The TARDIS lands in a dark railway station.  The Doctor and her two companions emerge into the cold midnight air.  The Doctor is a woman with a mission, a mission of revenge.  She’s a traveller, an adventurer.  A free-lance expert on the universe and a been-there escaped-that look in her eyes.  She wears a bright red lipstick but in her hearts it’s a disguise to cover up the dark red she wants to wear.  She’s dressed in a beige Mac but underneath it is a dark grey trouser suit.  Her purse is big enough to hold a magnum .45 but she never touches guns, she’s never needed one before.  Her fiery red hair cascades down her shoulders like a classic femme fatale, but the only thing fatal about her is her ability to bring down a giant space empire in 100 minutes.  She wears big heels to emphasise her stature because at 5’ 2” she’s recently lost a lot of height.  She’s a dangerous woman; because no one quite knows how she’s going to act, she could kiss someone in the cheeks in friendly recognition one minute or let them walk into a monumental trap of horrific consequences the next.  Everyone she meets underestimate her and hardly any of them are alive now to say how wrong they were.

Mickey Smith has been around a bit.  He’s a mechanic by trade, but unofficially he’s a monster killer and a defender of the planet.  He’s taken the hard decisions most would baulk at.  He’s risked everything to do the right thing and he’s lost a lot too.  He’s a hard man, not one of those bullies who thinks he’s hand because he uses others to do the things he cannot, but hard because he’s been forged in the heat of battle and sacrifice.  He’s mentally tough and hardly runs screaming from psychotic killer amphibians anymore.

Andrea Long is the newbie, wide eyed and curious.  She’s got a witty putdown for every occasion and she’s not afraid to use them.  She’s still getting used to the whole extreme danger but she’s survived things that would make most embittered psychotic space bitches wet their knickers in fear.  She’s also got an intense aversion to laddism and had been known to scream loudly at laddish behaviour.  Some think it’s a personality disorder, others think she just needs to get a bloke.  Either way she’s not her to meet a shrink or find a bloke, although if she did find a bloke that’s her business and no one else’s.

Elsewhere the mysterious Mr. X is smugly waiting for a rendezvous he thinks will allow him to gain the necessary details to dethrone the king and seize the throne himself.  However his contact is lying dead in a public bathroom in Leeds and the only footprints found exiting the convenience were those of a woman in big heels.

The nightclub is smoky, mainly cigarette but also cigars and even a few pipes.  This is an exclusive club where people come to be seen not to be seen.  Membership is highly limited to a few discreet individuals.  The Doctor has been a member for so long she can’t remember when she applied; she may even have established the club herself.  She signs in her two companions as her guests and takes her usual seat, it’s been sat in by the Doctor recently but never before by her.  She orders a martini for herself and her companions see to themselves.  She lights a cigarette she’s no intention of smoking, the brand new gold holder clamped in her hand like an old friend.

Mickey orders a lager and dry roasted peanuts, but they’ve never heard of that.  Instead he makes do with a single malt whisky and a packet of plain crisps.  He’s not happy.

Andrea plays it safe and orders a glass of the house red, even though she prefers white wine spritzers or a banana daiquiri if it’s a special occasion.

The Doctor sits back on the padded red leather of the fitted bench and lets out a sigh of contentment.  “We’ve only got to wait a few hours, five tops.  Our target should be here soon, we’ll wait until he leaves before we make our move.”

“Doctor, there’s no space invaders machine.”  Mickey complains.  “You wouldn’t even let me bring my PSP.  I’m so bored already.”

“That’s a dangerous anachronism in this time.”  The Doctor replies softly.  “Here we pass the time with the lost art of conversation.”  She looked at Andrea.  “Why don’t you start?”

“Me?  I’m with Mickey.  I was expecting a few bevies and a bit of a dance.”

“It’s not that sort of club.”  The Doctor replies.  “This is the most exclusive club on the planet.  You don’t get people who dance in here.”

“Except us.”  Mickey replies in return.  “I’ve seen you on the dance floor, remember?”

The police in Leeds find no DNA evidence on the body, at least nothing human.  They only find threads from a beige Mac and bright red lipstick traces on a paper tissue in one of the bins.

The Doctor lights up another cigarette, the appearance is for effect only.  In here every member smokes something.  Once upon a time she’d shared Cuban cigars with Fidel Castro, swapped roll ups with Roosevelt, both incarnations of him, and also swapped the brown weed with Marlene Dietrich in a dingy singing club in pre-war Berlin.  Now though she only uses it as a diversion to mask her true self.  Like a lioness stalking her prey on the hot savannah of Africa or a man-hungry temptress getting ready to let Mr. So-very-wrong put his best moves on her.

Mr. X however realises that the meeting was not going to take place.  He gives up waiting and goes to a local club he knows, very exclusive and the perfect place to hide for a few hours in case the police were on to him already.

“Can’t we at least play darts?”  Mickey points towards the dartboard.  It looks brand new.  He quite fancies himself as a darts player, he has the gold bracelet and he is good at subtraction.  He’d won a gold star for subtracting in junior school, pity he only scraped a C for maths on his second resit.

“No one’s played darts here for as long as I can remember.  It’s just a decoration really.”

“I was nearly a darts widow.”  Andrea casually says to Mickey.  “Thankfully I dumped him before he passed twenty stone.”

“Urgh, that’s horrible.”  Mickey feels right off his crisps, even though he’s nursed them carefully for the last hour.

The police in Leeds call for an immediate lockdown of the city when the corpse of the murder suspect vanishes mysteriously and a naked man is seen walking away from the police station.  This thing doesn’t happen very often, although future reports of something similar will be recorded in San Francisco on New Years Eve 1999 when John Smith, a British tourist, is mugged and killed and El Paso, Texas, in August 2002 when an elderly nun, Sister Rani, collapses and dies and hours later a young woman causes a twenty car pile up on the turnpike and claims to be the same nun before escaping police custody by unknown means never to be seen again.

Mr. X is taking quick gulps of his brandy.  Already on his third he is drinking to dull the rising feelings of panic and terror inside.  He doesn’t normally drink but right now he has no concept of stopping, as he fears if he stops then he’ll be caught and hanged for his treason.

The Doctor waits a few minutes longer to make her move.  She has a plan, it is forged from a thousand years of experience and refined by the hidden knowledge and arcane lore of various peoples and secrets conceived on lost worlds and the forbidden technologies that had eliminated all traces of them from the Universe.  She’s written the plan down on what has just become the most dangerous napkin in the world.

No-one notices the large red telephone box vanish from a certain street corner in Leeds, indeed no one could remember seeing it, especially as the design of it will not become popular for another twenty years.

The Doctor sits down next to her target.  “Good evening.”  She speaks softly, so as not to startle him.  “Do you have a light for my cigarette?  I’m afraid I’m all out of Lucifer’s.”

Mr. X reaches into his jacket pocket and withdraws a book of matches.  He tosses them onto the table.  “Take them, I have no need of them.  It’s funny.  To come so far and realise how little you actually want anything.  I wanted it all though, once.  I wanted back what was rightfully mine.  I wanted back what was stolen from me, my birthright.”

“Golly.”  The Doctor says casually.  “You sure sound like an important man.  Are you a lord or something?”

Mr. X laughs.  “I should have been far more than just a lord.  I should have been king, the king of England, the king of Great Britain, I should have had an empire to rule, instead all I have is a lifetime of bitterness and hate.”

“Do you want to talk about it, your majesty?”

“Talk?  Talk?  I’ll be lucky if I make it through the night with my life intact.  They’re onto me, I know they are.  That’s why he never met me.  That’s why he didn’t show.  They found him and he’ll have given them my name.  He’s not a man of loyalty that one.  Money bought him quite cheaply, his sort aren’t motivated by good and honour.”

The red telephone box appears as if by magic and a perfectly attired handsome man in a tasteful cream tuxedo with a black shirt and white silk tie emerged.  He sports a small gold sun badge on his lapel with matching cufflinks on his jacket and has an expensive silk kerchief tucked precisely and perfectly into his breast pocket.  He pauses to shut the door and lock it.  Which, if someone who knew the model of phone box was observing, would remark upon as unusual because they were never fitted with door locks.

Mr. X is feeling more and more relaxed talking to the young woman.  They don’t trade names, it doesn’t feel right and it adds a little something to have her think of him as some sort of mysterious stranger with an unspecified past and an agenda that speaks of secret dangers and unimaginable crimes.  He’s read that certain impressionable young women get quite romantically caught up in that sort of thing and she is very beautiful and does seem easily impressed with his false tales of derring-do.  “I imagine all of Scotland Yard is looking for me.”

The Doctor tries to give the impression that she is a simple-minded floozy with a romantic passion for dark and mysterious men.  Meanwhile she hopes Mickey and Andrea were behaving themselves and not playing strip poker, as they were talking about doing, to annoy her.  She puts on a sweet smile.  “Mercy, all of them?  You must be so smart to avoid them so easily.  You must be so charming and dashing, just like the characters in that book that made my heart flutter so much.  I’ve always had a secret longing to meet a man like that in real life and marry him.”

Mr. X freezes a little at the word ‘marry’ but he reckons that he can fawn her off when he is tired of her, and she is not without her obvious charms and perhaps a place to stay with a telephone he can use.  “Alas I am in town with no lodgings, do you know a place I could call upon at this time of night?”

“Mercy, no.”  The Doctor exclaims with a fake tut.  “A man of your skill and bravery deserves a warm house for the night.  I have a spare room, you can stay there, I’ll sort out the linens while you take a relaxing bath, there should be just enough hot water left for a nice long soak.”  She is just about to suggest they leave when she spots the newcomer in the club and then she sees Andrea take off her blouse, they ARE playing strip poker!

The Well-Dressed Man approached Mr. X and his cheap floozy, he speaks with an out of place American accent.  “The plan is off.”

“Do I know you?”  Mr. X asks.

“I am the Doctor.”  The Man replies.  “I was killed and I regenerated.”

“Oh, you spoke of that happening.”  Mr. X is relieved.  “What do you mean the plan’s off?”

“As much as I was for it in my past life, this life, I’m not so much a Kingmaker as a thief taker.”

“Oh Mercy.”  The (real) Doctor exclaims.

“Shut up you stupid trollop!”  Mr. X shouts and grabs the ‘Doctor’ by the jacket lapels.  “Don’t back out on me now.  I need that information to claim what’s really mine.”

“It was never yours.”  The ‘Doctor’ declares.  “I merely used you as bait, to draw out my real target.”  He looks over at another table.  “Is that couple really getting undressed?”

“I am so embarrassed.”  The Doctor mutters to herself.

“I’m the real king of England.”

“No, you’re a nobody.”  The ‘Doctor’ draws a sonic blaster and shoots Mr. X with it.  The anti-sound silencer muffles all but a quiet whisper of the blast.  “Now, shall we get down to business, Doctor?”

The Doctor smiles.  “I hoped you would, although was that necessary?  I was just going to move him to another time, where he’d be safely out of your way.”

“You killed my predecessor.  I had to fake a regeneration, make it look like I was one of your lot.”

“My lot?”  The Doctor sighs.  “My lot are gone, dead, burned in flames.”

“Time is a relative dimension, stay before a time war and you won’t get burned, that’s why you can’t sense them, they’re dislocated from you, in a temporal orbit.”

“Oh please.”  The Doctor gets angry.  “Don’t you think that occurred to me?  I looked everywhere.  They’re gone.  You’re a time agent, from the 51^st century, a very boring time if you ask me.  You think you can control time, rule it, shape it, you haven’t begun to realise the dangers you’re putting yourself in.  You treat time like it was a known quantity, two bags of sugar and a side of time, a box of time, a jar of time, it’s not like that, time is like fire and it will burn you unless you’re wearing flame proof underwear.  You cannot control time, no one’s meant to.  I was the ruler of the High Council and I never once considered myself the ruler of time.  If anything time rules us, it gives us purpose, being, a reason to go on.”

“That woman over there is taking her bra off.”

“Right, that’s it you two.”  The Doctor glares at Mickey and Andrea’s faces.  “Get dressed and get back in the TARDIS.  You’ve ruined tonight for me.”  The Doctor turns around and stalks back to the other table like death herself, but in better shoes.  “Where was I?”  The Doctor takes out a packet of mints from her bag.  “Time, ah yes.  It was a good friend of mine, Ford I think his name was, who said time is an illusion, he said some more but I had to leave as the world was about to end.  My point is time like control isn’t real, not like you think it is.  It’s like light, you can see it’s effect if it hits something but otherwise it’s invisible and untouchable.  Stop trying to control time and simply keep it safe.  If you don’t then the Universe will collapse and you’ll die and then I’ll be most annoyed.”  The Doctor stands up.  “Oh, by the way, I didn’t kill your associate.  I never kill anyone, unless I have to and then I feel really bad about it.  I can’t defeat an enemy if they die before I can make them see my point of view.  Murder just isn’t my style.”  The Doctor pays her bar bill, gets her coat at the door and walks out of the nightclub for possibly the last time in this life time.  She doubts she’d be welcomed back, not after this and if she really is the owner then she wasn’t the sort of person she wanted in her own club.

As for the time agent, well after losing 2 years of his memories he goes rogue and starts doing self-cleaning cons in Pompeii…