A/N: And, because I am terrible at not posting once a section is finished, now for something completely different.
This is an intermission. A glimpse into the times between adventures. It's mostly unnecessary, and you can feel free to skip, but it lets me explain a little bit about how I'm thinking about this story. There will be more later.
I did actually design the product of the happenings in this intermission, and it's posted on this tumblr I just made because whatever. I needed a place to post it.
ijustwantmoreWho-tumblr-com (obviously replace the hashes with periods.)


The Doctor, dressed in a thin gray v-neck shirt and a pair of too-long light blue flannel pj pants covered in ducks (that she might have accidentally-on-purpose forgotten to return to the Pierce household), pushed her black-framed glasses back up the bridge of her nose, hunching lower over a desk in the depths of her ship. She squinted at a tiny circuit board through a magnifying glass set into a hinged arm, eyeing the worn wiring of her well-used sonic screwdriver. The space was dimly lit, with only a couple of desk lamps on in her immediate vicinity, but the room was obviously a nicely sized workshop. Scattered across a handful of desks she'd pushed together against one wall where she was working were an assorted variety of tools. Some were obviously different sized wrenches and hammers, while others were unrecognizable in relation to humanity's basic tools, having come from very different planets, but they were all strewn where they'd been tossed after the last time someone had used them. It looked like the studio had been intended for at least ten people to have been able to work in at once, judging by the number of workstations, but most of the areas had become cluttered with discarded scraps or unfinished projects. On one of the few mostly untouched tabletops lay the immense Lord Tubbington, twitching his tail lazily while pointedly ignoring the room's other occupant, yet still somehow keeping an unimpressed eye on her in case any of that debris turned out to be edible.

Brittany was asleep at the moment, having been tired out by the grueling activities of the past few days, and the TARDIS was still. The Time Lord had thought it a good idea to let her catch up on some much needed rest, and sent her off to the room the girl had claimed for her own the first time she'd needed to sleep on the ship. The blonde made her promise to get some sleep herself, but after a full twelve minutes of staring at the ceiling of her bunk she'd gotten too restless to stay, and tromped down to the workshop. There were things she needed to take care of, anyway.

The first few minutes were spent taking apart her screwdriver, cleaning it, and reassembling with a few new tweaks. Once shiny with polish, and bearing a new grip on its handle, the little machine was set aside in favor of wheeling herself over to a computer interface to start perusing the data banks for a name.

That's right. A name.

It was a rather unique tradition she had started after her first regeneration that every new body got its own name, even if none of them were ever used out loud. Once, long, long ago, she had mentioned that line of thinking to a friend from home, but he'd just mocked the idea and called her a fool for being so sentimental. Despite having laughed it off as a joke, deep down she still felt that each of her deserved their own names beyond the blanketing title she'd given herself, and her true Gallifreyan name (which was never, ever to be spoken, lest it be used against her and the good she'd tried to do). She'd named herself 8 times so far, but it was the first time she'd had the opportunity to pick a female name and she wanted to choose it wisely.

For two hours (an incredible feat of patience, all things considered) the small black haired girl had sifted through lists of names from a number of her favorite planets, but nothing felt right. Finally she narrowed her search to just one hunk of rock. It seemed appropriate, seeing as she'd recently declared herself Earth's Champion to that ship of unfortunate Sycorax, that an Earth name would suit best. She quickly narrowed it to musically influenced names by simply following the intuition afforded to her by her form, and then down to potentially Hispanic origins in tribute to her recently acquired coloring. Maybe it was stereotyping, but an honorary human name was already a stereotype, so she didn't dwell on it.

Once she'd gotten the list to around seven million she huffed an exasperated sigh, fluttering a lock of hair dangling in front of her face. It was taking forever. She decided to send her hands rocketing over the computer screen she'd been using where it was set into a mostly unused workstation, tapping in an algorithm meant to weed out names she knew she didn't want to use, bringing it down to two million and seventy-five. A few more seconds dropped six thousand, or so, then another few thousand. Again, and again, her fingers tapped the screen, remixing the numbers to find the right set of letters.

At long last the list of names was down to three.

J-Lo
Carlos Santana
Shakira

The Doctor squinted at the screen. She must have typed something in wrong. These were hardly even names, and one of them was masculine. What even–

She pursed her lips, skimming her algorithms and the short list. That last name… That wasn't bad. Would it work as a first, and only, name? The girl frowned, considering, and shrugged to herself. It's not like anyone else was going to know, anyway. She'd keep it.

On a whim she brought up the full length versions of the other two names and pulled the family name from one of them, figuring if she was going to start with a second name, she might as well end with one, too.

Santana…. Lopez.

The longer she played with it in her head the more it seemed to grow on her. The Doctor nodded to herself. It would do.

She pushed off the desk forcefully, sending her wheeled chair careening across the room to the more used section of the room, nearly startling the oversized feline into movement– but not quite. The girl swung herself over to the end of the row with her preferred workbench and jerked herself to a stop there with a clatter of abused chair parts.

Now was the really fun part. A new body meant a new person, and a new person meant…. A new screwdriver.

She stretched one caramel arm out over a desk on the opposite end of the row from her favorite workspace, and pushed off again, sweeping the remains of past projects down the line with her across the flush tabletops, and into a tangled mess of wires and circuitry next to her chosen bench. With a grin the girl began plucking out the bits she liked. A tube here, a knot of fiber optics there, a handful of impossibly tiny bolts, and a selection of miniature circuit boards all found their way out of the chaos and into neat little stacks of potential.

While it was a fact that she was almost constantly tinkering with her singular tool creating an entirely new casing and matching set of innards was something different, and reserved only for special post-regeneration-cycle occasions.

This one would have to be sleek. Something narrow and smooth. No heavy-handed grips or top heavy claw heads, even though she had really enjoyed that thumb slider. The light would need to be a different color, too. She was done with greens, and blue wouldn't compare to her compan–… Wouldn't compare to–… Well, she didn't want blue.

Sleek, thin, not blue or green, and counterbalanced. She smirked.

Easy.

Bronze hands smoothly flipped the tie from her wrist up into her hair, twisting the length of silky midnight out of her way and into a messy bun on the back of her head.

It was time to work.


Three hours passed, unnoticed.

Gently she blew a thin puff bit of soldering smoke away, and took in her creation for the first time. It had taken more modifications than she had originally expected to fit everything into the casing she'd chosen, but she'd also included some upgrades and tweaks that she'd been meaning to get to, so she figured it wasn't as off the mark as it seemed. The final product was a smooth, steel barrel seven and a half inches long and a quarter inch in diameter. One end was rounded and set with a sensor that would recognize pressure, and activate at her touch. The same for a couple of unlabeled areas on the body of the machine where she had placed similar sensor buttons that only she would be able to readily identify, since she had put them there. Four grooves had been carved around the bottom of the barrel, and another four an inch and a half higher marked a section that could be pulled or twisted out to show a series of scan results, as well as a narrow panel nearer the top that would display her more commonly used readings. At the top end was a small button, and the whole thing ended with a red-lit tip.

Satisfied with the polished gleam she gave a relaxed sigh, and leaned back in her chair, stretching her cramped shoulders. She cracked her stiff spine against the seat before hunching back over her work and reaching for an etching pen to finish off the final details by engraving the name she'd chosen on the steel in her native language. The Time Lord smiled as she started the perfect spirals of home, and let her mind wander. It had been a harrowing few days with battling the Daleks, regenerating, defending humans against aliens, defending aliens against humans, then defending humans against humans and cats. She wondered idly when Brittany might wake up. Once this was done she was going to get bored again, and it was much more entertaining on the ship when the blonde was up and about. Sure, there was a pool, karaoke bar, and essentially anything else one could want with traveling through space and time, but without someone to care it was mind-numbingly dull, and if there was anything she couldn't stand it was a numb mind. Her companion, though, found joy in pretty much anything, and tended to bring that feeling out in her, too. Brittany had once gotten her to play hide and seek with her for hours without complaint while she was that wide lipped man, and he was even less inclined to focus than the person she'd regenerated into. She grinned slightly to herself at the memory. The girl was impressive in more ways than one.

Suddenly the graceful spiraling of her hand slowed, causing the Doctor to blink back to the present. She stared at her new screwdriver, as shock and embarrassed horror slowly seeped into her face. That once beautifully smooth barrel was no more. The whole thing had been etched up with circles her hand had wandered in while she had been thinking. To her chagrin now carved into the metal were a pair of names written over and over again. She cursed under her breath, adjusting her glasses frames again, nervously, and shooting a quick look at the empty doorway behind her, suddenly afraid a bleary-eyed Brittany might appear to see what she was doing instead of sleeping.

The small Latina shoved her hand into one of the piles of scraps, searching frantically for a replacement barrel, but came up empty. She cursed again. Of course she couldn't have been drawn to a tube she had duplicates of, and naturally she had to ruin the only one she had with her lack of focus.

Her dark eyes shot to her abandoned computer screen. Maybe there was a way she could simply mask the problem…. Just as a temporary fix until she could acquire a new barrel. She grimaced.

It would have to do.

She shot herself back over to the interface, immediately tapping at the screen and digging through menus to find what she needed. A furious determination on her face, the girl dove into the swirling base code and reached out for the band-aid that would save her pride. A few more clicks and it was done.

She smirked her silent victory, and rolled away again. Spinning her seat back to the desk her mocha eyes narrowed on her tools again, and she scoffed.

It was like she was a teenager, writing the names of boys or girls she (maybe) liked on her schoolwork. She sneered, and shook her head in disgust at how pathetic she was. Fifty years of awkward teenage years had been quite enough, and she really didn't have the time or patience to revisit that mess again.

No one else would know, though. She was the last child of Gallifrey, so there was no one left to have been taught it, and she'd just successfully detached her language from the translator software, so while every other language in the universe would be understandable to everyone, other than herself, her accidental inscription would remain simply an odd pattern on her sonic screwdriver.

Probably.

The Doctor sighed again, rolling her eyes, and picking up her new tool. Lightly kicking the chair out of the way she flicked the desk lights off, and briskly crossed the room, figuring now that she'd both found a name and built her new screwdriver, how ever strange that happened to have turned out, she might as well try sleeping again.

She quickly made her way back through the corridors of the TARDIS, her hands fiddling with her device all the way. As she reached the hall lined with bedchambers she couldn't help the jump her eyes made to the one closed door where she knew a yellow haired human was recovering from the exhaustion of bodysnatching and alien abductions. She forced her eyes away and pushed on towards her own room, sliding the door shut as she entered.

After setting the freshly constructed sonic screwdriver and her glasses onto a her nightstand the Time Lord flopped down on the bed and let herself melt into the blankets, not even bothering to actually get under them. Against her will and better judgment the girl's dark gaze slid across the barely visible ceiling panels again, then down the wall, settling heavily on the thin bit of metal mocking her with dimly reflected light from her bedside table. Her eyes traced the repetitive circular writing before her hold on consciousness waned.

Santana….

…. Brittany

Peirce….

…. Lopez

Brittany…

…Santana…

Br…

Darkness.