Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who. Please don't sue me or steal my story!
Author's Note: I was reading about Greenwich, England for a paper back during the fall semester, and I came across the story of Ruth Belville. She was a real lady who lived in the 1800s. She carried around a clock she called Arnold, which she would set regularly at the Royal Observatory. People called her the Greenwich Time Lady. I thought this was so cool, I just had to write a story. This story eventually evolved into my entry for the Big Finish Short Trips Writing Contest. The prompt was: How the Doctor changed my life. And that is exactly what I wrote about. The way watching Doctor Who changed my life. The character I invented, Twyla Todd, is not any sort of version of me, but the message she learns is. I'm an incredibly, deeply shy person. But watching Doctor Who adventures inspires me to take chances and show initiative--particularly in the classroom, where my first instinct is generally to keep quiet and sort of fold up into myself. If it wasn't for the Doctor's influence, teaching me to dive in and try, I never would have even entered this contest. My story didn't win, but it makes the point I wanted to make about the importance of thinking outside the box and following your own interests, and if you like it and let me know what you think of it, that would truly be all the prize I need. It would help me feel a lot better too. I hope you enjoy it!
Continuity Note: This story takes place between The Invasion of Time and The Ribos Operation. So it's set after the Doctor left Leela and K-9 on Gallifrey and before Romana I made her appearance, in that in-between time when the Doctor and his new K-9 model were traveling the universe on their own.
A Time Lord in Greenwich
by
Rowena Zahnrei
"Welcome to the Royal Observatory: the home of time! Here at your feet is the famous Prime Meridian, which cuts across this courtyard and through the wall behind you."
With a proud flourish, the museum tour guide indicated a crack that stretched up the side of the building, fired with an enthusiasm fourteen-year-old Twyla Todd found intensely obnoxious.
Slouching away from her school group, Twyla rested her arms on the iron fence that held her captive, her heart heavy with frustration.
She so did not want to be here. But, she didn't want to be at school either. Nothing seemed satisfying anymore. The days and weeks were blurred together like a vast net, an endless cycle of homework and television and sleep. And Twyla was sick of it. Sick of everything…
A sudden tap on her shoulder made her jump. Turning, she found herself confronted with the disapproving countenance of her teacher.
"Pay attention," Ms. Hester scolded before striding back to the rest of the group. Wrinkling her nose at her departing back, Twyla leaned against the fence, arms folded and ankles crossed.
The guide was pointing toward the Observatory roof–specifically at a big red ball impaled upon a metal mast that ended in a large, arrow-shaped weathervane.
"That's the Time Ball," she smiled. "Every day at 12:55, the Ball rises half-way up the mast. It continues to the top at 12:58, then drops at exactly 1:00 p.m. Back in the nineteenth century, ships on the Thames used the Ball to set their chronometers. But more about that once we're inside and you can all see what's possibly the most important timekeeper ever made. Have any of you heard of the inventor John Harrison? Nosirrah nohj rotnevni eht fo dreah…"
Twyla blinked, then blinked again. Surely, she couldn't have just heard…
"…uoy fo yna evah. Edam reve repeekemit…"
No, it wasn't her imagination. But then, why didn't anyone else seem to notice?
"…tnatropmi tsom eht ylbissop s'tahw…"
Twyla's stomach lurched. It wasn't just the guide. Everything seemed peculiar. Her classmates' movements–even the birdsong sounded weird. Yet, no one was reacting. Why was no one reacting?
Twyla turned in a frantic circle, her fear rising like a stone in her throat. A terrible wheezing thrum began pulsing in her ears, growing louder by the second…
"Stop it!" she cried, squeezing her eyes shut as a sudden wind whipped her frizzy hair across her face. "Stop it, please! Stop!"
And then, all at once, it did.
"Excuse me!"
Twyla turned so quickly she nearly lost her balance. A hand reached out to steady her, and she looked up–only to stagger back in alarm.
A tall man in a crumpled fedora was staring down at her, an immensely long multicolored scarf wrapped around and around his shoulders with the ends tossed carelessly to one side. He was standing before a battered blue telephone box, and Twyla was certain neither of them had been there before.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you," he said, his deep voice surprisingly kind. "You wouldn't be Miss Ruth Belville by any chance?"
Twyla stared. "What?"
"Ruth Belville. Known as the Greenwich Time Lady. Carries around a clock called Arnold?"
At Twyla's blank look, he frowned. "No?" He shook his head. "No. But this is Greenwich?"
Twyla nodded.
"Right place, wrong time," he mused. "Well…you can't have everything. I'm the Doctor, by the way. And you are?"
"Twyla!"
It was Ms. Hester, frowning from the doorway where the rest of the students were filing into the building. "Stay with the group!"
"Twyla, eh?" The Doctor glanced at her as if seeing her school uniform for the first time. "I say, what year is this, Twyla?"
"It's…2002."
The Doctor blinked. "That far off!" He shot an appraising look around the courtyard.
"Well, I may have missed the mark, but that doesn't mean this trip's a total wash. I've never actually been inside the Royal Observatory, you know, even with all my traveling."
Twyla frowned suspiciously. "You're a traveler, then?"
The Doctor leaned in close, as if to impart a secret.
"Your teacher's waiting."
With that, he charged for the door, leaving the befuddled Twyla to trail behind like the fringes of his fluttering scarf.
If Twyla had expected the Doctor's sudden appearance to set off some reaction, she was disappointed. The others quickly accepted him as a visiting scientist, almost as if he'd been expected. And it figured, she supposed. How else could he explain the inner workings of H4–the timekeeper John Harrison had developed to solve the problem of finding longitude at sea–with the air of one who'd actually seen it built?
Sighing deeply, Twyla glanced down at her own digital watch, wondering how much longer she had to stay there. The world was rapidly dulling back to ordinary. Already, she was half convinced she'd imagined the odd happenings in the courtyard. Nothing that strange could be real. Not in this world of movie times and bus schedules, where so much of life was dictated by the clock.
Still, here she was, standing in a room filled with nothing but clocks. It gave her a peculiar feeling, watching the seconds tick by–so swift, yet so painfully slow. Soon, there was another minute gone that would never come again.
But…wait–something was wrong. The seconds on her watch… Were they running backwards?
"Doctor!" she cried, though she wasn't sure why. It was automatic, a panicked call for help. "Doctor!"
Suddenly, he was beside her. "You felt it too?"
"My watch…" Twyla stammered. "First the courtyard and now–"
"Wait. Hold on." The Doctor looked her in the eye, and Twyla was surprised to realize he was quite as shaken as she was, if not more. "Are you saying you've experienced this kind of temporal anomaly before?"
"If you mean time running backwards," Twyla glared, "yeah–just before you showed up. Why? Do you know what's going on?"
"Something's not right…" he mused, frowning at the oblivious tour group.
"No joke!" Twyla shot back.
The Doctor looked at her. "Come with me," he said. "I might need your help."
"Master!"
"What's that!" Twyla exclaimed, watching warily as the Doctor unlocked the door of the big blue box in the courtyard.
"My dog." Flashing her a toothy grin, he strode into the box.
"Dogs don't talk," Twyla snapped after him. "What do you keep in that…" she read the inscription over the doors, "…police public call box?"
"TARDIS."
Twyla squinted. "What?"
"It's called a TARDIS," he repeated, his voice sounding surprisingly distant. "My TARDIS. Now come inside! We're wasting time!"
Instead of following him in, Twyla backed up. "You're mad if you think I'm going in that box with you."
"Fine," he called back gamely. "Don't come in. I don't need you anyway."
"But you said–!" Incensed, Twyla stormed through the door, only to trail off sharply when she realized the white room she had just entered was far too large to fit inside the narrow police box. The Doctor beamed at her from behind the room's centerpiece–a white, hexagonal control console arrayed with multicolored buttons, switches, and blinking lights–his sharp eyes twinkling with amusement.
"I know. Bigger on the inside, eh?" he smirked, crouching down to face the blocky metal dog at his feet. "You were saying, K-9?"
"Scanners detect there've been two major, four minor time distortions in this immediate area since our arrival, Master," the little robot replied in a perky, mechanical voice.
"And the cause?"
"Apologies, Master. Insufficient data."
Twyla stared, her whole body trembling. "That's your dog!"
The Doctor glanced up. "Oh, I'm sorry. I've been terribly rude. K-9, this is Twyla. Twyla, K-9. You both know me, of course, so–"
"Stop it!" Twyla shrieked. "This isn't funny! What's going on here? What is all this!"
The Doctor winced. "What do you think, K-9?" he asked. "Should we tell her?"
"Difficult to say, Master."
"Oh?" The Doctor looked surprised. "Why's that?"
"We do not know what's going on here."
"Ah! Good point," the Doctor grinned. "But I believe young Twyla here can help us remedy that."
Twyla blinked. "Me?"
"That's right."
"But-but you've got all this… The talking tin dog, this whatever-it-is we're in… How could I possibly help?"
"That's simple enough," the Doctor said, striding up to her. "Apart from me, you're the only person who's noticed the time distortions. That implies you were near the epicenter when this whole mess began."
Twyla hesitated, struggling to absorb the strangeness of the situation.
"Come on," he urged with a coaxing smile, "what do you say? Will you help me get to the bottom of this mystery?"
"But…" Twyla's voice was barely a whisper. "But what if none of this is real? I mean, how do I know this isn't all in my head?"
The Doctor looked at her askance. "Aren't you a little young to be so skeptical?"
Without warning, Twyla burst into tears. Unsure how to react, the Doctor reached out a hand, only to grunt in surprise when the sobbing girl thrust herself into his arms, burying her face in his scarf. Turning a bewildered look on K-9, the Doctor gently stroked Twyla's frizzy, black hair, murmuring soothing sounds as he waited for her to calm down.
"I do believe you," she sniffed at last. "I want to help. I've been waiting so long for something to happen–something exciting, extraordinary. But now it has–I'm just so scared. I want things to be normal again."
"Well, that makes sense," the Doctor said.
Twyla looked up, her dark eyes blurry with tears. "It does?"
The Doctor sighed, but his expression was affectionate.
"Typical human," he commented. "So desperate for change, yet always yearning for the comfort of the familiar. It's the dullness of routine that does it, you know. That horrid sense of ennui you get when you allow events to dictate your life. It's quite a vicious cycle, really–most people simply give in. But there is a cure."
Twyla tilted her head. "What's that?"
"To take action, of course. Show some initiative! Or, to put it more plainly: Think!"
"But how does that help?" Twyla frowned. "I mean, I can't just stop going to school, and lately that's been nothing but routine."
"Ah. But have you been contributing? Speaking up in class, exploring your own interests, that sort of thing? Or," he said with a knowing wink, "have you simply been doing the work assigned in hopes of getting it over with as quickly as possible?"
Twyla didn't answer. The Doctor smirked. "Well, there you are then," he said. "Take it from a chap who's been there. You can't live your life waiting for adventure to jump up and bite you on the nose. You're bound to be frustrated–current situation excepted, of course."
Twyla chuckled at that. Taking in a deep breath, she straightened her shoulders, her dark eyes sharp.
"Right, then," she said. "You want us to think, so let's think. How can we stop these time distortions?"
The Doctor smiled broadly. "First, we track down the source," he said. "K-9!"
"Master?"
"K-9, I want you to extrapolate–"
"Unnecessary, Master," the dog interrupted. "A new time distortion is currently forming outside the ship."
"He's right," Twyla cried, pointing to the viewscreen on the wall. "Look at the Time Ball! It's gone mad!"
The Doctor's eyebrows shot up. "Poor old thing's going up and down like a yo-yo!" He frowned. "So…it's not just backwards, but forwards as well. This is bad. Very, very bad... Twyla, where were you when you first noticed time was acting strangely?"
"In the courtyard," she said. "By the fence."
"Then we'll start the scan there," the Doctor said, snatching what Twyla assumed was a scanner from the console. "K-9, stay here. Twyla, we have an anomaly to trace!"
–O–
"I don't understand it," the Doctor scowled, running a hand through his mop of tousled curls. "We've traced three distortions in the past hour, yet we're no closer to finding the source. Clearly we're missing something…but what?"
With a sigh, the Time Lord absently pulled a bag of candy from his pocket and popped a green one in his mouth. Glancing over to Twyla, he offered, "Jelly baby?" (1)
Twyla shook her head. "No thanks. But what about that strange wind?" she asked, leaning against the TARDIS's side.
"Hmm? What strange wind?"
"Just before you came, there was this wind. And a noise–a weird wheezing, whirring sound. Could that have something to do with the distortions?"
"No," The Doctor said distractedly, munching another two jelly babies before shoving the paper bag back in his pocket. "That was the TARDIS materializing."
"Well, maybe that's it."
"What's it?"
"The TARDIS!"
The Doctor frowned. "Impossible."
"Why?" Twyla retorted. "We searched everywhere else–the whole Observatory! All that's left is your TARDIS."
"Ridiculous. Nothing can get inside my ship. And even if something did, K-9 or the TARDIS sensors would pick it up."
"Then maybe it's not inside. You told me while we were searching that the TARDIS travels in space and time, yeah?"
"Yes. But I don't see–"
"So," Twyla interrupted, "maybe the thing we're looking for is outside the ship–like a…a space barnacle or something."
The Doctor looked like he was about to protest, but then his eyes widened and he covered his mouth with his hand. "Outside the… Of course! That would explain everything. Twyla, stay here. Don't move."
"Doctor!"
But he had already vanished inside the TARDIS. Twyla started to follow, but froze when the police box began to waver, like a heat mirage. When it solidified again, Twyla found she could finally see the thing that had caused them so much trouble.
It was beautiful, a delicate, ethereal creature. Stepping closer, Twyla saw it was divided into segments, like the petals of a flower–each translucent frond glowing with a pulsing iridescence.
"Lovely, isn't it," the Doctor whispered, coming up behind her. "I always thought they were legendary–mythical energy beings that float through the space-time vortex like jellyfish in the sea, existing slightly out of phase with normal time. That's why I couldn't detect it–the phase differential acts as a shield."
Twyla smiled. "So, this was causing the anomalies?"
"Not intentionally," the Doctor said, carefully sliding a complicated-looking glass jar over the creature and affixing it to the side of the TARDIS with his sonic screwdriver. "This should contain its temporal emissions for now, but I'll need to release it back into the vortex right away."
"So that means you'll be going, then."
The Doctor nodded. "You're a clever girl, Twyla," he told her. "If not for you, I doubt I'd have discovered this time parasite until it was too late. I shudder to think what could have happened if it had gotten loose in this dimension. And it would have been my fault."
Twyla shrugged. "I was just doing like you said. You know, showing initiative…"
"Well, keep it up," he grinned, crushing her in a quick embrace before striding through the TARDIS door. "Bye-bye, Twyla!"
With that, he was gone. Yet, as she watched the TARDIS fade away, Twyla made herself a promise. She wasn't going to waste her life waiting for change. Instead, she'd face the future with time as her ally, making things happen on her own terms.
The End
Well, I know the judges rejected this, but I'd really like to know: what did you think of my story?
(1) This story now includes several edits that would have put it over the contest word limit had I included them initially. The bit with the jelly babies was kindly suggested by Cute Gallifreyan.