Summary: The Eighth Doctor begins his search for his mysterious friend, by compiling a list of changes and having the TARDIS search the universe to find anything that matched most of it. She found something that matched all of it pretty fast...from a very unlikely source. Oh dear.

Searching

The first shock, was that the culprit wasn't one, not really. The rewriting had been completely accidental on her part, she had no idea of what she'd done. The second shock was that the writer was a young human, very young...only ten years old, in fact. She was an orphan, crippled and an American...as a result, his plans had to undergo considerable changes because of this. He had to approach this carefully. Conversations with staff members at the orphanage soon revealed that she was not doing well, nor was she expected to.

"Children like that never seem to last long in such places as this, they tend to decline rapidly as she is doing. She'll end up in a state run hospice in a few years, like the others with MS have. It's sad, but normal. We don't have the ability to give her the care she needs. We do our best, but...we can't even afford to buy her most of the medicines she needs to survive." The Director sighed. "There are other, normal children here, with normal needs, that we can help so we must make the hard choice and most of the funding goes to help the highest number of children possible. It's an impossible situation for the cripples assigned to us by the State. Sometimes we're able to give her a bit of a treat, like that computer she adores, but mostly...she has to do without."

Completely horrified, "That's terrible." He told her bluntly. having established his credentials as an adopter with power and funding. UNIT America had come through nicely, actually, on that front. If he was correct...and how often was he wrong on something this simple, really, her writing skills and her compassion were at the root of it. How she made this a reality was not something he understood, though. "I'll take her. I can afford to give her the care that she lacks and needs. And a new computer."

"She'll still want that one. She's put a lot of work into it, actually. Sometimes we get bits or parts or whatever and we give them to her. She taught herself how to program it and did so without any lessons from anyone. She got one book full of weird codings and things, circles within circles and other odd symbols those were...along with a strange looking hard-drive and decoded it. She was so happy when she installed it, it was so much better than her old drive, she told us."

There was something there, in that statement that made the Doctor twitch, just a bit, as he was filling out the adoption papers...a subtle scan with the screwdriver of the girl's tower as well as the child, when no one was watching got astonishing results...no wonder she'd been rewriting people so successfully! But how the hell had she decoded the instructions that had come with it? THAT baffled him because she had scanned as pure human. There were none of the little swirls in her timeline that were the recognized hallmark of someone who'd been Arched, though, so she wasn't a Time Lord.

Obviously, she was just a very, very intelligent, and very sick little girl...but he could deal with that. It might still take him a year or two to get her on her feet after the cure, but he full well knew that he could get the crippling disease she had dealt with, in short order. Indeed, the medicines she needed were stocked in the TARDIS MedBay.

Soon enough he packed up the computer and the child and took both out to a waiting car with a UNIT driver to take her back to the TARDIS and it's highly advanced MedBay and where the highly advanced drugs were that would cure the crippling disease that was slowly killing little Sara Ann Culbert. First stop, though, was UNIT America to get a top of the line scooter for the girl and after that would follow a shopping trip once they had that, to get her things she wanted, that young girls should have and to spoil her some. While a tech was explaining the operation to the child, the Doctor dropped her things off in the console room, then rapidly explained things to the ship while he gathered up what he needed in the MedBay.

Every child deserved a bit of spoiling, once in a while, after all, so long as one didn't carry it too far. It wasn't really spoiling though, if a child had never had any, was it?

He injected the drug that would fully arrest the MS and followed it with the one that would reverse the damage, though that would take something he had in abundance...Time. He foresaw a great deal of Vortex time in his near future...Sara Anne needed it. Badly...just like she needed many other things that children her age should have been expected to have a bit of, now and then, and never had. She would now, he decided...and he had access to better malls than anything on Earth. He'd show her once she was able to run with him. But, first, she needed to heal.

For the child's part, she was ecstatic at finally having a parent, even if it was only the one. He couldn't get her to call him 'Doctor' to save his life, no...she had the right to call him Daddy, so she did. And it did strange things to his own emotions every time he heard it...his respiratory bypass shouldn't stay engaged this much, should it?

**TBC**