The Doctor's TARDIS
Location: Space–Time Vortex
Date: Time–Space Vortex
Timeline: Post–Last Great Time War (Take 2)

As Tarys sliced the Possible Knife through the dissemination loop, a weird and ancient screaming echoed through the dark passage, as if of a living thing in pain. She completed the electric-blue cut – and opened the event horizon of the Temporal Exterminator, revealing what should never be revealed.

There was a flash of darkness—

The time travellers ceased to be—

—Tarys's body awoke with a start, in a cold sweat and panting hard. Moments later, her mind came crashing back through the aeons to something like present. She suffered a dizzying relocation in space and time before she got her bearings.

She was lying on a floor, staring up at a never-seen ceiling. She was in a TARDIS, a console room. It was small, much-patched, dim with back-lit roundels. Loose cables hung from the ceiling and snaked across the floor, and broken old parts and weapons lay scattered about. There was a couch, leaking stuffing, the cushion angled to double as a well-used bed. Tarys remembered. This was the Doctor's TARDIS.

And the Doctor was there, or his hologram at least. '...It erases events, you see, destroys your timeline, starting with the moment you're hit—' The message in the hypercube was still playing, stuck on repeat, as it had been when she'd had her vision.

A vision. A vision of her own death – more than her death, but the beginning of her total erasure, and the end of everything. She'd had a mission, and it seemed she'd failed, or died trying. And yet...

'It takes longer on a time traveller, chasing your timeline around and around. Gives you a little time to—'

And yet now she had another chance.

She heard a materialisation groan. The TARDIS was landing.
This message was last edited by the GM at 12:28, Fri 26 June 2015.

Elona
Location: Summerton, Scotland, Earth
Date: 26th June 2015 CE
Timeline: Post–Last Great Time War (Take 2)

'Ti-i-ime is on my side, yes it is.
Ti-i-ime is on my side, yes it is.
Now you all were saying that you want to be free,
But you'll come runnin' back (I said you would baby),
You'll come runnin' back (like I told you so many times before),
You'll come runnin' back to me.'

Axander moved through the winding corridors of the big old house, searching for the source of the music. Normally it was very quiet, with only him and his books living in it. But, from time time, these odd things happened: creaks on the stair but with no one there, doors found open or closed when he'd not gone in, lights turned on in empty rooms, or lights turned off after he'd left. It was almost like he was living with someone else, someone accustomed to picking up after him. Some might say the house was haunted. But he'd never heard music before.


OOC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHVeyo4W18U

Axander, feel free to describe your house/TARDIS. The source of the music is up to you: radio, music channel on the TV, Spotify, iPod, whatever Axander would have that might play "Time Is On My Side". :) It's easy to turn off and there's nothing suspect about it.
This message was last edited by the GM at 12:28, Fri 26 June 2015.

The music was quiet, but still out of place enough to get Axander's attention. He'd already finished the essays assigned to him by his professors. Two different literature classes, one creative writing class, and two languages were the easy ones. He was interested in becoming a professor, himself, in those areas. The history and archaeology classes went well together. Lucy kept prodding him about his dislike of getting dirty in archaeology, and blamed it on his being so English. Either way, the work was done, and Xander, or rather Axander, could get back to enjoying a good book. Beowulf, in its original Old English.

Though being a Time Lord (almost) meant he could take in a whole page at once, thereby reading the poem in seconds, Axander had always felt that was almost an insult to the book and its author. Not unlike scarfing down a meal purely for sustenance, actually. A book was an experience, a long series of moments to be savored and appreciated. As such, he took his time. Somewhere in the middle of it, he'd heard music. It wasn't bad music, but it was certainly not what he'd have put on to read. Curiosity and mildest annoyance got him standing and in search of the sound.

The Rolling Stones. He'd seen them in concert once. Their first tour, 1963. That was almost three years ago. He'd remembered barely being able to hear the music over the audience. Hearing it so quiet now was so strange. Then he thought it was funny how the strange part was the volume, not the time. Ah well. Times change.

The song was nearly over by the time he found its source. The house had a very old and barely functioning TV, only made usable by the digital converter hooked up to it. There was a computer, but it looked to be about twenty years old and had trouble creating files usable on modern machines. The small portable radio was from the 60s, and lived in the kitchen. The den, where Axander had been reading his book, had a larger radio with better sound, closer to a device from the 70s. Eventually he'd narrowed it down to one device, a very special one.

Axander's psychic encyclopedia had been sitting on the nightstand by his bed, where he'd been inputting his journal entries to it for the last year or so. It sat open, on the entry for Mutter's Spiral: Quadrant 3: Sector 8023: Sol System: Earth: Culture: Music: Rolling Stones. The song being played was the entry's audio sample. With a stifled chuckle, Axander picked up the electronic book and closed the article, bringing silence back to the old house.

Tarys gets to her feet after the ship's landing, breathing deeply until she feels collected again.  Her shoulder and her side are throbbing -- but even as she thinks that, she can feel the pain slipping away from her, like a misplaced memory.  Worrying.

She circles the console of the craft, studying it and trying to judge its condition.  Technical skills were never a key part of her education, but even at that she can tell that this capsule is in bad shape -- like it has been through a Time War, she chides herself -- with numerous systems offline and reserves reading near empty.  It seems there is enough remaining power to move the craft again, but where?  Some place where the beleaguered remnants of the Time Lords might now be gathering, with Gallifrey fallen.

The Redoubt In Shadow might still be standing, or the Tesseract of Klest.  She decides that the latter is less well known, and if either survives, the ones who made it to the Tesseract would be the keepers of the most esoteric of Gallifrey's secrets.  Piloting is even her less her forte than engineering, but she knew the very basic steps of translocating to a few emergency locales.  So she sets the coordinates carefully, by rote, and engages the drive.

Or tries to.  There's a brief hum like the engines are powering up, and then they cut out with a plaintive sigh.  Tarys repeats the steps painstakingly, to the same result.  She frowns.  There's no clear indication of a malfunction: there's more of a reticence and a sense of disapproval at her attempt to get back to a potential place of safety.

Oh, she realizes.

"It's you doing this."  She speaks aloud, but the target of her scorn doesn't need the sound: its telepathic net would read her just find without it.  "I have never exactly understood why a... conveyance is permitted to have ideas above its station.  You're not letting me go back because you want me to stay here.  So where is 'here', may I ask?"

She doesn't expect an answer, but after a little bit of hunting she is able to find a set of indicators reading EARTH and HUMANIAN ERA and some additional detail on the epistopic interface.  Of course.  It's the Doctor's TARDIS, so of course it would be humans.  Eons and galaxies overrun by clumsy children....

Even as she thinks that (and senses the TARDIS's disappointment) she admits to herself that it's not quite as bad as that: humans had had their achievements of course; it's simply that they have been so very messy.

"Very well."  She makes certain that the Possible Knife is with her, absently running her hand down its length, and then she finds the door control.

(There is a crystal moment where she is positive that she has done these very things before.  This is not an unusual sensation for Tarys.  What is rather more unsettling is an equally solid conviction that she will never, no matter the reentrant state of her personal timeline, have the opportunity to do them again.  If some temporal phenomenon has set her back into her own timeline, it is equally clear to her that at some point she must do more, be better, faster, more clever, or that timeline will in the end be severed for good.)

"Since you insist that here is where I must start?  So shall I begin."

Tarys:

Tarys hit the door control then marched toward them, only to find them fail to open in front of her. There was a dull aren't-you-forgetting-something? clunk inside. On an impulse not necessarily her own, she retrieved the hypercube from the console, figuring she might have need of it this time around, then crossed to the worn old couch to retrieve the temporal trace locator, a crazy contraption of loose wires, duct tape, clockwork, and what appeared to be a hamster wheel, all connected to a 51st-century computer interface.

There she heard music, a tinny tune emanating from an iPod lost halfway down the back out of the couch. 'Ti-i-ime is on my side, yes it is.' Tarys doubted it was the Doctor's; it had probably belonging to his lunatic friend Destrii, who'd demolished Daleks to 20th-century pop songs.

With another, more satisfied clunk, the door was open and Tarys stepped through the real-world interface and out into...

Summerton
Location: Summerton, Scotland, Earth
Date: 26th June 2015 CE
Timeline: Post–Last Great Time War (Take 2)

...a cool sunny day in suburbia. A developed, tidy city. She was inside the gates of some property, with a winding drive leading up to a sprawling and decaying old mansion. Tarys already knew from the destination readout that it was Earth, 2015, and could easily guess this was Britain, knowing the Doctor's tendencies. The exo-chronoplasmic shell of the TARDIS was still in the incongruous form of a police telephone box, perhaps a little more at home here than on the distant world it had found her on.

No sooner had she stepped outside, however, than the doors slammed close behind her. She would find them locked. Suddenly, the lamp on top flashed erratically, and the dematerialisation noise erupted, loud and discordant and broken. It was more than wheezing and groaning, it was choking. Before she knew it, the TARDIS had faded away. Tarys was struck by a profound sense of loss, of absence. The TARDIS had died.

Axander

With the book closed, silence returned to the big old house, as quiet as the grave.

Book in hand, Axander began walking back to his study, stepping out into the hall. The wooden floor creaked beneath his feet. Then creaked again. Now the roof groaned as if under a great mass and the air-conditioner wheezed like an old woman. Dust drifted down. Lights flickered on, and stayed on.

Then in moments, the old house was shuddering, shaking as if in earthquake. Axander hurried for the safety, but the corridor stretched out before him, getting longer and longer. New doors and new rooms appeared in the corner of the eye: libraries, bedrooms, laboratories. When he reached the stair, he found it spiralling, and discovered a whole new floor.

Elona was blooming.

And the psychic encyclopaedia was playing again, jostled back on by some unseen force.

'Ti-i-ime is on my side, yes it is.
Ti-i-ime is on my side, yes it is.
You're searching for good times but just wait and see,
You'll come runnin' back (I said you would darling),
You'll come runnin back (Spend the rest of my life with ya baby),
You'll come runnin' back to me.'

Tarys frowns.  Alone, stranded, on a world filled with people who have barely managed spaceflight and certainly have achieved nothing resembling inner discipline.  Oh, and set with a heavy responsibility by a fabled hero.  She had been in many situations of more imminent peril before, but never any with quite so daunting a set of obstacles ahead of her.

"Time," she observes aloud, "is most assuredly not on my side."

Tarys moves away from the dead Type 40 before she takes out the temporal trace locator: it might yet contaminate any signal that the device might pick up.  She doubts there will be any.  Chances were, the poor dying capsule had brought her here with one last gasp of mistaken nostalgia.

She thumbs the power switch, and the hamster wheel begins to spin....

The quiet walk back to the study became much more interesting in short order. For a moment, Axander couldn't understand what was happening. Everything was shaking, and space was stretching out...had the Daleks found him? Or worse, the Time Lords? Once he realized the configuration of the architecture itself was shifting, another thought slammed into his mind. Elona was alive. The reasons why were all bad, but he managed to completely ignore any of that as the spark of joy turned into a jolt of excitement.

Before anything else, Axander wanted to find the secondary control room and check to see if the Time Rotor was truly active again. He couldn't, though. Not until the interior was finished...well, the accurate human analogy would be "stretching". Though he'd spent a long time in this ship, he wasn't imprinted on it yet, and didn't have the telepathic intuition of its layout. Even if he was connected on that level, the psychic flood of an event like this would be no less disorienting than simply watching it happen. Instead, he just stood at the staircase's railing and watched it grow up and down, turned to watch the hallways reach out and branch, and laughed in relief. He'd thought she was gone forever.

Axander:

All around him, the house grew ever inwards as it became dimensionally transcendental one more. A hanging light extruded from the ceiling, and switched on. Flower patterns on the wallpaper blossomed into circles and indented – roundels! Axander held tightly onto the railing, lest he be hurled into some newly formed attic, until he felt the carved wooden railed writhe like a snake, changing form. A hundred building features appeared, shifted, or morphed as they changed architectural styles. The whole architectural configuration system had been reactivated!

The wall tore open behind him, becoming a window, with glass panes and fluttering curtains. It looked out onto the drive and the gate. For a moment, Axander thought he saw a blue box fading away. It left a woman in black, standing at the gate.

Tarys:

The hamster wheel spun and spun, and all it needed was a hamster or a Pakhar, but no results came up. According to the Doctor, it was meant to locate traces of the Doctor's timeline, what might remain after his erasure. But there was nothing, not here, at least. Either he'd never come to this place, or he'd already been entirely erased.

But it was designed to interface with a TARDIS homing beacon circuit – and it had identified another TARDIS! Wavering, flickering, the indicator pointed toward the old mansion, which sat quiet, brooding, unmoving on the hill.

The revelation gives Tarys a moment of relief: a still-living TARDIS should mean that she can resume her mission with a minimal delay.  It also implies that the Doctor's TARDIS -- or the Doctor, in his last instructions to it -- had some semblance of a plan in sending her here.

But she quickly sobers, becoming wary.  A TARDIS implies a Time Lord.  What Time Lord in contemporary relative continuity would be here, marking time in this backwater of the continuum, while their whole species was locked in a tooth-and-nail struggle against the Daleks for the stability of the timelines and dominion over the cosmos?

A renegade.  A traitor.  Or a coward?  Tarys wasn't sure, but if they were at home, it was unlikely that they would meekly turn the vessel over to her and let her continue back to the fight.  Persuasion may be in order.

Taking a quick glance around her surroundings to make sure none of the natives will notice and make trouble for her, she slips out the Knife and folds it up out of sight, against the inside of her sleeve.  Then she carefully makes her way up the hill, watching for an ambush and stretching out her senses to find the entryway of the capsule.

As Tarys approached the front door of the old house, the latch made a small noise and the door opened just enough for Axander to peer out at her. It was obvious he was afraid, as it came through his voice. There was something else there as well, but it was hard to place. Whatever it was had him speak instead of run.

"Are...are you the Doctor?"

Tarys' head angles to one side as she studies the inhabitant of the TARDIS.  Gallifreyan?  Likely, but not certain: the Doctor was known to spread details of his existence promiscuously among lesser species, and the plasmic interface was making certain biological telltales unclear to her.

(His face is strangely familiar, but at the moment, she cannot match it to a name.)

"The Doctor is dead." she says.  "More precisely, the disruption of his timeline has left the probability of his existence down in the thousandths of one percent.  Improbable enough to be dead by any reasonable standard, I should think.  My name is Tarysevanemila; I am a Knight-Errant of the Patrex College of Gallifrey, Exploring-Lieutenant in the Operations Division of the Celestial Intervention Directorate.  I claim this capsule on behalf of the Directorate for its use in prosecuting the war against the Dalek Empire."  She watches for any sign of resistance.  "Please stand aside, and make ready to release any isomorphic interlocks."

The dimensional expansion and reconstruction slowed somewhat as Axander made his careful way through the restructured house, allowing him to get down the stairs without finding it an endless Möbius strip staircase, or pass down the corridor without being swallowed up by a new study.

And all the while, the music kept playing.

'Go ahead baby, go ahead, go ahead and light up the town!
And baby, do anything your heart desires.
Remember, I'll always be around.
And I know, I know like I told you so many times before,
You're gonna come back.
Yeah you're going to come back, baby,
Knockin', knockin' right on my door.'

And, right then, he was at the door, greeting his visitor. Something had excellent timing.

The music continued to play from his book, winding down to the end of track, if not shut off sooner. It was soft, unintrusive, and yet insistent.

'Ti-i-ime is on my side, yes it is.
Ti-i-ime is on my side, yes it is.
'Cause I got the real love, the kind that you need.
You'll come runnin' back (I knew you would one day),
You'll come runnin' back (Baby I told you before),
You'll come runnin' back to me.

Time, time, time is on my side, yes it is.
Time, time, time is on my side, yes it is.
Time, time, time is on my side'

Axander's eyes went wide after her initial reply, and rather than opening the door so she could come in, he simply stood there staring at her in horror. A few of her words seemed to connect to things in his mind, and his reply came after a moment of the Rolling Stones winding down.

"...Patrex? Patrex aren't murderers. You didn't kill the Doctor, did you? Timeline disruption, CID, that all screams "Time Lords murdered the Doctor" to me. I saw you arrive in his blue box. How do you expect me to trust you when the last one of you bloody soldiers was more dangerous than the Daleks?" He hadn't shut the door and run, he hadn't screamed, and he hadn't attacked. For someone clearly fighting against fear, he seemed to be doing quite a good job of it.

Tarys tries to calm herself, to find stillness.  She might have come at this too aggressively, although she found it hard to take in the perspective of a person just as fearful of her as of someone that genuinely meant them ill.

"In point of fact, I don't expect you to trust me.  We don't live in a universe that can afford a lot in the way of trust," she says.  "I can only assert that in the largest sense, I am on your side.  Being a soldier does not make someone a murderer, and I certainly have not murdered the Doctor.  I'm trying to understand and to follow the Doctor's last instructions.  I... don't clearly comprehend how I came to arrive here in his TARDIS, but I can show you the message he left me."  She shows the hypercube.

"Will you let me in to show you this?  We should not be standing and speaking of these things so openly, not here."

The line from the song. Had she been the one to send it to him? Had Elona been trying to tell him something? That was important, it had to be. And she seemed a little bit confused as it was, something about the Doctor having sent her. She didn't know about the Hound, but she might know more about Gallifrey.

Before he realized it, Axander had opened the door a bit wider. He looked less terrified and more surprised after her explanation, and after she showed him the cube, he glanced around into the distance behind her and then stepped aside and invited her in.

"Quite right, come in. Perhaps we can find one of the control rooms. The architecture's just shifted when you arrived, and I haven't had a chance to look around yet."

Despite herself, Tarys finds herself looking around the interior of this TARDIS with more than strictly tactical interest.  The place has a sort of cozy melancholy about it; all the furniture appears well-used and comfortable; everywhere she looks, there are more books.  Your average Time Lord would scoff at real pulp-leaved books for efficient data modules and reader units, and that was even before you got into military vessels and spaces that were all gleaming white and sharp-angled geometry.

This reminds Tarys of the earliest days she can remember, back before she'd really understood why there was a War to fight and when old Marsillanon -- by turns kindly and severe, cryptic or analytic -- had worked patiently to help her assemble a mind and a soul out of the fractured visions where the Untempered Schism had left her wandering.  He'd liked books and old things and quiet, gloomy places too, so it wasn't surprising that she'd come to share those with him.

Without fuss she lets the Possible Knife fall from hiding into her hand, and sheathes it on her hip again.

Before Axander can become agitated about the weapon, she holds up one finger.  "Wait.  Watch."  She finds a broad wooden table that has a little free space among an academic's paraphernalia, and places the hypercube there, tapping it to let it play.

As the fragments of the Doctor's message repeat themselves, she watches to see how Axander will react.
This message was last edited by the player at 02:13, Tue 30 June 2015.

Axander recognised the glowing white cube as a hypercube, a message box that 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 Tarys had seen him during the War. Axander recognised a much older form of a man he'd seen only in Public Register Video reports of 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.

Axander kept his eyes on his guest while carefully closing the door behind her. At the very least, she didn't seem to be actively hostile. He flinched visibly at the sight of her knife, but quickly went back to simply being wary with the weapon holstered properly. They'd need a place to set that cube to relay the message, so Axander took her to the next room over and offered a couch and the coffee table. He himself sat on a chair adjacent. In his worry, he'd forgotten all about offering tea.

When the hypercube was activated, the young man's attention was completely kept. That was the face of one of the few men considered to be as dangerous to Gallifrey as the Daleks themselves, though Axander had never believed that for a moment. It was the Doctor. With the image flickering, Axander's first thought was that the cube must have been damaged, but the explanation matched up with that perfectly. It wasn't damaged, the Doctor was simply being unraveled during the recording.

The message ended, the recording kept playing. Nothing. The Doctor was gone. Axander stared down at where the image had been, horror and tragedy burned into his face. That was the look of hope being snuffed out. Slowly, he leaned back into the chair and put a hand to his mouth, closing his eyes and taking every effort to remember to breathe. It was a minute before he could really get any words to come forward and volunteer for the next task.

"So, he's gone then. And he left you to do his job. And he left you here."