hopes and dreams are SHATTERING apart {open

[WINIFRED BURKLE]

There was a library in this place; that was good. Fred liked libraries. At least, she’d liked libraries until she’d picked up the wrong book in one and ended up in a completely different world, and she’d not been back since, but she figured that since she was already in the different world this time, going inside and hiding among the stacks of books wasn’t going to make things worse. If she was lucky, maybe she’d find a book like the one that had sent her to Pylea, and she could say the words that really needed more consonants to make sense, and then she’d be sucked back through a portal and be home. Home—she’d not thought of it as home until she’d got to wherever this place was. It was her home dimension, sure, but right now she wanted to be in the Hyperion with Angel and Cordy and Wes and Charles, and hide behind the counter and sniffle until Angel came to see what was wrong, then she’d hug him and not let go until he prised her away and—she couldn’t do this. She couldn’t think about that, because she had no idea when she was going to get back there. If she was going to get back there. Get sucked through a portal once and sure, maybe a knight in shining armour will come and save you. But that had taken five years; have it happen to you twice, and Fred was pretty sure that Angel wouldn’t be coming for her again. And that terrified her; she couldn’t last another five years in a place that wasn’t home, where she didn’t feel even the tiniest bit safe. She didn’t know where she was, and Fred had to know. Alright, so she’d not been made a slave yet, which had happened within minutes of her falling into Pylea (she’d just been admiring the two suns, and trying to approximate how that would affect the physics of the world using the specifications of her own sun as a guide), but that didn’t mean anything. Maybe they were lulling her into a full sense of security by making it seem relatively nice here first. Not nice like Los Angeles nice, even though Fred hadn’t actually been to see the city since she’d first been shown to her room, but nothing was trying to kill her. Given that she had no weapons, and no strong people around to defend her, Fred was eternally grateful for that.

It didn’t make this place any better, though. If anything, the fact that thus far, nothing had tried to kill her, and she’d not encountered anybody at all, was a little disconcerting. Sure, it wasn’t as disconcerting as suddenly being in another world when the very idea of going to another dimension was enough to make you break out in a cold sweat and curl into the darkest corner you could find—but Fred guessed she was still in shock. She’d been sitting in her room and then...she’d been standing on the street. Just like that. And she’d known it wasn’t a dream, because in her dreams Fred didn’t stand in the middle of the street; they tended to be more of the fugitive-in-a-cave variety. Why had this happened to her? Most people didn’t know that other dimensions existed, and now here she was, in her second one, and she’d not even been back from the first six months. If she’d thought it was about fairness, she might have started moaning about how unfair this was, but perhaps this was just her life – maybe she never got to have a home, and be sane, and have friends and a life and a world of her own. Maybe she’d always be the crazy girl in a new world, and the Powers That Be simply wanted her to be torn away from people she cared about, again and again, until any last remaining shred of her sanity disappeared. It was a wonder that she’d not dissolved into a sobbing mess just yet, really; an alternate dimension, which were the things she feared most, and no Angel around to save her—it was enough to do that. But first, she had to get somewhere safe. Safeish; Fred didn’t think anywhere in this place was safe, because she didn’t know where here was anymore. The security of shutting herself in her own room and choosing not to talk to people was completely different to finding herself in a place with no people in at all. She didn’t like it. She just wanted to go home, and be with people she trusted and not in some strange world where she didn’t know anything (again), because the last five years had pretty much destroyed the old Fred. If she had to spend a long time here, who knew what it would do to her.

She didn’t have time to think about that, though; Fred heard footsteps behind her, and she panicked. Trying to fight back tears, she took off towards the library, running as fast as she could. She didn’t wait to hear the librarian’s explanation, but tore past her, probably knocking the poor lady over in the process, and kept running. If she ran, the thing that wanted to make her a slave wouldn’t catch up to her, and she wouldn’t be crazy old Fred in a sack in a cave again. She didn’t even know if there were caves here; she’d feel safer in a cave. She could hide away from this strange world and start working out those equations that were supposed to take her home again. And this time, she wouldn’t forget that there was a home to go back to; she thought she’d made it up, in Pylea. But she hadn’t, and she wasn’t going to do that this time. She wasn’t going to lose the hope that Angel would save her from this, because he saved people. It was what he did; he was a champion. He was the handsome man who’d saved her from the monsters; even if there were no monsters here yet, and—and Fred found she couldn’t run anymore. She was out of breath and she was crying and the last time she’d felt so alone, she’d just been caught in Pylea and made into a cow-slave. Fred stumbled down one of the aisles, pressing herself into the corner between the wall and the last bookcase, and started pulling books off the shelves so she could hide behind them. Out of curiousity, she looked at which section she was in; physics. She started laughing hysterically – the irony of that was not lost on her – but then her laughs faded and she was back to crying, pulling more and more books off until she was half-buried in them, knees curled tight to her chest and her arms wrapped protectively over her head. “It’s a dream,” she told herself through her muffled sobs, although she didn’t believe that for one second. It wasn’t a dream; yet again, she was in an alternate dimension. “It’s a dream, it’s a dream, it’s gotta be a dream.”

[THE DOCTOR]

Things, if possible, were getting more bizarre than he had initially anticipated. Different dimensions he could handle with only a minor headache, but pulling someone out of their set time-line with him was making things decidedly more complicated. His meeting Martha should by all rights create a paradox that could very well unravel time as he knew it. Had he met her and not let on that he'd known her. . . but just because he knew very nearly everything about history and the future didn't mean he could ascertain what point in someone's time-line they happened to pop into this ruddy place. He couldn't be expected to anticipate everything. The most startling part about all of this was that nothing had changed because of what he'd done. If time were to have gone off kilter in all of this he would sense that he was remembering things differently. Yet nothing had happened. What was this place?

He frowned as he walked past row upon row of books. This library almost reminded him of The Library all the way in the 51st century: he'd not been there in years, perhaps he'd have to make an appearance sometime. The books almost seemed endless here. A part of his brain refused to believe that this place had all the books in the universe. Only one place could do that, his mind logically told him: after all there were certain books that only had one copy left. Yet he had the sneaking suspicion that this library had not only the all the books in his universe, but those in other people's as well. He shook his head at that thought.

When he found whoever was in charge of all this nonsense he was going to give them a sound thrashing -well maybe not a thrashing- followed by a long lecture on why books from other dimensions should not be accessed by some people. . .among other things. The librarian had told him they could all be accessed when he'd entered: "any book you want" she'd said. That and nothing else: she was just as tight-lipped as the rest of the staff around here. There was a part of him that was somewhat amused by the library though. It was bigger on the inside he had noted upon entering. Nothing but a shack really from an outsider's view, but once you had a proper look inside, it was enormous. It reminded him that he really needed to get his ship back. The old girl was probably lost somewhere in medieval London, wondering where her bloody Time Lord had gotten to.

He glanced up at a sign to see what section he currently found himself in: physics. He arched an eyebrow in amusement. He knew quite enough about that to be getting on with. No sooner had he glanced up than he felt someone breeze by him. A young woman, running through the library as though someone was hot on her heels. He glanced the way she'd came and saw nothing. If it was that nutter with the stove pipe hat, it looked like he'd have to add another lecture to his list. Shaking his head he followed the direction the girl had gone in. He found her tucked away in an aisle under a small pile of books muttering about it all being a dream. He'd been about to make a quip about life being just a dream really, but stopped himself upon hearing her sobs.


"I'm afraid it's not a dream," he explained to her, bending down slightly to try to get a better look. "It's not that bad though once you get around being sucked out of your home. It's a bit cozy here." He smiled at her, looking at the pile of books. "You sure you want to read all those?" he asked, picking up one of the books: Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel. He stuffed it back on a shelf, not really certain that it was the proper one. "You don't want read that, trust me," he told her. "Load of rubbish."

[WINIFRED BURKLE]

Angel would come. Even though she’d already started convincing herself that he wouldn’t, because you only got saved from terrible things once in a lifetime, Fred couldn’t shake the hope that somehow, he would realise what was going on (the fact that he was currently out of the country mourning his girlfriend, the one with the funny name – Bunny, or Buffy, something like that – notwithstanding), and he’d save her and make it so that the fact that yet again, she felt helpless didn’t matter, and tell her that it was okay that she wasn’t ready to save herself yet, that would come. Angel would come, because he always did. She just had to wait for him—and Fred almost thought that was worse than last time. In Pylea, she’d not expected anybody to come. After a while, she’d not even thought there was a place for them to come from. Being an escaped cow-slave had been her life, and though she scribbled on her cave walls and told herself stories about a girl in a world where she was equal to everyone else, and there was food and science and books...it had always been just a story. She’d been trying to crack the equations to get back, but she’d not believed there was anything to get back to. Now, she knew there was. Of course, there were no guarantees that that would last, because Fred was the expert at constructing stories that made even a terrible situation somewhat bearable, but she knew Angel was out there. And if she kept waiting on him, now that she had somebody in her life who she was pretty sure would walk through fire for her – she’d do it for him, anyway, so long as that fire didn’t lead to an alternate dimension, although in this place, an alternate dimension might be the one she came from in the first place, so maybe she should try walking through fire...maybe later – she was just going to be disappointed when it took years for him to come. Fred wasn’t sure she could cope with that—more to the point, she wasn’t sure she could cope with any of this.

It was too much change, all too fast. She hadn’t recovered from finding herself in a life that was good yet, where there were people who cared about her, and tried to engage her in conversation and make her feel included, even if she could only talk to them through her closed door or scuttle along the landing when she knew they weren’t going to be looking up to see if she was there. A world that had food, and nobody yelled at her, and she could have a bath and sleep in a bed and she actually felt safe—and now she had none of that again. At first impressions, this place didn’t seem as different as Pylea had to Los Angeles, but she’d not taken the time to explore. All Fred wanted was to hide until somebody could make things better so she was home again – Los Angeles was home, that dimension was home, the Hyperion was home, with the people of Angel Investigations was home. At least she was good at hiding; this might be a different place world, a different place, but she could hide with the best of them. It wouldn’t make her feel safe, not like it did in LA, but at least it’d stop any monsters that were here from trying to eat, hurt or enslave her. And this was a pretty good spot, she thought; it was in the far reaches of the library, away from anyone who just wandered in off the street, and there were enough books to practically build herself a fort. It wasn’t enough, it would never be enough, but it was a start. And books were good; Fred had always been comfortable in a library. Okay, so she was slightly hysterical now, and absolutely terrified, but the fact that they still had books here was something. There hadn’t been books in Pylea.

"It's not that bad though once you get around being sucked out of your home. You sure you want to read all those? Load of rubbish."

Not a dream? It had to be, because nobody was unlucky enough to get struck by lightening twice...or, in Fred’s case, sucked into an alternate, hell-ish dimension. Who was this man, anyway? She curled up tighter on herself, her hair falling into a curtain in front of her face, and she pulled more books off the shelves at random, piling them up to try and form a wall she could hide behind. She didn’t look at him; if he was one of them, a monster that had sucked her away from Los Angeles and was now going to do unspeakable things to her, Fred didn’t want to know what he looked like. She could still see the green faces of her first Pylean masters, and she really wished that she couldn’t. “It has to be a dream,” she said, almost involuntarily; he seemed friendly enough, if some stranger in a strange world could be friendly, and Fred talked to herself a lot anyway. It wasn’t as though having someone there to listen made much difference. She sniffed, wiping her eyes with her sleeve, and looked up, peering at the man through her hair. “There’s nothing good about being sucked into another dimension!” She was trying to sound firm about this, but instead she sounded panicked; there was nothing here that made sense, and Fred hated things that she couldn’t work some logic into. And there was logic related to everything, from magic to the most suitable weapons. There was nothing so simple or comprehensible about portals, and Fred didn’t want to know about them. She wanted to be back in her room so she could be trying to forget about them.

Did he really think she wanted to read all of these books? Even someone like Fred, who devoured books in hours would take a long time to get through these, especially if they were detailed books—detailed books. Fred froze, thinking; if this was some strange, new dimension, then maybe they had books about portals and such, like Wesley’s demonology books, but sciencey, so she could actually understand them...and preferably in English, because she didn’t read ancient Somarian, for example. She snatched back the book the man had returned to the shelf, fishing her glasses out of her pocket and putting them on. She wasn’t feeling any less panicky – her hands were still shaking, for a start – but at least this temporary distraction had stopped her from crying. It was bad enough that she felt helpless, without needing to be a crybaby about it. “Well sure, teleportation’s only possible if you use magic,” she muttered, forgetting that she wasn’t alone. She put the book on top of one of her piles, still using the books as a shield, and picked up two more, looking at the spines. “Not you, magnetism won’t help,” she continued, dropping them again. “I need quantum decoherence, wavefunction...” Fred paused, flicking through to the index, her glasses slipping down her nose as she ran her finger down the entries. “Gotcha, many-worlds interpretation.”

[THE DOCTOR]

The Doctor frowned slightly as she pulled books round herself, almost as a shield if he was guessing correctly. He had to get use to this, being an intimidating figure thing. To most people a strange person approaching you in a strange place you didn't ask to be was always a potential enemy. Of course, he wasn't most people, and as long as no daleks or cybermen or homicidal maniacs appeared he was certainly no enemy to anyone here. His frowned deepened at that thought. He hadn't thought about that possibility just yet. How could he not have? Well to be fair most of the people popping up in this place were human or humanoid in most regards. The powers that be in this place better hope none of those creatures came through or he'd make sure they were very, very sorry.

"There's no need for that," he assured her. "No one here's going to hurt you." The fact that she seemed to be avoiding looking at him didn't go unnoticed. He wondered idly where exactly she had been brought from to be in a state like this. She repeated that this had to be a dream. "Ask yourself," he began, the corner of his lips quirking into a lopsided grin. "If this is a dream, why am I here then? I don't usually make social calls in people's dreams." She continued sobbing and proceeded to wipe her hand on her sleeve. He felt around the brown pinstriped suit jacket's inside pockets and furrowed his brow in frustration. "Left my kerchief in the other suit,

[/b]" he apologized. "I suppose you're right about the dimension part, though you do get to meet new people, eh?"

He watched as she went about retrieving and putting on her specs, her hands shaking slightly. He noticed the crying had stopped, though not knowing her well he couldn't be certain if that was a good or bad thing. He tilted his head in confusion as she went to pick up a book. "You all right then?" he asked. He was distracted from thinking further on that matter by her next words. "Sorry, magic?" he repeated back to her, his head tiled this time in disbelief. "Teleportations a tricky, complex bit of scientific manipulation, you can't leave that sort of thing up to 'magic'." He said the last word using his fingers as air quotes. He had seemingly forgotten that moments ago this girl had seemed upset in lieu of his misgivings about any form of alleged magic. It had been his experience that people who claimed to be using it rarely were.

She began muttering to herself as she looked from book to book. "What are you--" he began, gesturing vaguely at the the books around her, but was cut short by her cry of “Gotcha, many-worlds interpretation.” He nodded his head knowingly then. "Ahh, I should probably warn you that I've tried just about every means I know of to get off this place, and nothing's worked."[/size][/blockquote]

[WINIFRED BURKLE]

"No one here's going to hurt you. I suppose you're right about the dimension part, though you do get to meet new people, eh?"

How did he know that? Sure, it was true that this man hadn’t hurt her yet, but how could he categorically say that nobody in this world was going to hurt her? Fred couldn’t have said that about her world; she knew that nobody in the Hyperion would, but she was pretty sure that somewhere out there, there were people who would have taken quite a lot of pleasure in her pain—and not all of them would have been demons. There were some very nasty people out there, and though Fred hadn’t yet had the misfortune to really meet any, what with the way that she had guardian angels around her to protect her from things like that, she was pretty sure that somewhere in this place, there would be at least one person who would hurt her. It just wasn’t him, which was a good thing. If the first person she encountered in this place wanted to make her life hell, or turn her into a slave again, Fred was pretty sure that she’d just curl up and die. She didn’t want to die, not after surviving Pylea and finding her way back to her own world and having friends (even if she chose not to hang out with those friends too much, in favour of trying to sort the mess that was her head out), but she wasn’t going to let herself be stuck in an alternate dimension for another five years. One of these places had ruined her life once, and Fred couldn’t cope with that happening again. She couldn’t cope with losing everything for the second time, just when things had started to seem alright again; right now, she couldn’t cope with anything but this very second. And even on that, she was a little shaky, and this man who sounded so cheery and blasé about this whole thing really wasn’t helping very much; Fred tried to make herself as small as possible, just in case. It wouldn’t help, if someone wanted to enslave her, but hiding was second nature to her. “I don’t wanna meet new people,” she informed him, her voice slightly muffled due to the fact that she was still choking back tears and she was as buried as she could be when the only things around to hide behind were books. “I only just got to know the old people.”

"Teleportations a tricky, complex bit of scientific manipulation, you can't leave that sort of thing up to 'magic'."

Well, he clearly wasn’t from her world. If he didn’t come from here – and from his words, Fred didn’t think he did, although there was the possibility that he was just tricking her as part of some evil master plan, and she wasn’t about to be trusting random strangers just yet – that meant that apparently, this was some kind of...inter-dimensional waiting room. One person being sucked out of their world into here could just be a cruel trick of fate, although why it had to happen to her twice in her life, especially when she was still so young, Fred didn’t understand, but it happening to more than one person, coming from entirely separate dimensions, couldn’t be just a coincidence. Fred didn’t believe in those; everything had a reason, a probability, something that connected it to another, seemingly random event. So this world was apparently one that was good at sucking people out of their worlds—which did not fill Fred with the tiniest shred of relief. Sure, it might mean that one of Angel Investigations would end up here too, not that she’d wish being sucked through to a different dimension on any of them, but it might also mean that some evil demony thing would end up here too, and with no demon-fighters to fight it, it would probably wreak havoc. Or maybe it had now closed, leaving her and the strange man in this world alone, with no return ticket. There was a way to get home—it just wasn’t teleportation.

He was right; this book was rubbish. There wasn’t going to be a magic shop here and even if there was, she only knew about it by hearsay, not how to do spells without half-destroying the world...not that she really cared about that here. Perhaps half-destroying it would lead to tearing a hole in the fabric of reality that led back to her world—although that was unlikely. The probability of that was – Fred tried to calculate it in her head, but she didn’t have all the necessary data – it was extremely improbable, anyway. “It’s not possible via science,” she said, and though she wouldn’t have admitted it, Fred found it a relief to be able to debate science with someone, even if that someone was from a different world where they didn’t have magic – which was stupid, because how else did he think they got here? Being sucked through portals that weren’t supposed to be there couldn’t be explained through physics, and Fred thought she’d know. “Faster-than-light travel is impossible, and you’d have to beat the uncertainty principle, which, even if you did, would leave the teleported person a copy of the original, and therefore debatably not themselves at all, which’d pretty much negate the idea of teleportation in the first place.” She’d thought about it, though, of course she had; stuck in that cave in Pylea, with only her scientific knowledge remaining relatively intact, Fred had thought about the possibility of teleporting herself out of there. It would have been so much easier if it were possible. “Magic can do it. Prob’ly.”

"I've tried just about every means I know of to get off this place, and nothing's worked."

“There’s a way,” Fred said, in a sudden mad flurry of opening books and spreading them around around her, the franticness of her actions a clear sign that she was beginning to panic again. “There’s a way.” There had to be; if he was telling her that she should give up hope right now, then he was sorely mistaken. Giving up hope would be like Fred simply giving up, and she couldn’t do that. Not this time. Not when she knew that if anyone could find a way to get here and get her out again, it was her people. Huh, ‘her people’; she would never have thought of them like that before she’d got sucked here. She’d never felt like she belonged – but she belonged more in her world than she did here. “Every action has an equal or opposite reaction, so there has to be another portal that takes people home, or p’raps one portal that does the takin’ and returnin’ at the same time...”

[THE DOCTOR]

It didn't exactly take a psychiatrist to figure out that someone had done a number on this girl. She had all the classics signs, or so he assumed, of a victim. A victim of what though was anyone's guess. She seemed somewhat less than convinced that no one here wanted to harm her. He tilted his head briefly to the right, conceding to an unspoken point. "Well I'm not going to hurt you at any rate, and that's a start," he assured her. "As long as you're not some blood thirsty alien bent on dominating all of mankind, anyway." His smile faltered a bit, replaced by a slightly furrowed brow, as she went on to say she didn't want to meet any new people, having just gotten to know the old people. "Well, I'm sure the new people won't be all bad. I've already met some . . .well certainly interesting, and sometimes rather lovely people here," he went on to say.

"It's not possible via science." He arched an eyebrow at that, his smirk returning nearly full throttle. "Oh I'd have to disagree with you there. It's almost implicitly possible via science," he countered. She didn't seem startled by the idea of teleportation, and so he didn't mind going on a bit about the scientific means behind it. "How else are you going to dematerialize atoms and transport them in an instant? Well unless of course your species happens to evolve to that ability. Bloody Eight Legs," he gave a purposeful shiver at that. Those were a species he wouldn't mind never meeting again.

His mouth quirked into a lopsided grin as she rambled off the problems with telportation. "Oh yeah, now of course it's impossible with science," he allowed. Judging by that outlook he'd place her time period sometime before the 22nd century on Earth. "But with the right technology, you could get around the uncertainty principle and work on the rest," he said evenly. She seemed to be hung up on this idea of magic. He frowned, realizing, just as he had before with Dr. Magnus that it wasn't entirely impossible that this girl didn't come from the same Earth that he knew, not even the same two Earth's he knew. Perhaps where she came from magic was a trusted means of science-- not that he idea left too much open for interpretation which in turn left far too much room for error.

"If you think magic can, be my guest," he said with a shrug. "I've got a feeling it's not going to work. Some sort of force field around this place from what I can gather, keeping every one inside," he said, taking a seat near the pile of books that surrounded the girl. “Every action has an equal or opposite reaction, so there has to be another portal that takes people home, or p’raps one portal that does the takin’ and returnin’ at the same time...” "Ah, but no two people have arrived in exactly the same place," he informed her, tapping his temple. "Though the possibility of an outgoing portal somewhere isn't entirely implausible. Unlikely, but not implausible, but I've worked with less."

[WINIFRED BURKLE]

"Well I'm not going to hurt you at any rate, and that's a start. As long as you're not some blood thirsty alien bent on dominating all of mankind, anyway."

In Fred’s experience, people who wanted to hurt you usually prefaced their words with, ‘I’m not going to hurt you’. That wasn’t to say that everyone who said that was going to do something horrendous to her, but just that his admission didn’t automatically make her want to give him her trust. She didn’t trust anybody. Not here, anyway; back in her world, she trusted Angel with her life and then some, and Wesley and Charles and Cordelia, and she thought she’d trust Lorne too, but she needed more time with that what with him being Pylean and all, even if she’d hated his own dimension, but none of them were here now. As such, Fred didn’t think that she could trust anybody. What was to say that this man hadn’t been the one to bring her here in the first place? She didn’t think he had, because there wasn’t anything about him that screamed ‘evil’ at her, but Fred couldn’t be sure. Right now, she couldn’t be sure of anything. “Aliens don’t exist,” she said, deciding to focus on that rather than his assurance that he wasn’t going to hurt her, because Fred couldn’t trust that. “Unless you’re a conspiracy nut like me, then it’s possible the government is hidin’ it, like they did with the demons, although I’m not sure that even the government knows about them.” But demons and aliens, together? Having both seemed a little far-fetched, if you asked her. It would have made her five-year-younger self extremely happy to know that some of her weed-induced wild theories had been correct, though. “I think we’re from different worlds,” she added thoughtfully, because though the basis of what he was saying sounded familiar enough, Fred was pretty sure that some of it was just rubbish, at least as far as she was concerned. It was probably the same the other way round; nothing like that would have surprised her anymore. At least he wasn’t a demon, or a vampire trying to kill her. “And I ain’t an alien. Or a demon. Or anythin’ like that. I’m human.”

"How else are you going to dematerialize atoms and transport them in an instant? But with the right technology, you could get around the uncertainty principle and work on the rest,"

Fred had always found science soothing, and now was no exception; she didn’t know whether it was a conscious effort on his part, to make her feel calmer and less likely to bolt, or simply that he liked science too, but she was definitely feeling less panicky, having to wrap her head around the concept of teleportation, something she’d not considered for a long time – it had been the first thing she’d attempted once she’d gotten settled in her cave in Pylea, and it hadn’t worked. Fred wouldn’t have gone as far as to say she was happy now, or even remotely comfortable, because she was still terrified, but being able to talk about physics with someone who actually seemed to know what he was talking about was refreshing. Not that anybody at the Hyperion was stupid, even though Fred was pretty sure her IQ score topped even Wesley’s, but they didn’t know science. Not like Fred knew science. “You’d have to have a huge amount of energy to make even a sub-atomic particle seem like it’s goin’ faster than the speed of light and therefore dematerialising,” she said, but she sounded thoughtful rather than certain this time; teleportation was far from her area of expertise. Now, if he wanted to talk string theory...but that wouldn’t be relevant here. Why was it that the things she knew never seemed to be relevant, or if they had the potential to be, they simply weren’t possible under the conditions she had available. “So to do it with actual people you’d probably need, like, the equivalent of the sun. And you still can’t exceed the speed of light.” Even getting remotely close to it was impossible; the average space rocket only went at about 0.0015 percent of the speed of light. “And if you could, you’d have the time dilation problem where the transported person’d age faster.” She tapped her fingers against her leg, the gesture more an indication that she was still extremely nervous rather than that she was thinking hard. “There’s technology to do that now?” How long had she been gone? Five years really wasn’t that long in the world of physics; Fred was pretty sure she’d know if somebody knew how to break the uncertainty principle.

"Ah, but no two people have arrived in exactly the same place. Unlikely, but not implausible, but I've worked with less."

Fred considered this, only flinching slightly when the man came closer; she’d have preferred it if he’d stayed back where he was, if she was honest, but he seemed harmless enough, and he had truthful eyes, like Angel did, and right now, she needed all the friends she could get. Not that he was a friend, given that she didn’t even know his name, and she certainly wasn’t planning on becoming well enough acquainted with anybody to consider them a friend but...an ally was welcome, even if he came from a world different to her own, with aliens and no magic and the ability to break all the laws of science as she knew them and teleport somewhere. “Are more people comin’?” she asked, given that he seemed more than knowledgeable about this place – he certainly had more information than she did, but she’d landed in the middle of the street, looked around her, and bolted for the library, surrounding herself in the safety of the written word. It hadn’t exactly been enough time for her to categorise everything – which she would need to do, if she wanted to have a good enough chance at figuring out a way back. She wondered if they had scanners here, or even a basic thermometer. She’d need data to input as variables. “Or is the population stayin’ the same? When I got—” Fred paused, realising that she didn’t want to tell a complete stranger that this wasn’t her first experience in another dimension; she didn’t even want to think about it, but thoughts of Pylea were secondary in her mind only to her panic and her absolute desire to get home again. She wasn’t going to sleep well tonight. She didn’t even know where she was going to sleep, for that matter. She swallowed, picking up a book to prop on her knees, not because she needed to read it – she’d learned all the information in it years ago, and physics didn’t change that quickly; it was new stuff, things that had been discovered while she’d been in Pylea, that she wasn’t up-to-date on yet – but because she could then bury her nose in it and at least attempt to hide the fact that she was a hair’s breadth away from falling apart where she sat.

“Before, I...it’s possible, uh, what I mean to say is,” she amended, after a couple more false starts, “Portals can take people and push ‘em through at the same time. So, between two worlds, the population in each stays the same, barrin’ deaths and births and all that, which really one shouldn’t ‘cause there are about one hundred and thirty four million babies born a year, but that’s not relevant right now ‘cause the point is, each time a person is taken, someone else is thrown through in their place.” She peered at him over her glasses, finding the useless knowledge in her head was actually doing an extremely good job at calming her down; who knew that retaining facts could be so useful. “Could that be happenin’ here? ‘Cause it wouldn’t solve the problem of how we get back to where we came from, since we’d just have to wait for a portal and it’s impossible to predict where they’re gonna be, ‘cause I’ve tried that, and it’d also mean that someone else would still be sucked into this place.” Fred frowned, chewing on the end of one of her pigtails, before laughing nervously, resuming her perusal of the book she’d picked up at random. “I’m talkin’ too much, aren’t I? I do that when I’m scared. Or...generally, actually.”

[THE DOCTOR]

The Doctor pursed his lips as she denied the existence of aliens. "Oh no, no of course not," he agreed, his voice suggesting quite the opposite. After all, by human standards he was one of these nonexistent aliens, and likewise to him, they were the aliens. Not to mention the countless other species he knew from both experience and studies to be out there. He nodded thoughtfully at her next comment. "Oh the government's good at hiding all sorts of things," he agreed. Yes the government didn't mind glossing over a few alien genocides here and there as long as it kept the people happy. “I think we’re from different worlds,” the girl said, and it was the simplicity of how she had said it that had caught his attention. Dr. Magnus had seemed to reject the idea when he'd proposed it and yet here this girl was suggesting it with little surprise. "That doesn't surprise you?" he asked thoughtfully. He cut himself off mid-thought. "Mind you, it's probably true. You're from a parallel Earth if I had to guess: you speak English, but you seem to place a lot of stock behind magic, more than usual for the Earth I'm familiar with." Not only did she speak English, he had begun to suspect there was a translator in this place, but he could detect an American dialect if he wasn't much mistaken. He wouldn't put it passed Americans to have some sort of Wicca cult that believed in magic, but this girl spoke of demons and magic the way he spoke of technology and space. Perhaps he was jumping to conclusions, but his gut instinct had served him well in the past. He smiled as she proceeded to tell him that she was neither alien nor demon, but definitely human. Well that made one of them. "Well, that's a relief," he returned, still grinning.

Perhaps he was only imagining it, but the more they seemed to talk about science, the more -well relaxed might not be the appropriate word for the situation- but calmer certainly, more rational she seemed to be. "You're just brilliant, aren't you?" The Doctor asked fondly. "You're right about the energy, but if it could be compressed properly it could be used for teleportation and of course you'd need to find a decent signal..." She went on to point out more problems with the process and he nodded as if conceding to her point before making somewhat dismissive gestures with his hands. "That can all be sorted out by the right minds in due time." Speaking of time, she was asking if that sort of technology existed now. "Oh no, no," he assured her. "Then again who's to say what time this really is? Time's a tricky thing," he muttered thoughtfully.

As she went on to ask about the other people that may or may not be coming to the area, The Doctor shrugged, his face turning more serious. "I hope not," he murmured. "But something tells me, you're not going to be the last of the people to end up here, and I'm almost never wrong." He arched his eyebrow and tilted his head slightly as she cut herself off and then stammered a bit, almost as if floundering for a way to explain herself. He listened to her ramble, processing all the information she was giving out. When she had finished he offered her a smile. He liked this girl; she was definitely a 'think outside the box' type. "Talking to much?" he repeated. "No, no, you can never talk too much in a new situation. Talking's a the best way for your mind to process things rationally, I find." She had brought up an interesting possibility. If a portal had indeed been opened to transport all these people here, perhaps it was taking others as well. He didn't much like the idea of some strange person winding up in his Tardis. That couldn't be possible though.

He frowned, debating momentarily whether it would be best to let this girl think it as a possibility or to tell her what he already knew. She seemed like a smart enough girl, even if she was a bit unstable emotionally. "From what I can tell," he began. "This place was abandoned before any of this lot started showing up, and no one's gone missing when new arrivals have come." He glanced distractedly at the nearby shelf of books, hardly registering their names as he thought. "I'm not certain, exactly where you from miss. . ." he paused, not knowing her name. "But the same rules that apply to your world may not apply to this one."

[WINIFRED BURKLE]

"That doesn't surprise you?”

“Why would it?” Fred asked, as if the man had wondered whether the knowledge that two plus two equalled four would surprise her. Perhaps Fred had more direct knowledge of the existence of other worlds than most, what with the fact that she’d spent the last five years of her life in one (and not a very nice one at that), but anybody who knew anything about the demon world knew they existed. “Sure, you gotta open a portal first, but there’s all kinds of worlds. Hell dimensions and places where ants rule and—” Fred paused again, frowning, momentarily remembering a world where the primary occupants were green demons, using humans like cattle and killing anyone they wanted, before mentally shaking herself and carrying on with her explanation; Pylea didn’t matter now. This wasn’t there. This guy looked human, for a start, and he seemed more willing to buy into her theories than a lot of people were. He wasn’t looking at her as though she was crazy, anyway, which was more than Fred could say for even her friends, sometimes. She did have a tendency to ramble on forever without ever reaching a point. “—and there’s a whole world without shrimp.” In fact, if she and him were from different worlds, that would make a lot of what he had said make sense; maybe in his world, there were aliens and teleportation was possible without magic (or by using magic that nobody knew about) and people didn’t get fazed by finding themselves in a strange new world. After all, this guy didn’t even seem bothered by the fact, whereas Fred was still curled up in a corner, her hair mostly over her face, using any book within reach to shield herself from the alternate dimension. And yes, the science was calming her, but not that much. Not enough to feel comfortable here; she didn’t know what was going to happen, what it was going to be like once she got out of the library. Not being able to predict that made her very, very nervous; Fred didn’t want to be a slave again.

"You're just brilliant, aren't you? Then again who's to say what time this really is? Time's a tricky thing,"

A nervous smile spread across Fred’s face, the soothing rationality of the science – even if it was theoretical physics that probably wouldn’t be possible for hundreds of years – and the feeling she got from the man that he wasn’t evil or a slave trader or out to eat her or destroy the planet making her a little calmer. Calm enough to have a relatively lucid conversation, and that was a pretty big step. Talking to people was a pretty rare occurrence for her at the moment, at least face-to-face. “I am?” she asked, as if the thought had never struck her; sure, Fred knew her physics. She’d learned everything she could for her three-year grad student programme in a semester, and then some. She had so much useless information in her head that it was a wonder it hadn’t exploded yet, and even when she’d been living in a cave with absolutely nothing, she’d still had her science, even if her brain had been a little addled. But she wasn’t brilliant; she was just...Fred. Crazy old Fred who hid out in her room eating take out all day and writing on the walls, and only scurrying out onto the landing when there was nobody else around, waiting for the day that Angel would come back in the hope that his presence would magically make her come to terms with what had happened. Well, that wasn’t going to happen now; if anything, she’d be even crazier by the time she get back—not only did she have to deal with her time in Pylea, but now she was here in this new world, and she’d have to deal with that too. Why did these things keep happening to her? Fred had been perfectly happy in her room at the Hyperion; all she’d needed was time. And Chinese food and tacos, but mostly time. Now she didn’t have that. “Time can go faster in some dimensions than others,” she said thoughtfully. “Not in—not in all of ‘em, but in some. And since we got taken from different worlds, it’s prob’ly a safe assumption that time flows differently in all of them and wouldn’t be measured by the Gregorian calendar anyway, so we got taken from different times too. Or this place just has no time. Can places be out of time?”

"I'm almost never wrong. Talking's a the best way for your mind to process things rationally, I find."

The idea that more people might end up here was not one that Fred particularly liked the sound of; she hoped it was going to turn out to be one of those theories that would be quickly disproven. Sure, she’d been ripped out of her world, and he’d been ripped out of his – and apparently he’d spoken to some people who didn’t belong to this place either – but surely there had to be a limit. Fred would have preferred that she wasn’t a part of it, but it seemed like she was dimension-hopping girl, and not by choice. This was the second time it had happened now; once would be called bad luck, but twice to the same person was more than just a coincidence, surely? “Poor people, bein’ sucked away from their lives,” Fred said sadly. Apparently, this was her life, being pulled away, and while she didn’t know what she had ever done to deserve it, somehow Fred didn’t count herself among those poor people. She knew what would happen; she’d search for years for a way back, until eventually she was just writing numbers without believing there was a back to go to, and she’d be crazy and alone and sad, until her knight in shining armour showed up; she just had to wait for Angel. “They don’t get that,” she said quietly, surprised that he seemed to understand why she talked so much; she’d had only herself for company for five years, and so it had become a habit, but it was the only way she could really think things through, if she said them aloud. “I say stuff and they look at me funny ‘cause I never quite reach the point even though I mean to, and they don’t say anythin’ ‘cause they’re all real nice, but I know they think I talk too much.”

"This place was abandoned before any of this lot started showing up. But the same rules that apply to your world may not apply to this one."

Well, out went Fred’s theory on two-way portals like the one that had taken her to Pylea and deposited Lorne in her world. “You can get portals that just take you too,” she said slowly, thinking it through with a frown on her face, “but why would anything wanna bring people to a world that’s abandoned?” It didn’t make any sense; if this was an evil plan, Fred thought it was a pretty terrible one. It wasn’t big on the fire and brimstone for one, and Fred thought that was one of those things that had to be there every time something nasty decided it wanted to destroy the world. Or maybe it was just getting rid of the people so it could take over Earth for itself – although that didn’t explain why it was taking people from different worlds, nor why it wasn’t just using this abandoned place as its spawning ground, or whatever it wanted—so that was a theory that needed to be dismissed, certainly. It might have made a little more sense if they’d come from the same dimension, but clearly they hadn’t; there appeared to be similarities between her world and his, from what Fred could tell, but also huge differences. At least the science seemed to be the same, the teleportation issue aside. If that had been different, Fred wouldn’t have been able to have the conversations that she’d had with him and she’d probably be a curled up, crying mess...as opposed to a half-curled up, dry-eyed mess. It was something of an improvement. “Oh, I’m sorry, I was rude. I’m not used to talkin’ to people,” Fred said with a nervous laugh. “I’m Fred. Winifred Burkle.” She didn’t offer him her hand; that would just be something a little too far right now. “Well, sure,” she agreed with a shrug; you couldn’t assume anything in a new world. It was wonder enough that she could breathe and that they were apparently speaking the same language as each other. “It has two suns and you think the physics is gonna be really interesting ‘til you ain’t able to study it anymore, and vampires don’t burn and can see themselves in the mirror. Worlds are always different.”

[THE DOCTOR]

The Doctor couldn't quite stop the smile that tugged at the corner of his lips as she asked the simple question: "why would it?" Why would it surprise her to learn that there were parallel Earths with different rules and societies out there in that undiscovered frontier? He himself wasn't surprised by the possibility, but her reaction almost reminded him of another doctor friend of his. One who had only recently joined them in this place, this 'Terra' as the locals called it. "No, no, of course it wouldn't," he said, the smile stretching across his face. "Nothing surprises you, eh? Smart girl." Oh he definitely liked this girl, he decided. A place ruled by ants? Well she wasn't trying to be funny, he reminded himself. Where she came from, that was probably true. The pause didn't go unnoticed by him. "And what?" he prompted. She supplied an answer in the form of a planet with no shrimp. "I've been to a planet with no shrimp," he offered conversationally. "Lovely place once you get past the smell."

He grinned again as she questioned her being brilliant. "Course you are," he assured her, resting her arms on his knees. As she went on to speak of time he found himself pleasantly perplexed. He hadn't heard someone speak of time and space like this since well since he'd spoken to the Master as Professor Yana. His companions, though capable in a tight spot, were not as intellectually knowledgeable (brilliant) as himself. If he had said something like that he probably would have received a funny look and a "Right Doctor" or "Whatever you say Doctor." "Well, from what I understand, most Earth's ted to go by the Gregorian character, but that's to do with the sun, rotation of the planet and obliquity of the ecliptic. Now go to a planet with twin suns or a red sun and you've got a whole new method of time measurement," he rattled off. "Can places be out of time?” she went on to ask. He frowned for a moment. He knew of a certain place that was out of time forever: locked away where they couldn't hurt anyone or anything ever again. He didn't want to think on Gallifrey just now, so he pushed the thought away. "Yes, I'm afraid places can and do exist out of time," he informed her. "I'm beginning to suspect this place may be one of them."

The Doctor didn't like the idea of people being sucked out of their times and worlds anymore than she did, but this was just the sort of thing he did on a regular basis: sorting out why strange things were happening to people and righting the order of things. It was only a matter of time, pun intended, because if nothing else, that was something he had plenty of. Especially since being dropped off here. There was something in her voice, something to suggest that this was more to her than simply being taken away from whatever place she'd happened to be in her dimension. "Poor people, all right," he agreed. "But if I have any say in things, everyone will be back to their rightful homes in no time." He pursed his lips slightly as she informed him that 'they' didn't get the talking thing. He talked to himself all the time, even if he had someone else in the room with him. It had become a natural thing for him over time. After all, it wasn't as though he always had a traveling companion. He could go for decades without finding someone suitable to come along with him in the Tardis. "Well I don't know who 'they' are, but they've obviously not spent enough time in a room by themselves," he informed her. "Well you don't have to worry about me, you can talk as much as you like."

This one was just full of questions, wasn't she? Well questions were good. Questions kept him from getting complacent in this place. Not to mention his mind was overflowing with his own set of questions. "That is a very good question," he replied in response to her question about the abandoned state of the planet. "Obviously we're being gathered here for something, but what? What could they--" There was no doubt in his mind that at least one sentient being, and a clever one at that, was picking them out. "--Want everyone for?" He was having a hard time finding any specific defining characteristic that linked all of the people in this place together. It was all so random, and not the kind of random he usually enjoyed.

He smiled in acknowledgment of her introduction. He didn't mind the lack of handshaking, he wasn't much of a handshake fellow himself. "Well, Miss Fred Burkle, I'm the Doctor," he informed her. After she mentioned the physics and twin suns, he nodded his head. "Yeah you -- hang on. Sorry, vampires?" he asked, tilting his head. He could allow that magic might exist in this alternate dimension, but vampires, really? Well she might call them vampires, but they were likely some species of alien that resembled the creatures that humans had mislabeled.

[WINIFRED BURKLE]

"Nothing surprises you, eh? Smart girl. And what? I've been to a planet with no shrimp,"

He was wrong about that; there were a lot of things that surprised Fred. The idea that there were other worlds, dimensions different to her own, whether they were parallel Earths or hell dimensions, was not one of those things. She had far too much personal experience of the matter to be unable to believe it, because she knew for certain that there were other worlds now; when she’d been in Pylea, things hadn’t always been so clear, and her world, the world of Los Angeles and physics at UCLA, had been just a story. Now Pylea was a story—she knew it was real, but it was easier, if it wasn’t about her. It was just about a girl, a girl who got lost and was very, very scared, and who got saved by the handsome man on the horse. And that girl might have been her, but it might not have been; Fred wasn’t quite sure about that yet. She’d yet to hear the click in her mind. She was listening very carefully, but it wasn’t there yet; until that happened, she was determined to make it a story. Stories weren’t scary. Reality was, and until she’d come here, Fred had had enough of being scared (at least while she was alone in her room—what happened when she attempted to come out, or people tried to talk to her, was another matter entirely). Now, though, that fear was back. That fear she was going to get lost in this world, and this time, Angel wouldn’t come to save her, because he was out in the Far East somewhere mourning Buffy, who was clearly far more important to him than Fred would ever be. That wasn’t her being self-deprecating, it was just a fact. He loved Buffy, but Fred was just a girl he’d saved; he’d not stayed around long enough to really get to know her...which didn’t help the puppy love she had for him one tiny bit. She shook her head as the man questioned what her ‘and’ had been going to be, refusing to answer that. He didn’t need to know. Nobody needed to know; Fred didn’t talk about it. She wrote it on her walls and tried to figure it out, but for all her words, she never talked about it. “There’s also a world with nothing but shrimp,” she said quietly, as if that was a better alternative. Shrimp probably was better than Pylea; anything was. Maybe even this place.

"Course you are. I'm beginning to suspect this place may be one of them."

Fred shook her head, she wasn’t brilliant. Sure, she understood more physics than most people did in a lifetime, and she had a perfectly valid reason for not remembering things like that, and she could put together ideas that almost nobody would see the pattern between, and do complicated calculations in her head...but she wasn’t brilliant. “I’m not,” she argued, because science didn’t automatically equate to brilliance. She didn’t know how to be in the world – her world, that was – and sarcasm pretty much went straight over her head. Talking to people was something she was terrible at, and Fred was scared all the time...she was just a girl. “I’m just a girl. A crazy girl.” A lost girl, at that. She was so lost, and not just because she’d been sucked through a portal without her consent. Knowledge was grounding, and Fred was so very glad that she had it, but it wasn’t the same thing. She wouldn’t have said she was grounded, because she clearly wasn’t in any way, but it helped a little. “I was thinkin’ about how two suns’d change the physics,” she said, almost sounding excited that he’d brought it up; sure, it would change time measurement, but that could be assumed from the fact that the world wouldn’t be the same size or shape, nor have the same sort of orbit or rotation about its axis as her world did, but it would change everything else, too. “Obviously, gravity’d be different, which would change almost everything, but I was wond’ring whether quantum particles would have the same behaviour as they do in my world. I think they would ‘cause they ain’t affected by gravity, but photons would act differently. I’d’ve studied it, but I didn’t get time. And there prob’ly wasn’t powerful enough technology anyway.” There hadn’t been any technology; if there had been, the calculations that had taken her five years to fathom out (and still been wrong, even then) might have been solved a whole lot quicker. If that had happened, she might never have met Angel, so maybe it was a good thing that the five years had been as long as they had. Well, not good, because Fred would have done anything not to have the memories she had of that place, but...getting to know the people at Angel Investigations was a benefit, definitely. Or it would be, if she managed to have an actual conversation with any of them.

"But if I have any say in things, everyone will be back to their rightful homes in no time. Well I don't know who 'they' are, but they've obviously not spent enough time in a room by themselves,"

“Y-You can make that happen?” Fred asked cautiously, trying not to sound too hopeful, because she knew that if you got up hope, it would just be taken away and smashed into tiny little pieces by some gleeful monster, right in front of your eyes so you could just see everything falling apart. She wanted to go home, and this man wasn’t Angel, but if he could do that, then she was willing to stick around to see. It couldn’t get much worse than this, really, and at least he had a scientific mind; Fred hadn’t realised how much she’d missed talking about physics with other people. Bouncing ideas off her walls was only useful when she managed to write down the right equations in the first place, and the potted plant she’d insisted someone get her was absolutely no use at anything to do with mathematics. Sure, his ideas might be a little weird ‘cause his world was different to hers and clearly had slight differences in the advancement of technology and the like (and if it wasn’t for the fact that Fred was absolutely terrified of other worlds, she really would have liked to investigate that a little further – but she would be perfectly content to just getting back to her room and waiting for Angel to return, like she’d been doing for the last two months), but he seemed extremely intelligent. That didn’t mean anything, not when it came to getting back home, but it was reassuring nonetheless. “They’re my—” Fred began, but she broke off, frowning a little. “Well, I ain’t exactly sure if they’re my friends yet, but they’re real nice to me anyway, even though I spend all my time in my room, and sure, once you spend five years with only yourself for company, you’re gonna start ramblin’ a lot. And y’know, I liked to talk before.”

"Obviously we're being gathered here for something, but what? Well, Miss Fred Burkle, I'm the Doctor. Sorry, vampires?"

Gathered. Fred did not like the sound of that. It implied that there was something bad about to happen, and they were the ingredients for it. “I don’t want there to be an apocalypse!” she said, and if she sounded more than a little panicked about the idea, Fred thought she was entirely justified. Sure, she’d not lived through one, but she’d overheard their stories, and frankly, they sounded like exactly the sort of thing to drive her to living in a cave (instead of going there out of necessity because she was a fugitive from creatures who slaughtered her kind like cattle). All she wanted was a quiet life, now, and for Angel to come back and want to spend time with her and buy her food and make her feel safe. She didn’t feel safe, even with the man who knew science and maybe how to get her home and all sorts of things about this world that Fred didn’t quite think anyone was supposed to know. Maybe it was because he was so calm; anyone who ended up in a strange world unintentionally should have been at least a little worried, but it seemed like he did this all the time. Maybe he did; maybe he spent his entire life going from one place to another, letting people who weren’t supposed to be there back to where they were meant to be...but no, he said that he’d been dragged here too, so that didn’t make sense. Not very much made sense, really. But introductions, she could do that; those things didn’t change. Sure, the phrases might be different, since she doubted that anyone really said ‘how do you do’ anymore, but the meaning was the same. “The Doctor?” she questioned, thoughtfully. “I mean, you bein’ a doctor would explain a lot. Though not if you’re a medical doctor. You ain’t a medical doctor, are you?” If he was, then somewhere along the line, she had got very confused; he was much more like a professor, if you asked Fred. Sure, you couldn’t judge a book by its cover – because this one with the really exciting looking cover that she had in her hands was actually incredibly dull and she’d already spotted three fundamental mistakes and she was barely past the first page – and it wasn’t like she was good at judging people, but that was how she saw him.

“Yeah, vampires,” she said, frowning a little; if he knew about demons, and other worlds, and strange impossible science, surely he knew about vampires? Unless...“Maybe they don’t exist in your world,” she suggested cautiously, because she’d heard of stranger things. Some beings could cross dimensions and have a place in all of them, and some were restricted to just one world. Vampires belonged in this one, just as humans did. “But you know, drinkin’ blood, bumpy face, all grr.” She tried to demonstrate, her hands coming up to make little claws, and then she dropped them back into her lap again, after a momentary pause to push her glasses back up her nose. “And they don’t have souls. ‘Cept Angel. He’s a good vampire ‘cause he got cursed by gypsies.” Her voice took on a slightly dreamy tone as she spoke of Angel, and it was all she could do not to burst into tears because he wasn’t here, and she really wanted him to be. “He’s gonna come and save me. He’ll come.”

[THE DOCTOR]

The Doctor merely nodded in acceptance to her alternative answer. He had a feeling there was something more there. Actually he had ever so slightly more than a feeling, but it wasn't really his business to pry if she didn't want to tell him. Now if this world was ending, then maybe it might be his business to pry. This girl certainly did know a lot about other planets for someone who claimed technology hadn't advanced enough for teleportation. If it hadn't advanced past quantum theories and Einstein's relativity, than it was highly unlikely that they were past the "rocketship to the moon" phase of off world transportation. Of course he kept forgetting to incorporate the fact that this was a parallel Earth and not necessarily everything matched up in chronological order.

The Doctor made a scoffing noise as she denied her own brilliance. Her acceptance of the situation alone was cause enough for him to consider her brilliant. He'd dealt with plenty of people who had gone into denial at the possibility. People who wasted precious time that could be spent solving a situation because they couldn't wrap their head around an idea. This girl seemed to think she was just crazy. "Oh don't be so modest," he replied. "Besides plenty of brilliant people were mad. Lord Byron kept a bear in his dormitory, tried to get him a fellowship, and he was bright as they come. " This girl didn't seem mad to him though, a bit eccentric, certainly, but who was he to judge on that count? She was standoffish too, but she didn't jump out at him as crazy. He'd met that Hatter just the other day: that had been a perfect example of crazy.

She went on to talk about how a planet with two suns might affect the quantum particles of the planet. Now there was a truly scientific mind at work. Forget the lifeforms a planet like that might produce, what about the photons? "You'd be surprised at how similar a binary system planet is to a single star one like Earth," he informed her. "Take Alrai for example, nice little binary system. They've got a planet that could be Earth's twin. Nitrogen rich atmosphere, plants with chlorophyll, the whole lot of it. Course there are some obvious differences in the polarity of the planet, what with the two stars fighting for dominance of gravitational pull and the orbit of the planet is a bit dodgy at times, but the quantum particles are largely the same." From what he was gathering of the general time period she seemed to be from in her parallel Earth she was right about the technology, and the photons, but that was another matter, there simply wouldn't be technology enough for that for a while, unless that was one of the differences in her plane. This whole parallel thing was getting more complicated by the moment.

“Y-You can make that happen?” "Yes," The Doctor assured her. "Well maybe. I can certainly try." It wasn't as if he'd never undertaken something like this before now was it? He'd sent the cybermen packing, jumped to an alternate dimension, blimey he'd even stopped the Sontarans from invading on more than one occasion. He had to be able to find a way off this place, and once he did, he'd sen everyone back on their merry little way and properly explore and analyze this place before following suit. He was letting his mind run away with him he realized; a habit he was likely never going to be rid of. He smiled as she went on about friends and being in a room by yourself for five years . He only just barely resisted the urge to cry out "aha!" Her reply, though fairly casual, was a bit too specific if you asked him, and with her odd behavior and her acceptance before he was willing to bet she'd been in a different dimension for those five years. Of course what that dimension was and who lived there was still anyone's guess, and there was the ever troubling question of how people were getting from one dimension to another; what with him being the only Timelord not trapped in the timelock an all, it should be all but impossible. He smiled tightly and nodded. "Try a couple of decades by yourself," he said. "You'll be performing your own one man play."

“I don’t want there to be an apocalypse!” The Doctor arched an eyebrow at her. "Oi now, who said anything about an apocalypse," he said in as best a reassuring voice he could muster. "Could be they wanted everyone here for a conference." Of course in his experience, it was rarely ever that. He could hope though couldn't he? "Whoever they are, they obviously don't intend to just kill us without warning. They wouldn't have gone to the trouble to bring us here," he mused. He smiled again as she questioned his area of expertise. "No, not a medical doctor exactly. I'm a doctor of all sorts of things really," he explained. Of course he didn't have long to dwell on that because they were back to the vampires.

He furrowed his brow, his eyes narrowing in both confusion and misgiving as she went on to describe the 'vampires' in her world. "Sorry, no don't think we have those," he said shaking his head. "They sound a bit like Krillitanes though; without the big scary wings of course." “And they don’t have souls. ‘Cept Angel. He’s a good vampire ‘cause he got cursed by gypsies.” He nodded slowly, the misgiving still present. The ideas of souls and gypsies and curses were all murky in his mind. Data Ghosts, alien witches and quantum locked statues he could understand, but what she was saying was like Greek to him. Well Greek if he didn't have the Tardis to translate it for him. "Of course he was," he said simply. As she spoke of him coming to rescue her he noticed the change to her voice. Now that he could understand. He smiled, meeting her gaze. "I'm sure he will," he said. Though how this 'Angel' was going to find her in an uncharitable location with portals that seemed fond of picking people at random was a mystery to him.

[WINIFRED BURKLE]

"Oh don't be so modest. Lord Byron kept a bear in his dormitory."

She wasn’t being modest – at least not intentionally; Fred really didn’t think that she was brilliant. She was just an ex-cow slave from Pylea, who’d probably been from Texas before that, if there had been a Texas in Pylea. There had been a Texas in the world that Angel had taken her back to, the world she’d come from, but there probably wasn’t one here, so did she come from there, then, or did her place of origin become her dimension? But her dimension didn’t have a name, so it was rather difficult to pinpoint it exactly. Things needed to have names; people spent ages agonising over the most accurate terminology for something, and if it didn’t have a true name, then it had a designation. So why didn’t the dimensions? Sure, that would mean that somebody had to know there were different ones in the first place, and it couldn’t be done by date of discovery like asteroids or planets were, because that date would be different in all the dimensions and therefore not a global thing (wherein global mean trans-dimensional...this terminology was confusing), but there had to be a way. Then Fred would know exactly where she was from, and exactly where she was, and it would all make sense. Well, partially make sense. She still didn’t get how she’d got here, because there hadn’t been a huge woosh of light and everything in the way there had been when she’d accidentally opened the portal to Pylea. If that had happened, she might have been able to grab hold of something and stop herself getting sucked in; she’d just appeared, and Fred didn’t think it was possible to stop spontaneous dematerialisation and then rematerialisation in a completely different plane. Actually, she didn’t think that was possible, period, but clearly it was. See—there were lots of things she didn’t know. Sure, she could solve equations and she understood string theory and quantum mechanics and engineering...but academics alone, science alone, wasn’t enough to be brilliant. Apparently, you needed...bears? “I don’t have a bear,” she said, sounding confused at how the subject had come into the conversation. “I don’t want one, either.”

Well maybe. I can certainly try."

Try? He was going to try? “You can’t try,” she said, pushing her glasses up her nose and trying – rather unsuccessfully – to hide the faint note of hysteria in her voice. “Get it wrong and you might get stuck forever, or create a black hole, or they might find you and make you forget that you’re a person, ‘stead of just a cow, and you had a whole ‘nother life before that’s just a story now.” Fred picked up a book, flipping through it desperately as though this one might hold the key, and then giving up, pulling more books off the shelf beside her to bury herself under, hiding away from him, from all of this—Fred didn’t want this. She didn’t want to be here, in some library with books that didn’t have the answer. She didn’t like libraries, because portals happened in libraries, and she didn’t like being lost. “Tryin’ doesn’t work. You have to know.” Angel had fully believed that he was going to be able to get her out of Pylea, and she’d believed that he wasn’t going to leave her behind because she wasn’t one of his friends. This man...Fred didn’t know. He wasn’t a champion, saving her from the monsters. He was just a smart – very smart – guy discussing science with her, which was all well and good, because Fred desperately missed having someone on the same wavelength who understood string theory and quantum loop gravity, but right now was really not the best time; it had done a pretty good job at momentarily distracting her, but Fred was pretty sure that she was panicking again. “You can’t—you can’t try to stop the bad people from destroyin’ the world, you have to know you’re doing it. You have to know that, uh, two plus two equals four, ‘least in base ten, a-and you gotta believe that string regularisation is vital to t-duality compaction of extra space dimensions, or you’re never gonna make that tiny breakthrough in quantum particles like you wanted and be a normal physics post-grad student again.” Yup, she was definitely panicking. “You have to know. Please.”

"Try a couple of decades by yourself. Could be they wanted everyone here for a conference.

There was no way in hell – and there was every possibility that this was hell – that Fred was going to spend a couple of decades by herself. Not in this world, because as soon as she figured out how to get back home she was definitely going, and wrapping herself in cotton wool and locking her door and saying as many spells as she could find to make sure that absolutely nothing could get her again. She hadn’t asked to be here in the first place, and so Fred was not going to stay. Well, she didn’t want to stay, but she wasn’t entirely sure how to get out of here either; she wasn’t really good at the whole saving thing, not even when it was herself she was trying to save. “No, no, not a couple of decades. Not one decade. Not any decade,” she said, shaking her head; if he was trying to be reassuring about the fact that her craziness from five years on her own was pretty much normal, then the Doctor wasn’t exactly doing a stellar job at it. All he was doing was making her scared that she was going to be stuck here for a very long time, and Fred couldn’t deal with that. She wasn’t sure that she was really dealing with any of this, actually. She’d hid behind science for a while, but she wasn’t sure that was working anymore; the shock of finding herself in a new dimension was wearing off, and the reality that this wasn’t actually a dream was freaking her out. Or maybe it was a dream; Fred pinched her arm as hard as she could. Nope, definitely not a dream, because that hurt—although she didn’t quite get what the pinching thing was supposed to do. It was one of those accepted norms that she didn’t actually think had any scientific fact behind it; you could feel pain in your dream and it wouldn’t wake you up. She knew that from experience. “There’s always an apocalypse,” she said with a shrug; it was just a fact of life. “This ain’t a dream, so there’ll be an apocalypse ‘round the corner. It ain’t a conference, either.” She didn’t know why she knew that, but Fred was almost certain that whatever reason she might have been here for, it wasn’t to sit and discuss the latest scientific breakthroughs with someone who didn’t believe in vampires. “Why’d they want me for a conference, anyway?”

"I'm sure he will,"

“How will he know where I am?” Fred asked suddenly; if Angel could get here (and if anybody could manage it, it was him; that was something Fred believed absolutely), he still had to find her. She didn’t have a GPS tracer on her, although...that wasn’t actually a bad idea, despite the fact that technology seemed not to work here. That would mean that she could never get lost again, not in her world anyway, and that was all Fred wanted right now; she didn’t want to be lost anymore. “He has to find me, I can’t be lost.” Her voice was quiet now, speaking her thoughts aloud rather than talking directly to the Doctor; it was like this place had thought of a number of the things that terrified Fred, and had dumped them all on top of her at once. Different dimension, check. No way home, check. Tenuous grasp on sanity, check. Lost, check, no home, also check. Nobody here to save her, yet another check. At least there weren’t any vampires trying to kill her, although if people were being snatched from all kinds of worlds, sooner or later, somebody was going to come through who did want other people dead; it was just a matter of statistics. Fred didn’t know the exact ratio of good to evil people, because it wasn’t something that could be easily categorised, but she did know that there were a hell of a lot of things out there that wanted nothing more than to eat you for dinner and then destroy the world for dessert. Okay, so most of them weren’t technically people, but she didn’t believe the universe, or fate, or the Powers That Be really cared about technicalities like that. “He has to know.” Last time, it had just been pure chance that Angel had saved her from the monsters; Fred wasn’t naïve enough to believe that he’d come to Pylea purely to look for her, and if they hadn’t made him be the one to execute her, perhaps he never would have found her and whisked her away and taken her home. Home, where she wanted to be right now. But she couldn’t leave things to chance this time; lightning did strike in the same place twice, with a probability of about one in three thousand (well, technically that was the probability of being struck, but again, technicalities weren’t exactly important right now), but those were huge odds, and there was probably a whole world out there. Angel had to be able to find her.

“I need a pen!” she said, scrambling to her feet, causing the books that had been half-burying her to crash onto the floor. Fred looked around, patting her pockets to try and find one, but coming up empty. Why didn’t she have a pen? She always had one on her, just in case. Fred blinked away the tears that filled her eyes, because she was not weak; she might have been lost, but crying meant you’d given up, and she hadn’t – she hadn’t given up on Angel. Not yet. Not ever; if she had to wait five years, again, or ten, Fred believed he would come for her. “He needs a map. X marks the spot, and I’ll stay here and be an X until he comes. I’ll hide...I’m good at hidin’.” There wasn’t a pen anywhere. Why not – this was a library, they were supposed to have pens! And stupidly, that was what tipped her over the edge; Fred burst into tears, standing almost in shock for a moment, before turning away from the Doctor and hiding her face against the wall, like a naughty child in ‘time out’, her shoulders shaking. “Why aren’t there any pens?” she asked, her voice thick with tears and muffled from her position against the wall. “Angel needs me to write him a map.”

[THE DOCTOR]

The Doctor could see this girl's mind was running circles 'round her. He also could see a fair part of it was due to his musings and thus he didn't pay it much mind. In his experience the people he met rarely could keep up with him once he was on a roll or started mentioning bears and Lord Byron. Seeing as how he had managed to do both in a fairly short time and she already seemed to be a bit on edge, he was surprised she was coping so well. He smiled as she informed him she neither had a bear nor wanted one. "Course you don't," he agreed. "Bears are impossible to house train and their table manners are rubbish."

His brow furrowed ever so slightly as she said he couldn't try. "Try is all we can do," he countered. All he ever did was try because even if the odds seemed impossible, even if they were facing certain death, the only thing left was to try. It helped that he'd seen enough in his extensive lifetime to make his "tries" a lot more like certainties, but in reality he was never quite sure if his plans and idea were anything more than just that. Not until he executed them at any rate. She seemed to have some more oddly specific examples at the ready for what could happen in the event of failure. He propped his right elbow on his knee, pointing his finger thoughtfully at her. "But if you get it right," he said. "Then you might just get yourself out of a sticky situation, eh?" She went on about how he had to know or else apparently it meant the end of humanity or something equally unpleasant in her world. "No one can know for certain," he informed her. "How are you going to figure out if something works if don't try it out, anyway?"

He didn't seem to be doing so well at the "reassuring the girl who seemed distressed" thing. She was not pleased to hear that talking a lot was perfectly normal if you were left by yourself for five years. He had spent full decades by himself, talking to the Tardis, talking to himself and anyone else he happened to meet at any given time. He considered himself normal, well perhaps not normal, but certainly sane at least. "No, not a clever young girl like you," he agreed. "I don't imagine you'll ever have to spend a decade alone." He certainly hoped so for her sake. The human mind wasn't meant to be left alone for such a long time. That was essentially an eighth of their lifespan. It was much easier for someone like him, with a lifespan easily over 10 times that of a human to go for years at a time without someone to hold a decent conversation with. Of course that didn't make it easy, only easier. He merely nodded s she went on to take about how an apocalypse always ready to happen. If she only knew how right she was. There was almost literally an apocalypse ready to happen in every time period.

He tilted his head slightly in confusion as she began to panic. Only she wasn't panicking like anyone he'd ever met. She needed this angel bloke to find her it seemed, and he didn't have the hearts to tell her that the likelihood of him actually finding her was very slim if not impossible. Before he could think of what to say, she was asking for a pen. To be fair, pleading was more the word for what she was doing. He had seen his share of desperate people over the years, but that didn't make watching a girl close to tears any easier. As the tears finally did come, he reached out his hand to put on her shoulder, reaching into a pocket inside his jacket for what she seemed to need. "Oi," he said softly, brushing aside his screwdriver and extracting a pen. "There we go." He wonder somewhat idly if this made him an enabler, but pushed the thought aside. "You can draw this Angel fellow a map, but I don't think hiding here is the best way to wait for him," he said.

[WINIFRED BURKLE]

"Try is all we can do,"

Didn’t he understand? Didn’t he see that if you tried, and failed, then you were so much worse off than you had been before? “Try and try and try, for five years, and it still gets you nowhere, ‘cause you don’t know,” she muttered, desperately; if Angel was here, he would know. And if he didn’t know, he would tell her that he did, just so she felt reassured. He always knew what to say to make her feel better, and she missed that; why wouldn’t the Doctor do that? Why couldn’t he just say, ‘yes, Fred, I know, and I know we’re all going to be okay’? Was it really so difficult? “And you don’t give up, but it’s better if you know. You have to know.” It was as simple as that, as far as Fred was concerned; if the Doctor wanted to get them out of there, then he had to know what he was doing, otherwise his plan would be unexecutable. It shook your belief, if you were only trying, and if you didn’t believe in yourself, in what you were doing, then what did you have left? Fred didn’t know; she didn’t know anything, because it seemed like, yet again, she was left with nothing. Nobody she trusted, nothing that seemed familiar or normal to her—it was horrible. Was she really such a bad person that the Powers That Be had decided to make this happen to her twice? Fred didn’t think she’d deserved that.

"I don't imagine you'll ever have to spend a decade alone."

Fred didn’t ever want to be alone again; it was bad enough being here, because it was another dimension and she had – quite understandably – a fear of them, so scared that she was going to get lost someplace for a fair chunk of her life again, but she was here without anybody she knew, and that made it a hundred times worse. Sure, the Doctor seemed nice, and were it any other time in the world she was supposed to be in, she probably would have enjoyed his company because he seemed to have a knowledge of physics far greater than anyone at Angel Investigations did, and she was almost sad that she wasn’t going to get a chance to really talk to someone who was on her wavelength about science, but there were far more important things at hand, like the fact that she was stuck in an alternate dimension, again, with nobody around. Nobody that she knew, anyway. “Not a decade,” she agreed, as calmly as she could manage, and though it might not have been particularly so to anyone else, Fred thought that she was doing a pretty good job, given the circumstances. “Not half a decade, again, or a quarter of a decade, or an eighth, or anything.” She wasn’t going to spend time alone...and it wasn’t alone, up in her room. She could hear them talking below through the floor, the sound of their voices muffled so that she couldn’t hear the individual words, and she could feel the vibrations when they came up the stairs, and sometimes she even talked to them through her door, and had a pretty good conversation—and she knew she wasn’t alone. Maybe, when she got back (and it was a ‘when’, not an ‘if’, because it had to be a ‘when’), she would be able to spend time actually with them, because this place had reminded her just how much she never wanted to be alone again. Bad things happened when you were left alone.

"There we go."

A pen, he’d given her a pen. Fred took it shakily, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, still angry at the stupid library for not having any in the first place, when it was supposed to because it was a library and people came here to work, but she clutched the pen tightly in her hand, stepping backwards a little, almost tripping over some of the books. But she didn’t care about that; as long as she didn’t fall over, Fred didn’t care if she twisted her ankle or tore a page or anything; Angel had to find her. That was the only thing that mattered here, because without Angel, she was nothing. She’d just be a lost little girl again, and she couldn’t be that, because he had made her feel found. And sure, he wasn’t around right now, but she still had a place, and a room, and people who came and talked to her through her door and made sure that she had things to eat, even if she would only come out when they had gone away and would never look them in the eye. She had been found, and given a name and the beginnings of a life again, and Fred wasn’t going to lose that because some horrible thing had decided to pull her through to another dimension. She started drawing on the wall, looking around her at the library to try and get the scale right, a map of what little of the street she had seen, as large as she could make it, a huge X where the library was. “Winifred Louise Burkle,” she muttered under her breath, content that her map was adequate enough and crouching down to write this underneath, so that it was there in words in case she ever forgot and didn’t know who she was anymore and thought it was just a story about some girl who kinda looked like her without the crazy hair and with clothes instead of a sack. Underneath her name, she wrote her date of birth, speaking aloud as she wrote. “Born October twelfth, 1978 in Dallas, Texas, USA, Earth. Lives in Los Angeles.” There, she couldn’t forget now. Even if she was lost and they made her crazy forever and Angel didn’t come for decades and decades, Fred wouldn’t forget who she was again. She knelt again, holding the pen tightly; she hoped she wasn’t expected to give it back, because she didn’t think she would be able to. She stared at the words, and at the map, and then she began writing again, neat lines of the same thing over and over: ‘Wait, wait, wait. Angel will come, Angel will come, Angel will come.’

I don't think hiding here is the best way to wait for him,"

She jumped as the man spoke again, the pen making a wibbly line halfway through a word on the wall; Fred had forgotten that he was here, she’d been so engrossed in writing, and it wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear. Couldn’t he say good thing, reassuring things, like people who were trying to be reassuring were supposed to? Because he wasn’t being particularly helpful right now, although she was extremely grateful for the pen. “I have to hide!” she said, because didn’t he understand? Didn’t he get that if she hadn’t hidden, she would have had her head chopped off by now and she wouldn’t even be here? “I hide, Angel knows I hide.” He knew her, even if he’d been gone recently; he would look in all the dark places, the small holes, calling her name, and eventually he’d find her and she’d be able to wrap her arms around him and never let go, ever, and he would take her home and she’d be safe and she probably wouldn’t let him out of her sight for a month, just in case. What was the Doctor suggesting, anyway—that she go outside? “Have to stay here, it’s safe here!” Fred knew she sounded hysterical, but she couldn’t help it; he didn’t understand just how important it was for her to stay hidden, to stay safe, to wait and wait and not let anything hurt her. “You go outside and they’ll take you and they’ll make you a slave and forget your name and where you come from and I can’t forget ‘cause I only just remembered again.” She knew who she was now, and she wasn’t going to do anything that might harm that, because she didn’t want to be lost. No more than she already was. “There’re monsters outside. I ain’t going nowhere near the monsters!”