'Jo' laughed. "Nope, try again."
The Doctor huffed, but she squinted closely at the other woman, seeing she was dressed more extravagantly than Jo's usual smart, but simple 70s fashion, and she snorted with disgust. "Well, well, well, Iris Wildthyme," she turned back and gulped down a shot of rum. She was disgusted with herself for letting herself think her friend from Earth had followed her.
"Got it in one, darlin'!" Iris cheered.
The Doctor groaned. "I thought you regenerated mostly into bodies that resembled actresses and famous musicians," she commented.
"Not always," Iris grinned.
The Doctor closed her eyes and took a deep sip of her drink. She wasn't particularly interested in hearing why Iris was here, or what her reasons for being here were, but she decided to try to make polite conversation.
"Alright, Iris," she slowly turned around and stared down the other Time Lady (she had never been sure of this woman considering she had never met her on Gallifrey, to say nothing of her paradoxical nature). "Why are you here?"
"To see you too, luvvy," Iris smiled before she became more serious while she drank from her glass. "I know you were exiled to Earth and you discovered the Timeless Child."
"How do you know about that?"
"Doctor," Iris pouted, putting her hand to her chest. "I'm not a Time Lord, but I am from a race that developed along similar lines to yours; whereas the Time Lords in some parallels travel just in their own realities, I travel the multiverse. Your timeline was rewritten from a future point, and the information was simply in the Matrix the whole time."
"Rewritten?" The Doctor whispered.
Deep down she didn't care one little bit if she came from Gallifrey or not; she'd never had a good relationship with the Time Lords, and she'd never felt at home on Gallifrey, and her contempt for some of their rules and laws went without saying. But if there was one thing she did not like, it was the thought someone, somehow, had interfered with her personal history. What made it worse was there were very few beings who had the power to do it so neatly and could bypass Time Lord Temporal Control security so easily; the Time Lords should have been capable of detecting the changes and putting a stop to them. The fact they couldn't was scary.
Iris nodded gravely. "By an old friend of yours, the Toymaker."
"The Toymaker?" The Doctor gasped in horror, her mind going back to Rallon, Millennia, the TARDIS falling into a realm beyond the underspace and the over universe. "But why, how?"
Iris sighed and took a drink from her glass. "In another reality, a future version of the Master played a game and bargained with the Toymaker, to play a massive game by rewriting your history while keeping the reality you're familiar with and overlaying it with the new reality."
The Doctor face palmed her head. "That parasitic loser, why can't he just leave me alone?" The Master had become one of her worst headaches ever since her exile began; she had only met him a few times since they'd left Gallifrey, and suddenly he was coming after her nearly every week.
Nestenes.
Axons.
Daemons.
That mind parasite.
And now this.
"Surely he knows better than to play games with beings like the Toymaker?" The Doctor said, but then she rolled her eyes. "Oh, of course; he's so obsessed with me that he stupidly doesn't think about what the Toymaker could do to him. What did the Toymaker do?"
"Not a lot on the face of it, beyond hacking into the Matrix and putting in a new history while he rewrote time so then Tecteun existed, but whatever he's done to time goes beyond what the Time Lords know."
The Doctor rolled her eyes, "That fits," she muttered. "The Toymaker exists outside the normal laws of time and space. He can twist reality like a pretzel, no wonder he can do this. Hold it, you said a future reality. You mean another universe?"
Iris nodded gravely, "The Toymaker likely didn't see the point in not playing his games with other realities, with other Doctors."
"Just so he could see if new games could be played," the Doctor said. "I can't see any hope in clearing up the timeline damage if something like the Toymaker could do it."
"You can't," Iris replied. "You're just going to have to get used to it. But the Toymaker made adjustments to your timeline where there was another you before you leapt into a Loom."
"And built a story around it," the Doctor nodded. "So two different timelines have been merged together, threaded together."
"Yes and no, Doctor. The Toymaker lied about the Timeless Child, but the Time Lords lied about regeneration. It's not a biological process at all, but a technological process."
The Doctor gaped at her. "What? But…regeneration energy, the thirteen lives…"
"Transmat-based technology which plucks a temporal clone from a different timeline; the mind of the Time Lord is then transferred into the clone. Regeneration energy is just the visible signs of the process. On Gallifrey, the Matrix scans the Time Lord's body and mind and carries out the process of dematerialising the body while materialising the new clone. In a TARDIS, the same process is carried out. The process is only possible about twelve times because the Time Lords have limited that as it's programmed by the Matrix."
"Who knows about this?"
"Well, all the High Council. It makes sense, Doctor; do you really think the Time Lords could shut off someone's biology so easily? Do you really think for one instant that there's any such thing as biological regeneration? How else do you think Time Lords have such great control over their new appearances? They simply listen to the training."
"What about the healing properties?"
"Special effects and nano genes, Doctor. You know full well that Time Lords have healing nanobots in their bodies to supplement the regeneration process," Iris said gravely. "The Time Lords lied about the process to give themselves more godlike powers."
The Doctor shook her head while she plucked more denials out of her memory. "But what about post-regenerative trauma? Regenerative dissonance?"
Iris sighed. This was becoming increasingly irritating. "Sometimes the process can be unstable and the body needs to settle down; sometimes during time travel or teleportation, there's a few effects, and regenerative dissonance is just one of them."
The Doctor was just reeling from the news of regeneration and all she knew of it was just a pack of lies. But she could understand the logic since she had never been able to get her head around the ghastly process that was regeneration, especially since there was nothing definitive or concrete about it.
"Come with me, Doctor, and we can travel the multiverse together, what have you got to lose? The Time Lords have locked the regeneration system of your TARDIS so you can't regenerate, and they have no power over you anymore since you used a different technology to leave Earth, and we can come here at any time," Iris said.
The Doctor had commitments in this universe; UNIT, the travels in the universe, but the thought of the multiverse and exploring it was a wonderful idea, especially since she was having to look over her shoulder all the time for the Time Lords. The thought of having the ability to regenerate again would give her a safety net, and there was an outside chance she could find another way to regenerate.
If there was one thing she had learnt since her last regeneration, it was that she had to fight for survival, and in the fight for survival, there wasn't a rule.
Sure. While she was prepared to simply go through her regeneration cycle, the Doctor had no intentions of not living her lives the way she wanted.
"Okay, sure," the Doctor said, while Iris was annoying, the Time Lords here in this universe had no jurisdiction elsewhere.
