AN: I know, I said I'd update on Wednesdays, I'm totally awful. But basically I spend all of yesterday out in Leeds and then went to see All Time Low, my absolute faves, in the evening and didn't get back until midnight.

Yet Another Human Centipede

Miss Quill

"This is pathetic. How old are you? Sixteen?"

"Eleven, miss."

"Eleven years old and you don't even know how to solve the hydrogen atom by path integral methods? Why do I even waste my time with you germs?" Quill said to the child, then she picked up the doodled-on piece of paper she'd been ridiculing and tore it in half, then scrunched the two halves into balls and dropped them onto the floor. "And now you're littering."

"But you did that!" the girl protested.

"Did what? I'm sorry, are you accusing me of vandalising school property? I don't think anybody else in this room would back you up on that, would they?" Quill glanced around at the faces of two-dozen terrified Year 7s. "Detention, every day next week, and I want a thousand words on why Feynman couldn't solve the hydrogen atom. And don't even think about answering me back in that insolent way you people have a habit of doing. It'll only make the outcome of this little encounter far more unpleasant for both of us." And the girl, who had a bit of an attitude problem, gave up and sat down with a grimace on her face. It was a good thing she did have an attitude problem, too. Some of these runts would cry when Quill told them off. You would have been eaten alive in the nest if you were a Quill, she wanted to tell them.

Quill skulked away through the rows of desks to get back to her own at the front of the room, where she sat back down and lifted her mug to her lips. It was empty, and it took all her willpower not to break the ceramic handle apart with frustration. Tea was sometimes the only thing that helped her get through the day, and what a day it had been. A perfectly ordinary one. How dreadful.

The day was just set to get even more like every typical day at Coal Hill Academy, too, when for the second time in the last two hours she heard screams wailing from somewhere deeper into the building than her Physics classroom. Everyone looked up and towards the door, Quill having to remove her eyes from her tablet. What could possibly be so important that it had interrupted her looking at muted videos of kittens on the internet? Despicable. She wouldn't stand for it. So she did what any responsible teacher would do, and slammed down her mug, storming out of the room and leaving her class completely unsupervised.

Most people were in lessons, and they were so accustomed to the goings-on at Coal Hill that when people outside started screaming, the children were under strict instructions not to leave their classrooms. So it was just a few stray kids – skivers and older ones with free periods or little ones on toilet breaks – running towards Quill. Wasn't the Doctor supposed to be dealing things, under his guise of being an exterminator? Why should she still be cleaning up peoples' messes?

"Typical," she muttered to herself, "Leave everything to Quill to sort out, because Quill will sort out everything, won't she? The national debt, just ask Quill. Conflict in the Middle East, Quill will know what to do. How about solving world hunger, Quill?" she continued to talk to herself like this as she walked, going the reverse direction to the fleeing kids, weapon-less and almost defenceless.

"Were you just talking to yourself?" Her speaking-aloud of her internal monologue was interrupted by April MacLean arriving from some other part of the school, meeting her at a cross-section of locker-lined corridors. Quill glared at her, not answering. "Did you hear the screams?"

"No, I just abandoned my class and went for a walk in the opposite direction to all these terrified students because I got bored," she said sarcastically.

"You do do that sometimes, though," April pointed out.

Quill was just about to think of something terribly witty and sharp to say to April in response, but a cacophonous and monstrous shriek ripped the air to pieces and made April clutch at her ears to try and block it out.

"What the hell was that!?" April exclaimed. Quill didn't know, so she didn't answer again, just started to move towards it.

"Where's Charlie?" she asked, "Somebody find that royal pain and drag him here so that he can get threatened."

"We were revising in our free period, but he and Matteusz left to go to the toilet nearly half an hour ago and haven't come back yet," April said, perplexed. Quill stopped walking and looked at her, long and hard. "What?" Quill rolled her eyes.

"Your naivety would be cute if it wasn't so embarrassing."

"I'm not naïve!" she argued.

"Shh," Quill hissed when she heard a noise around the corner. April did shush, and Quill approached very carefully, and what she saw was ghastly even for her seasoned, warrior's eyes.

She didn't know what kind of creature they were looking at, but it looked like a complicated amalgam of a whole bunch of other things which, going by what she had heard so far of the Doctor's involvement with the school, was probably accurate. There was its torso, that of a man, or more a boy, which was growing emaciated and dirty and had a sparse, thin coating of dark grey hairs. This body changed colour, grew darker and shinier. Halfway down he switched from being a vertebrate to an invertebrate, an exoskeleton growing on the lower half of his body with dozens of longish, insectoid legs sticking out of it, this whole part elongating and replacing his legs fully. But it wasn't just a half-boy, half-centipede, it also had enormous, leathery wings ripping through its malnourished skin and unfurling. It was sitting somewhat proudly in a mess of dead bodies – recently killed kids.

"Oh, this isn't good," Quill said. Another time when her bad habit of talking to herself got them into trouble. It looked around at them and they saw the snout and muzzle of a vampire bet set into a once-human face; it had been chewing on a torn-off piece of flesh from one of the recently deceased at its feet. All of its many, many feet. Again they heard that shriek, coming from the mouth of this horrid creature.

"Nicholas?" April asked, shocked, her eyes glued to this horror, and it froze, like it knew her. When April recognised it, Quill strained her memory and managed to place it, too. Here he was, Nicholas Vanderbilt, indirect murderer of Josh Hart. April only had it subdued for a moment, though, because then it roared again and spat blood and chunks of meat at them.

"Run, run!" Quill said, having to drag April's arm in order to tear her eyes away from the mutated fiend Nicholas had become, "I don't think we have much chance of saving Nicky anymore!"

But it gave hot pursuit, of course it did. With its many legs combined with its wings it was a fast-moving terror to be reckoned with, leaping between the walls and the floor and the ceiling, going around in a corkscrew as Quill and April ran in the opposite direction. It kept shrieking at them as it went, a noise that was only partially that of a bat, the rest of it sounding like a human in a great deal of pain. Maybe he was in pain. Or maybe he hardly knew what pain was anymore.

Glancing behind her, rounding a corner, Quill flat-out collided with somebody else.

"What's going on here?" asked Charlie, for that was whom she had very nearly knocked to the ground. He and Matteusz were – and no, she wasn't being hyperbolic – walking out of the gents' toilet.

"The pair of you are absolutely deplorable," Quill shook her head. Could have sworn she saw Matteusz trying to discreetly zip up his fly, but discretion wasn't the boy's best quality. Still, she tried her damnedest to ignore what she saw, and what she knew had been going on between them.

Nicholas threw himself around the corner and crashed to the floor and wailed at them again, and she heard Matteusz swear in Polish out of a gut reaction to the sight of the thing.

"It's threatening you, I can fight it," Quill declared to Charlie.

"No, I don't think so," Charlie said, and then he began to run off following Matteusz and April, and Quill had to go with them because of that blasted Arn in her skull. Had to stay near Charlie to protect him.

They burst out of the maze of identical corridors into the brightly-lit entrance hall of Coal Hill, next to the memorial board of the dead and near the doors outside. Maybe if they went outside it would get taken away by the hurricane? Quill glanced towards the windows to see if that was a possibility. Maybe it was, but she became immediately preoccupied when she saw something she wouldn't think was a possibility in a million years: Ram's car hurtling towards the doors, people inside clearly shouting at each other, coming straight for them.

"Uh-oh," she said, "Get out of the way!"

She didn't know who was driving, but would bet all the Earth-money she had (which wasn't much, but still) on the reckless driver being a Time Lord rather than a human. The car shattered the glass doors and some of the windows, letting the full brunt of the hurricane into the school and blowing glass dust and shards around them.

The car stopped for a brief second when it had broken half the school, and Ram and Tanya within took this opportunity to get out of the way, rolling out of the backdoors.

"My dad's gonna kill me!" Ram protested when he saw the state the car was in now.

"I think he's going to kill us all first," April said, pointing out Nicholas Vanderbilt's terrible form to them all, as the thing continued its rampage through the school to try and get its savage hands on anything it could eat. When Quill saw the Doctor get out of the driver's side door, she knew she had been right about the reckless driving. "What did you find at his house?"

"The two of you stink," Quill told both Tanya and Ram.

"Oi! We killed your favourite pet!" the Doctor shouted at Vanderbilt, who was taking advantage of the fresh, open spaces of this room to stretch his vampire-bat wings and fly around. He turned to his daughter, "I'll tell you something, breaking into a school by driving a car through the doors and having to fight a huge bat-monster brings back memories."

"Memories!?" Jenny exclaimed.

"Cut the nostalgia talk and find a way to kill it!" Quill shouted at the both of them.

"I don't know how to kill it! This time I don't have a large and convenient stash of explosive kitchen oil and a robot-dog-martyr to distract it and set off a bomb!" the Doctor argued. It was Quill, though, that Vanderbilt seemed to take a keener dislike to. Which she expected. Most people took a keen dislike to her.

"Get back, get back!" she waved her arms at the five kids surrounding her, shepherding them further up the stairs to the first floor while she remained, balled her hand into a fist, and connected her knuckles with Nicholas's animal face. She'd never sucker-punched a creature like that before, as it flew haphazardly towards her, but there was a first time for everything. And she was far stronger than she looked. After all, she had been the commander of the entire Quill army.

"I guess I'll use my last resort, then?" Jenny spoke to her father as Vanderbilt went spiralling towards the ground. The Doctor didn't seem to know what his daughter's last resort was, not until she pulled a plasma blaster from a few thousand years in the future out of her coat pocket, and slid a green-glowing cartridge into it.

"What are you doing! You can't shoot him!" the Doctor protested

"Shoot him already!" Quill yelled back. And Jenny did. She let it charge up to its maximum power and then shot a blast of green energy directly at Nicholas Vanderbilt's head, and hit him. Clearly this thing had been modified, because rather than just blow up his head like Quill was used to seeing plasma guns do, within a few seconds Vanderbilt had frozen and disintegrated into a pile of ash on the floor. Ash that was very quickly blown away by the power of the hurricane.

"You didn't need to do that," the Doctor said.

"Oh my god, are you an idiot? Yes, I did, because you said the SAI was beyond repair when we scrounged it out of the cellar of that house and then you set it to detonate in that mansion and take any trace of Nicholas's experiments with it," she told him.

"It's true, you did say that," Ram added.

"See?" Jenny indicated him, "You think I like shooting sixteen-year-old boys in the head now? Even Oswin can't reverse those sorts of changes, you know if she did she'd have found a way to fix Clara's vampirism by now. You killed a lizard with a roller coaster last week!" That shut him up alright. "You keep boasting about it. Ram and Tanya have already heard that story twice."

"That's true as well," Tanya said, both of them taking Jenny's side. It seemed Jenny's side was the correct one, and Quill had to agree. Then again, Quill didn't feel remorse about killing people, really. She was beyond caring.

"At least the hurricane is taking care of the mess," she shrugged.

"Of course you have no empathy – maybe if his teachers had noticed something was wrong-" the Doctor began.

"Oh yes, I'm very sorry, next time I shall be a might more careful to look for the signs that one of my worthless students is building monsters in his big house and killing his friends. What are those signs, again?" she asked him sarcastically.

"…What about my dad's car? You drove it through a door," Ram pointed out.

"Oh, right – do you have mobile banking on your phone?" the Doctor asked.

"Yeah." The Doctor approached them on the stairs then, holding out his hand to take Ram's phone. Somewhat reluctantly, Ram handed the phone over, and the Doctor pulled out his screwdriver and sonicked it for a few seconds. Then he passed it back to Ram and Ram nearly dropped it.

"It's boiling hot!"

"Yes, that usually happens when I add funds to peoples' bank accounts through their phones," he said, "It'll cool off in a moment. Five-thousand pounds will be enough to get the scratches buffed out, won't it?"

"You gave me how much?"

"My father doesn't have any conception of money," Jenny said, watching the ashes of Nicholas Vanderbilt blow away and mix with the glass dust from the broken window. Rain was now pouring in through the front. It was at this point that Dorothea Ames decided to make her appearance, walking into the scene from the door nobody ever used at the side of the stairs. It wasn't her office, but Quill didn't care enough to ask what she'd been doing in there.

"What's happened out here?" she asked.

"Nothing. Rats. Huge ones. Broke the windows," the Doctor said quickly.

"One of the children decided to mutate themselves into a bat-centipede… thing," Quill answered. Dorothea stared at her for just a second.

"Is it dealt with?"

"Mmm," Quill assured her, fake-smiling resentfully.

"And the rest of the 'rat problem'?"

"Oh yes."

"Charming. You'll be leaving then won't you, Doctor?" Dorothea turned to him.

"Sorry, what?" he asked, looking between her and Quill, "You're not…? Why did you tell her?" he asked Quill.

"She's the headmistress, it's her job to know," Quill shrugged. Quill thought Dorothea probably knew everything that had gone on that day anyway.

"I'll go and find somebody willing to repair those windows in this storm," she said pleasantly, "The Governors thank you for your help in the matter, Doctor. Jenny. I'll give you the professional courtesy of not charging you for the damages."

"I never told you my name," Jenny said.

"I should think not, a woman as famously elusive as yourself probably doesn't give her name to anyone, Major Young," Dorothea smiled. Jenny's jaw dropped, and then Dorothea was walking away.

"She's always like that," Quill said, "I suppose you get used to it."

"Another one who favours the use of guns," Matteusz grumbled. Jenny glanced at him. It was almost as though he was disappointed in her.

"I didn't have a choice. Ought I have flogged him to death?"

"Oh, no. The mess would have been awful," Quill said.

"Who is that woman?" the Doctor asked, Dorothea now gone prowling elsewhere.

"The new headmistress," Charlie said, "We haven't managed to find out what's the matter with her yet. Seems like a problem for a different Doctor. One who didn't crash a car through the lobby."

"Mmm. Perhaps. I suppose it is his responsibility… we showed up here by accident, after all… intriguing, though. Let me know if you ever find out about her and her… Governors."

"You're a major?" Quill asked Jenny.

"I'm a lot of things," she answered cryptically, "Right now I'm at a loss as to understanding how this school works. How do you actually get qualifications and pass exams? Are you ever even in lessons?"

"Of course, I never miss a lesson," Charlie said.

"Not even to have a quickie in the toilet?"

Matteusz went red. Charlie snapped, "Be quiet, Quill."

"What's a quickie?" the Doctor asked.

"Even I know that," muttered Tanya.

"Ask your wife. I'm sure she'll show you," Jenny said, leaving him puzzled. No doubt he was going to ask his wife. He was a buffoon.

"I think this is our cue to leave," the Doctor said finally, "Property damage is usually a sign I've outstayed my welcome."

"Sure," Jenny said offhandedly, thinking, "I just have to have a word with Matteusz about something. I'll be right with you…"