Searching for Life

Cardiff bustled. The streets were full of people moving in every direction, thousands of individual lives intersecting for a second before continuing on their way. Thousands of individuals living out their normal lives in a city that was anything but.

No one noticed the alien lying in the middle of the plaza. No one ever noticed the strange things that always happened in Cardiff. She was wearing a black leather jacket, jeans, a tattered red coat that beared the Gallifrey symbol upon it and a pair of sexy high heel boots.

She was lying precisely on top of a rift in time and space, not that it was visible to the naked eye. Her arrival had been sudden and unobtrusive, though far more traumatic for her. After a moment, she began to stir. She opened large, blue eyes and looked around with a dazed expression. Blood was pouring from her bodyand she was in so so much pain.

It was unbearable. Not as unbearable as what she had seen and fought. The things she had seen. The darkness, blood and fire and rage. No onecould bear it all. Billions of people relied on her to be a proper leader and lead them into all this darkness, blood, fire and rage. It was a terrible thought even for her.


She waited there for what seemed eternity to her, until someone bright enough would see her. But she knew she was in the right hands.

Romana was afriad as she saw people passing by notcing her blood was not red but orange as an inhabiatat of Gallifrey had. Would they lock ehr up in one of their cells? She hoped not. But she did not have enough strength inside her to crawl away to one of their puplic rooms. Tears fell down. She saw an approaching person come to her...

Kira walked quickly down the Cardiff streets. She had her hands in the pockets of her dark trousers. She walked to a small café and ordered a cup of tea from the clerk and went back outside. She took off her black backpack and sat in the chair next to her, then she threw off her long black coat onto the back of her chair.

She sat down and pulled out her laptop from her bag. It was literally ahead of its time, well the internal components and the software on it was, but the casing wasn’t. On the outside it looked like a normal Torchwood standard laptop, but on the inside it had loads of borrowed parts from the fifty-second century.

She set her laptop on the table in front of her and switched it on. Perfectly normal start up. She leant back and waited for it boot; she took a sip of her tea. The login screen appeared and she typed in a long password. A second box popped up and she put in her Torchwood Access Code into it, then finally a third, in a language that only she could understand. The boxes disappeared and a screen that was similar to a TARDIS scanner appeared on the laptop.

She smiled then got to work on her daily duties. She heard someone pass by, and she looked up and smiled quickly. He looked at her awkwardly. “Just a game,” she told him, but the screen started beeping and turned a warning red. “I think you lost.” The old man said.

Kira jumped up, knocking her seat to the floor. She closed the lid on the laptop and slipped into her bag. She took the last mouthful of her tea, then grabbed her coat and threw her backpack over her shoulder and took off running.

The Rift was going crazy again, but not like this. There was something different; she could feel it to the centre of her bones and it frightened her, yet she was excited by what she feared. She stopped, for she saw the man again. She was almost to the heart of the Rift. "Who are you?" She asked, staring mouthed at him. "Only you or your people can see, but it is not me you should be asking." He pointed through the crowd.

Kira followed his finger, to someone lying in the street. "Oh my!" She took off running to the woman in the streets. "What happened?" She looked at the woman, kneeling beside her. She felt something sticky against the palm of her hand and realized she'd put her hand in a small puddle of blood. Her mouth dropped like a large 'o.' She didn't have all her memories, but she knew enough that the colour of blood was like hers, like what she'd been told by her co-workers so often - Time Lord blood.

With her dry hand, Kira clicked the button on her comms device. "Jack! Gwen! Someone! We need medical aid, Stat!" Kira called through the small device. She left the device on and decided to try to keep the woman talking whilst she searched for her tube of nanogenes in her bag and pockets. "My name is Kira, what is yours?" She asked as a start. "Who did this to you, what happened?

Romana stared at Kira before plucking up the engergy to speak her most urgent words. "My name is Romana, the lord president of Gallifrey." bloood spluttered from her mouth. She kept herself going though. "I was commanding a lead battleship when thealeks captured me and put me to torture before what would have been my immediant extermiantion. Romana rolled over. "I need Jack Harkness. He knows the doctor as well as I do. I need someone with that knowledge."

Romana eyes almost rolled. "Don't worry. This is nothing compared to what I have been through. I should be able to regenerate if you can't repair my injuries." She screamed in pain as she took out a knife that had been stuck through her stomach. "Oh that's so much better." She attempted to stand up and eventually suceeded. "No ones stopping the president." Blood was pouring from her injuries. "Where am I anyways?"

Kira flinched hearing the words Dalek and Torture together. Not another victim, please no, Kira thought to herself. In her dreams there was someone who she'd called her father, being tortured by the Daleks. "Knowledge of the Doctor?" Kira asked looking at her. The Doctor was one of the people in her dreams. This woman knew him? Perhaps she could help her find him? Kira hoped so, for all she knew he was the only one who could help her, or at least that's why Jack and Martha told her.

"You're in Cardiff." Kira told her, answering her question, "Cardiff, Whales, 2010." she added. Lord President of Gallifrey, Kira thought to herself, hello again. She found herself thinking and felt like she was going to say, but decided against it. Kira pulled a long grey scarf from her pocket and held it out to Romana, "Please, take it and apply pressure, I'll get you Jack Harkness. He'll be here soon."

Kira pressed the comm button and spoke into it. "Jack, the woman that came through, she's asking for you. Says her name's Romana." Kira dropped her voice low, just loud enough for the comm to pick up her voice. "Jack, she's bleeding...her blood, it's like mine." She whispered softly. "I think she's a..." She didn't even finish, she knew he'd know what she meant.

Kira turned back to Romana, "Come on, I'll take you to him. He said he'd meet us." She said softly. "Can I help with anything?" Romana's strength was just like her own, Kira could tell. "You're wounded," Kira reminded her.