(Previously)

Clara Oswald watched the readouts on her screen, her hands hovering over the TARDIS controls. "There's some sort of weird ripple effect over most of America right now... I bet the Doctor's mucking about down there. And here we go..."

She took hold of one of the multitude of levers and eased it down, flicking switches with her other hand. Around her the TARDIS vibrated, the air filling with the rising and falling thrumm of its landing pattern. She held the lever steady for two seconds - three - and then pushed it firmly into its locking position.

"And we are down. How about that, then?" She turned to her companion, grinning widely.

Desdendelle looked back at her with Ashildr's face, her expression impassive.

Clara's smile faltered. "Oh. Right. I forgot. Well... we've landed. You can go and get your friend now."

Desdendelle frowned slightly. "I don't think that will work," she said. "I'm hardly recognisable right now." She cocked her head, studying Clara. "She would certainly recognise you, however."

Clara snorted. "Right, because I'm going outside in a corset to hunt for a woman I don't even know. Do you want to know how well that ended last time?"

"Someone has to go," Desdendelle said with a shrug. "I've explained why it shouldn't be me."

"... you know what? I'm just going to pull up the cameras now." Clara reached behind her and toggled a switch, activating the TARDIS's monitoring system. A portion of one wall flickered with static, then resolved into an image of the interior of the diner.

"O-kay." Clara walked round to another panel of the console and took hold of a joystick. "External view is... over there." The image jumped, showing a brick wall. "Er, right, other external view... there."

The picture showed a tarmac surface, and the front doorstep of the diner. Nothing moved. Clara glanced over her shoulder at her passenger. "Are you sure this-?"

"Ahem." Desdendelle nodded at the screen. "Yes."

Clara looked back just in time to see the top of a head vanishing into her diner. She heard the door squeak outside, and footsteps on the tiles.

"Okay," she said, "so there's someone out there. What are the chances it's your friend?"

"It's her."

"... any reason for thinking that?"

"I recognise her." Desdendelle turned away from the console and crossed to the door. She stopped in front of it, looked down at her hands, then shrugged and pulled the white door open.

The young woman who stepped inside had an expression somewhere between scepticism and awe. She brushed past Desdendelle as if she wasn't even there, got halfway to the console, then stopped and turned in a slow circle. "Wow." She crossed the rest of the distance and pressed a hand to the console. "Wow." She turned, walked up to Clara, and stopped just short of pressing a hand to her, too. "Just wow." Then she frowned. "Wait, why're you in your underwear?"

Clara ran a hand over her corset, snorted, and looked over at Desdendelle. "You see? I told you." She turned back to the newcomer. "Glad you've got a better handle on reality than your friend."

"My... friend?" The girl turned in a second circle, as if looking for someone. "I don't- that is-"

Desdendelle took a step forward, held out a hand. "Iximaz."

The girl turned slowly to face her. "You... don't sound right."

"It's me." Desdendelle flicked the imprecision away with one hand. "Desdendelle."

"Oh." Iximaz cocked her head. "Then I guess you don't look right."

"Yeah, he - she - whatever said you could help with that." Clara swung round, perching on the console. "That you're some kind of... mind-swapping expert, I guess?"

"Me?" Iximaz blinked, then laughed uncertainly. "No, I'm just a fan of... oh, no, actually that might work." She turned and studied her friend. "There was that thing with Lady Cassandra; you remember, with Ten and Rose? And I think Davros once-"

Clara shook her head. "Right, you two kids have fun," she said. "I'm going to finish getting dressed." She gave the two of them a pointed look. "Don't touch anything."

Iximaz looked affronted. "As if we we would!"

---

Clara had barely had a chance to loosen the laces on her corset (a little more than she normally would - she had a feeling these two were going to be trouble, and that she might need the maneuverability) when the TARDIS lurched to the side.

"Oh, come on!" She staggered out of the wardrobe and flung herself down the corridor as her ship span around her. Floors became walls became ceilings before she reached the console room and tumbled through into the eye of the storm.

"One thing!" she called as she hurried to the control column and fixed the pair with her best Doctor Glare. "You had one thing to not do!"

"Are you kidding?" Iximaz was clinging to Desdendelle for support as the ship rolled. "You left a pair of geeks unsupervised in a TARDIS, you must have known what would happen!"

"I bet this is why he went grey so suddenly," Clara muttered. "Right. You." She pointed at Iximaz. "Tell me what you did."

The young woman leant past Me's possessed body. "I pushed that... no, that lever." She frowned. "I think. And there was a spinny thing..."

"I did suggest you should leave well alone." Desdendelle managed to impart his flat tone with a whole heap of disapproval. "But you had to try it out."

Iximaz stuck out her tongue. "Like I said to her, what'd you expect?"

Clara bent over the controls, trying to reverse whatever the girl had done. "We're in flight," she reported, "and not exploding, so that's good. But you've- I don't even know what a spline reticulator is, let alone why you've redlined it." She span a dial, and the juddering noticably decreased. "Now if I can just get us into a stable temporal orbit while I-"

The TARDIS came to a sudden halt, with a thud made all the more abrupt by the cessation of all the noises that had been filling it. Clara looked up, brow furrowed. "Did you do that?"

"We thought you did," Desdendelle answered for both her guests. "Did you not?"

"If only." Clara flicked the exterior cameras back on and snorted. "Hello, familiar architecture. It would be England, wouldn't it? I reckon someone's buried a TARDIS magnet somewhere under London, you know." She glanced at her friend, remembered that she'd been possessed, and scowled. "At least we're not dead. That would really mess things up."

Desdendelle frowned slightly, but Iximaz whispered something in his ear and his expression cleared. Clara decided it must have been the equivalent of the Horseman's Word for mind-swapped people.

"Since we're here," she went on, "I think there's someone who might be able to help. I'll give her a ring, and- can you hear something?"

The sound was high-pitched and growing louder, like a motor about to shatter its bearings. Clara studied her instruments, muttered something under her breath, and knelt down to check the panels under the console. "If you two have broken something, I'm going to be very disappointed in you."

Iximaz laughed, which Clara thought highly inappropriate. "You're looking in the wrong place," she said. "That's no moon - that's a fangirl."

"Oh, come on, Star Wars references?" Clara straightened up and shot the girl a look. The squeal was very loud now. "Of all the-"

"Eeeeeee!" The door from the diner crashed open, and a young woman charged in. "Eeeeee!" Her black hair was pulling free from her braid, and she seemed to be dressed in her pyjamas - slippers included. "Eeeeee!" She ran up to the console, leant over it to give the rotor a hug, then turned to Clara. "Eeeeee-huh." She cocked her head, bird-like. "Not that I'm complaining, but why are you standing around in your underwear."

Clara groaned and looked over the woman's shoulder. "Again," she said, making eye contact with Desdendelle, "I told you. No-one thinks corsets are everyday wear."

"Which isn't to say they shouldn't be," the new(est)comer put in, "for some people." She turned round and waved at the others. "Hi! You're Iximaz, aren't you?"

"Um." Iximaz looked nonplussed. "Yes? Wait - it's not Kaitlyn, is it?"

"That's me!" Kaitlyn beamed, and swept a hand down her front. "I know I don't look my best, but I heard the sound outside, and-"

"I know, right?" Iximaz waved a hand at the room around them. "You hear that 'vworp vworp' sound in real life, and you just have to drop everything-"

"-even on the off-chance!" Kaitlyn span back round and threw her arms around Clara, then stepped back hurriedly. "Sorry, that- I didn't actually mean to do that, I'm just so- eeeeee!"

Desdendelle coughed. "I'm Desdendelle, by the way."

Kaitlyn glanced over her shoulder and frowned. "You sure? You look more like that annoying Ashildr woman."

"Hey!" Clara tapped the woman's arm, stepping away before she could be ambush-hugged again. "Don't say that about my friend."

"Desdendelle's your friend?" Kaitlyn waved a hand as if to wipe the words away. "Sorry, couldn't resist. But you've got to admit 'Lady Me' is a bit, well, dull."

"I don't have to- look, why are you even here?" Clara demanded. "I'm not exactly running a tourist attraction here."

"You're flying a TARDIS." That was Iximaz, now advancing on Clara with Desdendelle tagging along behind her. "Did you really think people wouldn't come running?"

"Oh God," Clara groaned, "I bet the Doctor never has this problem."

"You'd be surprised," Kaitlyn and Iximaz said in unison, then made eye contact and laughed.

"Oh, enough!" Clara folded her arms across her chest, aware of how that would look with the corset but not really caring. "Why don't you... I don't know, go through to the diner and have a cup of coffee?"

"Tea." This time it was Kaitlyn and Desdendelle who said the word together, and their exchanged glance was much more subdued. "But I can't," Kaitlyn went on. "I'm in my PJs, I'm not going out in public."

"You could let us visit the wardrobe," Iximaz suggested. "Then Kaitlyn could get dressed."

"Yes!" Clara snapped, then had to take a deep breath. "Yes," she repeated more calmly, "that's actually not a bad idea. Head that way, take the first right, second left, two flights down, once round the-"

She stopped, looking at their expressions: Desdendelle's attentive, Kaitlyn's bewildered, Iximaz's unfocused, as if imagining all the trouble she could get up to once let loose in the TARDIS. Clara imagined the same thing, and shuddered from head to toe.

"On second thoughts," she said, walking over to the wall and pulling open a panel, "give me a minute." She pushed at buttons, pulled on levers, and twirled dials, working more on instinct than logi...il finally she was able to look over her shoulder and see racks of clothes hanging just beyond the console room door. "There. One wardrobe. Get."

The trio wandered towards the relocated wardrobe, and Desdendelle leant closer to Iximaz. "If it is so simple to rearrange the TARDIS," Clara heard him ask, "why is the Doctor never able to get anywhere quickly?"

Kaitlyn, joining them just short of the door, gave him a grin. "C'mon, Des," she said. "He's the Doctor. Why do you think?"

---

Clara Oswald put the phone down at last, and leant pensively on her console. Kate Stewart had been sceptical at first, mostly due to the fact that she knew Clara was supposed to be dead, but had eventually agreed to help. That had led to her call being bounced around UNIT, over to the Foreign Office, up (briefly) to the Prime Minister (who hadn't been at all helpful), and finally all the way up to Geneva.

From there she'd been passed back down to the Israeli government, where the whole process had been repeated. She'd grown hoarse with explaining herself to what seemed like hundreds of different functionaries - all of them asking different obscure questions, most of which she couldn't answer - before finally, finally reaching the army facility where Desdendelle claimed to have originated.

Clara's sigh of relief on hearing that "Desdendelle" had been behaving so oddly that he'd been physically restrained managed to completely baffle the man on the phone, but after a few more transfers up and down the chain of command (and why couldn't any of these people take a message, good grief!) she was able to convince the Israelis that Ashildr was no danger. Strictly speaking, that wasn't actually true... but Clara was sure she'd behave herself. For a while. Maybe.

"Ohhh God." Clara groaned and let her head fall to rest on the console. "I just wanted to explore time and space and have a good time. I didn't ask for all this complicated rubbish."

There was no reply. But from deep within the wardrobe behind her, Clara heard a highly disturbing sound: a giggle.

She straightened up, eyes wide. "Aaaand I have guests." She turned and looked into the vast wardrobe. "Aaaand I can't see them. Aaaand that sounds like trouble."

The bizarre trio weren't in the first open area of the wardrobe. Clara followed the sound of laughter deeper into the labyrinth that her TARDIS apparently felt was suitable for clothes storage, until eventually she began to make out speech:

"... so tight!" That was Kaitlyn, her voice filled with admiration. "I don't know how you got in there, it's amazing."

"Practice." Iximaz sounded distinctly smug. "I like them tight, so I've got incentive to put in the effort."

"I can see it was worth your time," Kaitlyn said. "Wow, if I could-"

"Seriously." Desdendelle's voice was even flatter than before. "You must know how you sound."

"You're just grumpy because yours is so loose," Iximaz retorted. "I did offer to help you sort yourself out."

Desdendelle groaned. "Do you even listen to yourself?"

Clara paused at the last corner, shook her head, and stepped round. "Please don't tell me you've made a mess of my wardrobe."

"Eee!" Kaitlyn beamed, and Iximaz had to grab her shoulder to stop her bounding over to Clara. "Now we all match!"

Clara looked at the trio, and they did indeed all match: every one of them was wearing a corset. Kaitlyn and Desdendelle had paired theirs with trousers; Iximaz had followed Clara's example and gone for a skirt. As their conversation had implied, Iximaz had drawn the laces so tight it was a wonder she could breathe, while Desdendelle's corset was loose enough that it practically fell off.

"Uh." Clara held up a finger, then pointed it at Desdendelle. "I thought you were a man. I mean, whatever bakes your cake, but-"

Desdendelle sighed and flicked a hand towards the other two. "They insisted."

"Hey, that's not fair!" Iximaz planted her hands on her hips and winced. "Ow, that actually is too tight. Hang on." She fiddled with the laces on her corset for a minute, then straightened up. "Right. Where was I?"

"'That's not fair'," Clara reminded her.

"Right." Iximaz pointed at Kaitlyn. "She insisted."

Kaitlyn tossed her hair (which would've worked better had it not been tied up in a braid). "And I was right to do so," she said. "Four women hanging out in corsets? When you're given a shot at this level of hotness, you grab it and run."

"Uh. Right." Clara shook herself, and resolved to change back into her everyday clothes at the next opportunity. But first... "I've spoken to someone at your army base," she said to Desdendelle. "They have your body - and Me seems to be in it."

Desdendelle winced slightly, but nodded. "Excellent. And Iximaz has a plan to return me to my proper form."

"I'm not sure I'd call it a plan," Iximaz demurred. "I just think if we get you two close together-"

"That's it?" Kaitlyn demanded. "You think if they just touch hands they'll swap back? Aren't you even slightly genre-savvy?"

Iximaz folded her arms. "And I suppose you have a better idea?"

"Well... no." Kaitlyn sighed and tugged at her corset's lace. "But mark my words, this is going to end with us fighting a giant corset beast or something. There's no other option."