The Eternity Citadel
Location: Tantalus Spiral, Milky Way Galaxy
Date: Outside time
Timeline: The Last Great Time War

The room was plain, boxy, and dark, lit only by the stark white light that spilled in through the entrance. It fell on the dully reflective metallic surfaces of the floor and wall, upon the neatly stacked boxes marked with angular script, and cast space-black shadows behind them.

In these shadows, dust rose and billowed as the air stirred, was forced aside as something massive slid under the dimensions and inserted itself between every molecule. Sound followed, a wheezing and groaning, but hushed, as if it did not dare be heard. With it, a box, plain and silvery, tall and wide, began to materialise, achieving solidity with a resolute thud.

Time passed, an anxious wait for an alarm that thankfully did not come.

Then the box cracked open along a side, and the travellers emerged, looking around, cautious and alert. They had good reason. Ahead, through the lopsided arch, too narrow at the top for humanoid comfort, they saw something slide past – squat, domed, bedecked with globes, bristling with mechanical limbs – a terrible shape they knew all too well.

A Dalek.

They ducked swiftly and silently behind the crates, peering desperately around the sides. As it glided past, the Dalek's dome rotated, its eyestalk peering inside. For a moment, their hearts, once pounding madly, skipped a beat or two. Then, mercifully, the Dalek passed them by, going about its obscure business.

After a time, they heard a heartbeat not their own, a cold and mechanical rising, double pulsing. The beat of the hate-filled heart of a Dalek ship. A heart to which they had to venture.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC3pkx3ZfHQ
This message was last edited by the GM at 11:26, Thu 02 Apr 2015.

Grimly, they recalled just why they had come to this awful place, the message they had received.

It had come to Tarys first, to the distant part of time and space where she searched for clues as to the fate of Gallifrey and the Time War. The wheezing and groaning of the materialising TARDIS was especially hideous, but had had been hope and joy to the ears of a temporally marooned Time Lord. Battered, scorched with blaster fire, its outer plasmic shell was incongruous, appearing as a tall blue wooden cabinet, the legend POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX above its double doors. The vintage Type-40 TTC of the Doctor was notorious.

The door was open.

She stepped inside.

The control room was small, much-patched, dim with back-lit roundels. Loose cables hung from the ceiling and snaked across the floor, broken old parts and weapons lay scattered about. There was a couch, leaking stuffing, the cushion angled to double as a well-used bed. A strange, misshapen device lay here.

Yet there was no Doctor, no pilot. The room was empty. Worse, it felt empty. Tarys could feel the psychic void, the Doctor-shaped hole in the very space-time of this TTC. How many thousands of years had he puttered around this room, shaping the space-time to his form just like that couch? How could he have been so completely removed?

She could feel the TARDIS's grief.

A yellow Post-It note on the console proclaimed in a hasty scrawl: THIS IS PROBABLY THE BEST BUTTON TO PRESS. A large red button. She pressed it without a moment's thought but with an infinity of intuition. The time rotor juddered and the TARDIS dematerialised.

Also on the console, she found a glowing white cube, a hypercube message box, which would retain a message unchanged, whatever happened to the timeline it came from. It activated on touch. A hologram appeared: an old man, time- and careworn, with scruffy white beard and moustache, with cockatoo hair, wearing a shabby leather jacket, a tea-towel scarf, and a bandoleer bearing only a sonic screwdriver. The Doctor, as she'd seen him during the War.

'I'm dead.' he began without preamble, his voice so weary. 'Dying. Never was... Got hit by a Temporal Weapon Dalek getting out of the Temporal Cannon in the Tantalus Spiral – I think. It erases events, you see, destroys your timeline, starting with the moment you're hit, so you don't realise. It takes longer on a time traveller, chasing your timeline around and around. Gives you a little time to—' Then he vanished, but the hypercube was still playing. Tarys recalled the incident, not long before the end of the War. The Daleks had harnessed the energy of the Tantalus Eye, a space-time anomaly at the centre of the Tantalus Spiral, and used it power terrible new temporal weapons, weapons that could erase a target entirely from history, up and down their time-lines, so that they never existed, never would have existed, and were forgotten by all around them. Modified Special Weapons Daleks – Temporal Weapon Daleks – wielded smaller versions, but the Daleks had constructed a massive Temporal Cannon out of three good-sized moons and aimed it right at Gallifrey. It would utterly erase Gallifrey and the Time Lords from history, undoing all their works, good and bad. Only the Daleks would remain.

Naturally, Rassilon had ordered the use of the Tear of Isha to close the Tantalus Eye, but this would obliterate all twelve inhabited planets in the Tantalus Spiral. The Doctor, aided by Cinder of Moldox, one of those planets, had stolen the Tear and destroyed it in the distant future, earning Rassilon's undying hatred. Then he travelled back to the Temporal Cannon and obliterated all the Daleks and their weapons – exactly how was unknown, and Rassilon had classified all details on pain of death.

The Doctor suddenly reappeared. Had the last minute been lost? '—can't go back. Crossing your time-line accelerates the process, lets it jump from here to then, and mine's knotty enough as it is. Don't have long. It's up to my TARDIS now, she'll find someone—' He disappeared again, then returned. 'Use the temporal trace locator, it's—' The Doctor patted his pockets, looked frantically around. '—on the couch. I forgot I finished it...' he trailed off, a hunted look in his tired eyes. 'It will interface with a TARDIS homing beacon circuit. Use it to locate what remains of my timeline, traces of my passing. With enough data it will, well, "quadrangulate" the location of the Temporal Exterminator, the actual firing mechanism. You need—' Frustratingly, he disappeared again.

'—It'll be dangerous, and I won't ask you to do this. But if the Daleks wipe us out, they'll exterminate everything. So, well, think about it—'

'—and remember, don't ever—'

'So, good luck. Maybe we'll mee—' The Doctor disappeared, reappeared, looking forlornly at the floor. Then he looked up, began speaking again. The hypercube wasn't set to loop. The Doctor was repeating his message to ensure enough of the information got through. 'Hello. I'm the Doctor. Maybe you don't know me, but if you're getting this, it means—' The Doctor flickered in and out, with a few broken snatches of his message. Then he disappeared. And didn't come back.

The TARDIS had landed, taking Tarys to a city in Scotland, Earth, outside a small old mansion. Her first stop. Tarys thought to take the hypercube and temporal trace locator with her, having some idea she would need them. She was glad she did. No sooner had she stepped outside, then the TARDIS had dematerialised without her.

Fortunately, the mansion had proved to be substantially larger on the inside. The long-dormant, even dead, the other TARDIS had woken up, energised by the old Type-40 on her doorstep.

There, Tarys met a young student Time Lord in hiding, Axander. The two Patrexes had felt a kinship, though they hadn't met in the Academy or a Chapter get-together. It wasn't hard for Tarys to convince Axander to help her rescue the Doctor. With the TARDIS guided by the temporal trace locator, they had set off into the universe, seeing the traces of the Doctor's time-line, having many and varied adventures, and discovering a post–Time War universe.

The Time War was over. The Time Lords were gone, Gallifrey was destroyed. The Doctor was dead.

The Daleks had survived.

There was no-one to stop them overwriting the timelines, turning defeats to victories through history, over and over. At every point, they grew stronger, more numerous, more successful. In the distant future, their total victory seemed certain. The universe grew colder.

Yet they'd found allies, friends, who bravely chose to help them in their quest to thwart the Daleks, or perhaps for their own reasons.

On a stopover on the planet Raksha, they met Bluetooth, a young Rakshasa hunter with a knack for technology, friendly and curious as a cat and brave as a tiger.

At one point, the TARDIS had collided with another vessel in the Space–Time Vortex, a human-built starship called the USS Horizon doomed to make random hyperspace jumps throughout the universe and throughout history. The Horizon was fractured across time-zones, which the Time Lords soon repaired. When they left, they found a stowaway, a teenaged mechanic named Trace, plucky kid who'd rather choose his own destiny with the TARDIS than be marked as surplus to requirements and deposited on the next somewhat-habitable world the Horizon passed, as its masters were wont to do.

They met Stirix, a Martian scientist, keenly intelligent and just as honourable, and an excellent medic for those who submitted to his tender clamps.

In the 41st century, they met Major Farren Zander of the Space Security Service, an expert and highly capable spy with many secrets and mysteries. He readily volunteered to join the quest, feeling obliged to stop the rise of the Daleks and safeguard the Earth, and feeling compelled to step inside the wondrous TARDIS.

Together, they had closed on their destination and neared the end of their quest – the Dalek's Eternity Citadel.
This message was last edited by the GM at 03:23, Sun 05 Apr 2015.

OOC: Show time! You're infiltrating the Eternity Citadel, a Dalek fortress housing laboratories for the creation of various doomsday weapons and the Temporal Exterminator. You're aim is to destroy/disable the Temporal Exterminator and/or the Eternity Citadel, save the Doctor from being erased from history, save Gallifrey from being erased from history, and save the universe from Dalek conquest.

The Daleks are Time War–era Daleks. There are also captive alien scientists working in the laboratories. Key locations you may seek are the labs, the command centre, the power generators (powering the facility, not the Exterminator), controls for the defence grid, and the control room for the Temporal Exterminator itself.

You know each other reasonably well, having had a few adventures together. Feel free to share what details and hints other PCs would have learned about your character in that time, but you don't have to give out all of it.

Feel free to wing it regarding any background or details, or ask me for guidance.

The PCs (I assume Time Lords) are carrying the following:
* The Doctor's hypercube (can be reused)
* The Temporal Trace Locator (not required at this point)
See the Gadgets thread for details.
This message was last edited by the GM at 15:00, Thu 02 Apr 2015.

Daleks. The one species in the universe he'd hoped never to run into again. Naturally, he'd agreed to this mission when Tarysvanemila -- sorry, Tarys -- had told him what was at stake. Axander knew the stories. He knew lots of stories, but the true ones were what had kept him looking out into the universe during his temporary exile. Even terrified as he was, having seen Daleks up close during their civil war, he'd agreed.

When he'd found that Gallifrey was gone, just gone, what little had been left of his reasons for staying safe had gone as well. He'd been waiting for the War to end so he could go back home. But that wasn't how it happened. It could be, if they could fix things, though.

"Looks like we're here. Now what?" Keeping his voice low, Axander adjusted the leather bookbag on his shoulder and pulled out a little silver and black rectangle. It opened like a book, but it had screens. With the push of a button, his encyclopedia showed the entire contents of Gallifrey's Matrix computer network's information on the Eternity Citadel. It showed a moment of static, and then just black. His hearts sank into his stomach as he put the device away.

"We're going to be alright. We're major characters on an important mission. Long as we're important to the story we'll be fine..." A common reassurance when he was worried, clearly not directed at the others.