I'm back from my finals so far. I passed most of my class…just math, ugh, I got a 64.2 on the test, mostly because my first two tests were bad cause the review sheet he gave us and said what was on there was on the test. Guess what, that mf lied hard, so I got a 40 on that.
Now it's going to take a while for me to get back into writing cause i also just moved to a new house, while my old one gets repaired, and I have no table to put my TV or laptop
Also, my 5 G Wi-Fi is not working!!!
I'm still moving my stuff, so I don't have time to go over my work for mistakes, just going to put in chat to fix, cause im lazy :p
Ill rewrite most of this later
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The Engineer did not like the way the broken TARDIS watched her.
That was stupid, obviously. It had no eyes. Its outer shell was split open, half-sunk into a street that couldn't decide if it wanted to be London, a red desert, or a dead forest. The light steel casing had been burned nearly black. Its dimensional ribs jutted from the wound like exposed bones. The door was gone. The console room was gone. Most of the inner architecture had collapsed into a dead knot of folded space.
Still.
It felt like being watched.
Not by the TARDIS itself. Not anymore.
By what had happened to it.
The Engineer crouched low beside the wreck, one hand still pressed over the pocket where Omega's seed trembled with quiet, burning anger. That wheezing pulse had not stopped. It had only sunk deeper, becoming less of a sound and more of a vibration in her bones.
"Yeah," she murmured. "I know."
Nash was behind her, rifle stolen from some dead future soldier held awkwardly in his hands like he hated every second of touching it. Lira kept turning in place, one palm raised, trying to feel for magic and finding nothing but pressure, static, and the occasional screaming edge of weapons that should never have been invented.
"Engineer," Nash said, low. "Tell me you're not about to climb inside that thing."
"I'm not about to climb inside that thing."
He stared at her.
She glanced back. "I'm about to climb near it, and it's a tardis, not a thing that rude human."
"That is not better."
"It is technically better."
"Technically, better gets people killed."
"Lots of things get people killed here," she said, then immediately regretted how flat it came out.
Nash didn't argue. He just tightened his grip on the weapon and looked away.
The Engineer breathed through her nose.
Okay. Not funny. Bad joke. War zone. Do better.
'I wonder because I'm a time lord now that I will start thinking only in Logical."
She turned back to the ruined TARDIS and raised her Omni-Tool. It flickered once, the hard-light interface stuttering under the weight of Time War interference. She tapped the side of the bracer with two fingers.
"Come on," she whispered. "Don't be dramatic. I'm the dramatic one."
The Omni-Tool spat static at her.
She squinted. "Rude."
Lira moved closer, boots crunching over ash. "Can you read it?"
"Bits. The war time weapons are drowning everything. Imagine trying to hear one heartbeat in a stadium full of chainsaws."
Lira looked at the ruined time capsule. "Is it dead?"
The Engineer didn't answer right away, "Hmm, probably not, tardis are extremely hard to kill… well, unless you're the doctor, then it blows up every two months."
She reached out, just letting her fingers hover near the cracked shell. There should have been warmth or a vibration. A living time capsule had a presence even when wounded: a pressure, a hum, a sense of impossible rooms folded behind a door.
"Mostly," the Engineer said finally. "The body's dead. Some reflex systems are still twitching. Maybe backup archives. Maybe defense habits."
Nash frowned. "Defense habits?"
"It's a TARDIS," she said. "Even broken, it might still dislike being touched by idiots."
"And are we idiots?"
The Engineer made a face. "Yup, we are extremely underqualified."
"That's worse."
"Not if we're careful."
"That is exactly what underqualified people say."
She pointed at him without looking. "Valid. Annoying, but valid."
Omega pulsed again.
The little seed wasn't using words. It pushed feelings into her in flashes: fury, grief, hunger, recognition, and something else beneath it all. Not just anger at the dead sister. Need. A kind of desperate reaching toward the wreck.
A child smelling the bones of a family it had never met.
The Engineer's throat tightened.
"I'm going to take only what's already loose," she said softly, though she wasn't sure if she was talking to Nash, Lira, Omega, or the dead TARDIS. "No cutting into anything living. No stripping the core. No disrespect."
Nash's expression softened slightly. "You sound like you're asking permission."
"I am."
"From the ship?"
"From whatever's left of her."
Lira nodded once. "Then ask properly."
The Engineer looked at her.
Lira's face was pale, but steady. "You don't have magic here. Fine. But that doesn't mean respect stops mattering."
For a second, the Engineer just stared.
Then she smiled a little. Not bright. Not manic. Just grateful.
"Yeah," she said. "You're right, also, there is magic. I remember reading about a magic empire."
Lira looks at her ecstasy to learn more magic. "really were are they? Maybe they can teach us."
The engineer just shook her head, "Not possible. "
"Why.' lira look back at her
The engineer replied flat "I'm pretty sure the doctor erased a good chunk of the magic empire from the timeline
She turned back to the wreck, not looking at Lira's horrified look, and placed her palm against the scorched outer shell.
The contact hit like cold metal and old pain.
Not memory. TARDIS memories weren't like human ones. They were routes, rooms, passengers, coordinates, conversations held in engine vibration, old hands on the console, the feeling of doors opening into impossible mornings.
Then the last thing.
Impact. Breach. Fear. A Dalek signal cutting through the outer defense. Something worse is behind it. A weapon built to eat dimensional architecture. Rooms folding inward. Corridors screaming as they were unmade.
A pilot trying to say sorry.
Then nothing.
The Engineer pulled her hand back, breathing hard.
Lira stepped closer. "What did you see?"
"Enough."
Her voice cracked on the word. She cleared her throat quickly and shook her head, forcing her mind back into shape.
"Okay. Salvage list. We need dimensional stabilizers, shielding lattice fragments, any intact growth-matrix code, and if the universe feels generous for once, a weapons schematic that doesn't immediately erase everyone in a three-mile radius."
Nash stared. "That last part was too specific."
"This war has a theme."
She took another breath, then snapped into motion.
The fear didn't go away. It just became fuel.
Her Omni-Tool expanded into a scanning arc, a thin orange-gold fan of light passing over the wreck's surface. Interference shredded the display twice before she forced it into manual mode. Numbers scrolled too fast for human eyes. She slowed them down, cursed when the tool lagged, then rerouted through the Cyberman processor fragment she'd stolen from UNIT.
The interface stabilized.
"Ha," she breathed. "See? Theft pays."
Nash gave her a look.
"Salvage," she corrected. "Government-adjacent borrowing."
"Still theft."
"Morally flexible recycling."
Lira glanced over her shoulder at a distant flash lighting the horizon. "Whatever it is, do it faster."
The Engineer didn't need telling twice.
She crouched beside a split seam in the TARDIS shell. A section of the outer casing had peeled back, revealing layers beneath: not metal exactly, not bone exactly, but something grown with the patience of a civilization that had forgotten how to be humble.
She scanned it.
"Temporal shielding laminate," she said. "Cracked… but the base structure's intact."
"Useful?" Nash asked.
"For Omega? Very. This stuff teaches a young TARDIS how to take hits without turning into expensive soup."
Omega pulsed hotly at the word.
"Yes, yes, not soup," the Engineer murmured, already digging into her coat for tools.
She didn't have a proper extraction kit. Of course, she didn't. She had an Omni-Tool built in a rented flat above a fish-and-chip shop, a few alien fragments, and more confidence than health insurance. So she improvised.
The holo-sword came first, but not as a blade. She pinched the projection down until it became a thin cutting line, less weapon and more scalpel. The tool whined, angry at the force.
"Don't complain," she told it. "You wanted to be useful..hopeful that cyberman parts are going to degrade into a B-1 droid."
Lira crouched beside her, watching the street. "Does your tool always sound like it hates you?"
"It's learning from me."
"That explains a lot."
The Engineer smiled despite herself and began cutting.
Slow. Careful. Along dead seams only. She didn't cut living tissue. She didn't touch the fused interior nerves. Whenever the Omni-Tool highlighted a section that still had faint activity, she marked it red and left it alone.
The first shielding fragment came loose with a soft metallic sigh.
Omega's pulse sharpened.
The Engineer held the piece in both hands for a second. It was about the length of her forearm, curved slightly, light steel beneath the burn marks. Even damaged, it felt heavier than it should. Not in mass. In meaning.
"First piece," she whispered.
Omega answered with a small wheeze that carried hunger and anger both.
"No eating it raw," the Engineer warned. "You are not a goat."
A blast rolled over the battlefield, distant but strong enough to make the broken TARDIS creak. Lira's wards flickered uselessly and died again. She grimaced.
"I hate this place," she said.
"Reasonable," the Engineer replied. "Top-tier survival instinct."
The second find was better.
Behind a collapsed section of the outer shell, she found a half-intact chameleon circuit cluster. It was fused in places, but the core logic crystal was still there, shielded by stubborn old design and sheer spite.
"Oh, hello," she whispered.
Nash leaned over her shoulder. "What is it?"
"A chameleon circuits. Sort of. Let's a TARDIS blend into local environments. Police box. Pillar. Rock. Terrible wardrobe. Whatever."
"Can you use it?"
"Not directly. Omega's not grown enough. But the design language? The adaptive tech? That's gold."
She connected the Omni-Tool carefully.
The moment the data link formed, the dead circuit lashed out.
The interface screamed. Her wrist jerked. The holo-display shattered into broken symbols.
"Ah—ow—nope, no, don't do that!"
She slammed two fingers into the override node, teeth gritted. The circuit tried to lock her out again, old security waking like a guard dog with three legs and a grudge.
"I'm not stealing your secrets," she snapped at the dead system. "Clam down, your plot is probably dead anywhere."
The chameleon circuit pulsed once.
The data came through in fragments. Not full schematics, but enough to matter: camouflage philosophy, perception filtering, local history sampling, how to read a culture's "background object" instinct.
The Engineer copied what she could, then disconnected before the dying circuit could burn itself out completely.
"Thank you," she said, quiet again.
She moved deeper along the exposed side, stepping carefully over cables that flickered between solid and transparent. Somewhere inside, a corridor tried to exist and failed, its doorway opening into itself like a bad mirror trick.
The Engineer stopped at that one.
"Nope," she said. "Not touching that."
Nash peered in, then quickly looked away. "I feel sick."
"Good. Means your brain is rejecting it."
"That's good?"
"Better than accepting it."
They kept going.
The third find made her stop breathing for a second.
A weapons panel.
Not a main battery. Not anything dramatic enough to get them erased by Daleks for existing near it. A secondary defensive suite, partly melted but still physically present. TARDISes weren't supposed to be warships, but this was the Time War. Supposed to didn't survive long here.
The panel was grown into the inner shell, shaped like a smooth plate with circular sockets and branching channels.
The Engineer scanned it three times before touching anything.
"Defensive weapons," she said.
Nash's grip tightened on the future rifle. "How defensive?"
"Depends on how angry the TARDIS was."
Lira stepped closer. "Engineer."
"I know."
"No war crimes."
"I know."
"I mean it."
She looked at Lira then, and the teasing response died before it formed.
Lira wasn't scolding. She was afraid.
Not of the weapon.
Of what the Engineer might become if she learned from it too quickly.
The Engineer nodded once.
"No war crimes," she said. "I'm looking for shields, countermeasures, escape tools. If there's anything offensive, I study it only enough to defend against it."
Nash exhaled. "That sounded mature."
"Don't spread rumors."
This time Lira did smile. Briefly.
The Engineer connected the Omni-Tool to the panel to get a map of the rooms.
A few rooms deeper, she found another impossible object.
This time, she actually laughed. Because her brain had given up. Buried inside what had once been the TARDIS power architecture was a reactor.
Compact.
Elegant.
Beautifully engineered.
A glowing circular core surrounded by advanced containment systems.
The scan identified it immediately.
The Engineer stared.
Then looked around.
Then looked back.
"...Seriously?..someone took Iron Man's heart."
The Engineer slowly approached.
"Whatever come to mommy.."
A quick scan showed the reactor wasn't running on conventional power. That would've been almost normal, and well, Iron Man tech would so weak for a time lord.
Instead, somebody had modified it. Orbital Artron Collection Arrays.Temporal energy conversion systems.
Micro-dimensional capacitors.
It wasn't replacing the TARDIS heart. It had become a secondary heart.
"I'm sooo adding this to Omega later. Absolutely stealing this."
Omega approved.
The next several hours turned into a blur of scavenging.
The intent behind the design was practical in a way that made her skin crawl. Temporal snare fields. Anti-boarding pulse systems. Vortex-displacement mines designed to throw attackers into empty seconds. A "mercy lock" that prevented the TARDIS from firing on living pilots unless the ship itself was dying.
She paused there.
The dead TARDIS had been fitted with rules.
Even in the Time War, someone had tried to put a hand on the blade and say: Not too far.
"Okay," she murmured. "That explains why the universe didn't blow up with all these tardis blowing up, unlike the doctor one."
Lira's head snapped toward the distant skyline. "Movement."
Everyone froze.
The Engineer immediately dimmed the Omni-Tool, reducing its glow to almost nothing. The three of them crouched behind the wreckage of the TARDIS.
In the distance, over a ridge of impossible ruins, something was moving in the sky.
Daleks.
Not many—three or maybe four—were gliding low, their casings blackened and scarred. They were on a patrol pattern, searching for survivors, salvage, or anything worth exterminating on principle.
The Engineer's mouth went dry. Nash raised his rifle.
She grabbed his wrist before he could aim."No, trust me, that's a bad idea," she whispered.
His eyes flicked to her.
"Do not shoot first," she cautioned. "Do not make noise. Do not let them know we're here."
"At them?" he mouthed.
She nodded as if her words were completely normal.
The Daleks passed overhead, their voices distorted by distance and damaged speakers.
"SCAN FOR TEMPORAL LIFE SIGNS."
Her stomach dropped.
Artron signature. Her signature.
She activated every half-finished cloaking idea she had, although they were crude and incomplete.
Temporal dithering. Perceptual dampening. False depth.
Not finished. Not safe. But functional enough.Her Omni-Tool burned hot against her wrist as she smeared their presence across three useless seconds and buried her artron output under the dead TARDIS's residue.
For one horrible moment, the nearest Dalek stopped. Its eyestalk turned.
The Engineer held her breath.
Nash and Lira didn't move.
The Dalek scanned again."NO VALID TARGETS DETECTED."
It moved on.
Only when the patrol disappeared into the fire-lit haze did Nash breathe out.
Her hands were shaking now. She hated that, but there it was. She flexed them once, twice, then went back to the weapons panel because stopping would make the fear catch up.
The System chimed lightly in the back of her head, not with a flashy pop-up, just a clean line of thought.
Stealth countermeasure concept improved. Temporal noise injection stabilized under live threat.
"Good," she muttered. "At least near-death is educational."
Lira crouched beside her again, softer now. "You okay?"
"No."
"Good answer."
"I'm going to keep working."
The Engineer swallowed and copied the defensive suite schematics.
Not all of them.
She filtered.
No displacement mines. No pilot-kill overrides. No nightmare loops. But the shielding harmonics? The anti-boarding pulse logic? The emergency translation of a hostile force into harmless kinetic bleed? Those she took.
"For Omega," she said.
Omega's pulse warmed slightly.
"For defense," she added. "Not revenge."
The warmth flickered. Not in agreement exactly. More like reluctant listening.
"I mean it," she said, hand over her pocket. "I know you're angry. I am too. But I'm not growing you into a weapon just because this place is awful."
The seed went quiet.
Then came a small, stubborn pulse.
The Engineer smiled faintly. "Yeah. We'll argue later."
The final find waited near the heart of the wreck.
She almost missed it because it didn't look important. Just a cracked panel half-covered in ash, tucked beneath a support strut that had folded into a spiral. But the Omni-Tool caught a repeating pattern buried inside: not power, not weaponry. Instructions.
Growth architecture.
Her breath caught again, this time for a different reason.
"No way, just what I needed."
Nash shifted. "Good, no way or bad no way?"
"Blueprint cache."
Lira blinked. "For a TARDIS?"
"Partial. War-era. Growth acceleration, emergency coral reinforcement, dimensional room-seeding, self-repair under hostile temporal conditions…"
She stared at the cracked panel as if it had just handed her the keys to the universe.
"This is exactly what Omega needs."
The cache was damaged. Of course, it was damaged. Everything here was damaged. But parts were readable, and the parts that weren't readable could maybe be inferred later with enough time, coffee, and several emotional breakdowns.
She connected the Omni-Tool.
The moment the first layer opened, Omega reacted so strongly that the Engineer nearly dropped to one knee.
Hunger.
Recognition.
Desperation.
A psychic reach toward the cache so intense it hurt.
"Easy," the Engineer gasped, clutching her pocket. "Easy, you little maniac. I'm getting it."
Nash stepped forward. "What's wrong?"
"Omega wants the blueprint."
Omega pulsed harder.
The Engineer winced. "I said not safely."
The seed answered with a pressure that felt very much like: Now.
The Engineer clenched her jaw. "No."
The battlefield rumbled again. Somewhere nearby, space folded with a wet crack.
Lira looked up. "We're out of time."
"I know."
The cache was larger than she could download normally. Too much interference. Too much corruption. She needed a clean transfer, or as clean as possible in the Time War, which was like asking politely for dry socks in a hurricane.
She pulled the shielding fragment from her pack and wedged it between the cache node and the Omni-Tool, creating a crude temporary buffer.
"Hold this," she told Nash.
He grabbed the fragment. "Is it dangerous?"
"Yes."
"How dangerous?"
"Don't lick it."
"I hate that this is becoming a standard answer."
She turned to Lira. "If anything starts glowing purple, tell me."
"Everything is glowing purple."
"More purple."
Lira nodded grimly. "Got it."
The transfer began.
It hurt.
Not physically, not exactly. The blueprint wasn't just data; it was instruction meant for a living time capsule. It tried to unfold inside her head, showing rooms that weren't rooms yet, corridors grown from equations, power systems fed by stars, coral learning how to dream bigger.
Omega reached for it through her.
The Engineer held the line with everything she had.
"No," she whispered through gritted teeth. "Not all at once. You'll choke."
Omega pushed again.
"I know you want it!"
Another push, fierce and frightened.
The Engineer's voice softened despite the pain. "I know. I know you're scared this'll happen to you. But if you swallow broken war-code whole, you'll grow wrong."
That got through.
The pressure eased just enough.
The Engineer breathed, shaking, and guided the transfer in layers. Shielding first. Growth stability second. Emergency room-seeding third. Weapons suite locked behind a mental quarantine, labeled with three separate warnings and one personal note that simply read: Ask me when we are not scared.
The cache finished with a soft click.
Then the cracked panel died.
The Engineer sat back on her heels, panting.
Nash lowered the shielding fragment carefully. "Did we get it?"
She looked at the Omni-Tool.
Data sat there, damaged but real. A war TARDIS blueprint fragment. Not complete, not safe, but enough to change Omega's future.
"Yeah," she said, voice rough. "We got it."
Lira's gaze shifted past her shoulder.
"Engineer."
The tone made her move before asking.
She turned.
The ruined TARDIS was destabilizing. Whatever remained of its structure had finally noticed too much had changed. The exposed ribs flickered, phasing between moments. The shell groaned, folding inward a fraction at a time.
Not exploding.
Collapsing.
"Time to leave," the Engineer said.
They ran.
Behind them, the broken TARDIS folded into itself.. Almost neatly. The remaining shell curled inward around the dead heart, pulling the wreck out of the battlefield, out of reach, out of misuse.
The Engineer glanced back once.
For a second, she thought she saw a door.
Not real. Just the memory of one.
Then it was gone.
She stumbled, caught herself, and kept running.
They ducked behind a ridge of shattered stone just as the space where the TARDIS had been compressed into a tiny flash of silver light and vanished.
Silence followed.
Well.
Time War silence.
Distant explosions. Screaming sky. Daleks somewhere ruining everyone's day.
The Engineer dropped against the ridge wall and slid down until she was sitting, breathing hard.
Nash sat beside her, equally wrecked. "So. Successful shopping trip?"
She gave him a tired look.
He held up a hand. "Too soon?"
The Engineer looked down at her pocket. Omega had gone quiet again, but not cold. The anger was still there, banked like coals. Under it was something new.
Purpose.
The Engineer touched the seed through the fabric.
"We've got what we need," she said softly. "Not everything. But enough to start."
Omega pulsed once.
This time, it didn't feel like rage.
That almost broke her more than the battlefield.
She swallowed hard and pushed herself back up.
"Okay," she said, too quickly, because emotions were getting close and she did not have time for that nonsense. "Now we find an exit before history notices we're shoplifting its nightmares."
Nash groaned as he stood. "There she is."
"What?"
"That thing you do. Horrifying sentence, cheerful delivery."
"I contain multitudes."
"You contain several safety violations."
"Also true."
Lira looked toward the burning horizon. "Where do we go?"
The Engineer raised her Omni-Tool. It flickered, then stabilized, now carrying a sliver of the dead TARDIS's shielding logic. The scan reached farther this time, cutting through the interference with cleaner lines.
She found three possible routes.
One led toward a Dalek patrol.
One led into a temporal minefield.
One led toward a field of broken time capsules, half-buried under the ruins of something that had once been a Gallifreyan forward base.
Her stomach twisted.
More TARDIS wrecks.
More sisters.
More parts.
More danger.
Omega pulsed, sharp and hungry.
The Engineer closed her eyes for half a second.
"Yeah," she whispered. "I know."
Nash saw her expression. "I'm not going to like this, am I?"
"No," she said. "But there might be more salvage."
Lira stared at her. "You want to go deeper."
"I want to get us home," the Engineer said. "And right now, the fastest way home is building Omega enough of a spine to punch a doorway through this lock."
Nash looked at the burning sky, then at the Omni-Tool, then at her.
"You actually think you can do that?"
The Engineer looked at the partial blueprint glowing over her wrist. Broken, dangerous, incomplete.
Then she looked at the battlefield.
Then at the place where the dead TARDIS had folded itself away rather than let the war use her again.
Her fear was still there.
So was the shaking.
So was the part of her that wanted to curl into a ball and scream until the universe apologized.
Instead, she grinned.
Small. Wild. Exhausted.
"I think," she said, "I can cheat enough to try."
And with Omega's seed burning warm against her heart, the Engineer led them deeper into the Time War.
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wordcount-4130 not bad