Prologue

"Hang on! Start over. Slower this time." Roland tried to calm Jenny down by gripping her shoulders. He had just got back from a trip to his parents' house to find Jenny panicking in the laboratory. "You saw a what in the vortex?"
Jenny shrugged Roland's hands away and bounced in place as she excitedly told her tale. "There was a paradox! It made the vortex look like storm clouds, and the module detected it too. The readings rotated and looked like bubbles instead of squiggly lines."
"Like bubbles?" Roland repeated. Jenny nodded in reply, biting her lip. "That is odd. So you want to investigate?"
Jenny nodded again. "The last time I saw bubbles like that was after we were separated in the vortex. There was an alien hand in a weird jar of fluid and it bubbled when I was near. Now, the vortex certainly wasn't reacting to me. It never has before. So what if it was detecting my dad? He is the only other one like me-"
"Jenny!" Roland interrupted. "You're rambling again. Please, just calm down, grab a jacket, and we'll go see for ourselves, okay?"
She grinned and wrapped her arms around his neck in a tight squeeze, forcing him to bend over a bit to match her height. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" she squealed as she ran off to borrow clothes from Roland's closet.
When Jenny returned she was wearing one of Roland's white button-up shirts with a black denim jacket. They had an over-sized appearance on her which contrasted nicely with her usual leather pants and black lace-up boots. "Note to self," Roland thought. "Take Jenny clothes shopping sometime."
Inside the shuttle, Jenny squeezed past Roland and hopped into the large captain's chair. The cockpit took up more space than the back of the ship did, leaving little room for Roland. The large red round things lining the walls didn't help much either.
Fortunately, it usually didn't take long for them to reach their destination and Roland was able to hop out first. This time they had landed in a marketplace. Roland didn't know where or when exactly, but he guessed they were still in Europe, some time very long ago.
Foods of a large variety filled baskets all around them, and hundreds of tapestries were hung out for everyone to see. Roland saw a flower stand and grabbed Jenny's hand, pulling her towards it. "I've never seen so many flowers in one place," he said. "Look at this!"
Jenny smiled as she examined the flowers, but Roland could tell her mind was somewhere else. "What are you thinking, Jenny?"
She looked up, as if waking from a dream. "Hmm?" She shrugged. "Oh, I was just thinking about that paradox. I thought the vortex would take us to the source if we traveled through it, but evidently not. Did you see it? It looked as normal as ever."
Roland frowned and studied Jenny's expression. "I know what's wrong here. You're dadsick." He wrapped an arm around her shoulder and said, "You know what? I think we should go back to the Gatehouse and keep trying new locations until we find him. What do you think?"
"I'd like that," Jenny agreed, and they walked back to the shuttle.

Chapter One

"Clearly we're not making any progress on Earth," Jenny said, matter-of-factly. "We should try somewhere else." It had been five hours and sixteen locations since Roland promised they would look for her father, and they hadn't found anything that implied the Doctor even existed at all. "His friend Donna said he travels the universe. Is there any way the IRCM can be programmed to go to other worlds?"
Roland blinked and stuttered. He had no clue, but he couldn't just tell Jenny that. "Let me see. This might take a while," he said instead. He looked at the module and examined every inch. Usually, when they were just traveling to Earth, he simply used arrow keys and a number pad to enter Earth coordinates. "What would happen if I entered universal coordinates?" he wondered.
He decided that it was worth a try and entered coordinates for the first place that came to mind. There had been a mysterious incident surrounding this place about a millennia ago, and if he knew Jenny, it was just the sort of place she or her father might go. He set the coordinates to the approximate time the historians estimated the incident to have occurred and pressed the activation button. The time window showed the swirling vortex on the other side, and there seemed to be a light at the end.
"Is it working?" Jenny asked hopefully. It almost wasn't a question.
"It appears to be. The module isn't showing anything out of place."
Jenny stepped forward to get a better view of the vortex and glanced back at Roland. "Where are we going, then? Random coordinates or a specific planet?"
"A specific planet. It was the last location I studied in my universal history course in college. Evidently there was a big event back in the 51st century. Sounded like the sort of thing your father might be involved in, so I thought we should check it out."
Jenny grinned and stepped into the shuttle. "You're not going to tell me what it's called?"
Roland climbed in after her and buckled himself in. He didn't normally, but Jenny was getting so impatient that her piloting was reckless at best. "Where would be the fun in that?" he asked. "I thought you loved mysteries."
The shuttle started up and Jenny grinned. Despite her impatience she managed to keep a positive outlook on the situation. She did love mysteries, she admitted to herself, and the longer it took to reach a conclusion, the more satisfying that conclusion was. Surely the quest to find her father would be just the same.
Emerging from the vortex, Jenny saw that they were in a large room with marble columns and walls lined with books. There were so many books, in fact, that some had been stacked on tables or even the floor. It was daytime in this enormous library, and light flooded in through a round window on the ceiling above them.
As they stepped out Jenny heard voices in the distance. It sounded like a crowd exiting the building, and after walking ahead to see the source of the noise, she saw that people were leaving in teleports. Was it closing time already?
"Why is everyone leaving so early?" Jenny wondered aloud.
Roland shrugged and turned to look around the room. "If I remember correctly, everyone in the library vanished a century ago, and then they reappeared today. If I went through something like that, I'd want out of here fast."
Jenny frowned in thought and followed Roland into another part of the library. "Why do you suppose they disappeared?"
"No clue," Roland admitted. "If we find your dad maybe we can ask him."
Just then Roland heard voices come from above them. To their right was a staircase leading to a higher level. His eyes traced the banister until he saw two figures on the level overhead; a man and a woman. The man looked strangely familiar, even though he could've sworn he'd never seen him before. He nudged Jenny in the arm and pointed.
"That's him!" Jenny said. She bolted up the stairs after him, but when she reached the top the man and woman had already walked away. She peered around the corner, but no one was in sight. Her eyes darted to the banister in front of where they had stood and she saw that there was a blue book with a strange device sitting on top of it. Stepping forward, she recognized the device as similar to the one her father had used on Messaline.
She picked it up just as Roland reached her side and she rolled it over in her hands. It was a 7-inch grey and copper tube with a black base. On one end was a bulb and a thin, clear pipe was attached to the side of the device by a copper ring. "Roland, do you know what this device is?" she asked.
Roland held out his hand and Jenny gave it to him. Pointing it away from both of them, Roland pressed a button on the side and the small bulb on the end lit up blue. Nothing else happened. "I'm not sure," he replied, "But it's sonic, whatever it is."
Roland looked over at Jenny, who had picked up the blue book and started reading it. The book was worn and the pages had yellowed. Rather than the fine print that was more common in the 51st century, Roland observed that the book had been hand-written and illustrated. It was a journal of some sort. As Jenny read on, her eyes grew wider and Roland couldn't help but ask what the book said.
"It's a diary, by a woman named River. Listen to this: 'It all began in the autumn of 2011, back when I lived in Leadworth and everyone called me 'Mels'. I stole a car and followed my parents, Amy and Rory to a cornfield just out of town. The Doctor had landed his TARDIS there. I knew he had and I wanted to meet him. Needed to meet him, more like.'"
Roland peered over Jenny's shoulder at the page as she continued reading. "'The police were hot on my tail by the time I caught up with them, so I had no choice. I pulled a gun on the Doctor and said I wanted to go see Hitler. The TARDIS is a time machine, after all, so why not?'" Jenny looked up at Roland. "Who's Hitler?"
"An ancient warlord. Very, very bad man. Killed lots of people."
Jenny frowned and looked back at the page. "Is this 'TARDIS' the ship you talked about?"
Roland nodded. "You should've seen it. It was bigger on the inside! A blue box with whole rooms in it." He stopped talking when he saw that Jenny's eyes were slowly tearing up. "Hey," he whispered. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and directed her towards the shuttle. "We'll find him, you know. This diary might even help. What do you say we keep it for a while? This is a library, after all, and you're supposed to borrow books from here."
Jenny smiled slightly at Roland's somewhat ridiculous attempt to cheer her up and wiped her eyes. Roland handed her the sonic device and she placed it in the inside pocket of the jacket she had borrowed from Roland. When they reached the shuttle, she climbed inside, with the diary still clutched in her right hand. "Let's go back to the Gatehouse," she suggested. "We can get a better look at the diary once we're there."