AN: I'll be honest with you: this is a little weird, even for me. But I sort of like it. I felt like I hadn't been Time Lord-y enough in the last two chapters, so this sort of makes up for it. Also, just as a note, the bit at the end is more of an homage to The Doctor's Wife rather than a connection to it. I guarantee you, no characters in this story are going to be ending up on House any time soon.


As the summer drew to a close, Lily could no longer wait for school to start once more. She was tired of loneliness. The first of September was a welcome thought in her mind as she found she had nowhere else to go in the meantime.

This year, Lily decided to bring a few more comforts of home along with her. Her parents had warned her that, if she didn't spend more time with her TARDIS, it would hardly recognize her, making it potentially difficult to pilot in the future. So, in a small bag that was considerably larger on the inside, she stuffed her still-young TARDIS and left the Spinner's End once again, Hogwarts in mind.

When she got there, she found it was difficult to keep the TARDIS hidden. While her bag had enough Gallifreyan technology to keep her young time machine growing at a proper rate, she had trouble finding the time to care for it. She would need to carefully plan when exactly she could be around it so that no one else would see it. On occasion, she would pack it with her as she went to the Gryffindor common room to study, feigning trouble with an Arithmancy equation or an Ancient Runes translation until the room had cleared and she could spend some time alone with her beloved plant.

Lily soon tired of this, though, fearing that she would not even be able to last until Christmas. She really needed a room for it, a place where she could tend to the TARDIS and give it enough space to truly grow.

A blessing of sorts came to her one Sunday morning in the form of Peter Pettigrew. This was certainly a surprise, for, while she found Peter to be inoffensive, he also struck her as unbelievably dull.

As Lily sat in the corner of the Gryffindor common room that morning, fretting over whether the Runic word aphlotix would better translate to pansy or azalea, she was startled by Peter poking his nose (which, Lily thought to herself, was not so much a nose as a snout, pulling his meek face forward with it) over the back of her seat.

"Psst! Lily!" he whispered.

"What?" She, too, was whispering; although hers was out of mockery rather than fear that someone was listening.

"We've found something." His normally beady eyes were now wide with earnestness.

Lily followed him through the castle, up several flights of stairs, down dark corridors. He continued talking. "It's weird," he said, wheezing a bit from the long walk. "Me and James and Sirius and Remus found every other part of this castle within the first two months, but we didn't even have any idea that this existed until today. We'd been down this corridor loads of times, but we had never seen this. Not even once."

They finally stopped in front of a tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy and some dancing trolls. "You've never seen this before?" Lily was not amused. "This is a bit out of my way, but even I've seen this tapestry before."

"No, no, no!" Peter was in a slight state of despair. "Across from the tapestry." He pointed at a blank wall.

"Well, it just looks like the rest of the stonework to me."

"No, just… just watch."

Peter paced down the hall and back again, passing by her on his way back, three times. As he walked, he looked as though he was speaking words, although no sound was coming from his mouth. His eyes were shut tight, and he was obviously concentrating. As he passed her the third time, the wall slowly morphed into a doorway.

Lily stood back for a moment, taking in the magic. She had spent three years with this, and it still never failed to amaze her. She finally reached for the handle of the door, pulling it slowly open.

Inside, the room was magnificent. To call it enormous would be an understatement. How it could possibly have been sitting here for so long, and no one had noticed it yet, was simply unbelievable.

She quickly found the other three boys standing to the side. Whereas Sirius and Remus beamed away at her, James' eyes wandered off to a corner of the room before finally settling on the floor.

"So, what exactly is this room called?" Lily asked, going over to the walls and feeling them. She could practically sense the energy pouring out of them, a sort of life surrounding her in the masonry.

"We haven't the foggiest." Remus shrugged. "It just sort of… appears. You have to walk by it three times, thinking about what it is you want to see, and then it opens up. We've been in and out of it all morning."

"An excellent way to waste time, I'm sure." She felt oddly at home in this place. "So why was I invited?"

"Well, why not?" Sirius laughed. "We trust you enough. You're practically one of us."

"Which might explain why I was here when you found it." She smirked. Inside, she knew she would need to remember this room.

"We couldn't exactly go about waking you up, could we?" James finally looked at her. "The stairs don't trust us enough to go and see you or the other girls." It was true. If they so much as tried to visit the girls' dormitories, the stairs would slip out from underneath them, making them impossible to climb. "Besides, it's not like we found it on purpose."

"I'm sure you didn't."

As she leaned against the walls of the room, she began to truly connect with the room. And, as she connected with the room, she realized something very important: the room was speaking to her. She knew it wasn't English; it couldn't be. The boys certainly didn't seem to hear it or, at the very least, understand it enough to recognize it as language. But, to Lily, it sounded very much like English. She tried not to show to the others that she was actually listening to a room. "I like that one," the room said. "The one with the glasses. He's rather funny."

Lily stifled a laugh. "So, how did you find it?"

"Isn't it obvious?" said the room. "I wanted them to."

"Well, we were just sort of for a bit of a stroll," started James.

"And Sirius got a bit ahead of us up around here," continued Peter.

"And then he tossed a dungbomb at me," added Remus, grimacing.

"And then he got all worked up, pacing back and forth, thinking of how to get rid of it before it went off," said Sirius, laughing at his friend's earlier frenzy. "So then this old thing showed up."

"Who is he calling old?" the room complained.

Lily was baffled by the entire scenario unfolding around her. Not only had these four boys stumbled upon a hidden room, but the room was also sentient. This was beyond what even Lily's comprehension.

As their conversation drew out, the boys parted, one by one, until Lily was left alone in the room. She sat down against the wall, sighing. "So, you're a bit different, too, I see."

The room laughed. Could rooms do that? "If you understand me so well, I can see that you're a little bit different."

"Yes, I suppose so." Lily looked around at the enormous hall. "So, what are you exactly? An android? A type of plant? What?"

"I am a sort of coral from the planet Alzarius, if you must know."

Lily frowned. "I've never heard of that planet. My parents are from another planet. Those are all I learned about for the first eleven years of my life. Why haven't I heard of it?"

"Well, which planet are your parents from?"

"Gallifrey."

"Ah. A Time Lady." The room chuckled. "To make a rather long story short, Alzarius is in a parallel universe known to the Time Lords as E-Space, in precisely the same coordinates as Gallifrey."

"Really?" This normally would have seemed far-fetched to Lily, but, seeing as she was talking to a room in a castle filled with people waving sticks at one another, she could hardly complain. "Is Alzarius much like Gallifrey?"

"Not much, I'm afraid. Alzarius did not have the advantage of being drenched in the time vortex, so the people there don't regenerate, although they are exceptionally fast healers, at least compared to humans. My kind is rather like those… those… oh, what are they called again? The coral that resembles a machine."

"The TARDISes?"

"Yes, those. Like our people, though, we were not exposed to the vortex, and so we have no command of time. I am, though, rather gifted in travelling through space. I don't even need a pilot." The room chuckled. "Unfortunately, on a journey some thousands of years ago, I fell through a crack, so to speak, and here I am!"

"How is that you speak? TARDISes don't unless they have a voice interface."

"We've a great many differences with the TARDIS race, as far as I can understand. Although we can both communicate telepathically, my kind managed to develop the ability to produce our own sounds and, later, language. The better question might be, how do you speak to me? You've mastered the language of my kind quite well, I must say."

"Well," Lily said, "I've sort of got a TARDIS growing in my dormitory."

"Ah. That would explain it. The translation circuits must be growing well."

"Actually, I was wondering…" Lily was worried that the request she was about to make might be too much for her new friend. "Do you think I could keep the TARDIS hidden in here? It's in a bag right now, but I feel like it might be able to use some space."

"Of course!" The room sounded delighted to have something even remotely like her within her walls. "Shall I prepare a special room for it that only you can access?"

"Oh, that would be lovely! Can you do that?"

"Don't insult me. Of course I can." Lily imagined that, if the room had a mouth, it would be smiling right now.

"Thank you." Lily grinned, awkwardly patting the floor. "What are you called, exactly?"

"Similarly to how the TARDIS is short for 'Time And Relative Dimension In Space,' my race is known as IDRIS, 'Inter-Dimensional Relativity In Space.'"

"IDRIS." Lily liked it. "Pleased to meet you, IDRIS. I'm Lily."

"Lily, my dear, I feel this will be the beginning of a beautiful new friendship."