Chapter 2: The Crossroads of Fantasy

[Pete's World / 2010]

Commander Rose Tyler of Torchwood knew something had gone wrong when she stumbled out of a temporary tear in the walls between worlds, and found herself in a large warehouse in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the very same universe she'd started in.

Pulling the circular, palm-sized dimension cannon out of her jacket pocket, she stared in confusion down at the tiny, narrow screen on the side where a set of bright green coordinates was flashing. Everything indicated that she had technically completed a successful jump, but she hadn't managed to end up in a different universe, or a different planet. She knew there had been nothing related to Santa Fe, New Mexico, the United States, or anywhere else on Earth in the destination coordinates the cannon had locked onto back at Torchwood – and the coordinates were supposed to be based around the TARDIS' energy signature. Yet here she was in a dark warehouse in the western United States, still in Pete's World.

'Bugger.'

"Sorry, lost your signal there for a minute. Did it work?" Mickey Smith's voice filtered through the comm device in her ear with a faint crackle. (The small blue earpiece had been designed with her own input by engineers at Torchwood, specifically made to look different from the kind once distributed by Cybus Industries. Rose, Pete Tyler, and Mickey had made sure of that.)

"No, I'm still in the same universe. Bloody cannon just jettisoned me all the way over to New Mexico," Rose grumbled, placing the cannon carefully in the inner pocket of her purple leather jacket and looking around the warehouse. There was nothing she could see that looked remotely connected to the Doctor. Well, there was something there, but nothing obviously alien or Doctor-related that might have been the cause for her jump getting pulled so far off course.

The something that was there was unexpected, to say the least.

"Oh my god," she whispered.

"What is it?" Mickey was quick to respond, always prepared for something to go wrong.

"Nothing dangerous, just strange. I'm in some kind of warehouse, and the only thing stored in here is literally a two-story house. Just a regular old house," Rose said, listening for any sign of movement from the house or the warehouse around her.

No one just stored an entire house like this for no reason.

"A house? Could you repeat that?"

"There's a house in here. Looks sort of old. Pink roof, nice front porch. It even has, wow, it still has flower pots hanging from the roof! The flowers look alive and everything..." Rose trailed off, about to go up the front step to the porch to take a closer look at said flowers. It was so dark in the warehouse. She couldn't understand how anything living could be thriving there.

The moment her foot touched the front step, a violent shiver went up her spine and she was suddenly overcome with a sense of utter wrongness about the house. She gasped at the cold suddenly seeping through her clothes and into her skin.

"Commander Tyler, we had to reboot our side of the cannon's location tracking systems, but we have your location locked in now. Since you didn't travel very far, less energy was used up in the jump. We can use the cannon's recall to get you right now, if you would prefer." Alia Hanson's voice informed her over the comm. Alia was part of Torchwood's experimental tech department, and often helped run the Torchwood end of Rose's dimension cannon experiments with Mickey and the rest of their team.

Rose shook her head, slowly backing away from the dark house. The frigid sensation didn't leave her body though, and she was forced to wrapped her arms around herself for warmth. "Give me ten minutes. I want to see if I can find out why the jump went off course," she said. There had to be something about this house, something with a similar enough energy signature to the TARDIS to completely derail her dimension jump.

"Affirmative. Delaying dimension cannon recall by ten minutes," came Alia's reply.

Mickey was not so calm. "I don't like this. We've never recorded anything like that happening before."

"Mickey, it's New Mexico, and I'm still in the same universe," Rose argued. "Besides, aren't there supposed to be tons of 'alien sightings' over here every year? It looks like a plain old house, but there could be something more to it." Even as she spoke, her right hand hovered over the Torchwood-issued gun holstered at her waist as she walked around the side of the house.

Thankfully, Alia was on her side. "Tyler is right, we should check this out. The last few jumps, when we managed to actually lock onto the TARDIS's energy signature, we landed you within a kilometer or two of it. Sometimes not even that. This could be important."

Rose was all too aware of that. After all, she'd been the one hopping all over the multiverse like a madwoman, and the most recent series of jumps had been infuriating. She'd come so close to finding the Doctor and the TARDIS so many times, only to lose track of him again.

"The only issue we might eventually run into is that Area 51 is in that region. Hopefully this warehouse isn't holding something of theirs, otherwise there will be a lot of unfortunate paperwork to fill out," Alia added.

"It'll be fine, I'll see you in ten minutes." Impatient now, Rose made sure her tone brokered no room for argument. When there was finally silence from her team at Torchwood, she finished circling the house.

There was no movement from inside. No lights on other than the warehouse floodlights far above her, no other sounds made except her own breathing and her quiet footsteps. It was too silent. Too cold. Not right.

Not right at all.

'Beware!'

The blonde tensed as an unfamiliar voice whispered into her mind, the power and intent behind the words making her feel like she had just walked through a cold spot in a haunted house. That had been clear and advanced telepathy, but from who? Ghosts didn't exist, the Doctor had told her so. But could they in Pete's universe? She'd never considered the possibility before, never had any reason to.

Rose ran around the front of the house, her eyes flitting around the dim warehouse. Someone else was in the darkness with her. Just as she was beginning to fear that she had stumbled across another species of invisible, telepathic aliens (she had already encountered two such species on previous dimension jumps,) she spotted a silhouette in the shadows along the wall opposite the front of the house.

"Who are you?" she asked, her hand still hovering over the grip of her holstered gun. There was a crackling noise from the other end of her comm, and Rose belatedly realized that her link back to Torchwood had just gone dead. Whoever was in the warehouse with her didn't want her to be heard. That was never a good sign.

A small, humanoid figure stepped forward into a circle of yellow light cast by one of the ancient warehouse floodlights. It was a boy, or at least, he looked like a human boy. He appeared to be around nine or ten years old, with dark grey eyes and light blonde hair. He was wearing jeans and a green t-shirt. His feet were bare.

"Can you understand me?" Rose asked, wondering if the boy was from Earth or not. There was something very off about him. He looked dazed and feverish, and his gaze was unnaturally intense as it bore into her.

He observed her without blinking, making no physical response to Rose's question at first. Then, she heard him in her head again, a quiet voice whispering, 'Beware, Bad Wolf. They will find you if you stay here much longer. Then they will take you.'

Heat flared through Rose's veins at the two simple words: Bad Wolf. A name for her, the part of her that she often brought to the surface of her mind these days but rarely talked about to anyone. How had this boy known about Bad Wolf?

The chilling sensation she felt from the house behind her lessened slightly as she focused her Bad Wolf abilities on responding telepathically, 'Where did you come from? Who's coming for me?'

Pressed for time with only a few minutes left until the dimension cannon recalled her to Torchwood, Rose didn't bother with telepathic formalities she knew more advanced telepaths would have used. Instead she projected her voice straight into the boy's mind, just as he had done to her. It was a bit crude, and definitely would have been rude to do to any other telepathic being in the universe. In her defense, the boy had started it, as childish as that sounded. (She also knew she should have tried forming better mental shields as soon as she reconnected to Bad Wolf in Pete's World, but she didn't have anyone learn that from. She hoped the Doctor might teach her if she found him again.)

The boy's eyes widened, and he took a step back in fear. Rose took no pleasure in knowing that she intimidated him, but she soon rationalized it. If the boy knew her as Bad Wolf, then he should have known that she could easily use his own telepathic techniques against him.

'Well?' Rose pressed, 'What's with the mysterious warning? Who are you?'

'I'm…lost,' the boy replied, projecting a deep sense of loss and hopelessness into Rose's mind.

'Me too. I'm trying to get home.' Rose sympathized with him.

The boy shook his head. 'No, you don't get it. I want to go home, but home means that everyone will die or leave me alone, and I don't want that! But you know a way to cheat death, don't you? You've seen it, you've remade yourself because of it, and that is why the Charter will hunt you down. Here, and in every world, because you are like me. You are part of the Anomaly. It was nice to meet you, Bad Wolf. My name is Lex.'

With his message and warning conveyed, the boy's form flickered out of existence, leaving Rose confused and feeling even more lost than before. "I don't understand!" She shouted this time, releasing hold over Bad Wolf's telepathic powers in her haste to search frantically for any sign of the boy.

The surface-level telepathic connection he had initiated with her suddenly cut off, leaving her feeling drained, cold, and haunted. He was gone. The chill in the air rushed over her again like an invisible wind, sending goosebumps all up her arms.

She should leave. This place was a close to haunted as she had ever seen, and she didn't fancy finding out who more of the ghosts haunting it were.

At that moment, Rose's comm reconnected to Torchwood with a crackle. "Com…Ty…come…in! Do you copy?" Alia's frantic voice came through along with a burst of static.

Rose scrambled to answer. "I copy, I copy! I'm okay!"

"We're trying to recall you, but we've lost the connection to the cannon! And what the hell happened to just ten minutes?" Mickey demanded. There was a metallic crashing sound in the background, and Rose winced at the crackle it made over the comm.

It took her moment to comprehend the true magnitude of the problem Mickey had just reported. "What do you mean you lost connection to the cannon? Just reset it like last time. I'll wait. We fixed that ages ago, shouldn't be a problem. Not being able to recall me at exactly ten minutes is hardly all my fault!" She snapped.

"Okay, you're right, you're right! But—"

Pete Tyler's voice came over the comm then, interrupting Mickey. "You went silent for 18 minutes, Rose. We've still got a GPS lock on your location, but the cannon recall systems have completely shut down. It could take at least a few hours to figure out what went wrong. If this had to happen, at least it happened while you were still in this universe."

Rose clenched her hands into fists, reminding herself that it was inappropriate for a commander to start screaming in frustration at the Director of Torchwood, who also happened to be her quasi-alternate universe-not-quite-father. "I know that, Director. Getting stranded is always a possibility, but that's a risk I'm willing to take to get back to the Doctor. You know as well as I do that we need his help to figure out why the stars are going out. We can't do it alone."

Pete sighed. "I know. As long as you're safe for now, just give us some time to try and reconnect your cannon to the controls here."

"I'm...not so sure about that," Rose muttered. Her hand flew to her jacket, feeling around for the dimension cannon she had put in the inside pocket.

Her breath hitched when her hand slid down the side of her jacket uninterrupted. She hastily unzipped her jacket, checking the pocket itself for the device. It was empty. "The cannon's gone," she said in utter disbelief.

"What do you mean it's gone?" Pete's tone was cautious.

"I mean the cannon literally disappeared from my pocket. I know where I put it, but it's just, it's gone!" She knew exactly which pocket she'd put the only functioning dimension cannon in this universe, but she checked her other pockets anyway, and even jogged around the house to make sure she hadn't accidentally dropped the device without realizing it. She knew she hadn't.

The cannon was really, truly gone. Lex might have had something to do with its disappearance, but Rose couldn't figure out how the cannon had left her inside jacket pocket without her knowing.

"I don't like this. Whatever pulled you there cut off our communication with you for 18 minutes. I know you well enough to believe that if you say the cannon's gone missing without your knowledge, then there could be something with you in that warehouse that isn't friendly. Find an exit and get out of there, now. That's an order. We will send one of our allies in the States to pick you up in a zeppelin," Pete said.

"I'm know there's something in here with me. And I can't see any exits. I noticed that earlier." Rose looked around at the warehouse walls as she spoke, just to make sure she had been correct.

It was still true. The warehouse had no doors, windows, or even a loading dock to be seen. She was stuck inside it without the cannon. When she got out of the warehouse, she and her team could try to rebuild it from scratch, but it would be difficult. Some of the components weren't even from Earth. She didn't know how they would possibly obtain those items again.

She studied the house again, standing tall and imposing in front of her.

A shiver went up her spine. Was the warehouse getting colder, or was that just her own fear?

'Time to run, Bad Wolf.' Lex's quiet voice slipped through her mind like a phantom echo.

'What have you done with my cannon?' Rose demanded furiously. It only angered her more when she received no response from the boy.

Chatter over the comm from Torchwood pulled at her attention, but she ignored it. Instead, she called up more of Bad Wolf's power to the forefront of her awareness, enough to heighten her senses and expand them into the house. There were voices whispering unintelligibly from somewhere within.

"I think I know who took the cannon. I have to go after it. Don't think I have much of a choice, really." She spoke over the other Torchwood agents and Pete.

"This is not the time, Rose. The building you're in should have five or six exits. It used to be a bowling alley before it the interior was torn out and the whole place was abandoned, according to local news sources. All of the exits show up on our satellite images of the exterior. Are you sure that you can't see any of them? Maybe they're just covered up, or the signs were removed when the whole inside was stripped," Pete suggested.

"There are no exits visible anywhere. No doors, no windows, nothing. I'm sorry, Pete, but I have to go after the cannon. I have to go." Rose was certain of this. Regardless of satellite imagery or news sources, the exits were not accessible from the inside. She didn't want to leave this place yet anyway, not without her cannon.

Approaching the house's front door again, she felt golden fire rush through her limbs, making her hazel eyes and pale skin take on a faint golden glow. She smiled slightly. The rush of golden, protective warmth from the Wolf never got old. She had been learning to control it more and more lately, and the results of her hard work were gratifying (like not frying her brain to ashes as she almost had the first time she'd become the Wolf.)

Bad Wolf seemed to agree with her decision to stay. Rose would not be left entirely unprotected or alone when she entered the house. Bad Wolf was always there for her, for she was her, and together they would find the cannon and accomplish their long awaited goal of finding their Doctor.

"Don't disobey orders—"

"Tyler, what are you talking ab—"

"Rose, no!"

The voices from Torchwood fought to be heard over the comm, until one by one they faded away. The fear that had been building in Rose since she had realized the cannon had disappeared was now overruled by her determination to retrieve the missing device, and find out why Lex had appeared to warn her about the Charter, whoever they were.

'It's a mystery worthy of the Doctor,' Rose thought. Or rather, it was a mystery worthy off Commander Rose Marion Tyler, the Bad Wolf and Defender of the Earth. Whatever was going on here, she had to trust that she could face it. She didn't know what Lex had to do with any of it, but she was not going to sit around and wait for Torchwood to rescue her. She had never played the part of a damsel in distress, and she certainly wasn't going to start now.

With a deep breath, the young woman tore her comm out of her ear and clasped it tightly in her right hand. She couldn't risk putting it in her pocket and having it disappear as well.

She looked the house's front door up and down. It didn't look particularly dangerous or unusual, but Rose knew better than to assume anything yet. Biting her bottom lip nervously, she cautiously reached forward and turned the doorknob. The door swung open with a creak, revealing a dark hallway.

Peeking inside, Rose could see a small painting studio set up in the small bump-out to her left, and a living room to her right. There were stairs leading up to the second floor a short distance down the hall. The rest of the house remained shrouded in darkness.

Rose stepped across the threshold. Within an instant, the entire structure began to shudder and groan. She had to grab onto the door frame with both hands to keep herself from falling.

The dim yellow flood lights hanging from the warehouse ceiling blew out all at once, showering glass and sparks everywhere.

Something began tugging with increasing strength at Rose's hair and clothes. She fought it, clinging to the doorway until whatever it was, whoever it was, yanked her forward hard enough to throw her onto the floor.

She shrieked as she collided with the hard surface, raising her head just as the front door slammed shut behind her. As Rose got to her hands and knees, the voices whispering in the darkness around her grew louder and louder, along with the distant notes of an unearthly melody. A melody that almost sounded familiar...

Her scream was swallowed by the house as it vanished in a whirlwind of blinding light, taking her along with it.

A few seconds after the house disappeared, a new figure appeared in the warehouse, stepping silently out of a nearly invisible ripple in the air. They wore a uniform comprised of a black racer jacket zipped up over a white, long-sleeved shirt, black trousers, and black boots. They cradled Rose's dimension cannon in one of their hands.

"This is Agent 35, reporting in. A foreign entity has entered the Selig-Pastore house through a temporal echo in a parallel universe. I repeat, there is a foreign human entity currently inside the house that should be apprehended as soon as possible. I managed to confiscate her dimensional travel device before she entered the house and could further influence the rapidly destabilizing multiverse inside. This should help us capture her, as she will likely be stuck inside without it. At this time, the house still resists all attempts to place it under a complete spatio-temporal lock. An echo of its physical form was in my current parallel universe for exactly 27 minutes. Permission to continue tracking said foreign entity?" The figure spoke into a black, multi-universal communication device strapped to their wrist.

A tinny, barely audible reply came back, which the agent listened to before answering, "No, I have nothing to report on the last Time Lord. He does not appear to exist in this universe, unlike his current human companion. I only know the foreign entity that just entered the Selig-Pastore house is connected to the both of them somehow."

Another distant reply.

"No," Agent 35 shuddered, "I can do this myself, Officer. I will not fail like my predecessors, I swear! Please don't throw me in the robot pits. The situation will be under control shortly."

With that, the agent disappeared silently into the shadows again. He had no time to waste, with multiple troublesome assignments to track down: a meddlesome Time Lord and his red-haired human companion, a blonde human woman with powers beyond normal human capability, the temporal echoes of a very strange house, and one missing family, starting with a boy named Lex Pastore.