B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (57 page)

Enigmatic circus people, the Night Travellers, performed in the dead of night and left a trail of “damage and sorrow” - as well as claiming children to “live with them forever” - wherever they performed. In 1898, they were responsible for a number of disappearances and coma victims in the town of Wellsfield.
 [1161]

1898 - The Banquo Legacy
 [1162]

A scientist, Harris, built a machine that could share thoughts. He demonstrated it at Banquo Manor as the eighth Doctor, Fitz and Compassion arrived, trapped by a Time Lord device. The Doctor discovered that the butler, Simpson, was a Time Lord searching for Compassion. The Doctor unravelled the web of blackmail and murder involving Harris and his sister, Catherine. Simpson was thought killed, and the Doctor’s trio left before Simpson was missed by Gallifrey.

On 12th January, 1898, Florence Sundvig died. Mary Eliza Millington was born on 3rd March, dying four days later. At the end of the nineteenth century, the grandfather of Reverend Wainwright translated the Viking Runes in the crypt of his church.
 [1163]

1898 - Grand Theft Cosmos
 [1164]

The eighth Doctor and Lucie went to Stockholm by train to see Strindberg’s new play, and made the acquaintance of Frederick Simonsson, an art buyer for the King of Sweden. The time-travelling Headhunter summoned Tardelli forth from the black diamond that Simonsson had obtained, as the Emperor Vassilar-G of Ralta wanted to hire him as an official court artist. The Doctor convinced Tardelli to perform a fifth-dimensional dump on the diamond, sending its pocket universe into the gap between universes, where it could exist independently. He also confiscated the Tardelli paintings in Simonsson’s possession while the diamond’s stone guardian wandered off into the woods around Stockholm. The Headhunter and Karen took Tardelli away to work for the Emperor Vassilar-G, but the Doctor believed that the Emperor had notoriously fickle tastes, and would likely eat Tardelli on a balcony, in front of a crowd, when he got bored with him.

Having failed to sell the diamond as an energy source to the industrialist Yashin, the Headhunter thought it best to avoid Earth between now and his death in 1905, lest he exact retribution on her.

Emily Holroyd, an operative for Torchwood Cardiff, burned her partner to death when he contracted a mutative infection and transformed into a giant snake. His replacement, Alice Guppy, was offered employment with Torchwood on Tuesday, 13th September, 1898.
 [1165]

w - 1899 (a Sunday in March) - FP: Movers / A Labyrinth of Histories
 [1166]

Godfather Sabbath had just been appointed the head of Faction Paradox’s military wing. To insulate his bloodline from temporal interference by the Faction’s enemies, he began systematically killing off his family tree. The godfather murdered his mother, then his mother’s father - after each slaying, the historical equations governing Godfather Sabbath’s existence were rebalanced so he could exist without progenitors. He next tried to kill his maternal grandfather’s mother, Fiora Vend, but arrived after she was already pregnant. As killing his grandfather twice would be in very bad form, the godfather instead murdered Fiora’s niece, Emma James, hoping it might open up further avenues of attack in his family history.

Godfather Morlock recruited Emma’s cousin and best friend, Justine McManus, to join Faction Paradox.

1899 - TW: Fragments
 [1167]

Jack Harkness had taken to wandering from drinking den to drinking den. He had been “killed” fourteen times in the proceeding six months when Emily Holroyd and Alice Guppy of Torchwood investigated statements Jack had made in taverns concerning the Doctor. Holroyd offered Jack employment as an uncontracted field agent, and he accepted after a mysterious young girl who read tarot predicted that “the century would turn twice” before he would see the Doctor again.

1899 - TW: Consequences: “The Baby Farmers”
 [1168]

Admiral Sir Henry Montague financed an operation aboard the decommissioned HMS
Hades
to breed extra-terrestrials and create an army of superstrong amphibious assassins for the Empire. Torchwood - led by Emily Holroyd, and otherwise composed of Alice Guppy, Charles Gaskell and Jack Harkness - destroyed the operation. Jack allowed members of the race that Montague was farming to kill the man.

Holroyd received a sentient alien book that Jack had sent through the Rift from 2009, and per his instructions filed it away in the University College library. This caused the book to become aware of Torchwood’s existence, and it desired stories pertaining to the group.

The Panoptican Theatre in Cardiff opened
in 1899, and hosted touring dramatic companies.
 [1169]

1899 - Players
 [1170]

The sixth Doctor and Peri stopped the murder of a 24-year-old Winston Churchill, who was serving as a war correspondent in South Africa. The Doctor helped Churchill escape from a P.O.W. camp, and Churchill returned home a hero.

1899 (26th December) - Castle of Fear
 [1171]

The fifth Doctor and Nyssa visited Stockbridge, and witnessed a mummery that entailed Father Christmas, St. George, a dragon... and a rendition of the fifth Doctor himself and his TARDIS. The travellers went back to 1199 to investigate the source of the play. They returned to 1899 to find that the Rutan spaceship in Stockbridge Castle had regrown in the interim, and was influencing the town residents to dig it out. The Doctor and Nyssa piloted the weakened ship into the stratosphere, but its engines triggered a hyperspatial warp-core explosion that flung them to Stockbridge in the early twenty-first century.

The Doctor and Iris met Oscar Wilde in Venice after his imprisonment. They also fought some “fish people”.
 [1172]
Gerald Carter,
age 24,
joined Torchwood
after being trained in military intelligence. One of his earliest missions was the Centurian Incident of New Year’s Eve, 1899.
 [1173]

The Twentieth Century

Joan Redfern had married Oliver, her childhood sweetheart, but he died at the Battle of Spion Kop.
 [1174]

The first Doctor was present at the Relief of Mafeking.
 [1175]
In 1900, Emily Holroyd drafted a manifesto pertaining to Torchwood’s Rules and Regulations, including guidelines concerning the group’s succession of leadership.
 [1176]
Professor Angelchrist saw H.G. Wells speak about
The War of the Worlds
at a bookshop on Charing Cross Road.
 [1177]

Battlefields from the Boxer Rising and the Boer War were lifted by the War Lords.
 [1178]
Jack Harkness was in China for the Boxer Rebellion.
 [1179]
Nurse Albertine studied battle surgery and saw some action during the South African War. She would come to work for Toby the Sapient Pig.
 [1180]
Colonel Hugh served in the Boer War.
 [1181]

(=) By the beginning of the twentieth century, Dhakan - the alternate Earth ruled by Katsura Sato - had interstellar travel.
 [1182]

The Doctor told L. Frank Baum that if monkeys had wings, they technically would no longer be monkeys.
 [1183]
Iris met Arthur Balfour in the Reform Club.
 [1184]

1900 (January) - Tales from the Vault
 [1185]

Kalicarache, an extra-terrestrial being composed of psionic energy and could possess dead bodies, escaped when the prison transport carrying it crashed in Africa. The first Doctor, Steven and Dodo confronted Kalicarache during the Battle of Spion Kop, after he had possessed the late Lt. Thornicroft. Kalicarache’s consciousness was left trapped inside the fabric of a coat worn by a killed solider, Tommy Watkins. In the decades to come, Kalicarache could control anyone wearing the item.

w - (=) 1900 (May) - FP: Warring States
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Compassion furthered her gambit with the White Pyramid by placing the Empress Dowager Ci Xi in a garden within her internal dimensions, and then impersonating her. Cousin Octavia, accompanied by her Red Burial and Prester John, arrived in this time zone to lay claim to a casket found within the Pyramid by an archaeological team, as she believed that it held the secret of immortality. Compassion pitted Octavia against Liu Hui Ying, and they both travelled back to the Pyramid.

When Compassion’s stratagem finally failed, the archeological team found only an empty tomb.

The toadstool-like xXltttxtolxtol discovered their homeworld would extinguish in a few thousand years, and sent a stardrive through the Rift to “invite” to other species to travel to them... a means of identifying a world to conquer. The Queen granted George Herbert Sanderson of Torchwood permission to visit the stardrive’s planet of origin, a few solar systems distant, on behalf of the Empire. Sanderson experienced time dilation during the journey, and aged little as a century passed in the outside universe.

Late in her life, Queen Victoria commissioned Agnes Havisham to serve as the Torchwood Assessor. Havisham would enter cryo-sleep at a storage facility in Swindon, and only awaken when automatic systems predicted deadly peril for a Torchwood station. Havisham was to have absolute authority over Torchwood in such cases. Her hibernation chamber was finally ready in late 1901. She would only awaken four times in the next hundred years - for “two invasions, one apocalypse and a Visitation by the Ambassadors of the Roaring Bang”.
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1900 (December) - Foreign Devils
 [1188]

The second Doctor followed Jamie and Zoe’s passage through the “spirit gate” in 1800, arriving exactly a hundred years later. The Chief Astrologer’s curse started murdering the descendants of Roderick Upcott, and the Doctor teamed up with Carnacki, an investigator of the supernatural, to look into events at Upcott House. The curse used the spirit gate’s dimensional energy to remove the house from time and space, and transformed Roderick Upcott’s corpse into a dragon. The Doctor destroyed the spirit gate, which returned the house and made the dragon crumble to ash.

1901 - TW: Exit Wounds
 [1189]

Alice Guppy and Charles Gaskell of Torchwood unearthed Jack Harkness, who had been buried since 27 AD. At Jack’s urging, they placed him into cryo-freeze and timed his revival for the twenty-first century. Jack’s younger self continued working for Torchwood.

= Iris was “instrumental” in the final battles against the Martians in an alternate dimension.
 [1190]

In 1901, the Night Travellers were responsible for the disappearances of eight people from Church Stretton.
 [1191]
In the same year, an English author began to write boy’s stories for
The Ensign
.
 [1192]
The Doctor saw the assassination of President McKinley.
 [1193]
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec died in 1901.
 [1194]
Jack Harkness dated Proust for a while, and claimed the man was rather immature.
 [1195]
Jack was married at least once.
 [1196]

1901 (20th October) - Cryptobiosis
 [1197]

The sixth Doctor and Peri sought to vacation aboard the
Lankester
(sic), a cargo ship en route from the Cape of Good Hope to New Orleans. The
Lankester
’s chief mate, Jacques De Requin, was smuggling two captured mermaids - Anthrotrite and her daughter, Galatea - to sell them for profit. Other mer-people, led by Anthrotrite’s father Nereus, breached the ship’s under-carriage. Anthrotrite died, the
Lankester
sank and the mer-people captured de Requin to torment him. The Doctor and Peri returned Galatea to her grandfather, and convinced him to discretely rescue any
Lankester
survivors. As part of these events, the Doctor was drafted to serve as a medical professional attached to the Merchant Navy.

On 12th December, 1901, John Lafayette, a linguist, accidentally travelled along a space-time path to ancient Babylon.
 [1198]
Jack Harkness met a precognitive named Sam who had just returned home from the Boer War.
 [1199]
In the same year, Jack, Emily Holroyd and Alice Guppy defeated a shadowy terror that brutalised the imagination.
 [1200]