‘So I noticed. I suppose budding must get boring. Especially when you can’t do it any more.’

‘Well, that’s just the point,’ said August. ‘We encountered a Time Lord on the planet Apertsu, which we were contemplating as our next acquisition. The Apertsians are a race of flying rodents, and he was acting as a security consultant for them, setting up various defence barriers which would have presented us with considerable problems. Now, you hear a lot of rubbish about the Capitol not interfering in the affairs of other races, and at the time we were rather surprised to see him there, but it seems they do this sort of thing quite often when they feel that they might eventually come under threat. They’re quite keen on interbreeding the humanoid races, for one thing, directing genetic drift by introducing genetic material from one biosystem into another. One surmises that they’re looking for a way to ease their periodic infertility.’

‘We kidnapped this Time Lord,’ Serif hissed, ‘intending to see if I, who have gained mastery over the depths of the mind, could pry any of the secrets of regeneration from him. I could not. His consciousness was as labyrinthine as any of the barriers he planned to set. So we took a biological sample and consumed it between us, intending to take on the ability to regenerate genetically. Nothing happened save a fever that nearly killed us. While we were in this weakened state, our subject was able to escape and return to his TARDIS. Moments later, we were time-looped.’

‘It was horrible!’ Aphasia added. ‘Like being on a roundabout all the time!’

‘He must have returned to the Citadel and convinced the Interventionists to take us on,’ August continued. ‘We were only saved by Greeneye’s intuition that you could outrun a time loop by completing the action spiral faster and faster. Time Loops are creatures, after all, and any creature can be fooled. We fled the planet as quickly as we could, but the whole adventure had given us a new aim in life, a plan that would provide us with ambition and future purpose. We want to take on the attributes of a Time Lord, the ability to regenerate included. As our research proved, our genetic matrices are similar enough to theirs so that each of the thirteen incarnations of an Aubertide Time Lord would be able to bud, and each newly budded descendant would be able to regenerate twelve times itself and have a child each time. So an individual Aubertide would be able to have thirteen children, and each of those thirteen, also.’

‘You should be careful,’ Benny mused. ‘You’re trying to reinvent the Grandparent. Christmas will never be the same again.’