Raven shielded herself in time to fend off the chunks of concrete that were blown out of the wall around the blast door, but the percussive force of the explosion still hurled her back. Romana and Starfire were hidden from view by billows of dust and smoke – and something else. There was a greenish tinge to the smoke-cloud. Realising what it was, Raven flew to the far end of the room.
"Starfire?" she called, fear for her friend giving her voice a slight tremor. "Are you okay? Listen, you mustn't breathe the gas!"
Starfire flew out of the murk with a pained expression on her face, coughing and spluttering.
"I already have – ahem! – and it tastes very nasty! But I do not think it is dangerous to Tamaranians, only to humans."
"Thank goodness, I was afraid you'd been poisoned."
"I, too, am pleased that you are uninjured. But," Starfire gasped suddenly, "where is our new friend, Romana?"
"Oh yeah..."
Raven conjured a small portal that sucked in the cloud of gas and smoke and blew it out again into the courtyard of the building, several floors above, to be dispersed safely by the wind. Now they could see a pile of metal and concrete fragments lying in front of the blast door where Romana had been standing. Starfire shrieked with dismay.
"Quickly, we must help her!" She flew over and began digging with her hands.
"Great. I could have just teleported us through the door, but oh no, she had to open it," Raven groused as she helped Starfire heave away the rubble. "Typical scientist. Some doors are supposed to stay closed!"
They soon unearthed Romana. She lay pale and still, her beautiful pink suit caked white with dust. At least she had avoided being crushed – but she had still caught the jet of nerve gas full in the face.
"She is not breathing! Oh, we are too late! If only we had been quicker, we could have – eeeek!"
Starfire squeaked in fright as Romana suddenly sat up, bringing the two of them nose-to-nose.
"We thought you were dead," said Raven, without a flicker of emotion.
"Respiratory bypass," Romana replied smugly. "It takes more than a bit of toxic gas to knock me for six."
"Useful ability," remarked Raven. "Witchcraft?"
"Time Lord," Romana corrected her.
# # # #
The Doctor backed away as the gun-toting henchmen advanced on him. Suddenly, they were brought up short by a familiar voice.
"Twelve against one? Not exactly a fair fight. Lucky we're here to even up the odds..."
Robin, Cyborg and Beast Boy had appeared in the doorway. The masked villain raised a hand to stop his henchmen's advance, and turned gloatingly to the new arrivals.
"Ah, the Teen Titans! I've been expecting you. I'm so glad you could make it; you're just in time to witness my plans come to fruition."
"And you are?" inquired Robin.
"I am Wizzard: Master of Sorcery, Lord of Occult Knowledge, Prince of Dark Magick. I expect my reputation precedes me?"
"Sorry, I've never heard of you."
"You may also know me as... Heatstroke the Exterminator!"
"Nope."
"What kind of a name is that, anyway?" asked Beast Boy sceptically.
"Silence!" shouted Wizzard, disgruntled. "So you presume to mock me? Pathetic children! Soon, everyone on this planet will know the name of Wizzard – once the mighty Ragnaroctopus has awoken from its sleep of aeons and consumed them!" (The Doctor rolled his eyes at this.)
"Sorry, Wizzard, but you're just dreaming," said Robin, unimpressed. "Titans, go!"
Robin, Cyborg and Beast Boy leapt into action. In response, Wizzard produced a rune-inscribed bo staff that crackled with sorcerous energy, twirled it around flashily, and hurled himself at them. More armoured henchmen began dropping into the workshop from the gantries above. Within seconds, the room was criss-crossed with laser bolts, sonic cannon blasts, magic fire, birdarangs, flying debris, and the unconscious bodies of Wizzard's thugs as they were headbutted high into the air by a green Triceratops which hadn't been there a minute ago.
Somehow everything missed the Doctor as he sauntered over to the dimensional array. Producing a jeweller's loupe (eyeglass), he began examining parts of it more closely, his sonic screwdriver whirring in his hand.
After a few seconds, Wizzard crashed down into a heap next to him, having been thwacked by a dinosaur tail. He clambered to his feet and stared nastily at the Doctor.
"Don't interfere with the summoning device!" he snapped.
"Why not? It's frightfully interesting."
"Because I built it, and I say so. Who are you, anyway?"
"My name's the Doctor, how do you do? Oh please, just a quick look."
"NO!" bellowed Wizzard, striking out like lightning with a blade. With one slice, the Doctor's sonic screwdriver was dimidiated (cut in half). The bulbous end tinkled on the floor as it rolled away.
"My screwdriver!" exclaimed the Doctor, boggling at it in dismay. The loupe popped out of his eye comically. "You've murdered it!"
"Indeed. And now I'll do the same to you."
But before Wizzard could make good on the threat, Robin crashed into him boots first, and they rolled away, fighting. The Doctor stared for a moment at the sparking stump in his hand, then shrugged and casually tossed it away.
"Luckily, hearts aren't the only thing I've got two of," he said to himself, producing another sonic screwdriver from the pocket of his trousers. He resumed his inspection of the summoning device.
"Frightfully interesting," he ingeminated (repeated).
# # # #
Inside the vault, Raven, Starfire and Romana found the equipment their adversaries had been so keen to get their hands on. It was a bit unimpressive to look at: a small plastic component floating in a suspensor field.
"Why, it's just a subspace oscillation-matrix harmonizer," said Romana. "How quaint. Right, let's smash it."
"We can't do that!" Raven exclaimed. "Vandalizing something is as bad as stealing it! We aren't the criminals here."
"We can hardly just leave it for those thugs to find, can we? They'll be coming round in a few minutes. We also can't take it with us to their base, where I assume we'll be going next, because that's exactly where they want it!"
An amplified voice boomed out of the loudspeakers, making them all jump.
"SPECIAL SECURITY POLICE! THE BUILDING IS SURROUNDED! YOU HAVE ONE MINUTE TO LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND SURRENDER, THEN WE'RE COMING IN!"
"That solves that problem," said Romana. "The authorities will round up this lot and secure the vault, while we get going."
"We must hurry. Robin and the others are not answering their communicators. They are likely to need our assistance," said Starfire.
"I can take us to that derelict science park, but we'll have to find the others once we get there."
"I have a better idea," said Romana. "That machine covered with aerials outside the vault is a dimensional tunneller. Once they'd stolen the harmonizer they were obviously planning to use it to get back to their secret base instantly, and without leaving a trail. The co-ordinates must be pre-programmed; with that, I can take us right to where the enemy is."
"So if they can open holes in the fabric of space", said Raven, as Romana got to work on the device, "why did they bother breaking in through the wall upstairs?"
"Because they didn't know the internal layout of this complex before they got here. Dimensional tunnelling is very dangerous unless you know precisely where you're going. How would you like to spend the rest of your life with your molecules fused to a wall?"
"Well, I wouldn't like that," replied Raven, a touch acidly. "Although when I do it, that doesn't seem to be an issue."
"Yes, well… you're magic, aren't you?"
# # # #
His staff an invisible blur in his hands, Robin ploughed into the last three henchmen, knocking them senseless. He looked up. Wizzard was floating in mid-air, swathed in magical energy. A tyrannosaurus closed in on him, but he sent it flying with a bolt of lightning. It disappeared in mid-air and Beast Boy's tiny form spiralled away and landed upside down on a computer console.
"You may have dealt with my servants, Titans, but this was always about you and me," Wizzard was shouting with diabolical glee. "The city's 'heroic saviours'! Before this world is consumed, I wanted the pleasure of proving that my way – the unification of technology, sorcery, and ruthless will – is superior to your puny, orthodox heroism! I must thank you all for permitting me that satisfaction."
"Oh yeah?" grunted Cyborg, unleashing a volley from his sonic cannon. "Word of advice: you gotta beat us first."
Shrugging off the sonic blasts, Wizzard swung his staff in a wide arc, and with a flash the ground collapsed under Cyborg's feet, plunging him into the basement.
Robin fired his grappling line, curling it expertly around Wizzard's staff. The staff seemed to focus his powers; if he could only get it away from him…
A charge like an electric current ran from the staff along the line, melting the projector in Robin's hand and throwing him backwards with a painful shock. Wizzard laughed, easily batting away the green eagle that tried to swarm over his face.
"Enough of this!" he said. "The time for games is over. Hitherto, you have only seen a fraction of my true power." His voice dropped to a menacing growl. "But now…"
Even as Cyborg, Beast Boy and Robin were still scrambling to their feet to face him, Wizzard lashed out with his staff. An invisible force grabbed them and flung them back against the wall, where they hung helplessly, unable to move.
"I will kill you all now, but first you will witness the culmination of my plans: the summoning of the Ragnaroctopus to this plane of existence to consume our worthless reality! Everything I have done has been for the sake of that glorious moment! It will be –"
"All your Christmases come at once, yes?" supplied the Doctor, who had been conspicuous by his absence during the fighting of the past few minutes. He had picked up a length of cable that now emerged from the depths of the summoning device, and was toying with it nonchalantly. "Before you do that, can I ask one question? Have you ever stopped to consider the Ragnaroctopus's feelings in the matter? Don't you think it might prefer to stay up there in its own reality, swimming around happily in the cosmic aether?"
"The creature's feelings are irrelevant," replied Wizzard. "It shall obey my will."
"And your will is for it to come down here and eat you?"
"Can you think of a better way to die?"
"There's just no answer to that," said the Doctor, half laughing. As if dismissing Wizzard, he strolled casually away, ending up near a control panel on the wall. "I can honestly say this is the most insane scheme I've ever had to thwart."
Suddenly, so fast that the others in the room could hardly register it, he was all motion. Slamming the cable into a wall socket, he began tapping buttons on the control panel as if his life depended on it.
"What is he doing? Stop him!" screamed Wizzard.
A dazed henchman recovered enough to grab the Doctor, and grappled with him for a second, but the Doctor dispatched him with a powerful elbow to the face and finished inputting the control sequence. Robin stared, his nerves on tenterhooks. Had the Doctor come up with a miraculous last-second solution?
There was an expectant pause.
"Ah. Hmm." The Doctor looked intently at the panel, and then the cable. "Something should have happened," he announced confidently.
"You are a pathetic fool, Doctor, and you have lost!" shouted Wizzard. "Now you, too, shall feel my power!"
He pointed dramatically, and a sorcerous blast smashed the Doctor into the wall and pinned him there. He struggled to move, but was stuck like a fly in a cobweb. Wizzard threw his head back and laughed.
"Nothing in the world can stop me now!" he cried. Which was tempting fate, in retrospect.
"Want to bet?" said a sarcastic voice. Wizzard looked round, and did a double-take. A dimensional gateway had opened in the air behind him. Silhouetted dramatically against the backdrop of its swirling maelstrom, doing quite shameless hero-poses, were three female figures.
"Raven! Starfire! You made it!" exclaimed Robin.
"Indeed! The robbery has been thwarted, and the final component is in safe hands!" said Starfire, her voice ringing with righteous determination.
"Who's this?" asked Raven, casting a laconic eye over Wizzard.
"Show the proper respect when you refer to me, girl, for I am Wizzard – Master of Sorcery, Lord of Occult Knowledge, Prince of Dark Magick!"
"Master of sorcery? Prince of dark magick?" said Raven, cracking a smile icy enough to chill the blood of far tougher villains. "Big titles, for such a small man. Let's see if you deserve them. Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos!"
She deflected away the paralysing blast that Wizzard shot at her and flew at him, unleashing a stream of sable energy. Magic fire leapt from Wizzard's staff to counter it. After a brief contest, Raven was thrown back, but before Wizzard could attack again, a fierce green ray from Starfire smashed him to the ground. He hurled himself back into the air and traded energy blasts with them both. Ethereal flames of all colours washed around the laboratory like seawater around an ocean grotto.
"Romana! The controls!" Using what little movement remained to him, the Doctor nodded frantically at the cable he had plugged into the wall panel. "You must reverse the polarity!"
With Wizzard distracted, Romana scurried round the edge of the room, ducking as stray starbolts blasted showers of sparks out of the wall around her. She reached the panel and set to work on it with her sonic screwdriver.
"Hurry, Romana!"
"Almost… there!"
For a split second, the room lit up like a lightning storm. Electricity crackled between the wire lattice of the summoning array and the ceiling – and suddenly, as if plucked by an unseen hand, Wizzard was snatched up through the air and crashed into the array, his staff dropping uselessly from his hand. Robin, Cyborg, Beast Boy and the Doctor all flopped to the floor as the power holding them was released. It was Wizzard's turn to be stuck fast by an invisible force; he thrashed around angrily.
"What is this? What have you done?"
"Just a little trick I learned on Aldebaran IV," said the Doctor breezily, dusting himself down. "Wait, I tell a lie – it was Aldebaran V."
"What trick?!"
"Well, you see, I deduced from the blueish sheen of your armour that it was made from a super-light ferritic 'blue steel' alloy popular with superpowered renegades in various parallel universes. I knew a powerful enough electromagnet would neutralise the energy fields that power it, and jam the psionic boosters in that staff of yours to boot. I simply ran a current through the dimensional flux array, converting it into an electromagnet, and whoosh… you were left high and dry."
"Once the polarity of the neutron flow was properly aligned, of course," said Romana archly.
"Impossible! Blue steel is completely gauss-neutral; it can't be magnetised!"
"Oh, but it can – when it's been subjected to the subtle molecular distortion which results from exposure to the eldritch energies of the primal vortex," the Doctor beamed.
"Science," tittered Beast Boy. "Cool. Hey Wizzard, what's the matter – feeling blue? No need to be stuck up about it!"
"Demagnetizing myself after Gizmo pulled that trick on me a few weeks back is feeling like a really good decision right now," Cyborg noted.
"Curse you, Doctor!" raged Wizzard.
"Oh don't worry, old chap, it can't be Christmas every day you know. Now then, we'd better dismantle this dimensional flux circuitry, to make sure no-one else can try the same thing as you." He bounded over to the arcane machinery surrounding the summoning device and began ripping it apart.
"Well, that was actually pretty easy," said Robin to the others, as in the background the Doctor started pulling bits and bobs out of the flux circuitry, examining them briefly, then hurling them over his shoulder. "Wizzard's thugs didn't put up too much of a fight."
"In their defence, they only outnumbered us by about twelve to one," said Raven.
"They're only human, after all," said Romana, understandingly.
"Yeah," said Beast Boy, "I was expecting them to be robots or other-dimensional beings or something – but they're just men in suits."
"Disappointing, isn't it?" said the Doctor. "Aha!" He had found what he was looking for in the entrails of the machine, and waved it in the air triumphantly. "A universal transponder! Just the ticket."
# # # #
Once the formalities were out of the way, and Wizzard and his men had been unmasked and carted off to jail, everyone went back to the tower for a post-battle, just-saved-the-world party. The Titans ordered in enough pizza, fried chicken and burritos for seven, and weren't too upset when the Doctor and Romana took one look at the fare and decided they weren't hungry. Over dinner and long into the evening, Titans and Time Lords recounted stories of their favourite adventures: battles fought, monsters and villains defeated, witticisms quipped. At some stage the Doctor produced a case of wine which he had procured from somewhere, and after stern admonitions to the Teen Titans not to drink it, he had kindly looked the other way. Things got even merrier after that, and the fight scenes were more loudly (and messily) acted out. After a few bottles the Doctor and Romana lost interest in reminiscing and began to tell each other jokes in a variety of foreign languages which only Raven laughed at, but seeing Raven laugh was unusual enough that it made the others laugh as well, so everything was fine. The night melted away into a happy, crepuscular blur.
One by one, the Titans crept silently to rest. Left alone, the Doctor and Romana settled down together in the huge window overlooking the sea and commenced to finish off the wine. While they were at it they poured K-9 a glass as well. ("Negative, Master; this unit is teetotal.")
"Well, I thought that adventure went rather well, don't you?" said Romana, tossing her fine blonde hair back over her shoulder cutely. "No casualties, no lives ruined, the villains are under lock and key and the planet's still in existence. All quite straightforward, really."
"Yes," agreed the Doctor. "Nowhere near as dangerous as that time a few realities back when Dr Drakken teamed up with The Hood and Lord Zedd and nearly conquered the solar system." The Doctor and Romana both shuddered at the memory. "Now that was a tight spot. Lucky we had so much help sorting it out."
They sat in companionable silence for a while, watching the setting moon dissolve in the waters of the bay.
"The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves/ the moon into salt tears," proclaimed the Doctor, with slightly cross-eyed gravity. "But time – time's the thief, Romana. They're very young, aren't they?"
"I suppose so."
"They live in such an age of innocence, have you noticed? Rather like you and I have been doing, these past few years. I wonder how long it can last?"
"Whatever do you mean?"
"How long before whoever's writing this universe decides to rewrite it as something brighter and louder and full of in-jokes, but lacking its beauty and sincerity? And turns these wonderful characters into crude caricatures?" He fell silent, wrapped in one of his deepest glooms.
"You don't necessarily know that they will."
"You don't know human nature like I do. They're constantly inconstant. They're never happy with anything they make for long. They'd even do the same to us."
"You're very melancholy tonight. Merlot doesn't agree with you," Romana said, swishing her wine around the glass and staring into the red vortex it made. "Will we ever get back, do you think?"
"Oh, I should think so, one day," said the Doctor. "Tomorrow. Let's say tomorrow."
They sat up together until the cartoon sun rose.
# # # #
The next day, after the Titans had got themselves going (a tad later than usual), everybody congregated downtown on the corner of Fifth and Lombard to say their goodbyes. One of the team was feeling quite emotional about it; Starfire seized Romana and gave her a bruising hug.
"Oh, farewell, friend Romana! I shall never, ever forget our glorious alliance against the forces of the evil Wizzard! May you find joy and wonder in all the worlds and universes you visit on your travels – and may your grofnars always be free of vardlesnorts!"
"How sweet," said Romana, smiling indecipherably. "Happy times and places to you too, Starfire. It was a pleasure meeting you… and teaching you Gallifreyan. Bye, Raven."
"Bye," said Raven.
Romana disappeared into the blue box, K-9 following at her heels.
"Goodbye, goodbye," smiled the Doctor, waving regally to the others from the threshold of his time machine.
"Thanks for your help," said Robin. "Come back and visit us sometime."
"Yeah, it's been way cool!" exclaimed Beast Boy.
"I'd be delighted. One day, I shall come back – yes, one day... until then, you have a lovely, colourful world here; don't let anything nasty happen to it."
"Don't worry," said Robin, "it's in safe hands."
As the door closed behind the Doctor the assembled Titans could just hear him saying in his booming baritone: "No mistakes this time, Romana – we'll be home in time for tea!"
With a trumpeting roar and a flashing of light, the TARDIS dematerialised.