Text Key

"Audible speech."

'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'

School Reunion

Chapter 11 - The Demon Headmaster

I'd always had a mixed relationship with schools.

On one hand, they'd been my easiest access to books, computers, and people - friends and librarians and teachers who actually cared about both their students and their subjects beyond what was needed to make it to the end of the day.

On the other… well. Even if you threw out active malefactors among the faculty and student body, the number of those just willing to let shit happen in front of them without comment or even a second glance were enough to taint the very word 'school', even if the particular institution had everything else going for it.

Of course, there were always those very special institutions were everyone was awful but in fun and largely harmless ways, like the Unseen University.

Deffery Vale was definitely nowhere near being that interesting, but I could rate it about level with Sunnydale High - poorly hidden malevolence from a good quarter of the managerial staff while the rest waffled in a purgatorial zone of well-meaning uselessness.

So, yeah, nothing particularly special beyond the conspiracy to ascend to godhood or local equivalent of bubbling in the background and slightly suspect lunch offerings.

Oh, right, and the UFO reports that had brought us here in the first place.

As soon as Mickey had told the Doctor about those, the Time Lord had landed the TARDIS in London and started about the business of an investigation which then evolved to a proper infiltration. Within two days, Deffery Vale had a new lunch lady, librarian, and physics teacher.

Rose shot me a murderous glare as she served me my lunch, only breaking that stare to fix it on the Doctor next.

She shouldn't have bothered; the entrée was enough of a death threat on its own merit.

After we sat down at our table, I poked at the plate, watching a puddle of vomit yellow something weakly twitch in response.

Speaking as someone who had the memory of eating everything from rat and dirt down to two-hundred year old radioactive snack food and the occasional unpleasant concept - and that was without even adding in the Parisian Catacomb corpse water incident -, I probably didn't have much to complain about with regards to a fairly regular human lunch, but…

"You are really going to have to show me where the TARDIS's kitchen is after this adventure," I told the Doctor as I pushed the plate away. "I can't survive on this nonsense."

"Come on, it's not that bad," the Time Lord said as he chewed on a chip, avoiding the suspect smear on his own plate. He swallowed and gave the bit of deep-fried potato remaining a considering look. "Though I'll admit, the flavor is a bit off."

I took a bite of my own, only to find myself grimacing. The potato was fine, but the oil… the sourness to it could have been mistaken for mundane spoilage, but combined with the fact that it didn't strike as familiar to any I'd ever tasted before and that I could actually feel it speeding up my nervous system already... "Different sort of oil."

"Mmm," the Doctor said in agreement, munching away at the rest of his chip. "If it's an Earth variety, it's not one I recognize."

Maybe Time Lord biology didn't get that secondary effect, because there was no way that he wouldn't have commented on the sensation of having one's mental gears liberally greased up and set spinning at maximum speed, to the point that even I noticed it with my powers active. Combine that effect with the neuroplasticity, metabolism, and body weight to caloric intake ratio of the average teenager… well, it was easy to puzzle out how efficient a think tank this was to a suitably devious individual with designs on a dangerous equation.

"Well, I think the chips are just gorgeous," Rose declared as she walked up to our table, stealing a chip off the Doctor's plate as she plopped down next to us.

I could have quoted Mean Girls. I could have. 'You can't sit with us' was only five little words. But there was enough awkward tension between us that one last indignity for Blondie in the wake of so many - even if bringing out the memes was so, so mild a sin - in the span of three days could have well spelled some sort of disaster for me.

On top of the job title, Rose was dressed in a set of those formless pastel-shaded scrubs that belonged to the lowest denominator of the service industry, specifically of the kind people tended to gloss over even as they looked at them. At least fast food work afforded the dignity of a nametag, because the only thing that separated her from the rest of the lunch ladies was the configuration of her face which belonged only – at least as far as I knew to be a fact in this universe – to one Rose Tyler.

She stole another of the Doctor's chips. "Anyway, have either of you found anything? Because it's been three days and if I'd wanted to be bored in a dead end job…"

"Blame your boyfriend. He was the one who brought us here, chasing alien activity," the Time Lord reminded her before leaning forward in a half-conspiratorial manner. The fact that his new position kept Rose from stealing more of his food would go without comment on my part. "And he was right. Had a boy in class this morning, Milo, rattling off numbers that he shouldn't have in the first place. And I don't mean upper level stuff. I mean like how to facilitate FTL travel, which you lot won't have a handle on for another couple centuries."

Impossible knowledge. Always a fishy sign, speaking as someone who made efforts not to come across that way. "So, someone's been feeding him and the others stuff outside of the local knowledge," I summarized. "To what end?"

The Doctor shrugged. "Oh, could be anything. I've seen more wetware computation devices than I care to remember, but they can be for practically anything; injecting creativity into war simulations, brainwashing to get an 'in' on the next generation of science, calculating numbers for some kind of intergalactic lottery drawing… there's a lot of motives that can go into that, so I can't get a pin down without more information. Can't make bricks without clay."

"And it falls to us to supply the clay, of course," I said, rolling my eyes as the Doctor started beaming at us for being so understanding. Typical Time Lord.

Zeke made a mock noise of pain. 'I am wounded by the association.'

'Then tell him to do more leg work instead of crowing about the cleverness of he before there's anything to show for it,' I shot back.

The conversation cut short as the head lunch lady, a wizened spindle of a woman whose mouth seemed to be permanently puckered into a sour pinch, stalked towards us, eyes fixed on her youngest hireling.

Alright, there wasn't any point in holding it back at this point.

"Looks like you can't sit with us," I whispered to Rose, finally giving into the peer pressure of the Plastics.

"Back to scrubbing," Rose sighed as she stood up and grabbed our abandoned food trays. "I don't see why you got the cushy librarian job."

"Cause I have that listed on my resume - eh, CV? That's what you call them over here, right?"

Both Rose and the Doctor stared at me.

"What? I've had jobs and I like books. It's not hard to find a place where those two areas intersect," I said defensively.

Picking up a near supernatural command of how to navigate libraries from a certain flat world travelling through the cosmos on a Jenga tower of giant animals in a past life rarely went over well, even if I left out the bit about the little blue man who lived in my hat.

'Alas for poor Wee Jamie; he is always such a delight.'

"When did you manage to do that? You can't be more than a few years older than me," Rose protested.

Oh, she was way off on that math, but I didn't even have to spin a lie to cover my ass. "Late 90's. Southern California, fun little town called Sunnydale." If you found routine vampire attacks, magic bullshit, and accidentally giving yourself the screaming mindfuck of a millennium on Halloween 'fun'.

"I thought you were from Michigan?"

The Doctor leaned forward slightly, looking interested in the reveal of personal information.

"I did a couple cross country tours. Southwest's my favorite - apart from the cults, of course," I said, waving off the Time Lord's stare. Catching the sight of the head lunch lady's approach, I motioned for Rose to get moving. "Interrogate me later."

"You are not permitted to leave your station during a sitting," the Ms. Bitters knockoff hissed at Rose.

"Was just talking to these two," Rose mumbled.

The Doctor waved at the evil one, a bright smile fixed on his face while I settled for a level stare.

"He doesn't like the chips," Rose added, as if this was some great and terrible secret.

Considering the evil one's reaction, it might have been.

"The menu has been specifically designed by the headmaster to improve concentration and performance," the woman snarled before turning her hateful gaze back to Rose. "Now, get back to work."

With that and one final glare, 'Ms. Bitters' vanished back into the depths of the cantina with a malicious smoothness that left the sound of a rattlesnake ringing in my mind's ear.

Rose rolled her eyes, doing a final turn to face us. "This is me; Rose Tyler, Dinner Lady."

"Save me a bit of the crumble," the Doctor said.

"I'm so going to kill you."

The Time Lord grinned. "Dessert first, if you don't mind," he called after her before she vanished back into the kitchen. He turned around to look at me and found my unimpressed stare now directed at him. "What?"

"Trying to figure out the dynamics." Particularly how the hell they even had a dynamic, but…

A girl who wanted to be special and clung to what she felt was 'hers', damn anyone or anything that got in her way, even if it was that one rule on the Evil Overlord List about 'consuming energy fields bigger than your head' or a guideline about not exploding two entire universe over the sake of a love interest.

An alien wanderer in time who had both an overdeveloped ego and sense of responsibility as 'the Last of the Time Lords' without age and a guiding hand to smooth off the extremes, coping with the relatively trauma of the Time War by launching himself into an idealized form of pacifism which could quickly spin out into both self-righteousness and hypocrisy if not caught in time.

Those were two things that played off each other easily. I just didn't like it because it was incredibly dangerous to anyone in the vicinity, a word which here meant 'practically anywhere and anywhen in the universe' thanks to the TARDIS.

The Doctor just shrugged. "I like her and she likes me. What's there to figure out?"

Everything. Like how to keep that combination of 'like' from getting someone killed.

"Anyway," he redirected. "I didn't know you were a librarian."

"Librarian's assistant, if you want to split hairs. Surprised I had a life before you?"

Could have said 'lives' if I really wanted to rattle his chain, but there was something to be said for self-control.

The Doctor almost looked abashed for a moment. "Well, one would think that a person with steady employment wouldn't be wandering around London alone on Christmas," he said.

Instead of answering that, I took a sip from my milk box. At least this wasn't sour like the oil. "What we think can be very different from the truth."

As I sat and considered the complete absence of anything permanent in my lives - the consequence of moving universes every decade or so, and having a metric fuckton of crazy shit shoved in between those shifts - beyond my currently absent companions and a constant level of stress, awkward silence wormed its way into the lull in the conversation, hanging over the table like a death sentence before the Doctor cleared his throat.

"Bit too quiet in here for my taste," he said. "Would have thought we'd see some sort of delinquent behavior by now. Hoodies, ringtones, gossip. But no, nothing."

That was true, I thought as I looked around the room. Too little noise for this many kids shoved into an enclosed space, with the most of it being a very muffled sort of small talk and the clatter of cutlery on plastic. Not much in the way of movement either, save the odd teacher making their rounds, all too often in the style of a predator looking for an injured or sickly animal to separate from the herd and devour.

And above them all, loomed the headmaster.

Seeing Giles' face used so wretchedly was… upsetting, especially in the contrasts between the headmaster and the Watcher I'd known... and I'd known Rupert Giles very well; all the little quirks, habits, and subtleties tangled up with the more important things of 'lines never to be crossed' and 'promises never to be broken'. The way he had of conveying 'why am I the only reasonable person in this town' immediately before doing something just as unreasonable but six degrees to the left was unmistakable.

And this… lookalike, this thief of faces, had none of that. None of the body language, none of the lived-in suits - in fact, the entire presentation of 'Headmaster Hector Lucas Finch' was close to that of a corpse, with both perfectly pressed suit and slicked back hair never so much as twitching out of place.

And then there was the way that he looked over the room like he was picking out his next victim.

"Definitely something about the chips," I said, looking down just as Finch's sweep would have resulted in eye contact.

The Doctor nodded along, stealing another glance at the Headmaster through the corner of his eye. "Oh definitely."

'This library is unused,' Keshui muttered as I tasted the sterile air of my current workspace, xir feathers ruffling in distaste in some phantom space inside and just behind of my mind. 'What is even the point of having it then? Why gather stories and histories if no one is going to read them?'

'I know, I know,' I replied, moving between the rows with the handful of books that had been removed from the shelves in the last week. 'It's an utter waste.'

Despite Deffery Vale's library being undersized and underused, it still had the distortion of L-space around it. Not enough to properly do anything properly impressive, of course - unless I felt like giving it a little push - but enough for it to be a reassuring touch of near-magic in a universe that was otherwise absent of it.

I suppose not even Time Lords could argue with knowledge equals power equals (force times distance squared), even if it wasn't quite cut-and-dried logical.

'Probably was close enough to Block Transfer Theory or Quantum Mnemomics to justify it,' Zeke mused, brogue buzzing and rolling his 'R's like bumblebees in a rock tumblr. 'But I think you'd have to find The Library to make proper use of it. Now that'll be a properly powerful place, having that 'The' stuck to it. Anything that's gets the 'The' tends to be rather important.'

'Fine words from a man who called himself "The Doctor", Zeke.'

'Ah, well, that's a few millennia in our rearview, isn't it?' my personal edition of the Time Lord replied, not even making any movement towards dismissing my toothless accusation that he thought himself important. 'In my old age, I've come to find "Professor Ezekiel Sterling" more than sufficient for my needs.'

Right. Not just because it was confusing now that we were hanging out with the Doctor - unrelated? Semi-related? The vibes weren't quite the same as Zeke's, even from the beginning -, but because the process of housetraining Zeke had probably brought enough character development along with semi-forced human mentality to make a human name more comfortable.

Or maybe it was because getting people to acknowledge the 'The' part of his old title was generally difficult outside of his own universe and it was just easier to not play the game.

'Anyway,' I began after schooling my thoughts. 'What do you think of the situation?'

'Seeing as we have a fair idea of how easily the Krillitanes were dealt with without our input, I'm assuming you're referring to my… successor.'

I shrugged as I shoved a selection of encyclopedias back into their places and started to make my way back to the front desk. 'You would know him best.'

'Hardly. Not only was I separated from the experience about four models from this one, I don't have my previous incarnations to cross-reference either. Probably for the better, given your reaction to and interactions with Six.' Zeke sighed. 'You haven't made any observations I haven't made myself. Miss Tyler's influence is probably part of why the current model is so…'

'Grandiose? Impulsive? Self-sacrificing? Needlessly preachy? Wildly careless?'

'Please, Delaine, those are all standard features,' the Time Lord said dismissively before becoming serious again. 'Let's just say… the exact combination of those traits combined with a certain lack of others that might otherwise counteract them have led to an… unbalanced personality? One might even accuse me of being an example of such, though too much brains, too little heart rather than being caught between ancient and immature.'

'At least until you got stuck with our mess,' I said.

'Yes. It's rather difficult to pull off such complicated plans inside of a decade without a TARDIS and exhaustive knowledge of the universe I'm operating in,' Zeke admitted. 'Never mind the twisting of one's history by the whim of a petty cosmic power or the swarm of commentators that do nothing but scream and try to usurp control when one starts moving in directions a little too morally suspect for their liking.'

'Please,' I thought back with a roll of my eyes. 'You know you like us.'

'Like gnome jokes and haggis, it's an acquired taste.'

With that, his mental presence receded into the back of my mind to mill around with the rest of the little pinprick points of light that made up my other selves.

I sighed as I settled into a comfortable perch on the stool behind the front desk, pulling a yo-yo out of my warehouse before strapping my limiter back on and starting the process of idling. Zeke hadn't given me any answer I could work with, but I couldn't quite blame him.

After all, he knew about as much about the current model of the Doctor as I did and, like the Doctor had said earlier, you couldn't make bricks without clay.

The yo-yo jumped up to and down from my hand before making a quick detour around the world before I snapped it back to rest into my palm.

"Testing the local gravity?" an amused voice asked.

Startled, I fell off my stool, dragging a number of papers off the desk with me as I went. The yo-yo that smacked me in the face a few seconds after that was merely icing on the humiliation cake.

Two figures looked down at me, both familiar in two very different ways.

One was the thing wearing the Giles-skin. The other was Sarah Jane Smith.

"Are you alright?" Sarah Jane asked, her brown hair swaying as she leaned over the counter to look down at me. "Are you hurt anywhere?"

"Just in my dignity," I groaned. "Also possibly my coccyx."

"Unfortunate," the Headmaster said, like the lack of injury was the real tragedy here.

Bitch.

"Anyway," he continued as I pulled myself off the floor. "This is Miss Sarah Jane Smith, a reporter. Miss Smith will be writing a profile on me for the Sunday Times and I expect you to render her as much assistance as you are… capable."

With that, the Headmaster turned on his heel and left the library.

Double bitch.

"All business, isn't he?" Sarah Jane asked, watching the door swing shut behind him.

"He knows what he's after and has a pretty good idea of how to get it," I said, not looking away from the door. Universal domination through the exploitation of children, I didn't add. "Anyway, was there anything you needed, Sarah Jane?"

She blinked, her face settling into a considering look.

"You know," she said carefully, watching my face with an intent that went beyond mere politeness. "Most people begin with Miss Smith. Or just 'Sarah'."

Fuck. Okay, come on, not the worst possible thing I could have said… or the worst voice I could have said it in, given that I had only just put the limiter back on a minute ago -

"I've known some Sally Anns, a few Mary Janes, and a couple Sarah Lees. A Sarah Jane isn't so strange," I said, covering as casually as I could manage under the circumstances. "Of course, if you would prefer 'Just Sarah', I suppose I could –"

The amusement was back. "No, Sarah Jane is fine. No need to go overboard." She looked around the library, frowning at the emptiness. "Where is the cellphone signal best in here?"

I pointed towards the back of the library, which was mostly window. "It's not the greatest, but it's steady if nothing else."

As Sarah Jane moved out of earshot, I kicked myself. Stupid. Idiot. Sixteen thousand plus years of collective experience, still making an ass of myself in public.

Could I use the excuse that I hadn't been a dominant personality for a half dozen centuries? Probably not, seeing as nobody else got to use 'senility' to cover for their fuck-ups, especially given that I had come pre-installed with my social stupidity.

"How's the snooping going?" the Doctor asked from just behind me, the Time Lord just barely ducking out of the way of the wild swing I took in his direction.

Just like the general jumpiness.

"Don't sneak up on me like that!" I hissed, gripping my arms hard enough to hurt. Why hadn't I brought a jacket with me? I didn't like being exposed like this, especially not when someone with a face and voice straight out of my nightmares was now a fact of my day-to-day life.

Now it was the Doctor's turn to stare at me, this time with concern instead of studious intent. "Are you alright?"

Do alright people look this scared? Bad enough that the not-Giles was putting me on edge - though more through anger than fear -, I didn't need flashbacks of Kilgrave every time a certain someone decided to get up in my personal space.

"I'm fine." I straightened my waistcoat and shoved my stress back into a little box to be dealt with later. Much, much later. "Anyway, what was it you wanted, Doctor?"

The Time Lord gave me a searching look very much like the one Sarah Jane had given me earlier, but he didn't push the subject.

With the benefit of hindsight, that probably should have been concerning.

"Just wanted to know if you'd found anything," he said.

I dragged a hand back through my hair. "The absence of evidence is evidence in itself," I said, turning to the computer and turning on the appropriate screens. "You say that these kids are able to rattle off impossible numbers like nothing? Well, they aren't getting them from here, because this place barely sees any activity outside of class projects. I'd say Sarah Jane's getting more out the room right now than most of the students."

"Sarah Jane?"

Don't play dumb, Doctor. "Smith. The award-winning investigative journalist? I somehow doubt that she's here to write a mundane puff piece. Besides, even if she was sent to do a report on the upswing in school scores, it would be an article about the school in general, not a profile on the headmaster." I turned off the computer and turned to look at the Time Lord. "She's playing off his ego to get what she wants."

"And what is it you think she wants?"

Playing dumb again or feeling out my thought process?

"Answers, clearly. It's the question that's unclear," I finished.

No, it wasn't. She'd probably heard about the alien activity as well and was here for the exact same reasons as us. But I wasn't supposed to know that.

The Doctor hummed as he busied himself around the desk, pausing only as he found a book I'd been reading earlier. "The Demon Headmaster?" he asked, holding up the hardcover.

"Thought it was thematically appropriate."

"Mmm," the Doctor replied, flipping through the pages. "Bit of an obvious villain, isn't he?"

I raised an eyebrow. "And you're calling the guy who's a Nehru jacket, goatee, and a right-hand cat away from being a Bond villain 'subtle'? I mean, what kind of guy stands on a balcony to loom over everyone at lunchtime, if not to watch all within his domain eat his strange chips, which have quite possibly been spiked with alien brainwashing oil?"

The Doctor lifted up a finger as if to argue the point and then lowered it again. "Okay, point. Finch is too tied into this not to be a major player."

Thank you for confirming what I already knew and told you.

"Anyway, when did you want to go out on that double date with Rose and Mickey?" I asked as the bell rang and Sarah Jane walked out, casting another searching glance our way. "Tonight?"

The Doctor checked his watch. "Four hours, you think?"

"Five works better."

"It's a date then," he said with a wink, disappearing before I could ask him never to do that again.

This adventure was just going to bring back so many memories of Sunnydale, wasn't it? Forget the enemy with Giles' face, the simple act of sneaking into a school after dark with a blonde girl just ahead of me reeked of the Slayer ages.

If I was following my ideal playbook for that time - though by being in a group, I mostly wasn't -, I would have focused on being quiet, cautious, and as well-prepared as I could reasonably be before venturing into a potential demon pit.

This group? We weren't any of those things beyond whatever me going without my limiter and with a stake up my sleeve counted as.

"It's weird being in a school at night," Rose said as we slunk down the darkened hallways of Deffery Vale, her voice barely within range of being a stage whisper. Under the night's palette of bruised black, blue, and grey, the building could have been mistaken for an entirely different place from that of the dull and uninspired browns and tans of daylight. "You know, when I was a kid, I used to think the teachers actually slept in the school."

"Someone wrote a book about that, actually."

"Really?"

I winced at the volume. Stealth mission, stealth mission.

"Apple Island, or The Truth About Teachers, by Douglas Evans. Fantasy-Satire, 1998," I recited from memory at the appropriate volume for the current situation. "Recommended for children eight to nine years old."

The interest that had colored Rose's tone withered away instantly. "Oh, nice."

What? Had that read as an insult? Whatever intent I might have had going in, there was no missing that any good will I'd managed to generate with the blonde had just evaporated. Vanished. Poof. Dissipated into the ether.

And yet somehow, I didn't care about that nearly as much as the sound of leathery wings outside, wings a lot bigger than anything on any Earthly bat.

Krillitane. At least they had the good sense to keep a lookout while the rest slept.

"Alright, team," the Doctor said - again, too loud for a so-called 'stealth mission' - before losing his train of thought. "Team… don't quite like the sound of that. Gang? Comrades?"

"Fellowship of reckless idiots?"

The look the Doctor gave me didn't have near as much heat as Rose's did.

"Anyway," he continued. "Rose, you go to the kitchen, get a sample of that oil. Mickey, all the new teachers are Maths Department, so check out that wing. Delaine –"

"I'll go with Mickey, he doesn't know the layout." And I really didn't want to be a third wheel during the grand Doctor and Sarah Jane reunion, mostly because I knew I'd find some way to take the wind out of those sails just as surely as I did every time I was in the same room as Rose.

"Right. I'll check out the Headmaster's office," the Doctor said as he started to run up the stairs., before he disappeared into the dark, he paused to look back at us. "Anyway, be back here in ten minutes, don't have a crisis without me."

With that, the gang committed the cardinal sin of horror movies and split up, Rose breaking off towards the kitchens while me and Mickey headed off into the tangled hallways of the Maths and Science wing.

"So, uh, we haven't been introduced yet," Mickey said as we stopped at a fork in the hallway. "I'm Mickey. Mickey Smith."

"Delaine. Pleasure to make your acquaintance."

I scanned the hallway a few times over, stretching out different senses just to be sure that it was as empty as it looked. For now, it seemed safe, though how long that would last with that lookout flying around was arguable.

Still, for the moment, all was clear.

"So… how'd you meet the Doctor?" Mickey asked as we slunk down the hall, with me picking open whatever locks were in place with the most mundane tools I had on hand and a little bit of applied telekinesis to smooth the process.

Unfortunately for our snooping session, most of what we found were empty classrooms and a rather basic broom closet which was of… negligible value to the investigation.

"Naked mole rat aliens tried to steal Christmas. Rose was at an ABBA concert."

"Uh…huh. Suppose it's no weirder than the Invasion of the Killer Mannequins or the farting aliens in 10th Downing Street," he said as I picked open another locked door. "You human or some sort of alien?"

I spared Mickey a half second glance. "What makes you ask?"

"Ah… just something about you."

Smart boy. Much smarter than anyone gives him credit for. That or I'd slipped up on something silly like changing my eyes to something more suited for nightwork. It was hard to miss glowing green cat's eyes in the dark.

"I was human last time I checked."

The door popped open, revealing a chemistry lab that, once more, was definitely not what we had been looking for. Still, it was something more interesting than the desks and blackboards of the previous rooms, so Mickey likely took that as a cue to start searching it anyway.

Should I have mentioned that we were looking for computers?

'Probably,' Kourtefour said, the Irken watching over the scene through my eyes with languid disinterest, likely because this calm and sedate pace was slow compared to the sort of misadventures in sneakery he usually got up to. 'Not like it'll make much of a difference, at this juncture, but if it makes you feel better...'

A door creaked open and Mickey screamed as a wall of vacuum-packed rats fell down on him.

'Ah, too late.'

I resisted the urge to facepalm. Typical - a very loud fuck up right at the very worst time. If stealth had ever been a part of this mission, it sure as hell wasn't now.

Credit to the Doctor Who companion cardio program - 'that has never been proven, you have no evidence,' Zeke argued -, it took the Doctor, Sarah Jane, and Rose only a little under a minute to get from where they were to the lab, with none of them acting the slightest bit winded by the effort.

"Find anything interesting?" the Doctor asked.

"Mickey can hit a high C," I deadpanned before nodding down at the floor. "And biology will be covering rat anatomy soon."

"Screaming like that over a couple of rats? I expected better from you, Mickey Smith," the Doctor said, deftly stepping over the small pile and the fact that he was not surprised by Mickey screaming about the same thing. "Besides, I've seen bigger. Big enough to gnaw a man's leg off."

"Yeah, yeah, rats so big you had to take an elephant gun after them, I get the idea," Mickey spat. "They took me by surprise!"

"And your response was to scream like a little girl."

"It was dark and I was covered with rats! Anyone would scream at that!"

"I'm thinking nine, ten years old. Frilly skirt, pigtails…" the Time Lord continued.

Mickey clutched at the sides of his head, as if by merely speaking the word had somehow added pigtails to his hair.

"But why are there rats in a school?" Rose asked. "It doesn't make sense."

"For dissection, of course," Sarah Jane replied, a touch snippily. Ah, so Rose Tyler had employed her noted diplomatic tactics; namely, the complete absence of such. "It's a basic biology class… or perhaps you haven't gotten to that bit yet. How old are you?"

Rose didn't even flinch. "Excuse me, but they don't do dissection in school anymore. They haven't done it for years. What, are you from the Dark Ages?"

The Doctor and Mickey looked back over to Sarah Jane, apparently ready for the return salvo. I, on the other hand, was ready to do something else.

"They did dissection at my school," I interrupted, toeing a piebald rat as I did so. Probably would have been cuter if it wasn't dead. "Never heard anything about rats, though some people did worms and chicken legs, but we did cow's eyes, pig's lungs, the Dark Harvest, and cats at different points."

There are a few ways to redirect people's attention. The best way is to drop some kind of bomb. Explosives would work, sure, but saying something too goddamn weird to ignore worked even better. Things too goddamn weird to ignore that just happened to be complete and total truth were simply the best material for said bombs.

"What?" Sarah Jane asked faintly incredulously. "What was the last thing?"

"Cats? That was high school. Skipped that class. Can't abide hurting a cat, even if it's already dead," I said, turning to boggle my eyes at the team before I dropped my voice into as close to the Fourth Doctor's I could get without someone realizing that the noise coming out of my mouth wasn't one it should have been capable of making. "I heard someone found kittens."

Mickey looked ready to have kittens himself, though everyone else settled for different combinations of disgusted and disturbed. "No, I think she meant the thing before that."

"The pig's lungs? I was there for that. Elementary school - uh, primary, I guess you'd call it. Found food in ours. Not very appetizing."

"No, the Dark Har- what kind of school did you even go to?" Rose asked, incredulity returning with a side of revulsion.

The way I'd phrased it sort of did make it sound like some kind of serial killer training ground, didn't it?

"Anyway!" The Doctor interrupted. "While this conversation is very interesting, I would like to remind everyone that we did come here on a mission, which was…"

"Not die."

"No. Yes. More of a guideline, actually," the Time Lord said, shifting on his feet a bit. "Anyway, since Mickey's catlike tread couldn't have gone without notice, we really should leave… after I take a look around Finch's office."

Ducking out into the hallway, Rose and Sarah Jane quickly pulled head of the group as they resumed their passive-aggressive combat.

"I don't mean to be rude or anything, but who exactly are you?"

"Sarah Jane Smith. I used to travel with the Doctor."

I nudged Mickey. "Ten quid says the office is full of nasties."

"No bet," he said before casting a considering look at the bickering women. "Ten quid Rose tries to kill the bird before we leave school grounds."

Somewhere ahead of us, the blonde cut in with, "Oh. Well, he's never mentioned you."

I looked at Sarah Jane, who'd stopped giving Rose the dignity of eye contact. I was more on her side than anything, though how much of that I could grant to her being Sarah Jane or the other option being Rose fucking Tyler was up in the air.

"Oh, I must've done. Sarah Jane. Mention her all the time," the Doctor said weakly, his spiky hair seeming to wilt a little at the sudden spotlight on his silence.

"Hold on. Sorry. Never," Rose said around a vicious grin before she turned a corner.

"Does that count as a murder?"

"Feels like it should."

"What, not even once? He didn't mention me even once?" Sarah Jane asked, stealing a hurt glance at the Doctor as we rounded the corner on the way to the Headmaster's office.

Rose pulled no punches. "Not unless your name used to be Teagan or Adric."

Mickey sped up a bit, clapping a hand on the Doctor's shoulder. "Now, this may be the point where I would make a comment about 'the Missus and the Ex'," he said, ignoring the annoyed glare the Doctor shot at him. "But I'd like to think I'm above that sort of pettiness. So I'll just settle for welcoming you to every man's worst nightmare."

"Thank you ever so much for that," the Time Lord said as he pried the boy's fingers off his shoulder. "Now go bother with monkey business somewhere else."

Mickey shrugged before going to join Rose, Sarah Jane, and I at the door, where I'd taken over picking the lock.

"You're rather good at that," Sarah Jane noted.

"Patience, practice, and a good teacher," I said as the final tumbler shifted into place and the lock clicked open. That and the gentle touch of applied telekinesis. "And there we go."

We opened the door slowly, peering into the darkened interior of the room.

Nothing on the floor or at the desk. But on the ceiling…

"Mmm, remember what you said, Rose?" the Doctor asked coolly as he looked up at the massive cluster of bat people clinging to the ceiling. "About teachers sleeping in the school?"

One of the Krillitane stretched its wings in its sleep, disturbing the calm slumber of its fellow next to it. Though it was hard to call from this angle, each one had to be about six feet tall with a wingspan of… what? Fifteen or eighteen feet? Either way, they were certainly nothing a normal human could take in straight combat.

"I'd say you're about right," he finished as he ushered us out of the room and towards the exit.

I doubted anyone besides me noticed the sound of leather wings following us to Sarah Jane's car.

Author's Notes

(Updated - 11-28-2021)

The updates have been coming a little quick on this one, haven't they? Well, part of that is that I have a bit of backlog on the material (though anything after School Reunion is far from done) and a burning need for people's approval. Call it the result of not getting enough praise for my creative endeavors as a child. Or teenager. Or just in general.

(2021 edit - ditto but for the chapter fixes. Relatively speedy good).

Six is love. Six is life. Six gets a better deal (and more character development) in the audios. The Wrong Doctors is a good example of that development. Unfortunately, the primary Doctor for this story was chosen by the roll of the dice (which I'm still a little annoyed about because the thing was unfairly weighted towards New Who), but I might do some omakes featuring other Doctors and some of Delaine's other selves. Depends on how the muse hits me, but I do have a few ideas.

And on the subject of Handy, Arashi, the word is 'spoilers'.

Yes, Uberch10, it was meant to be the Fourth. Basically, if jelly babies, yoyos, and being a troll come up, it's probably Four. Hooray for the interwebs, that incredible series of tubes, home of information and misinformation.

Lightsbane: Yep, the Interstellar Market chapter was all me.

Booklover: Yeah, I'm not the biggest Rose fan but I am trying to not… overplay her worst traits, because that just strikes me as lazy writing. Unfortunately, I'd say that neither School Reunion or Age Of Steel/Rise Of The Cybermen were highlights for her character (or Season 2 in general, but again, I have a really low opinion of Rose Tyler at the best of times) but I did cut out her most obnoxious bits from Tooth And Claw, so maybe I'll end up being able to pull that off in other places (where canon and my own original storylines allow).

There's also the fact that she and the primary POV character really don't like each other – the mental image I get when I think about them interacting is just two Sims doing the red negative signs at every turn –, so that's another aspect that colors the narrative. If Rose was the primary view point character, Delaine would not come across as likable as she is, since most of her humor and thought process is kept internal or shared with characters other than Rose.

Plus there's the fact that they don't have that much common ground between them, considering that Rose is about 19 years old, reactive and impulsive without regard to the consequences of such behavior where Delaine is 16,000+ years old and very aware of the damage her actions can do, physically or otherwise. They might come from similarish backgrounds originally (before Rose started travelling with the Doctor and before Delaine started on the whole jumping thing), but they really display how different their approaches to life are in the way they act, which will get highlighted more as the story continues. Even comparing the Delaines from this story and Shadow Savers (which is roughly 16,000 years back in Dimensions In Time Delaine's backstory and right at the beginning of her Jumpchain) should show a lot of character development between here and there, though I don't doubt that even early Delaine would dislike Rose on a deeply personal level.

I think the primary reason I'm able to cut Rose any slack at all is that she's a teenager and I remember quite strongly how good my decision making process and brain-to-mouth filter were at eighteen and nineteen (spoiler: not very), not to mention I've seen the dumb shit that teenagers will do in the name of 'love' (I've seen things. Not done them myself, really, but. Stuff has been witnessed).

But just because I understand it doesn't mean I have to like it.

2021 Update: same mentality with Rose, but with the benefit of editing to chill out how she's handled a bit more in and out of universe.

On Wednesdays, we wear pink.

L-space (or Library-space) is a concept from the Discworld books, and is, to quote the l-space website, 'the ultimate portrayal of Pratchett's concept that the written word has powerful magical properties on the Discworld'. Basically, the idea is taking 'Knowledge equals Power' to a logical conclusion covered earlier in this chapter.

In short, if you get enough books in one concentrated space, space and time begin to warp.

Anyway, since the Discworld books are amazing (both in humor and content), I recommend them highly. GNU Terry Pratchett.

The Nac Mac Feegle (little blue men) may have also belonged to Terry Pratchett, but anyone asking them about who they belong to will be informed – possibly alongside receiving a good swift kick – that the Nac Mac Feegle have nae king, nae quin, nae laird, nae master, and correspondingly, nae owner and that they will not be deceived on this subject again on pain of many vicious headbuttings.

Regardless of ownership, the Wee Free Men do feature in a number of Mr. Pratchett's books.

Buffy jump (so far unwritten) highlights relevant to fic - semi-Scooby status (was not friends with half the gang, but did get along good with Giles + a few others), won a bet regarding everyone's Halloween costumes once, picked 7 for her own look to encapsulate smug clever feelings, and then immediately got a horrible prize in the form of 'very unhappy NVA!Seventh Doctor' downloaded directly into a brain capable of keeping a sizeable fragment of Time Lord mind intact instead of doing the usual 'Halloween costume transformation leaving hazy memory + skill bonus' thing.

This, as implied by a few previous information reveals, did not go well, but it also should explain why Delaine is skittish around 10 - because she got the most extreme version of Seven at his worst as her enemy inside her own head for a week before he even began to chill out + mostly remembers The Tenth Doctor for his highlight reel of 'what the hell hero' moments.

Keshui is another Alter, specifically the one with the Discworld librarian background. Xir (genderfluid) usual form is that of an Argonian from the Elder Scrolls. Still hammering out xir exact speech pattern and I'm sure that xe will be fighting me on exactly how to present that for a good while yet.

Kourtefour is an Irken alter for the Invader Zim jump, formerly known as Dei in his appearance in the deleted earlier version of the fic (name changed to avoid confusion + be more interesting). His 'gimmick' is 'the Fourth Doctor but more bastardly/suited for Invader Zim', which is in-universe at least partially Delaine's fault on the visual front. He recently got a design update that's visible on my tumblr.

Coccyx – tailbone. Also a minor reference to a conversation the Third Doctor, his companion Jo Grant, and the Master in the Time Monster (which started after Jo fell down and bruised her tailbone, the Doctor said 'I'm sorry about your coccyx', had to explain the word, and then the Master hijacked the TARDIS scanner to say 'I'm sorry about your coccyx too, Miss Grant').

With catlike tread, upon our prey we steal. In silence dread, our cautious way we feel. No sound at all, we never speak a word. A fly's footfall would be distinctly heard. – The Pirates Of Penzance, an opera by Gilbert and Sullivan, 1879. If you want to get a grasp of how loud that song is, look it up on Youtube.

Tarantara.

Anyway, feed me [the reviews], Seymour.