A typical Master plan

The light picked up a dark-haired, cross-looking Time Lady, who seemed more annoyed than embarrassed by the whole situation. Not that she particularly enjoyed having her intimates displayed to the whole court but hey, who would?

“You Are Ko-”

“Missy, please,” she interrupted. “Short for Mistress.”

“You will tell us of a time you were naked,” the Judge said.

“Will I now?” she said. “I don’t take kindly to being lumped in with the riff-raff you know.”

“Truth scan activated,” the Judge said. “Speak.”

Missy sighed.

“Well which me would you like to hear about? There are rather a lot,” Missy said.

“I suppose the best story would be in the days of the War. It was still the early days of course, when huge world-ending paradoxes were still considered **** rather than everyday. I was hardly fighting on the front lines, but I didn’t want the universe to end. Well, not unless I could take the credit.

I was what you’d call… deniable. I could do all manner of naughty things the High Council would never want to admit to. Well, early days, like I say.

One project…

There is a species that haunts the nightmares of just one species in all the universe. They’re hungry, so hungry. Pale skin, blood-red lips in huge toothy smiles, with jagged teeth, able to hunt their prey across all space and time. But then there’s what they eat.

They eat Time Lords.

More specifically, they feed on regeneration energy. Our natural predator, if you will. So, of course, they were cast out from the universe in the Dark Times, Rassilon, dear chap, wasn’t a fan of opposition.

I was given one of them. We had to dip back into our own history to get it, but we nabbed one; then my job was to re-engineer it. Rather than have it target regeneration energy, the plan was to alter it so that what it fed on was something more useful to us. By which I mean Daleks, there’s no point in being coy. We were at war after all.

I broke down their genetic code – I could be more… scholarly in those days, you should hear what I did with the Rage – and tried to tweak it. Instead of regeneration energy, I wanted them to hunger for dalekanium, or the radiation that makes up the mutants, or something.

Or, for the approach I finally went for, that kind of hatred that makes the Daleks distinct. If it worked, I’d be able to sic one of the most lethal species to ever exist on them up and down the timeline.

Well, the war didn’t end there, so it didn’t exactly succeed. But it was close.

I just made a tiny slip-up, one little miscalculation in the telepathic patterns so that rather than hunting down and feeding upon hate, they wanted, well, embarrassment. Specifically, embarrassment from exposure.

I tested it on a wonderful girl I’d kidnapped, Sheena or something of the sort, I had to know what had gone wrong so I could fix it. I watched as the ravenous thing approached her. It reached out with a claw-like hand, then with incredible speed it tore away all of her clothes.

She barely had time to whimper. Still, it didn’t hurt her. Kind of boring really. Once she was naked, it seemed content.

Unfortunately, I had made one… misstep. The Ravenous now fed on embarrassment, so in giving it the opportunity to humiliate Sheena, I’d given it the strength to slip from the bindings I’d placed upon it.

One moment it was there, the next it was sailing the time winds, out in the universe. It went out, and fed, and created more of itself. Soon there was a whole clan of ravenous things that travelled all of time and space and fed on, specifically, female embarrassment.”

“That was you?!” several of the jurors yelped.

Missy smiled proudly, idly winding her hair around a finger. She seemed rather pleased with herself.

“And they turned upon you?” the Judge said.

“Oh, heavens no,” Missy said. “I was at least prepared enough to ensure it would do what I said. I could set it on whatever world I wanted. It wasn’t the anti-Dalek weapon I wanted, but it was at least entertaining.”

“That was not what you were asked,” Judge said.

“Your question was so tiresome though,” Missy said. “Besides, you don’t want to hear about that incarnation naked.”

“Running diagnostic on truth field…”

“Oh, don’t bother,” Missy said. “Time Lady, you won’t get something that crude to work on me. What I can offer you, though, are a few fun anecdotes from my time nannying a clan of ravenous embarrassment-eaters. Or something else, you heard about what I did for dear Miss Grant.”