Chapter 6
The second Doctor picked himself up out of the undergrowth and smoothed down his black coat. He looked up at the portal, and then around the clearing.
"So where have I ended up then?" He asked, as a floppy brown hat dropped on his head. "What the?..."
He moved out of the way as long, woollen scarf started to coil itself into a conical pyramid before a man fell out of the portal and landed on it. "Hah! Excellent. If you're thinking of falling any distance, always make sure you're wearing a long scarf."
The man with a mop of curly hair wore a grey coat, impossibly long scarf, and an enormous smile. He stood up and looked at the second Doctor with his large round, friendly eyes. "Oh, it's you… Mmm, something odd going on here if we are coexisting in the same time line."
"Coexisting? Does that mean that you're a future me?" Two asked.
"Yes," the fourth Doctor said distractedly. "This is my fourth body… Where am I? The last thing I remember is Sarah Jane and myself having a glass of wine with this affable fellow called Solon."
"Oh dear. I haven't turned into a lush in my fourth body have I?" Two asked him with a frown.
"What? No, of course not. I suspect that it may have been a vintage Chateau Mickey Finn. Sarah Jane's probably in danger, I need to get back."
"Yes, and I need to continue my transmat journey to the Moon."
"Who are you travelling with at the moment?" Four asked him.
"Zoe and Jamie," Two replied.
"Ah, right. So, is that the Ice Warrior incident in the late twenty first century?"
"Yes, that's the one. I need to destroy the homing device that is leading the invasion fleet to the moon."
As they were talking, they heard a voice coming from above them.
"Look out Peri, incoming Doctor." A man with fair, curly hair, dressed as a clown, dropped into the undergrowth and pitched forward onto his hands and knees. He stood up and brushed the leaf litter off his yellow trousers, before rubbing his hands together.
"Peri? Did you get teleported to the wrong place as well? I think the twins calculations that I applied to the revitalising modulator may have been off a bit."
Two and Four looked at each other with expressions of amused disbelief, before looking back at the man wearing a red, patchwork coat.
"Oh dear, don't tell me that's one of my future incarnations," Two said.
"If it is, then he's in my future too. And if he is, it looks like he fell out of the fashion tree and missed all the good taste branches on the way down," Four said with a grin.
Two looked him up and down. "Whereas you only hit a couple I suppose."
"What? Oh, the scarf. That's not a fashion accessory, it's an essential survival tool. Douglas Adams was nearly right when he said it was a towel. What he meant to say was a scarf."
"A towel?" Two said with a frown.
"Oh, that's right you haven't read the 'Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy' yet. A long scarf is just about the most massively useful thing any interstellar traveller can wear. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the frozen landscape of Woman Wept." He put his arm around Two's shoulders and looked off into the distance, spreading his arm in front of him to emphasise the vista he was imagining. "You can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Extans Superior, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep wrapped in it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Shokesh; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of Oswald's Hypnotic Eye; you can wave your scarf in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course you can dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. Oh, and you can use it to break a fall out of a swirling vortex."
The fair haired man with bad fashion sense, heard them talking and turned around. "Oh, hello. Have you seen a young, American w…"
He stopped in mid sentence and frowned at the two Doctors. "It's you, isn't it? The pair of you."
"Yes, I'm me," Two said helpfully.
"And I'm me as well," Four said. "Oh, and I was him… once."
"Yes, I know. I remember. Still wearing the long scarf then I see. And have you still got the recorder?" The Sixth Doctor said.
Two sheepishly reached into his coat pocket, took out his descant recorder, and gave it a toot.
"Hmm, thought so. Right then, do either of you know where we are or how we got here?"
"Er, no. We'd only just got over the introductions when you dropped in," Two said.
"Introductions?" Six said with a puzzled expression. They were the Doctor, wasn't that obvious?
"Yes. It's always polite to make the introductions. I mean, we know who we are, but which version," Four said. "He's in my second body, I'm in my fourth…" He raised his hat in greeting. "And you are?"
Six rolled his eyes impatiently. "I'm in my sixth body. Now I need to find a way to get back to Peri."
"Going to miss the matinee performance are you?" Two asked.
"What?" Six said with a frown.
"Well, wearing that coat, I thought you were in the Lloyd-Webber production of 'Joseph'," Two said with a mischievous grin.
"No, I have to stop Azmael from making a big mistake." He thought about how his old tutor had just tried to blow him up in a sealed room. "Well, a bigger mistake at least."
"Azmael, the Prydonian Academy tutor?" Two asked. "How is the old devil?"
"He's in big trouble, and I need to help him."
"Right, it sounds like we all need to be back where we came from," Four said, looking around at the forest. "Oak, Ash, Couch Grass, Buttercups."
Two tilted his head to one side. "Blackbird, Crow… We're on Earth, Great Britain I'd venture."
Six sniffed the air. "Hints of wood smoke on the air. Pre-industrial I would guess as I can't discern any petrochemicals, and I don't see any aircraft contrails."
Of course! Air analysis would give them a good indication of the era. All three reached into their coat pockets and produced their sonic screwdrivers.
They wandered around the clearing, scanning the air, the ground, and the vegetation.
"Over here, quickly," Two called out.
"What have you found?" Four asked as they approached him.
"This undergrowth is just springing back from being disturbed and trampled."
"Hmm. A couple of possibilities come to mind," Six mused. "Someone came here with their equipment, opened the Time Fissure and then left, or this is the other end of the Time Fissure, and someone has travelled through it before us."
"Either way, that person may have a better idea of what's going on than we do," Four said.
"So, are we agreed that we should follow whoever it is who has come through here?" Two asked.
Four and Six looked at each other, nodded, and looked back at Two. "Agreed," they said together and set off in the direction of the Tower of London.
"We really need to get out of here," Nine told them nervously.
"But where do we go? We're in the middle of nowhere," Three said.
"How did you get here before?" Seven asked Nine.
"I told you, I don't remember. TARDIS I think, but I haven't a clue where I parked it. I do remember a long walk though."
No more. He heard the echo of a memory from that awful day.
"Then it would seem our only option is to go back through the Time Fissure and see where we end up," Seven said.
"But that could be anywhere, anywhen," Three said.
"Well, that's gotta be better than sitting on top of a machine that can obliterate all the seventeen suns of the Kasterborous constellation," Nine said. "Come on, link arms and we'll jump up into the fissure."
Seven looked between them as they had linked arms. "Just click your heels together three times, and we'll be off to see the wizard."
"Yes, very amusing," Three said sarcastically. "Let's just go."
"One, two, three," they said together, bent their knees, and jumped into the vortex.
"I hate travelling through a vortex without a capsule," Nine said as they slowly rotated.
"Something green approaching," Seven alerted them.
"Return your seats to the upright position and fasten your seatbelts," Nine joked.
"Brace for impact," Three said before they dropped out of the vortex.
Thud, thud, thud. Two pairs of shoes and a pair of boots landed in the grassy undergrowth of a clearing in a forest.
"Now that's more like it," Nine said. "Much better than that dusty old barn. And not a weapon of mass destruction in sight."
"Yes, but why are we in the middle of a forest?" Three asked. "I can understand being in the barn with the Moment, but here…"
Seven looked up at the portal. "Well, maybe whoever created this wanted it to be hidden from prying eyes."
"Hmm, good point," Nine said. He walked across the clearing and crouched down. "It looks like there's been a fair bit of foot traffic through here recently."
"So it looks like the party's that way," Seven said, walking past them and following in the footsteps of those who had gone before. In fact, they were following in the footsteps of three people who were just ahead of them through the trees.
"Y'know, I'm sure I can hear someone behind us," Eight said to the Doctors ahead of him.
One turned to face him, leaning on his improvised staff that he'd fashioned from the straightest branch he could find in the undergrowth. "Really? Hmm… Maybe it would be prudent to get off the path and let them pass."
"What about that large oak up ahead?" Five suggested.
"Good idea. Come on, their should be enough cover for us to move around the tree as they go past," Eight said as he moved forwards.
They stood with their backs to the huge old oak tree, and listened to the approaching group of travellers.
"Y'know, it's difficult to talk to people about things you've experienced when they already know what you're going to say," a man with a northern accent said.
"Yes. And of course, you two can't tell me about things I haven't done yet," a rather cultured voice said. The three Doctors behind the tree frowned at each other as they listened to the approaching conversation.
"Not without the risk of causing a paradox," a man with a slight lisp said. "It's bad enough that the three of us are existing in the same time line."
One and Five were alarmed when Eight stepped from behind the tree and confronted the travellers.
"And with six of us, its got even worse. I knew I recognised two of those voices," Eight said, standing on the track in front of them with his fists on his hips.
"And who might you be?" A man with curly, grey hair and the cultured voice asked.
"That's your eighth incarnation," The northern man in black said, and then realised that none of them would know him. "I'm your ninth incarnation by the way."
"Oh, and your fifth," the man with the lisp said, as the fifth Doctor came from behind the tree.
"And the original," One chuckled as he emerged from his hiding place. "The one, but not the only."
"So what's going on then, does anyone know why we are here?" Five asked. "Wherever here is."
"Not a clue," Nine said. "I take it you came through the Time Fissure as well."
"Yes, yes. And I assume you were in some sort of teleportation process when you were hijacked," One said.
"Yes, that's right. We ended up on Gallifrey," Three told them. "Where did you end up?"
"Not sure," Eight replied. "Late twentieth, early twenty first century Earth. In an art gallery that had holographic paintings."
"Really? That's interesting. Maybe it was some sort of covert store of alien artefacts," Seven ventured.
"Yes, my boy. Yes, that's not a bad theory," One said. "But all this chit-chat isn't getting us any nearer to finding out why we are in the middle of a forest."
"We were following the yellow brick road to find the wizard," Seven quipped.
"The wonderful wizard of the Time Fissure," Eight said. "Doesn't quite have the same ring to it as Oz, does it."
"Well, in the absence of any other plan, I suggest we continue onward and see what we find," Three advised.
The group looked around at each other with shrugs and nods, and agreed to press on. They chatted about their previous lives, always having to be cautious about what they could give away without causing a paradox.
The first Doctor was at a particular disadvantage, as everyone else was from his future. He started to do some simple maths. "So, if you're my ninth body," he said to Nine. "Then we seem to be missing numbers two, four and six," he calculated.
"I wonder if they are the people we were originally following?" Five said.
"Possibly," Three said. "I think we'll be finding out soon. There's a castle over there in the distance."
"That looks like it might be our destination then," Seven said, and they set off with renewed vigour.