I own neither Doctor Who nor the Twilight Zone; in this chapter, you are going to see why I created the crossover in the first place.

Enjoy, and please let me know what you think.

A Nexus of Strangeness.

The old Type 35 TARDIS's original owner had clearly liked comfortable furniture within their old console room, which reminded the Doctor vividly of the medieval chairs she'd placed in the console room of her Type 40; she was grateful for the comfort on offer since she needed time to think, and she didn't want to sit down on the floor during the return trip to Gallifrey, a world she had really not wanted to return to for a long time after the way they had force regenerated her after dealing with the Players' attempt to meddle in Earth history which culminated in trying to untangle their little schemes which eventually resulted in the death of Serena, that mess with Dastari and the Androgum and the half-remembered encounter with the Sontarans.

Shortly after the damage to time had been repaired, the TARDIS, obeying preprogrammed instructions, dematerialised.

The next stop was for Gallifrey, so the Doctor had decided she had nothing better to do but to accept the instructions for what they were and waited until the Type 35 returned to Gallifrey for her long-awaited reunion with the Type 50 she'd abandoned so long ago. She had been tempted to override the course coordinates, and head out for somewhere more interesting; ever since her regeneration and the restrictions placed on her, to say nothing of the memory blocks they'd placed on her, the Doctor had no real desire to return to Gallifrey anytime soon.

Only she hadn't done it.

Oh, she could have done it, especially since this TARDIS was working properly but she hadn't. She had accepted the fact the main reason for her attitude was because she was going to back on Gallifrey, but was it really home after what she'd just learnt? That was the reason why she was sitting in the armchair near the console - she'd had to pull it there, and she had sat down in it while the TARDIS made its way for Gallifrey, but she knew from long years of time travelling anything could happen during a journey, and the closer you were to the controls of a time machine, the better - so she could think about it.

She just wasn't sure if she could take everything she had learnt from the Type 50 into her mind. It was not every day you discovered that the life you'd thought you had led was nothing more than a fiction. During a trip to the final years of the 20th century, she and Susan had watched a film titled The Truman Show, and it told a particularly sad story about a young man who had been raised since childhood in a giant film studio depicting a town. Nothing was real.

His childhood was nothing more than a fake. His friends, family, neighbours…everyone, including the small children, were nothing more than a bunch of actors. The poor man played to perfection by an actor named Jim Carrey had to play this character, who steadily began to piece together the truth and discovered his life, his whole life, was nothing but a lie. And now the Doctor herself was left wondering how much of her life was a lie.

As she sat in the chair in the TARDIS console room, the Doctor was busily trying to sort through the memories her old Type 50 had fired into her mind and was trying to work out just how much of it was still blocked off while she tried to work out what her next move was now she knew of this truth.

She had never felt like one of them, Gallifreyans. Oh, she was still a Time Lord, well Time Lady if you took her new gender into the equation but that was a formality, really. Her connection to two TARDISes was proof of that, nobody could take that away from her, really.

But the fact she was not a Gallifreyan was a shock while at the same time the Doctor had to confess to herself it didn't really concern her that much. She had never felt at home on Gallifrey, really, but now she knew why that was. But the idea of her being found on a planet somewhere, apparently alone underneath a portal leading…somewhere, and she had brought with her the secret of regeneration which in turn led to the rise of the Time Lords…

It was staggering, at the same time it was horrific given what the Gallifreyan scientist who'd adopted her had done to her. The Doctor shuddered at the thought of herself being dissected, especially by someone her previous self had probably trusted, all so then the Gallifreyans would become almost immortal.

Now that she was thinking about it, the Doctor had to admit the stories of how the Time Lords had gained the power of regeneration were immensely vague; one-minute people were saying it was because of their exposure to the Untempered Schism, the power sources of the Time Lords, some kind of virus of advanced nanogenes created by Rassilon, or Artron the engineer's work. And they were only the start, there were many more legends like them in Gallifreyan history.

The Doctor herself had never really known what to believe. During her time on Gallifrey back in her first life (was that old man really her first incarnation after what she'd just learnt?), she had just heard one legend after another before she'd become so heartily sick of them she had begun to ignore them. Leave the legends for sad people like Runcible to ponder over, just accept the notion regeneration even existed and go along with it, that was what she'd believed at the time.

No wonder they hid the truth, especially given how many Time Lords believe other races to be beneath them, she thought ruefully, thinking of all the times she'd had to listen to the other students at the Prydonian Academy when she had been there speaking about aliens, peoples they had never even met with disdain, especially as they repeated the propaganda spouted by the Time Lord tutors and cardinals…..

Something was wrong.

Suddenly the Doctor noticed there seemed to be something wrong with the console room of the TARDIS. Looking around, the Doctor checked the console but there didn't seem to be anything physically wrong with it. But the walls…The Doctor looked up in shock at the walls of the TARDIS as they seemed to glow and she watched a corner of the console room, where the bank of instrumentation stood much like the one in her own TARDIS, seemed to shrink. The Doctor's eyes widened in horror, wondering if there was something wrong with the dimensional control (idly a part of her wonder if this was karma for what she'd done with the Monk's TARDIS; she had imagined she'd gained her punishment during that mess where the War Chief had manipulated the interior dimension of the SIDRAT she'd been escaping in with Jamie and Carstairs), but just as she was checking the controls there was a flash of light…

XXX

The Doctor gasped as she staggered away from the Chamber she'd been standing in, and she looked around in consternation around the console room of her Type 40 TARDIS. "Wh-what was that?" She whispered, looking around blearily. What happened, what happened to the timeline changes she was trying to overlay? Sure, the mess of timelines in Morden had been an interesting little input which made the scenario work - she guessed Susan, Ian and Barbara's presence had been her mind calling for those more innocent days where she had only felt all she needed to do when she'd kidnapped the two teachers was to get them home while taking care of Susan before arriving on a Dalek occupied Earth, and then investigating the man who'd murdered all but two members of a peace-loving race just to save his own skin - but it was just an illusion, a possibility….

Staggering over to the console, she began checking it over but it was hard - most of the console had been dismantled, with a lot of the environmental panel had been replaced, the doors were open in order to allow enough of the atmosphere outside to circulate through her ship - the Doctor checked the systems.

The power to the possibility generator had been shut down.

And then she remembered. Months ago, the Doctor had been checking the time rifts of Earth; she'd gotten the idea into her mind if she manipulated temporal rifts, using her TARDIS, she could rocket her way back into the universe. It was crude, primitive compared to what she was used to, but if she could escape Earth and travel to other worlds, she might be able to use more advanced technology to repair her TARDIS instead of relying on technology from Earth.

It wasn't the best solution, but if she could reach a future age or alien world, she could do so much more with her ship. Maybe if she had access to Monan Host or Nekkistani technology, there was a chance she could do repair systems her ship had always had issues with, like the main time mechanism, the chameleon circuit, though she'd likely need to visit Logopolis for a chameleon conversion for that, but having a functional TARDIS again would be worth it.

But during her work, the Doctor had been going through her 500-year diary and she had recalled the encounter with the Master and Ailla during that mess with the Darkheart, and the Master's attempts to change history in order to gain omniscience over the universe itself, linking his TARDIS with the Darkheart so he could change history as he went along. As she had gone through her diaries, the Doctor had also remembered one of the illegal experiments she had worked on at the Academy into Possibility Theory, which was illegal on Gallifrey because possibilities could become probabilities. The Doctor had dismissed the idea at first knowing it broke the Laws of Time, but as she'd considered the matter closely she'd realised if she could build a Possibility Generator using her TARDIS to control and stabilise the timeline, and using the Cardiff Rift, which was easily the largest rift on Earth - its size and the amount of temporal radiation it bled out into the real universe was the main reason the Doctor had chosen it to help her with her 'temporal rocket' experiments, which she'd named the experiments to blast away from Earth using the power of the rifts instead of just travelling the normal way through the vortex.

When she had built her Possibility Generator the Doctor had formed a plan to use the generator to change history, ever so slightly - she had planned on using the generator to induce minor changes to the timeline, using the Cardiff Rift to ensure there was nothing damaging history, but on a smaller scale compared to the Darkheart. She had wanted to use the rift in conjunction with the generator to induce possibilities back along her timeline, so then when her original incarnation left Gallifrey with Susan, she would make sure to buy the Type 40 instead of stealing her, and working on the ship so not only would she have better control but many of the systems would not be so heavily damaged. If she had bought her Type 40 then the anti-theft protocols which had attacked her memory, as well as Susan's, would never have been triggered but that was what happened when you happened to steal a TARDIS belonging to somebody else.

And it worked. She had been experimenting with the generator for a short time, but her use of the device while she used the TARDIS to stabilise it and ensure no serious damage to the timelines occurred while she overlaid the right changes to her own timeline.

But she had gotten greedy.

She had been so obsessed with the idea of leaving Earth and getting out of her exile even if she'd only been on Earth in this point of the planet's timeline for a few years that she had wanted more.

She had become so tempted by the notion of travelling in a totally different TARDIS, so she had dreamt up a scenario where she would have access to a Type 50 which she'd abandoned on Gallifrey while coming up with a way of getting back to it and leaving Earth in the process.

Everything that happened with Morden - the timeline splintering because of an aged TARDIS used by a real temporal terrorist organisation to damage time, meeting her original self and his companions, meeting those time agents, hearing the Type 50, that twaddle about the Timeless Child which was her own invention in order to make her think there was a big mystery in her life (she wondered if that was the reason her little attempt to get out of her exile had failed, because it was just too much for the generator to cope with) all of it was a hoax. It had never happened. She'd been in Cardiff the whole time.

It was the Doctor's scenario which had come up with Stopwatch's plan to use a sabotaged Type 35 and crash it in Earth's timeline, triggering a temporal meltdown.

It was the Doctor's scenario where she would interface with this fictional Type 50 TARDIS, and come up with a fairy tale about her being this 'Timeless Child,' when she was nothing more than a pure Gallifreyan just to make the whole thing more interesting, using the Possibility Generator to weave the new timeline so then she'd have access to another TARDIS as if she'd had it since her original life even if she'd chosen this old Type 40 which she genuinely did love, but she had reached the point where she would go as far as to steal a TARDIS belonging to even a good friend, like the Corsair without caring what it did to their relationship down the line.

Unfortunately, she had gone too far, added in one scenario after another the Possibility Generator, which had been cobbled together from a combination of advanced Time Lord technology and what passed for advanced technology on this dreary little planet, that it couldn't cope anymore, so it had just broken down.

"I should have just stuck with the original plan," she whispered to herself, shaking her head in despair. "I was just so determined to get away from this stinking wreck of a planet, I went too far."

The Doctor bit her lip and she walked around the console before she did a complete circuit and patted the controls and blew out a breath. "I guess…I should just go back to the drawing board, although I won't go anywhere near Possibility Manipulation again. I'm sorry, old girl," she patted the console, "I wasn't trying to hurt your feelings. I was planning on taking you with me."

A hissing groan beeped back at her.

"Hey, don't be like that," the Doctor chided, "I know you want to leave this planet as much as I do, but you didn't think I'd leave you, right? Yes, you've annoyed me a lot in the past, but I would never leave you behind."

After a while, the console whirred.

"Thanks, old girl," the Doctor patted the console gently, already reassessing her plans to leave Earth although she would not give up on the temporal rocket plan since it was viable, she was tired of Cardiff even if the rift offered several possibilities for her escape. Perhaps if she could get a hold of a nuclear reactor so she could bypass the inhibitor….

Well, I did tell you this would be the chapter where the crossover made sense; I got the idea from the Twilight Zone episode where a man being hung in the American civil war managed to escape and was running to meet his wife... only for it to be a nice dream before he was hung. That's all the Twilight Zone is beside the kid who can make people into Jack in the boxes, aliens who've come to SERVE man, a twisting illusion where what you think is happening isn't what's happening.

The possibility generator comes from the Unbound stories 'Auld Mortality' and 'A Storm of Angels' where an alternate first Doctor who didn't leave Gallifrey became an author and used the generator to act out his scenarios. He later used it when he left Gallifrey in the TARDIS to create a facsimile of Susan to travel with him. I thought it would be a nice little twist for this alternate third Doctor to use it to manipulate time to let her escape.

What did you think?