Fourth Intermission

Rose Tyler had been having a perfectly ordinary day – ordinary for her, anyway: rude, impatient holiday shoppers had filled the shop all day, running her ragged with their impossible demands, pulling her from one to the next, cursing when she didn't move fast enough or wasn't able to provide the precise item they were looking for. And then Karen, her relief, had been almost twenty minutes late, so she was literally going to have to run to make it to the school on time.

She let herself out through the back door of the shop into the alleyway behind with a sigh of exhausted relief, dropping off the bag of trash into the dumpster, and then forcing her tired, aching feet quickly towards the street. Just as she reached it, a police officer stepped in front of her.

"Rose Tyler?" he asked importantly, flashing his badge. At her startled nod, he grabbed her upper arm and added, "Come with me, please. There's been a spot of trouble."

She felt all the blood drain out of her face, and she turned with him towards the distant school, peering ahead as if she could see the six blocks with telescopic vision. Was that distant smoke, or just the usual haze? "Oh, my god," she whimpered, heart in her throat. "Is it – "

That was as far as she got, however, before the world disappeared in a brilliant flash of light. She stumbled through the blast and out into a completely different street, looking more like a village lane than the busy London avenue they'd just been on. The officer was still holding her arm in a tight grip, but seemingly ignoring her and their incredible transportation, both, as he pulled out a mobile phone and made a call. Before she could gather wits or breath to ask what was going on, it happened again, this time depositing the pair inside a vast metal space, full of computer and lab equipment.

And then a large, imposing man loomed before her, staring down at her with ice-cold sea-green eyes, demanding to know if she'd ever seen him before. Shocked utterly witless, all she could do was wordlessly shake her head; quite certain of that, if nothing else, even with those eyes...

They were interrupted by another flash-bang, and yet another man appeared, holding the arm of... herself. The two mirror images gaped at each other, eyes huge, then they were both pulled around and taken down some dark, metal stairs and shoved into a small cell, where yet four more Roses awaited!

"Oh, my god," one of them said. "How many parallel worlds are there?"

Rose looked at the woman blankly. "Parallel worlds?"

The other woman nodded quickly, a picture so familiar to Rose from her own mirror that she felt sick to her stomach. "Yeah. Parallel worlds. And parallel people. We're all different versions of the same exact person, Rose Tyler."

This was impossible. Utterly unbelievable. And yet...

Before they got any further, the door to the cell opened again, and yet another Rose was shoved in to join the six already there. "Oooookay," she said after gaping around. "Definitely parallel worlds."

^..^

And so it went, through the rescue, trooping back upstairs, figuring out what was going on, and starting the process of sending them all back. Rose stayed mostly silent, more and more agitated and upset; she needed to get home! Even with all the evidence staring her in the face, she barely believed all the noise about being in a parallel world and a different time period; it was too impossible to absorb. Even the smooth reassurances from the handsome one, Jack, that she'd be returned to the exact moment she'd been grabbed by the fake police officer didn't help.

Well, I guess this is it. I've finally cracked. Might as well go along with it until I wake up or come out of this delusion, whichever it is. She sighed impatiently, barely holding on to her temper, while one by one the others were sent off to do their jobs in those same flashes of light. It didn't begin sinking in that this was real until the tall skinny one began teaching her and the other three remaining women how to use those strange wristwatch-like devices that seemed to be the cause of all the trouble, these "time jumpers". She had "hers" on her wrist, and it slowly took on tremendous mental weight, anchoring her to reality, almost becoming the single "real" thing in her mind, as she realized it was the only way to get back home – it and whatever it was she was going to have to do back in history.

The last Rose before her finally jumped out to do battle with Henry VIII (Rose vaguely remembering a recent movie about him and his six wives. Didn't seem to be anyone named Belle in the list, though, she mused absently.) The two in charge, since Jack was still missing in action after leaving with one of the others, watched that next pattern take shape on their monitors, glowing a pretty peach, then at long, long last, Jared turned to her with his supposedly-winning grin.

He drew breath to begin his usual long-winded briefing, but she'd waited long enough. "Spare me the history lesson, please," she cut him off grimly. "Just tell me what I have to do to get home."

His mouth shut with an audible pop, and he considered for a moment, then spoke carefully. "You have to convince a king to go to war." And then he stopped and waited, eyebrows raised expectantly.

Closing her eyes in exasperation, she sighed heavily. "All right," she gave in. "A few more details, please."

"I'll try to be succinct, but you do need to know a little bit of background," he replied, settling into his spiel with an apologetic air. He started to gesture her into a chair, but then thought better of it and hurried on. "In the first decade of the eighteenth century, Russia and Sweden were engaged in the Great Northern War. Russia, under the Tsar Peter the First, later called Peter the Great in our universe, crushed Sweden's army in the battle of Poltava in June of Seventeen-oh-Nine. Sweden's king, Charles the Twelfth, escaped south and took sanctuary in a little town called Bender, just inside the Moldavian border – Moldavia being next to the Crimean Khanate, and both of them part of the huge Ottoman Turk Empire.

"Charles immediately launched into a letter-writing campaign, trying to convince the Ottoman Sultan and his underlings, including the Crimean Khan, to restart their own war against Russia. They resisted for two years, but then Tsar Peter invaded Moldavia himself. He faced off against an overwhelming Turkish army in July, Seventeen-Eleven. The Russians were surrounded and about to be annihilated, but Peter managed to broker a truce with the Turkish general, on very easy terms. Far too easy for some. Peter only gave up a scrap of territory he'd won from the Turks a few years before, and escaped back to an intact Russia.

"The problem was that Charles wasn't there. He was still sulking in Bender. If he'd been at the battle with his few remaining troops – as apparently he was, in your history – then either the battle would have been fought and Peter defeated that way, or the terms of the treaty would have been immeasurably harsher. In either case, in your world, apparently Russia was divided up between the other major powers of the day, and never again reformed or became a world power in its own right.

"So what you need to do, is go to Bender, a month or two before the Russian invasion, and talk King Charles of Sweden out of his funk."

Rose thought a moment. "Well, I guess that doesn't sound so hard," she began, when the conversation was suddenly interrupted, incongruously, by a phone ringing in Jared's pocket. It was Jack, at long last, calling on what they'd termed the "superphone" (although she couldn't see for her life what was so "super" about it). The so-called Alpha Rose grinned, and working the big console alongside the tech, Joel, brought the big arch-like structure beyond it alive with crackling electrical energy – and there he was, appearing in an eyeblink in the midst of the storm.

"Where the hell have you been?" Alpha Rose hollered at Jack, echoing her same grinning demand when he'd earlier rescued them from the cell below. He grinned right back at her, dropping his greatcoat, which he'd been carrying in a bundle, on the floor beside the console.

"Sorry I'm late. Lost the coordinates and had to do it from memory," he replied cryptically, before turning to shoot Jared a serious look. "Hey, are you locking these jumpers? You need to. We had a bit of trouble."

"Locking them? How?"

"You don't know? Never mind, I know..." Jack interrupted himself. "...you had a sports car. Here, gimme." He spied Alpha Rose's jumper on her wrist and held it up, then showed all of them how to lock and unlock the keypad like any mobile phone, preventing accidental usage. Rose carefully paid attention, then locked her own, checking it a couple of times by pressing various buttons. No response, and she relaxed a hair. Jared then unlocked it again and programmed it while still on her arm for her return target, the point of origin of the last jump it had controlled, when she'd been kidnapped. Finally, he thought a moment, calculating with his eyes closed, then punched in the coordinates for her jump into history.

She peered up into his face while he worked, and then asked him anxiously, all her stomach-knotting worry distilled into one question, "Are you SURE I'll get back home to the same exact moment I left?"

"Completely," came his utterly sincere reply.

She stared a moment longer, gauging his reassurance, then sighed once more. "All right. King Charles of Sweden, then."

She stepped back a pace, straightening her shoulders determinedly. Then she gave them all a brave would-be smile, and pressed Activate, flashing out to meet her destiny.

Alpha Rose started her now-habitual swing to the monitors, but then caught sight of Jared's face. Just as the Swedish Rose had flashed out, he'd drawn breath to speak, his expression suddenly slightly panicked.

"Jared? What is it?" a little panicked, herself.

"Nothing," he muttered, wiping his face blank as he turned around. "I think I programmed that right."

Rose stared at him with trepidation, a hundred memories of the Doctor missing his target crowding her mind, and they slowly swiveled together to watch the monitors, holding their breaths as they waited for the dimension cannon's verdict.