Amy had listened to enough. Her Doctor would and had rearranged the fabric of the universe for her, for River, even for Rory. That this previous Doctor could be so cold in the wake of Romana's loss set her blood to boil. Perhaps he noticed that her skin tone was beginning to match her hair color, because his eyebrows went up.

"Perhaps you're wondering how he plans to find the White Guardian?"

"No. I'm wondering how you can be so bloody cold."

"I beg your pardon," he said, sounding incensed, though his facial expression remained amused.

"Romana. She sacrificed herself for us."

"She did no such thing. If she was the sixth piece, the angels couldn't afford to kill her. Now they have the ultimate weapon they need to decimate all of reality."

"You could at least pretend you're interested in saving her. Don't you even care?"

Four's expression melted into annoyance. "Of course I care, Mrs. Pond. Aside from the fact that Romana was essentially forced upon me by the White Guardian, and that for the majority of her first incarnation, she treated me with superior indifference, after all we've been through, I've come to see her as rather charming and have no intention of abandoning her."

Amy looked unconvinced.

"She even dresses like me."

"She dresses nothing like you?"

"An observant little fashion queen, aren't you, but it seems you haven't observed that her little coat, scarf, and hat ensemble echoes my own."

For once, Amy, now thoroughly bemused, was rendered speechless. "Well, no, but now that you mention it. Yes, I do see it."

The fourth Doctor smiled warmly and said, "If you like, would everyone take a moment to come into my TARDIS? It should clear certain matters up."

Walking over to the TARDIS, a strange sight in the console room, everyone followed the fourth Doctor in. "Ah, memories," said Eleven. The brilliant white was blinding in contrast to the more muted white they were used to. The console looked more like 1960s sci-fi, than their more modern version's art deco. The white console was perfectly octagonal, with a clear, glowing cylinder in the middle that went up three feet. The console room was also much smaller. There was a coat rack by the door, and a robot dog wandered around. In what they all recognized as the Doctor's favorite chair, sat Romana, reading "The Other Gods", by H. P. Lovecraft.

Everyone turned in surprise to the fourth Doctor, who had gleam in his eye. "You see, there really is nothing to worry about."

Amy said, "But the sixth piece."

"They don't have it," said Eleven. "It's a fake."

Rory said, "So the key still doesn't work."

"Oh, it'll work with the fake piece. It won't be as powerful and won't work correctly, but it will work."

River said, "I get it. When they followed us to our own TARDIS, Romana knew the way to the other TARDIS was clear. She dropped the fake piece on the way so the angels wouldn't pursue her. How did you know?"

Romana said, "The Doctor had played the trick before, when the Black Guardian kidnapped Princess Astra. The Guardian didn't know Astra was the piece. He only knew that she had something to do with it. He made a fake piece and assembled the key to trick the Black Guardian."

Amy looked at Eleven. "You knew?"

"I knew the moment my younger self hauled me to the TARDIS."

Rory sighed. "That should do it for the next five April Fools Days."

Amy crossed her arms. "It was a mean joke." A grin cracked her angry expression. "Still a good trick."

The fourth Doctor said, "As it happened, I could easily recall how I manufactured the fake. It won't work, being of a mundane material, but it'll will still help the other pieces work. The Black Guardian, we already know, fell for it. He's created something of a pseudo-universe, when in reality, he thinks he is rewriting this one."

Eleven said, "He has been trapping my incarnations in this pseudo-reality."

Rory said, "So, only you and the people you know are in danger then? The universe is safe."

Romana said, "Not quite. He's removed you from time. The Doctor sensed it from the start, but he did so without removing you from this universe. Imagine there are are a thousand realities. Actually there are many more, but a fixed number will help you wrap your mind around the concept. A thousand Rorys, a thousand Amys, a thousand Doctors, all living in their respective universe, but there is only ever one Calabi-Yau space. Reality is connected."

"Not anymore," said Eleven. "The Void has closed. The realities are sealed off from each other."

Romana's eyes narrowed. The fourth Doctor's expression became sullen and serious.

"How could something like that happen?" asked the fourth Doctor.

Eleven paused. "I can't tell you that."

"Something this important?"

"We wondered why our eighth self was the initial focus of the Black Guardian's attack. The closing of the Void may be directly related to this, as it happened near the end of my eighth lifetime, directly leading to my regeneration. It is a fixed point in time affecting the entire universe and I am a key component of the event."

Four regarded Eleven for a long moment, as if trying to see what was being hidden. He stepped out of his TARDIS and into the eleventh Doctor's TARDIS. He recognized the layout. It was "Toy Room". He examined the console. Pinballs, puzzles, games, and numerous other interesting devices, including an antique typewriter represented the controls. An old man inhabited this TARDIS. He was in so much pain that he died and was reborn, starting over, leaving the pain behind.

Everyone else joined him. Now, the blue box inside the TARDIS didn't look so strange. It was just another abstract oddity. Four looked at Eleven again, as if seeing him for the first time. He considered the circumstances that could lead to the world he saw around him. Then he considered the science of what Eleven had told him. Romana knew. He could see it in her searching expression. She was also reevaluating the eleventh Doctor.

Four finally said, "How many of us survived?"

"I beg your pardon," said Eleven, not very convincingly.

"There's only one way for the Void to close: if the Eye of Harmony on Gallifrey is destroyed, and there's only one way to destroy the Eye of Harmony on Gallifrey."

"I'm the only one, as far as I know. I tried to go back and warn people, but Gallifrey is Timelocked."

There was a time in which nobody spoke. The rise and fall of the oldest civilization passed in those moments, and then Romana broke the silence. Though her voice wavered in obvious distress, she chose to leave the upsetting topic behind. "It doesn't change the fact that Calabi-Yau space connects all realities. The misuse of the Key to Time may well cause the Void to reopen. The Void would be a shepherd to the other realities, in essence chasing off the bad wolf."

Eleven and River both looked at Romana sharply.

Romana asked, "What did I say?"

Eleven said, "You said, 'Bad wolf.'"

"So I did. What of it?"

"Near the end of my ninth life, a traveling companion of mine absorbed the Heart of the TARDIS temporarily becoming an entity calling itself the Bad Wolf. It would have killed her, so I absorbed it, and triggered my regeneration cycle. Before that though, the Bad Wolf said that it sent clues across space and time that would lead it to me. The phrase generally tends to appear at a place or moment best suited to get the right reaction out of me. Such as now. The Void has been destabilizing for several years now. There is a rift in London at One Canada Square, or rather, several stories above it, that won't stay closed. It connects to an alternate reality, at a location in Sweden called Bad Wolf Bay."

Romana smiled. "So the Void isn't completely closed anymore."

"I suppose not."

The fourth Doctor snapped his fingers, "Then that is the window into the Black Guardian's constructed universe. First thing's first, however. We do need to consult with the White Guardian. I'm afraid that I now have no way to find him."

Eleven grinned boyishly. "Not to worry, I know exactly where he is. One of the Black Guardian's past tricks left him stranded on Earth in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."

"Oh, really? Where?"

In another reality, another group of people were having a similar discussion. At One Canada Square in Canary Wharf, Pete and Rose Tyler sat with the Doctor, his meta-crisis, and Grace Holloway. Chang Lee was in an infirmary and the TARDIS was in the main storage facility. Both the Doctor and the meta-crisis agreed that Chang's symptoms suggested that he had glimpsed the Untempered Schism. That he even survived was a miracle.

Pete, the director of Torchwood, listened to all of the statements, perfectly impassive, regarding nobody. His problem was complicated. He had to make a decision based upon the resources of Torchwood, the immediate needs of Torchwood, England, the Crown, and Earth, and needed to weigh the pros and cons of acting on any information. What did not make the problem easier was having the rambling statements of two aliens from an ultra-advanced civilizations and even worse, one of them was his pseudo-son-in-law-from-an-alternate-reality.

"Can you get this Doctor's TARDIS working, Doctor...?" he asked.

"How about, 'Smith'?"

"Smith it is."

The meta-crisis, Doctor Smith said, "It's not the most straight forward matter, but clearly the Void has been breached so the energy required must be accessible. It's beyond the capability of your resources so you don't have to worry about it. I'll handle it."

"Good, that being out of the way, you don't honestly think we have the resources to pursue this White Guardian? How do we even enter Calabi-Yau space?"

Both and Eight and Doctor Smith said, "You don't have to."

Eight said, "I know precisely where he is."

"Really? Where?" asked Pete.

"The Sudan."

In the first reality, the fourth and eleventh Doctors arrived in the TARDIS with their companions to a tent erected near an oasis in the desert. In the second reality, the Doctor, Doctor Smith, their companions and representatives of Torchwood approached the same tent in the same desert near the same oasis. There was a man sitting in the tent, tended by servants. He wore a white suit, had white hair, with white shoes, a white gaucho hat with a pearl hat band, and he had a white cane. Suffice it to say, his beard and hair were white.

As the Doctors and their companions approached the tent, the man stepped out and in a clear, gentle voice, he said, "Doctors, I've been expecting you."

The eighth Doctor said, "Thank you, it's good to see you again."

"I doubt that, considering our meetings are never under good circumstances."

"Ah, but one should always be honored to stand in the presence of one such as yourself, regardless of the circumstances."

"And has it occurred to the Doctor that he is also such a being?"

Doctor Smith grinned lopsided. "The thought never crossed my mind."

The White Guardian addressed them all. "Before this meeting begins, I should tell you that I exist here in all realities in all levels of existence. I tell you that there are four Doctors at this meeting. His fourth incarnation, his eighth incarnation, his eleventh incarnation, and his meta-crisis. You are all standing here. You can all hear my words and you all have the same questions."

The eleventh Doctor asked, "How many of us have been affected by the Black Guardian?"

Without waiting for a command, one of the servants, woman dressed in lavender silk, poured drinks for everyone. The White Guardian sat in a throne like chair and said, "There are six: those of you here, and the ninth and tenth incarnations."

"Where are they?" the eighth Doctor asked, abruptly.

"They are in a realm of the Black Guardian's own creation."

Rose, looking from the Doctors to the Torchwood members around her, expecting to be silenced asked, "So he is not directly the real world?"

"He believes he is. He does not realize yet that he does not have the complete key. That was the fourth Doctor's doing. The sixth piece of the key is a fake. The Black Guardian does not have it. He has the other five pieces because the Weeping Angels are his servants for he created them."

River was shocked to hear that. "He created them?"

"We are the Guardians of Time. We created the races of time. At one time, we all possessed a piece of the key. The Black Guardian possessed the sixth piece and with it created the Weeping Angels. From the original six races of time came the Time Lords, whom we entrusted to maintain the flow of time and to defend time from those that would exploit it."

Grace said, "But I always thought time was a relative idea."

"It is. The existence of time depends upon the very idea that nothing is real. If nothing is real, then you can create anything you want, and now that the Black Guardian has the Key to Time, he is doing just that."

Doctor Smith asked, "How do we get there?"

"I think that you already have the answer to that. There is one exceptionally clever Time Lord among us that already has the right idea." The White Guardian held out his hand to Romana. When she took it, she appeared in both realities.

"Romana!" exclaimed Doctor Smith.

Romana smiled, unperturbed by the small crowd she now addressed and said, "The eleventh incarnation of the Doctor has made it apparent that a catastrophe in the history of Gallifrey has resulted in the closure of the Void, which would make it impossible to travel between realities.. That having been said, I believe that everybody here can testify to the presence of a rift in the Void, indicating that it, in reality, is not closed. In my own reality, One Canada Square in London and an area between Earth and the sun are two locations for rifts leading into an alternate reality; the one I believe we are presently interacting with. In the other reality, the rifts locations are respectively, One Canada Square and Bad Wolf Bay in Sweden.

"The TARDIS cannot exist in a reality where the Time Lords never existed. Should it enter such a reality, it would be cut off from its primary fuel supply and effectively die unless a way could be found to re-power it. I suggest that these rifts have been created by the Black Guardian in his initial attempts to affect our universes, and instead of doing so, inadvertently created a universe between these two realities. It logically stands to reason that if the rifts exist between our realities and the Black Reality exists between these two realities, then the rifts and the Black Reality must be one and the same."

"Well that explains it, then!" shouted the eighth Doctor. "When I confronted the Black Guardian, in his anger, he attempted to send me to his false reality, but instead inadvertently sent me and Grace to the other side."

Doctor Smith said, "So we set the TARDIS down in the midst of the rift."

"The TARDIS would be in touch with these two realities and the Black Reality acting as a door between all three."

Romana conferred with the fourth and eleventh Doctor's and said, "That's our conclusion as well, which means we will have to contact Torchwood in our own reality, as the rift at One Canada Square seems to be the most accessible one."

The White Guardian released Romana, wholly restoring her to her own reality. He said, "You might be able to save your trapped selves without entering the Black Reality, but then you would not be able to confront the Black Guardian, and I think that that is necessary. Doctors, he has already attempted his revenge twice and he has failed. Expect his traps to be well laid. By now, he will be frustrated. Do not forget, that what happens to you in the Black Reality directly affects these realities. If you fail, the Black Guardian's influence will extend to these two realities, and with a deteriorating key in his possession, that could be extraordinarily dangerous."

All four Doctors and their companions solemnly observed the White Guardian as he spoke these words. Not long after, all left, on their ways to the next steps of their journeys. And in the Doctor's reality, at One Canada Square, Captain Jack Harkness was nearly asleep trying to finish a report when he heard a sound he had not heard in some time. It started as a whistling echo with a rush of wind, a low-pitched throbbing hum, and ended with a grinding sound that filled the entire office. Setting the report down, he made sure he wasn't dreaming. Then he looked full on at the device, a blue wooden box with the placard reading Police Public Call Box at the top. It was either a close cut man with a leather jacket or a man with fabulous hair in a gorgeous suit. He hadn't actually bet on a man in a tweed suit with a bow tie.

Jack said, "For once, Doctor, can't you keep the same face for at least a few years?"

"Ah! Captain Jack Harkness, adventurer and fellow time traveler, my companions and I require the services of Torchwood."

"Okay...why are you wearing a fez?"