A/N: And to think I took so long posting this chapter because I was looking for a quote that I couldn't remember… thanks to The Chibis Are Stalking Me for helping with that, and hooray for the Doctor and Jo Grant!

2150 hits. You're all lovely. :)

The truth of the matter was that neither Tardis nor John had any idea where to start, and so they simply set to work familiarizing themselves with their new-old ship. John in particular spent a great deal of time being welcomed back by whatever life the ship had, sitting for hours in the captains chair and reveling in it while Tardis worked at learning the technology and trying to repair what burnt out switches and wires and circuits that she could find.

"Well then it might interest you to know that for the last 2 hours, you've been working on the converter that allows the TARDIS to disguise itself, and that that circuit has, in fact, been broken and nigh unfixable for longer than either of us'd care to think."

"Damn it!"

It wasn't until John started fiddling around with the monitor on the console that they found something particularly compelling.

"S'there supposed to be evidence of recent Rift activity in the Centaurus A galaxy?" John called to her.

"What do I know about Centaurus A?" she called back, but she pulled off her (new) workman's gloves and joined him at the monitor. "She said that he'd closed up all the gaps, though, so I doubt it's supposed to be there." That brought up an entirely new project, which only made the two more excited. The Rose Project was set aside to compile scenarios about the Rift for all of two seconds, until Tardis had pointed out that from some point of view, you could say that any activity in the Rift would have something to do with Rose. And so, they had slammed the loose panels back into place, test-driven the TARDIS to their homes to pack, and to Torchwood to upload every bit of information they had about the Rift to the TARDIS's memory banks, and had shot off to the galaxy called Centaurus A.

The traces of activity, they'd found, were very old, and therefore hardly helpful. Another trace was found further off, and in several different time periods. They could hardly help running into trouble in some of the places they followed the traces to, and what began as a simple research trip soon turned into a full-blown adventure, and Tardis was treated to a life with a Doctor of her own, while John was given those precious links to a life that was previously gone forever.

It took years to put the evidence they gathered together into any cohesive order, but at last, they formed a theory. What they'd found were not open holes, or even scars of the Rift. Instead, they appeared to be simple ripples in the fabric of space and time, shimmers really, that lasted anywhere between two to fifteen minutes, and because they existed at the edge of both space and time, it didn't seem to matter whether you were in the year when the universe began, or five-billion-apple-something-or-other. The ripple existed.

That was why it took them so long to compile information, in the end. They had to travel in a sort of real time.

The trick with the ripples was that they weren't so much ripples as they were freakishly undulating, ginormous waves in the fabric of space and time, and as such, they were largely unpredictable. With some practice, they'd figured out how to easily (in a very complicated, intricate, delicately handled way) predict the next occurrence of those ripples up to a month before. Getting your signal to penetrate the waves in just the right way, so that it wouldn't be scrambled or even touched, however, was downright hard.

In the end, it was what John smugly informed her was "Time Lord technology" that got the first signal through. You had to shorten whatever you were sending into a singular wave and thus, whatever you had on the inside was bigger than the wave on the outside. It was, quite simply, "dimensionally transcendental."

They worked tirelessly to construct the means of transporting a human through the ripples and into the next universe, drifting out in the middle of somewhere or other while they argued over who would go through to test it out. In the end, it was Tardis who stepped over to the spot near the wall that they'd cleared of anything that wasn't nailed down. If the first try wasn't successful, after all, someone would need to find out why and fix it before sending Rose through, and Tardis would hardly fly the TARDIS better than she could fly of her own volition.

Tardis was packed and ready days before John allowed her to push the correct buttons and flip the right levers and twist the right knobs and wind the right wheels to compress herself. He said he was adding the finishing touches to the monitor that would accompany her and allow her to send transmissions back through to let him know she'd made it, but she caught him on several occasions nowhere near the monitor, and suspected after a while that he was really just making sure that the compression was as painless as possible. There was an unfamiliar crease in the middle of his forehead that hadn't been there before. And when it came down to the moment when she slung her pack over her shoulder and found herself lifted off her feet as the compression began, she decided that she was very grateful that he'd thought of it.

Because you did have to fit the outside around the inside, and that proved to be quite uncomfortable when you got down to it.

I haven't said it much in this one, but reviews do mean quite a bit to me :) Plus, I answer them all, so it's fun to meet new people.