Merry christmas hope you got whatever you wished for
For me, it was mine alienware best gift I was ever given fr fr my old laptop barely could barely use Google on. That shit took up 80% of my CPU. I was in hell
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The Engineer didn't sleep.
She lay on the narrow couch in the borrowed flat—adjacent to the UNIT safehouse, but not inside the perimeter—staring at the ceiling as if it had personally offended her. The city hummed through the walls: power lines, footsteps, and the ticking of time, obnoxiously loud when you knew how arbitrary it was.
Meanwhile, her brain was doing parkour. The Engineer hadn't stopped thinking for ten minutes. Not because she was in a hurry, but because lying still allowed her thoughts to pile up too quickly. Her mind was already elsewhere.
UNIT tracked me off a single correction pulse. Bad. Not catastrophic. Not unexpected. But bad.
Okay. Problems. List. Go.
UNIT had her artron signature. Not hostile. Not dumb. Chill, even. Which somehow made it worse. Chill people remembered things. Chill people kept files. Chill people eventually asked for favors.
She rolled onto her side, fingers drumming a rapid rhythm against the couch cushion. "Nope. Not happening. I'm not becoming the glowing beacon of 'please ask the Time Lady.' Hard pass."
Her Omni-Tool flickered to life at her wrist, projecting thin, pale schematics that hovered over her forearm like nervous thoughts made visible.
Defense against scans. Cloaking. jamming. "Okay," she whispered, sitting up suddenly, her eyes bright. "What if I don't hide the signal? What if I ruin it?"
She started pacing quickly, slapping the floor. "Artron energy—how do I block that without a TARDIS? So what if I introduce noise? Not random noise. Convincing noise."
She waved her hand, sketching equations in the air. "Temporal dithering. Micro phase-skips. Fractional second offsets layered so any scan gets ten different timestamps and believes none of them." Her grin flashed sharp and delighted. "When UNIT tries to lock on, there are no alarms. No spikes. Just… static, similar to that Spiderman suit big show or whatever it's called."
The Omni-Tool chimed softly, saving the plans.
From the kitchenette, Nash cleared his throat. "You're smiling like that's either very good news or very bad news."
The engineer spun around. "Both! Hi!"
Nash flinched slightly. Lira, seated at the small table with a mug she hadn't touched in ten minutes, just raised an eyebrow.
"You haven't blinked in a while," Lira noted.
"I blinked," the Engineer said quickly. "Just… asynchronously or when i remember to."
She zipped back to pacing, her hands moving as if conducting an orchestra only she could hear. "Okay, so defense layer one: temporal noise injection. Layer two: perceptual dampening. Not psychic— don't touch brains most of time, that's rude bu People look at me and subconsciously decide I'm not the most important thing in the room.
Nash frowned. "That sounds dangerously close to mind control."
"Pfft, no," she said, waving it off. "It's statistics. Everyone already does it. I just encourage the curve."
Lira leaned forward. "And layer three?"
The Engineer paused, thought, then her expression turned serious for half a heartbeat. "…False depth."
They waited.
"If someone really pushes," she continued, quieter now, "they don't find me. They find a shell. A convincing, boring, human-looking temporal residue that leads nowhere—like knocking on a door and realizing it was just a painting of a door."
She shrugged, then immediately perked back up. "Okay! Questions! You both had questions. You were doing the 'we are politely not freaking out' faces."
Lira snorted despite herself. "Alright. Space and time. Explain it like we're not idiots but also not… you."
The Engineer beamed. "Perfect! Love explanations."
She hopped up onto the back of the couch, crouching like an excited bird. "Okay. Space and time are the same thing, pretending to be different so your brain doesn't melt. Space is where. Time is when. Spacetime is why this instead of that."
Nash blinked. "That did not help."
"Okay, okay, okay, imagine a loaf of bread," she said immediately. "Classic. Every slice is a moment. You live on one slice. You think the loaf only exists as slices pass. But I can see the loaf."
Lira tilted her head. "And you can… move between slices?"
"Sort of! I can also toast specific bits, fold slices together, remove mold before it spreads—"
Nash held up a hand. "Please don't toast history."
She grinned. "No promises."
Lira watched her carefully. "And magic?"
The Engineer's grin softened but didn't fade. "Magic is what happens when the loaf remembers it used to be dough and try to go back fighting if need."
They stared.
She sighed. "Right. Short version: before Time Lords, reality allowed—basically allowed everything. Stories mattered more than rules. Magic was the universe saying, 'Sure, why not?' Then my people said 'absolutely not' and hammered everything into laws."
Nash frowned. "And the Carnival Queen?"
The Engineer's energy stuttered—but only for a fraction of a second. "She's… the part that got thrown out," she said lightly. "The 'why not' with nowhere to go."
Lira's voice was quiet. "And you?"
The Engineer hopped down from the couch, suddenly very still. "I'm new," she said. "Which means I'm messy. Which means compared to my people of time … means I'm stuck here." Then, like flipping a switch, her brightness returned.
"Which is FINE," she added quickly. "Actually great. Gives me options. And nightmares of my future. But mostly options."
She tapped her Omni-Tool, schematics rearranging rapidly. "Once I finish the scan countermeasures, UNIT loses me unless I want to be found. Then I focus on adaptive defenses. Anti-chaos fields that don't suppress everything. Selective enforcement of reality."
Nash whistled softly. "You make it sound like software updates."
"It is!" she said cheerfully. "The universe just has terrible documentation."
Lira stood, finally sipping her cold coffee. "You're not scared."
The Engineer paused. Consider the question honestly.
"I am," she said. "I just work better like this."
She gestured vaguely at herself—bright-eyed, restless, alive with ideas.
"Fear means I pay attention," she continued. "Hyperfocus is just panic wearing a lab coat."
Nash laughed quietly.
The Engineer's Omni-Tool pulsed once—new subroutines compiling, defenses taking shape.
Outside, London kept breathing. UNIT kept watching—finding nothing but static and false doors. And somewhere beyond sense and reason, something old and delighted felt her sharpen.
She clapped her hands together once.
"Okay," she said, grinning. "Next problem."
The shift happened without warning. There was no portal, no flash of light, and no dramatic tearing of space. One moment, they were walking down a quiet London street, tension clinging to them like smoke. The next moment, the sky was on fire. Not metaphorically, actually on fire. The Engineer staggered as gravity lurched sideways, her boots skidding across something that was no longer pavement. The air screamed; there was no better word for it. A constant shriek layered beneath every sound, like reality itself was being dragged across broken glass.
"motherfucker!!!."
Nash hit the ground hard, rolling instinctively. "What the hell—?!" Lira didn't answer. She couldn't. Her mouth was open, eyes wide, magic wards flaring on reflex before being crushed flat like paper under a boot. The Engineer froze not because she didn't know what to do, but because she knew exactly where they were.
The sky burned red, orange, and sickly violet, split by black fractures that pulsed like open wounds. Shapes moved within them, massive, impossible silhouettes phasing in and out of existence. Explosions blossomed without sound, then detonated with time-delayed thunder that rattled their bones. Above them, a Dalek fleet hung in the air, war-scarred, bristling with weapons that bent causality around their barrels. Below them, the ground was not ground. It was a battlefield layered over itself a thousand times, trenches overlapping trenches, ruins stacked atop ruins from different moments, different versions of the same destruction. Corpses flickered in and out of existence as timelines corrected, erased, and rewrote themselves.
The Engineer's breath hitched. "No," she whispered. Her heart pounded so hard it hurt. "No, no, no, no, she didn't." Nash scrambled to his feet. "Engineer! Where are we?!"
She didn't answer because she couldn't stop staring. In the distance, too far and too close at the same time, something moved. A blue shape burned its way through the chaos, not flying so much as forcing itself forward. Around it, Daleks died not exploding, not crashing, simply ending, erased mid-motion as if they had never existed.
And then there was a figure standing amid the storm. Tall, wrapped in armor that looked grown rather than built. A presence that made the battlefield bend subtly toward him.
The Doctor of War. The Engineer's stomach dropped. Her human memories surged forward, YouTube documentaries, novels, and fan discussions she'd read late at night. Half-myths. Half-recons it what you get in a universe that treats time and space like toys. All worse than the truth. The Doctor who stopped running. The Doctor who picked a side. The Doctor, The Butcher of Skull Moon.
The engineer starts panicking hard, "This is impossible, the war was time lock nothing can get in or out without some serious power
"I—I know this," she breathed. Lira grabbed her arm. "Engineer, talk to me!" The Engineer flinched at the touch as if burned. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused. "This is the Time War," she said, her voice thin. "Midpoint. Before the end. Before everything broke completely."
Nash swore under his breath. "Is this war that bad?"
"It is," she snapped, then immediately regretted it. She forced herself to breathe. "It is here." A shockwave tore across the battlefield, flattening debris and knocking Nash back a step. Lira barely stayed upright, clinging to the Engineer instinctively. "This place kills Time Lords," the Engineer said quietly. "It kills them permanently. Even regeneration doesn't save you here."
Fear finally cracked through her composure. Not panic. Not hysteria. Real, cold fear. "I'm too young of a time lord to fight this," she whispered. "I don't belong here.
Something laughed not out loud, but in the fabric of the moment. A ripple passed through the air, subtle but unmistakable. Colors are oversaturated for half a second. Sounds bent into carnival-like echoes before snapping back. The Engineer felt it was like her eyes had just been flash-banged. "...She did this," she said.
Nash looked around wildly. "Who?!"
The Engineer swallowed. "The Carnival Queen, but where is she getting the power to rip a hole into the time war? Not even the Time Lords could do it." The laughter came again closer this time. A presence coalesced just at the edge of perception, like someone standing behind a curtain, watching with delighted curiosity.
"Oh, a voice hummed, warm and playful and deeply wrong. You weren't supposed to be this scared. This is history, darling. Art." The Engineer clenched her fists. "You dragged us here," she said aloud, her voice shaking despite her efforts. "This is genocide. This is the worst moment in existence."
Yet the Carnival Queen replied lightly, "Magic was never more alive." The battlefield shifted. A Dalek screamed as reality folded inward and swallowed it whole. Somewhere, a Time Lord died screaming during their regeneration, became to unsable.
Lira was pale. "Engineer… I can't feel my magic."
"You shouldn't," the Engineer said tightly. "It doesn't survive here unless it's weaponized."
Nash looked at her. "Can we leave?"
The Engineer hesitated. And that hesitation terrified her. "...Yes," she said finally. "But not cleanly."
The Doctor of War turned not directly toward them, but near them. The Engineer felt his gaze brush past her like the shadow of a blade. Her heart hammered. If he looks directly at me, she thought, I don't know what will happen.
The Carnival Queen's voice softened. "See? You belong to both worlds."
"No, I'm to survive, this then, I'm going to make you suffer, the Engineer whispered.
She planted her feet.
Reality bent around her.
Not violently.
Firmly.
She reached inward to the part of herself that corrected equations, that forced laws to behave. She wrapped it around Nash and Lira like armor.
"We're leaving," she said. "Now."
The Queen laughed again—amused, not angry.
"Run along then, little Engineer. But remember… You survived the Time War."
The battlefield tore sideways.
And somewhere far away, the Carnival Queen smiled because the game had finally begun.