The Legend of Gallifrey Part Eleven: Power of the Paradox
Everything was normal, until the TARDIS exploded, and unfortunately, the Doctor was inside it when it did.
It was as if the TARDIS was having an allergic reaction. One moment, it was fine, travelling through the Vortex just like normal, but then the console exploded in the Doctor's face, and the TARDIS began to spiral out of the Vortex. A moment later, it exploded.
The Doctor woke up in a field of green grass with a black sky above him. He sat up, taking a look around, noticing a city in the distance, and a parked spaceship just outside the city. He stood up and began the long walk towards the city.
A minute later, a huge puff of smoke erupted from the city, accompanied by a burst of flames, and a moment after that the explosion reached the Doctor's ears, as well as a large amount of screaming. The Doctor began to run towards the city, with his coat trailing behind him. He sprinted for five straight minutes, until he arrived at the scene.
It was a tall silver building with curvy edges, and the explosion had taken a huge chunk out of the top of it. People were running around everywhere, screaming and waving their arms wildly. Chunks of rubble fell all across the road, narrowly missing many people and causing others to be buried and to disappear under and behind pieces.
The Doctor ran around the rubble, searching for what had caused the explosion. He couldn't see anything, but the sonic detected trace amounts of chronon energy, the type that usually stemmed from temporal knots or loops. It was also the type that attracted TARDISes. So that was what had drawn the TARDIS in to wherever he was, but what had destroyed it?
A ship flew in from above and began to spray the fire with a green substance, and the fire began to go out. A whole bunch of large black creatures ran out and began herding the citizens away from the wreckage and towards their houses. The Doctor knew what the creatures were instantly.
Nimons.
They were minotaur-like creatures that fed on energy. With the chronon particles all around this area, it was no wonder they were here. Their technology obviously wasn't sufficient to contain whatever energy they were trying to harness, probably for food. If they weren't careful, this entire place was likely to blow.
The Doctor took another look at the black sky. There weren't even any stars to show where they were, just faint grey clouds, but now that the Doctor was paying attention he knew exactly what that meant. He was in a pocket dimension. Combine that with the chronon energy, he had an explanation for why the TARDIS had exploded. The chronon energy being compressed into a pocket dimension had not only caused the TARDIS to be drawn in, but it had also overloaded the Eye of Harmony. If the Doctor could find a way out of this dimension, the TARDIS should re-form around his temporal signature.
'Should' wasn't perfect, but it was better than nothing. Right now, the Doctor had to get the Nimons to stop harvesting chronon energy from wherever it was they were getting it. If something went wrong, which it definitely was, then this dimension would be filled to the brim with dangerous levels of chronon energy, and when it burst the rest of the universe would be sucked in too.
The Doctor spotted one group of Nimons escorting some civilians away from the wreckage. He ran to catch up with them.
"Hey!" he yelled. "Wait up!"
The Nimon looked back at him, and spoke in a deep, echoing voice. "All civilians and workers are to be evacuated from this area. Come with me."
"Oh, no, I'm not a civilian," the Doctor said. "I need to see what you are harvesting, the chronon energy."
"All civilians are to evacuate the area," the Nimon said.
"I'm not a civilian!" the Doctor said. "I'm the Doctor! I believe you've met me before?"
The Nimon looked at him for a moment, then grabbed his shoulder and pushed the civilian it was escorting towards another evacuation group. Then it began to lead him roughly away from the destruction area and towards another building on the other side of the makeshift city.
The building was the tallest one in the area, and the Nimon lead the Doctor all the way to the top, without saying a single word the whole time. The whole way there, the Doctor kept noticing rubble and burnt marks on the buildings. The Nimons had been having trouble containing whatever it was already.
The room was big, with control panels and screens everywhere. The Nimons seemed to be watching over the entire makeshift town; the screens showed scenes of Nimons escorting civilians away from the explosion. Several other Nimons stood around the control room attending to their control panels, but they all looked up when the elevator opened.
The Nimon walked the Doctor out into the room, then spoke to its brethren.
"This man claims to be the Doctor, the same one who has foiled our plans before. This needs to be proven."
One of the Nimons pressed a button, and on one of the screens an x-ray of the Doctor's body appeared, showing two hearts and a 3-D model of his DNA off to the side.
"It is confirmed," the Nimon said. "This is the Doctor, after we met him last."
The Nimon that had led the Doctor here bowed. "It is good to meet you, Doctor. For once, we are not your enemies," it said. "Some here have met your past selves and may be a little distrustful of you, but they will follow their orders. We believe we have found a source of energy that will give us no need to continue our usual routine. That power is the paradox."
The paradox again. After all this time and the Doctor still didn't know a thing about it, and it was beginning to annoy him. Would he ever know?
"How are you harnessing this power?" the Doctor asked. "Whatever you're doing is obviously not working, and putting the lives of the civilians in danger. Speaking of which, why are there civilians in a pocket dimension."
"Your second question is easier to explain. We have hired workers from various species to assist us in setting up our unlimited supply of energy, and nearly every one of them brought their family, so we had to build a city for them to live in. As for your first question, that one is a little difficult to explain."
"Try me."
"We… took it from the Time Lords. This pocket dimension was once a TARDIS interior, but the TARDIS crashed nearby our world and gave us a safe area to attempt to harness the paradox."
"That isn't very difficult to explain."
"We assumed you'd think we stole it straight from Gallifrey. We aren't exactly trustworthy, to be entirely honest."
The Doctor nodded. "But whatever systems that held the paradox in place seem to be broken, and this TARDIS isn't capable of complete self-repair. That would make it somewhere between a type-25 and type-50. So I know the basic layout, I can find the systems and repair them, if I can get to the correct area."
The Nimon nodded. "Thank you, Doctor. We have not been… kind to you in the past. We appreciate what you are willing to do for us."
A group of Nimons, along with the one who he'd been talking to (called Morta), escorted him to a particular building in the centre of the city. The outside doors were blue, with two white windows and a sign above them that read "Police Public Call Box." This sight caused the Doctor to freeze in his tracks.
"This TARDIS," he said. "What did it look like?"
Morta stopped for a minute, trying to remember. "The chameleon circuit was badly damaged, leaving the exterior to shift its shape constantly, but I do remember it taking a particular liking to the shape of this door. Is it important?"
The TARDIS that had crashed near the Nimons had been a type-40, which was within the 25-50 range the Doctor had predicted, and it took a liking to the shape of a police telephone box, which made sense when you consider that it had spent centuries in that shape. You get used to a shape when you've had it for that long.
The Doctor was in his own TARDIS.
On the one hand, he knew for a fact now that he could fix the right circuit. On the other hand, that meant that his TARDIS was, at some point in the future, going to be so badly damaged that it would not only lose its shape, but it would completely delete the interior, leaving a city and grassland. It was even teeming with chronon energy from the paradox.
The Doctor decided to worry about that later. For right now, his main concern was containing the paradox energy inside its circuits, so he opened the door and stepped through, into a control room he hardly recognized.
It was similar to when he'd first got it, with the white walls and round things covering the interior, but it was a lot more spacious and energetic. The doors were the TARDIS exterior, the police box, but on the inside they were white. They connected to an area of floor that stretched around the outside of the wall, with a low ceiling, and from the door a pathway went up to the console platform, which was suspended in the middle of the room with stairs leading down beneath it to more rooms, and a section of ceiling that was raised above the rest. The console was very old-style, with the six sides, but the central column went all the way up and into the ceiling, even though it was designed like the default TARDIS column. The whole area was an amazing variation on the original TARDIS interior with an awesome spin on it.
The Doctor walked up to the console and checked the monitor, which was built into the console. It had a crack in it, even though the rest of the TARDIS seemed as good as new, but it still managed to read: EXTERIOR CONNECTION DISABLED. DAMAGE LEVEL: HIGH.
He gripped one part of the console and lifted it off its stand and put it on the floor carefully, then he pulled out some wires and began to cross-connect them. Several Nimons walked in, including Morta, and looked around. They'd obviously never been in here before, but they knew better than to press any buttons without knowing what they did.
One of the wires sparked in the Doctor's hand, and he pulled it away, holding it up to his face to look at the burn mark. A small wave of golden energy rippled across his hand and the burn mark vanished, and the Doctor looked at it in disbelief. This confirmed his theory; the TARDIS had a sub-routine that utilized stored regeneration energy to heal small injuries, like cuts or burns. It had a considerable amount, too much for a Time Lord to absorb, but it could release it in small doses to heal the aforementioned small injuries. It was a program that the Doctor had installed in his TARDIS with the help of several other Time Lords.
This was, without a doubt, his TARDIS, but the systems had had several upgrades. This was the TARDIS at some point in the Doctor's future, but how did it get here, and what had caused it so much destruction? And since it had been coated with so much chronon energy, what did it have to do with the paradox?
The Doctor went back to work on the systems, trying to repair the damage enough so the Nimons could siphon the energy without any more explosions, but that could only be a temporary solution. They were going to have to leave this dimension and the Doctor was going to have to examine this place to find out what had happened. Maybe the TARDIS memory banks could tell him a spoiler-free version.
The Doctor gestured for Morta to come over to him while he worked.
"Once this is fixed, and there won't be any more explosions, we're going to have to work something out," he said.
"What is there to work out?" Morta asked. "You have agreed to assist us in acquiring a food source, and we have the facilities to store it and use it to our will."
"This place, this dimension, it can't stay where it is, It's not just a TARDIS, it's my TARDIS, from the future, and I need everyone out and off it so I can fully repair it and find out what happened."
"And what would happen to our city?"
"I can try to find a way to attach it to the main one, so you lot can go in and out at will."
Morta looked confused.
"Okay, imagine a soap bubble, with a smaller bubble on the side," the Doctor said. "What I'm proposing to do is to pop the bit that separates the two bubbles, and the two dimensions become one."
Morta nodded slowly. "That sounds like it could work, Doctor. And since the energy is connected to this dimension, we would still have the connection?"
The Doctor nodded.
"Thank you, Doctor. The Nimons appreciate your help."
"You lot are a lot nicer than the usual Nimons I meet. What happened?"
"The Time War," Morta said. "While other races like the Voord became more warlike, the Nimons saw for the first time the slaughter on a scale that rivaled their own, and we sought a peaceful way to acquire our food. We found it in the paradox."
The wires sparked and the lights brightened for a moment, then the Doctor replaced the wires and the console segment.
"That should do it," he said. "Now we need to pop the figurative bubble. Everyone who is going to the Nimon world needs to be outside when I do what I'm going to do. That means all of you."
Morta pointed towards the door and everyone filed out, leaving the Doctor in the control room of his future TARDIS. He typed something into the console, in an attempt to carve the dimension in half and separate TARDIS interior from the city, but the already-damaged TARDIS began to spark, and a red flashing light appeared and began to blink wildly.
The Doctor tapped the light and pressed a series of buttons. The sparks stopped, but the light continued blinking and a WARNING: EXCEEDING POWER LEVELS message appeared on the monitor. This TARDIS was a total wreck and the Eye of Harmony was likely dying out, but there was a failsafe that would briefly reset the time loop and give the TARDIS a moment of infinite power. The only problem was, it would leave the TARDIS dead in space without even life support.
The Doctor twisted a dial, and the lights began to get brighter. Then he pulled a lever, and the whole dimension rumbled. The Doctor almost lost his balance, but he grabbed the console to steady himself. He could feel the whole dimension crack under his feet as the TARDIS interior separated from the Nimon architecture. Slowly but surely, the Nimon city began to merge with the main universe, and the TARDIS interior stayed behind.
With a rumble, the city finished merging with the universe. Now the Doctor's work of connecting to the exterior began.
Suddenly, the lights went out, and everything on the console turned off. The TARDIS ran out of power, and the Doctor stood there in the dead version of his own TARDIS. A poof echoed from the door to the rest of the TARDIS. There was just the console room now.
The Doctor flipped a switch back and forth frantically, trying to restart the TARDIS. There had to be a way to bring the TARDIS back to life before even the console room was gone. A Time Lord could never watch their TARDIS die if they even thought there was something they could do, so the Doctor tried absolutely everything to try to save it.
He noticed a thick darkness gathering in the corners of the room. The TARDIS was slowly dying, and now even the console room was being eaten up. The Doctor had to get out of here, but the only way out was the front door, and that wasn't connected to any specific spot. He could come out anywhere.
With the amount of chronon energy attached to this TARDIS, the Doctor was likely to end up right in the center of the paradox, and he wasn't sure he was ready for that yet.
On the other hand, the darkness was getting closer, so his choices were: die here, or end up Rassilon-knows-where with no means of escape.
He opened the door, and a gust of wind knocked him forward towards a blue star just outside the door. He grabbed for anything to hold on to, but whatever it was he grabbed wasn't secured, and he and it tumbled towards the star.
A moment later, he woke up in the TARDIS, his TARDIS, not the one that had been consumed. It must have reconstituted itself around him when he left the other one, but now he and it were inside the paradox. He could feel it.
He took a step towards the door and lifted his hand towards the handle, then he realized what it was he'd pulled from that future TARDIS.
It was a pair of goggles.