Neverland (audio story): Difference between revisions
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== Plot == | == Plot == | ||
''to be | ''Part one” | ||
The Doctor and Charley celebrate their victory over the Daleks, trapped in a paradox and cut off from the rest of Time. The Time Lords will release them from the loop eventually, as much of history depends on their actions... but Romana has a score to settle with them, and will no doubt let them stew for a while. But as the Doctor sets course for their next destination, a fleet of battle TARDISes materializes around his own ship, just like the fleet the Doctor slipped past once before. This time, he realizes that they’re after him -- and Charley. CIA Co-ordinator Vansell and President Romana are already on their way... | |||
The Doctor attempts to weave his way out of the trap, but one of the battle TARDISes fires time torpedoes at him. If he dematerializes to avoid them, the fleet will pluck his ship out of the Vortex; if the torpedoes hit, the Doctor and Charley will be frozen for centuries, giving the Time Lords plenty of time to break in. The Doctor refuses to give up, however, and at the last moment he and Charley are saved by a wave of time distortion which sweeps past, stealing vital seconds from the web of Time. By riding the crest of the wave, the Doctor gets past the battle TARDISes, which are unable to track his turbulent path. By the time the disturbance dies down, the Doctor and Charley have escaped. | |||
Apparently satisfied, the Doctor tells Charley the time has come to celebrate her birthday, and presents her with a single exclusive invitation to a thousand-year party in a distant pocket of time and space which the Time Lords know nothing about. Sadly, there’s only one invitation, but the Doctor promises to pick her up again in a year’s time while he takes care of trifling business elsewhere. Charley isn’t fooled for a moment. She knows the truth; by rescuing her from the R101, the Doctor has broken history. She’s supposed to be dead, and the Doctor is taking the responsibility upon himself -- confident and carefree that nothing will go wrong, like Peter Pan living a life of adventure in Never-never-land. But while Wendy shared Peter’s adventures for a time, she had to grow up eventually. Charley chose to stow away on the R101, she chose to travel with the Doctor, and she understands the consequences of those decisions -- and thanks to the Doctor’s instructions during the Nimon invasion, she knows what the Fast Return Switch does. Before the Doctor can stop her she presses the Switch just once, and the TARDIS returns to its previous location, materializing in the path of the time torpedoes just as they detonate... | |||
Three hundred years later, Celestial Intervention agents Kurst and Levith finally break into the Doctor’s TARDIS. He’s beginning to recover, and they send him to the President’s battle station, locate Charley, and prepare to install her in a space-time converter. Charley begins to recover, disoriented, but not so disoriented that she fails to take offence at Levith’s patronising attitude. Levith assures her that the Doctor is all right, and that they’re simply preparing Charley for a small procedure which shouldn’t harm her -- if she doesn’t resist... | |||
The Doctor revives, deliriously reliving a few moments of a past adventure with Mary Shelley and Lord Byron before he recovers and realizes that he’s in a Time Station. Vansell attempts to interrogate him, ignoring the Doctor’s taunts and gibes; the Doctor has been brought here to discuss Charlotte Elspeth Pollard. The Doctor invokes the Archetryx Convention and demands a fair trial, but Romana arrives and assures him that Charley will not be harmed. However, the Doctor must be made aware that the time distortion which enabled him to escape earlier was not a random event. The Time Lords have detected many such distortions recently -- and they now believe them to be caused by particles of anti-Time. The Doctor doesn’t know whether to laugh or not; anti-Time is a pseudoscientific concept with more basis in superstition than reality. According to legend, when Rassilon created the Eye of Harmony, Time was pinned down to one continuous history -- but as every action has its equal and opposite reaction, the creation of positive Time created a mirror universe of anti-Time, a force as destructive to causality as anti-matter is to positive matter. If the Universe of anti-Time really exists, it’s a chaotic realm with no past, present or future; just an endless, meaningless, ever-changing Now. | |||
The Doctor doesn’t believe such a place exists, but Romana reveals that the web of Time is near breaking point. History has changed on several important worlds, including Earth, where the wrong President was elected into control of a major landmass. The initial outbreaks of time distortion have now been traced -- to the times and places which the Doctor has visited with Charley. The mere fact of her survival has created a breach in space-time, a living gateway through which particles of anti-Time are flowing into this Universe, shattering causality. The Matrix has been turned over completely to anchoring the web, but it’s breaking under the strain -- and what’s left has projected a horrific future. Vansell reveals that the Doctor is inside a projection unit, an Eighth Door through which he casts the Doctor into the Matrix to see the future for himself... | |||
The Doctor finds himself in the ruins of a once proud city, the skies dark with smoke, but not so dark that the Doctor can’t recognise the constellations. A sad old man, whom the Doctor finds terribly familiar, confirms that this world was once called Gallifrey -- but it is now the empire of Zagreus. The Doctor recognizes the name from an old nursery rhyme, but as he tries to recall the details, he is transported to a vast arena which was once the Panopticon. The crowd chants viciously as the cruel Imperiatrix Romana takes the stage and presents to her people the Dalek Emperor, trapped with his people in a time pocket. The Emperor demands to be released, arrogantly convinced that his race is required to maintain historical causality -- but instead, Romana passes judgement and obliterates the Daleks from history completely. The Dalek Emperor, realizing too late what is happening, begs for pity -- but Romana simply scoffs as the Daleks are crushed into oblivion forever. The Doctor is appalled, but as he protests this cruelty, the angry mob turns on him, prepared to tear him to pieces... | |||
Vansell pulls the Doctor out of the projection just in time. Though shaken, he refuses to accept that saving Charley’s life was wrong; if Romana wishes to put Charley back on the R101, she’ll have to erase the Doctor from the whole of history first. As long as he lives, he’ll find a way to save his friend. But Romana reveals that there is already another way -- albeit a potentially dangerous one. According to Vansell, certain esoteric records in the Matrix have provided an alternative. Just as particles of anti-Time are travelling through Charley, so the Time Lords can use her as a conduit to travel the other way and stop the threat at its source. | |||
Kurst and Levith are already at work in the Doctor’s TARDIS, setting up a proton accelerator to transform Charley into a living breach in space-time. Charley braces herself, and tells Levith to give the Doctor her love, though she believes Levith won’t understand such a concept. Kurst activates the converter, and Charley’s body twists out of time and space completely... | |||
The Doctor is concerned, but Romana assures him that the change will only be temporary, and that once the flow of anti-Time has been stopped, Charley will be free to go. The Doctor thus accepts her plan, and accompanies her and Vansell to the bridge of the Time Station -- which is staffed with a skeleton crew of Interventionists due to the secret nature of the mission. Levith contacts Vansell and reveals that Charley has become a gateway, through which she can see the whole Universe. “And the gate of Zagreus opened before him...” But as the Time Station dematerializes, the Doctor’s TARDIS console overloads and the TARDIS is sucked through the breach itself. The Doctor begs Romana to abort the mission, but they’re already committed and can’t stop now. The Time Station passes through the breach... | |||
As the Doctor’s TARDIS loses power, so does the space-time converter, and Charley returns to her natural human form, badly shaken by her experience. Kurst and Levith, also shaken, check the destination monitor and find that it can’t settle on temporal co-ordinates. They are in a universe without Time... yet strangely they’ve materialized on a solid surface. Charley leads them outside, where Levith sets up a beacon to guide the Time Station to them. Assuming, of course, that the Station made it through the breach before it closed up... | |||
The Time Station materializes, but its sensors, calibrated to operate in a Universe of linear Time, are overloaded with useless data. The Doctor suggests just opening the windows, as it were, and the Under-Cardinal lifts the observation ports to reveal a universe of constant motion and chaos -- with one fixed point, a static planetoid which cannot have originated in this maelstrom. The Doctor theorizes that his TARDIS would naturally have been attracted to the one safe place for it to materialize, which seems confirmed when the Time Lords pick up a signal from a time beacon and a TARDIS signature -- although the TARDIS signature is too scrambled to identify clearly. The Time Lords set course for the planetoid, but as they approach, they lose the signal -- and the Doctor realizes that it’s being affected by time distortion. | |||
As Levith waits impatiently for the Station, Charley and Kurst see a forest of metal spikes in the distance. Charley sets off to explore, unaware that Kurst and Levith aren’t following her -- something has gone wrong with the beacon and they’re desperately trying to get it back under control. Nevertheless, Charley isn’t alone -- for something speaks to her in her own voice, and she finds herself facing what appears to be her own ghost. More spectres surround Charley, identifying themselves as the people who never were. Kurst and Levith open fire on the ghosts, distracting them while Charley flees to safety -- but the ghosts reform and descend upon Kurst, consuming the essence of his life. Charley and Levith try to flee back to the TARDIS, but the ground splits open before them, and the beacon and TARDIS tumble into the abyss and are lost. | |||
The beacon stops signalling, and the Doctor realizes that the TARDIS they’re detecting isn’t his. Frustrated by the Time Lords’ hesitation, the Doctor pushes past the Under-Cardinal and pilots the Time Station beneath the cloud cover before Vansell can stop him. Their descent scatters the ghosts before they can descend upon Charley and Levith, but the Doctor dismisses the forest of metal spikes as another sensor fault -- although he admits his mistake after the Station crashes. Vansell is concussed by the crash, and deliriously quotes from Gallifreyan mythology -- “Zagreus waits at the end of the world, for Zagreus is the end of the world; his time is the end of time and his moment time’s undoing.” The Doctor is puzzled; why does a make-believe villain from children’s stories keep reappearing today...? | |||
Vansell is infuriated when he recovers, but as he threatens to erase the Doctor from history completely, Charley’s ghost materializes -- or rather, the spectre which has taken Charley’s form. The Doctor realizes that this is a native of the Antiverse, a Never-person -- and he’s horrified when it reveals that it has passed through the breach before, and that it consumed Lucy and Richard Martin while it was there. More Neverpeople materialize in the station and begin drawing temporal energy out of its cracked time rotor, but when Vansell tries to drive them off, their leader informs him that the thing he seeks lies in a grotto not far from here. Vansell decides to set off immediately, and though the Doctor questions the wisdom of leaving the Time Station to the Neverpeople; however, Romana reveals that if they leave the Station long enough it will repair itself. The Doctor reluctantly accompanies Romana, Vansell and the guards out of the Station, beginning to suspect that Romana hasn’t told him the whole truth about their visit to the Antiverse. He’s right, and Vansell fears that the Doctor will oppose them when he learns the truth... | |||
Outside, the Doctor is reunited with Charley, and while Levith reports to Romana and Vansell, the Doctor studies the metal spikes; they are artificial, and the ground itself consists of iron filings. Acid begins to rain from the sky, and the Doctor, Charley and the Time Lords shelter in a nearby cave -- but as they head deeper into the cave they realize that the tunnel is more like an artificial corridor. Charley spots a familiar round pattern on the walls, and when they enter a vast chamber with a hexagonal structure at the centre, the Doctor realizes that this “planetoid” -- which must be from their own universe -- is the wreck of a TARDIS. | |||
Vansell, delighted, operates the TARDIS’ power receptors, and manages to bring up a hologram which the Doctor recognizes instantly. It’s the old man from the Matrix, a wise, sad old man who should be centuries dead; conqueror of the Yssgaroth, over-priest of Drornid, and first President of Gallifrey -- Rassilon himself. Rassilon speaks to the Time Lords who have found him, and tells them that the legends are true; by locking the continuum in place with the Eye of Harmony, he also created the menace of anti-Time. He thus piloted his TARDIS into the weird fringes of space-time, where he found the monster Zagreus and did battle with it. The monster was defeated, but Rassilon’s TARDIS was shattered and the way home lost. Since then he has lain suspended in a Zero Cabinet, waiting for his descendants to find him -- and rescue him. After millions of years, Rassilon is coming home. | |||
== Cast == | == Cast == | ||
