The Legend of Gallifrey Part 5: The Paradox Effect
The TARDIS materialized in a marketplace that was filled with aliens, everything from Draconians to Tivolians. It appeared around a corner and out of sight, so the Doctor could step out of the TARDIS without getting weird looks.
He turned out into the main selling area, looking out across the crowd and recognizing every species he saw and every item on every stand. He turned towards a side alley and stepped in between the buildings, his feet on auto pilot. He'd been down this way every month since he'd left Gallifrey, but something was different. It was noisier, and the Doctor found out why in a second.
Several people clad in dark clothes ran by. One at the end stopped for a second and grabbed his arm, pulling him down the corridor towards the HQ.
HQ was a big place filled with consoles and yelling people. In the center of it all was a chair with a multitude of buttons, for the commander of the outpost, which was pointed at an incredibly tall screen, with the words 'Time Agency' written in blocky letters across the top.
The Doctor had met the Time Agents almost immediately after he and Susan had left Gallifrey. They told him that they were from Gallifrey's future, and had implored him not to ask any more questions, and he had obliged.
The person who'd grabbed his arm, a human woman with long black hair, pulled him over to one of the consoles which was manned by a Draconian male in more black attire. The Time Agency liked black.
"This is him, the one I told you about," said the woman.
"The one with the celery?" The Draconian asked. "Ah, yes, I see it is. Hello, Doctor, nice to meet you. I'm Kron, and this is Mya."
"Yes, good. Well, nice to meet you too," said the Doctor. "What was it you lot needed my help with?"
"Ah, yes," said Kron. He typed something on his console, and an image of fifteen galaxies appeared on the big screen. "These are the known galaxies, as I'm sure you're aware," he typed something else, and a large black dot appeared in the middle of them all. "We detected this about a month ago, surrounding your home planet of Gallifrey. It hasn't done anything as of yet, but about a week ago it did."
He typed something else on his console, and the dot grew larger. "It's expanding," he said. "And we have no idea what it will do to the universe. Likely destroy it. We need your help in stopping it."
The Doctor nodded. "And why here?" he asked.
"We discovered that whatever this is ought to still be dormant around Gallifrey, so after careful examination we traced whatever was amplifying it to here. Whatever it is is on this planetoid, causing the universe to be destroyed."
The screen fizzled right on cue, and a figure in a hood appeared on it. It began to talk in a strained voice.
"This message is transmitting to all points in the universe who are under threat by the force that is threatening to consume the galaxy, whoever it was said. His voice was very deep, obviously warped by software. "It is my doing. I wish for only one thing: the surrender of the creature known as the Doctor, and I will tell the force to recede."
Mya and Kron looked at him, as did everyone else in the control room. The Doctor look a shaky breath.
"Looks like you're now the universe's most wanted," said Kron.
The Doctor nodded. "I need you two's help to find this person. You said he should be on this planet?"
Kron typed something quickly. "Yes… the signal is somewhere in the market. Mya and I can help you find it, I'll send the signal to your sonic screwdriver."
The Doctor's screwdriver beeped, and Kron got up from his post. The Doctor turned and ran back down the way he'd come, and Kron and Mya followed behind him.
The market had emptied quickly. The Doctor took out his sonic screwdriver, and the head of it spun and pointed down the street. The Doctor followed its directions, with Mya and Kron close behind.
It pointed down a street that seemed to go on for a ways, over hills of brown grass and almost out of sight. On the edge of the horizon, it stopped at a blue-trunked tree with red leaves.
"Here." Kron held out his Vortex Manipulator. The Doctor and Mya both put their hands on it and the Doctor connected the sonic to it, sending it the signal trace. Then Kron activated it, and they vanished, reappearing next to the tree. The sonic's head began to spin wildly.
"This is it," said the Doctor. "This tree is where the signal came from. It must be or have some sort of transmitter. Maybe filled with miniaturized people?"
"Doctor, what are you talking about?" asked Mya. "It's a tree. I accept that the signal came from here, but is it maybe underground, or up in space?"
"The sonic can easily do height, thank you very much. It's definitely this tree, not underground."
The Doctor knocked roughly on the tree and put his ear up against the bark. It responded with two faint humming noises.
"It's a TARDIS," the Doctor said. "The chameleon circuit must be active, we just have to get in somehow."
Mya held out her Vortex Manipulator, and Kron put his hand on. The Doctor went to do the same, then stopped with his hand inches above.
"Doctor? Are you okay?" asked Kron.
The Doctor was definitely not okay. The cloak, the TARDIS, the technology to pull this off, there was only one person who could be behind this.
"It's the Master," the Doctor said.
Mya and Kron looked scared. The Time Agency certainly knew who the Master was, they'd told him about a time they'd thwarted certain plans he'd had for Metebelis 3. Their top agents had seen his horrors firsthand as he'd sent them running through a time-shielded maze of traps, leaving a quarter to die of old age, a quarter to reduce to nothing, another quarter to have their timelines erased, and a quarter to escape, barely, and take him down. Mya and Kron obviously knew him.
Mya was the first to recover from the news of the Master. She grabbed the Doctor's hand and put it on the Manipulator, then pressed the button.
The brown grass and the tree disappeared, and a darkly lit TARDIS console room, the original version with the small white-themed console room with the round things covering the walls and a door on the opposite side of the control room leading to the rest of the TARDIS.
The Master was nowhere in sight, but the Time Agents wouldn't recognize him if he was. The Master that they knew had a graying beard and a fresh evil perspective on the universe. It was the Master that the Doctor had first met, during his exile on Earth. This one was the one with the scarred features and bulging eyes that went around in a ripped up cloak. He was likely in his broadcast room; he liked to have a separate room for everything. The Doctor was pretty sure he was OCD.
The Doctor tiptoed towards the door, motioning for Kron and Mya to follow him, then he grabbed and slowly turned the handle and tiptoed out into the hallway.
There were quite a lot of doors, but one towards the end of the hallway had a light coming out of it. It demonstrated the Master's suppressed sense of humor with the digital sign over it that read 'ON AIR' in green letters. The Doctor continued tiptoeing towards it, with the agents right behind him.
From the corridor, only the Master's torn up cloak was visible, since he was facing a hovering silver saucer-shaped camera and a projected image of what it was picking up, but the image showed the horrific face of the scarred Master. It clearly repulsed Kron. The Master was recording another video about demanding the Doctor's surrender.
"If the Doctor isn't surrendered to me within 5 hours of the broadcasting of this video," he rasped, "then I will demonstrate what this force can do on the planet Earth."
Of course it was Earth, of all places.
The Master stepped forward and reached out a scarred hand towards the recorder, and waved it in front of the camera. The light coming from the lens shut off and the camera settled onto the floor. Then the Master began to turn around.
The trio quickly hid behind another door as the Master shuffled out the door, and the green 'ON AIR' sign switched to read 'OFF AIR' in red letters.
The Master stopped briefly in front of the door they were behind, but continued to walk towards the control room, leaving a clear space for the Doctor, Mya, and Kron to follow him from a safe distance. He walked into the control room, leaving the door open and giving them a clear view of him spinning levers and flipping switches. Then they heard the TARDIS dematerialize, and it dawned on the Doctor that they were trapped on a TARDIS in flight with the most insane and damaged Master of them all.
The Doctor carefully closed the door they were behind and turned around to see a dimly lit hallway with doors and doors. The hallway went on for a very long time, out of even the Doctor's sight, with doors on both sides on the hall every five feet. The TARDIS lurched.
"The Master," said the Doctor, quietly. "He's steering the TARDIS somewhere with something in tow, likely that force he's using. We need to find a backup control room."
The three of them began walking down the hallway and looking into every door, searching for a backup control room. They found a swimming pool, a weather control unit, and a nineteenth century amphitheater. Then Mya opened a door.
The control room was dark, like the rest of the TARDIS, but it was a lot more eccentric. The console was round and sleek, and the central column went all the way to the ceiling, which was unusually high. The walls were glass, and on the other side there were robotic, alien, and exotic fish swimming through water that seemed to go on forever. The console was on a section of metal grating that was raised four feet over a stainless steel floor.
"I like this place," said Kron. "This is a good place to save the universe."
"Let's hope so," said the Doctor. He walked over to the console and pressed a button, and the monitor on the console showed him something in gallifreyan.
"The force that the Master is using isn't being generated by his TARDIS, only amplified by it," said the Doctor. "It wouldn't have consumed the universe for over a million years if the Master hadn't decided to use it for his own purposes. If we can remove his control over it, it would retreat to where it would have been at this point."
"But what is it, Doctor?" asked Kron.
"The force? It seems to be some sort of temporal knot, likely from a paradox. From the size of it, one at cosmic proportions. A paradox big enough could consume the universe, and the Master's making sure it does."
This put a strained look on the Draconian's face.
"How can we remove the Master's control over the paradox?" asked Mya.
"From here? With a little difficulty, and a lot of luck." The Doctor began to run around the console and the writing on the monitor spun. The console made a beeping noise, and the Doctor cursed.
"The Master!" he said. "He knows we're here! He's fighting me!"
The console sparked and a crack appeared in the glass, water spewing into the room. The Doctor continued running, pulling levers and typing commands, but the console continued sparking and the crack widened.
"The Master is trying to cut off the power this console room has over the TARDIS!" the Doctor yelled. "I can't shut down the control over the paradox!"
The water from the walls may have looked cool, but now it was building up. By now it was splashing against the grating of the console platform.
"Doctor!" Mya yelled over the water. "Give me the controls! I can do it!"
"What are you saying?!" he yelled back. "Of course you can't, the Time Agency hasn't even seen any TARDISes apart from mine! You wouldn't know the first thing about what to do!"
"Doctor, I can do it!"
He hesitated. There was no possible way she could even tell the TARDIS to dematerialize, let alone steal control of the TARDIS from the main control room. Not even the Doctor knew how to do that. But she seemed very confident that she knew what to do. The Doctor nodded. The water was up to their ankles.
Mya grabbed the controls and began typing something into the monitor, then she yanked a spiral lever and turned it clockwise. This didn't make any sense, she was inputting the controls to tell the TARDIS to remove all extra rooms. She might very well kill them.
The water reached their waists, but suddenly the cracks made a tinkling noise and vanished into the glass. The water stopped at their knees and sploshed against the console.
The Doctor gave Mya a bewildered look. "How did you do that?" he asked.
Her eye twinkled and she opened her mouth, but the door opened and the water began to spill out into the hallway, soaking against the cloak of the Master. He stepped into the room and closed the door, causing the water to stop at their knees.
"Doctor," he simply said. His bulging eyes stared menacingly at the Doctor, then he pulled something out of his cloak pocket and wrapped his burnt arm around the nearest neck (Mya's) and aimed the device at the head attached to it.
"You have foiled my plans again, Doctor, but this time you are trapped in my TARDIS," he said. "You will not escape with your life, and I will have your regenerations."
He held up the device. It looked rather like the sonic screwdriver before the Doctor had added the magnet on the top, only it was silver with yellow lines across it.
"Laser screwdriver," he said. "One wrong move, and I'll take her head off."
The Doctor slowly scooched towards the console. Kron took a shaky breath. Then the Master's eyes flickered towards the Doctor's feet, and aimed the laser at his head. The tip lit up, and a horrible high-pitched noise reverberated off the glass walls. The Doctor saw the laser heading right towards him. Then something black covered his vision.
Apparently, since Kron was a member of a reptilian species and was therefore covered in scales, the water slid over his skin and gave him amazing water maneuverability. The idiot had rushed in front of the Doctor and taken the laser blast right through the second stomach and part of the lung. He collapsed into the water and floated on the surface of the water, his blood spreading out through the water like a sponge soaking up a liquid.
Mya elbowed the Master in the stomach, then spun around and kicked him between the legs, causing him to fall backwards into the water. He, too, landed on the water's surface, with his cloak acting like a floater. His laser screwdriver flew across the room and fell into the water, shorting out.
The Doctor and Mya rushed to Kron, but the life was already leaving his eyes. His scales withered up and began to fall off and float away in the water, revealing a very human-like skin underneath. Mya lifted up Kron's arm slowly and pressed a button on his Manipulator, and his body vanished into the Vortex along with a chunk of water.
Mya and the Doctor stood in the water for a minute, staring at the scales floating in the water. They were jolted back to reality when the TARDIS shuddered.
"The paradox!" the Doctor said. "It's pulling the TARDIS in!"
"We have to get out of here!" said Mya. She hoisted the Master's body over her shoulder and grabbed the Doctor's hand, activating her Manipulator. The three of them vanished and reappeared in the Time Agency HQ with a large chunk of water. A group of agents lifted the Master's unconscious form over their heads and carried him towards the cells.
Mya walked over to Kron's station and typed something in. On the main screen, a picture of Kron's face appeared with a big flashing DECEASED message. Everyone in the room stopped what they were doing and lowered their heads.
The Doctor sat in the Time Agency break room, sipping a cup of coffee and thinking over the events of yesterday. Kron had died a noble death at the hands of the Master, who was now locked up in the brig. There were only two things that still stuck in his craw: the origin of the paradox, and how Mya had managed to take control of the Master's TARDIS.
Then Mya walked in, wearing a black trench coat over a gray collared shirt and dark blue pants. There was one aspect of her outfit that stuck out more than the rest:
The red converse sneakers.
The Doctor stood up and faced her. "You aren't Mya, are you," he said.
She smiled and shook her head. "You were always a clever one, Doctor. You always will be too. No, Mya was a character I made up, because I knew that in this specific fight you would need my help, the help of someone with the codes to bypass the locks around the central console room of a TARDIS."
"You're M," said the Doctor. "The same M I met at the end of the universe, and at the Sontaran-Rutan War."
She nodded. "You're needed once again, Doctor. I've been to your TARDIS and pre-programmed the coordinates you need. All you need to do is dematerialize, and you'll fly right into the paradox. All of you will be needed to fix it, in the end."
She handed him a note. "I'll be needing to go now. I know you'll feel the urge to disobey me, but you cannot open that note until I tell you to. It could very well be disastrous for the entire universe. Again."
She held up her Vortex Manipulator and tapped it, and she vanished into the Vortex. The Doctor looked at the note she'd given him, then stuffed it into his coat pocket and walked outside, vanishing into the crowd.