B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

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B00DPX9ST8 EBOK Page 155

by Parkin, Lance


  c 7862 - “A Fairytale Life” [1519]

  The eleventh Doctor and Amy had recently escaped the stomach of a space chicken, and he granted Amy’s wish and landed the TARDIS on the fantasy-themed holiday planet of Caligaris Epsilon Six. They discovered the deception that King Aethelred had perpetrated in separating Caligaris Epsilon Six from the wider universe, and came to believe that the people there should make their own choices. The Doctor devised an antibody that eliminated the Pest contagion, and freed the colony from its isolation.

  & 7932 - The Catalyst / Empathy Games / The Time Vampire [1520]

  After Gallifrey and the Time Lords were no more, Leela - who had enjoyed an extended lifespan thanks to the Time Lords’ biofields replenishing her telomeres - rapidly aged. She became a prisoner of the Z’nai, who interrogated her about her encounter with their emperor, H’mbrackle II. Leela carried a Z’nai-killing virus that eliminated her captors, but their machines kept her alive for at least another year.

  In the last moments of Leela’s life, K9 arrived in the TARDIS and took her back in time some centuries - to meet her former self and facilitate her rebirth as a time vampire.

  & 8000 - The Judgement of Isskar [1521]

  A castle - actually a disguised segment of the Key to Time - on the planet Safeplace radiated a balance-restoring sensation, and so became an ideal location for peace talks. The fifth Doctor and the Key-tracer Amy converted the segment, but were captured by the revived Lord Isskar - who demanded they face trial for their role in Mars’ devastation. The rival Key-tracer Zara attempted to crash Isskar’s spaceship, thinking she could retrieve Amy’s segments from the rubble afterwards. Isskar ejected to safety in an escape pod. A new incarnation of the Black Guardian - needing the Key segments to restore his diminished abilities - transported the Doctor and Amy to ninth-century Sudan.

  Two thousand years after it had been established, the Gogglebox enabled users to view every recorded media event from the human race’s history. Alan Fitzgerald had been cloned, and one hundred eight copies of him aided visitors. [1522]

  The Krashoks - cybernetic humans who had incorporated weaponry from races such as the Daleks, Cybermen and Rinteppi; and alien organs such as Renevian tiger claws, Slitheen arms and Gappa legs - initiated various wars and sold weapons to both sides. They hired the Darksmiths of Karagula to create a device that would resurrect the dead - a means of extending conflicts, which would be good for their business. [1523]

  The Mazuma Era [1524]

  c 8162 - “Free-Fall Warriors” [1525]

  Doctor Asimoff from Sigma had been coming to the Festival of the Five Planets for the last fifteen years, although it used to be the Festival of the Six Planets until one planet broke away from the Federation. Asimoff recognised the fourth Doctor as a Time Lord, and the Doctor showed him the TARDIS. They met the Free-Fall Warriors - a stunt pilot team who challenged the Doctor to go on a flight with Machinehead, one of their number. They launched right into the middle of an attack on the planet, and were forced down onto an asteroid. The remaining Free-Fall Warriors - Big Cat, Cool Breeze and Bruce - set off to intercept the raiders, and the Doctor fixed Machinehead’s ship in time to play a decisive role in the battle.

  c 8162 - “The Moderator” [1526]

  Josiah W Dogbolter, a creature not quite a man and not quite a frog, was the owner of the Intra-Venus Inc and the richest man in the galaxy. He profited from everything, including the war on Phobos and ruby mining on Celeste. Dogbolter had a presence on many planets, including Celeste - a world where he sent “moles”, meaning people who rebelled against him. He owned Mars, Jupiter and Venus, plus a score of worlds in other systems.

  The fifth Doctor and Gus landed on Celeste and narrowly escaped arrest for breaking curfew. Deep in the ruby mines, they were attacked by the Wrekka, a combat robot sent in to deal with the moles. Dogbolter’s guards brought the Doctor and Gus to their boss, who learned the Doctor had a time machine. Dogbolter knew that “time is money”, but the Doctor refused to sell his Ship and left. A furious Dogbolter brought in the Moderator, a company troubleshooter. He tracked them down and killed Gus.

  Gus had wounded the Moderator. The Doctor returned the Moderator to a hospital in his home timezone... where Dogbolter’s right-hand robot, Hob, turned off his life support.

  c 8162 - “The Shape Shifter” [1527]

  Avan Tarklu was a 45-year-old Whifferdill - a shapeshifting private investigator who was tempted by the quarter of a million Mazuma reward that Dogbolter had posted for the fifth or sixth Doctor.

  Meanwhile, the sixth Doctor learned that Dogbolter had sent the Moderator, and was heading to Greenback Bay, Venus, when he was attacked. Avan Tarklu secretly helped the Doctor repel the attack - purely to get his hands on the reward - and snuck into the TARDIS. The Doctor and the shapeshifter landed at the headquarters of Intra-Venus Inc, which Dogbolter had evacuated, then nuked. They tricked Dogbolter into handing over the reward, then escaped. The shapeshifter joined the Doctor on his travels.

  c 8162 - “Voyager” [1528]

  The sixth Doctor had a nightmare about a shadowy figure on a sailing ship, waking to find that the TARDIS had landed at the Antarctic of “an outback dimension somewhere between mythology and madness”.

  The shapeshifter - who was now semi-permanently in the form of a penguin, and calling himself Frobisher - had discovered the same ship, frozen in ice. Exploring the ship, the Doctor found star charts. He was accosted by Astrolabus, an old man with a blunderbuss, who took the charts and made his escape in a da Vinci flying machine.

  The Doctor and Frobisher followed him to a lighthouse, where the Doctor confronted Astrolabus - and found that the lighthouse was his TARDIS. Astrolabus tried to escape, but crashed into the sea. Voyager showed himself to the Doctor and demanded the return of the charts - which Astrolabus had tattooed onto his chest. Astrolabus was in his last incarnation and was seeking immortality, but Voyager ripped the chart off his body, killing him. Voyager told the Doctor he was now free, and the Doctor and Frobisher continued their travels.

  c 8162 - “Polly the Glot” [1529]

  Terminal LX 116/RM was a space station at the centre of the Milky Way - the crossroads of an entire galaxy - and was known as Galena. Dr Ivan Asimoff was passing through when he saw the TARDIS. He invited the sixth Doctor to the Save the Zyglot Trust annual conference, as he was the group’s treasurer.

  Polly, the only Zyglot in captivity, was at the Ringway Carnival along with freakshow exhibits from a hundred worlds. The creatures were hunted for their colours by the dullest race in the universe, the Akkers, and the Trust was failing through lack of funds. The Doctor and Frobisher “kidnapped” Asimoff, generating a great deal of publicity for his cause.

  The Doctor learned that the President of the Trust was a Professor Astro Labus. They headed for a hunting ship, freeing the Zyglot in their clutches and discovering that an Astral Arbus owned the Ringway Carnival. The Doctor also freed Polly, who soared and blossomed - and left Asimoff heartbroken. The Doctor left the quarter-million Mazuma reward he stole from Dogbolter for Asimoff to donate to the Trust.

  c 8162 - “Once Upon a Time Lord...” [1530]

  The sixth Doctor and Frobisher entered the cabinet of Astrolabus, and encountered a variety of surreal obstacles.

  c 8162 - The Maltese Penguin [1531]

  Frobisher briefly returned to his homeworld to resume his occupation as a private investigator. Through a bizarre twist of economics, Josiah W Dogbolter was generating immense profit on the planet by making sure no factory actually made anything. Frobisher’s ex-wife, the Whifferdill named Francine, manipulated events to display the joke, “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps”, on the computer terminals of Dogbolter’s employees. This triggered communication and productivity, and ruined Dogbolter’s operations. Frobisher resumed travelling with the sixth Doctor.

  The seventh Doctor banished Death’s Head to Earth in the year 8162. [1532]

  c 816
2 - “Where Nobody Knows Your Name” [1533]

  The eighth Doctor drank at a bar run by his old friend Frobisher, but as both had changed their appearance, neither recognised the other.

  At some point in the next forty thousand years or so, Real Phobos crashed into Old Barsoom, a.k.a. Mars. [1534]

  c 8400 - Turn Left [1535]

  The tenth Doctor and Donna visited the planet Shan Shen, where Donna was lured into a fortune teller’s booth and attacked by an alien beetle - one of the Trickster’s Brigade. Such creatures normally changed people’s lives in tiny ways and fed off the resulting temporal shift, but the beetle changed Donna’s personal history so she never met the Doctor - with grave consequences to the history of Earth. Rose helped Donna to restore history, and the beetle died.

  Donna passed a message from Rose to the Doctor - two words: “Bad Wolf” - which made the Doctor race outside the fortune teller’s booth, and see that everything with writing said exactly that. The TARDIS cloister bell started ringing, and the Doctor told Donna that it signalled the end of the universe. They returned to the twenty-first century. [1536]

  After the great cybernetic massacres of the eighty-fifth century, sentient androids fell out of favour. From this point, most robot servants were connected to a central webwork rather than being autonomous.

  The Federation had remained a democracy, but the Chen dynasty brought an end to that. Civil war broke out, and the final battle of the conflict took place in the Mirabilis system. Federation forces won, but the Imperial Fleet devastated Mirabilis itself with an atmospheric plasma burst that killed 90% of the population. Emperor Chen was captured and executed.

  The civil war had taken its toll on the Federation, and the galaxy entered a new dark age in which scientific progress all but ceased. During the ninetieth century, the remnants of the Federation became the Union - a united political entity at peace with the Draconian Republic, the Cyberlord Hegemony and the radioactive remains of the Sontaran Empire. There were two other forces for unity: the Elective, a massive criminal organisation that controlled all criminal activity between New Alexandria and the Perseus Rift; and the Lazarus Intent, a religious organisation which commanded eight quadrillion people. [1537]

  The Darksmith Legacy

  The entire surface of Mordane, the first planet of the Gandii Prime system, had been converted into a place of cemeteries and catacombs - according to the TARDIS data bank, Mordane served a hundred different species from a thousand worlds as a planet of the dead. Humans from colonies such as Folflower, Mayside, Riverville, Wystone and Humberville buried their dead on Mordane. Lady Rosilie of Peladon was buried there. An entire continent, Sector Alpha, was designated for humans. [1538]

  An underwater research base was established on Flydon Maxima to monitor the planetary warming there. The global warming ultimately gave way to a catastrophic ice age, forcing the planet’s inhabitants to abandon it. [1539]

  King Morrish a’Jethwa, who ruled five planets in the Folflower system for many years, was buried on Mordane. Following his death, the monarchy was deposed in a bloodless coup and went into exile.

  Brother Varlos, the Darksmiths’ chief engineer on the Krashok project, succeeded in building a device that could reanimate the dead. He field-tested the device on Mordane, and succeeded in making the dead walk. Varlos realised that the device had the potential to revive the dead on millions of worlds, and was so horrified that he vowed to destroy the device - but didn’t know how to demolish its central power source, the Eternity Crystal. Varlos left his “daughter”, an android named Gisella, at a base made from Darksmith technology on Flydon Maxima. He then fled with the Crystal to nineteeth-century Paris. [1540]

  The walking dead on Mordane prompted the Galactic Union to designate the planet a quarantine world with a Grade Two Exclusion Order. In the eighty years to follow, all records of Mordane were erased. [1541]

  c 9000 - The Graves of Mordane / The Colour of Darkness / The Depths of Despair / The Planet of Oblivion [1542]

  The tenth Doctor visited the cemetery world of Mordane to learn more about the Eternity Crystal. He deactivated Varlos’ re-animation machine, turning the undead that walked on Mordane into dust. He also helped Catz, the granddaughter of King Morrish a’Jethwa, to retrieve a torch from the king’s tomb - it was the symbol of her right to rule the Folflower system. The Darksmiths’ Agent took the Eternity Crystal from the Doctor, and the Doctor pursued the Agent to the Darksmiths’ homeworld of Karagula...

  Later, the Doctor went to Flydon Maxima to learn how to destroy the Crystal. The Darksmiths’ enforcers, the Dreadbringers, followed the Doctor through time in the Dreadnought Adamantine. The Doctor sent a surge of icy water through an underwater base - this both swept away the Dreadbringers and enabled some local lifeforms, the tentacled Blaska, to retrieve a clutch of their eggs. The Doctor met Gisella, and together they went to find her father in Paris, 1895... [1543]

  The Darksmiths re-conferred with the Krashoks on the peaceful planet Ursulonamex, a.k.a. Oblivion, concerning the Eternity Crystal - a devastating “rain of fire” was then unleashed upon the planet to cover up the meeting. The insectoid Dravidians, a race of thieves, arrived at Ursulonamex’s only surviving space station and claimed to have answered a distress call. The Dravidians clandestinely set about draining the station’s power and adapting its environment to suit their offspring, which hatched in their thousands. The tenth Doctor and Gisella forced the Dravidians to withdraw. [1544]

  After around eight thousand years in the time corridor created by the fourth Doctor, Sutekh finally perished at the beginning of the ninetieth century. [1545]

  ? 9,000 - Dreamtime [1546]

  The seventh Doctor, Ace and Hex arrived at the Uluru as it travelled through space. The people’s faith in the Dreaming had weakened, and the Dreaming began absorbing people into itself by turning them into stone. The Doctor accidentally travelled to the time of the solar flares and influenced the Uluru’s departure from Earth. He returned and restored the people to normal, and it was hoped that the Dreaming’s next attempt to terraform the Uluru would prove more successful.

  ? 9200 - The Children of Seth [1547]

  An army warred with itself on the plains of Ragnarok, and only three hundred of its mightiest heroes survived. Their leader, Autarch Siris, forged a major trading empire with the cities on the asteroid archipelago around Sirius as its core. Idra, a student, met the Doctor while she was subverting the propaganda agency on Sirius III. She belonged to the Gracious Academy of Women, and realised that the budding empire would need an enemy to fear and rally against. Idra invented the bogeyman Seth, as he was named in her book The Trick of Darkness. In time, she would became Siris’ concubine, Queen Anahita, a.k.a. the Queen of Poisons.

  The Sirian Empire reached a long way across its sector, and included at least ten humanoid variants. Androids were outlawed, and The Trick of Darkness was banned. Anahita’s face was scarred as she tried to rescue copies of it from a fire.

  Forty-three years after Anahita met the Doctor, Siris relinquished his authority to Lord Byzan - who consolidated his power by rallying his people against Seth, now said to have taken shelter in worlds beyond the Rim. Anahita feared the consequences for the empire, and summoned the fifth Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa. Androids who had infiltrated Sirius staged a coup, hoping to create a society without humans. The Doctor posed as Seth, and Byzan ended the insurrection by destroying the android Albis - which by extension made random “people” across the empire become immobile, their android origins revealled.

  The empire disbanded, with individual worlds regaining their sovereignty. Anahita and Siris retired, after she poisoned Byzan in his cell.

  The Antonine rescue raid on Scultiis in 9381 failed when the natives’ electric fields disrupted their weapons. [1548]

  c 9968 - The Scarlet Empress [1549]

  The planet Hyspero was visited at some point by hawk-like beings who were revered by the natives, yet had no interest in ruling the planet
. They left behind Cassandra - the first Scarlet Empress, a jam-like creature in a jar - to look after their affairs. She built up the Scarlet Palace and founded the tattooed Scarlet Guard. A long line of Scarlet Empresses - Cassandra’s descendents - ruled Hyspero, and the planet became home to an interstellar market.

  The latest Scarlet Empress was a tyrant who conscripted Iris Wildthyme - who was dying, as she had eaten the flesh of a Kaled mutant - to reunite a mercenary band named the Four. One of the group was guarding Cassandra, and the incumbent Empress sought to lay claim to her ancestor. The eighth Doctor and Sam helped Iris find the Four, whereupon Cassandra destroyed her descendent and reclaimed the throne. Iris regenerated thanks to the healing properties of a life-restoring honey.

  Around the end of the one-hundredth century, the Silurian scientists Ethra and Teelis worked on time-travel experiments. The results were published in the March 9978 edition of Abstract Meanderings in Theoretical Physics. [1550] The ArcHive studied the history of the universe, and served as vast repositories of knowledge. They had access to time-travel technology. [1551] Emperor Brandt and the Cyberlord Hegemony possessed the ArcHive in the hundredth century. [1552]

  10,764 - The Crystal Bucephalus [1553]

  In 10,753, Alexhendri Lassiter fulfilled on the Lazarus Intent, stabilising a time gate that rescued Lazarus from the Sontaran throneworld before his death. But the truth about the false Messiah quickly became clear, and Arrestis took control of the criminal Elective. Meanwhile, Lassiter and his brother Sebastian built the Crystal Bucephalus, a time-travel restaurant on the planet New Alexandria, which sent the galaxy’s elite to the finest eating establishments in history.

 

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