Leena helped the Doctor to his feet.

"Tremors are getting worse," she said as they ambled through the rocky catacombs.

Ahead and behind them lay miles of decades old tunneling made by the Algar, or, as the Traxians called it, 'The Trembling Beast.' Its home was a sun-warm orb that lay in a pit near their planet's crust. Beast it was, it never ate anyone or anything, but by simply passing through in the cramped quarters, its natural body heat could burn someone alive.

"Beast that never existed, living out its days beneath the planet like it's been here all along," the Doctor said, swaggering and stumbling amidst the tremors.

Leena stumbled with him. "But how do you know it never existed? I mean, it is here."

The Doctor stopped and stroked his big vest. "Leena, you see possibility. I see time. Its wisps, creaks, tenors and tears. Plus, you know, I have a time machine. But, without even seeing the future of Traxus, I would already know the Algar never should have been here. Never was."

Large quake.

"Well it is now!" Leena said, grabbing the walls. The corridor behind them began to glow liquid orange.

The sound of a thousand scuttling claws came at the duo from around the corner. An endless fleece of tiny, metallic insects swarmed over the Doctor and Leena, lifting the silver fragment from the Gorl's pocket. The humanoid pair shook and flailed and shuddered as the swarm sank to the floor and formed up into the shape of the former Doctor in the duster.

"You two are so slow," it said and threw the fragment down the corridor toward the oncoming heat. The tremors instantly worsened, bouncing all three of them between the walls, the copycat Doctor melding and meshing to absorb the blows.

A web began to grow around the fragment, crawling up the rocks, forming a faint seal across the passageway. A purple glyph appeared in front of it, an airy hallucination hovering between the oncoming Algar and the Traxian, Gorl, and Time Lord.

"That should do it," the Traxian said, looking pleased with itself.

The beast kept coming.

"That should do it," Leena said, her spines standing on edge. She rolled her three eyes. "You're like him."

"I am him," it said, still pleased.

The ginger doctor picked up a rock and threw it at the web. The rock disappeared. "You are not me."

"What is that thing?" Leena asked, walking between the simulacra. She stuck her finger out.

"Don't touch it," the two others said in unison. Red glared.

His copy went on looking pleased. "I saved you."

"If you're me, that means I saved us," Red said, pulling Leena's hand away.

"I saved both of you," it said, pointing at them.

Red pulled his copy's hand down, too. "You know how it's obvious that you're not me? I've saved lots of people."

Leena said nodded toward her companion. "He gets over it faster." She removed Red's hands from both of theirs.

The beast turned the corner, ran straight at them, hit the glyph, and vanished.

"Same question," she said. "What is this purple thing?"

Red scanned it with his sonic screwdriver (also red). "It's a gateway. A doorway."

The copycat dug in his pockets.

Red smiled at him and waved the screwdriver around. "Can't copy this."

Leena looked the web up-and-down. "I see two doorways here. I mean, this one gate has the potential to be another, a different kind, I assume."

The copy picked up another rock and tossed it through. "Gateway to a world of dreams. World of nothing. Worlds that never were. Everything that isn't, that shouldn't be, that never was, belongs in there."

"And now that beast is in there, too," the Gorl said, rubbing her arm. There was a large welt on it from hitting the wall during the tremor. The Traxian reached out, his hand transforming into a white, viscous substance. It wrapped around the wound then pulled away becoming his arm again. Her injury was gone.

She rubbed the spot. "That's clever."

The Traxian shrugged. "We try."

"And my mother's in there," Leena said, motioning toward the glyph. "Locked away in a world that isn't real."

The copy nodded. "Yes, but-"

Leena stepped into the glyph and vanished. The gateway disappeared behind her.

I I I

The Doctor stood before the Traxian procession in their spherical hall.

They spoke in unison, their featureless faces as calm as the slowly turning walls around them.

"The fragment was a test. To see if we could send something back, to see if we could cross over. It worked."

"Yes, it worked," the Doctor said. "But now I need another one. Leena kind of used that one up."

"It will take us a long time, even relative to a Time Lord's lifespan," they replied.

"That's fine. It's fine. I have the TARDIS. You start now. I'll jump in and come out when...you're..." Red became lost in thought.

"When we're done," spoke the procession.

Red danced his finger thoughtfully. He saw the procession in his mind, saw their history, their rise. He saw their place in the Time War, their battles with the Daleks, and their end.

"Right," he said quietly. He swallowed and walked to the TARDIS. "I'll come out when you're done."

"Just one question," he said, hand on the TARDIS. "Who brought the Algar here?"

The procession all transformed at once, each forming the same figure, a tall human.

"Zsu," they said.

"And where's he from? I know that I said one question."

The Traxians all formed together into one sheet that cascaded along the inside of the sphere, shaping the image of mountains, forests, continents. There were islands covered in opalescent fog, steppes of endless green, and white-blue breakers at the beginning of a world covered in oceans.

The Doctor stepped away from the TARDIS. He stood in the middle of the hall and looked from canyons to valleys, from receding glaciers to firths and fjords. The sparkling of twilight gave way to wiry, luminescent webs of cityscapes, and, as the oceans waned purple and then black, a small chill ran up his side. It had been a long time since the Time Lord had seen Earth. He had watched it grow, had protected it and simultaneously seen its people burn and blight each other while the better ones held on for dear life. The few that ran away with him long ago did so for many reasons, trapped as they were on a planet that was as magical and wondrous as it was stifling and damned.

Red tugged thoughtfully on his vest. "And how did he get here? Why did he come?"

The procession formed into the Doctor in the duster. "You brought him here."

"I didn't bring him here," Red said, defensive. "I've never seen that human before."

"Then you will bring him here. Time Lord timelines are complicated."

"Did I bring him here as that, as you? As my old self?" Red stepped forward as tiny pops and bursts lit across the continents around him. "Because I couldn't have. I would remember," he said, almost entirely through his teeth. The particular generation of his life the Traxians had formed into was one of more turmoil, wonder and sadness than any the Time Lord had ever experienced.

He raced through the possibilities: Rose Tyler, Martha Jones, Donna Noble. Had one of them been with him here? The thought that there might be something left undone, or even worse, forgotten, meant revisiting a time he had spent generations forgetting. The Traxians appearing casually as his old self already disturbed Red, but if he had done something and forgotten, had adventures and companions lost to time or even one small slip where he had lost his memory and couldn't save someone and then forgot, that would mean too much. The Doctor liked who he was now, liked not owing anything to the past. He was busy searching for meaning in his own way, with his TARDIS, his spiny companion, his glowing head and gaudy vest.

"No," the procession replied. "You brought Zsu here as your current self, Time Lord. But lately your history as this incarnation presses closer and closer to the surface of your thoughts."

Small streaks flew across the shifting continents as the tranquil nocturne played out into a scene of shimmering brightness and blinding flashes.

"And what is this?" he asked, looking from inverted horizon to horizon.

"It is what we saw in Zsu's mind. We do not understand it."

Red kept scanning the scene. He pulled out his screwdriver, tossed it up and caught it. "Neither do I," the he said, returning to the TARDIS.

I I I

The Doctor had lived for almost a thousand human years. His journeys with the tall, blue TARDIS and his companions were and would be noted in the annals of countless races. Hammerbeasts and Algars were standard fare, creatures lively but misunderstood, called "beasts" because they were different, cast aside by Time Lords and Daleks and humans and anyone that couldn't understand or use them. Their presence in the cosmos seemed insignificant, while others, like the Doctor's, seemed so large. Everyone needed saving, it seemed. Everyone, everywhere, all the time, could use help. So, when the Doctor turned away from the Traxians and stepped back into his magical box that day and vanished and failed to reappear, the universe had to go back to its old way of working. Without such a looming figure as the Doctor, everyone that seemed small started to get just that much bigger.

I I I

Earth

Palamedes Temporal Research Laboratory

"They've trapped him," Zsu said, throwing a lever. "They've aged him." He pressed a sequence of red and green buttons. "They've shamed him." He traced an equation thoughtfully in the air. "And now, none of that will ever happen."

A small, white vortex opened in the center of the gray laboratory chamber. Its essence squealed and reached out like a white hell, the cavernous steel of the chamber's shell pulling inward toward it. Wires ripped from their fasteners. Buttons exploded from the consoles and flew into the vortex. Zsu walked toward the controlled maelstrom, himself untouched.

"Master of space and time," he said. "Who refuses to rescue when rescuing is due." The scientist pulled the dark shears from his pocket. He snipped around the edge of the white storm. "Who fixes time when the time is convenient." The shimmering portal began to pull apart from the room, cut finely into a slightly larger vortex of pure black. "And causes the pain he seeks to end."

Zsu put his arm into the disappearing cataclysm, jerked upward with the shears, and watched as bursts and explosions shot forth, like rainbows trying to escape the experiment only to be sucked back in.

"The universe would have been so much better without you."

Pieces of the walls and ceiling, large steel chunks, began coming loose and falling into the shattered vortex. The small, white portal seemed to suck everything in, while the larger black one expanded slowly, as if content to reach out itself and consume the room. Still, Zsu stood tall and untouched.

And then, in the wake of the small storm, he saw a face.

It was a girl's face, dark face with thick, braided hair. It was only a face, but in his mind, Zsu saw the girl standing in a white hallway wearing a little silver and black dress. She curtsied to the scientist. She curtsied to all the scientists because that's what she had seen in the little nanobook that her father had gifted her on the girl's eighth birthday.

She was Zsu's daughter.

I I I

Deep Space

Argo I Labs

Every story has a beginning, and some beginnings actually happen at the beginning. Others find their way in due course. Zsu's story did not begin when he was born or even when he died. Though, that can happen.

It began when his daughter disappeared with the Doctor, ages ago, when they had lived together at Zsu's first experiment platform, Argo I. It was the place where humanity first tested its own version of time travel, where Zsu first realized his life's dream. It was something the Doctor couldn't resist visiting. Just after he regenerated as the reddish-looking wanderer, the Time Lord found it somewhat fitting that he should travel to that particular place, to put the past behind him (it had a way of sneaking out front) and to watch humanity's first foray into the really unknown.

The Doctor dallied about on Platform 7, the practical applications section of the project. There, researchers ran calculations determining the effects of everything from stopping a war to stopping a butterfly. The Doctor, fascinated, took pleasure in pointing out every misstep, every potential disaster, every stunted war that would give birth to ten more. He laughed and joked with the crew, knowing full well that their efforts would be varied, terrible to some, but he knew that they would ultimately all be regulated and controlled. These cowboys would do no real damage. He had seen it.

Platform 11 was Zsu's stead. Experimental applications. This was the dangerous corridor, the one that required a temporal cleansing before anyone could enter. No stray timelines allowed inside. One of Zsu's experiments would seek to determine if there was an Original, a set, absolute timeline from which everything branched. He had read about the Doctor's exploits, had seen the holovids and newspapers and cave drawings. And, as fantastic a character as the Time Lord was, he was messy. There could be no telling what he had changed, what effects he had wrought on an absolute scale. Where they were living, what they were doing, could all fluctuate and change because of this one being. Zsu needed a room away from that, a place without the effects of unwanted time travel.

The technology existed, he knew, to "lock" a place in time. On Gallifrey, the Doctor's home world, it had been used to isolate a genocidal war. Zsu subsequently chartered a vessel and traveled to what he thought was the planet's location. Gallifrey wasn't there, of course, having been locked away. But there was a small rip in the event horizon of the planet's temporal prison. Someone or something had gone through. It could have been a ship or a being. Regardless, it gave Zsu a small corridor in which to work. He descended through the rip, down to the planet, and worked tirelessly for several months, looking to unearth the source of the lock. Having discovered what he thought to the the technology, the scientist flew out, returned to Earth, and earned a grant for deep space experiments based on the artifacts that he had brought back.

Zsu's daughter did not believe him.

"This can stop all time," he said, holding up a small black cylinder.

"How does it do that?" she said, incredulous. The little girl thumbed through her nanobook, the pages shifting and changing based on her questions. It went blank at her sudden inquiry.

The scientist put his cylinder into a protective case. "I don't know. Your book doesn't know. Nobody knows."

"Then how do you know it works?" She was looking at him.

Zsu bent down and touched her cheek. "Because I've seen a place where thousands of these keep a whole planet suspended in time. It doesn't move. No one can see it."

"Then how did you see it?" The book sprang to life. It drew a diagram of ocular nerves and light response.

"Someone left a door open," he said.

Argo I's first experimental functions nearly tore the station apart. Zsu pledged to send his daughter away on the first ship to Earth following the incident. The shuttle was a few weeks out at the time. So, he decided not to run any more tests until then. "I didn't realize the power," Zsu had said while holding her. "I didn't know." Three crew members had been blown out into space when the Platform 8 subcorridor power systems fluctuated and exploded. The fluctuations threatened to spread all over the station, but Zsu had a moment of insight where he linked the black time cylinder into the plasma flows, isolating them long enough to fix the problem. Her dad, who had almost killed them all, had genius enough to save them all, but there were complications.

"He doesn't know what he's doing," several engineers and fellow scientists began to say. A lot of them simply didn't feel safe after the loss of friends on the first experiment. They wanted assurances.

The Doctor appeared in the meantime, after the explosion, but before the shuttle to Earth was due to approach. It was his first time out as a new being, as the fiery figure that Leena would later call "Red." For once, he didn't have to worry about being chased away or misunderstood. Everyone on the temporal research station knew who the Time Lord was. They were all honored, without exception. And Zsu's daughter was fascinated.

The girl followed the Time Lord everywhere. She shadowed and mimed him, asked him questions about the TARDIS: "Where does it go?" "Who lives in it?" "What's it for?"

She was asking him these questions one day when Engineer Adelman Burke from Platform 7 let himself into Zsu's office and began poking around. "What is he doing in there?" they had all been asking. Zsu held the grant and therefore didn't need to explain himself to any of the crew, but his total lack of explanation, his haughtiness and increasingly mysterious demeanor had led to questions, and finally tactless espionage. Burke was holding up the small protective case containing the piece of the Gallifreyan time lock when Zsu walked in.

"My Dad says he can stop time," his daughter had told Red. "He has a thing." She put her fingers together, tracing the image of a cylinder in the air.

"Your Dad thinks he can do a lot of things." The Time Lord floated in his cloud of superiority.

"No, no, no," she said and pulled out her book. "He went to Gallifrey." A picture of blank space with stars appeared.

"He couldn't go to Gallifrey. It's time locked."

The picture on the book changed to that of an old Victorian house with the front door hanging open.

"Daddy says someone left the-"

Red picked her up and ran.

I I I

"What is this?" Engineer Burke asked, undaunted by the fact that he had been caught snooping.

Zsu reached forward. "You put that down. You put it down now, and I will forget that you came in here."

"What? It's that important?" Burke shook it.

Zsu sweated. "No, it could kill us all. Put it down."

"It could kill us all?" The engineer looked around. "What else in here could kill us all? What kind of danger have you put us in? We lost three good people-"

The scientist grabbed Burke and tried to wrest the case from his hands. The engineer let go. "Fine, fine," he said and walked out, pointing. "We're watching you."

Zsu wiped his forehead and set the case down, but slipped when he tried to support himself with a wet hand. The cylinder shot across the room and shattered in the corner. It zapped and sparked and began to grow, forming the image of a person before the scientist turned around and bolted from the room.

I I I

"We're getting out of here," the Doctor said, placing the girl on the TARDIS console. "Once you're safe back on Earth, I'll come back for your father. What's his name?"

She lipped the words, but nothing came out. The girl had gone mute. The Doctor pulled out his stethoscope.

"Are you ok? What is going on?" The girl began to flash and flicker in front of him, and the TARDIS shook. As it disappeared into the vortex on its way toward Earth, all the Doctor could read from her lips was, "I want my daddy."

Red watched the effects happening all around the little girl. He recognized them. In a faint corridor of the Time Lord's mind, he saw what was happening to the scientist's daughter.

"We're not going to Earth," he said, pulling a lever and priming the console. "We're going to Gallifrey."