Donna sighed in exasperation as she saw the papers under her keyboard, with a sitcky note that informed her, in the same untidy scrawl as the writing she had to type, "30 copies to computer 12 from stairs, thanks."

"At least I get one thank-you today," she muttered, and began to type. It seemed an odd sort of survey — questions like "Has anything strange happened since you bought these products?" and "Have you or anyone in your family had lapses of memory subsequently to your purchase?" were mingled in with the usual queries about which products the family had bought and how various qualities would be rated. "Funny kinds of questions," she said to herself. "Who thought those up, memory loss and lack of emotions exhibited."

By the time she'd finished, the Doctor had gone downstairs. He was a tea person, really, but if he was going to find anything out, he didn't have time to go get tea. He would have to make do with coffee.

As he walked down the stairs, Donna arrived in the lift, and dumped her thirty copies of the highly unusual survey on the desk twelve away from the stairs. "Type this up for me," someone said to here as she flounced past. With a resigned sigh, she took the papers. She was sick of temping. Maybe she should look for other jobs.

The girl in the jacket walked by the empty desk and saw the surveys. She glanced at them. She was only disguised as a reporter, but she could get away with taking a few of these. They would certainly be useful for her investigations. She grabbed about half the stack and walked over to the copier.

The Doctor climbed the stiars and forwned down at the surveys. That seemed too small a pile. He counted them. Fifteen? He was sure he'd ordered thrity. Oh, well, he would just need to make more copies.

He walked over to the copier just as the jacket girl went down the stairs, and Donna came up once again. She walked right past his desk, handed the papers back to the one who needed them, and was heading downstairs in the lift by the time the Doctor got back.

He clicked around on the computer. He hadn't even know it was doing anything when he'd gone, but when he got back, it had been in a deeper-than-surface, hidden layer of the site website. He was determined to find out what was going on here, and this seemed like a very good place to start.

But first, he remembered, he had a mission. Before he went poking aroudn too much where he shouldn't be, he could at least find out whether his suspicions had any justification.

He headed down the stairs and out the door.

Donna was sitting at her computer when a voice called, "Oi! You! Redhead!"

"Watch it," she said. "What do you want?"

"Can you take these surveys around to a few of our customers?" a young man asked, wavign a handful of surveys. "Normally I'd ask Hennie to do it, but she's out sick. Do you mind?"

She shook her head, got up, and snatched the surveys from the man's hand as she marched past and down the stairs.

She'd just walked out the doors when the girl in the jacket stepped out of the lift. She held her borrowed surveys in her hand and walked with the same sort of casual-purposeful stride as the Doctor used. She had her head up, her shoulders back, and a determined expression on her face.

It was a mask, all of it, nothing more than a mask. The confidence, the pride. All that was real was the control, because she needed it. She needed it badly. Without that control, the façade would slip, and her shell would break. Without that control, she was nothing.

She brushed her hair back from her eyes and shook her head slightly. She was older now. Harder. Stronger. She was beyond the reach of all the things that had happened in the past.

As she walked out the door, she put the mask back into place, hid back inside her shell, and the girl who had appeared there, for just a moment, was gone. The walls came back up, the barriers and defenses which she kept herself behind, and Rose Tyler disappeared again.

A/N: As if you hadn't all guessed it already...:P So, what do you think? Like it? Hate it? Want to turn it into soup and eat it? Tell me and get a Code Red chibi!Character set!

~DH~