DAY 6,574

Deal or No Deal

Mickey

A run-down multi-storey carpark in 2011 wasn't exactly the place where they expected to find the Master – or, Mistress. Mickey had been half expecting the Shadow to send them to Somalia where she'd become a brutal modern warlord, or to the Dark Ages where she'd become a brutal medieval warlord, or to the distant future where she was, again, a warlord. Anything related to being a warlord he could seriously picture Missy involved in. However, they were in a damp and derelict parking garage in the middle of the night while it rained heavily outside. He and Martha hid behind one of the few cars that were actually in there and saw her, dressed up like a Victorian dominatrix with a fancy hat and a cane, arguing very loudly with a gang of tall and threatening teenagers about the contents of a paper package.

Missy took out a switchblade and cut open the paper packet after placing it on the car boot of an old sedan the youths must have brought with them. They were definitely the type of boys Mickey would cross the street to avoid, and he'd grown up in a working-class London council estate. He could have sworn he saw one of them with a gun stuck into the side of his jeans.

"What's this, then?" Missy asked, glancing between the boys and the packet once she cut it open. Mickey squinted and thought it was full of white powder. The boys said nothing. "This better be what I asked for this time, Robbie. We don't want a repeat of last week." She dipped one of her fingers in the powder and proceeded to rub it into her gums for a few seconds, frowning and thinking. Then she spat onto the floor. "Are you kidding me? Did you honestly think I'd believe that this was good shit? This is sub-par. You expect me to peddle this to those blasted PTA 'mummies' and give you a cut of the profit? Do you know how much ket it takes to scroll through a Mumsnet forum without committing suicide? A lot. You might think you can get away with screwing me over – and trust me, I can certainly see the appeal of screwing me – but I'm not going to screw my customers over. I'm an honourable business woman."

"That's not right – this is good product, mate," Robbie argued with her, while the other two boys bowed their heads like they were afraid.

"Excuse me?"

"I said this is good product."

"Good product…" she tutted, shook her head, then laughed, "This is such low-quality shit it wouldn't be enough to anaesthetise a dog for a boil lancing, and that's its intended use. And I'll tell you what you get for answering back to me, you little turd," she reached inside her coat and pulled out what Mickey clearly recognised as a tomahawk, "You might be standing there thinking of all the money you're going to make exploiting what you think is a defenceless but very attractive and incredibly young Scottish lady-"

"Young?" Mickey muttered to Martha.

"-but you're going to find it very difficult to count said money after I chop off your fingers with this axe I stole from a CIA operative, who thought he could assassinate me in a coup to seize control of a poor South American country I was democratically elected leader of." Missy grabbed the wrist of the closest boy, Robbie, who had been the only one to answer back, though he was now as terrified as his peers.

"Ah – what the fuck are you-" She held his hand against the boot of the car next to the packet full of powdered ketamine and was just about to literally chop off one or more of his fingers when Martha left their cover behind the car.

"Erm – you can put that down right now," Martha shouted at her. Missy paused, tomahawk raised in the air. Mickey followed after Martha and regretted that he hadn't brought out one of their guns, since they kept a fair few in the house on the advice of Gwen and Rhys.

"Martha!" Missy exclaimed, grinning, not letting go of Robbie's arm, "Fancy seeing you here! Quick question, is Jenny in the nearby vicinity and does she have her special teeth-pulling pliers with her?"

"Jenny has special teeth-pulling pliers?" Mickey questioned.

"Of course she does. It's her second-favourite torture method, after individually breaking all the major joints in a person's body. She certainly knows how to carry out an interrogation. Stop squirming, boy," she snapped at Robbie. "Keep on like that and it'll be more than your useless bloody fingers I chop off."

"We need to talk to you," Martha said.

"Can it wait? I'm in the middle of a business transaction."

"Let him go," Martha ordered her. Missy paused, debating the risks that came hand-in-hand with getting on the wrong side of Martha Jones and her pyrokinesis. Finally, she rolled her eyes.

"Fine, whatever. You've taken all the buzz out of a good dismembering by showing up here like this. Go on, get out of here." Robbie tried to grab the packet of drugs once she released him, "Erm, I don't think so."

"You haven't given us any money for it," he said.

"What a mouth on this one, eh? Chatty for a wannabe drug dealer. Listen, my gift to you is the gift of your continued ability to wank yourselves off into oblivion, which I know is all teenage boys do. If this happens again you're going to be castrated by my own fair hands, and don't think I won't do it. I wouldn't even blink. Now get out of here and don't come back until you have some real, pure shit for me to sell, alright?" They finally took their leave, hurrying away as fast as they could from the psychotic alien and her tiny axe. "Well, then. What can I do you for? Do you want to buy some ketamine?"

"No, we don't want any ketamine – why are you buying ketamine from teenagers? What are you going to do with it?" Martha questioned her. Missy shrugged.

"Probably just hang around outside the school gates and see who fancies a nosh," she winked at Martha.

"School gates!? You're selling ketamine to kids!?"

"No! Don't be absurd! What kind of monster do you take me for, Martha Jones?" She shook her head indignantly and put her hands on her hips. "I'm selling it to their parents. I need the money to fund an investment to mod a car, so I can enter a drag race – it's a long story, involves a rogue Raxacoricofallapatorian and some nerve agent. Complicated. I might be in to win a jetpack, though."

"Well, I think we'll just ignore all of that you just said…" Mickey muttered.

"Suit yourselves. If you don't want any ketamine, what do you want?"

"This, for a start." Then Martha, unafraid of the tomahawk, took the parcel full of ket from the car boot and set it on fire in her hands. It erupted into a foul-smelling pile of ash and smoke she let drop to the floor at their feet. "And then you can tell me what you've done with Mattie."

"Firstly, there was no need to burn it, I would have given you a friends and family discount if you just asked. Secondly, I don't have a clue where little Matthew is."

"Matilda."

"Whatever," she scoffed, "I almost paid good money for that ketamine. If I don't win my race now I fully expect to be compensated for my lost jetpack. Unless you want to sit and the back of the car and give me a turbo boost with your fire-hands?"

"That's not actually how cars work," said Mickey, "This isn't a video game."

"Where is my daughter?" Martha again resorted to threatening bodily harm with her pyrokinesis, though Missy was much less perturbed than the Shadow had been.

"I don't know. Where did you see her last?"

"My living room."

"Best check there first, then? Although, in my experience, things are usually in the last place you look."

"Don't take the piss," Mickey said.

"How is it anything to do with me if you can't keep track of your own toddler? She's probably just wandered off to play on some train tracks or whatever it is kids do. You know what they're like, the little… creatures."

"She hasn't wandered off, she was taken," Mickey explained, "Right in front of everyone, she vanished."

"Oh, I see. And you think it was something to do with me. Have you tried the Shadow? That thing's always taking what doesn't belong to it. Just a few months ago he stole my entire stash of Szechuan sauce, can you believe it? Now what am I supposed to dip my chicken nuggets in? Ketchup? Dream on."

"It wasn't the Shadow."

"I can't believe you think it was me. I'm not the one on ket; never touch your own product, that's the golden rule of drug dealing. Why would I take her? I don't have the time to deal with Shark Boy and Lava Girl coming after me. Even though Shark Boy & Lava Girl is a cinematic masterpiece."

"Everyone knows Shark Boy & Lava Girl is rubbish," Mickey argued.

"Excuse me? It's the highlight of Taylor Lautner's acting career."

"You clearly haven't seen the 2028 all-male remake of The Devil Wears Prada, then," Mickey said.

"Not helping," Martha snapped.

"Hold on, what do you mean 'in front of everyone'? Who else was there?"

"Just, you know, everybody."

"Everybody?"

"Yes."

"The Doctor?"

"Two of them."

"Why? What's the occasion?"

"Her eighteenth birthday."

"She was snatched right in the middle of her eighteenth birthday party!? What kind of fiend would do something like that?" Mickey and Martha both raised their eyebrows at her. She rolled her eyes. "Apart from me. It wasn't me. I didn't even know it was her birthday – but I can't believe I wasn't invited! Here," she again reached into her coat, and this time took out a Desert Eagle.

"Bloody hell!" Martha exclaimed.

"Oh, relax, it's just a loaded weapon, it's not going to hurt anybody. Consider it a birthday present. For the girl."

"A gun!?"

"Maybe if she had a gun she wouldn't have been kidnapped," Missy pointed out. "Don't you want it?" Mickey snatched it out of her hands then cocked it and aimed it at her. "Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth. I haven't kidnapped the brat. I've never even met her."

"You have met her, because ten years ago you climbed in through her bedroom window one night and told her you were the Tooth Fairy. Then you tried to give her a briefcase full of counterfeit Soviet currency and we moved a month later," Martha said.

"Oh, yeah," Missy reminisced fondly, "Do you still have that briefcase, by any chance?"

"No. Thirteen wanted it."

"Typical. She's always a slut for the Soviets."

"I will shoot you," said Mickey.

"Do I look bothered?"

"Well… if the Shadow didn't take her, and you didn't take her, then who the hell did take her? Where is my daughter!?" he demanded, brandishing the gun which would certainly kill the Master instantly if it went off. He'd better be more careful with it in case he ended up doing a Pulp Fiction.

"I'm bored of this conversation now, so I'll tell you where she probably is, as long as you don't overact and shoot me in the face," she eyed the gun, though he did seem unamused by the situation by this point. Probably wanted to go and find herself some more ketamine. "The reason I'm hiding out here in Earthling slums is because I'm on the run."

"As usual," said Martha.

"Yes, well, at the moment I'm on the run from a pretty nasty group of Daleks."

"DALEKS!?" Mickey shouted, and then the gun went off. Luckily, he had been flailing his arm around at the time and the bullet just ricocheted off the roof of the carpark and then shattered the window of a nearby car, but the noise was deafening. Missy clamped her hands over her ears.

"Bloody hell!" Martha exclaimed.

"Brilliant, just when I thought I'd shaken off the last bout of tinnitus. I did tell you not to overreact," Missy complained. "I heard that some fanatical little gang of Degradations are trying to hunt themselves a Time Lord for whatever twisted reason, so I've been on the move."

"Hang on. You knew that a group of crazy Daleks are going after Time Lords, and you didn't warn anybody!?"

"Now hold on a second, I've been trying to phone the Doctor about it for weeks to warn her, but her useless, jealous wife never calls me back. I've left a dozen messages. You can't pin this on me. There have been people scheming about how to get their hands on Matilda ever since she was born, but I always thought it wasn't worth it. Not to get my head almost shot off in the middle of a carpark drug deal. I want to die in a blaze of glory, or while paragliding, or at least get eaten by a shark. Something cool. Not in here. The weather's not even nice.

"Anyway, Daleks are the only things both stupid and clever enough to do something like this. If you ask me, what happened is they've got their little plungers on some time-stopping technology. Wheeled in, bagged her up, wheeled right back out again. See, if my other half had any critical thinking skills, maybe they would have worked it out. But they're too distracted, by women, the pesky creatures."

"Wouldn't Rose have picked up on that?"

"Apparently not," said Missy, "Daleks know all kinds of tricks, they can be quite ingenious though I hate to admit it. They've managed to keep tracking me down. God knows what they actually want, I've never stopped to chat to them long enough to find out."

"You said Degradations, what's a Degradation?"

"Mutant Daleks. They're like regular Daleks, only angrier. Very pent up. Sexually repressed. Spend their time building war machines. Heavily armed. An unfortunate product of the Time War. Nuclear lunatics, the lot of them, much more dangerous than the normal bloodthirsty ones. I'm keeping tabs on their ship to make sure it doesn't move."

"You're-? Well, where is it?" Mickey asked urgently.

"Sort of, behind the moon. You know, with all those Nazis."

"Nazis?"

"The ones who live on the moon. The moon Nazis. Hopefully they haven't come to an alliance – though both Nazis and Daleks are terrible for reneging on their deals. Very untrustworthy, that Hitler fellow. And I should know, once lost a bet to me and never paid me my winnings. Listen, I don't know for sure if those Daleks have stolen the child, but if I were a gambling man – and I certainly am – I'd go all in to say that they are behind it, and I'll do everything in my power to help. Aside from actually going with you because they really are incredibly insane."

"So, what will you do?"

"Your vortex manipulator coordinates? You may not like it, but Matilda is a member of my species, too. A Time Lord. I won't stand idly by and watch someone destroy my people. Except for, obviously, the time the Doctor destroyed our people and I did sort of… well. I survived, that's all that matters. But, eh, you can keep that gun there if you're really heading off to knock some sense into an army of deformed salt shakers."

"Great. A cult of trigger-happy mutant Daleks have kidnapped my five-year-old daughter and taken her to the moon," grumbled Martha, shaking her head, "That's so bloody typical."