Chapter 2
Series 3, "This is my Life."
Rose leaned back against the closed half of the TARDIS door, and smiled faintly, watching the Caracalasian sunset.
"Beautiful." She whispered, refering to the whisps of gasses and so on, that made the northern lights on Earth look like splatterings on a canvas painted by a child.
'I know.' The TARDIS 'whispered' back.
Rose grinned and jibed, 'How would you know, you don't have eyes.'
She got the distinct impression of eyes rolling. 'Oh you young whipper-snappers. Just because I don't have eyes doesn't mean I can't see. Besides, you did let me, sort of, borrow your eyes.'
Rose shook her head and just kept her gaze locked on the sight before them.
After the Sun had gone down, she stood and stepped back into the TARDIS. Warm in here, she took off her outer coat, and draped it over the coral strut next to the ramp, and went on up to the console.
"Okay, let's go. Where to next hmm? I read that the Veliis System, back in, oh, the year three billion and two B.C. had this great-"
'Rose.' The TARDIS interupted.
Rose just turned her head sideways, and asked, "Yeah?"
'Aren't you going to go someplace that actually has people?'
Rose paused, and then smiled. "I know, the planet, Stephanie Clark. So named after the great playwrite from the 64th Century."
The TARDIS seemed to sigh for a moment, but didn't say anything else as Rose started the trip.
By the end of it, she was laughing, laid back on the floor, thrown there by the shaking.
After a minute though, she got up, and went to the door.
'Be good.' The TARDIS wished her.
'You too.' Rose thought back, as she opened the door. And promptly shut it. Then got her coat on and went back to the door. She could have sworn that the TARDIS was laughing at her.
'Hey, It's cold out!' She thought, and stepped out.
And it was like a strange transformation, because what left the TARDIS, but came out of the TARDIS, were two different beings. Rose left the TARDIS, but the Wolf came out.
--
The Wolf browsed the various stalls in the market place she had found. Each time she spotted an item she had learned about, a corner of her lips would quirk for a moment.
She was about to step up to one stall that caught her eye, when someone came barrelling into her.
"Oof!" The Wolf looked at what had bowled her over, and smiled. A kid.
"Ss-s-ss-sorry." The kid stuttered, and her smile faded. He sounded absolutely shit-scared, but not because of her. Hell, she caught a faint whif of fear from the kid.
"You alright?"
"N-N-n-n-…" The kid paused, and then nodded his head. "y-y-y-yeah." With that, the kid made to get up and run off, but the Wolf hopped up onto her feet and stopped him.
"Hold on one second, kid. What's got you so frightened?"
The Wolf got her answer, in the form of a rather tall and angry man stalking towards them. Protectively, the Wolf pushed the boy behind her back, hidden from view, and she acted non-challant. The man completely missed them and passed on by.
The Wolf pulled the kid into a side alley, and knelt down so she was eye-to-eye. "What's your name?"
"Jeremy." The kid answered with much less fear.
"Alright, Jeremy, who was that?" She asked, and tilted her head shortly in the direction of the man. The kid tried to tell her, but his sudden fear that the man would get them, or that she would give him to the man, had completely overwhelmed him and his ability to speak. "Shh, it's alright, I'm not gonna hurt you, let him hurt you, or anything like that. Come on. If I'm going to help, I need you to tell me who he is." Jeremy started to stutter again, so the Wolf sighed, and added, "So I can go kick his butt."
Jeremy smiled a little, probably imagining the image, and more calmly, told her, "Headmaster Snape."
--
The Wolf groaned as she found a secret door in the Headmasters' office at the boarding school where Jeremy lived.
Exploring through it, she found another whole wing of the school, but much more down-trodden and cramped than the school proper was. And there were far more kids in this wing than there was in the other wings combined.
Many of the kids looked worked-to-the-brink-of-death. Those that didn't were either obviously new arrivals since they didn't look as dirty, or they had a mass of muscle, presumably from whatever the Headmaster had them all doing.
Spotting a security camera, she took out her handy Sonic Screwdriver, and with a quick adjustment to its settings, she pointed it at the camera, said, "I'll have enough of that, thank you very much." And used it. The camera exploded.
--
The Headmaster scowled at her as the local security force took him into custody. "WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?" He shouted out before the officers got him into the back of a van.
The Wolf gave him a wolfish grin, and in answer to both the now former-headmaster, and the officers who looked at her with the same question on their faces, she said, "I'm the Wolf."
As she stalked off, she could hear someone ask, "What Wolf?"
--
Rose stepped out of the library. As she headed through the corridors to the control room, she asked, "I have no idea where to go now. Feel like going someplace at random?"
'Okay.' The TARDIS replied, and Rose smiled.
As she landed the TARDIS, she got an odd urge to read. She shrugged it off, and with her typical well-wishes to the TARDIS, left; becoming the Wolf once more.
She looked about and could almost groan. "Alright, New York, Earth. 20th Century?" She mumbled. She spotted a newspaper stand, and went over to it. Wthout buying one, she looked at the date.
"Okay, 2009. Bit ahead." She mumbled, and proceeded to look around, wondering what brought her here.
When she spotted a store with the signs, 'Harry Potter Books 1-7, 75 Percent Off', she had an idea. A quick trip to a cash machine later, (not so quick, she found it difficult to find one that wasn't covered by CCTV,) and she returned to the shop and bought the books. At the cashiers' look, she shrugged and mouthed, "Birthday present."
She returned to the TARDIS and took her out into the drifts of space, giving herself (and the TARDIS, as she insisted,) time to read the books in peace.
--
"YOU HAVE GOT TO BE JOKING!" Rose growled and shouted upon reading the last chapter.
She looked around at the room, and said to the TARDIS, "I don't know who wrote this, but this is not Harry Potter, and this was not written by J.K.; How could she kill her off? And him!"
'Rose, Calm down. It's just a book!' The TARDIS tried, but Rose was having none of it.
"I'm going to go have a word with her!" Rose growled, quieter but still.
The TARDIS groaned throughout the trip, where Rose did exactly what she said, and the editors at Bloomsbury and Scholastic both got an earful too from the Big Bad Wolf.
--
The Wolf stepped out of the TARDIS, and took in the sight of the alien planet Stow. On her explorations of the city, she found that the race was kind of an off-shoot of the human race, although seperately evolved.
When she passed an advertisement for the Max Capricorn Cruiseliners, she spotted a man being beat up by a group of kids, and looked quite out of it.
"OI! You lot! Stop that!" She shouted, running up to them. She idly noticed what looked like miniature EMP devices in their hands as they ran off. She looked at the man, and re-adjusted her description, it wasn't a man, well, stow-human man at any rate, but a short red alien with spikes on his head that looked like a cross between cactii prongs, hair, and scales. She picked him up and took him back to the TARDIS. Unfortunately, her trip back to it wasn't without incident.
--
Rose rubbed her arm with a wince, as the automated devices in the TARDIS' version of an A+E got to work on healing her various broken bones.
Across from her, laid the small red-skinned alien, unconscious. His chest was open, revealing some kind of machine implanted into his mid-torso. He too was being healed as much as he could by the TARDIS. While he would still need those cybernetic implants to live, he would be able to survive for a short time should the device be powered down - for instance, say an EMP is triggered.
"Well my little red-skin friend, looks like I've got a revolution to start." Rose muttered under her breath, not happy with the political or social climate of Stow.
--
The Wolf frowned severely when her revolution wasn't as successful as she thought it'd be, but she at least smiled when she realised that some of the people in power had listened.
Mainly when she realised one of them was a cyborg too. With that, she left planet Stow rather pleased, although she would have been happier if the situation had improved far more than it had, but political and social revolutions like that do tend to take a long time, or so the TARDIS pointed out to her before they left.
--
The Wolf was frowning as she looked over a device. She was back on Earth, but it was around the 80s. She was in a base owned and operated by U.N.I.T., having been caught in the middle of an investigation into some kind of ship crashing in Montana - typically, when she was just relaxing a mile away from where the crash happened.
They had been rather intrigued when she prooved to them that she travelled through time by using her password to open the 9th Doctor file.
Which had brought her here, to a science lab, trying to work out what the hell she was looking at. A device, pulled from the wreckage.
Colonel Charles Crichton, an irritating man, asked her again, "What is it?"
The Wolf shrugged, and was about to answer, when a voice from the door said, "Julsaen blackbox."
The Wolf barely caught a sideways glance at the man before her head whipped to stare.
"Hello." He greeted, curious at her reaction. He turned to the Colonel, "Charles, my boy. Good to see you."
"You too, sir." Charles responded with a salute.
The man groaned, and told him, "No, don't salute."
"Sorry sir. I'd like you to meet-"
"Donna Smith." The Wolf introduced, with a side-glance at Charles, who frowned at her.
"She saw the craft crash in Montana, and apparently has extensive experience with aliens." The Colonel said with some sarcasm.
The Wolf rolled her eyes, and told him, "I've only been exploring the universe for 2 years, Colonel. Or is it Charles?" The Wolf grinned.
Charles rolled his eyes, and introduced them properly. "Donna Smith," he paused with a glance at her, "This is John Smith."
The Wolf racked her mind for which of him he was, and asked, "Lemme guess, 3rd Doctor?"
That got the Doctor's eyebrows up. "Do you know me, child?"
The Wolf gave him a glare, her eyes glowed slightly and she growled at him. The sight made him pause. "Don't call me child, Time Lord."
"So you're not human." The Doctor mumbled, and Charles raised his eyebrows.
The Wolf shook her head as her eyes returned to normal. "Human. You don't want to know what that glow is about."
She almost lost her 'angry' composure when the TARDIS said to her, 'Tell that stuffy version of him, Jo Grant says hi.'
"So, what-"
"Oh by the way, Jo Grant says 'Hi'." She added with a short smile.
"Er. Alright." The Doctor looked at Charles for a second, then back at the Wolf and shrugged a little, although the tightening of the corner of his eyes did show that he at least knew that name.
Charles looked between them, and shrugged when no information was forthcoming.
Shortly after the two got to work on trying to access the data on the 'Juslaen Black Box', the Doctor found himself intrigued when the Wolf pulled out her own Sonic Screwdriver, since he was taking a little too long to find his own.
"Nice Sonic Screwdriver." He complimented.
She held back a smile, and asked, "Who do you travel with now?"
He gave her a look, and answered, "Wonderful woman, Sarah Jane-"
"Smith." The Wolf finished.
"You don't by chance happen to be related to her?"
The Wolf just gave him a faint smile, and didn't answer.
Unfortunately, her mobile chose that moment to ring. When she answered it, she saw their looks, and the Doctor's frown.
"Hey SJ." The Wolf greeted.
"SJ?" The person on the other end asked.
"Sorry, nickname." The Wolf dismissed.
"Where and When are you?" The person asked.
"Earth, 1980 something. Hold on." She turned to Charles, and asked, "What year is it?"
He answered, "85."
The Wolf repeated that, and added, "Guess who I'm working with? Right now?"
"Who?" The person asked.
The Wolf grinned, and said, "Your Doctor."
"You- Wait, what do you mean, 'My Doctor'?" The person asked.
The Wolf just looked at the Doctor, winked, and said, "You know the Doctor you met before he regenerated. When you travelled with him."
The Doctor's eyes widened as he understood what was going on.
"What? Can I speak to him?"
The Wolf rolled her eyes, and said, "I dunno, if he lets it, with the possible dangers of Ontological paradoxes and all that."
The Doctor nodded slightly, and commented that he had met such a Sarah Jane from his own future before. She passed the phone to him and was amused for the few minutes where they talked. When Sarah Jane made a seemingly innocuous comment on their black box device, the Doctor exclaimed, "Of course! Thank you Sarah Jane!… Wait." He paused and his eyes widened.
The Wolf's eyes widened also when The Doctor sheepishly handed her the mobile, and got the computer links done.
"Sarah Jane." The Wolf simply said.
Innocently, Sarah Jane asked, "What?"
"Did you just give your Doctor the solution to our problem just now?"
"…" Sarah Jane didn't reply.
The Wolf muttered, "Thought so." Then asked, "Anyway, what you ringing for?"
With that, the Wolf bid goodbye to the Colonel and third Doctor, stepping out of the lab, heading for the TARDIS.
"I said I'd call." Sarah Jane told her, as the Wolf followed the TARDIS' directions to where U.N.I.T. had transported it.
"And I said I'd run." Rose Tyler replied, stepping into the TARDIS.
"I'm sending landing location details on a frequency piggybacking this one. The TARDIS should be picking it up."
The Wolf went to the console, pulled the monitor around and made sure the TARDIS was. When she saw the screen show the download complete, she said, "Got it. And I'm running for you now."
"See you soon."
Rose Tyler sighed as she looked at all the informaton sent along. Strange weather patterns spotted over a hospital several times a month, but getting successively stronger. And an odd pattern to them.
She put her head in her hands for a minute, and when she looked up again, it wasn't Rose Tyler, but the Wolf.
--
The Doctor, out of curiosity, followed this, 'Donna' person. Colonel Charles did also. When he saw her step into the TARDIS, he froze. "What's she doing with my-"
"Hold on a second, Doctor." The Colonel began with a frown. The Doctor watched, amazed, as the TARDIS proceeded to leave. "That's not your TARDIS. That's 'Donna's TARDIS."
"Who is this, Donna?"
"Uhm, I have a nasty suspicion that I shouldn't tell you."
The Doctor just looked at him.
"She called herself, the Wolf. Like you call yourself 'the Doctor', and that other Time Lord fella, 'the Master'."
"but she's not-"
"No."
"How the heck did she get a TARDIS?" He wondered aloud.
--