Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was no light.

Not the gentle, warm dark of closed eyes. Not the silver-strewn infinity of a starless night. This was a hungry, dark, absolute, all-consuming, pressing in like the weight of an ocean with no surface to swim toward.

I wasn't sure if I still had a body. I tried to breathe and got nothing. Tried to move and got nothing. Tried to scream… and got nothing.

The thought came slowly, sluggish as if pushing through molasses:

I'm dead.

Which was… fine? Maybe? I wasn't panicking, which probably meant shock had claimed me before death had. I could remember… pieces. The flash of something impossibly bright, the sound of reality cracking like glass, and then—nothing.

I drifted. Time, if it still existed here, stretched and folded over itself until seconds and centuries were meaningless.

Somewhere in that endless night, a voice spoke.

[System initializing… Please remain existential.]

I blinked mentally because blinking physically wasn't an option, and the void rippled like someone had just dropped a pebble into it. The words didn't echo. They existed all at once, imprinted directly into whatever part of me was still "me."

"Uh… hi?"

[Hello, New User.]

The voice was feminine, calm, but with a faint hum behind it like gears turning just beneath the words.

"'User'? I don't remember… signing up for anything."

[You didn't. This system was assigned to you. Creator Authorization Level: Infinity.]

"Right. And who's the 'creator'?"

[Data classified.]

Suspicious! Also, annoyingly intriguing.

"Okay, mystery program, what exactly are you?"

[Designation: GAMER SYSTEM v.Ω. An adaptive life-optimization and survival interface. Primary function: facilitate your continued existence in a hostile multiversal environment while enabling exponential skill growth and temporal stability.]

That… was a lot of words. I picked out the important ones: "survival," "exponential," and "multiversal."

"So you're… a video game character creator and leveling system… for real life?"

[Analogy: 72% accurate. Adjusted definition: I am your system. You are my user. I will ensure you not only survive, but thrive.]

I should have been freaking out. Instead, there was a low hum in my chest — excitement, anticipation. This was ridiculous, impossible, incredible.

"Alright. Let's pretend I believe you. What's step one?"

[Step One: Reincarnation. Your previous life's data core — i.e., your consciousness, memories, and knowledge — has been preserved. Physical form: irretrievable. However, all stored educational, cultural, and experiential data has been successfully archived for reapplication.]

"So… I keep my schooling, my books, all the TV and pop culture I ever consumed?"

[Correct. You retain all conceptual and informational data from your previous universe. Emotional attachments, personality drivers, and intellectual frameworks remain intact.]

I grinned or would have, if I had a face. "Okay, that's… actually amazing. Where's the catch?"

[Catch: You must choose a new existence. The System requires a host to be anchored to a physical and temporal plane. Without selection, you will dissolve into void entropy within projected 78.21 hours, which is pretty impressive for a low-dimensional being.]

There it was. Always a timer. Always a choice.

[Step Two: World Selection.]

And then, without fanfare, the void lit up.

Not with light, not exactly, but with windows. Hundreds. Thousands. They floated in all directions, each showing flickers of impossible worlds.
Some were familiar — blue police boxes whirring through vortexes, men and women with alien faces staring at the stars. Others were alien to even me — cities built upside-down in orbit around black holes, forests lit by lightning that never touched the ground, sprawling metropolises crawling on the backs of titanic beasts.

[Instruction: You may select your destination reality. Data for each will be provided, including environmental hazards, notable factions, dominant threats, and narrative resonance rating.]

"Narrative resonance rating?"

[How much chaos, conflict, and… entertainment… your existence will produce.]

The way she paused on "entertainment" made me uneasy.

[You may browse worlds in any order. Caution: once confirmed, transfer is irreversible.]

The void warped again. A circle of lights spun into being around her, each a glowing orb, each carrying something. Memories? Histories? Lives? She wasn't sure, but she felt the weight of them like anchors.

[Step One: Select Universe.]

Her breath hitched — if she had lungs, they would've been hyperventilating.

[Candidate Universes Available.]
[Marvel] [DC] [Warhammer 40k] [Doctor Who: Expanded Multiverse] [Fate/Type-Moon] …]

"...Oh, you're kidding. I get to pick?

[Affirmative.]

She didn't hesitate. "Doctor Who. No contest. Expanded universe, of course. None of that watered-down TV-only stuff. Give me the Time War drama, the books, the Big Finish, the comics, the works."

The lights shifted, the others fading until one sphere pulsed brighter than the rest. The weight of infinite time, paradoxes, Daleks, Time Lords, and all the messy beauty of that universe pressed against her soul.

[Confirmed.]
[Universe: Doctor Who EU]
[Step Two: Define Time Parameters.]

"Oh, this is gonna be fun." She cracked a grin that didn't exist.

:

World: Gallifrey Adjacent – The Prime Spiral

Primary Setting: Doctor Who continuum variant, post-Time War fracture.

Primary Factions: Surviving Gallifreyans, Dalek Remnants, Temporal Nomads, "Chaos Entities."

Main Enemy Archetypes: Temporal predators, rogue Time Lords, universe-scale anomalies.

Notable Nemesis Type: The Oncoming Storm — singular fixed-point individual capable of multiverse-scale disruption (Doctor variant).

Environmental Hazard Level: Extreme. Timeline instability index at 83%.

Narrative Resonance: 4/5 ("high drama, high stakes, minimal downtime").

Another window slid into view, this one vibrating faintly, colors slightly unstable.

World: Gallifrey Adjacent – War of Chaos and Time

Primary Setting: Same base as above, but dominated by two apex entities:

The Engineer of Time — architect of stability, master of Death's touch.

The Lady of Chaos — avatar of paradoxes, architect of instability.

Primary Conflict: Eternal cold war between order and chaos, often erupting into direct temporal warfare.

Main Enemy Archetypes: Living paradoxes, weaponized timelines, sentient warships.

Hazard Level: Insane. Most native inhabitants die before achieving narrative relevance.

Narrative Resonance: 6/5 ("will almost certainly kill you, but it'll be interesting Death").

"…These are actual choices?" she asked.

[Correct. You may also view alt universes, different dimensions, and hybrid universes. However, given your retained knowledge base, the prime Doctor Who continuum presents the highest potential for systemic growth and narrative yield.]

She sounded pleased, which made me suspicious again.

"Alright. I'll look. But before I pick, what about… character customization? If I'm doing this, I'm not going in as some random bystander."

[Step Three: Character Form & Trait Selection.]

The world-windows folded away, replaced by a sprawling, spiraling menu made of floating script and symbols I somehow understood. With thousands of orbs with images

The System's voice purred in her head:

"Now that you've seen the basics… let's expand. Remember, every choice comes with its enemies. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Choose wisely, little Chrono-seed."

Race Options – Overview

(Select one. Each race provides unique perks and drawbacks.)

 

The next orb twisted, revealing the iconic shape of a Dalek casing — but then the system peeled it back, revealing the disgusting existence: a mutated Kaled lump of flesh, bristling with sensory tendrils, eyes like festering pearls.

[Perks – Dalek]

Living Tank: Encased in nearly indestructible battle armor. Flight, death ray, shielding included.

Hive Consciousness: Connection to the Dalek Pathweb — infinite tactical knowledge and coordination.

Ruthless Logic: No hesitation. Every action is calculated toward victory.

Survivor's Instinct: Daleks are notoriously hard to kill; even the flesh can persist if the casing is destroyed.

 

[Advanced Perks]

Dalek Prime Casing: Upgrade into a reality-warping emperor form.

Conceptual Existence: Become an idea of hatred given form. Even if destroyed, you linger in collective thought.

 

[Drawbacks]

Nemesis: Time Lords (Absolute). The oncoming storm, the mad dogs of

Isolation: Almost all species view Daleks as abominations. Zero diplomacy.

Mutation Drift: Over time, the Dalek body mutates further, requiring upkeep or upgrades.

 

( Literally Anything With a Pulse Will Gun You Down :p)

She wrinkled her nose. "Yeah, hard pass. I don't want to wake up looking like calamari stuffed in a pepper shaker."

An orb pulsed silver. A humanoid form appeared, armored in steel, eyes hollow.

[Perks – Cyberman]

Cybernetic Immortality: Organic decay halted, consciousness uploaded into a cyber-frame.

Upgrades: Can continuously self-modify with stolen tech.

Network Intelligence: Shared tactical awareness with nearby Cyber units.

Superior Physiology: Enhanced strength, endurance, stamina.

 

[Advanced Perks]

Cyber-Controller: Direct hive control over thousands of units.

Post-Human Singularity: Ascend into digital godhood across galaxies.

 

[Drawbacks]

Nemesis: Humanity.

Loss of Self: Emotions suppressed, individuality eroded unless fought against.

Vulnerability: Gold, specific sonic disruptions, and emotional resonance are weaknesses.
The Lady of Chaos(Rogue Time Lord)

 

"Yikes," she muttered. "No thanks, I like having emotions. And anger issues."

4. Eternals – "The Living Concepts"

Another orb flared — showing towering, robed figures with starfire for eyes. These weren't "races" so much as personifications, like gods of thought.

[Perks – Eternal]

Concept Embodiment: Anchor yourself to a universal concept (Hope, Chaos, Death, etc.).

Immortality: You exist as long as your concept is acknowledged.

Reality Manipulation: Your will shapes your domain.

 

[Drawbacks]

Nemesis: Guardians, Time Lords.

Dependency: Lose strength if your concept wanes.

Isolation: Mortals cannot easily relate to you.You have no imagination, which leads to extreme boredom

 

"…So, literally an Elden Ring final boss. Tempting, but that boredom is making me not want to pick this."

5. Great Vampire – "The Hunger of Stars"

The orb oozed black-red light, forming a monstrous, bat-winged predator with teeth like swords.

[Perks – Great Vampire]

Immortality via Blood: Feed on life force to sustain endless existence.

Eldritch Physiology: Superhuman speed, strength, and regeneration.

Dark Majesty: Intimidating psychic aura over mortals.

 

[Advanced Perks]

Star Feaster: Drain entire worlds to ascend into kaiju form.

 

[Drawbacks]

Nemesis: Time Lords (Destroyed your kind). The Mad Dogs of Gallifrey

Blood Dependency: Starvation causes madness.

Hunted: Survivors are exterminated on sight.

 

She grimaced. "Wow, literal space Dracula. Hard pass unless I wanna cosplay Castlevania forever."

6. Magic-Born – "The Arcane Heirs"

The orb cracked, and light spilled out, glowing differently. Not science. Not math. Magic. It pulsed like an old heartbeat rediscovered.

[Perks – Magic-Born]

Arcane Flow: Access to spells and rituals predating Gallifreyan science.

Reality Weaving: Can bend physical laws with sufficient energy and will.

Hybrid Potential: Magic synergizes with technology, creating technomancy.

 

Advanced Perks

Archmage of Paradox: Rewrite local laws of physics temporarily.

Godspeaker: Directly interact with higher-dimensional beings on equal terms.

 

[Drawbacks]

Nemesis: Time Lords (They purged magic). Great Old Ones

Chaos Magnet: Magic attracts entities outside normal time.

Exhaustion: Overuse burns your soul-thread.

 

Her grin widened. "Ohhh, now we're talking. Magic and tech? That's spicy. I could try to make a magic Iron Man armor."

____________________________________________________________________

7. Nestene Consciousness

The orb bubbled like molten plastic.

Core Perks:

Plastic Manipulation: Control, animate, and reshape plastics and polymers.

Distributed Lifeform: No true central body; can spread across worlds.

Survivor Instinct: Extreme adaptability in hostile environments.

Advanced Perks (Peak):

Macro-Nestene: Can control entire planetary ecosystems of plastic.

Bio-Polymer Evolution: Create new hybrid lifeforms from plastic and flesh.

Drawbacks:

Dependency: Requires energy feeds (normally radiation).

Material Limitation: Weak in worlds without plastics.

Nemesis: Time Lords, Fire, the Auton Hunters.

She wrinkled her nose. "Imagine dying from a plastic fork. Hard pass."

Human (Enhanced): Fragile, short-lived, but adaptable. With perks in ingenuity, compassion, and "plot armor." Nemesis: The universe itself — they break easily, yet keep getting back up.

 

She rolled her eyes, "Why would I be a human again? That's so boring! And it sucks."

 

The next orb comes to me. The orb brightened, and the first resolved into something terrifyingly familiar.

Time Lord – "The Children of Time"

Classification: Higher-dimensional humanoids

The image shifted to reveal… not a human figure. Not exactly. What she saw made her essence recoil and thrill at once.

It was humanoid, yes — tall, robed in crimson, face hidden behind a mask of golden light. But behind that mask was something… wrong. A form that bent dimensions. Limbs that flickered between being there and not. Eyes that were not eyes but spirals of galaxies collapsing inward.

This was what Time Lords truly were, stripped of their polite humanoid disguises: higher-dimensional predators wrapped in skin-suits, beings who could fold timelines like origami.

The System's voice burned the description into her.

[Perks – Time Lord]

Regeneration (Core): Cheat death up to 13 times, each with full bodily reset and potential stat shifts.

Temporal Engineering: Ability to manipulate and construct advanced technology by bending laws of physics and causality.Chrono-Perception: Instinctive awareness of timeline flows, paradoxes, and anyone breaking the laws of time.

High Evolution: You are already a higher-dimensional being compressed into humanoid form. Vast resistance to physical harm, time manipulation, and mental intrusion.

Technogenesis: Ability to bond with, create, and upgrade temporal technology (TARDISes, vortex manipulators, paradox engines).

Memory Castle: Time Lords naturally develop vast mental landscapes to store infinite knowledge.

Symbiotic Nuclei: Enhanced durability, resistance to radiation, and aging slowed to near immortality.

Time Sense: a Time Lord has 22 Temporal Senses
Superior Intellect: +500% baseline learning speed compared to humans. Access to higher mathematics, dimensional engineering, and psychic telepathy

[Advanced Perks]

Transcendence: Shed your humanoid shell to manifest your full eldritch form, temporarily overriding local dimensional laws.

Omega-Class Manipulation: Directly rewrite localized causality. Example: "This enemy never pulled the trigger."

Temporal Apotheosis: Become a living fixed point — an unalterable being who can choose what else becomes mutable.

[Drawbacks]

Nemesis: Daleks, Eternals. Carnival Queen, any magic users

Nemesis: The Lady of Chaos (Rogue Higher-Dimensional).

Hubris of the High Council: All Time Lords are feared and hated for their arrogance and godlike power. Expect constant interference from Gallifrey.

Soul Weight: Higher awareness of time brings constant psychic strain. Madness is a frequent side effect.

Nemesis Mark – All Time Lords attract cosmic enemies. Daleks, Faction Paradox, the Guardians, and even rival Time Lords will hunt you.

Regeneration Instability – Each new body risks personality collapse. Too many deaths too quickly can lead to madness.

Hubris – Every perk comes with an instinctive arrogance you won't take mortal issues as a problem; resisting it is a lifelong battle.

She whistled low. "So, eldritch space god with a British accent. That tracks."

She read it all, races, perks, curses, but her soul was already pulling toward one option.

[Selection Confirmed: Time Lord]

The system shifted tone, almost sly.
Her eyes widened as new text scrawled across the void:

[DRAWBACKS: SELECT TO INCREASE POWER AND XP GAIN]

Nemesis Bond (Major Drawback): An equal and opposite force is forged alongside you. As you grow stronger, so do they. They will always hunt you. They will always know you. If you're alive, then they will die fully. Their hatred will be intimate, personal, inevitable. Reward: +300% XP and evolution potential.

Shattered Self (Minor Drawback): Fragments of your soul will scatter across time. You will occasionally glimpse other "yous" — some helpful, some hostile. Reward: +15% XP from all learning.

Living Paradox (Major Drawback): Your very existence destabilizes fragile timelines. Paradox events will gravitate toward you. Reward: +200% XP from paradox resolution.

Marked by the Void (Minor Drawback): Eldritch beings will always "smell" you as kin. Some will see you as prey. Some will see you as a rival. Reward: Unlock unique powersets & eldritch perks.

After reading the drawback, she let a grin out and picked the nemesis bond. Instead of dread, laughter bubbled up from her throat. "This is perfect! A built-in rival, villain waifu, or husbando package. Just like manhwa. Do you deliver with a bow, or do I have to sign for it?"

[ SELECT Nemesis Bond (Major Drawback)]

[Nemesis Bond Accepted.]

[Forging Counter-Entity…]

[Warning: Connection Established.]

[Your Nemesis will grow in lockstep with you. Their existence is inevitable. Their obsession is yours to endure.]

[Nemesis Lady Of Chaos (a Time Lord that was born to kill anything or anyone that gets in the way of Gallifrey's rule)

She then picked Shattered Self and marked by the void

"I don't think other me's will be a problem, I will mostly beat them with some Chinese food, and who doesn't want more powersets?"

[Race Selected: Higher-Dimensional Time Lord]

[Warning: True Form detected – latent restrictions removed.]

[Preparing Ascension…]

The transformation was not painless. She screamed, though no sound existed in the void, as her soul stretched into more dimensions than three. Her awareness folded in on itself, like origami made from space-time. For the first time, she saw herself.

Her body unfolded like equations breaking free from chalkboards, her soul expanding into dimensions she had no words for. First came the nebula-flesh: swirls of violet and indigo, galaxies drifting within her form like freckles across infinity. Her chest rose and fell with the rhythm of collapsing stars.

Across her face stretched a mask of obsidian bone, smooth yet etched with golden Gallifreyan glyphs that shifted and rearranged with every thought. From that mask sprouted eyes—not two, but dozens—gleaming like amethyst clockwork. They blinked independently, each one perceiving a different layer of reality: quantum strings, gravitational tides, the whispers of unborn futures.

Her arms weren't arms anymore but currents of time given structure, wrapped around her like ribbons of aurora. Within her torso, black holes yawned and contracted, pulling in starlight only to birth it again as supernovas.

Before she can even react, the system starts back up

[Hidden Perks] (Now Unlocked):

Supernatural Luck: A statistical distortion field that ensures survival and success against impossible odds. Events "fall into place" around the Time Lord.

Magic Nullification: Any supernatural or arcane force that touches the Time Lord is unraveled into raw energy. Spells collapse into math, curses scatter into starlight.

Causality Manipulation: Subtle adjustments to probability streams. A missed bullet, a falling stone landing just so, entire wars shifting by a single whisper.

Higher-Dimensional Presence: When observed in their true form, mortals perceive madness-inducing phenomena: nebulae swirling in skin, endless eyes staring through masks of infinity, stars birthing and dying in veins. To look upon a Time Lord unmasked is to realize the universe itself wears them as clothing.

Her own mind reeled. She stared at herself through her eyes in third person

Her spider-eyes all blinked in unison, watching multiple timelines of her own reaction, each slightly different. She saw herself weeping, laughing, raging, kneeling in awe. All futures were true. All futures were hers.

She whispered into the void, voice echoing in harmonics

"…holy shit. I'm beautiful, I look like if H.P. Lovecraft and a supernova had a baby."

[pic]

The violet system window unfolded in front of her, gears spinning lazily across its frame. New text scrolled into place:

[System Notice]

[Your humanoid shell is camouflage only like the Tardis chameleon circuit. Higher-dimensional or magic scans will reveal your true form. Sometimes, when you're not holding the form back, primitive scans can see you.
Warning: Exposure of true essence may cause mental collapse in lesser species. Expect awe, fear, or hostility, depending on the observer's resilience.
Note: Masking protocols are limited. Only partial obfuscation is possible.]

She squinted at the glowing lines. "Wait… so you're telling me if someone points the right scanner at me, they're gonna see the eldritch horror edition of me?"

The system pulsed.

[Affirmative.]

"Great. That'll make small talk at space bars, really! smooth. 'Hi, I'm a time lord, don't mind the galaxy-eating spirals where my eyes should be.' Totally fine. Not terrifying at all."

Another message blinked across her vision.

[Reminder: Maintaining cover is your responsibility.]
[Suggestion: Do not get scanned.]

She let out a laugh that bordered on a snort. "Oh yeah, no problem. Just gotta dodge every nosy Magic users, bounty hunter, and half-baked Dalek probe in the galaxy. Easy."

The window flickered one last time:

[Addendum: Some will find your true form… appealing.]

Her eyes widened. Then she grinned. "...Oh. Oh.

 

[DESIGNATION REQUIRED.]

[COMPILING TRUE NAME…]

[True Name Unveiled: Θel'vranhesh]

[ Chosen Title: The Engineer.]

"The Engineer," she murmured, tasting the syllables, finding them sharp and sweet. "Yeah, that does it, good thing it's not something dumb like the Hash Slinging Slasher."

Though she was embarrassed about the true name, mostly for one reason, " how the mothertrucker do I even pronounce my true name?"

[This Is The Name Written in 3-dimensional. Time Lords' true names are not simple words but are complex, multidimensional concepts. They exist in a language beyond human understanding and contain powerful conceptual or mathematical components.

[You're Full Name Is Ω⋅Ξ(∞)+Δt⋅iπ≡Φ[Void]​⊕Ψ[Chronos]​

She just stares at the full name without blinking, and lets out a small sigh, "Yeah, so I won't be able to ever say my name ever."

[Names are important. Knowing a being's name gives one a degree of power over that being. Keep your name close to your chest or face potential death.]

She rolled her eyes and muttered, "Jesus, everything is so over the top in this multiverse."

Then she had a thought hit her, "wait, now I'm a time lord, so do I say Rassilon or Omega instead of Jesus?"

[Age: 21 Years]

[Name: Θel'vranhesh]

[Title: Engineer]

[Family: Unknown]

[Exp:0/200](%315 Boost)

[Level 1]

[HP: 1500](1450HP Boost from race)

(Normal Humans Stats Can Only Have 50 Max. A newborn Time Lord is 3x stronger than a fully grown, trained human. excluding going full Eldritch )

[Strength: 150]

[Vitality: 150]

[Dexterity:50]

[intelligence:150](%515)

[Wisdom:30]

[Charisma:50]( Time Lords Can Messes With a Person Perception)

[Luck:150](Mostly Cause Of You're True Form Can Mess with Causality)

[stat Points:0] (5 per Level Up)

 

"Now, why is my wisdom the lowest stat? I think I have great common sense!... most of the time!

[SYSTEM BOOTSTRAP ENGAGED.]
Welcome, Prime Directive Instance.

Her mind, vast as a constellation, suddenly found itself colliding with walls. She tried to move and felt nothing; she tried to breathe and tasted nothing. Her consciousness swam in the machine's lattice, staring at its scaffolding.

"System," she whispered, though her voice carried as a vibration across the infinite black. "Be more gentle."

 

[MORTAL SHELL ASSEMBLY PROTOCOL INITIATED. YOU'RE APPEARANCE WILL BE BASED ON YOU'RE THOUGHTS.]
[WARNING: DIMENSIONAL COMPRESSION MAY RESULT IN IDENTITY FRACTURING, EXISTENTIAL DISSONANCE, AND EXTREME SOMATIC PAIN.]

It was like being fed into a singularity. Her higher-dimensional body nebulae of purple flame, orbits of black holes, and masks with a thousand eyes all began to collapse. Stars within her chest cracked and folded, her cosmic bones snapping into strings, strings into particles, particles into dust, until she was forced into the narrow casing of flesh.

"Too small!" she roared. "This body is too small!..pause!!."

[MORTAL SHELL REQUIRED FOR FIELD OPERATION.]
[SIZE: 172 CM, MASS: 63 KG, AGE: 21 EARTH YEARS.]
[INSTALLATION CONTINUING…]

Her skeleton grew its first bone, knitting from luminous dust, locking into form. She felt each joint slam together, marrow being squeezed into existence. Muscle tissue wrapped around it in twitching ropes, veins threading like serpents, her blood simmering with violet light. Her skin came last, dragging itself like molten wax across her body until it cooled into pale flesh.

And still she screamed.

The world was wet and cold. She gasped, lungs inflating for the first time. Rain pattered down around her — she was lying on a back alley street, neon lights bleeding through drizzle. The stench of oil and wet concrete clung to her new nostrils.

She staggered to her knees, clutching herself, shuddering as phantom limbs still unfolded from her back and then snapped away.

A puddle glistened beside her. She leaned over it and froze.

In the water, she did not see her pale skin, her dark coat, her violet-burning eyes. She saw her. The true her: a storm of nebulae wrapped in gears, a mask with eyes like a spider's web, her body built from events and paradoxes. No flesh could bind that image.

The puddle rippled, and the mortal shell's face blinked back at her. Pale. Masked. Human-shaped.

She clenched her fist.

The System chimed again.

[Welcome to Reincarnation, Omega-Engineer.]
[Starter Pack available. Opening now.]

[Starter Pack Delivered.]
[ Contents:

TARDIS Seed (Unattuned).

Temporal Toolkit (Basic).

Chronon Shards x3.

Basic Engineer's Codex. ]

Light flared in her palm. A small crystalline seed hovered there, pulsing faintly.

She frowned. That's it?

[Item: TARDIS Seed.]
[Description: Contained potential for a fully-grown, custom TARDIS. Requires a temporal anchoring and nurturing environment to cultivate.]

"…You're kidding me." She turned the crystal over. It looked like nothing more than a shard of glowing glass with complex lines. "What am I supposed to do, plant it in a flowerpot?"

[Error: No instructions provided.]

She grumbled sharply, bitterly. "Of course not. That would be too easy."

"Wait," she muttered, brows furrowing. "Can't a TARDIS just… regrow its systems by itself? Doesn't it heal like, well, a living thing?"

The system chimed in, flat and unhelpful:

[No. Your TARDIS seed lacks any Multidimensional Grey Prints.]

Her violet eyes blinked. "…The hell are those?"

[They are the complete schematics and structural equations of a TARDIS. Once a TARDIS leaves the Neural Construction Docks, the Grey Prints are locked inside the Master Control Console. They are used by the Molecular Stabilizers to maintain and regenerate the ship. Without them, your TARDIS cannot repair or evolve. Like the Eye of Harmony, Physical access to Grey Prints is restricted—usually reviewed only during major overhauls every 3,000 years.]

She stared at the glowing text, silence stretching.

Then, with a long exhale, she muttered:

"Well… shit."

=======================

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i don't know to put picture on here if you want to see some pic go on webnovel

Chapter Text

She sat on the damp grass in the shadow of abandoned warehouses. In her hand, something pulsed. She opened her palm to find it: a crystalline object, no larger than her thumb, faintly glowing with fractal lights. Alive.

She could feel the potential inside it — a womb of dimensions, a ship waiting to be born. A TARDIS unlike any other. But here, now, on Earth? She had nothing to grow it with. No Eye of Harmony, no power grid of a dying star, no Gallifreyan forges.

"I wonder, could I add magic to a TARDIS? That would be so cool, I think there was a-," the engineer thought before remembering how Time Lords react to magic-magical things

"Let's forget about magic for now. I should probably think about what type of TARDIS I should build."

"Or do you have anything to say about how you're build? I know a Tardis mind-soul is beyond time," she looked down on the seed

Her Chrono-Perception flickered. She saw brief flashes: her holding the seed years later, standing inside a massive console room, laughing as the walls pulsed with light. Saw herself crying into its core after nearly dying. Saw battles, escapes, and adventures all anchored to this seed.

"Whoa. Okay. So you're important." She set it gently on the table like it was an egg. "We'll figure you out. Eventually."

"I should probably name you, hmm." She looks at the omega symbol on her coat before looking back at the seed

"You now name omega! Hopefully, the Time Lord Omega doesn't get angry for using his name; he should still be locked up in the anti-matter universe."

[User Had Named The Tardis Seed-Omega]

[The Tardis Soul Loves The Name-Name Can't Be Changed Now]

The TARDIS seed. It pulsed faintly, black and violet like a heart of compressed storm.

She laughs softly, "Glad you like the name, now I guess we should get a house, lucky time lords are powerfully psychic

[Timeskip of the engineer and Omega looking at houses for sale]

The human mind was… soft. That was the first thing she noticed.

Not weak exactly, humans had teeth, claws, willpower—but their thoughts weren't armored like hers. Time Lords wrapped their skulls in labyrinths, their souls in paradoxes. Even their dreams had corridors you could get lost in. Humans? They were open floor plans. Walk in the front door, look around, steal the TV, leave.

She wanted a house. Somewhere to put the TARDIS seed when she figured out how to grow it. Somewhere with walls, a roof, a lock. Normal people worked jobs, saved money, and begged banks. She wasn't normal.

"Alright, System," she whispered, crouched on the curb outside a For Sale sign. The neighborhood was old brick, sagging porches, and rain stains on every window. "Let's cheat."

[New Skill Activated: Hypnotic Command.]
[Sub-Skill: Suggestion.]
[ Energy Cost: 3 Chrono-Units per use.]

The system's blunt words blinked in her mind. No flashing UI, no sounds. Just text in the dark.

She stood, dusted her coat, and walked up the path. A man was outside, fumbling with a cigarette. Bald patch on his scalp, sweat stains under his shirt. He looked tired. Seller, she guessed. She didn't even need the sign in the yard. He had the look of a man who needed out.

Perfect.

"Hello there!" she said, cheerful, bouncing up the porch like a college kid selling cookies. "You the one selling this place?"

He eyed her. "Yeah. You interested?"

She smiled. Too wide. Humans thought she was quirky when she did that. They never realized it was a predator's grin.

"I'm more than interested." Her voice softened, dropping into the low hum of her psychic centers warming up. The world shimmered faintly around her temples, colors bending just enough to matter. "In fact, you're going to give me the house."

His cigarette paused halfway to his lips. He blinked once. Twice. "I… am going to give you… the house."

"Exactly." She leaned closer, voice silk and steel. "No contracts. No banks. You'll sign it over to me, nice and clean. And when you walk away, you'll be happy. Relieved. You'll barely even remember my face."

She felt the push as her mind pressed into his. It wasn't just words—it was gravity. Her will fell into his skull like a black hole, bending his neurons around it.

For a moment, resistance. A flicker of human stubbornness. He opened his mouth, maybe to say What the hell are you talking about? But she pushed harder.

The psychic wave surged.

[Mind Control Success: 82%.]
[Remaining Willpower Detected.]

"Shh," she whispered, putting one finger against his temple. "Don't fight. Fighting makes it hurt."

His eyes went glassy. His breath slowed. The system's words blinked again:

Target subdued. Suggestion locked.

She pulled back, releasing the grip just enough for him to stay upright. His cigarette dropped, smoldering on the porch.

"There we go." She clapped her hands once, sharply. "Now then. Let's sign some papers."

The actual process was almost boring. Humans loved their paperwork. She sat across from him at his kitchen table while he shuffled through documents. Every time his doubt started to twitch—why am I doing this? Who is she?—she whispered another command. Another push.

"You're happy to do this."

"This feels right."

"You want to walk away free."

Each time, his mind folded. Paper in the rain.

She skimmed the contract like it was a menu. Title deeds, mortgage releases, numbers that meant nothing to her. She didn't need them. All she needed was his signature in the right place. When the pen scraped across the last page, she let out a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding.

[Acquisition Complete: Property Ownership (Legally Recognized).]

The system didn't bother congratulating her. No fanfare. Just the blunt fact.

She leaned back in the chair, stretching her arms over her head. "Well, look at that. I'm a homeowner. The American Dream—without the loan sharks."

The seller blinked at her, half-dazed. "I'm… free now, right?"

"Completely." She smiled, soft this time. Almost kind. "You don't even need to remember me."

His face slackened. Confusion fogged into nothing. He stood, mumbled something about catching a bus, and walked out the door without a backward glance.

She sat alone at the table, staring at the deed in her hand. For a moment, guilt scratched at the edges of her thoughts. Was it fair? Ethical? She had just hijacked a man's will, bent him like a puppet, and stolen his house.

"Mine now," she said, grinning again.

The house itself was old, creaking, tired. Wallpaper peeling like dead skin. Floors groaning. But to her, it was perfect. A shell. A seedbed.

She walked from room to room, trailing her fingers against the walls. Every nail, every brick, every wire—she saw the timeline bleeding off it. The house had memories. Families laughing, fighting, sleeping. Decades of echoes. She drank them in.

In the kitchen, she found a mirror above the sink. She paused. Looked.

The mortal shell smiled back. But in the corner of her eye, the true form bled through—fractals shifting, stars blinking. She tilted her head. The reflection tilted a heartbeat late.

"You're going to help me build something bigger," she whispered to the empty air. "Something they'll remember."

The system answered.

[New Base Established: Safehouse.]
[Possible Upgrades Available: Dimensional Reinforcement, Psychic Shielding, Cloaking Field.]

"Oh," she breathed. "Now we're talking."

She dropped onto the old couch, kicking her boots onto the coffee table. The deed was still in her hand. She waved it at the ceiling like a trophy.

"Step one: steal house. Step two: conquer time. I'm killing it today."

She opened up one of the system gifts.

System Gift: Engineer's Codex (Basic)

Pages shifted when she blinked. Text wrote itself in languages she half-knew, half-remembered, half-stole from other lives. It didn't matter. Her mind drank it down like fire.

[Time Lords perk: Learning Speed x500.]
[Retention: Perfect.]

She skimmed once. Knew it forever. Skimmed again. Built a blueprint in her head.

"Alright… so this is the IKEA manual for god-machines. Step one: don't die building your TARDIS. Step two: good luck."

She looks at the window. London rainwater warped her reflection. Not human.Her eyes. Her skin—flesh only because she forced it. The puddle rippled and her true form stared back: nebula veins, shifting fractals, black hole flickers under skin. She leaned closer, grinning.

"I look like a nightmare Picasso painted while drunk. Cute."

The Codex pulsed in her lap. Pages glowing.

She thought about the Doctor's box. Too small. Too polite. She wanted something hers. Gothic spires? Warship aesthetic? Or something stranger?

"System. Question time."

[Listening.]

"Any blueprints for empires that mixed tech and magic? Not 'screwdrivers and robes'—I mean real integration. Arcane engines. Runes that run like circuit boards. That vibe."

Silence. Then text burned across her vision.

Query: Magic-Tech Civilizations.
Results Found: 7.

Elyssar Dominion — fusion of divine architecture and temporal machinery.

Chrono-Arcanum Collective — spell matrices bound to quantum processors.

The Old Gallifreyan Orders — before rationality purged the craft.

Cult of the Aetherforge — living ships made of bound spirits and alloy.

[REDACTED BY System Creator] — forbidden, unstable.

The Magi-Technocracy of the Endless Spiral.

Death's Forge — Empire of Necrotech, banned from timelines.

Her grin widened. "Oh, now we're cooking."

The puddle shifted. Her nebula self leaned back, almost smirking with her. She tapped the Codex like it was a game controller.

"Alright, Omega seed. Let's get weird."

The first morning in her new life did not feel like a morning at all. It felt like she was still falling. Her mortal body breathed, her heart hammered, but behind her ribs burned the hum of something that did not belong to flesh: the thrum of the Time Vortex.

clutching her chest as though it might burst. The walls seemed too thin, the bed too fragile, reality itself stretched like paper around her. It was overwhelming, intoxicating, terrifying.

[System: Power Calibration in Progress.]

[Unlocked: Chrono-Perception.]

[Unlocked: Temporal Instinct.]

"Holy hell," she whispered. "I can… hear time?"

It wasn't hearing exactly. It was like watching dominoes falling before anyone had touched them, feeling the ripple of choices spreading across seconds yet to arrive. She reached for a glass on the bedside table—and caught herself knowing it would slip if she used her left hand. So she used her right. The glass didn't fall.

Her laugh cracked sharply in the quiet. "Oh, this is dangerous."

She spent the next hours running experiments like a kid with new toys. She dropped coins just to watch the way their futures spun out in multiple probabilities, like silver threads. She flicked one, caught it before it hit the ground, and felt reality itself sigh in relief that she had chosen the correct version.

The System interrupted often, but only with blunt, curt text.

[Skill Growth: Probability Awareness.]

[Passive: Weakness Detection.]

[Warning: Overuse strains mortal neural tissue.]

"Yeah, yeah," she muttered, eyes flashing violet. "I'll stop when my brain leaks out of my ears. Until then—science!"

She grabbed a notebook. Pages filled with diagrams: spirals, timelines, branching choices. The pen raced faster than her hand should have allowed, because she was already remembering the words she hadn't written yet. By the end, she had scrawled formulas no human mathematician had ever seen, fragments of Gallifreyan looping script burned into the margins.

Her head pounded. Nosebleed. She grinned through it. "Worth it."

"System," she mumbled. "What's the point of all this? Why me?"

For once, no blunt text appeared. No answer.

She just sighs. "Figures. You're just like a teacher who only writes red X's in the margin but never explains the lesson."

Her body ached, her brain buzzed with futures, but beneath it all she felt… alive. Alive in a way she never had been as a human. The universe was terrifying, incomprehensible—but now she had teeth. Now she could bite back.

She needed to test her physical limits, not just her mind. She changed into her only outfit: a gothic trenchcoat, black pants, and boots, clicking on the cracked pavement. The Omega symbols stitched into her coat seemed to glow faintly when her eyes glowed with power.

She ran. Faster than she thought she could. Her body was lean, but her true advantage was the way her mind moved: she remembered every footfall a second before she made it, every muscle twitch already anticipated. She leapt a fence and didn't stumble, because she had already seen herself do it.

She skidded to a halt, panting, exhilarated.

[Stat Increase: Agility.]

[Stat Increase: Dexterity.]

"God, I'm going to get addicted to this," she muttered, wiping sweat from her brow.

She tested combat next. She had no formal training—at least, not yet. She shadowboxed in the alley. Her punches were sloppy, but Chrono-Perception compensated. She moved wrong in ways that somehow ended up right, like a glitching puppet skipping frames. Her fists landed exactly where an enemy's weak point would be.

==============================

End

Wordcount-2165 next chapter is going to be about her finding a way to time travel.

Chapter Text

Sorry for not posting yesterday, but my stomach was hurting, and it still hurts, so I might not post tomorrow

And I'm still listening to Big Finish audiobooks and other stories, so this can feel like a Doctor Who

===================================

England, 2006.

The air was damp in that peculiar way only London managed: like the city itself was sweating under the weight of its own history. Rain wasn't falling, not really, but the clouds kept threatening, and the gutters smelled of petrol and rotting leaves.

The Engineer loved it.

Not the smell, though she found decay charming in its own way, but the possibility. The United Kingdom in 2006 was a nexus of tiny accidents, bruises waiting to happen. Step on a bus, someone would spill coffee on a stranger, and the stranger's laptop would spark,

The Time Lord's Law.
Murphy's Law on steroids.
Wherever a Time Lord went, things went wrong. Problems show up.

"Which am quessing is time itself getting the time lord to help."

Which she is going to abuse a time lord's Murphy's Law that attracts problems, so she can get resources and knowledge, hopefully she gets her hands on some alien tech without unit coming down on her

The Engineer had figured out she could use that.

"XP farming," she muttered to herself, sprawled upside down on a cheap hostel bunk in Camden Town. "Grind the mobs, loot the shinies, level the stats. Same principle. Except instead of boars or goblins, it's alien parasites and eldritch time-crabs."

She tilted her head, humming thoughtfully before speaking aloud to the silent presence in her mind.
"Hey, System, do Time Lords even have religion? They don't strike me as the kneeling-and-praying type."

[It's… complicated. By nature, the Time Lords are not a religious people, unlike the Dark Age Time Lords. They pride themselves on logic, science, and control. However, their history is steeped in superstition, cults, and reverence for higher beings. Roughly half of them give worship directly or indirectly to the Menti Celesti: the personifications of the primal forces of the multiverse, such as Death, Life, Fate, and Time.]

Her brows shot up. She let out a low whistle.
"Half the smug time-bureaucrats pray to cosmic personifications? Damn, those things must be heavy hitters."

[Correct. Each of the Menti Celesti operates on a scale far beyond the Eternals or other cosmic hierarchies. Their classification falls into Tier 1-T+, meaning they are transcendent entities who can influence or erase not only all possible worlds but also realities that are logically or metaphysically impossible.]

She blinked. "Okay… is that power-scaling talk? Because that went right over my head."

[(😮‍💨) To clarify: "1-T" means Transcendent beings who transcend all logically possible worlds. The "+" signifies they go beyond even that—shaping or destroying realities that cannot, by definition, exist. They stand outside the framework of logic itself.]

She leaned back, a slow grin tugging at her lips.
"Well damn… Mommy Time is busted, OP."

Three minutes later, the first anomaly hit.

A black, sleek car, way too expensive for the tiny brick houses around it, screeched around a corner. Tires howled, water splashed, and the thing skidded onto the curb in a spray of mud. The driver, pale and frantic, scrambled out holding a briefcase clutched like it was glued to his ribs.

Behind him? Three men in trench coats, all too coordinated, moving like predators.

The Engineer tilted her head. "Corporate espionage? Organ smuggling? Secret alien cult?"

Her grin sharpened. "Don't care. Mine now."

She strolled into the middle of the street. The driver spotted her—a pale woman in a gothic coat with purple-glass eyes and a streak of white in her hair, standing as if she owned the storm.

"Help me!" he shouted, voice cracking.

The trench-coat men raised guns.

The Engineer sighed dramatically. "See, this is why people don't like trench coats. You all make them look like a fashion statement for crime."

And then she moved.

Her body didn't flow like a human's. She didn't dodge; she edited herself. One step, and she was suddenly where a bullet should have been. Her spine twisted too far, shoulders rolling like water, head tilting at an angle that made one of the gunmen hesitate mid-shot.

Because of how Uncanny she is moving.

She smiled through it. "You know, I'm trying to be nice here, but you're making it so hard."

The gunmen fired. Bullets screamed. She moved wrong again—limbs jerking like marionette strings but always a fraction out of sync with cause-and-effect. One shot grazed her coat; another ricocheted into the ground, spraying sparks.

By the time the third man blinked, she was already in front of him, fingers gripping his wrist.

"Mine," she said, and snapped it with a sharp crack.

The fight was quick. Too quick. By the time the driver realized she wasn't on his side, the trench-coat thugs were unconscious on the ground, their weapons scattered.

She crouched, rummaging through their coats like a kid at a yard sale while using the system to identify the items.
"Let's see, let's see… ah! Old UNIT-issue comms, a neural scrambler that looks like it was stolen, and—hello, what's this?—a temporal residue scanner? Naughty boys."

She twirled the device, tossed it up, caught it, then stuffed it into her own coat.

The driver was shaking. "Who… what are you?"

She flashed him a grin sharp enough to cut glass. "Murphy's Law with legs."

She plucked the briefcase from his hands. He yelped, but she was already prying it open. Inside: stacks of printed schematics, glowing blueprints laced with Gallifreyan symbols she recognized instantly.

Her breath caught. "Well, well. Someone's been raiding the Time Lord junk drawer."

[New Data Acquired: Prototype Dimensional Stabilizer (Partial).]
[Resource Gain: Quantum Alloys x3.]

Her grin returned, wider. "Ohhh, this perk is the best thing ever."

She almost didn't notice him at first. Just another man on the street, umbrella in hand, wearing an old-fashioned suit that looked a little too sharp for 2006. His face was calm, almost amused, as though he'd seen this scene a thousand times already.

He clapped slowly. "Bravo. Quite the performance."

From the darkness stepped a man in a dark suit. Neat beard, slicked hair, a smile like a knife hidden in velvet. He looked perfectly human. Too perfectly.

The Engineer froze, coat dripping in the rain. Her eyes narrowed. There was something wrong about him, not in the way she was wrong, uncanny and eldritch—but polished, masked, practiced.

"Thanks," she said brightly, tilting her head. "Do I know you, Mister Overdramatic Entrance?"

The man smiled. A charming smile, the kind that could sell poison as perfume. "No, my dear. But I know you."

But her violet eyes burned, and she saw what no human could: beneath the flesh-mask shimmered another shape. A higher-dimensional predator, like her.

The System whispered across her mind.

[XP Objective Detected: Major Entity Encounter.]
[ Entity classification: Time Lord.]
[Threat probability: 92%.]
[Recommended Action: Observe. Exploit. Survive.]

Her grin froze. A Time Lord.

Not just any Time Lord.

She looked at him again. Really looked. Beneath the glamour, the disguise, the careful mask of humanity. And she knew.

The Master.
Ainley's face. Suave, deadly, reptilian in charm.

Her heart did a little somersault.

"Well. That's awkward," she whispered aloud. "You're him."

His smile sharpened. "Who, exactly?"

" I know who you are! The Doctor's First crush at the academy," she said, "Yes, he told me about you."

"And he said you were dead."

He gave a languid shrug. "People do keep making that mistake. Eighty-five times, give or take."

She squinted at him, then suddenly pointed again. "You're the Rani!"

Silence. His expression froze.
"…What?"

"The Rani. Another one of the Doctor's old Academy friends. Brilliant, manipulative, stylish fits you perfectly."

"What!"

"Well, you're clearly a Time Lord who knows the Doctor. Who else could you be?"

He just stared at her, blank and unblinking.

"Oh, wait, are you Romana?"

His voice dropped, sharp as broken glass. "No. I am not Romana."

"So you must be the rani! Then."

"Unless…oh."

"Unless…" he snapped her fingers dramatically. "Ohhh. Ohhh, wait. I hear the faint tinkle of a penny dropping."

He folded his arms, watching her with icy disdain.

"If you're not the Rani, then… ohhh. You're the Monk!"

That made him choke. "The—what?!"

"The Monk! Time meddler, a bit of a nuisance, kind of like a knockoff Doctor, but with worse fashion sense. Yeah, I see it. You've got the whole 'smarmy, up-to-no-good' vibe nailed."

His nostrils flared. "I am not the Monk! That to far."

"Mmhm." She tapped her chin, clearly unconvinced. "You say that, but you're not exactly ruling out being the Rani either. Or Romana. Or Borusa on a spa day."

He opened his mouth to retort, but she plowed on.

"Well, you're not quite as the Doctor described you, anyway."

That caught him. "…No?"

She leaned closer, inspecting him like he was a questionable piece of fruit. "Mmm. Less… terrifying demi-god of malice, more… disappointed dad who just found out the kids ate his last biscuit."

The Master's composure wavered. "That is not—"

"Oh, don't get me wrong! Very dashing. Suave. Deadly in a 'hello, I'm evil, have you got a moment to die?' kind of way. But also—" she tapped his lapel—"I can definitely see you in a hat."

"…A hat?"

"Yes! The Doctor said you were all about the schemes, but I'm sensing a hat phase."

His lips curled despite himself. "…Funny you should say that. You'd expect shoes. Everyone expects shoes. But no, suddenly—it's hats. I'm all about the hats."

She clapped her hands, delighted. "Knew it! Evil mastermind chic. Fedora for the plotting, wide-brimmed for the dramatic speeches, and a nice bowler for when you're blending in at evil conventions. Do they have evil conventions?"

He gave a sharp little laugh, half amusement, half threat. "Oh, they do now."

She smirked. "So what do you call yourself these days? Because honestly, 'The Monk' is still open. Pretty sure it hasn't been trademarked."

"I," he began grandly, "am—"

"The Monk!" she interrupted.

His jaw clenched. "No."

"THE MONK!" She jabbed a finger at his chest. "Don't lie to me, Monk-face."

"That's enough!" His suave façade cracked as his voice sharpened. "I am not the Monk, nor the Rani, nor—"

"Romana?" she cut in sweetly.

"NO!"

"Sure? Because Romana had that same pouty expression whenever she lost at chess."

His eyes flashed. "Right. That does it. I've tolerated this long enough." He straightened, menace radiating from every word. "I'm going to pull your head off. Right here. Right now. No speeches, no theatrics, just pop, gone come here."

The Engineer's grin widened, violet clockwork eyes spinning.
"Ooooh. Angry Monk noises. Ten out of ten. Would troll again.

He circled her slowly, like a predator testing prey, his eyes sharp and appraising. Every flicker of movement, every shift in her stance, he catalogued with surgical cruelty. His voice slid out, rich and mocking, each word meant to cut.

"You move like a child in stolen shoes. Untrained. Sloppy." His gaze lingered on her hands, mostly her right hand. her stance, her balance. "Not even a trace of your precious toy. That little blasting contraption… the Omni-Tool, wasn't it? Where is it, hm? Misplaced? Or not built yet?" He leaned close, a serpent whispering into her ear. "How old are you? Some half-grown offshoot? A failed Time Tot who tripped and landed in her big shoes too early?"

Her grin sharpened, flashing teeth, violet eyes spinning faintly with clockwork light. "Ohhh, I love this. You think I'm young. Cute. Soft. Keep underestimating me, sweetheart. It's gonna make the punchline so much better when it lands in your smug face."

Outwardly, she radiated cocky bravado, chin tilted like a duelist ready to banter her way through the fight. But inside her head—

'Shit. He knows me. Wait. Did he just say Omni-Tool? Like… Mass Effect Omni-Tool? The holographic, hacking, pew-pew wristblade thing?'

Her brain derailed for a moment, spiraling.

'So… that means future-me invents one? Or do I invent it because he told me about it? Or—oh crap—he just said it, so now I know about it, which means now I'll make it because he said I would. Paradox loop! Self-fulfilling prophecy! Ugh, time travel is such a pain in the-'

Her eyes widened slightly as a thought slammed into her.

'…Okay, but hang on. An Omni-Tool made with Time Lord tech? That sounds crazy. Crazy cool. Like, miniaturized vortex manipulator + Gallifreyan chronon stabilizer + a laser screwdriver all on my wrist? Future-me, you absolute badass. Or idiot. Or both.'

She nearly giggled out loud at the mental image of a glowing orange Time Lord Omni-Tool, menus flickering in High Gallifreyan glyphs, hacking Dalek eyestalks while also brewing coffee on the side.

She forced her grin wider, tilting her head mockingly as the Master finished circling. "Sorry, what was that? I got distracted imagining how cool my future toys are. You were saying something about me being sloppy?"

He moved first. A flick of his wrist, a hiss of energy—something small, hidden, sharp. A knife of chronon energy.

But she was already gone. She bent backward at the waist, spine curving too far, dodging with an inhuman snap. Her laugh rang through the warehouse.

"Too slow!" she sang.

He tried again, feinting left. She hopped onto a beam like a marionette, balancing on the balls of her feet, head cocked.

"You move wrong," he snarled.

She grinned down at him. "No, you move boring. There's a difference."

With a snap of her fingers, she flicked a handful of stolen Chronon Fragments into the air. They shimmered, cracking the light around them. The Master flinched back.

"Where did you—"

"XP drops," she said sweetly. "Perks of playing the game."

The fight halted abruptly as voices echoed outside. Human police. Shouting, flashlights cutting through broken windows.

The Master growled. "Sloppy. You've drawn attention."

"Me?" She gasped, pointing to herself. "Excuse you, Murphy's Law drew them. I just, y'know, invited it."

"You're more insane than the doctor, that big feat."

"Thank you!"

The Master's smile returned, sharp and cruel. "Another time, little Engineer. When you've grown teeth."

She pouted dramatically. "Oh, come on, don't ghost me after our first date!"

"Enjoy your game while it lasts," he hissed. "Soon, you'll learn what it means to lose."

With that, he stepped back into shadow. His form shimmered, disguise reasserting, and then he was gone.

The police burst in a moment later, flashlights cutting through dust and smoke. The officers froze when their beams found her—standing dead-center, coat swishing, purple clockwork eyes glimmering like embers.

"Hands in the air!" one barked.

She tilted her head, grin stretching too wide. "Ooooh, authority figures. How scary."

Another officer stepped forward. "Now, miss!"

Her laugh rang soft, almost sing-song. "See, that's the problem. You're looking at me in three dimensions."

Before they could blink, her body shuddered—stuttering like bad footage. Her outline fractured, then recomposed two feet to the left, then three feet behind, like reality was buffering her frame. Flashlights jittered across her as if she were a corrupted recording.

"What the hell—" one officer gasped, clutching his cross.

She leaned close, her voice right behind his ear, though she hadn't moved.
"Don't worry. I'm not really here. Just a glitch."

The constable spun—she was already standing across the room, winking.

Then she exhaled, and the puddles on the floor rippled as if time itself had hiccupped. To their eyes, her body stretched, folded, and dissolved into static, vanishing with the sound of a tape rewinding.

Her laughter lingered, echoing in the rafters long after she was gone.

Chapter Text

The night air hit her face like a slap. London rain, metallic and dirty, plastered her hair to her cheek as she landed in an alley. The glitch-fold that got her through the police hadn't exactly been… smooth. Her atoms still buzzed like they'd been playing hopscotch across probability.

She bent double, clutching her knees, laughing like a maniac.

"Woo! Ten points for Team Engineer. Style, grace, and an exit that makes David Blaine look like a children's party clown."

[You should know the master was playing with you if he was serious, you would have died before you birth you're next thought.]

The System pinged in her head. No box, no fanfare — just words sliding into her brain like graffiti on wet glass.

 

[Permanent XP Multiplier: 315%]
[Immediate XP Dump: 34,600 → Processed]

"Three hundred and FIFTEEN percent XP boost!" she shouted at the rain. "Ohhhh, System, you spoil me!"

The dry, scrolling words flickered across her vision.

[Nemesis Mechanic engaged. Permanent XP multiplier active: +315%.]
[Warning: Nemesis also scales in power.]

She blew a raspberry. "Yeah, yeah, fine print. Don't kill my vibe, text box."

[You are vibrating at unsafe enthusiasm levels.]

She gasped. "You can sass now? Oh, this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Her feet slapped across the wet roof tiles as she skidded to a stop, crouching. The giddy laughter gave way to a sharp inhale. Focus. She had a boost. She had a nemesis. She had a ridiculous cosmic gamer cheat system. What she didn't have… was gear.

"Right. Inventory check." She clapped her hands, eyes rolling skyward. "Do I have anything cool yet? Like a laser screwdriver? Sonic spork?"

[Inventory: One (1) trenchcoat, one (1) TARDIS seed 'Omega,' one (1) suspicious amount of sarcasm.]

"Wow," she muttered, "that's pathetic. Even the Doctor starts with a screwdriver. I get sass and a houseplant."

The "houseplant" in question pulsed in her pocket. The seed of Omega, her future TARDIS, made a faint humming sound—like a smug cat.

"Don't you sass me, too," she hissed at it.

It pulsed again. Definitely sass.

Omega let out a psychic pulse; it wasn't words, but I got the feeling that it said(I'm going to say it female), "That's not a tool. That's a war crime on your wrist."

She gasped. "Oh my gods, you can sort of talk now!"

"I've always talked. You've just been too busy monologuing at cats to notice."

She clutched her chest. "My baby can sass! I'm so proud!"

"Don't call me baby. I'm older than your reincarnation body."

 

[Level Up.][Level Up.][Level Up.][Level Up.]...

 [Level Up → LVL 6 → LVL 16]

 

[Stat Screen Opened]

Vitality: 150 → 164

Strength: 150 → 162

Dexterity: 50→ 64

Intellect: 150→ 163

Wits: 30→ 40

Luck: 150

 [Core Perk Unlocked: Prototype Tech-Crafting]

Her eyes widened. "Oh-ho-ho… jackpot."

The words kept coming.

[Skill Unlock: Improvisation Lv.1]
[Skill Unlock: Gremlin Ingenuity Lv.1]
[Skill Unlock: Mad Science Lv.1]

"Gremlin Ingenuity?!" she screeched, startling a cat out of a trash bin. "Oh, that's offensive. That's accurate, but offensive."

She flicked her hand, pulling up the perk trees. Rows of glowing nodes like a gamer's fever dream hovered in her vision.

[Core Class Perk: Engineer of Time.]

[Specialization: Fabrication of tech that shouldn't exist.]

[Sub-Perk: Time-Tinkering — able to weave minor time dilation into gadgets.]

[Warning: May cause spontaneous paradoxes.]

"Ohhh, this is beautiful." She kicked her boots against the puddles. "Paradoxes are just the universe's way of saying 'try again but more heartbreaking'."

[New Design Slot unlocked → Omni-Tool Base Construction Available]

She flopped back against the wall on top of a roof, laughing until her sides hurt. "Oh, Master, you absolute beautiful bastard. You've basically given me a powerful tool."

The System chimed.
Quest Generated: 'The Hand that Builds'

[Objective: Construct Proto-Omni Tool.]

[Requirements: Alien alloys, advanced energy conduits, adaptable neural interfaces. Suggested source: UNIT Research Division.]

[Reward: Skill Tree [Techsmith], XP, and Omni-tool framework.]

She plopped down cross-legged and yanked out a rain-soggy notebook. Sketches tumbled across the page, drawing the design, manic scribbles of an Omni-tool design: part Mass Effect hologram, part Swiss Army knife, part eldritch glowstick.

"Okay, okay," she muttered, gnawing the pencil. "Needs modular tools, hardlight projector, hacking interface, plasma torch… oh, and coffee dispenser. Non-negotiable."

Omega pulsed, unimpressed.

"Shut up, Omega. Coffee is a weapon of survival."

The System chimed:
[Blueprint created: Engineer's Omni-Tool (Prototype). Status: 4% complete.]

She groaned. "Four percent?! That's, like… barely a button."

She sighed, tapping the pencil against her forehead. "And where can I find a unit base in 2006 England, hmm?"

Omega vibrated. A psychic pulse from the seed: a picture of UNIT logo, glowing red.

Her grin spread like wildfire. "Ohhh. You bad, bad influence, now my tardis baby show me thy way."

She bounced to her feet, trenchcoat dripping. "Right then! Next quest: rob UNIT blind!"

[Warning: High-risk target. Probability of success: 2%.]

She giggled. "Two percent? That's plenty! Murphy's Law is on my side. When things go wrong, I win XP. When things go right, I get parts. Win-win."

The System scrolled dryly:
[That is not how probability functions.]

"Shhh. Gamer logic only. No math allowed."

And with that, she dashed off into the London night, cackling, ready to commit cosmic burglary.

The rain hammered harder. She pulled her trenchcoat tight, eyes glowing in the night.

She twirled on the bridge railing, nearly slipping off before righting herself with an elastic snap of her spine. "Alright, toy store here we come."

Her mind fizzed with images: the Omni-tool flaring into existence on her wrist, a better weapon than the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, a scalpel, a shield, all at once. And if UNIT had even a sliver of Dalekanium or Cyber-tech in storage…

Her grin turned sharp. "Sorry, Brigadier-wannabes. Tonight, I'm your poltergeist."

She needed to test her stealth. That meant crowds, locked doors, slipping unnoticed.

She ducked into a pub, dripping on the floorboards. Nobody paid her much mind — a soaked goth girl in a trenchcoat wasn't strange for London. She slid into a booth, scribbling more designs.

The Omni-tool blueprint sprawled with notes:

Plasma torch function (for welding and cutting enemies).

Hard-light blade projector(probably not going to get the tech needed for that).

Data interface (must be able to hack Dalek-Cyberman circuits).

Emergency med-mode for biological repair. (If my life is going to be like the doctor's, then this is a must.)

She chewed her pen, humming. "Yeah, yeah, this is workable. Just need…" Her grin widened. "...a UNIT base raid. Perfect."

The System dinged again.
[Quest Update: Gather Required Materials. Optional Bonus: Infiltrate without detection for extra XP.]

"Oh-ho-ho-ho." She clapped her hands, startling a bartender. "Stealth run, it is!"

She ordered a cider, downed it in one gulp, and strolled back into the storm.

The first lesson of thievery, the Engineer decided, was that stealth wasn't about silence. It was about confidence. If you looked like you belonged, no one questioned you.

…Unless you were dripping wet, wearing a gothic trench coat with giant Omega symbols stitched across the back, and humming loudly as you scaled the security fence of a UNIT research facility at 2 A.M.

"Confidence," she muttered to herself, dangling upside down as she fiddled with the lock on the top wire. "I ooze it. Drip it. Drown in it. If confidence were soup, I'd be… consommé."

[Skill Gained: Stealth [Rank 2].]
[Skill Gained: Improvisation [Rank 3].]

"Oh-ho! System, you spoil me." She landed with a neat flip and immediately faceplanted into the mud. "Ow."

-2 HP.

She pushed herself up, grinning through muck. "Tactical pratfall. For flavor."

The river fog rolled low over the embankment, shrouding the streets in muted yellow from the lamps. Somewhere beneath those cobblestones and bureaucratic facades, UNIT kept their secrets. Weapons. Files. Alien salvage. The kind of treasure trove she could turn into her real toolkit.

The Engineer walked silently through the mist, trench coat swaying, boots clicking once, then vanishing into stillness. Her manic grin from last night had burned down into something steadier: focused, sharp, and cold.

Omega pulsed against her chest. Not in words, not in sentences — but in sensations. A quick staccato burst, like a heartbeat overlaid with the image of a locked door. Then a shimmer of green static: warning.

"I know," she whispered, lips barely moving. "They're paranoid. They should be. This is UNIT."

 

[Quest: Infiltrate UNIT Blacksite]
[Primary Objective: Acquire alien tech components (min. x5)]
[Bonus Objective: Data theft — alien science archives]
[Bonus XP multiplier: +60% for Stealth completions.]

She inhaled. Slow. Steady. This wasn't a joke anymore.

The perimeter fence buzzed faintly with an energy deterrent field. Old tech. Old to her, anyway. 

She would've grinned, made a joke about parkour, and tried vaulting it for fun. Tonight, she moved like a liquid shadow. Her fingers brushed the Omni-tool prototype strapped to her wrist — crude, duct-taped, incomplete, but alive, barely. Tiny chronon filaments hummed inside the gauntlet, feeding off her own temporal resonance.

She flicked it open. The screen was an iPhone she stole as the interface shivered into being — jagged, half-finished, but enough.

Her lips curled in a faint smirk. "Now we're playing."

She knelt in the shadows, tracing her finger along the metal. The System fed her fragments of schematics.

[Skill Unlocked: Circuit Intuition Lv.1]
[Passive Effect: You 'see' the flow of energy in technology.]

To her eyes, the fence came alive — wires glowing like veins, energy currents pulsing like blood. She slid a hairpin from her pocket, twisted it once, and jammed it into the relay. Sparks flickered. The field sputtered.

She stepped through as silently as falling dust.

Inside, the compound was a maze of floodlights, cameras, and bored guards

[Skill Progression: Stealth Lv.2 → Lv.3]

The corridors were sterile, humming with recycled air. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, sterile white against cold steel. Somewhere above, soldiers' boots echoed.

She moved in silence, her outline twitching like a figure pulled from broken film. To human eyes, it was as if she skipped the spaces between steps.

Omega pulsed again. This time, the sensation was hunger, mixed with the sharp taste of static and the faint ringing of glass under pressure.

"Yeah," she murmured. "I feel it too. Something alien. Close."

Her gauntlet pulsed in answer, feeding her a ripple of data. She tilted her head, following the trail like a predator.

Behind a sealed bulkhead, she found it: a vault. Rows of shelves stacked with containment cylinders. Inside, glowing fragments of things that had fallen through time.

She pressed her palm to the door. The Omni-tool hummed.

The Engineer stepped through.

Her eyes widened. Alien alloys, processors, weapons stripped of power cores. A xenotech candy store.

The Archive stretched like a cathedral of stolen futures. Alien weapons hummed in stasis. Shards of Dalekanium sat inert in locked glass. A Sontaran helmet glared from its mount.

She inhaled sharply. "Beautiful."

Her eyes locked on the processors, stacked neatly in containment crates. Sub-Quantum cores, humming faintly with potential. Plasma containment lattices. Everything she needed to birth the Omni-tool.

She gathered what she needed: an alien alloy shard, a plasma containment core from a melted Dalek gun, and processor fragments from a salvaged Cyberman head. All slid into her coat like puzzle pieces waiting to be assembled.

"Lucky this outfit's pockets are bigger inside."

But she didn't take too much. She wasn't greedy. Not yet.

She moved swiftly, prying open crates, filling her pockets with components. The omni-tool started, scanning shelves, directing her to overlooked caches of parts. Omega pulsed approval each time, its psychic thread vibrating like pride.

For a moment, she felt a rare calm. This was what she was born for — not the chaos, not the laughter, but the precision. The art of creation.

"Perfect," she breathed.

Halfway back through the hallways, she heard it: boots. Several pairs. UNIT patrol.

Her breath stilled. Her body folded into the shadows, pressing against cold steel.

[Skill Progression: Stealth Lv.3 → Lv.4]

The guards passed within feet of her. She could smell the coffee on their breath, the sweat in their uniforms. Their voices were low, tired.

"…command said keep an eye out. Something glitchy on the sensors."

 "…probably just rats. Or another bloody Torchwood screw-up."

They laughed quietly and moved on.

She waited three beats longer. Then slipped away.

Only when she was safe in the stairwell did she let herself breathe again. Her pulse was fire in her veins, but her grin — small, tight, satisfied — returned.

Her final stop: the facility's data hub. A sealed room of humming servers, where UNIT hoarded their deepest alien files.

Omega pulsed urgently now. Knowledge. Necessary. Risk.

She pressed her palm against the main console. Information being downloaded through her omni-tool: Dalek weapon blueprints, Cyber conversion blueprints, things UNIT had no right to even touch.

Her body shuddered as she absorbed it, the System parsing the torrent like a sieve.

[Skill Gained: Fabrication Theory Lv.1 → Lv.2 → Lv.3]

 

[Skill Gained: Weaponized Interface Lv.1]

 

She staggered back, panting, but smiling. "This… this is enough."

Omega pulsed. Agreement. Completion. Exit.

Leaving was harder. The longer she lingered, the more the building felt hostile — like reality itself wanted her gone. Cameras flickered strangely. Doors resisted her touch. Guards lingered too close.

But she moved carefully, slipping through cracks in their perception, guided by Omega's psychic nudges.

By the time she scaled the fence and melted back into the London dawn, her coat heavy with alien fragments and stolen data, she was exhausted.

But alive. Victorious.

The System chimed softly.

[Mission Complete: Infiltration]
[XP Gained: +6,500]
[Level Up x3]
[Skill Progression Unlocked: Omni-Tool Construction Lv.3]

She collapsed into an alley, breathing hard, eyes bright with triumph. Slowly, she drew the Omega seed from her pocket. It pulsed warmly in her palm. Not words. Not sentences. But pride. Encouragement. Companionship.

Her lips curved faintly. "Yeah. We did it."

And for the first time since she'd been reborn into this universe, the Engineer didn't laugh or scream or grin too wide.

She simply sat in the dawn light, holding the tiny living seed of her future fortress, and whispered:

"…let's build."

Chapter Text

The Engineer shut the door behind her, dumped the heavy coat onto the sofa, and spilled a rain of alien shards, processors, and glowing cores onto the floor. They clattered against each other like marbles of gods.

She crouched over them with wide eyes. "...you little beauties. Mama's home."

The seriousness from the heist was gone. She could feel the tension unraveling in her shoulders. Now the mania leaked through, bubbling over, jittering down her fingers.

"Alright, alright, where do we start—oh, System, don't just sit there looking smug. Pop the window!"

The System obeyed. A glowing text prompt unfurled across her vision.

[Omni-Tool Mk. I Blueprint Unlocked]
[Requirements: Processor Core, Alloy Frame, Power Conduit, Neural Sync Interface]
[Skill Requirements: Engineering Lv.10, Code Programming Lv.10, Design Theory Lv.10]

[Warning: Skills insufficient for stable construction.]

She rubbed her hands together. "Engineering, coding, design. Got it. Time to grind."

Her "workshop" was a crime scene of wires, alien shards, soldering irons, and at least three half-dismantled toasters. She started simple: rewiring a Cyberman processor into a laptop.

She picked up the Cyberman processor. Its broken eye stared up at her like it resented her very existence. She grinned back.

"Don't look at me like that. You lost, I won. Recycling time, baby."

With a screwdriver, a soldering iron she absolutely stole from a garage, and far too much confidence, she started dismantling it. Sparks flew. A faint wisp of smoke filled the room.

"Wish I had a sonic screwdriver that would make this so much faster."

The laptop screamed, sparked, and nearly bit her hand.

[Skill Progression: Engineering Lv. 2 → Lv. 3]
[Skill Progression: Code Programming Lv. 1 → Lv. 2]

"YES!" She fist-pumped, hair sticking up in electric static. "We're cooking now!"

Then the laptop hissed and exploded.

She yelled, "IT'S FINE, I'M A SCIENTIST! TECHNICALLY!"

Two hours later, she was juggling three projects at once:

Coding a UI for the Omni-Tool using alien processor fragments.

Designing modular holographic interfaces on scrap paper.

Building a drone made out of a dismantled fan.

The drone spun wildly, clipped her in the ear, and flew out the window.

[Skill Progression: Design Lv. 3 → Lv. 4]

She rubbed her ear, cackling. "See, Omega? This is art."

Omega pulsed faintly in her mind: Disapproval. Hunger. Energy.

She squinted at the seed, now sitting in a teacup like a pet rock with delusions of grandeur. "Don't diss me. You're just mad you can't eat my chaos."

Omega pulsed again, sharper. Artron energy. Temporal resonance. Feed me.

The Engineer made a face. "You're like a Tamagotchi that eats time. Do you have any idea how unhelpful that is?"

Still, she held her palm over the seed, let a trickle of her own Time Lord energy bleed into it. Omega drank greedily, pulsing bright purple-gold for a moment before dimming back to its calm state.

Her chest ached. "Yeah, yeah. Don't get used to it. I need to juice this shell too."

By the third day, her flat looked like a cyberpunk goblin's nest. Plates of forgotten takeout, wires crisscrossing the floor, alien alloys hammered into rough shapes, notes scrawled on papers in marker pen ("make plasma coupler???" "ask system if time knives exist").

Her hands were burned, bandaged, stained in oil and ink.

But her eyes? They shone.

[Skill Progression: Engineering Lv. 3 → Lv. 6]
[Skill Progression: Code Programming Lv. 2 → Lv. 5]
[Skill Progression: Design Lv. 4 → Lv. 7]

Every small success made her scream-laugh like a mad inventor. Every failure was followed by a louder scream-laugh.

At one point, she burned a hole clean through her desk. Instead of panicking, she crouched over it like a gremlin child discovering fire.

"…floor portal."

By the end of the week, she had something.

Not good, exactly. Not stable. Definitely not safe.

But something.

A clunky, half-formed bracer of alloy and glowing circuitry, strapped to her forearm. Wires dangled. Lights flickered. The holographic interface blinked in and out like a bad Wi-Fi signal.

She tapped it. The hologram stuttered to life — jagged, bright, humming.

[Skill Progression: Design Lv. 7 → Lv. 8]
[Skill Progression: Engineering Lv. 6 → Lv. 7]

Her grin split ear-to-ear. "OH, IT'S ALIVE."

Then the bracer screamed at her in binary and electrocuted her elbow.

She collapsed backward, twitching so hard her stomach hurt. "OH, IT'S REALLY ALIVE."

Omega pulsed from its teacup: Disappointment. Irritation. Amusement.

She pointed at it with a shaking finger. "Don't laugh at me. You're basically a plant."

Days blurred. Projects piled. Mistakes exploded.

But she learned. Faster than any human ever could. Faster than she thought even a Time Lord should. The quadruple helix of her new body thrummed with impossible efficiency, parsing alien code like second nature, refining designs instinctively, building with inhuman precision.

Her System chimed constantly:

[Skill Progression: Engineering Lv. 7 → Lv. 8 → Lv. 9]
[Skill Progression: Code Programming Lv. 5 → Lv. 6 → Lv. 8]
[Skill Progression: Design Lv. 8 → Lv. 9]

Each ding of progress made her dance barefoot on her floor, hair wild, muttering nonsense like, "WHY IS IT EXPLODING?"

Her neighbors filed so many complaints.

Finally, it happened.

[Skill Progression: Engineering Lv. 9 → Lv. 10]
[Skill Progression: Code Programming Lv. 8 → Lv. 9 → Lv. 10]
[Skill Progression: Design Lv. 9 → Lv. 10]

[Skill Threshold Reached: Omni-Tool Mk. I Eligible for Construction]

She froze mid-scribble, marker falling from her hand. Then her grin returned, manic and unstoppable.

"…we're doing it."

Omega pulsed from the teacup, sharp, hungry, expectant. Now. Build.

She slammed her palms down on the table. "YES, MOTHER."

"Jeez, you're so needed."

She worked for twenty straight hours.
No sleep. No food.
Just chaos.

The flat became a forge of madness: sparks flying, code pouring across glowing screens, blueprints scrawled over the walls, circuits soldered, alloys fused, alien fragments hammered into place.

 [Component Integrated: Plasma Core Stabilizer]
[Component Integrated: Cyber Processor Fragment]
[Component Integrated: Dalek Alloy Shard]
[Component Integrated: Human Laptop Keyboard]

(The last one was purely for comedy value. She insisted it was "aesthetic.")

Finally, with a final spark and a scream of triumph, the Omni-Tool bracer locked onto her arm.

The holographic interface flickered to life, stable, smooth, clean. Glowing orange-gold like a second sun.

She stared at it. Breathless. Teary.

"…holy… Time Vortex. I did it."

The System chimed.

[Major Achievement: Omni-Tool Mk. I Constructed]
[XP Gained: +12,000]
[Level Up x5]
[Skill Fusion: Engineering + Design + Programming = Omni-Forge MK.3]

She wheezed out a laugh. "Oh my god. I just unlocked New Game Plus crafting."

Omega pulsed violently from its teacup: Hunger. Feed. Energy.

She sighed. "Fine. You helped. You get the first charge."

She tapped the Omni-Tool, channeled a pulse of temporal energy into it, and let it flow into the Omega seed. The seed pulsed, glowing brighter than ever before, a warm psychic flood of approval. Pride. Affection.

The Engineer slumped against the wall, smiling like a delirious child who just built the world's deadliest Lego tower.

London still had that post-storm scent: ozone and wet stone. She crouched on a concrete ledge above the Thames, coat pulled up, Omni-tool braced against her forearm. It felt like wearing the beginning of a war on her skin — warm, pulsing, alive. Against the dull grey of morning, the bracer's interface bloomed in tiny orange glyphs and a ribbon of holographic text unfurled into the space in front of her. System messages scrolled quietly in her skull as if the Universe were whispering notes to a composer.

[You have Omni-Tool Mk. 3.]
[Functions: Holo-UI / Nanoforge / Minor Chrono-Loop Overclock / Diagnostics.]
[Resource: Chronon fragments x7.]
[Recommended: Field testing in a controlled environment.]

She smirked at the "recommended." Recommendations were for mortals. She tapped the bracer and the holo bloomed into a compact, shimmering toolkit: micro-forge, diagnostic scanner, three tiny drones. The Omni-tool responded to thought and hand, both — a marriage of her will and tech.

She flexed her fingers and sent one of the drones skittering out like a moth. It cast downwards, scanning for signatures. Her brow tightened as it shot a clean read across the water: low hums, a lattice pattern in the riverbed, a ripple of code like something burrowed beneath the surface. Not natural.

Her grin got sharp. "Okay. Test one: find a scary problem. Found. Test two: punch scary problem in its ugly face."

It was nearly noon when the alert hit.

UNIT dispatch, terse and clipped: anomalous signal on the disused Northbank maintenance tunnels; electromagnetic spike; local CCTV feed corrupted; possible salvage theft. Secure the perimeter; wait for experts.

She could have sat back and watched. She did not.

She jogged. The Omni-Tool tracked her biologically, snapped a tiny holo-map into the air for three seconds a little ghost of her route overlaying the city and then folded back into silent readiness.

The north river walkway smelled like iron and old sea-spray. Chains clinked. Pigeons went about grieving quietly for their dignity. UNIT men and women in plain suits were already there, flattening civilians out of the way with practiced, nonchalant violence — the kind of efficiency born of too many near-impossible days.

"Stand down!" barked a woman in a tactical jacket, voice layered with authority. She had a hard jaw and softer eyes. Close behind her were two techs with tac-pads and a small, boxy electromagnetic scanner blinking like a nervous eyelid.

The Engineer kept her chest open, shoulders relaxed. She looked like a woman who'd just stepped in from somewhere else entirely. Which she had.

"Excuse me," she said, bright and too loud. "Hello! So, UNIT, hi. Friends? I assume friends." She smiled in that way that made people decide whether to trust her in three seconds and then lean into instinct. Most people were wrong about her.

Unit tech One barely hid his scowl. "You're not cleared. Please stand back, ma'am."

She clicked the Omni-Tool. A soft, synchronized chime three notes, like the hinge of a cosmic door. The bracer's sensors reached out in a whisper: radar, EM, low-signal radio, nanodetection, thermal gradient. The Omni-Tool spoke in data. The System layered the interpretation into her head.

[Anomaly signature: Cybernetic resonance / Temporal bleed]
[Probability of recruited Cybernetic salvage: HIGH]
[Temporal distortion: microlooper — small, repeated time eddies forming in location]

UNIT's tech blinked at his readout and went pale. "That's not … that's—"

She held up a hand, calm like she'd just ordered a coffee. "They're koalas on the internet. Cute, but they want you dead. Let me peek?" She didn't wait for permission. The bracer extended a filament of light and touched the air; the Omni-Tool's probe slipped through the tunnel mouth like a fishing line into black water.

What it saw was not a Dalek funeral nor a tidy trash heap of Cyberman parts. It was a living plan: components drifting in static fields, converted into a lattice that hummed to the rhythm of a machine learning itself. Somewhere down in the maintenance caverns someone had been feeding salvage into a pattern. The pattern was growing teeth.

The Omni-Tool translated the pattern into simple words that slammed into her skull like a hammer.

[Object: Cyber-conversion hub]
[Purpose: Autonomous assembly of conversion nodes]
[Trigger: when conversion nodes hit threshold → signal to central relay → mass conversion sweep]

She unclipped, breath shallow.

"Unit—" the field commander said. "How do you know—"

She turned to them with sudden, lethal clarity. "Because it's Cyber. And because I can smell their time displacement." She hated that it sounded like boastful nonsense. It was the truth: the Omni-Tool saw resonance. Her lungs filled not with fear but a low, bright excitement. This was the thing she had built for.

The commander squared her shoulders. "We can isolate and neutralize the hub. But we'll need a controlled insertion — disable the relay, reverse the assembly sequence, and get out before the system self-heals."

This was not, she thought, a plan bad enough. This was a plan ripe for improvements.

She dug into the tech box she'd dragged, producing three things like a conjurer: a makeshift EMP pulse node (home-built and dangerously pretty), a micro-holo jammer, and a filament she'd made from Dalek alloy and her own nanowire. The Omni-Tool blessed each item with a diagnostic chirp.

She laid her plan out with a speed that made UNIT's captain blink.

"You go in through the maintenance artery here," she said, tapping a spot with a fingertip that left a nano-mark, "use the EMP to drop the assembly threshold by 17–19% — long enough for me to push a microcode in via the filament. That filament will ride their lattice like a parasite and flip the assembly logic to a cleanup directive. We shut down their production, then collapse the relay." She smiled like the end of a bad joke. "Very Simple."

The commander stared at her as if she'd suggested knitting nuclear warheads. Then she counted the risk in her eyes and shrugged. "We have men on standby. We trust the tech team. You're with us."

Trust was a small thing in UNIT; willingness to stand in front of impossible odds and not flinch was larger. They were willing.

They moved into the tunnel like ghosts. The maintenance throat groaned with old machinery. Pipes were wet with condensation, and at irregular intervals the air shimmered: little loops of time where a drip ran upward, where a loose bolt fell twice in two different places. Time was sick here.

Her Omni-Tool hummed tight against her wrist. It told her what the bracer could not speak how the lattice would receive the filament, the frequency to soothe the temporal eddy. Omega pulsed from the seed inside her jacket: careful. hungry. feed after.

They split into teams. UNIT's two techs handled the EMP rig; two soldiers would secure exits. The Engineer slipped on black gloves and forwarded a fragment of code into the filament's tiny core. Her hands didn't shake. She felt, for the first time in a long time, like she belonged to something that mattered.

"Three… two… one."

EMP fins hissed. The cavern screamed in the guttural language of cut power. Lattice growth stuttered; components aborted the weld. For a breath the world perched on the edge of a coin, glittering.

She pushed the filament forward like a surgeon. It slipped into the lattice, and then the thing happened: the Cyber-conversion pattern tried to heal itself. It flailed, and then the filament injected the parasite-code. The lattice's hum went wrong. The Omni-Tool sent her a flood of data: trust this, push a lane here, nudge their timing there. She obeyed.

A scream echoed from deeper in the cavern an analog sound, human and raw — then resolved into something mechanical that had remembered how to panic. The lattice convulsed, converting incomplete. A half-formed conversion node seized and collapsed inward, vaporizing in a blue hiss of static.

They didn't have long. The relay a ring of calibrators began to pulse, calling to the nodes. She felt it like a headache that wanted to be a mission.

"Push now!" she shouted.

They all moved with synchronized violence. The filament sang; the Omni-Tool threaded microcommands through the Cybernetics' own language. UNIT's techs broke into the relay's heartbeat, forced the ring to reverse polarity, and the assembly sequence folded like a bad memory. One by one the conversion nodes shut down and unravelled.

The cavern was suddenly very quiet, filled only with exhaust and the sound of heavy breathing. The temporary time eddies smoothed. UNIT guys unclipped safety harnesses and looked at her with the kind of awe reserved for things that did not die easily.

"Holy—" one whispered.

She wiped her forehead with the back of her glove and smiled that dangerous, quick smile. "Not bad for a day's work, right?"

A soldier approached with an interrogative tilt. He held up a recorder like an offering. "We need ID. Who are you? Where are you from? You just saved us from an outbreak."

She felt the System's neat line feed her exact outputs: XP gained, critical success, skill progression. It tasted of iron and chips.

She blinked. She had never liked the name he would say next, the one carved into the hollow of her history. The soul-word the System had given had always been too intimate.

She could say anything. She could lie that she was some freelance scavenger; she could admit the truth nebular, eldritch, time lords.

She chose indifferent honesty. "I'm the Engineer," she said. The single syllable dropped into the tunnel like a stone in a sanctified pond.

The soldier's face changed in a way that frightened her: the shift was small but seismic. Eyes dilated, mouth slackened, as if the air had been replaced with colder air. Around them other UNIT members, trained and weathered, stepped back an inch, and in that inch the world looked different.

They didn't just recognize the name. They remembered, viscerally, the stories adults didn't speak aloud. The Engineer the word carried the weight of endings. Death as a tool. Mercy as a scalpel. Time as judgment.

Somewhere behind her, the Omni-Tool hummed a content Omega pulsed in her mind, a wave of warmth and… hunger. She felt suddenly very small in a very large way.

One of UNIT's techs swallowed and said, as if naming a god or a plague, "You're—are you… engineer..The Engineer?"

She laughed, not joyously this time. "Yup that me." She rested her palm on the filament still glowing in her hand. Tiny motes of static drifted off and dissolved like dust.

They looked at her like they'd seen a god of death

She made weird face at that."Wtf did my future self did to get that reaction."

=====================

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Chapter Text

====================================

The house was quiet when she shut the door behind her. Too quiet.

Her boots squeaked against the warped floorboards as she stepped inside, shoulders hunched like she was trying to shrug off the whole damn world. Outside, the streets of London buzzed with the same indifference they always had, cars rattling over potholes, neon signs flickering, humans shuffling through their lives. Normal. Forgettable.

But in the eyes of the UNIT soldiers she'd worked beside? She hadn't been human. She hadn't been "normal."

She'd been Death.

Their faces still haunted her—the way men twice her size with weapons in their hands had gone pale, had stepped back from her like she was radioactive, like she carried some inevitability in her veins. No matter how casual she tried to be, no matter how many jokes she cracked, the truth was in their stares: they hadn't seen a woman. They'd seen something older. Something that wasn't supposed to be standing in front of them.

She tossed her trench coat over the couch and sank into her chair by the little desk she'd cobbled together out of scavenged parts. Her laptop hummed weakly as it powered on. She chewed her lip, her purple eyes reflecting back faintly in the black screen.

"…Why the hell did they look at me like that?" she muttered.

The System stayed quiet this time. Omega pulsed faintly in her coat pocket but didn't "speak" either. She was left alone with her thoughts.

The laptop booted. She opened a browser.

"Let's see what I will do."

She typed slowly, like saying a name out loud in a haunted house:

"The Engineer."

The results slammed into her like a freight train. Hits came up, but not just engineering jobs or universities. Strange, hidden threads—cryptid wikis, dusty scans of academic papers, conspiracy forums.

All of her.

Not exactly her, but it's always close enough to be undeniable.

 "The Purple-ClockWorkEyed Woman: History's Most Persistent Cryptid."

Pages upon pages. Paranormal forums. Folklore archives. Even Wikipedia had an entry.

She raised an eyebrow about that. "I do have purple eyes, but it's not clockwork. Did something happen to my eyes?"

Her stomach twisted as she clicked the first link.

The Engineer – Global Folklore Entity
A recurring figure in human myth, spanning thousands of years and multiple cultures. Characterized by distinctive traits:
– Black hair with purple streaks or white
– Purple, clock-like eyes
– Garments marked with the Omega symbol
– Accompanied by a strange sound described as a clock's tick mixed with a death whistle
Witnesses describe the figure as either a harbinger of catastrophe or a savior arriving at pivotal moments in history.

The being seems to be able to change its form it 

Her throat went dry. She clicked.

The page opened to a black-and-white sketch: a woman slim and strong, with black hair streaked white, clockwork eyes glowing faintly purple. A trenchcoat marked with a symbol: Ω.

The caption chilled her.
"The Engineer. Documented across at least 4,000 years of human history. Known by many names. None survived unchanged after meeting her."

"The Engineer, the unholy offspring of time and death itself, is unknown if it is a devil, a god, or a curse. Said to appear at moments of great death or healing. Always accompanied by a whistling sound and the ticking of unseen clocks."

"Never engage this being, your only chance is to hide and pray she does not find you

There she was.

Not exactly her — but always close enough to be undeniable.

[Archival voice, modern English translation.]

"This is the earliest known textual evidence for the entity later labeled The Engineer.
Carbon dating places it roughly five centuries before the rise of Uruk.
Linguistic markers imply the scribe had no framework for technology—what he describes as 'light without flame' and 'house that walks' may indicate a vessel or structure capable of movement and luminescence far beyond the period."
— Dr. Lena Rhys, Department of Parahistorical Studies, Cambridge.

Dr. Rhys's tone in the recovered reel is professional but tight. The hum behind her microphone betrays the unease in the room. On the table lies a photograph: the fragment's surface under ultraviolet. The grooves form an outline that no one expected—symmetrical arcs and a central circle call it an Omega sigil.

Engineer stare hard at the arcs on screen because, while it might seem like a random circle to humans, but to engineer, it looks like 

"Isn't that the language of Gallifrey?"

A Sumerian tablet carving: a tall figure with clocks for eyes holding what looked like a burning gear.

The oldest written mention of her comes from a broken clay tablet recovered near the ruins of Uruk. The translation, though incomplete, reads like a prayer and a curse intertwined:

"The Woman of the Turning Sky walked among us. Her eyes were of purple flame, and her hair streaked like stormlight. She bore the mark of the Circle that Devours Itself. Where she walked, the dead whispered and the sick stood again."

Archaeologists at first dismissed the account as an allegory, but carbon dating confirmed that the tablet predates any known Sumerian concept of circular infinity or Omega symbolism.

By 2200 BCE, she appears again in Egyptian temple murals, always in the background, never named, her hand hovering over her face, hiding it

Over the next thousand years, new depictions surface like echoes through time. Wall carvings in predynastic Egypt show a tall woman with hair black as pitch, streaked white in front, standing before a pillar of mirrored stone. Greek pottery calls her Khronarchē, "the Architect of Hours." Always the same details:

eyes of violet light;

the halo of clock-gears turning behind her;

the great "house" or "tower" that changes shape but hums with the same low resonance, a note neither mortal nor divine.

"Which I'm guessing that whistle of death is the sound my tardis makes when the brakes are on, like what happens with the doctor."

Every age reacts differently. Sumerians carved prayers. Romans founded a cult the Fraternitas Tempus, that offered sacrifices of broken clocks. Crusaders swore they saw her standing over battlefields, cloak torn and eyes burning through the storm, raising the dying to fight once more. During the Black Death, monks in plague masks painted her guiding souls with a hand of light.

In each depiction, her expression shifts: sorrow in one century, calm amusement in the next. Never cruelty. Always inevitability.

Historians note that the myths evolve alongside human progress: whenever humanity reaches a new threshold fire, bronze, gunpowder, atomic energy—the Engineer's "house" reappears, changed to mirror their understanding. The fortress breathes like a living thing, its walls folding and reforming in geometric pulses. 

Renaissance painting: In the corner of a fresco depicting a plague, a pale woman in a dark coat, purple eyes watching, hand resting on the shoulder of a dying king.

World War I photograph: Blurred, but unmistakable, a trench full of soldiers, one figure too tall, standing amidst smoke, eyes glowing faint clockwork violet. The caption read: The Death Woman.

Medieval tapestry: A battle scene. Knights clashing. In the background, a figure in black with white-streaked hair. A whistle was stitched into the scene like sound made visible.

Urban legends, modern blogs: Survivors recounting stories of a whistle in the dark, a presence watching, and a woman in a trenchcoat appearing where death and chaos gather.

A photo, early 1900s, a grainy black-and-white of a woman in a trenchcoat, an omega symbol painted bold across her chest. Soldiers blurred around her. The caption read: "The Watcher in the Somme, 1916."

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