Isabel blinked when she was first struck by a bright, hot sun shining down into her face and along the front of her body. "Oh, hello Isabel. Do you have any idea why we're here?"

At first Isabel couldn't help but cringe when she recognized Shelda Devensee's voice and knew that Ava's aunt had recognized her. She was supposed to be surreptitiously inside the dream of Ava's Antarian Aunt, and so far seemed to be earning zero points out of ten for stealth. However, when she looked over at Shelda, and found an Antarian girl who seemed to be at most her own nineteen years, she didn't see any suspicion at all in that innocent face.

Shelda had to still have some of her adult memories, if she had identified Isabel, but apparently didn't seem to think anything was odd about seeing some Earth girl who she had just met in a dream of her childhood. Dreams could certainly be at least that jumbled sometimes - Isabel knew that much from personal experience. "Umm, I don't even know where we are," Isabel said without thinking it through, and then decided that pretending ignorance could go even further than admitting it honestly. "Or who you are. What happened to Roswell?"

"Umm... that's a long story," Shelda said, with a private smile. "We're at the rock of Nairda, near the city where I grew up in the province of Bubozif."

Isabel couldn't keep from laughing. "You're not making up those names, are you?"

"No!" Shelda insisted. "Keep quiet, you're just an Earth girl who wouldn't even understand my language without the TARDIS thing - and if you weren't a fragment of my dream."

"Gotcha," Isabel agreed. "I'll keep quiet - for now." To herself, she wondered if being inside Shelda's dream was indeed confusing her understanding of the Antarian language, or providing a translation that worked in a different way from the TARDIS. Had the time lords who had devised the translation field planned for it to cover dream-walking?

"No, I guess you don't have to do that," Shelda said with a sigh. "I appreciate the company, actually - just, try not to ask stupid questions, okay?"

"Gotcha."

There was a long silence. "Which means that I'll have to start the conversation by rambling, I suppose," Shelda continued, wandering towards the rock. "I guess it's natural that I should dream of being back here, after talking with Rath and your friends about climbing up this way and about meeting Pinchan."

"Okay." Isabel considered. "How does being here make you feel? I hope that that's not a stupid question."

"Well, no, but it sounds terribly like something that a psychologist might ask you about a dream in a session, isn't it? Getting asked the question inside the dream is something like irony."

"Maybe a little," Isabel said. "Somehow I'm surprised that you have psychologists on Antar - and irony."

"Some things are nearly universal," Shelda remarked. "Well, I feel uneasy, as if this rock is representing more than just my past with Pinchan, but some other deep dark secret that I haven't been willing to admit to myself." She reached out to touch the rough surface of the cliff, which was reasonably full of appendage-holds. "And I'm not in a mood to hide from my own secrets tonight, so what do you say, Isabel? Up to the top or give it our all trying, and see what's there when we make it?"

"Umm... I'm up for it if you are," Isabel muttered. "Can't say that I'm good with climbing when I'm awake. Is it true that if you hit the ground when you're dreaming, you die of a heart attack?"

"I don't know, but I don't intend to let myself hit," Shelda said, taking two handholds, then one foothold and another. Isabel nodded and waited, deciding that she'd be best off taking the same route that Shelda had chosen after her, instead of trying to find a parallel track up.

Climbing up the rock face in a dreamscape was somehow surreal for Isabel, as if her fear of falling had been turned off, and though the weight of her body as she was hanging on felt more or less normal, she missed her footing several times, and was able to recover it in a way that seemed as if an invisible force was helping her out, though maybe that was just because she didn't have enough experience climbing to know when you really could get a second chance like that.

In just a few minutes, Shelda was hauling herself up over the edge, (and showing Isabel way too much of an Antarian posterior in tight pantaloons at the same time,) and Isabel hurried to follow. As she struggled to her feet, something was immediately wrong when compared to her expectations. For one thing, they were inside a room, or possibly just half a room in half a house, bisected by the cliff.

Well, when in doubt, ask the dreamer. "Where are we? Shelda, do you recognize this place?"

Shelda looked around and shuddered. "This - uh, it's none of your business. What are you doing in my dream anyway, Isabel Evans?"

Isabel smiled slightly to herself. She knew how to spot when someone was scared of having the truth come out, from years of experience. Apparently the signs weren't so difficult to recognize even for another species. "That's not going to work, Shelda. If I'm here, it's because I need to be here for you to face your dark secrets." Would Shelda believe that? "You're going to have to answer my questions. If you don't want to tackle where, then here's another one." She pointed at a cute little Antarian rug-rat, dressed in a pretty light blue jumper, crawling on his hands and knees through a doorway towards them. "Who's he?"

Shelda chuckled. "She. Who'd dress up a baby boy in blue?"

"Guess that's a cultural gap," Isabel muttered to herself. "Okay, then, who is she?"

"Probably Ava," Shelda said with a fond smile. "This is the house that her parents lived in for the first four years of her life, or at least part of it. The real house wasn't built on a mesa top with walls open to the cliff edge."

"Yeah, I should hope not," Isabel said, walking over to pick baby Ava up. "So why were you scared to tell me about this place? Is there some bad memory that is rooted here?"

"No, nothing bad ever happened in this house," Shelda insisted. "We should stay right here and finish the dream."

"Yeah, right," Isabel muttered. If Shelda's panic reaction was leading them to stay in the house, then whatever she was afraid of wasn't here, surely enough, but it had to be close. Maybe in the neighborhood that the house had been a part of. Dream rules being what they were, there was no guarantee that if Isabel went out the front door of the house, she'd actually find the neighborhood. It had been a mismatch that had brought them here, after all, and the dream house could be on top of the mesa with Shelda's old sweetie waiting for her, or in a jungle, or just about anything else. But she didn't want to hang around somewhere that Shelda Dervensee thought was safe.

It took her a lot of tries to find the front door, and Isabel ran into other dream figures along the way, including family members who weren't exactly happy to find a stranger holding their little daughter/sister, but eventually Isabel found the door, the entire Dervensee clan trailing at her heels now, and pushed the button to slide it open, wondering just what she'd find.

"Don't do that!" Ava's mother yelled, and started rummaging in a chest of drawers near the door. But it was too late to stop the door from opening, and the scene that greeted Isabel was indeed a small-town neighborhood, with a few differences that she could see.

First, there was the thick fog, white with a blueish tinge, which seemed to blow through in uneven clouds, and completely masked anything more than half a block away. Everybody out walking in the fog, from elderly couples walking arm in arm with one cane on either side, to the little boys who stood a few feet high, were wearing some kind of gas masks strapped to their faces, and all of them, with the possible exception of the little boys, seemed to be very focused on where they were going.

A wheeled vehicle drove down between the sidewalks, and Isabel peered at it through the fog. The driver and passenger didn't appear to be wearing masks, but the entire vehicle seemed much bulkier than an Earth car, or the comparable vehicles that she'd seen at Brok Bay. Puzzled, she stepped over the threshold, trying to get a better look, and immediately started coughing and wheezing as she breathed in the foggy air. In her arms, little Ava started to cry and squirm herself.

Belatedly taking the hint, Isabel rushed back inside the house and blindly stabbed for the button that would close the door again. Once she had her breath back, she turned to Ava's mother, who had pulled something out of a drawer that extended sideways out of the chest and was holding it out to her.

It was a gas mask.

"What the heck is going on out there?" Isabel demanded, throwing her free arm in the direction of the door.

#

"Uh-oh," Alex muttered, as Isabel's catatonic body started to tremble and shake in distress. "I think that the dream's getting into a bad bit."

"Should we try to snap her out of it?" Liz asked, biting her lower lip as her brown eyes filled with worry.

"No," Alex insisted. "Not for something like this. I don't think that there's anything in Shelda's dream that could actually hurt her, and if there is - then there'll be a clearer sign than this. She told me once that when dreams take a bad turn is usually where she learns the best details. I'm not sure if she was thinking of this kind of situation, but it makes some kind of sense."

"Alright," Max said. "I do hope that Isabel manages to find something out, because she's really our only lead left."

"We could try dropping in on the rest of Ava's family," Liz suggested. "Finding them might be a bit of a pain, but still. There's no hard and fast rule that we have to go back to the present to meet Tess as soon as we leave Brok Bay."

"The Doctor might have something to say about that," Alex pointed out. "I think that he planned out this little jaunt to minimize the chances of interfering with the past, and still we've had two close calls, as I make it - Vilandra's ghost and Aunt Shelda."

"Yeah, you may be right," Max said. "If the Doctor says that we pull out of Antar's past, then we go." He cocked his head. "Did anybody tell him what we were trying with the dream walking?"

"I don't know," Liz said, looking over at Isabel, who had started to quiet down. "What's his Time-Lordiness up to, anyway?"

"Not sure, aside from keeping watch over the TARDIS and pretending that he's keeping an eye on the power cells," Alex pointed out. "But wasn't Kyle last seen going over to check and see if Rose was in there with him? He would have been able to bring them both up to speed on the plan."

"Did we know the whole plan the last time Kyle was around?" Liz asked. "I thought that was when we were going over to casually chat with Shelda, so nobody had come up with the plan to dreamwalk her yet."

"No, we knew that she might have to dreamwalk to follow up any leads that you got from talking to her," Max replied. "But maybe somebody should go to update the Doctor with what's happened since then." He sighed to himself. "It's been a long day, and a long evening."

"I don't think that anybody should go running off quite yet," Alex pointed out. "Isabel's coming 'round."

"She is?" Max asked. Isabel didn't seem to be obviously shaking off her dreamwalker's trance yet, her finger still on a borrowed portable communicator with which Jim Valenti had captured a visual image of Shelda Dervensee.

Liz chuckled. "Give Alex a little credit for understanding your sister more deeply than you do by now, dear."

"That much, I have no problems admitting," Max laughed. "I certainly wouldn't want to be as intimate with her as Alex is."

"Trust me, none of us want that," Isabel mumbled, and one of her eyes flicked open. "Okay, I think that I've got the details. Hopefully, I also managed to end the dream in a way that won't make Shelda back off on her level of pressure with Ava."

"Is this going to make me feel guilty about letting the past fulfill itself?" Max asked her.

"I don't think so - it's a bit of a noble goal, though possibly impractical. Let's see, umm." Isabel coughed, and crawled into Alex's arms. "Something to drink first would be good. Not that Rynec stuff."

Liz went to fetch a glass of water. Isabel took a sip, rinsed her mouth out with it, looked around for a moment as if wishing that she had something to spit out into, and then reluctantly swallowed. Liz stifled a snicker.

"Don't rush yourself, honey," Alex advised.

"I'll try not to. Let's see. There's a large town over on Breoll, where Ava's family lived for a few years - actually, she may have been born there, I'm not sure. Miserable little place, even by Breoll standards. It's a mining town, and there are poisonous gases that come out of the mine shaft and hang around the entire area, like this blue-tinged fog. I saw the stuff, in Shelda's dreams... she wasn't living with them at the time, it was just Ava's parents and siblings, including her half brother, but Shelda visited."

"Why did they build a town there?" Alex asked.

"Money and power, I guess it comes down to. I didn't really understand what they were mining, but it's something that was only found at that one spot on all known planets, and very valuable, partly because of that scarcity. And the mines are big enough that there need to be a lot of workers, and processing plants reasonably close. Some of the mine workers have their families live away from the mine town and the gas, but some of them can't afford to, and some of the families don't want to. It's pretty safe, as long as your house is properly air-conditioned and you're careful about wearing gas masks outside and all of that stuff, but still, it seems a pretty shitty way to live to me.

"That's where Ava's parents came in. They went there to try and improve living conditions for the worker families, and I guess part of the reason that they brought their kids was to inspire the trust and confidence of the Breoll workers - they don't just say that the new kind of houses they're putting up are more reliably gas-tight, they brought their own children to live in one of them, that kind of thing. But in the end, there wasn't as much that they could do for those Breoll as they'd hoped, and after they got back home to Antar, the Dervensees came up with a different plan, but there was at least one big problem with it."

"Well, don't keep us hanging," Max muttered when Isabel trailed off awkwardly.

"It was something that would take royal approval," Liz guessed. "The Granilith maybe, or just top-level diplomatic access, since changing the local conditions around such an important mine could be considered interference over Breoll sovereignty."

"Both of the above." Isabel took another drink of the water. "Still, it was just an idle notion, as the kids grew up, until something else happened. There was an accident of some sort in part of town, with the air conditioning failing, and an old safety device malfunctioned. Several hundred Breeolyn, and a few visitors, are stuck in time-stasis now, on the point of suffocating to death. Nobody can turn off the stasis without letting them die, so they're just stuck in limbo. The Granilith is probably the only thing that can save those people's lives, but the Breoll government won't ask King Sanren if he'll help them. And the rest of the safety equipment in town is just getting worse and worse."

"So what happened then?" Alex asked. "Do you know how much the older Dervensees connived to get influence over the Granilith, and the royal family?"

"That's still a little bit unclear," Isabel admitted. "I've got part of Shelda's version of events. She was the one who first really paid attention to the fact that Zan was around the same age as Ava, and that they were both starting to go through Antarian puberty at the time. She did arrange for Ava to visit the seaside town with her girlfriends from school, at the same time as Zan would be there, but claims that she didn't do anything else to make sure that they would meet. And I couldn't really get a straight answer about how much she did to encourage Ava after hearing that she and Zan had met."

"Okay." Max stepped close to the bed, and reached out to touch Isabel on the arm for a moment. "Thanks for stepping up, Isabel. You did well." He sighed. "Okay, now somebody should go to catch the Doctor up to speed, and probably that means you at least, since you've got the direct information. Any preference for who you want to go with you?"

"Oh, come on Max," Isabel edged away from Alex and lay her head down on the fluffy pillow. "Any of you can take the secondhand news to whoever you like, and I'll debrief anybody in the morning. Preferably either over breakfast, or after breakfast. But me needs sleep right now."

Max, Liz, and Alex exchanged looks. "Though she hasn't asked for you specifically, I think that having her Alexxy to snuggle with will keep Isabel happier, and the last thing we need is for her to get any crankier tonight," Liz said with a smile. "Max, I think that we can relay the update before hitting the sack. What do you think?"

"That we should get out of their room, immediately if not sooner," Max chimed in. "Goodnight, and we'll see you both at breakfast."

"Bye now, sweet dreams," Alex said, waving and stretching out under the light covers next to Isabel.

Max and Liz let themselves out via the balcony doors.

#

Kyle woke up with a headful of blonde hair in his face, and smiled to himself. "Hey, are you up already?" he whispered.

"Do I look as if I'm up, Valenti? I'm right down here with you."

"Yes, but I guess that answers the question I was really asking." Kyle stretched his legs out on the bed slightly. "I guess that I'm a little bit surprised that we made it to daybreak without getting woken about some new development on the Aunt Shelda thing."

"Well, you weren't sending out 'Hey, come talk if you have questions or need help' signals last night," Rose pointed out, stretching her arms out, one of them running along his side. "But I guess that we're not going to learn anything more until we go out for breakfast."

"Well, not unless we have something to learn from each other." Kyle sat up, got his feet oriented properly to slide into slippers, and reached out for a robe. "What's going on with us, Rose? I mean, from your perspective. I could have sworn that you were really into me, and then yesterday, just before the naming day party, it was like something made you cool off."

"Well, yeah, I guess that something did." Rose admitted. "I don't remember exactly when it was offhand, but you kissed me, and somehow I guess I could see something from deep inside you. I'm not sure if that's because Max healed you and you're partially alien now, or maybe I'm a little bit psychic myself now from travelling so much with the Doctor. I don't suppose that really matters."

"So what was this thing that you saw, that was enough to make you drop me like a hot potato? Did you get a flash of the way I used to treat girls? Or maybe it was just that I seem so young and immature, compared to a woman like you."

"Neither," Rose whispered softly. "Well, there was one other girl, but not one that you treated badly, as far as I could tell. And she might have treated you better than she did, but there's still a piece of your heart that's true to her, after all this time."

"Dammit." Kyle flopped down into the desk chair. "Tess. I really didn't want to hear that, from you. I don't want to even like her anymore, after the stunt that she pulled."

"Is - is it okay if I ask about the two of you?" Rose's voice was soft and her face very sympathetic. "I mean, I've picked up some of the broad strokes of how she fit into the rest of the gang, but..."

"I asked her to our junior prom," Kyle muttered, wondering if this would be relevant to what Rose wanted to know. "I finally admitted to myself that night that I liked her like that, that I might be falling in love with her. And she told me that I was like a brother to her. Then Liz went looking for Max and found him kissing Tess. Max had been Liz's date, too."

"Oh," Rose muttered. "That must have been hard for both of you."

"Yeah. And it was a few weeks later that I saw Max walking Tess home - the next day at school they were holding hands walking down the hall and everything, and soon enough the word was going around in the group that Tess was pregnant."

"Wow." Rose took a deep breath. "Did she say anything to you before she left?"

"Not really," Kyle admitted. "There wasn't much time before the Granilith launched, and the four of us had just rushed up to the pod chamber to let Max and the others know how Tess had used Alex to make sure that she had a way home, and that he was in bad shape as the mindwarp wore off. There was a lot of arguing about that, and if Tess had arranged the whole thing to steal the Granilith for anybody, and no time for anything else."

"Right." Rose took a deep breath. "Well, as much fun as it might have been to take the next step with you, it's looking like the timing's not so great. Once the Aunt Shelda thing is worked out, we're off to face Tess, and you'll be able to get some closure if that's what you want - but then the Doctor and I will be heading off for some other place and time. I mean, unless you want me to ask him if he'd consider taking you with us, at least for a while. He's done that before, but I'm not even sure if that's what you'd want."

Kyle considered that. "I'll think on it, but I'm not sure I need to get mixed up with other aliens like that."

"Fair enough." Rose started to pull on a set of cute sweats. "Now, let's see about breakfast."

#

"Could you pass me the tea biscuits, please," Maria asked her mother.

"I think that these are scones, not biscuits dear," Amy said, but she handed the plate down the table. "Oh, say, are those birds of some sort?" She pointed out in the direction of the bay, where the orange Antarian sun had just risen.

"I can't tell in this light," Jim muttered, trying to shade his face from the bright light with one hand and still look at the tiny little black flying specks in the distance.

"Zan and Vilandra mentioned some kind of flying amphibians living out by the bay," Michael said. "Not that big, but maybe pigeon-sized. Oh hey, we've got two more. Good morning, Valenti junior, and good morning Doctor's companion."

"Hi there," Kyle said, waving at the breakfast gathering.

"Sit down and help yourself," Amy invited. "The breakfast buffet isn't Antarian cooking, and we're not sure who arranged for it."

"It could have been the Antarians, Miz Deluca," Kyle told her. "They did a pretty good job with cheeseburgers and French fries - that was before you came over."

"Could have been, honey, but it's not," Rose countered, patting Kyle on the shoulder and then taking a seat on the patio table. "I recognize the flair if not the spread. This would be the work of a one-man operation that you could call 'TARDIS Catering.'"

"The Doctor?" Jim asked.

"Actually, yeah, that kind of fits," Michael said. "He had us inside the TARDIS for breakfast one morning on Kaalto, and yeah, it was a bit like this - full English breakfast style."

"Okay, that's okay by me," Kyle said, lifting a dish cover in the center of the table. Inside were a large number of waffles, warm and crisp. He transferred two over to his plate and started looking around for some maple syrup. "Where's everybody else?"

"Well, let's see," Jim passed his son a little glass bottle full of thick dark brown liquid. "Max and Liz are presumably in their room, Alex and Isabel likewise. We haven't checked on any of them yet. And the Doctor hasn't put in an appearance while any of us have been up, and nobody's mounted an expedition down to the TARDIS to check there for him."

"So you just got up, found breakfast, and fell to?" Rose put in with a smile.

"More or less," Amy admitted.

"Michael and I went to bed late, and the other four were still up then, more or less," Maria put in. "Isabel was going to dreamwalk Aunt Shelda, and the others were planning to wait up and see what she found out."

"Okay," Jim said, nodding. "I remember somebody mentioning the dreamwalking plan, but not those details I think. So I guess none of us know how the dream went."

"I suspect it went well, if the Doctor went to all of this trouble," Rose said, waving at the breakfast spread and smiling. "A bit of a celebration, and maybe also figuring that we wouldn't need Earth food any more, so we might as well enjoy it now."

"But we're not going back to Earth straight away, are we?" Amy asked. "I thought that the plan was to go to Tess' moon." Rose just shrugged in reply.

There was some silent munching. "That is indeed the idea, Miz DeLuca," a voice suddenly announced from down over the edge of the patio, and soon the Doctor's head popped up as he climbed the last few rungs of the wall ladder. "So perhaps I'm being a bit too theatrical in using up my supplies, but why not commemorate the occasion with them. Somehow I'm not sure that we'll be spending as long at Dimares moon as we have at Kaalto and Antar, anyway."

There was a stunned silence as the Doctor strolled over to the table, picked a tater tot out of a heaping bowl of them, dipped it in a smaller bowl of ketchup, and popped it into his mouth. Then Rose chuckled.

"Good news from Isabel's dream?"

"Nuh-uh." The Doctor spun around playfully and waggled his finger in Rose's direction. "That's not the right possessive. It was Shelda's dream; Isabel was just dropping in for a visit. But the news was definitely good, though I'd like to hear a bit of it straight from the... oh, no." The Doctor took a seat opposite Rose, his face almost comically pensive. "I wouldn't want to say 'straight from the horse's mouth'; it's hardly very complimentary to such a talented young woman. Straight from the messenger?"

"Straight from the source?" Amy offered.

"Well, is Isabel the source, or just the relay to the true source, which was Aunt Shelda?" The Doctor asked. "Then again, if a relay or a messenger is good enough, why not Max and Liz who relayed from Isabel to me?"

"Straight from Isabel?" Kyle suggested, and the Doctor sighed at such a prosaic turn of phrase.

"Straight from the witness," Valenti volunteered, and the Doctor snapped fingers at him, delighted by that one. "Yes, I thought that it fits. Isabel directly witnessed, while Max and Liz were just relaying hearsay."

"Well, come on, what's the hearsay?" Michael asked. "The rest of us haven't heard anything at all."

But the Doctor just shrugged and scooped himself out a bowl of the porridge and picking out things to sprinkle into it.

#

It wasn't too long before Isabel emerged to give them all the recap of her dream. Max, Liz, and Alex also came out for breakfast at around the same time, bringing the entire Earth/Gallifrey party together out on the patio. Everybody who hadn't already heard the details listened quietly until Isabel was done.

The first to comment afterwards was Michael. "Okay, so how does this help us with Tess?"

"I'm not sure," Max admitted. "It depends on if Tess has already figured this much or more out about Ava's background. If not..."

"What have I, against your men, your mental powers, and yes, even the Granilith, which is stronger than anything that I have ever dreamed of possessing?" the Doctor asked softly. "Why, nothing, except a little grain, such a little grain of knowledge, that even yet you do not possess. Now you see it and now you don't." He looked around the table and grinned at all of his new friends. "Knowledge is always powerful. Trust me on this. Whether Tess knows this same thing about Ava's background that we do or not, we're the stronger for having learned it."

"That much makes sense to me," Amy admitted, her head cocked slightly. "Especially since it seems that she put so much stock in Ava's and Zan's story, more than the rest of you have. So, on a more practical note, what now? Just go say our final goodbyes to the Royal family and the hangers-on, and pile all into the TARDIS?"

Max looked over at Liz, who shrugged. "I don't see that there's any more unfinished business keeping us at Brok Bay."

#

As breakfast was winding up, Vilandra came out to the patio to pay a courtesy call on the visitors, a little brother and sister trailing in her wake. She asked the Doctor how the repairs or recharging of the TARDIS was going, and he gave her the good news that they were ready to make their departure at just about any time.

The news spread quickly, and there was a sizable group of the usual suspects gathered around the courtyard an hour later to give the visitors a royal sendoff. Ava rushed forward to hug Liz goodbye, which took Liz a little by surprise. "Thank you all so much, for your help with the party and everything."

Liz giggled and nudged the Antarian girl in the side. "How did your special private night go with Zan?"

"We both had a really great time." She flushed slightly blue. "Not that great or anything, if you know what I mean. It was just nice to talk with him and have a dinner and some music in private, without needing to worry about chaperones."

"Sounds pretty great to me," Max muttered, and Liz smiled, patting Ava's shoulder reassuringly.

"My turn, I suppose," the Doctor said, just loudly enough to help everybody pretend that they hadn't heard Ava's whispering. "Your Majesties, Your Highnesses, and all. I'd like to formally thank you for your hospitality in the names of the Time Lords of Gallifrey. Don't worry; the formality doesn't require that I list off all of their names."

Sanren nodded at the Doctor, with a smile on his face, and offered him his hand. "Not many Kings, even, get a chance to spend a few days with a living legend, Doctor," he said. "You're not just any Time Lord. It's clear from the research that I've been able to, that the Doctor is one of a kind." He paused. "Unless that's a ruse, and there are really dozens of you who just call yourselves the same thing."

The Doctor snickered, and Rose smiled a private smile. "I can assure you, Your Majesty, that there's only one of me, though sometimes you might occasionally see more than one, through a trick of the light. We've all had a great few days, but really should be leaving, unless there's somebody else who needs to say something..."

"Oh, you're not getting away quite that easily," Queen Alinda said severely. "Not without a proper send-off line." There were a few blank stares from the Roswellian contingent, and not even the Doctor quite knew what she meant by this. "Line up, all of you." Alinda gestured to indicate a straight line through the area where most of the guests were already standing, in front of the TARDIS.

Once their line was straight, the Brok Bay hosts formed a second line of their own, with Sanren and Alinda in the lead, followed by Zan and Ava, Vilandra and Rath, the younger prince and princesses, Larek, Shelda, and a few other notable persons. Sanren stepped up to Kyle, who was at one end of the Roswellian line. "Farewell, Kyle Valenti, and may the best of fortune follow you until the end of your days."

Kyle paused only a moment before reflex courtesy took over. "Goodbye, Your Majesty, and thank you for making us so welcome here in your palace. I shall bear good word of your grace and kindness, wherever I go."

Sanren smiled and moved on to Rose, standing next to Kyle, and kissed her on one cheek, while Kyle came up with a departing wish for Alinda. As she waited for the Royal couple to reach them, Liz was struck with the irony of acting out another Earth ritual from wedding traditions, in a very different alien context - this was the receiving line, but sort of backwards. (Even to the name, as in receiving and sending.) And an odd thought struck her - if any of them actually lived to go through an alien wedding ceremony, how weird would that be - for her to join her life with Max, say, in a day full of alien customs instead of the American wedding day that she'd sort of come to expect.

Then she wondered what had made her think about that. They would be going back to Earth as soon as they'd been to see Max, wouldn't they?

Then Sanren was wishing peace and dreams on Max, and Liz shook herself, realizing that she'd be up to face the full lineup next.

#

"Alright, finally ready to get on our way?" the Doctor called as Isabel slipped in through the TARDIS doors and closed them behind her. Rose had unlocked the time box after she and Kyle had finished with the sendoff line, and one by one the others had followed them inside.

"Yup," Isabel agreed. "All present and accounted for, and if anybody left luggage behind, that's just too bad."

There was a pause for anybody else to complain even so, and then the Doctor started to work the Time Vortex controls. "Last chance for anybody to speak up for a side trip back to Earth, for any reason. Anybody at all?" There was no answer. "Alright, setting co-ordinates for Dimares moon, local equivalent of April second, 2002."

Amy shook herself slightly and clung tightly to Jim's side as the distorted vworp vworp sound began. Liz didn't really feel disturbed, even though this was only her second trip in the TARDIS, but having an excuse to snuggle up to Max looked fun, so she pulled his arm around her shoulders and nestled in tight, grinning a big grin. And then it was like the police box crashed and bounced.

Everybody was either knocked off their feet by the first impact Liz looked up to see the Doctor struggling back to the controls. "What's going wrong this time?" Rose yelled at him.

"There's something fighting the TARDIS engines," the Doctor reported. "If I didn't know better, I'd call it one of the Time Lord banishment fields - but that's almost impossible." The control chamber shook again, violently, but this time the Doctor stayed at the controls. "The Arton power cells are discharging fast - as if that's the karmic payback I get for telling a tall tale about them." He pushed one of the levers up higher. "If we can't break free in another thirty seconds, then I'll have to back away and figure out what the hell's going on."

"Maybe that would be a good thing to do right now," Max suggested, a worried frown on his face, his fingers clenching at Liz's hand. But then, there was a different sensation, one of motion without motion, and Liz caught the impression of unimpeded flight for a few seconds, then the entire TARDIS shook with a hard landing. A few faint 'vworps' sounded from somewhere nearby, as if an afterthought.

"Did we make it to Dimares," Michael asked weakly.

"We'd better see," Max said after the Doctor didn't comment, just frowning at the TARDIS controls. Rose opened the doors for them, and all the Roswellian kids piled out of the police box into a very different courtyard than the one that they had just left at Brok Bay. Walls of yellow-white metal stretched twenty-five feet high in two directions. Above, an orange-yellow sun gleamed in a bright sky that shone with highlights of green through purple.

And maybe fifty feet ahead of the TARDIS doors, a giant glowing cone was lying with its curved surface resting on the uneven stone cobbles. Its surface didn't look like the Granilith had when it was in the pod chamber, but there was no way to mistake the size and shape of the artifact.

As everybody stared at the Granilith, somewhat dumbfounded, the Doctor emerged and checked on the molding at the bottom of the TARDIS. "That's odd," he muttered. "Usually it'd park itself against one of the walls, if possible, not just in the middle of nowhere like this. Then again, that certainly isn't nothing."

"Damn it all to hell, one minute too late," a familiar voice called out. Liz looked around in surprise, and then Max gently guided her around the side of the TARDIS. A blonde woman about Liz's height stood there, dressed in a floor-length long sleeved light rose gown, with a tiara of gold and pastel-pink gems in her hair. To anybody who didn't know her, she would have looked every inch a princess, or a young queen, but Liz knew Tess Harding and wasn't impressed with however she dressed herself up.

"Yeah, your time's run out," she muttered.

"Well, I kept you and your Time Lord friend away for long enough, but I guess you just wouldn't give up," Tess grumbled. "I could have kept it up for longer, if it hadn't been for that case of food poisoning that Larek gave me - kept me from attending to the Granilith."

"Wait a second, what are you going on about?" Max asked Tess. "You kept us away using the Granilith - for a long time? We only just set out to reach you a few minutes ago."

"Ooh, I get it!" the Doctor exclaimed, coming up behind them. "If Tess set the Granilith, old Time Lord relic that it is, to repel a TARDIS, then it would work, but the TARDIS slipped forward in time, trying to find a gap in the repulsor field. And it did - but then it landed us in our future, without a clear warning. Sorry about that."

"How - how far in our future?" Liz asked. Tess didn't look middle-aged or anything, but she could easily be years or even a decade more mature than when she had left Roswell. It would be hard to tell, especially since she had a rather child-like face for a sixteen year old even when Liz had first met her.

"How old is our daughter now, Tess?" Max asked, cutting to the chase.