Missy left Dr Chang asleep on the office floor after disentangling herself from his hug - for not liking contact when sober, he became a sad, soppy bramble in her skirts with a few drinks in him. When he'd wrapped his arms around her waist and cried somewhere between shoulder and chest she'd about disintegrated him right there. But then he started talking about how kind she was, how he respected her and thought her pretty in a scary sort of way, and Missy didn't have it in her hearts to kill him. He'd talked about a bunch of other things, too, but they weren't her so she didn't pay attention. The world was going to hell and she'd have very few people to compliment her then. Where would that leave her? With just her mirror, her toys, and memories of the Doctor calling her beautiful, begging her so sweetly to stay with him, be his companion (but not his equal, she knew, and that's where the memories turned sour).

After leaving her employee unconscious on the office floor, Missy went to visit her other one: Seb. With a great sigh as her only warning she dropped into the chair across the desk from him. He yelped and scattered his papers everywhere. Then, having expressed his surprise as humans did, Seb settled back down with a smile and the paperwork lay where it fell.

"Missy! What did you do?" The smile, like everything else about him, was artificial, but it looked more strained than usual.

"The world's ending."

"Aaand?" His hands rolled, trying to coax out more of an answer. She had a bit of a flush to her cheeks and cottoniness to her head, and got distracted by his movements, which he must have picked up from somewhere. He had been active for hundreds of hundreds of years that she mostly skipped, and this was what he did now, get his gesticulation all over everything. "Aaand?" Seb prompted again. "Isn't that a good thing? More souls means more soldiers. You can start early!"

Missy crossed her legs and readjusted her skirts. "I don't want to start early, I want to start exactly when I mean to start. Besides, it's not going to stick - time travel - I know, right?" She returned the face he made at the mention of time travel. Like all technology, it managed to be both overly complicated and convenient. "So I don't want any of these wibbly dead people who are now floating about the airwaves to be uploaded. It'd just be too much trouble to deal with. Got it?"

"Is that why you made a backup, too? Is there another me running around in your ship?"

"Would it bother you if I said yes?"

Seb didn't reply immediately, actually taking a moment to process the idea. "Yes."

Missy leaned forward and tutted at him, catching Seb's wild hands much as she had with Chang's. "Seb. Sebbie. Sebastian. Sebina. You are just the A.I. interface, because people don't like amorphous nothingnesses being their gods. If I want to duplicate you, I will." He looked crestfallen in a way eerily reminiscent of Dr Chang, probably because that was who he took the look from in the first place. The two doctors of 3W, Chang and Skarosa, had been his only personal contact with living humans, and he'd picked up bad habits from them it seemed. She needed to keep that in mind when dealing with Seb.

Missy sat back. "But don't you worry. I didn't. I needed just the humans safe, so off they went for copying. As soon as this is done, and assuming no damage that requires a reset, I'll delete the backups."

"... You couldn't have come up with a better reason than 'I don't care about you'? 'I'll just reset you if I need to'?"

"Don't be like that, Seb. I care about you very much. You, this data slice you, are intrinsic to my plans for the Doctor -"

"Doctor, Doctor, Doctor. Which doctor, exactly? Skarosa? You were very friendly with him, whispering all these clever little schemes. David Chang? I saw you two sloshing about out there. I might be locked down, but I can still access 3W, you know. Pinstripes, scarves, leather jackets, decorative vegetables? Don't they leave you, always?"

Missy's fists pressed hard enough to her hips to leave bruises. At some point during his tirade she had stood, and loomed over the A.I. A bit wobbly, but still a threat. As soon as he left a gap in his words, she jabbed his shoulder with one finger. "You are getting far too sassy, mister. I will take you apart line by glitchy line if you don't straighten out your attitude."

Seb wilted. "Sorry, mum."

"I'm not your mum."

"You sound like my mum," he groused.

Missy, back to her earlier calm, walked behind Seb to slip her arms around his shoulders and lace her fingers in front of him. Her chin rested on the top of his head and she closed her eyes, willing her headache to go away. She shouldn't have let her body process that alcohol. "You don't have a mummy, Seb. I made you - I didn't birth you, I didn't adopt you, I didn't even particularly want you. But I made you for one reason, and I like my tools to function properly."

Seb didn't say anything.

"When I come back, I'm going to work on your code. I suggest you do the same. Before I return."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good boy." And, much like the mother she professed not to be, Missy kissed the top of Seb's head. "Tootles!"

Then she was gone.

Missy popped into her TARDIS to freshen up before heading to the Valiant, try on ten different outfits, wash her face and reapply her makeup. She wanted to look good for the Master, and needed a moment to regain her composure. That was the problem with intelligence - it tended to change, especially when left to its own devices. Another problem for another day and another spot on her to-do list.

She posed in front of the full-length mirror, imagining herself one body back, a hundred-hundred years ago. The Master liked... well, he liked power. He liked games. He liked control, and losing it, gaining it, a tug-of-war across the stars. Harold Saxon in particular enjoyed music to drown out those incessant heartbeat drums. Meat. Humiliating people. Torture. Missy couldn't recall what he preferred sexually. Except the Doctor, always. She grimaced. Missy wasn't about to debase herself. She didn't have any pinstripes, anyway. Just lots and lots of velvet.

Missy must not have had a sexual preference back then, brief life that it was. Sex had been just another item on the to-do list of world domination. It was so long ago when she was him, and she didn't remember meeting Missy so couldn't even crib answers from herself. Odd, but not surprising. Time travel was curious that way, even without the Time Lords governing them so meekly, so narrowly. (Just thinking about them, tucked away in their pocket dimension when they should be burning, burning, set her teeth on edge, and Missy had to breathe deeply to return to the issue at hand). Time straightened itself out some way, some how, and unless it truly became a problem or she had some free time, she wouldn't question it.

Currently, Missy liked all sorts of people, had had time to enjoy herself and explore. She'd even come up with a fun little nickname to call herself, and kept it around as her alias. "Missy" in this mouth, with this tongue and teeth and the accent she'd snatched, sounded just adorable, and she really liked cute this time. Puppy eyes, no eyes, Escher-angle bodies, large hands, her own small ones... Her definition of cute was flexible.

Back when she was Harold Saxon, she liked touching things, not just to establish control, as that was the point of the Archangel, but just to feel them. Noise, songs. Very sensitive to taste, smell, breathing deep the breezes of pollution from her labor camps. Sunrises, fluorescent lights. She reveled in sensations, anything to drown out the drums that weren't just a sound, or a thought, but everything everywhere as far back as she could remember. The memories of the drums had changed, too, curiously, but neither here nor there for Missy's current venture.

Missy hunted down the most flattering of stimulating outfits she could find, petting her clothes enough to make her kitling jealous in search of just the right ply and lay. He proceeded to shed black fur all over her white blouses and underskirts until she'd mollified him with some catnip, locked him in a back room, and found a lint roller. Thusly prepared, ornamented, perfumed, and cat-fur free, Missy stepped out to meet the Master.

Back outside the TARDIS, which looked like any ordinary door at the moment, marked with a sign reading "Institute Director" and under it "Missy", she strapped on the vortex manipulator. She locked Chang in the office then teleported to the belly of the Valiant. No Toclafane here, just the red-blood glow of the Doctor's TARDIS burning itself out, screaming - singing, they called it - as it was forced to sustain the paradox. She placed a hand on the too-warm blue wood of its doors and leaned in close.

"That's what you get for eating me, Sexy," Missy whispered, then placed a red-lipped kiss on the window pane. Let the Doctor find that biometric imprint.

She left the sweltering room for cooler places, pausing only a moment to adjust the frequency on her manipulator. With the Toclafane bundled up in tech, it was easy-peasy to trick their sensors with some simple cloaking. Everyone else was too busy being brainwashed or tormented to pay much mind to the woman in purple (velvet, because she really did have a lot of velvet) swanning through once-familiar corridors. She'd gone for spikier heels that clicked like the knifes they were named after and gave her an extra three inches. Missy felt she could kill someone in these shoes, and not just herself when walking over open grating.

If Missy remembered correctly, she had grown tired fairly quickly after taking over the world, all high energy then sharp crash. Between the TARDIS screaming, time itself screaming, the Toclafane giggling, the world rebelling against the network (and also screaming), the Doctor begging and those everlasting drums, she had needed a bit of a lay-down. Too much stimulation was just as bad as too little, in that regeneration. Never happy, was her Master.

She headed for the living quarters.

There he was. All tuckered out, poor sweetling. Even her entrance hadn't caused him to stir, which was a shame because she'd put a lot of thought into it. First impressions were everything.

The Master held his body tightly to himself on top of the bedding with only a pillow over his head, muscles wound up tight and knotted. He'd barely taken off his jacket and shoes, left everything else to be mussed up. Missy slipped off her shoes and closed the door carefully behind her, locking out the Toclafane and guards, leaving the Master to her gentle mercies.

She tiptoed over to the bed and sat on the side opposite him to remove her own jacket and hat before crawling across the wide expanse of mattress to him. Missy bit her tongue to keep from giggling and ruining the surprise. She made no real effort to hide herself from him, yet the fact that he couldn't sense her even at this distance spoke measures toward how overwhelmed he was, mentally.

Missy could play doctor, too.

Red nails fluttered over the back of his shirt before alighting on his neck, just at the dip at the base of the skull, delicate as a butterfly. "Contact," was all she gave as warning before connecting to his mind.