One of the Robomen wandered off, whilst the other one stared at Wells. "What are these three doing here?" he asked in a dead tone.
Wells quickly came up with an excuse: "I took them off work detail to help me... pick up the tools!" He quickly motioned for Rose, Ian and Larry to pick up the pickaxes.
"Which work detail?" the Roboman persisted. Rose rolled her eyes. "Oh, for pete's sake!" She swung one of the pickaxes at the Roboman's helmet, causing the Roboman to nearly shout before Ian could grab at his mouth. Within seconds, the man was at peace.
"Why on earth did you do that for?!" hissed Wells. "We could've gotten away with it! Now they'll be after us all!"
"Never mind about that!" Ian said. "We've got to hide! Do you know a place?"
Wells thought for a second. "Well, there's the meeting place with Ashton."
"Ashton? Who's Ashton?" Ian asked.
"The black marketeer. No one knows how he gets into the camp and out again, but he does, and he smuggles food in as well."
Rose piped up: "So he can get us into the mines, yeah?"
"The mines?" Ian asked, confused.
"Well, that's where the Daleks are! We need to find out whatever they're doing down there. That's what the Doctor would do."
"I'll ask him, but it's all I can do. Hide after I've gone. We'll meet here again after dark." Wells set forth and departed.
Ian sighed. "So much for homecoming. Come on, let's go."
After the trio had slipped away into the woods, they started looking for branches and twigs to make a shelter for the rest of the day. As soon as Larry was out of hearing range, Rose went to Ian.
"You mentioned something about homecoming?"
"Oh yes." Ian said. "The Doctor's been trying to get us back home for some time now. We thought he'd succeeded, but... well, you see where we are." He randomly motioned around.
"But why can't the Doctor just take you back where you came from?"
"I thought you knew him. Or some 'version' of him, whatever that means."
Rose rolled her eyes. "When the Doctor is hurt, like really badly hurt, he can... um, change his body. New face, new head, new everything. The Doctor I knew never had trouble getting me back home."
"Well, you're lucky then." said Ian, taking the whole body-changing thing remarkably well. After all, the Doctor was an alien. "The Doctor I know has barely any idea where we're gonna land next. This one time, we found him asleep in the control room and the TARDIS just flew itself and still landed! Makes you wonder why we even need him."
"No way!"
"Yes. But we have gotten to Earth more often than not, so I suppose he's trying."
Rose quickly started describing her Doctor: "Where I'm from, the Doctor can take me anywhere, anytime. I can visit my family on weekends."
"I'd like to meet your Doctor." Ian wistfully said.
"Maybe you will?"
"Yeah, maybe. How did you end up separated?"
"Oh, I got stuck in a parallel world. Y'know, sort of different from ours, but not that much. Went through this rift, this... crack in time and space and ended up on the other side of the wall."
Ian was amazed: "But that's fantastic! I mean, not the being stuck part, but a parallel world! Another Earth, another... me?"
"Where are you from?"
"Oh, me? 1963, London. I was a chemistry teacher at Coal Hill School before this madness started."
Rose smiled, thinking of all the crazy things the Doctor had shown her. Madness, indeed. "And how'd you end up traveling with the Doctor?"
"Well, Barbara, my colleague and I, we were worried about a student of ours, Susan. Turns out, she was the Doctor's granddaughter!"
That wiped the smile off her face. "You met the Doctor's... granddaughter?"
"Oh yes. She's still with us. Well, somewhere around here." He vaguely motioned around.
But the Doctor said he was the last of the Time Lords... he couldn't have been wrong... so this was a time before the Time Lords died? Before the Time War? An earlier version of the Doctor, with his family still there...
It hurt Rose, it really did, to know that she had a chance(a slim one, but still) to meet the Doctor's own family, but the Doctor himself was cut off from them. It was the worst thing that could've possibly happened.
"And what happened then?" she asked, to distract herself of these news.
"Well, we went to see her, but turns out, her address led to a junkyard. And there it was. The TARDIS. We found the Doctor, but he wouldn't give us any answers, so we went inside. That's when it happened. That's when we took off."
Rose was confused now. They just took off?
"The Doctor thought our knowledge of the TARDIS might change the future. A bit paranoid, but I can't really blame him. Not really. So he took off with us. Now he's trying to return us home." Ian explained.
Larry scampered to the other two. "Someone's coming!" he whispered. The three immediately dropped everything they were carrying and hid in the undergrowth. A hazy figure, dressed in black was indeed approaching. Rose tried to get a look at his face, but she was too deep in the plants to see anything.
A shrill voice pierced the air: "Exterminate! Exterminate!"
Rose, Ian and Larry jumped up in the air and the Master chuckled. "You should've seen your faces!"
He didn't laugh half as much when Larry punched him in the face so hard he fell down.
"My nose!" he mumbled in a muffled tone. "You broke my nose!"
"I'll break a lot more if you don't shut up and keep down, you blithering idiot!" Larry snarled. "Not only did you scare us to death, you could've gotten us killed!"
The Master got up and in a cold tone, replied. "Yeah, well... when it comes to me, I don't doubt it."
"What do you mean?" Rose asked.
The Master gave her a serious look. "Time Lord stuff, you wouldn't understand. I found the TARDIS. It's intact and ready for take-off." He took Rose's hand. "Let's go."
Ian protested: "Wait, what about the Doctor? And the Daleks?"
The Master hesitated. He desperately wanted to be off the planet as soon as possible, even if the threat of regeneration didn't loom over him. But he'd forgotten Rose's mission to find the Doctor. If he took the TARDIS now, it might change the Doctor's timeline irreversably.
A part of him argued back, that his own reason for crossing over to another universe was to be master of his own life, without the meddling of the Time Lords. Why let Rose or the Dalek invasion or most importantly, the Doctor get in the way of that?
He had been friends with the Doctor once... the Doctor was one of the few renegade Time Lords out there. But this was a Doctor before the Time War, he could tell from his appereance on the Dalek saucer alone. He might give the Master up to the Time Lords of this universe. It wasn't worth it!
Or was it?
