Thanks for your reviews! I'm glad to see so many of you like it.

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The door slid silently closed behind them and faded.

Before them, showing the originality of the Toymaker, was another white room. Unlike its predecessors, however, this one was not empty. It was filled with keys. Gold, silver, bronze, small, big, long and short. Every type was accounted for in the mound that spread the full extent of the room. There must have been thousands. Hundreds of thousands.

"Two guesses what we're meant to do." Rose sighed as their computers beeped in chorus.

Round two: The Search. Find the right key for the lock. No time limit, no hazards.

"Probably could have guessed that." The Doctor grinned, before rubbing his hands together. "We should probably start!"

"Tell me you're not actually excited at the prospect of doing this?" Rose whimpered as she sank to her knees at one side of the pile, while the Doctor wandered up to the lock itself.

"You know me – I'm all keyed up!"

Rose groaned audibly. A small part of her couldn't believe he had just said that. The majority, on the other hand, could. "Say anything like that again and I'll stick a key up your nose."

The Doctor grinned at her from where he was inspecting the lock. "Look for a typical key. Nothing that could open a dungeon or particularly weird, okay? Won't be bronze, I'd guess. Gold or silver."

"Size?"

"TARDIS key. Actually," the Doctor's eye had a mischievous glint in it. "There's a point…" He tried his own TARDIS key, but it didn't work and the Doctor looked slightly dejected as he turned back to Rose. "Tell you what, you begin sorting, and I'll try them in the door. Okay?"

"Yeah, why not."

He looked at her like a teacher with an unmotivated child. "Now, now. It's not that bad."

She poked her tongue out and began sorting through the keys before her. The majority were those that the Doctor had specified, but whenever she threw one into the empty corner behind her it did give a sort-of short-lived satisfaction. The only sound was the clink of metal and Rose found herself getting more and more bored by the second. And she wasn't the traveller with itchy feet – she wondered how the Doctor was feeling if the monotony was getting to her so much.

She was giving the Doctor ten or so keys at a time, and every time he came back and put them all behind her. Time melted away – the computers had timers, not clocks, so Rose had no idea how long they had been working. It was probably only about ten or so minutes, but it felt like hours, and the pile didn't seem to be getting any smaller even though the pile behind Rose was getting bigger.

"How's the scar?" the Doctor asked lightly, looking at Rose out the corner of his eye as he came up to collect more potential lock-opening keys.

"What?"

"After the running." He said over his shoulder, returning to the door.

Oh right, she was meant to be being careful of overexertion. "Oh - fine. Little sore, hurts a bit to breath. It'll pass. And," she added before the Doctor could reply, "yes, I'm sure it'll pass."

"I know." He was facing away from her, but Rose could tell from his tine he was smiling.

She stopped working, crossing her arms. "Then why were you going to ask if it would?"

"I wasn't."

"Liar!" she laughed, returning to her sorting.

Twenty minutes later, her back was sore and her hands hurt from sorting through metal. She bent back, flexing her spine and trying to make it feel better. It didn't, not really, but the ache retreated slightly.

"I swear this pile isn't getting smaller. Would it be like the Toymaker to create a never ending pile of keys?"

The Doctor shrugged from where he was crouched, picking possible keys from the locked-door side of the pile. "Maybe. I think this'll be possible. It will take ages, sure, but we'll be out."

Rose rolled her eyes. "How can you be sure?"

The Doctor looked up at her. "What's better? Mundane or exciting?"

"Exciting."

"Same for a villain. This is a mundane way to kill us." He stood, a small pile of keys in his hand. "This is just to bring us down and strain us mentally. It's perfectly possible he wants to trap us, but provides him no entertainment."

Rose didn't know if this was to reassure her or not. "Right."

The Doctor came back to Rose, throwing the failed keys in his hand behind her with the others. She passed him more, and he retraced his steps to try them. So it went – Rose passed him keys and sorted for more, he tried them and returned every time to get more and throw away the failed ones. It was going nowhere. Rose felt like screaming.

"I'm so sick of this!" she exclaimed, rubbing her tired eyes with a hand.

"I'll say." The Doctor was sitting against the opposite wall rubbing one wrist.

Rose was struck with sudden inspiration. "What if we stopped? Do you think the Toymaker would remove a whole heap of keys or something to speed us up?"

The Doctor considered this notion. "Maybe…but there's nothing else to do – you'd find yourself sorting again to give you something to do."

He was right, unfortunately enough. "Yeah…" Rose pushed her hand into the pile, flinching slightly as the sharp metal edges and kinks of the keys dug into her hand. She pulled out a pile at random, threw three of them away over her shoulder and placed the rest aside to hand to the Doctor to try.

"Can we swap?" She asked into the silent room.

"Me sort, you try, you mean?" came the reply. The Doctor was crouched again, picking out hopefuls.

"Yeah. I'm terribly stiff."

"I'm just terrible." He replied, face impassive but eyes smiling.

Rose laughed. "That I know already."

She picked up the pile she had put aside and stood, pausing for a moment to let the blood flow back into her legs and stretch a bit. The room itself wasn't big and she crossed it in four steps, standing next to the now sitting Doctor and trying the keys. None worked – some fit, but stubbornly refused to turn.

One by one she threw the keys back across the room to their 'useless' pile, and took the ones the Doctor handed up to her. Again and again she tried, again and again it didn't work. This was getting to a point of stupidity unrivalled by anything they had ever done before – and that was saying something.

Although, she reflected silently, the monotony and repetitive nature of their task did make it easy to do it automatically and let her mind wander. She still thought about her old life – she never saw this coming. How long ago had she met the Doctor in that cellar? Not in earth years, but in her own biological years. She must have been travelling with him for a few years now.

She turned, throwing the useless keys into the corner with the others, and taking more from the Doctor. "So how we going to defeat this guy?"

"I don't know." His reply sounded hollow – his mind on other things.

"How did you do it last time?"

There was a pause. "He had me playing a separate game to my companions. If I finished that one, then the world would explode. He's quite impatient – kept skipping me forward a few moves to try and hurry me up."

Rose nodded to herself. "What game?"

"Ever played that irritating towers of Hanoi or whatever game you've got on Earth?"

"Yeah."

"Well, it was that, but with about twenty levels but still only three pegs. If I finished it, then his world imploded. So I left the last move, then got in the TARDIS and impersonated his voice and called for the game to go to the last move. We escaped, the world collapsed while we dematerialised, and that was it." He paused. "I don't know how we'll do it this time, but we will."

Rose turned back to the room. That was strange – one of the piles seemed smaller. Maybe it was because she was standing not sitting, and the different in height made change to her perception, but it definitely seemed smaller. She shook her head slightly and turned back to the door with new keys, handed up to her.

"Doctor, is that pile smaller?" she asked conversationally.

"It should be. We've been working on it long enough."

"No, I mean the other side of the room. The one we haven't touched."

He stood at this, next to her, brow furrowed and a hand rubbing the back of his neck as he considered the mound of keys. "I think it has, actually."

"Do you think we're taking to long?" Rose asked with a smile. "You just said the Toymaker was impatient."

The Doctor returned the smile, adding in a low voice, "We might just be. Go a little slower, see if more vanish…"

They did so, Rose keeping an eye on the pile behind her as she tried the keys. Ten minutes later, she was sure. It had decreased now by about half, giving them less work. The Toymaker was making it easier. Shouldn't they be worried?

"Shouldn't we be worried?" she asked the Doctor, who shrugged.

"Maybe. Depends on the next game. Either this wasn't meant to take this long anyway or he's bored. Probably both."

Soon the ones they hand already tried had gone, and the untouched pile was only about a hundred keys. The Doctor decided to get them out of the way first – there was a greater chance that the one they needed was in there – after all, if it wasn't, wouldn't' the Toymaker have taken them all away?

Many of those left over were unsuitable at a glance, and so when the Doctor handed Rose another ten keys she once again began to fit them to the lock. They all looked similar, some fit, some didn't, but one, the sixth she tried, slid in easily and turned without complaint. The lock clicked.

With a cry of triumph, she pushed the door open, coming face to face with not a white room for once, but a dungeon-like room, made of stone with torches on the walls.

The Doctor followed her through and the door faded behind them.

"Now what do we have here?"

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Ohhhh, what's it gonna be? Sorry if this chap was a little slow and/or boring, but if you got this far them I'm proud! Stay tuned for the next part!