that I really, really, needed to be home yesterday."

"You- wait- what?"

"Are you normally this verbose or has your journey scrambled your usefulness to zero?"

"Hey now, that's rude."

"So is pointing."

"Ah. Right. One could even say point to you."

"One could, but one shouldn't. Oh, don't look at me like that. I'm tired. I'm hungry. I'm pretty sure that this creature is from an evolutionary track that's never been seen before and I'm not equipped for such research and observation and I'd really really like to get out of this sewer. And why is it glowing red? Ever-Light is blue. Blue, damn it."

"What are you- wait. There's something odd about you."

"Yeah, well there is more than something odd about you. One should not throw stones when one is a living glass house."

"I'm pretty sure that's not how it goes."

"I'm pretty sure I don't care."

"Let's start again. Hello, I'm the Doctor."

"Fortuitous greetings Sir Doctor, I am Henrietta DeTamble, Acolyte of the Arcadian Scholars. Creatures' Department."

"Impossible. The Arcadian Scholars are- I- I mean. Are you sure?"

"How could I not be, they've only been paying my Account of Credit for years."

"But. But you're not a Time Lord."

"Of course not. If I had mastery over time I'd hardly need a Chronomancer, now would I?"

"That's…"

"Don't say 'point.'"

"I wasn't."

"No need to be so defensive."

"I'm not!"

She raises a single eyebrow; "Indeed."

Meanwhile the creature behind them – that might be a Greater Gelatinous Cube, but is probably an Auton – settles down from its high state of agitation because they obviously aren't a threat to its lively-hood. Plan B isn't put into action and there is no invasion, just a steady occupation by a refugee looking to start over. There are no explosions, no sudden TARDIS reveals, and Henrietta does in fact get saved by a Chronomancer. Eventually.

But that's another story for another time. This story- right now? Well, it rather has a lot of bickering, more than a dash of impossibilities, and quite a bit of travel.