Clara Oswald was tightening the last of the laces on her corset when she felt her TARDIS lurch slightly, as if going over a speedbump. She rolled her eyes, leant out of the wardrobe, and yelled, "Keep it steady, Me! It feels like a rollercoaster in here!"

Shaking her head and smiling to herself, she turned back to the dress hanging in the centre of the room, a masterpiece of red velvet and lace. "Right, then," she said, "let's get-"

The room spun crazily. The dress tumbled back into the depths of the wardrobe, and it was pure luck that Clara managed to grab onto the doorframe in time to avoid a similar fate. "Me!" She shouted, as the TARDIS whirled around her. "Me! Ashildr!"

Clara didn't run up the corridor. That would have been impossible, what with the floor occasionally turning into a wall. But she staggered at top speed, until she emerged from the warren of hallways into the console room.

"Ashildr!" Her copilot and fellow adventurer was clinging to the frantically vibrating console, staring at it with an expression somewhere between terror and awe. "Ashildr! Don't just stand there!"

The TARDIS made a twanging noise, as if it had just bounced off a guitar the size of a solar system (which, the way things were going, it might well have). Clara clung to the doorpost, trying desperately to time her next move. The shuddering of the time capsule rose to a peak, then fell back towards a minimum.

Clara flung herself towards the console. A sudden jolt threw her to the side; she bounced off a wildly-chiming grandfather clock, found her footing, and dove. Her hand caught the rim of the console, jerking on her shoulder; she pulled herself up past the frozen form of her friend and slapped the emergency cutout.

The shaking stopped instantly as the TARDIS dropped out of the timestream, floating in null space. Clara got her feet under her, caught her breath - not so easy in a corset that she now realised she had laced a little too tight - and stared at her friend.

"Ashildr. Me. What were you doing?"

Her companion (in a purely co-equal manner, of course) was still fixated on the time rotor, now rising and falling slowly in an idle pattern. Clara let go of the console and waved a hand in front of her face. "Me. Look at me."

"Hunh?" The immortal Viking turned her head, finally making eye contact. Her jaw dropped. "Jenna Coleman?"

Clara blinked. "What?"

"What?"

Clara guessed that her friend's blank incomprehension was mirrored on her own face. "Okay," she said, "so something's happened to you. Do you know who I am?"

"Yes." Lady Me frowned. "Only no, because that doesn't make sense."

"O-kay." Clara pursed her lips. "Do you know who you are?"

Me scoffed. "Of course. I'm Desden-" She caught sight of her own hands and stopped abruptly. "Uh."

"Right..." Clara took her friend's arm gently. "So if I told you you were an immortal half as old as the universe who was currently on the run from, oh, probably everyone, you'd...?"

Me held her hand up in front of her face, turning it slowly as if studying it. "I'd think I'd gone entirely insane."

"Okay." Clara closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. "It's okay, Me. We can fix this. The first thing to do is get your diaries, they might trigger some memory or-"

Me shook off Clara's hand and turned to face her. "No," she said, her voice flat. "I don't know what this is, but no. My name is Desdendelle; I come from the real world, not the Whoniverse; I am male, not female. I am not Ashildr, this is not a real TARDIS, and you are certainly not Clara Oswald."

"So you do remember. Though," Clara lowered her voice slightly, conspiratorially, "I think you might be right about the insane thing. I didn't understand half of that."

"I have grown tired of this," Me said. "I will be leaving now." She strode over to the console room door - and she really was striding, Clara realised, making her steps significantly longer than normal - and pushed her way through.

Clara cocked her head, listening. There was a short, strangled squeak from the diner that served her TARDIS as a porch-slash-disguise. Then a long silence. Then a quiet whimper. And then Me walked back in, her hands shaking.

"We," she said, pushing the door closed behind her. "We."

Clara raised an eyebrow. "We're suspended in deep space and time, with bizarre temporal nebulae on all sides and no way to convince yourself this is all a fake?"

"... yes." Me leant against the door, then shuddered and stepped away from it. "What is going on?"

"At this point I don't actually know," Clara said. "I'm assuming some sort of memory-loss thing - God knows I've seen enough of those - but you say you've gained memories as well. That means it's something weird."

"I had figured that part out." Me - or Desdendelle, or whoever she was right now - squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again, then walked back to the TARDIS console. "Very well, then. I believe the logical course of action would be for you to take me to the location where I last remember being. It may be that Ashildr is there in my body, in which case we are one step closer to solving this."

Clara tapped her tongue against her teeth thoughtfully. "Okay," she agreed, "that's a decent plan. Give me the where and when."

"Earth." Desdendelle chuckled abruptly. "The real one. Israel. There's an IDF facility-"

"Whoa." Clara held up her hands. "You want me to land a TARDIS in the middle of an army base? I'm not the Doctor, you know!" She frowned. "Uh, he's this-"

"I know who the Doctor is." Desdendelle drummed her (his?) fingers on the console. "I suppose an American diner would be rather hard to hide. Very well, I have another plan."

"Is it one that's less likely to get me shot?" Clara asked. "Because I'm a big fan of not getting shot."

"This one is perfectly safe," Desdendelle assured her. "There is someone we should visit. If a mind-swapping event like this has happened on Doc- uh, has happened before, she will know about it, I am sure."

Clara waited, but it seemed her fellow traveller was finished. "O-kay... so that's all I'm getting?"

Desdendelle blinked. "I can give you a place and time, of course."

"I'm sure you can." Clara pinched the bridge of her nose. "Ugh. Vague plans, people refusing to tell me everything... it's like being back with the Doctor again, except he'd have asked why I was standing around in my underwear by now."

Desdendelle looked at her. "I assumed you thought of this as an acceptable outfit."

Clara waved her hands in front of herself. "Yeah, no-one thinks of corsets as everyday clothes. Well, you did say you were a man... come on, let's get this thing started."

(Next)