B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (56 page)

Jago inherited the New Regency Theatre. His continuing adventures with Litefoot entailed their defeating Dr Sibelius Crow, a mad scientist who wanted to turn corpses into bestial creatures to serve as soldiers for the Empire; besting the Theatre de Fantasie, a living story that fed off the dreams and fantasies of mortals; and killing the fiend Gabriel Saunders.

c 1892 - Jago & Litefoot: Dead Men’s Tales

Operating from 2011, the temporal engineer Elliot Payne tried to harvest all of Earth’s temporal energy - enough raw power to free his wife, who was trapped in an event horizon millennia in the future. Payne’s experiments created time breaks, and so Leela was dispatched from Gallifrey to aid Litefoot and Jago in dealing with the situation. One of Payne’s experiments translocated the doomed Navy seaman Johnny Skipton from 1958; the resultant time break resolved when the spirits of Skipton’s crewmates claimed him, and they all drowned as intended.

1893 (spring to 8th May) - Benny: The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel
 [1134]

Straxus, a Time Lord who was stranded on Earth, diverted Benny’s time ring as she travelled from prehistoric times. Dr Watson and his wife were away on a recuperative cruise, so Benny made the acquaintance of Mycroft Holmes - who worked for Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and looked nothing like his illustrations in
The Strand
. She aided him in solving a number of crimes, including the Case of the Peculiar Pig. They also stopped the Choirmaster of Cloistersham from selling cipher keys to the Shah of Iran.

Benny and Mycroft stopped Straxus’ assistants, two Cwejen, from committing murders that prominently featured the number 7, in an attempt to create a pattern in history that would attract the attention of a “pale god” named Mr Seven. A past version of Straxus locked up his successor, and also gave Benny a working time ring.

Mycroft Holmes currently possessed the only copy of
All-Consuming Fire
.

1893 (July to August) - Camera Obscura
 [1135]

The eighth Doctor and Sabbath both arrived in Victorian England after detecting disturbances in time. A faulty time machine, based on the principles of temporal interferometry, had splintered the stage magician Octave into eight individuals. Octave attacked the Doctor, who lived because Sabbath had placed the Doctor’s second heart in his own chest, which tethered the Doctor to the living world. Sabbath’s assassin, the Angel-Maker, killed Octave.

The time machine had also twinned the insane psychologist Nathaniel Chiltern. One of the Nathaniels attempted to further use the machine, which could have punctured the space-time continuum, but the Doctor destroyed the device by flinging himself into it. Nathaniel killed the Angel-Maker, but was then killed by Sabbath. By extension, this killed the other Nathaniel.

At this time, the Doctor, Fitz and Anji attended a séance. Also in attendance was a young man named William.
 [1136]
The Doctor collected some oolong tea in Peking in either 1893 or 1983.
 [1137]

c 1893 (August) - Jago & Litefoot: The Man at the End of the Garden

Eleanor Naismith, née Maycombe, had become a famed author of fantasy stories. Litefoot, Jago and Leela helped to stop the fairy-man whom Eleanor had bargained with as a child from vengefully killing Eleanor’s daughter Clara - who had been formed via the fairy-man’s magic pocketbook. Clara used the book to make jackdaws carry the fairy-man away to the moon, where one of their number kept him company.

c 1893 - Jago & Litefoot: Swan Song / Chronoclasm

Litefoot, Jago and Leela found that Elliot’s experiments had forged a temporal link between the New Regency Theatre and Elliot’s laboratory, which stood on the same locale in 2011. Payne’s equipment was ruined, but he successfully journeyed down the link and arrived in the 1890s. Because it amused him, Payne kidnapped Nikola Tesla from a future year to serve as his assistant.

(=) Leela and her allies failed to find Payne, who converted Earth’s temporal energy. Roads split and the Thames boiled as the whole history of London happened all at once. Jago witnessed the cataclysm and was thrown back in time a few hours...

Leela’s temporal register triangulated Payne’s location from the future Jago. A cadre of Time Eaters arrived to collect the energy Payne had promised them. Payne realised the Time Eaters had killed his wife, and, on Litefoot’s suggestion, temporally connected his lair with 12th October, 1940 - when a bomb was slated to destroy the New Regency. The Time Eaters were obliterated, Payne also seemed to perish and Tesla was returned to his native year.

Leela said farewell to her friends, but her time ring failed to return her home - indicating that danger was still present - even as Jago and Litefoot were approached by Professor Claudius Dark...

Prior to this, Professor Litefoot had met Oscar Wilde.

In 1894, Frederick Simonsson purchased two of Claudio Tardelli’s reality-warping paintings for the King of Sweden.
 [1138]
Thomas Reginald Brockless, a soldier in World War I, was born on 7th February, 1894.
 [1139]

1894 - Time Zero
 [1140]

Keen to be an adventurer in his own right, Fitz accompanied palaeontologist George Williamson on an expedition to Siberia. Tsar Alexander III was present when the expedition left Vladivostok.

Reptiles from another timeline attacked the expedition, killing everyone but Fitz and Williamson. A huge explosion encased the two of them in ice, where they would remain for over a hundred years. The eighth Doctor and Williamson later went back to 1894 and averted the saurians’ timeline by arranging Williamson’s death. The billionaire Maxwell Curtis, travelling down a time corridor to this era from 2002, died in a minor explosion.

As a result of these events, an energy being from an o-region - a sort of isolated, mini-universe - was drawn to Earth. Bits of it seeped through Williamson’s time corridor into the past, where it was worshipped by some cultures. The main portion of the fire elemental that arrived in 1894, however, achieved enough critical mass to work toward its agenda of consuming Earth entirely.

The elemental allied itself with Roger Nepath, who believed it could restore his dead sister Patience to life.
 [1141]
Marnal’s first story, “The Giants”, was published in the
Strand
in 1894.
 [1142]

1894 (June) - Demon Quest: The Demon of Paris
 [1143]

The fourth Doctor and Mrs Wibbsey dropped off the elephant they picked up in Roman Britain and proceeded by train to Paris to investigate the Doctor’s appearance on one of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters. Lautrec’s recent behaviour had been erratic, and a number of girls had been found murdered. Moreover, all of the paintings in the artist’s studio had been slashed to pieces. The Doctor and Wibbsey found Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge, and discovered that even Lautrec has begun to doubt his own sanity. The travellers found desiccated corpses in Lautrec’s attic, along with the missing component from the TARDIS - but this made the Doctor suspect Lautrec wasn’t the murderer. The concierge was a shapeshifter who drained life energy, and the same demonic being who posed as Claudius in the first century. The alien once again escaped in a dematerialisation chamber, and the Doctor and Mrs Wibbsey returned to 2010.

Shortly after this time, Mrs Wibbsey’s parents died. Her younger self was sent to live with her aunt.
 [1144]

= 1894 (a Thursday in June) - Iris: Enter Wildthyme
 [1145]

Iris Wildthyme’s favourite month and year to spend in Paris was June 1894, and she worked to avoid running into herself there. She, Kelly, Simon and Panda saw the Martians invade the Paris of an alternate dimension. Between now and the turn of the century, the city would be levelled.

1894 - The Bodysnatchers
 [1146]

Henry Gordon Jago had been a bit dyspeptic of late, and on Professor Litefoot’s orders had gone to see his sister in Brighton for a few weeks. With Litefoot’s help, the eighth Doctor and Sam Jones discovered that a series of grisly murders were part of a Zygon plot to conquer the world. The Doctor confronted Balaak, the Zygon leader, and accidentally killed some of the Zygons by poisoning their milk. The Zygons’ pack of Skarasen threatened London until the Doctor lured them into the TARDIS. He relocated them and a Zygon survivor, Tuval, to an uninhabited planet.

In 1895, Frederick Simonsson acquired one of Claudio Tardelli’s sculptures. It was actually a silicate-based lifeform tasked with protecting the diamond containing Tardelli’s micro-universe.
 [1147]

@ c 1895 (January) - The Burning
 [1148]

The amnesiac eighth Doctor ended up in Middletown, just in time to investigate a mysterious geological fault. He realised that it was the home of a fire elemental that was in league with local developer, Roger Nepath. The Doctor blew up a dam, flooding the fault and extinguishing the elemental. The Doctor callously killed Nepath.

On February 14th, 1895, the Doctor attended the debut performance of
The Importance of Being Earnest
.
 [1149]

@ In March 1895, the Doctor met George Bernard Shaw at a party hosted by Oscar Wilde. Around that time, Sherlock Holmes solved the McCarthy murders before the Doctor could.
 [1150]
The Doctor claimed to have acquired a walking stick and shroud after an encounter with Oscar Wilde and a theatre of midget assassins.
 [1151]
The fourth Doctor claimed he was asked to be George VI’s godfather.
 [1152]
Nikola Tesla was temporarily transported back in time by Elliot Payne.
 [1153]

1895 - The Vampire of Paris
 [1154]

Brother Varlos of the Darksmiths buried the Eternity Crystal on Earth’s moon and took up residence in Paris. A timeship followed Varlos to Earth, and the time vampire that powered the vessel killed the crew and escaped. The tenth Doctor and Varlos’ android daughter, Gisella, tracked down her “father”. Together, they reversed the strange temporal effects that the creature was causing, and allowed it to peacefully escape into the Time Vortex, but Varlos died while doing so. The Doctor and Gisella left to find a means of obliterate the Eternity Crystal, but destronic particles jolted the TARDIS, catapulting it to the Silver Desolation in another time zone...

1896 (10th November) - The Sands of Time
 [1155]

The fifth Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa arrived in the Egyptian Room of the British Museum. At the invitation of Lord Kenilworth, they attended the unwrapping of an ancient mummy, only to discover that the mummy was the perfectly preserved body of Nyssa herself. The Doctor came to realise that the intelligence of the Osirian Nephthys was in Nyssa’s body.

Lord Salisbury lent the Doctor a morning coat for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
 [1156]

1897 (November) - The Death of Art
 [1157]

The seventh Doctor, Chris and Roz investigated a psychic disturbance in France. They encountered the Brotherhood, a secret society researching psychic activity. A man called Montague ruled one faction of the Brotherhood, but another, “the Family”, were working against him. The outbreak of psychic powers was because the Quoth, multidimensional beings, had taken shelter in human brains. The Doctor sided with the Family against Montague, who was killed. The Doctor retrieved all the Quoth and took them to a new home in a neutron star.

In 1898, humanity’s average life expectancy was forty-nine years, nine months and five days.
 [1158]
The Martian landing at Horsell Common, as depicted in
War of the Worlds
, was indeed fictional.
 [1159]

w - (=) ? 1898 - FP: Warring States
 [1160]

The timeship Compassion required an independent power source, and extruded part of her internal dimensions into Chinese history as a White Pyramid. Compassion’s machinations brought Cousin Octavia of Faction Paradox and a Chinese girl named Liu Hui Ying into conflict over a casket found within the pyramid in 1900, and they both travelled (Octavia by derailing a Faction Paradox train while doing so) to the pyramid itself. Compassion time-looped the battle between the two women - sometimes Octavia prevailed, sometimes Ying would. Each “winner” became a mummy within the casket, enabling Compassion to power herself from their witchblood.

Compassion sustained herself in this manner for “thousands of years”, but Octavia and Ying finally combined efforts to defeat her, and vanished into another reality.