B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

by Parkin, Lance

  1915 (18th November) - Players [1312]

  The second Doctor arrived in No Man’s Land using a time ring. He saved Winston Churchill from an ambush engineered by two Players, the Count and the Countess. The next day, he saved Churchill again, this time with the help of Jeremy Carstairs and Jennifer Buckingham. Carstairs joined Churchill’s staff. The Doctor escaped a German firing squad by using the time ring.

  The scientist Nikita Kuznetzov saw the devastation at Tunguska. [1313] Harry Randall and his twin brother Herbert - both of whom became trapped in the Toymaker’s domain - performed as comic funambulists. The two of them, or possibly just Harry, topped the bill at the Empire Theatre in Penge. [1314]

  The Somme

  The Battle of the Somme took place on 14th July, 1916. Richard Hadleman survived, treated by Timothy Dean, a former student of Dr John Smith of Aberdeen. [1315] Tim Latimer saved himself and his schoolmate Hutchinson on a First World War battlefield, thanks to a premonition he’d had some years earlier. [1316] Lance Corporal Weeks, later the chief steward aboard the R-101, fought at the Somme. [1317] Roger Gleave, a future police inspector, witnessed the devastation. [1318]

  On one of their missions, the crew of the Teselecta converted their ship to look like Rasputin - but made the mistake of rendering him as green. [1319]

  w - Two days before Rasputin’s death, Faction Paradox took him away to the Eleven-Day Empire, where he became Father Dyavol, an advisor to Cousin Anastasia. In his place, the Faction supplied a duplicate Rasputin generated in a remembrance tank. The Great Houses sensed something amiss with Rasputin’s history and attempted to rewrite the duplicate’s biodata, even as the Celestis put their mark of indenture on him. The faux Rasputin effectively became three zombies in one, and the prolonged manner of his death embarrassed all concerned. [1320]

  1916 (December) - The Wages of Sin [1321]

  The third Doctor, Jo Grant and Liz Shaw arrived in St. Petersburg as members of the city’s elite, concerned about Father Grigori Rasputin’s growing influence over Empress Czarina Alexandra, conspired to murder him. Jo befriended Rasputin and saved him from death by poisoning, but the conspirators repeatedly shot and beat Rasputin, still failing to kill him. The conspirators finally had Rasputin thrown into a frozen river. The Doctor refrained from action as Rasputin drowned, fulfilling history. Six weeks later, the Russian Revolution overthrew Tsar Nicholas II.

  1917 - The Roof of the World [1322]

  Lord Davey discovered an alien pyramid in the Himalayas when his expedition was wiped out in a storm. He was killed and replaced with a doppelganger. The fifth Doctor, Peri and Erimem arrived in Darjeeling, where Erimem met Davey and was possessed by the same force. A black cloud descended, killing dozens of people... including Erimem. The Doctor deduced this was an attempt on the part of the Great Old Ones to take control of the world, and that Erimem was still alive. Peri froze the cloud with liquid nitrogen. The pyramid was buried beneath an avalanche.

  On 16th April, 1917, the Doctor and Lenin played tiddlywinks on the train journey that returned Lenin from Switzerland to Russia. After that, the Doctor met Empress Alexandra. [1323] The Doctor was present in Russia during the October Revolution, met Lenin and became a Hero of the Revolution. [1324] The Doctor regarded Lenin as a “disagreeable man with terrible breath”. [1325]

  1917 - No Man’s Land [1326]

  An agent of the Forge, posing as “Lieutenant-Colonel Brook” of the British army, undertook experiments to refine his soldiers’ killing instinct. The Forge also wanted to know if psychological trauma could endow people with time sensitivity or precognition. Soldiers at Charnage Hospital near Arras in France were subjected to psychological refinement in the “hate room”, and made to “kill” dummies of German troopers. Brook sent a squad to No Man’s Land when a wounded trooper, Private Taylor, informed him of an old church on an excellent vantage point there. Due to Brook’s conditioning, the British soldiers slaughtered one another.

  The seventh Doctor, Ace and Hex destroyed Brook’s research, and Brook was killed by his own callous men. The Doctor postulated that perhaps the unhinged Private Taylor had indeed demonstrated precognition.

  The first Doctor and Susan were caught in a Zeppelin raid at some point during the war. [1327] A First World War battlefield near Ypres was kidnapped by the War Lords. [1328] The Doctor claimed to have been wounded at the Battle of Gallipoli. [1329] Burton, later a camp leader at Shangri-La in 1959, fought in the War using his sabre in hand-to-hand combat. [1330] The Toymaker kidnapped two British soldiers from Ypres. [1331]

  Turkish soldiers during the First World War claimed to have seen The Ark of Ages on Mount Ararat. [1332] The Doctor saw the Battle of Passchendale. [1333] The Doctor met the noted sailor Felix von Luckner. [1334]

  In 1917, Reginald Tyler started writing the fantasy epic The True History of Planets while on leave from soldiering in France. [1335] Brigadier General Tamworth was part of the Versailles delegation, and foresaw that reparations against Germany would further a bigger conflict. [1336] Harriet Derbyshire was recruited from Oxford to join Torchwood Cardiff. [1337]

  In 1917, the Cottingley Fairies photographs caused a sensation - even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle thought they were genuine. Decades later, the girls who took the pictures admitted they were fakes, but Torchwood would have reason to suspect they were real. [1338]

  1917 (autumn) - The Way Through the Woods [1339]

  As part of their investigations into the people who had gone missing in Swallow Woods, the eleventh Doctor and Amy dropped off Rory to observe barmaid Emily Bostock. Rory and Emily were transported into a pocket dimension that Reyn the were-fox used to save the odd person from his sentient spaceship.

  w - Russia made the switch from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian one in 1918, when the 31st January was immediately followed by 14th February. Cousin Anastasia claimed these lost thirteen days and founded the Thirteen-Day Republic, a rival to Faction Paradox’s Eleven-Day Empire. [1340]

  The Doctor was present on 23rd March, 1918, when the Chinese conjuror Chung Ling Soo died on stage in London. Soo was performing in the Wood Green Empire, and perished when his bullet-catching act went wrong. [1341]

  w - Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, Tsar Nicholas II’s youngest daughter, was recruited to join Faction Paradox and became known as Cousin Anastasia. History recorded that Anastasia was executed along with her family on 17th July, 1918. [1342]

  Around 1918, the Doctor and Cornelius literally crossed swords in an adventure that involved a Newcastle coal mine and Leopard Men. [1343] The British military captured a Sontaran named Brak when he crashed to Earth. He was brought to England in 1918, and would be kept under paralysis until World War II. [1344]

  @ 1918 - Casualties of War [1345]

  The eighth Doctor investigated reports of the walking dead in Hawkswick in Yorkshire. Befriending the village midwife, Mary Minnett, he discovered that the creatures were being created by the traumatic memories of wounded soldiers convalescing at Hawkswick Hall. The Doctor caused a psychic backlash, destroying the hall and the man behind it - the head of the hospital, Dr Banham.

  @ The Doctor kept the last letter Mary wrote to him (on 22nd August, 1918). [1346] The West Pier in Brighton absorbed the cheerful feelings of its visitors - the malevolent aliens from Indo subsisted off these emotions, and grew stronger. However, the armistice that ended World War I created such a widespread feeling of relief, the aliens were temporarily subdued. [1347]

  1918 (October) - TW: To the Last Man [1348]

  The Rift caused St. Teilo’s Hospital in Cardiff to overlap with itself in the twenty-first century, an act that endangered both time zones. Gerald Carter and Harriet Derbyshire of Torchwood were instructed by a future projection of Thomas Reginald Brockless - a soldier at St. Teilo’s recovering from shellshock - to find and cryo-freeze his past self. They did so, enabling Torchwood in future to close the Rift by sending Tommy back through it. Tommy resumed being shellshocked on his return to 1918; thr
ee weeks later, he was returned to France and executed for cowardice.

  1918 - TW: “Rift War” [1349]

  Gerald Carter and Harriet Derbyshire disrupted a group of stone circle worshippers by “borrowing” a tank from the military. Rift activity briefly juxtaposed them with Ianto and Tosh in 2008, where they saw their friend and colleague Jack Harkness.

  An influenza epidemic in 1918 and 1919 killed more people than the Great War itself. [1350] An agent of the Bureau arrived from the future (circa 2386) and adopted the name Percival Closed. [1351] Following an incident on a rowing boat on Lake Balaton, the summer of 1919, Mrs Elsa Kerniddle would never speak again. She was later transported into the Celestial Toymaker’s realm. [1352]

  (=) In the world of the Dark Matrix, the Jack the Ripper killings started again after the Great War. Ghostly Rippers begin terrorising London. There was mass panic, despite summary executions for suspects. The government withdrew to Edinburgh. [1353]

  1919 (August) - The Memory Cheats [1354]

  The second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe were in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, as the Bolsheviks took command of the North, and were expected to spread their control to the South. The letters of Richard Lansing detailed how school children were going missing, and said a deformed man was responsible. Lansing and his wife Elizabeth were killed before discovering the truth. It was possible that a kind alien observer was collecting some children to take back to its homeworld, and spare them the horror of warfare on Earth. It was also possible that the Lansings had died because Zoe accidentally agitated the creature into killing them. In Zoe’s native time, she and her defence council were unable to agree on exactly what had taken place, and how this matter resolved.

  1919 (late September) - Toy Soldiers [1355]

  Investigating the mysterious disappearance of children across post-War Europe, the seventh Doctor, Benny, Roz and Chris discovered that they had been kidnapped by the Recruiter, a device transporting beings from many worlds to act as soldiers in the fourteen-hundred-year war that had ravaged the planet Q’ell. The Recruiter had been built to destroy the Ceracai race, but the Doctor reprogrammed it to rebuild the devastated planet.

  Harriet Derbyshire was killed, age 26. Gerald Carter retired from active Torchwood service, but remained a consultant. [1356] The Doctor drank with Lloyd George when he was Prime Minister. [1357]

  The Nineteen Twenties

  The Doctor acquired a copy of the 1920 book Every Boy’s Book of the English Civil War. He would later lose it in 1648. [1358] The Doctor met movie producer Harold Reitman in England in the 1920s. [1359] He helped Joyce with Ulysses. [1360]

  In the 1920s, Blue Tit birds in Southampton learned to tear the tops off milk bottles and drink the cream inside. Soon, Blue Tit birds more than a hundred miles away were exhibiting the talent - even though the birds rarely flew more than fifteen miles - and by 1947, the habit was universal among the species. This owed to morphic resonance, a collective memory held within a planet’s morphogenetic field, and passed on to each new generation of life. The same effect was witnessed in monkey creatures four million years in the future, on the planet Endarra. [1361]

  The time traveller Honoré Lechasseur was born in 1920. [1362] Jean-Henri, Honoré’s father, abandoned his son and Honoré’s mother, Evangeline Lechasseur. [1363]

  1920 (5th December) - Blink [1364]

  The Weeping Angels transported Kathy Nightingale from 2007 to Hull in 1920. She would marry Benjamin Wainright and live out her life in her own past.

  1921 - TimeH: The Severed Man [1365]

  The Cabal of the Horned Beast was now powerful enough to enthrall the village of Middleton Basset using a time-creature. The time travelling Honoré Lechasseur and Emily Blandish broke the Cabal’s hold over the time-creature, freeing the townsfolk.

  c 1921 - The Daleks’ Master Plan [1366]

  While hiding from the Daleks, the TARDIS landed briefly on a film set in Hollywood.

  The Russian mineralogist Leonid A Kulik visited the area of the Tunguska explosion in 1921, but failed to locate the impact site. [1367] In 1922, a foreigner staying at Tullock Inn vanished on Tullock Moor, kidnapped by the Zygons. [1368] Dr Judson was crippled before this time. [1369] The Threshold set up offices on Earth’s moon in 1922. [1370] Sao Paulo, 1922, was the site of a Vondrax visitation. [1371]

  In the same year, Jack Harkness once again failed to enter the Tretarri housing district, but engaged in some “sexual deviancy” with a young lady in the back of the Torchwood Daimler he’d requisitioned. [1372] Zoo animals killed during an earthquake in Tokyo, 1923, became vengeful spirits, and were contained within a haunted house later built on the same locale. [1373] The Doctor watched a cricket game featuring Percy George Herbert Fender - whom he regarded as the finest cricketer ever to captain England. [1374]

  Material pertaining to the Skith was embargoed from Ernest Shackleton’s biography. [1375]

  1923 (23rd October) - Paradox Lost [1376]

  The eleventh Doctor brought the AI unit Arven to live with the retired Professor Archibald Angelchrist, figuring they could both use the company.

  1923 (9th November) - Timewyrm: Exodus [1377]

  The seventh Doctor and Ace witnessed the Munich Putsch, an attempted coup organised by a young Adolf Hitler, so the Doctor could gain Hitler’s confidence and sway events in future. A man with energy weapons fired upon the time travellers - it was the War Chief, who was operating in this era to aid the Nazis, but the Doctor didn’t recognise him.

  In 1923, George Limb, a member of military intelligence, failed to convince his superiors that the British should side with Hitler. [1378] Iris Wildthyme spent a night in a cell with George Orwell. [1379]

  @ The Doctor studied Ba Chai in Peking, the 1920s. [1380] The Doctor borrowed a rucksack from George Mallory and Andrew Irvine before their final assault on Everest in 1924. He warned them not to lose their gloves, lest they lose their lives, but he never saw from them again - possibly because he’d failed to return Mallory’s gloves. [1381] In 1924, the Panoptican Theatre was converted into an 850-seater and renamed the Beacon Film Theatre. [1382] Iris Wildthyme’s bus had a constant supply of fresh water thanks to an inter-dimensional, time-travelling pipeline to a Canadian lake in 1924. [1383]

  The last remnants of Marshall Sezhyr’s Ice Army fell into in-fighting, and his most devout followers were slaughtered - chained out onto the surface of Mars to face the Red Dawn. One group gathered relics from his shrine and escaped to Earth. [1384]

  On 28th February, 1924, Jack Harkness showed up at Torchwood India in Delhi armed with dance records, and seduced the group’s leader: Eleanor, the Duchess of Melrose. Britain’s hold over India was coming to an end, and Jack had orders to relocate Torchwood India’s holdings back to the home country. On 29th February, the Duchess and her associates used a piece of alien tech left behind - a “time store” - to halt the passage of time inside an old colonial mansion. They carried on for decades, unaging, as the world changed around them. [1385]

  The Meddling Monk offered his companion Tamsin “Caesar’s very own Caesar salad”. [1386] Another Toymaker captive, Lola Luna, was a denizen of the Weimar cabaret circuit. [1387]

  1924 (October) - The Clockwise Man [1388]

  The ninth Doctor and Rose arrived to visit the British Empire Exhibition, and quickly discovered that a creature that ticked had committed a series of attacks. Shade Vassily, a war criminal from the planet Katuria, had been tracked down to Earth by the socialite Melissa Heart - actually a disfigured alien hunter. The Katurians used clockwork technology, but the Doctor prevented Vassily and Heart’s conflict from destroying London.

  = c 1924 - FP: Warlords of Utopia [1389]

  On Roma I, Scriptor came to the attention of the Emperor and was commissioned to write the history of the Hercules Bridge that linked Europe to Africa. Following this, he decided to write a history of the Forum in Rome, and learned of the mysterious old man who’d materialised the day he’d been born. He also made many contact
s, and married Angela, the daughter of a Scottish merchant.

  A few months later, Scriptor tracked down the old man in a Swiss hospital and located his time ring. Scriptor accidentally followed the old man to another universe (Roma II) where Rome never fell, but had not prospered quite as much as his own. Scriptor and his family negotiated trading deals between the two universes, keeping their monopoly on travel between them - and the existence of other Romes - a closely-guarded secret. He soon mapped hundreds of other Romes - Roma III, where Yung Lo had won the coin toss and moved the Chinese court to Rome; Roma IV, where the Christians were a political force; Roma V, where the Mediterranean had been drained to irrigate the Sahara; Rome VI, a matriarchy; and so on. Lacking any understanding of parallel universes, the Roman philosophers believed that each of these Romes orbited a different sun in their own universe.

  On Rome CLII, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs in most universes arrived sixty-five million years late, and wiped out a Roman civilisation that pitted dinosaurs against each other in their arenas. On this ruined world, Scriptor killed a mysterious monster that had been tracking the thirteen Great House members who’d fled their universe, and had murdered seven of them. Scriptor took the seven time rings the monster had collected - now armed with eight such devices, Scriptor’s family expanded the scope of their operations considerably. The existence of other Romes became public knowledge on Roma I.

  w - The earliest iteration of Faction Hollywood, an offshoot of Faction Paradox, could be traced back to 1925, although Faction Paradox proper would have little to do with the group after the 1940s. [1390]