3Next chapter is on May the 3rd.
The Doctor seems unusually active when he next comes in. It's nothing like he used to be but still it gives her more hope that maybe he's breaking through the mental shift now, slowly and surely as she would expect of him, like a bird on a diamond mountain, chipping away at eternity, at his bonds, at evil.
She wants to kiss him now for it but knows that it would possibly not be welcome and it would most certainly not help.
Instead she helps him rearrange the furniture, move the table and chairs from her space again and pretends to fuss over closing her piano as he serves food, resettling the things she's been given in a safer space while he's distracted.
It's that chicken peanut thing again with rice.
She looks for any sign that he knows the significance of it but sees none.
Still she holds hope in her hands gently as if it were her own hearts she was holding.
Her small room looks strange without the table in it but she finds that she doesn't mind seeing it on the other side of the glass, the chairs pulled askew from where they'd sat together and she could almost, almost, almost, pretend that it was normal.
The Mistress feels like she's been left alone for longer than usual.
It itches as she presses her hands against the glass, feels it cold against her palms, unyielding.
She imagines still that she could push through it, that it would melt under her touch instead of chilling her. In this form she whispers through the outer walls too and then she is standing in unclimate controlled air. She can feel the drag of time again, heady as it catches up to her and she leans against a wall for support, letting herself be corporeal again as she waits for her time sense to readjust, deal with the sudden influx of information.
She feels her breaths become shallow as she closes her eyes to input, allowing herself the time and space she needs to recollect herself.
And then she is opening her eyes again and her face is pressed against the glass which is fogged with breath.
Her legs complain as she sits properly again, unbending them, and her right arm, which had been focusing most of her weight on the glass.
She stares out of her enclosure, on her knees.
The Mistress buries her head in her hands, teeth clenched tightly together.
Bill grins as she steps into the vault, leaning back against the doors as she shuts them with a grin.
"You'll never guess what I got!" She says excitedly, smile in her voice too as she quickly covers the distance to the Mistress' enclosure and types in a code which she seems to remember most days now.
The Mistress raises an eyebrow in curiosity, standing from the piano stool and closing the lid over the keys.
"Oh?" She asks, knowing that the human is already bursting at the seams with excitement to reveal her secret.
Bill takes her hand, pulls her to the dining table, sits her down on the chair and gently places a hand over her eyes.
"Promise not to look?" She asks and the Time Lady could laugh that she's being asked such a ridiculous question by someone who she would have already killed months ago just for coming so comes to her.
Instead she closes her eyes obediently and feels the hand, which had been hovering just a short distance from her face, move away. There's a soft rustling, fabric against plastic, and a gentle thunk of something not overly large against the wooden tabletop.
"Open your eyes!" The human exclaims and the Mistress manages to hold back her chuckle again as she does as asked.
On the table is a laptop, unopened, thin and folded, a little bit battered around the edges, clearly from a later period of time than they went into production in the timeline they'd originally inhabited.
"You managed to get it!" Missy says, opening the lid and lifting it up. She feels the weight of it in her hand.
It's strange to hold something in her hands again which isn't crude or devoid of any level of sophistication.
Sure, the device is human and so not very advanced at all but still it's a far cry from the things she's had access to for the last fifty years.
"I thought you might be able to get it so the monks can't find us through it better than I would." She explains, shrugging.
The Mistress hums, looking at the bottom.
"You wouldn't happen to have a screwdriver before we even turn this on?" The Time Lady asks.
"Ah." Bill wrinkles her nose, "I didn't think of that."
The Mistress puts it down carefully.
"Well. I can keep it here if you like- signals can't get in or out of this place even now. When I can get it open I can check there's nothing that shouldn't be inside there and might be able to optimise things a little bit. Then I can start it up and patch it through to anything that might be still functioning along the old timeline. Some code has a way of lingering like that and if the monks haven't been able to stop me from remembering here there might be other places around Earth where this has happened too." The Time Lady explains.
" . Alright." Bill is smiling as she meets the Mistress' gaze, "Yeah. We can do this." Her eyes crinkle.
The Mistress smiles back.
The next time Bill returns she has a small set of tools which are enough for Missy to relatively carefully dismantle the computer and check it for unneeded components. There are a few pieces which don't make it back into the machine in its entirety when she reconfigures it.
It boots up with a black screen and white writing.
Missy sighs at the simplicity but begins the arduous process of analysing the devices' primary coding and proofreading it.
Tardises make this whole process about one billion times easier but the old-fashioned method will have to work for now on this backwater planet.
The minutes tick by as she reads and corrects and rewrites and deletes.
She can sense Bill's anticipation building until the human finally talks.
"I thought it would be quicker than this." She says, peering over Missy's shoulder with quickly dimming excitement.
The Mistress doesn't turn from the screen, thanking the universe for the fact that neither the monks nor the humans had much technology to build upon and so this would be a relatively simple albeit boring job.
"Dealing with code always takes a long time and a lot of close reading." The Time Lady dismisses her, waving one hand as she focuses in again.
There's a pause and the Mistress manages to get through a few more lines before Bill interrupts again.
"But in the films it's like. Five seconds of a guy typing at a keyboard and then they're in." She says, complaint in her tone.
The Mistress smirks a little, amused but still not diverting her eyes from the text she's scrolling through.
"Well. You can't trust everything you see on the television, Bill Potts." Missy teases.
Her eyes seem to close a little more as she chuckles and Bill gripes.
It feels light to talk to her like this even though the stakes are far too high for it really.
She has always been a fan of high-stakes...
By the time Bill returns the Mistress has finally finished editing the code for their requirements and has set up an external method of connection to facilitate a hidden and inaccessible method of communication when it is taken outside and the right commands have been selected.
Bill doesn't seem very impressed by the plain black and white screen but it will do what they need it to and she isn't going to question Missy's aptitude with, well, anything honestly.
"So," Bill starts, watching the Mistress as she brings her through the very, very limited amount of functions this computer now does really, really well, "What's the plan again?" She asks, as if it was nothing.
The Time Lady stops to look across at her, frowning at the question.
"Again?" She asks.
They'd spent most of their time together when not doing other things focused on it.
Bill frowns, looking down for a moment and shifting her weight.
Her eyes meet Missy's again and lock her where she is.
"I don't want to mess things up a second time and we can't write any of this down." She says firmly, resolution the clearest thing of her as she challenges the Time Lady to say differently.
The Mistress feels a slow smile come to her lips, looks down and shakes her head.
"Okay then. Listen up," the Mistress says, turning from the laptop to face her accomplice properly.
"First things first we get out of here. We have your laptop now so through that or the connections you're making out there we get a boat or a plane or just something to the place where you said that pyramid was. If you can get co-ordinates then I can possibly scrounge together some quick travel device and skip on time differentiation as we don't want to wander too far around and miss our chance. Then all we have to do is get in there, evade whatever security measures they have in place and overwhelm the system with some uncorrupted memories of the previous universe which we'll have to isolate in our own minds." The Mistress says.
She pauses for a moment and then tilts her head.
"Those memories," she starts and then immediately reconsiders, smiling with tight-lips, "We'll talk about them closer to the time." The Mistress decides, ignoring the fact that this makes it more risky for a memory to be corrupted, by a human especially, when they are thinking about it at all.
