((Hopefully no-one minds me stealing another turn, but I had Ideas and they wouldn't let me go...))

A Time Lord and a Doctor walk into a cafe. Stop me if you've heard this before...

"It was always funny," Martha said, sipping at her latte. "There's me, an actual doctor, travelling the universe with someone who's just called 'The Doctor'. There was this one time..." She shook her head, quietly added another packet of sugar to her drink. "'Is there a doctor on board?' - you never expect to actually hear it, you know? Especially not ten thousand years in the future while riding a half-alive sky-submarine. So I'm halfway to my feet, but he's already out of his seat, bounding over like the Easter Bunny on a chocolate high."

(Over the road, in the high-end clothing store, a woman impatiently tapped the shoulder of the man standing in the aisle. He turned slowly, revealing that beneath his bowler hat he had no face at all - simply blank skin.)

(Her shriek turned heads across the store, but was lost in the roar of the traffic.)

Martha chuckled, staring down at her coffee. "And you know the worst thing? He was right. The patient was this... apparently the name isn't even pronouncable by humans, the Doctor did this weird whistle." She did her best to imitate it, a curious warbling. "I think some of xir anatomy was energy-based. I would have been completely lost, but of course he not only saved the patient, he also found the poisoner and saved the day."

(The faceless man disappeared as the woman backed away, but moments later his place was taken by a huge dog, its eyes burning red beneath vivid orange eyebrows. A young man in a black coat staggered away from it before it, too, vanished.)

"I'm sorry," Martha said, smiling ruefully at the Reader. "I know I'm rambling, but it's so rare I get to talk about any of this. With Torchwood gone, and the cuts at UNIT, it's basically just me and Mickey. You know -" She laughed again, and dropped a pair of air quotes. "'Defending the Earth'."

(Across the road a fire suddenly sprang up, ripping through the clothing racks, sending the customers fleeing. The sprinklers came on automatically, dousing the flames - which vanished as suddenly as they had came, leaving the drenched customers looking around in bewilderment.)

"I'd heard about that," the Reader said, taking a swig of her fruity coffee (not actually on the standard menu, but the server had found her inexplicably hard to say no to). She was doing her best to keep quiet - her knowledge of the Whoniverse stopped some five years before Martha's present, and she dreaded to think what kind of paradox she might set up if she said the wrong thing. "Isn't it a bit... dangerous?"

(As the clothing store staff ushered their erstwhile customers out of the door, one happened to glance into a full-length mirror close at hand. The air seemed to flicker, shadowy refractions slicing through the shop, and then at a dozen places across the shop floor gruesome, lurching zombies shambled out of thin air. They shimmered in the still-falling sprinkler water, took a step towards the terrified crowd - then faded out, shattering into nothingness.)

"The universe is dangerous," Martha said, leaning forward seriously. "The first time I met the Doctor, my entire hospital got snatched away to the moon - the actual moon! - because an alien tried to hide there. If we know that, and do nothing to keep it a little safer, how can we live with ourselves?"

(The front window of the empty clothing store flickered, the reflections of the pedestrians outside briefly taking on inhuman, non-euclidean shapes. One of the passers-by saw them, gasped and turned pale.)

"I can... understand that," the Reader said carefully - all this talk of protecting worlds was a conversational minefield. "But surely the Doctor...?"

(Up and down the long glass frontage, semi-transparent figures rippled in and out of existence, as if something was trying to figure out the physics of window-glass.)

Martha grimaced into her nearly-empty mug. "The Doctor is... we're not entirely sure. Mickey runs this website, has for years, keeping track of sightings." She smiled fondly, distantly. "It's hardest for him... I can tell everyone I'm a doctor, that's respectable, but Mickey doesn't have a job apart from this Work of ours." She looked slightly sheepish over the capitalised Work, but the Reader nodded encouragingly. "Well, the Doctor sometimes... that is, his appearance..." She trailed off, looking at the Reader's t-shirt. "How much do you know about him?" she asked warily.

(Rivulets of slime oozed from along the length of the window, coalescing into a huge green blob. Horrified walkers backed away from it, stumbling into the road, setting brakes screeching and horns honking - but not enough to be obviously unusual for Soho. When it vanished, it left glistening streaks on the pavement for a few moments before they, too, faded.)

The Reader drained the last of her coffee contemplatively. "You're talking about regeneration," she said at last.

(The air flickered again, angles forming where angles shouldn't be, and for a moment the whole street seemed to splinter like a dropped wineglass. Up and down the road, car wingmirrors flashed with unearthly colours. The moment seemed to hang in the air, gathering like a storm.)

"Right," Martha agreed. "So it's like a detective story - he shows up with a new face in the present, and then Mickey tracks down other appearances throughout history. Only, for the past few years, the Doctor has been... missing." She swirled her mug, took another sip. "Well. Maybe. There's reports of a woman up north who certainly sounds like the Doctor, but... I don't know." She nodded at the Reader. "That's why I wondered if you might be him... her. Do you think that's possible?"

(The clothing shop window exploded, sending ripples through the fabric of reality. Fractures of light cascaded along the street, and a hundred hundred monsters leapt out of nowhere and launched themselves at the populace.)

The Reader wished fervently she still had coffee to drink and cover her concern. It was always possible that Martha might reappear in the series, and telling her something that she might not know in that appearance was exactly the sort of paradox she was supposed to avoid. But how rude would it be to ignore a direct question like...?

The screaming interrupted her thought process. As she turned to the window, the Reader was irrationally grateful.

"Is that a Dalek? ... wearing clown makeup?"

The two women exchanged a look and then charged out of the coffee shop. Martha knelt down next to a woman who had fallen on the pavement, while the Reader whipped out her penlight and aimed it at the Dalek. "Not today, monster!" she yelled, flicking the sonic to its highest setting.

The Dalek shattered into a thousand shards of energy. Behind it, the wingmirror of a parked car exploded into dust - and in a chain reaction, every mirror on the entire street burst in turn.

The Reader turned to Martha, her eyes wide. "'Watch the mirrors'," she said. "The mirrors..."

"Gosh, that was awful," said the woman Martha had gone to. "Thanks ever so much for the rescue." She picked herself up off the pavement, brushing off her rather outdated jacket. "Sarah Jane Smith," she said, holding out her hand to the Reader, who shook it on a kind of stunned autopilot. "Love the sonic, by the way - very stylish. The man I'm travelling with has one just like it." She looked up and down the street, taking in the shocked Londoners and glass everywhere. "You haven't seen him, have you? Huge scarf, funny hat - he's called the Doctor. You can't really miss him."

((I'm also on board with a notes doc, and will get you an email response later today.

~Z))

((I'm very interested to know what'll happen next, but having an idea of what you guys started cooking up would help me take another whack at this one!))

I didn't think of the Key to Time because I've seen a regrettably limited amount of Classic Who--though, funnily enough, I do remember bits of the PPC version. It sounds familiar, anyway. But no, this is going to be a quest to return a New Who style silver door key--unfortunately, I didn't know Sarah Jane had a different type, or I might have written that in. On the other hand, I don't know how well I can write Sarah Jane, so while I'd love for her to somehow show up for a bit--even just a cameo--she's not going to be the main person involved. If anyone else can figure out a way to bring her in, though, absolutely feel free.

~Z

She just desperately wants things to go back to the way they used to be. She blames herself for everything that happened between them—after all, if she’d never gotten killed on the Rose Potter mission, if she’d just been more careful, she wouldn’t have ended up in such a situation.

She never blamed the Reader for any of it, though she suspects the Reader doesn’t lay enough of the blame on her. As far as Ave’s concerned, if she can just show the Reader enough how sorry she is that it all had to happen, then she’ll be forgiven.

Obviously that’s not how it works but she needs to cling to the reassurance that there’s some way she can make it okay again.