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The Rani looked at Donna blankly.
"You want me to what?" she asked incredulously. Donna rolled her eyes.
"If you want to defuse the suspicion, you should try to be less anti-social," she said. "I know you aren't fond of family dinners, but this would help us have time enough to fix me before they call in the marines or something." She decided not to mention that her granddad thought that they were dating. That would make it even more difficult.
"But we do need to keep working on the device," the Rani protested. "I really don't think that this is necessary." Donna sighed with exasperation.
"It would delay us a lot more if any other people from UNIT start coming around here," she pointed out. "I rather think that was my granddad checking up on you. And you must admit, you could use a bit more meat on your bones," she added with a smile.
"Hmm," the Rani said and appeared to be thinking. "Is your mum a good cook?" she asked finally.
"Not gourmet or anything but she can make some very good and filling food," Donna said, knowing she'd won.
"Alright," the Rani said finally. She turned to see Donna already bent over the machine and suppressed a sudden urge to kick her over. "We can get this up and running now," she added.
"Oh yes, there's just a few minor calibrations to make," Donna said. She began typing.
"Fast typing," the Rani said in an abstracted voice. She had found a circuit that had wobbled out of place and was delicately nudging it into place.
"I can type more than a hundred words per minute," Donna said and grinned. "How far into the future will you want to go?" The Rani considered this.
"Let's shoot for Christmas," she said finally. "That should work out fairly well." She did a once-over and then nodded firmly. It was ready to go. Donna tapped in the coordinates and nodded briefly.
"No problem," she said and the Rani nodded back. She sat down in the chair and held the machine up to her face. It looked primitive and unwieldy to her Time Lord senses but she knew that it would work. She took care to go over the temporal coordinates, remembering all the times the Doctor had ended up in various random places after carefully entering in the data. Every time, he had said something like 'Now I know what I did wrong,' and then end up somewhere even more peculiar. From what she could tell of the coordinates, they were accurate but she triple-checked them anyway.
"I'm ready," she said and tapped in the command sequence. The unpleasant whine of machinery was a far cry from the pleasant thrumming noise of a TARDIS but she braced herself and managed to keep her cool. Donna activated the beacon and sat down as well, bracing herself.
"Systems are go," she said with a grin. The Rani took a deep breath and flipped the switch. Immediately she was thrown into the spinning and twisting vortex of time, feeling the force of Time itself around her. But she was a Time Lord of Gallifrey, and she felt the power of time around her every day. She let the power flow through her, burning and renewing as it struck. The energy that lay beneath her skin felt the intrusion and answered it, enshrouding her in a cloak of power. Her eyes glowed with the raw fury of Time and she laughed as it crackled through her. This was where you learned if you were a true Time Lord, braving the power of the Vortex and letting it burn into your body the eternal mark of the mastery of time, the regeneration that proved to all who see that time had no dominion over you. Then she felt the pull of the device and allowed herself to be dragged forwards, exiting the Vortex as easily as she had entered. The Rani found herself in the same room and she scanned it quickly, eyeing the desk. There were several pieces of paper with schematics on them and she crossed quickly to them.
"Good, you're here," said a voice from behind her. She turned to see a hologram emitter standing in the corner and her own face was coming from it. "I need to fill you in on a few things that are going to happen soon for you. The plans for helping a Time Lord recover are on the table but you need to take this emitter with you when you leave. And you must not tell anyone about this until necessary." The Rani paused and then grinned. "You'll have to build your own emitter once you are done, because if you leave this one here then we'll be facing some stiff temporal paradoxes and the Doctor will be ticked off."
Donna looked up as the beacon began to hum. The Rani had told her that she needed to activate it as soon as possible so she had activated immediately. She eyed the portion of space that had suddenly begun to glow and stepped back, wisely as it turned out. The glow intensified suddenly and the Rani stepped out, glowing with golden light that blazed like a supernova. For a moment, her mind nearly burst from the shields around it as that light triggered so many memories it nearly threw her to the floor. Then the light faded and the Rani looked like the same slightly absent-minded woman as she usually did.
"Are you alright?" she asked and Donna nodded, her mind reasserting the shield. The Rani smiled in relief and sat down, on what turned out to be thin air. The look on her face was priceless. Donna couldn't help laughing, and the Rani, after glaring for a moment, began to chuckle with her.
"Sorry," Donna gasped out finally. "But you really should look before you sit down." The Rani gave her a look.
"I thought that I had calculated out the vectors," she said and got up, giving the chair a look that should have made it burst into flames before sitting down on it. "I have the designs, but they are going to take a while to make." She held up several sheets of paper. "My own handwriting too," she added smugly.
"How long?" asked Donna. The Rani paused and looked at the plans carefully.
"If I had to guess, you can tell your family that you'll have an interesting Christmas present," she said and shrugged. Donna snickered and the Rani looked at her in surprise. "I said something funny?" she asked, clearly puzzled. Donna had been considering the cover story that she had concocted and the impressions that her mother and grandfather would get from that statement were easy to determine.
"I was just thinking of something," she said and the Rani gave her a suspicious look. "Are you coming to Christmas dinner?" she asked and smiled as her friend was diverted.
The UNIT squad that had been monitoring the lab had not picked up the temporal-spatial travel, not realizing that their equipment was monitoring the wrong thing. The human time travel would become far more advanced than most other races, but Time Lords used the Vortex, an energy construct that had been made so long ago that even their memories and histories did not record it. It was stable and secure, enduring through everything that its masters had put it through and so the Rani had used it without even realizing it.
The team had recorded everything that emerged from the lab, and so the readings were picked up but ignored when they seemed to be simple radiation. The Doctor could have told them what it was, and for that matter, anyone who looked closely at the reports about the Doctor would rapidly come to the conclusion that he used something much different. Unfortunately, none of the UNIT soldiers knew that they were monitoring a Time Lord, merely a suspected alien of unknown origins. And there were hundreds of those in London alone.
The readings had been sent daily to the local office of UNIT and then directly to Martha Jones, who carefully compiled them into a report that she planned to hand over to the Doctor as soon as he appeared anywhere. Unfortunately, he had told her when she had called that he was being called by something he called the Ood and so she knew it would take some time before he appeared again. Still, nothing dangerous was happening so far and she was beginning to think she had been paranoid. Certainly Dr Anne had not shown any change in her work, although she did seem to be less social than before. She also remembered the Doctor saying that he would detect any Time Lord that was unconcealed and that the only reason that the Master had hidden was the Archangel network, which was gone now.
Unfortunately, she was not aware that the Rani had realized this within seconds of regaining her mind and used a device that easily masked the natural telepathy that all Time Lords had, using an old design that had been designed for too-powerful telepaths to allow them sleep. It had not been easy to make but she knew how to conceal her mind briefly. It looked like an ordinary lab-coat but she had used the techniques that the Doctor had used, making the pockets a great deal large on the inside. It was easily large enough to hold the equipment that was necessary and unlike the Doctor, the Rani had no problem with using weapons.
The Rani was, in fact, looking forwards to the next invasion. With the Doctor (as she thought) out of the picture for now, she would have the full resources of UNIT to make the next bad guy aliens regret their attack. If they attacked before she had revived the Doctor then she would not even have to worry about his (or, as she thought, her) scruples. And while she was not even close to being the kind of sociopath that the Master was, she was not a nice person to people who were trying to kill her.
Hope you enjoy this update. Sorry about the delay, but I had a nasty case of flu. You might notice the place where I stopped yesterday and had to lie down. Please review and tell me what you think.