"Taking on this job won't be easy for me," Berenyi said as she flicked her blonde hair out of her face - she was still getting used to her new incarnation following a regeneration she'd had recently after encountering some belligerent Silurians during a job where a naturalist had hired her to design a change to the timeline where the Silurians would send ships into space to escape the moon coming into Earth's orbit.
She missed her old incarnation. She had grown used to the red hair, and some of her old clients had problems accepting her new appearance despite knowing she was a face changer.
"Why not?" Her new client asked.
Berenyi leaned back. "Twentieth and Twenty-first century Earth's timeline has been fixed for a long time," she explained, "A few of my people have time-travelled to those centuries, and their presence has made sure history is fixed in place. When that happens, the potential timelines are affected. There's nothing I can do about that. Some of the events are crystallised; to Design this change, I'll have to go back into the past and wait for the right moment."
"Then do that," her client insisted.
Berenyi didn't have any problems with this sort of job. "What kind of changes do you want me to rewrite into the timeline, anyway?"
She already knew what he wanted, she just wanted a little clarification.
Her client paused so that he could choose his words carefully.
He was a human, with thinning grey hair, but the Time Lady's temporal senses told her this man was much older than he physically appeared; at some point during this part of the 25th century, the humans had finally thrown out their old prejudices towards therapies that allowed them to undergo stem cell treatments. Berenyi, like all of the Time Lords, could tell if humans or other races were immortal or mortal or at fixed points in time.
While this man was over 120 years old, he only appeared 50. She had seen he had grown old once before and then he appeared young again and then he had turned old.
Humans were a species she had varying opinions of, depending on which life encountered them. In her last life, she had found humans interesting in much the same way a butterfly collector sought after rare breeds. In her new life, they were interesting but only dimly. Personally, she didn't care about them or their history. She didn't care if her changes upset their history unless they damaged the Web of Time.
Her new client was one of those more interesting ones because the Design she would create would drastically affect history. Berenyi was a Time Lady, a Designer - a time-traveller who edited the timelines. The Time Lords had purposefully outlawed Designing Time because many were aliens who made stupid mistakes and caused massive damage, but due to her Time Lady nature, she was better equipped and trained to make the changes work with minimal fall-out.
But that didn't mean she could be careless. She knew if she was stupid and made some reckless mistake, it could create a wound in history.
Berenyi had been called here so she could re-Design the space age of Earth, in the 20th century. To be honest she had always wondered if she would ever get a job like this; she had visited many worlds in her lives, but Earth, while mundane, was fascinating even if she found humans to be nothing but squabbling primitives.
Her client had long since believed human history was flawed when it came to the space age, seeing it as being extremely slow, and she could see his point of view. He wanted humanity to not only land on the moon, he wanted them to go much further out, like the moon would be one of several space expeditions at the same time, and she had to admit she was intrigued by the possibilities and she could see ways of doing it, but she was worried about what could happen.
At the same time, her previous lives had always found Earth's history mundane and she often thought it was a miracle they'd survived, let alone reached the edge of their galaxy by the end of their 22nd century.
"I've already told you what I want, but I have always felt many more countries should have been interested in space travel; China, France, Spain, Germany despite the lack of resources at the time, Britain - if you can change history there so then the British see the benefits of studying the war missiles the Germans fired on them during the war, they might fire some back at Germany, and eventually become pioneers in the field of rocket science," her client said.
"There were pioneers in Britain," Berenyi pointed out. "There was Professor Bernard Quatermass; he drove the British Rocket Group on and he made many discoveries in rocket science that other scientists and engineers built on."
"I know, but I've heard your job allows you to Design people's lives, can you do that here?"
It was easier to create changes to history if other people made it more possible than to force the changes at specific points. In that sense, if you hypnotised someone to live a specific type of life then the Design would set in.
"At the same time, I want you to create secret histories of Earth," her client added before he placed a well-thumbed book on the desk.
Berenyi leaned forward and saw it was a copy of HG Well's The First Men in the Moon. She'd read the book before, and she found it more plausible and more advanced than the crap Jules Verne wrote, even if she was partial to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
"You want me to Design people's lives so they'd build rocket ships in Victorian and Edwardian times?" Berenyi asked.
"Can you?"
Berenyi sighed as she looked at the book and flicked through it lightly. Why did her clients view her as a miracle worker? "I'll think about it, but I'm not promising anything; later 20th-century and 21st-century science is more advanced, so I might stick there…but if I do create a secret history, I might Design something a bit realistic."
"How do you mean?" Her client asked.
Berenyi sighed again at the humans' lack of common sense. "I don't know, yet. But I will."
-0-
Individual Time Lords who'd gone renegade from Gallifrey or had just left their home world to explore the universe customised their TARDISes to suit their own personalities. Berenyi knew the Doctor seemed to prefer a default desktop, while the Master preferred to keep his own TARDIS as a darker copy of his old rival.
The Rani had modelled her TARDIS's desktop theme to resemble a cross between the most advanced choice and colour with a customised console that was as distant from the model TARDIS, and a laboratory with a house of horror with specimens in tanks and jars littering the console room.
The Monk kept his own TARDIS close to the default desktop, but he displayed all of the things he'd collected on his travels.
The Corsair had modelled his/her own TARDIS to mimic a pirate ship on the inside as well as on the outside. Astrolabus had varying designs, but he kept everything he'd plundered through history on display.
The Magician preferred a silver floor for his TARDIS with the console room crowded with chairs of varying sizes.
Berenyi's Type 55 TARDIS varied from incarnation to incarnation. It was never fixed. When she had left her home world of Gallifrey, the Time Lady had known she would be wandering the cosmos for centuries, and she had no desire for her TARDIS to be like…well, a TARDIS. She wanted a home despite her business as a Designer.
The First Berenyi had chosen a living room/cinema theatre for her desktop, the Second Berenyi had chosen a vast library, and now, the Third Berenyi had chosen a comfortable living room with movie posters from dozens of worlds, and there were music players playing pop from dozens of times and worlds.
"It's going to be one of those cases, old girl," she said as she patted the console before she looked at the pieces of paper she'd taken from her pockets. She insisted on her clients giving her paper copies of her jobs since data pads and holo crystals could be erased easily. "But it's an interesting one."
Author's Note - Berenyi was an OC Time Lady who appeared in a Brief Encounter short story in Doctor Who Magazine. She's a freelance Designer who edits out the timelines. She left Gallifrey like many others and became a mercenary out of spite.