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The Doctor stumbled forward, her coat flaring behind her as she was prodded along a sterile corridor by Archie’s Rani. Anita’s Rani strode ahead, humming a discordant tune, fingers dancing across a glowing console embedded in the wall.
The trio emerged into a vast laboratory, lined with flickering containment tubes, humming machinery, and dozens of arcane scientific instruments whose purposes could only be guessed. The air buzzed with displaced energy, vibrating through the floor.
The Doctor’s eyes flicked to the wide viewport.
Her breath caught.
The stars glimmered over a rust-red terrain scattered with metallic wreckage and eerie silence. It looked scorched. Desolate. Familiar.
“…No,” the Doctor muttered.
Anita’s Rani turned, smiling darkly. “Ah. Recognition.”
“This is…” the Doctor whispered, stepping closer to the glass. “Kastarion 3.”
“Correct,” said Archie’s Rani, now casually removing her gloves. “A peaceful planet with no sentient life. Once.”
“You killed it,” the Doctor snapped. “There was no war here until humans brought one. Until Villengard thought someone else must be fighting back, and started shooting shadows.”
“And then you stopped it,” Anita’s Rani added with a nod. “So noble. So tragic.”
The Doctor turned, eyes dark. “Why bring me here? Kastarion 3 is dead. Abandoned.”
Archie’s Rani gestured around at the tech-laden chamber. “Not anymore. We’ve reclaimed it. Repurposed it.”
“For what?” the Doctor growled.
The two Rani’s exchanged glances—smirking in perfect sync.
“To build a paradox,” said Anita’s Rani. “A paradox strong enough to pull a Time Lord across space and time. One specific Time Lord.”
Archie’s Rani stepped closer. “We needed the planet’s residual Artron saturation. This place is soaked in it thanks to the war and your meddling. It gave us the fuel.”
The Doctor’s jaw tightened. “Why go to all that trouble?”
Silence fell for a moment.
Then, both Rani’s spoke in unison—voice cold and precise:
“Because we want your secret.”
The Doctor blinked. “…What?”
Anita’s Rani stepped forward, eyes sharp as scalpels. “Thirteen regenerations. That’s all we get. That’s what the Matrix said. That’s what the ancient laws codified.”
Archie’s Rani sneered. “And yet here you are, on your fifty-second.”
“You bend the rules,” Anita’s Rani said, circling her now, “You break the rules. And no one knows how.”
The Doctor held her ground. “I don’t know.”
“Liar,” Archie’s Rani spat.
“I don’t!” the Doctor snapped. “The Division—something they did—whatever was hidden from me—there are fragments but no answers.”
Anita’s Rani’s eyes narrowed. “Then we’ll find the answers the old-fashioned way.”
The Doctor’s face shifted from defiance to concern. “Don’t do this. Whatever you're planning—”
“Don’t worry,” Anita’s Rani cooed, activating a series of switches. “We won’t kill you.”
“Yet,” Archie’s Rani added, adjusting a cruel-looking crown-like device brimming with blue light. “We just want what’s in your mind.”
“Every unspoken thought,” Anita’s Rani said.
“Every buried secret,” Archie’s Rani echoed.
The Doctor backed away. “I can promise you both, you won’t find what you’re looking for.”
The crown hummed louder. A forcefield snapped into place behind her.
“Maybe not,” Archie’s Rani said coldly. “But it will be fun trying.”
The machine activated. Tendrils of light snaked from the ceiling toward the Doctor.
She gritted her teeth. “You’ll never understand what makes me who I am.”
Anita’s Rani leaned in close, her voice a whisper. “We don’t want to understand. We want to steal it.”
The light engulfed the room.
And the screams began.
~
Inside Archangel’s TARDIS, the console room buzzed gently with ambient hums and flickering orbs. Amanda sat on the steps leading up to the inner corridor, watching the time rotor rise and fall with soft pulses of light. Archangel—arms folded, brow furrowed—stood at the monitor, typing in navigational coordinates with a distracted kind of determination.
The mood had shifted. Lighter moments had thinned. The weight of what had just happened—seeing the Doctor taken—hung over them both.
Amanda broke the silence first.
“You didn’t ask me why I was down there,” she said, voice low, barely above the rhythmic thrum of the ship.
Archangel paused. “…No. I didn’t.”
Amanda stood and crossed over, resting her hand on the edge of the glowing console. “I wasn’t meant to be. I’m usually behind a desk. Or out giving the safety briefings. But lately I find myself in the heart of the plant. Deepest corners. Coldest rooms.”
“Why?” Arch asked gently.
Amanda exhaled, staring at the glowing column of light at the center of the console. “Because there’s nothing left to fight.”
Archangel slowly turned to face her.
“I have stage four breast cancer,” Amanda said flatly, without embellishment or pause. “I had it years ago. I fought it. Surgery, chemo, the whole tour. It went away.”
She paused. “Then it came back.”
Archangel said nothing. Her posture softened slightly.
Amanda continued. “I don’t tell people at work. It’s easier that way. They still call me Amanda Coles—don’t even realise I changed my name after I got married. Amanda Williams, now. Not that it matters. The only name that really means anything to me is Mum.”
She looked up. Her eyes were wet but unwavering.
“I have a daughter. She’s nineteen. Her name is…” She stopped herself, swallowing the name like it was something too sharp to say. “When my son was born—he’s eleven now—I was sick again. My husband and I… we couldn’t do both. Not properly. Our daughter was struggling, lashing out. She needed more than we could give.”
Archangel listened intently, her normally bright energy tempered into stillness.
“We put her into care,” Amanda said softly. “Not forever. Just for the help. But she never came home.”
Silence. The ship seemed to listen with them.
“My twin sister adopted her. Took her in officially. Different name, different life. They never told her about her brother. Never told her… about me. She thinks I abandoned her. That I disappeared.”
“Have you tried—?” Archangel began.
Amanda nodded. “Too late now. She’s not my daughter anymore. She’s my sister’s. Legally. Emotionally. Everything.”
The TARDIS let out a soft ding, indicating arrival.
Amanda blinked. Cleared her throat. “Anyway. That’s why I stay at the rig. It’s easier to fix broken cables than broken family.”
Archangel stepped forward and gently squeezed Amanda’s shoulder. No words—just presence.
Outside, the engines powered down. Archangel moved to the door, glancing back once with a smirk more melancholic than usual.
“Hope you brought sunscreen.”
She opened the doors.
A blinding light filled the console room, followed by a waft of salt air. The beach stretched out beneath a washed-gold sky, waves lapping lazily at the glistening sand. Crystal blue water shimmered beyond dunes made of pale pink rock.
And there—under the wide arc of a ridiculously oversized umbrella—was Missy. Reclined on a floating hover-lounger, dark sunglasses perched on the bridge of her nose, one leg delicately crossed over the other. She held a cocktail glass in one hand, the umbrella in it even more absurd than the one above her.
She sighed as Archangel and Amanda stepped down onto the sand.
“Oh, honestly,” Missy drawled, without turning her head. “What is it this time? Another collapsing universe? A demon disguised as a historian? Have you come to borrow my molecular destabiliser again?”
She finally turned her head toward them.
“Or is this one of those ‘the Doctor’s been kidnapped’ situations?” Missy pushed her glasses up with a single finger. “Because if it is, I swear—if I don’t get to shoot something with lasers this time, I’m flipping a black hole upside down just for the thrill.”
Archangel gave Amanda a sidelong glance and whispered, “Told you she’d be in a mood.”
Amanda just blinked. “She’s… Missy?”
Missy stood slowly, brushing sand from her chic black trousers. “The Missy, darling. Short for Mistress, because I couldn’t stand the patriarchy anymore. And if you’ve come to waste my beach day, you better have a good story.”
Archangel smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “It’s a long one.”
Missy stretched with a bored groan and waved her hand in a circle. “Well then, start talking.”
~
The walls of the containment room on Kastarion 3 pulsed with an eerie violet glow. Machinery whirred lowly, like a mechanical breath. The scent of scorched ozone hung in the air, faint but constant—an aftertaste of every agony that had passed through the wires and circuits in this hellish chamber.
The Doctor stood, or more accurately hung, within the translucent force field at the room’s center. Shackles of energy—not metal but wiry strands of blue light—ran up her arms, latching like vines into her very biology. Her face was gaunt, eyes ringed with shadow. Her breaths were shallow, uneven.
Across the room stood the Ranis.
Anita’s Rani, more poised, more clinical, adjusted the dials on a pulsating console. Her eyes glinted with curiosity, detached but fascinated. She never blinked during sessions like these.
Archie’s Rani, meanwhile, leaned lazily against a reinforced pillar, her smile feline and cruel. She was the predator that enjoyed the chase, but enjoyed the begging more.
“You always say you don’t know,” Archie’s Rani said, almost sing-song, circling the force field like a buzzard. “But that’s the problem with liars, Doctor. They forget they’re lying.”
“I’m not lying,” the Doctor rasped, barely audible.
“You’re impossible,” Anita’s Rani murmured. “Every Time Lord was meant to reach the end. Thirteen regenerations. That was the rule. And yet…”
She turned the dial.
A surge of energy lashed through the Doctor’s shackles. Her back arched with the pain, her scream muffled by sheer exhaustion.
“It’s been two years, you know,” Archie’s Rani said gently, mockingly, crouching just at the force field’s edge. “Two entire revolutions of Kastarion around its star. You could’ve just said something.”
“I have… nothing to give you,” the Doctor croaked, her voice hoarse but defiant. “No secrets. No cheat code. No magic switch.”
“Then why do you keep coming back?” Anita’s Rani snapped, losing patience for the first time. “You should not exist! Not like this. Not after the War. Not after Gallifrey.”
But then… something changed.
The Doctor’s arms—still restrained—began to glow. A deep, burnt yellow hue poured from her fingertips, spreading across her veins like wildfire. Her head jerked upward, eyes wide, pupils dilating.
The Ranis stumbled back, startled.
Anita’s Rani gasped. “No. Not now—she’s—!”
The room exploded in golden light.
Flames of regeneration energy erupted from the Doctor’s body, pouring in fierce streams of heat and brilliance. The blue shackles writhed and sparked violently as if confused by this sudden surge of Time Lord biology breaking through its constraints.
Then came the release—a soft, final gasp.
The glow faded.
What remained was… new.
A smaller frame, collapsed on the floor now. Pale skin. Soft blonde hair stuck to her forehead, damp with sweat. Her new form was delicate, almost fragile, but her presence was unmistakable.
The Doctor had regenerated again.
The Ranis looked at each other—and smiled.
“Oh, you wonderful idiot,” Anita’s Rani said, her voice thick with greed. “You’ve just given us exactly what we needed.”
Within seconds, devices embedded in the walls activated. Green coils of light erupted from the ceiling and floor, draining the residual regeneration energy still lingering around the Doctor’s trembling body. She twitched, trying to move, to scream, but no sound escaped. Her strength—already raw and confused from the transformation—was being leeched, syphoned into containment crystals.
Her body spasmed once.
Then went still.
“Like draining a star before it can collapse,” Archie’s Rani said softly, holding a fresh vial of swirling gold essence in her hand. “The gift that keeps giving.”
~
Later.
She stirred.
Her limbs ached. Her skin felt like parchment stretched too thin. Every breath was an effort, her lungs stuttering like broken valves.
She opened her eyes.
“I regenerated,” she whispered.
A voice, cold and amused, answered from the shadows.
“Yes. And we watched. And now we’ll begin again.”
Pain returned. Fresh, unrelenting, eager.
And yet still, through it all, the Doctor said nothing that could help them.
Because whatever her secret was, she didn’t know it either.
~
The quiet hum of the ceiling fan was the only sound in Ditra’s Diner, save for the occasional rustle of paper as Clara Oswald lazily flipped another page of Sunday Science Weekly. The title on the front cover promised “Ten Fascinating Facts About Neutron Stars,” but it hadn’t delivered beyond three—and one was probably made up.
She sipped cold tea and gave the empty booths a once-over. Sunday mornings weren’t exactly bustling in downtown Wisconsin, especially not in a retro, time-parked diner like this. Still, she liked the calm. The lull between stories.
The ding of the front door barely stirred her.
She smiled anyway, out of habit more than anything—just a flicker of familiarity at the edge of her mouth.
Then something landed on the counter in front of her with a deliberate clink.
Clara blinked, lowered the magazine—and froze.
A sonic screwdriver. Not one she recognised exactly, but unmistakable in its design. A sleek core of brushed silver, a delicate green glow pulsing faintly from its tip.
Her fingers hovered over it for a moment, hesitant. Then she looked up.
And her heart sank in a curious cocktail of fear and affection.
There she stood. Dressed like a villain stepping out of a steampunk opera, twirling an umbrella over one shoulder and smiling like a cat that had not only caught the canary, but taught it how to sing soprano.
Missy.
“Well,” the Time Lady purred, “you haven’t changed a bit, have you, pudding?”
Behind her stood two other women—one dark-haired and visibly out of breath from the awkward Midwestern heat (Amanda Coles) and one with silver hair swept stylishly to one side, her dark eyes watching Clara with more reverence than curiosity (Archangel).
Clara’s gaze dropped again to the sonic. “That doesn’t belong to you.”
“Course not,” Missy said. “It belongs to your old flame. Well. Sort of. The Doctor dropped it, or got it nicked—it’s a whole thing. Very torturous.” She paused, then added with a wink, “Literally.”
Clara's breath hitched. “The Doctor?”
Amanda nodded. “We think she’s in serious danger.”
Clara blinks. “She?”
Missy leaned in, placing her chin daintily on her clasped hands. “So. Consider this the beginning of a rescue mission. Or a revenge tour. Depends how noble you’re feeling today, darling.”
Clara looked between them all, her mind whirring now. Not since she had left her travels in the stolen TARDIS had she heard a whisper of the Doctor, though she’d looked in every crack of time and space. Over two hundred years and nothing.
She swallowed. “Of course, I’ll help.”
Archangel stepped forward then, politely but firmly. “Just… one thing.”
Clara raised an eyebrow.
“When we find the Doctor,” Arch said carefully, “don’t accidentally say ‘him’. She hasn’t been a ‘him’ for a while.”
Clara blinked, surprised. “Regenerated again?”
“She’s regenerated many times,” Arch said with a wry smile. “This is her 52nd body.”
Clara’s jaw slackened slightly. “Fifty-two?! That’s not even possible!”
Amanda raised a hand sheepishly. “I said the same thing.”
Missy, meanwhile, looked faintly smug. “And yet, here we are. Welcome to the paradox, poppet.”
Clara looked back down at the sonic screwdriver. Its gentle pulse seemed stronger now. Like it knew something was coming.
“Alright then,” she murmured, voice low but fierce, “Let’s go save her.”
~
The chrome-and-neon hum of Ditra’s Diner faded into something older. Deeper. As Clara twisted a dial beneath the milkshake dispenser and flicked an unassuming switch beside the till, the linoleum floor beneath them began to shimmer like a disturbed pond.
Moments later, with a soft thrum, the true form of the diner revealed itself: the inside of a TARDIS. Walls of soft bronze coral shimmered beyond the false chrome counters, the faint echo of stars humming through the ancient ship's bones.
Amanda gasped softly as the perception field dissolved completely, revealing the command console like a glowing heart at the centre of the room.
“A diner that travels through time,” she murmured, shaking her head. “Of course it is.”
“Don’t worry,” Clara said with a half-smile. “You get used to it. Eventually.”
Behind them, Archangel’s TARDIS, shaped still like a battered metallic bin, remained tucked in a side chamber—quiet, watchful. A TARDIS within a TARDIS. A temporal paradox wrapped in a backup plan.
“I’ve only ever seen that once,” Missy mused, tapping her lips with a gloved finger. “And last time, the entire Eye of Orion tried to implode out of jealousy. Let’s not keep this nesting thing up too long.”
Clara rolled her eyes, hands flying expertly over the diner console. “Don’t worry, the systems are stabilised. I reinforced the dimensions when Me started keeping her TARDIS parked in my boot cupboard.”
Missy’s head turned sharply. “Speaking of—which version of her are we talking about now?”
“That Me,” Clara clarified, tugging a lever and opening a star map above them. “She found a sort of... quiet place. Somewhere lodged between this dimension and the next. Says the silence helps her think. She's—well, she talks to her alternate self there.”
Missy raised an eyebrow. “Chit-chat with yourself across timelines. How deliciously narcissistic.”
“Can we focus, maybe?” Amanda piped up, hands still trembling slightly as she looked around at the not-quite-possible architecture. “We’re wasting time.”
Archangel nodded, stepping up beside Clara and Missy, her tone suddenly sharp with command. “We need a plan.”
She pointed at the console screen, where the coordinates for Kastarion 3 flickered in crimson. “This is where they’ve taken her. The Rani sisters are using the planet’s paradox core to torture her for regeneration secrets.”
“And they’ve already had her for years,” Clara added grimly.
“We’ll need to cut off the energy source,” Archangel said, her voice quickening with purpose. “I can cloak my TARDIS and land inside their field network without detection.”
“And I,” Missy said, flipping open a hatch to reveal a weapon rack Clara never knew existed, “can cause a healthy amount of chaos to buy you time.”
Amanda frowned. “What about me?”
“You’re with me,” Clara said, surprising even herself with how firm she sounded. “We’ll be extraction. Get the Doctor out when the field falls.”
Missy twirled her umbrella. “So, we’re doing the impossible again, are we? Love it. Like old times—except with more oestrogen and significantly fewer exploding Daleks.”
Amanda looked around at the three women surrounding her—two aliens, one mystery, and all of them impossibly calm in the face of galactic stakes.
She straightened her spine.
“Let’s go get your Doctor.”
The diner TARDIS engines roared to life, shuddering the chrome shelves and shaking dust from ancient circuits. Inside the nested bin-TARDIS, Archangel’s screen lit up simultaneously, locking in coordinates.
Two TARDISes. One mission.
And a storm brewing on Kastarion 3.
~
The light in the chamber shifted — not brighter, but hungrier.
The containment room on Kastarion 3 echoed with the low, feral hum of machines well beyond natural design. The walls thrummed with siphoning energy, pulsing like veins as they drew every flicker of Time Lord life from the shivering figure at the chamber’s heart.
The Doctor, her frame now smaller, paler, still unaccustomed to its new bones — her fifty-third form — lay slumped in mid-air, barely suspended by the shimmering blue shackles trailing up her arms and across her spine. The wires didn’t restrain. They devoured.
Across from her, a sleek chamber of obsidian glass slowly filled with what looked like liquid light — burnt gold and red. It twisted like molten thread, moving with intelligence. Regeneration energy, stolen from her body, drop by agonising drop.
Or as they now called it — Regenergy.
“Well,” said Anita’s Rani, smoothing down her sharp-edged coat as she stepped back from the console, “we’re nearly full. The tank is stabilised. Just a few more hours and we’ll have more power than Rassilon ever dared dream of.”
“Yes,” purred Archie’s Rani, circling the containment field like a bird watching prey grow weaker, “and no more waiting. No more questions. Why ask how she keeps regenerating, when we can simply take it?”
They turned in tandem, as if choreographed — mirror monsters with purpose. Neither looked back.
“But what about the Doctor?” Archie’s Rani asked idly as the doors began to open, bathed in the orange glow of Kastarion’s dying sky.
“Oh, leave her the equipment,” Anita’s Rani replied, her voice like honey over poison. “Can’t have her getting out too easily. Where’s the fun in that?”
The doors closed behind them with a hiss of finality, sealing the Doctor once again in silence.
At first, nothing.
Then a breath.
A rasping, desperate breath.
The Doctor lifted her head by a fraction, golden hair tangled and stuck to her sweat-slick forehead. Her new body ached like it had been born inside a furnace. Her eyes burned with light not fully formed.
The field pulsed again.
Pounding.
The regenergy tank siphoned a fresh surge of energy, pulling it from the marrow of her being. Her spine arched against the field’s will, breath wrenching from her lungs in a guttural cry.
And still — she didn’t scream.
She only whispered, teeth gritted through pain.
“Just… hold on… a little longer…”
But there was no one to hear it.
So, she lay there. Enervated. Drained. Waiting.
Not for escape.
But for someone — anyone — to find her.
Because the Doctor was dying again.
And this time, she wasn’t sure there’d be anything left to come back.