Chapter 1: The Oncoming Storm
Rintaro Okabe blinked.
He should be dead — he was sure of it. The storm destroyed everything: people and pets, trees and lampposts, homes and skyscrapers alike. His friends' terrified faces were still etched into his mind: Itaru's eyes widening as he stumbled to the ground, Mayuri's pleading face as her grip on his hand was wrenched away, Kurisu's tear-stained eyes looking lifelessly at nothing. He recalled his lack of breath, the torrent of sound, and the pile of debris crashing down on his head…
And then he was back. Back at a crossroads in an unharmed, completely normal city. People were walking past each other, many on their phones, completely oblivious to their surroundings, let alone the concept of their fragile mortality. Billboards flashed the same drinks, the same models, the same TV shows. Buildings stood straight and tall, as if they, too, forgot they could be uprooted.
"Okarin? Okarin!"
With a start, Rintaro stopped looking at the sky. In front of him, a short young woman wearing a blue dress and a matching hat stared at him with a curious expression.
"You're spacing out," she noted. "That's dangerous at a crosswalk." She giggled. "Don't tell me Mayushi's rubbing off on you?"
Rintaro stared. There she was: his childhood friend Mayuri Shiina, who called herself "Mayushi." Ditsy but perceptive. Frail of body but strong in heart.
Alive, not dead.
He glanced around again. His ears detected Mayuri's voice again, but his brain didn't register the words. He searched for anything that betrayed the apocalypse he'd just witnessed, anyone that might have seen what he'd seen…
As he turned around, a pair of eyes filled his vision. Rintaro jumped and cried out. The throng of pedestrians walking past them gave him odd glances, but everyone passed on their way. Everyone except the man who was now standing before him.
He was a tall, foreign-looking man with curly grey hair and bushy, cross-looking furrowed eyebrows. His face was old and wrinkled, but he wore what looked like a blazer over a hooded zip-up. Most pressingly, his eyes, grey and piercing, were closely scrutinizing Rintaro's own face.
"What were you looking at?" the man suddenly asked.
After getting over his initial surprise, Rintaro sputtered, "I could ask you the same thing!"
"I was looking at you what were you looking at?" The man's reply ought to have been two separate sentences, except there really wasn't that much of a pause between the first and the second. Rintaro was struck speechless. How to answer that question? How could he ever explain what he'd seen?
"You saw it, didn't you?"
The question made Rintaro's face go pale, and his arms, raised in instinctive defence, lower. As if on cue, the strange man stepped closer; Rintaro, trapped by the curb and the street behind him, couldn't back away.
"You saw it," the man continued. "What happened here. And you still remember."
Rintaro swallowed. "You mean…the storm?"
The man's bushy grey eyebrows shot upward. "Oh? Is that what you saw?"
"I saw this whole city being torn apart," said Rintaro. "The buildings collapsing, anything not nailed down flying in the air. I saw…" He glanced at Mayuri, who tilted her head, and fell silent.
The man suddenly pulled something out of his inside coat pocket; Rintaro flinched, but the man put the thing he'd pulled out on his face — a pair of sunglasses. "Who are you, exactly?" he asked, and Rintaro thought he heard a faint whirring noise coming from…the glasses?
He tried to pull himself together, and reached for an old lie. "I'm Kyouma Hououin," he answered. "The mad scientist."
The man took his sunglasses off (and the whirring noise ceased, Rintaro noticed). "A mad scientist!" he repeated, folding the glasses and stowing them in his pocket once more. With his other hand he reached out, grabbed Rintaro's hand, and shook it. "Always a pleasure to meet a peer."
Rintaro was afraid to ask, but he pushed the words out: "And…you are?"
"I'm the Doctor," the man answered.
"You're a doctor?" Mayuri chipped in. "What kind of doctor?"
The man didn't break eye contact with Rintaro as he replied, "I'm not a doctor. I'm the Doctor. The main one, you could say."
Something in the "Doctor"'s jacket began to beep. The man relinquished Rintaro's hand and fished something out of his other jacket pocket: some kind of small, long blue device with a flashing light on the end of it. The man put it up to his ear, then held it away and peered at it. Then he looked back at Rintaro and said, "I'll be in touch, Kyouma Hououin, mad scientist." He swiftly turned on his heel and walked away, quickly fading into the crowd.
"Well, Mayushi didn't really get it," Mayuri commented, "but the funny man called you a peer. That means he's a mad scientist too, right? Maybe that weird blue thing was an invention of his." She gasped and clapped her hands. "And he said he'd be in touch! Maybe he could join our lab! What do you think, Okarin?…Okarin?"
The million thoughts running through Rintaro's head precluded his reply. He knows about the storm. Does he know what time travel is? Does he know I've time traveled before? But I didn't cause this. He felt his chest tighten as more thoughts occurred to him. He said he'd be in touch, but I didn't give him my real name. Or my number. Does he already know who I am? Could he figure me out? How is he going to find me?
And then he felt his whole body go cold as he processed his ultimate fear: Is he SERN?
He grabbed Mayuri's hand. She looked at him, surprised.
"We need to run," he declared.
And with a tug, the two of them did just that.
The man called the Doctor was also running — not away from something (at the moment), but toward it.
The blue device in his hand beeped at varying frequencies. When it slowed, he also slowed and changed direction, until the noise increased in speed, at which he, too, would increase his pace. He let out a triumphant "aha!" when he reached a location when the fast beeping turned into one long tone; then, upon second reflection, he realized that he was in the middle of a crosswalk with no one else crossing. Looking up, he let out a startled cry as he and an oncoming car narrowly avoided each other; somehow, he made his way back toward the sidewalk unscathed.
"That would've been the most embarrassing regeneration ever," the man muttered.
Standing on the edge of the sidewalk, he pointed the device, which began to emit a whirring noise, at the space in the middle of the intersection. When the noise ceased, he held it up to his face and inspected it. With a grimace, he placed it back into his pocket and walked away.
On another sidewalk, a blue wooden antique British police phone box stood in the middle of foot traffic. Logic would dictate that this artifact, which had not ever been in that location before, would attract questions and attention from those who lived, worked, or at least walked near this section of the 21st century Japanese city of Mitakihara; but it was not so. Those who saw it gave it no more than a moment's thought, if any; assuming it was supposed to be there, everyone lived their lives around it.
The man called the Doctor, on the other hand, strode right toward it, pushed open one of the double doors, and stepped inside, closing the door behind him.
It was not cramped inside. Past the wooden doors was a whole room, dominated in the center by a sleek silver hexagonal table with various controls, handles, buttons, screens, and widgets adorning it. Atop this table was a glass pillar with glowing orange filaments inside. On the walls, round fixtures glowed blue and orange. Around the circumference of the (seemingly) round room, an elevated "second level," accessible by stairs placed periodically around the room, contained large wooden bookshelves filled with both old and new tomes.
Outside the box, those who saw the man enter the box dismissed the thought immediately.
Inside the "box," as the man called the Doctor strode in, another man — bald, spectacled, and slightly rotund — was examining one of the screens that protruded like a desktop monitor from the hexagonal table. He looked up and, noticing the older man's arrival, asked, "Find anything interesting, sir?"
The Doctor took his blue device from his pocket and inserted it into a small cavity in the table. A screen nearby flickered to life, and the Doctor dragged around the table on its axis and brought it next to the bald man.
"That's our epicenter," said the Doctor, pointing at the screen, and specifically a pulsing red dot on what appeared to be a map of the city. "The residual vortex energy readings are unmistakably high. A burst of temporal energy took place in this area, and caused the world to shift back in time, before the attack on the city."
"Any idea what caused it?" the bald man followed up.
"Couldn't get it from a basic scan," the Doctor answered as he walked away, around the table, and flipped a few switches. "But whatever it was, it was powerful enough to create a rift in spacetime so large that three parallel universes collapsed onto each other. There's no hiding that kind of technology for very long — not from me."
"Mmm, I don't think so," said the bald man.
Taken aback, the Doctor stopped in his tracks and looked at him with a doubtful expression. "Pardon?"
"No," the bald man repeated. "Whatever caused the shift didn't also cause the universes to collapse."
"And just how would you know that?" the Doctor retorted.
"Well, it says it right here." The bald man gestured toward the screen in front of him. "I took a look at the 4D seismic tracker, as you so nicely asked, and it says the parallel contact happened before we got here. And the shift back only happened after we arrived."
Immediately the Doctor rushed to the screen, displacing the bald man to the side as he gripped the screen and peered at it closely. "Now that was harrowing, wasn't it?" the bald man continued. "I thought I was going to get crushed by a maid cafe, but then I blinked and I was in the maid cafe, as if nothing had happened." He grimaced. "Though after a few minutes in the maid cafe, I started to wish I had been crushed instead. Then I thought I had been crushed and I was in hell."
"I've been to hell. It's better than a maid cafe. Nardole," the Doctor addressed the man, "do you know why I hate when you correct me?"
The man called Nardole shrugged. "Because you're an egotist?"
"Because I hate being wrong," said the older man as he pushed the screen away with disdain.
"Same thing, isn't it?" Nardole pointed out.
Choosing to ignore the point, the Doctor continued, "So, observation: three parallel universes have overlapped each other, with this city as the contact point. Then, something caused the whole universe to shift back in time by at least several weeks, or at least to a similar point in another timeline. Question: what was the cause? And are they related?"
Nardole's forehead wrinkled as he asked, "Not the Time Lords, is it?"
The Doctor shook his head. "I'd know if it were the Time Lords. It's not them."
Nardole breathed a sigh of relief. "Well that's good, isn't it?"
"In a sense, yes," said the Doctor. "And in a sense, no. Because it means that another, if not two other entities have the power to completely manipulate multiple universes and the timelines of each one. And I don't know who they are, what they want, or what more they're capable of."
Understanding dawned on Nardole's face. "And if there's one thing you hate as much as being corrected…"
"Right." The Doctor nodded grimly. "ASMR."
"Not knowing something."
"Oh. Right you are." The Doctor plucked his blue device from the table, then turned back around and glowered at Nardole. "You just corrected me again, didn't you? I'm going to have to patch you."
Nardole merely rolled his eyes.
The two of them went through the double doors and stepped back into the busy streets of Mitakihara City. If anyone thought the sight of two men exiting a small box was odd, they kept it to themselves and walked around it.
In a moment, the two men also joined the moving throng of people. Nardole cast his gaze around him and remarked, "It's still going to be tricky finding the sources of those phenomena in a city like this."
"Maybe," the Doctor replied. "But I think I have a lead." He drew his sunglasses from his coat pocket and placed them on his face. He gave them a tap, and they began to hum.