Hello! I know, it's been another long wait for this chapter. **The Selig family letters, notes, and any Charter agent assignments in the following chapters are not mine. They belong to their respective authors at Meow Wolf.**

I'll just say now that Meow Wolf is, quite frankly, impossible to ever describe in its entirety. This story is not meant to endorse/promote Meow Wolf, I'm a merely combining the universe(s) created by its artists with Doctor Who for personal enjoyment. I actually wrote this chapter a long time ago, but it was a struggle to get it into a publishable state. I'm really excited to finally post it!

Chapter 6: Journey to the Centre of the Nexus

[Santa Fe, New Mexico / June 2016]

Much to their surprise, the Doctor and Donna next stepped out of the TARDIS into a hot, dry summer day. Needless to say, A parking lot n an industrial area of Santa Fe was not where they thought the Mendocino house's trail would end.

The Doctor frowned, throwing an incredulous look over his shoulder at the console room before he closed the TARDIS' doors. The strong hum of reassurance that came across his bond with the time ship didn't help him feel any better about the temporal anomaly they were chasing.

The ship simply gave another encouraging hum and mentally nudged at her pilot to have a good look around.

'What are you up to?' the Doctor wondered, slowly letting his hand fall away from the door. He only received silence in return. Shaking his head with exasperation and a touch of fondness for the antics of the ship that was his oldest companion of all, he gave in and turned away.

Across the car park stood a white adobe building that spanned the length of an entire block. The front half was one story tall, with the back half twice that.

"Are you sure we're in the right place?" Donna asked. She was squinting in the bright sun, shedding her jacket and tying it around her waist as she spoke.

"I, weeeell…" The Doctor drew out the word in an attempt to stall. "We did track the house's signal properly."

"And that's why we're in New Mexico in the middle of summer, under a sculpture of a giant spider?"

"What?" The Doctor shot a bewildered glance at his companion. She pointed to something above them, and he tilted his head back to see what she was talking about.

"Ah, so it is! A giant…spider sculpture," he proclaimed, staring up at the dark metal body of said art piece. Its eight round legs were bolted to the ground many feet apart, with its body high enough above the ground for the TARDIS to comfortably fit beneath. It was just one of many huge metal sculptures scattered around the car park, all of them likely related to whatever lay inside the white adobe building. The colorful sign on the front of the building read MEOW WOLF.

An involuntary shiver went up the Doctor's spine. 'Another wolf,' he thought, 'why does it always have to be wolves?'

"Why does it always have to be giant spiders?" Donna muttered under her breath, unknowingly echoing his thoughts.

'Ah, right.' The Doctor understood her fixation with the spider better now. He considered commenting that at least the Racnoss Empress hadn't been quite as big as this sculpture, but one look at Donna's face and he quickly decided against it.

"What on earth is a meow wolf? And where's the house?" Donna asked. She had evidently read the sign on the building as well, and been equally perplexed by it.

"I'm sure we're in the general vicinity of it," the Doctor said.

Donna gave him a look that said she knew better than to trust his easily-given reassurances. "You mean like Summer is in the general vicinity of March? Because it's clearly not spring here anymore."

He grinned sheepishly and shoved his hands into his coat pockets. "I may have landed us a few months later than intended."

Donna scoffed. "I hope for both our sakes that that doesn't cause any more trouble for us with the Charter. Maybe they've forgotten about us by now."

The Time Lord's smile faded slightly. "Let's see what's inside Meow Wolf." He started toward the white adobe building with determined strides, gaze fixed on the line of people waiting to have tickets scanned by a young woman standing outside the front doors.

He wanted to believe that Meow Wolf was a tourist attraction or theatre of some kind, one that just happened to be in the general vicinity of the Mendocino house's new location. Unfortunately, the tingling sensation under his skin and the disorienting feeling that always accompanied temporal anomalies suggested otherwise. He and Donna had to be very close to the house. They just couldn't see it.

Hopefully someone working at Meow Wolf would know something about it. He and Donna were going to need tickets to get inside, and fortunately, the Doctor had just the thing for that. He felt around his dimensionally transcendental pockets for the wallet that held his psychic paper. It took a few moments, but his right hand finally closed around it and he held it up triumphantly.

"Good old psychic paper." Donna nodded to the wallet in his hand.

"Good old psychic paper," the Doctor agreed. "It's going to be our ticket in so we can find out what Meow Wolf is, and ask about the house and the Charter. The TARDIS insists that we're in the right place, and I can sense the anomaly nearby. It has to be here somewhere."

The long line of people had already disappeared into the building, so the two of them were able to easily approach the young woman holding the ticket scanner at Meow Wolf's front doors.

The Doctor opened his mouth to speak, but Donna beat him to it. "Hi. We're, uh, we're lost, really lost. We're just visiting Santa Fe, and we were on our way to see some tourist attractions, but we took a wrong turn somewhere. This one-" she pointed to the Doctor- "is a terrible driver no matter where he goes. Do you know where we could find out more about the area, or maybe do a little sightseeing around here?" she asked the young woman.

"I am not a terrible driver!" the Doctor protested.

"He doesn't think he is, but it's true." Donna insisted, elbowing him in the ribs in warning.

The young woman before them was in her early twenties and wore a neon yellow t-shirt with the Meow Wolf logo on it. Her long black hair was dyed red at the tips and gathered in a ponytail.

She looked the two of them up and down. "You could get downtown if you got back on Cerrillos and followed it to Paseo de Peralta or Alameda," she began, "but if you're looking for tourist attractions around here, you've come to the right place. Meow Wolf is a local artist collective in Santa Fe, and our new, permanent, interactive art installation opened here earlier this year. You can purchase tickets inside or online. If you want to check it out today, the next time block is almost sold out but there might be a few spots left. For some reason today hasn't been as busy as usual."

She held out two colorful brochures for them to take. The Doctor skimmed through one with mild interest. Opening the side flaps, he found himself staring at a photo of the house from Mendocino, printed right in the middle of the page.

"That's the house!" Donna exclaimed, shoving her own brochure into his line of sight.

The young woman spoke up again before the Doctor could respond. "Oh, have you've seen us on the news? That's how most people learn about us, especially with all the publicity we got the opening day of House of Eternal Return."

The Time Lord's interest in Meow Wolf increased exponentially. "Sorry, did you just say Eternal Return?" he asked. In the back of his mind, the TARDIS hummed in confirmation.

The woman nodded. "Yes, sir. House of Eternal Return is our main exhibit."

"Sorry, I just realized that I recognized the name. I must have heard about it at some point, but didn't know you lot were located in Santa Fe. When did you say the installation opened again?" He quickly feigning a regular visitor's level of enthusiasm.

"House of Eternal Return opened this spring. You're welcome to go inside and learn more about it." The woman proceeded to wave him and Donna through the front doors of Meow Wolf with a well-practiced smile.

Donna leaned in to whisper in his ear, "Is she deluded, or am I going mad? This is the exact same house, isn't it?" She held the brochure close to her face, scrutinizing the image of said house as the doors closed behind them.

The Doctor made a noise of affirmation, looking curiously around the foyer they had entered. It filled him with a bit of bewilderment, a bit of apprehension, and no small amount of awe. 'Humans and their infinite creativity, always surprising me,' he thought, smiling in spite of himself at the outpouring of artistry covering almost every part of the Meow Wolf foyer.

It was unlike any other venue he'd ever visited—and he'd seen the universe at its best, worst, and weirdest, so that was really quite a feat. To the right was a walled off children's learning centre with windows to allow other visitors a view of children and a few adults learn to craft all sorts of fantastical creatures out of colorful materials set out on white lab tables.

Straight ahead, there was a welcome desk where employees were checking in visitors and attaching neon yellow bands around their wrists to show that they had purchased tickets. Over to the left there was a small café, along with something that made the Doctor grin. Meow Wolf had a little shop! (It was actually quite large, but he liked calling it a 'little shop', and what did it matter what he called things in his own mind?)

"Doctor, we'll can stop by the shop later. Right now, we need tickets." And there was Donna, keeping him on track. (Sometimes on his more morose days, he really wondered what he would do without her.)

A young man with spiky purple hair and a neon orange MEOW WOLF t-shirt greeted them at the front desk. "Welcome to Meow Wolf! Do you have tickets purchased already, or—"

The Doctor quickly flipped open the wallet with his psychic paper and showed it to the man. "Yes, we do. Right here, I believe. Haven't visited Santa Fe in a while. Some friends told us we simply had to visit Meow Wolf before we left."

"I'll say!" the man muttered, eyes widening as he read whatever had appeared on the psychic paper. He quickly set two yellow wristbands, looking rather flustered. The Doctor resisted the urge to glance down at the psychic paper to see what it said.

The Meow Wolf employee's next words came out in a rush. "Please tell Mr. Martin that we are grateful for his ongoing support. Here are your tickets for The House of Eternal Return, you'll be able to enter in about five minutes. The line starts around the corner, just follow the arrows. You can't miss it! Oh, and you might want to check the mailbox when you first enter. Just a suggestion."

The Doctor thanked him and finally gave into the impulse to glance down at the psychic paper as he put it away. Donna took their wristbands and prodded him in the direction the man had pointed.

"Ah, we're friends of George R.R. Martin! He bought our tickets for us," the Time Lord said as Donna steered him toward a hallway with neon yellow duct tape arrows on the walls that pointed down it toward an unknown destination.

"Who?" Donna asked. She handed the Doctor one of the wristbands and started to attach her own around her left wrist.

The Doctor took his gingerly between his thumb and pointer finger, making no move to put it on. "He's an author, and a somewhat eccentric sort of man. I've never met him. Maybe I should reconsider that someday soon. He's been a major financial contributor to Meow Wolf, if my psychic paper is anything to go by."

"Never heard of him," Donna said with a shrug.

The Doctor muttered under his breath that she might in a few years, once that show about pointless thrones and endless bloody wars started. Donna cleared her throat and gave the wristband in his hand a pointed stare.

He promptly shoved it into his coat pocket. "I don't like wearing wristbands. They're irritating, hard to get off, and if the universe ended right now, I bet you those things and Earth's cockroaches might actually survive it!" He said. He was only half-kidding.

The two of them came to a halt at the end of a line of people waiting to enter the art installation. "Just hold onto it or something. Is it that hard to hold onto it for just a few minutes?" Donna demanded. She looked like she might do something drastic in the next few seconds if he didn't start behaving.

The Doctor simply barreled on with his never-ending gob. "Have I mentioned that I don't like waiting in line either? It's boring! Linear time is for other people, Donna, people who have time to waste!"

"Oh, will you stop complaining? Because if you don't—"

Thankfully, the Doctor was saved from whatever terrible thing Donna planned to do by the opening of the door at the end of the hallway.

"Oh look, time to go in! Finally!" the Doctor said, cutting off whatever Donna was about to say. They followed the line of visitors through a pitch black door, and there it was.

The missing house from Mendocino right in front of them, in its entirety, as if someone had transported the entire property from its neighborhood in California to Santa Fe almost without changing a thing. The only major difference was that the cars and driveway were gone. The mailbox was still there, although it was no longer stuffed to the point of overflowing. A few people had stopped to open it and read through the handful of letters and cards inside.

The Doctor decided to follow the Meow Wolf employee's advice to check the mailbox later. Right now, the house itself was more important. Every light inside it was turned on. Visitors could be seen moving about exploring the rooms through the windows. So many people, wandering around inside this anomaly of a house as if it were a place of pure novelty, a kind of artistic theme-park adventure! There was even a haunting sort of music being piped in from somewhere. The melody sounded vaguely familiar, like something half-remembered from a dream.

The Doctor didn't even have to stretch out his time sense or use the timey-wimey detector to feel the effects of the temporal anomaly that was clearly still very active around the house. Being so close to it again was almost overwhelming, with a staggering number of possible timelines practically bursting at the seams of reality.

"Blimey! This is so incredibly dangerous I don't even know how to describe the scale of danger it's on!" the Doctor said, gesturing broadly to the house and all its temporary occupants with a mixture of astonishment and horror. He bounded up the front steps onto the porch with Donna trailing after him, and paused at the front door. It was propped open with a door jam, and the mat in front of it had "Beyond Here There Be Dragons" printed across it. (The Doctor thought it was a rather apt metaphor for a temporal anomaly of this magnitude, if those dragons beyond possessed universe-ending fire.)

A chill came over him as he stepped through the doorway, and the sense of wrongness emanating from the house flooded through him. He'd felt it before in Mendocino, but it still felt as startling now as it had the first time.

Groups of visitors were gathered in every corner of the house, on the couches in the living room, around the dining table, in front of the family photo hanging above the living room fireplace, in the kitchen, on the stairs, against the bannister lining the hallway on the second floor.

'What happened to the people living here?' the Doctor wondered. That was one of the bigger questions he now faced. The owners of this house must have been involved in the formation of the temporal anomaly somehow. Had they been overwhelmed by some part of the anomaly during its formation?

He stopped to explore the small bump-out by the front door that had been converted into a painter's studio. It was there that he found the first clue that suggested the cause of the temporal anomaly had started long before the day it finally exploded into being.

In the middle of the small studio sat a worn armchair and a large wooden easel on a faded, circular rug. The easel looked like it was used quite often, with streaks and flecks of paint all over. It wasn't the easel itself that caught the Doctor's attention, however, it was the lined piece of paper clipped to the right side of it. He tilted his head slightly as he moved closer to it, curiosity piqued by the opening sentence of what appeared to be some kind of letter.

Mom,

I know Lex got hurt. He made me promise

The Doctor quickly slipped on his glasses and unclipped the piece of paper, brow furrowing as his eyes flitted down the page, reading the rest of the letter at lightning speed. The paper itself was like any old piece of loose leaf paper, probably torn out of some spiral-bound notebook.

Mom,

I know Lex got hurt. He made me promise not to tell you, but I can feel him getting worse. It's like it's happening to me, too.

Lex took Grandpa's books. He said he wanted to learn how Grandpa used sound to bring Nimsesku back to life when you were a little girl. He said this could help Uncle Lucius travel to other worlds again. He tried to use Grandpa's machine but he got hurt. He says he feels out of phase, like he's slipping out of the world and into a different one. He says everything looks foggy.

We have to be careful to not talk about this, only write. There are people in science coats spying on us and listening to what we say.

Morgan

"Morgan…" The Doctor murmured aloud. Who was Morgan? Likely young, given their phrasing of certain sentences.

Now he knew about a few members of the family from Mendocino: Morgan, Lex, a mother, an uncle named Lucius, and a grandfather. More importantly, Morgan had mentioned a specific machine that used sound to bring "Nimsesku" back to life when their mother was a little girl. He already knew sonic energy was involved in the creation of this anomaly, and now he could infer that the sonic energy had likely been generated by that machine. That certainly fit with everything else he and Donna had learned recently.

The people of Mendocino had reported hearing strange, haunting sounds at odd hours of the day, and Doctor and Donna had experienced the universe-rending sound first hand at the moment the anomaly formed. The Charter had somehow quarantined the Mendocino house seconds after the anomaly formed, somehow cutting off the energy causing it before the fabric of reality could be torn apart. Those people in 'science coats' that Morgan mentioned probably worked for the Charter, too.

'Now to find the grandfather's machine...'

Just to see what would happen, the Doctor stretched out his time sense, feeling for the timelines weaving throughout the house.

Fragments of Time and lives and moments instantaneously slammed into his mind with the force of water blasting through an insubstantial dam. The Doctor sucked in a breath, quickly drawing up as many mental shields as he could to filter out the overwhelming temporal feedback.

He hadn't expected it to be that bad. The timelines here were seething with incomprehensible amounts of unstable energy, tangling together and splintering apart in so many ways it was truly miraculous that the house and everything around it hadn't already imploded and breached the Void itself in the process. Whatever else happened at Meow Wolf, or with the Charter, that sort of event could not be allowed to happen under any circumstances whatsoever.

Dodging other visitors, the Doctor made his way into the living room next, hoping to find more clues like Morgan's letter. At first, it looked like any old living room, found anywhere in the United States. A worn rug lay under a worn couch and an old wooden coffee table in front of the window. There was a colorful fish tank on the vanity against the wall to the right, and an old television sat on a stand in the corner to the left. The wall between the living room and dining room had been removed, allowing for a more open floor plan.

The Doctor's eyes landed on the black and white family photo hanging on the wall above the fireplace mantle. He went over to it, leaning in to study the photo's smaller details. In it, a mother and father posed with their son and daughter, all of them smiling to various degrees. Both children had blond hair like their mother. They looked like fraternal twins.

So this was the family that had lived in the Mendocino house. They looked happy and young, and oh so simply human.

Actually, maybe that wasn't quite true.

There was something strange about the boy's face in the photo. The Doctor squinted at the sullen-looking youth, searching for the faint blurriness he was sure he'd just seen a moment ago. He couldn't find it at first. Then, quite suddenly, it reappeared.

The boy's face blurred beyond all recognition while the rest of his family's faces remained clear. The Doctor blinked, automatically reaching for his sonic screwdriver and started to turn it on before realizing that perhaps using sonic energy in the middle an anomaly caused by the same energy probably wasn't the best idea.

For one hearts-stopping moment, the house and everything in it warped and distorted. The Doctor gasped, twisting around to see an utterly empty living room that had previously been filled with visitors. Every timeline that had been hovering just out of sight and mercifully kept a bay suddenly railed against the constraints of the physical world and set Laws of Time.

He'd never seen or felt anything like it. It was as if the universe ended and began again in the blink of an eye. The house trembled and creaked, until finally, finally, Time and Space resettled.

Barely able to breathe past the gut-wrenching feeling of wrongness, the Doctor frantically looked around at the living room again, and was oddly relieved to find it packed with tourists once more. Nothing looked out of place. He was still in the same universe.

He let out a shuddering breath, clutching the sonic screwdriver tightly in his left hand. This was exactly why he tried to avoid causing or coming into contact with temporal anomalies, why the Time Lords of old had created so many laws and precautions against the creation of such things. This was, quite possibly, the end of the universe in slow motion.

Something prodded his leg, jolting him out of his thoughts. He jerked away and looked down just in time to see Donna Noble crawl out of the fireplace.

"There you are!" she exclaimed, clambering to her feet and dusting off her clothes. "I looked everywhere for you! Thought I saw you go into the kitchen, so I went there too, but I couldn't find you. I went out the back door and ended up in the giant paper forest with glowing mushrooms on the trees, and then I went into a hallway that turned into some kind of life-sized aquarium—without the water, obviously—and THEN, I ended up in glowing crystal caves with a gigantic, glowing fossil of a mammoth. I eventually spotted your skinny stick legs through a hole in the wall, so I crawled through it and here I am! So, where have you been?"

The Doctor gaped at her, mouth moving in an attempt to respond but utterly unable to find the right words. "I…What? Mammoths? I've been here the whole time. How…."

Donna huffed impatiently, gesturing for him to follow her. "Never mind then. You really need to see the rest of this place." She led him through the dining room, where the electric chandelier on the ceiling hung askew, and the chaotic wallpaper had clearly been altered by…something. There was a large dining table with six chairs in the centre of the room, and an old mirror on the far wall. There was also a rather disturbing hole in the ceiling right above the table. It was barely larger than a grapefruit, but the concentric ripples going out from it reached up to two feet away.

The Doctor inspected the hole, wondering if it had been caused by Morgan's grandfather's sonic machine. If enough concentrated sonic energy had been generated, he had no doubt that the resulting energy burst would have been more than enough to burn a hole straight through the ceiling. Which only made it more vital to find said machine as swiftly as possible.

Donna reminded him that he had yet to see the forest, aquarium, and glowing bones, so the Time Lord reluctantly left the dining room behind with a vow to come back later, and followed his companion through the kitchen and a narrow laundry room.

They stepped out the back door and entered a forest. The Doctor's mouth dropped open as his trainers sank into thick, green carpet, and his gaze travelled up, up, up the thick, white trunks of artistic representations of towering trees. Colorful, intricately carved lanterns hung from their white branches among thousands of white paper leaves that veiled the high industrial ceiling. Strands of multicolored lights crisscrossed the tree's trunks, some of which had bioluminescent fungi growing on them (or rather, resin molds shaped into vaguely fungal shapes and filled with touch-sensitive lights). Kids were tapping on the fungi and giggling in delight when their luminosity brightened at their touch.

A set of metal stairs wound around the trunk of the tree closest to the middle of the room, transforming into a covered ramp/ladder halfway up. This ramp connected to a narrow catwalk that wove through the trees' upper branches, passing through a camping trailer-turned-treehouse in one direction, and a coral-textured treetop gazebo in the other.

The floor was carpeted with a patchwork different carpet types and textures, mostly green or brown, but also in every other color in certain places where more sections of carpet had been somehow stuck together with cushions to resemble natural changes in topography.

The Doctor looked over his shoulder at the back of the house. It looked precisely the way it should have, under normal conditions. Its sides did not. They disappeared behind high walls, melding into them until each separate structure became indiscernible from the other.

Even from a few cursory glances, the Doctor knew there were far more people in this forest room than there had been in the house. Here, they were climbing, lounging about on pillows, couches, and carpets, playing hide and seek among the trees, and gallivanting about on the catwalks with gleeful innocence.

"What's up there?" The Doctor wondered aloud, gaze drifting over to the catwalks again. "Where do they go?"

Donna shrugged. "Dunno. I stayed down here last time."

"Well, all those people up there must be going somewhere!" He jogged over the stairs and bounded up them. He scrambled up the covered ramp, before pausing a few moments, giving Donna time to catch up.

Once on the catwalk, they had two options, to go either right or left. The Doctor decided to go left purely because more visitors were heading in that direction than any other. He and Donna followed the crowd along the catwalk and through the coral gazebo, until they stepped onto a true second level with a solid floor. On the wall in front of them was a multicolored, geometric mural depicting Lex's likeness.

The Doctor pointed this out to Donna as they passed it, and told her about the incident with the family photo in the living room.

"Can that sort of thing happen again? Will it?" She asked.

"It could happen again at any time. I saw the full effects of the anomaly's distortions because, you know, Time Lord. Comes with the job, and the genetics. The anomaly here is only partially contained, so I expect that won't be the last time something gets distorted around us." The Doctor said. He might have added more, but then two of them began to encounter numerous new things that were as bewildering and concerning as the forest they had left behind.

The first such thing they stopped to stare at was the top half of a yellow school bus sticking vertically up out of the floor in front of them.

"Is that an actual-" Donna began.

"Yes," the Doctor answered.

"But why—"

"Temporal anomaly."

Next, they stumbled upon a room with pipes all over the walls that lit up with blue light and either made gurgling sounds or musical notes when touched. The Doctor had fun discovering which pipes made particular sounds, and by the time he and Donna departed the room, he felt rather pleased with the little melodies he'd come up with (even if Donna was still laughing).

Then they reached another section of the second floor, where it transitioned into a balcony overlooking a colorful open area on the first floor, and continued around the sides of the open area as a mezzanine. Doorways and tunnels lined the open area on both floors, letting visitors go in whatever rooms and realms they pleased.

'Oh, this just gets better and better, doesn't it?' the Doctor groused, bracing his palms on the metal railing at the edge of the balcony. He was rendered speechless by the sight of even more visitors ambling around the open floor below him, and cheerfully darting in and out of the rooms accessible from the second floor walkway.

His companion joined him. "What are you thinking?" she enquired. "Made any sense of this place yet?

The Time Lord straightened with a reluctant sigh. "I think we're standing inside an extremely realistic illusion, a façade that was created either by the family that lived here, or the Charter, to hide the temporal anomaly in plain sight."

Donna's eyes widened in alarm. "How can they do that?"

"I don't know yet. This is like nothing I've ever seen," the Doctor continued. "We're standing at the center of a massive temporal anomaly, all of it partially frozen in time a few seconds after it exploded into being. And, at some point, it was transformed to look exactly like an interactive art exhibit."

"So Meow Wolf isn't real?"

"Oh, it's real, in a way. It seems to be part of whatever is containing the anomaly."

"What do we do now? Can we do anything?"

"We keep looking for the Charter. There's nothing I can do. This is, quite literally, a problem on the scale of several universes, and the effects of it didn't reach the TARDIS until long after—or actually before it had been created. Because we came across it when we did, we're now directly caught up in events. If I'm right, and I hope I'm not, then the house didn't just become part of an anomaly on March 17th. Whatever happened that night was so powerful that it formed a sort of hybrid causal nexus."

"And a causal nexus is what, exactly?"

The Doctor rubbed the back of his neck, glancing down at the crowds below. "Remember when I told you about fixed points in Pompeii? It's sort of like that, but much more problematic to deal with if something goes wrong. A nexus is basically a point in space and time where multiple strands of causality are exposed and sort of malleable. Even the smallest alteration at that point can produce new alternate timelines, even new universes. This is the first time I've even seen a semi-stabilized causal nexus. It technically shouldn't be possible."

"So you're saying with all these people here, you're telling me that because one small change can create whole new universes and timelines, then..."

"Yes. You see the problem."

Every single person's presence at Meow Wolf, even theirs, was influencing new timelines and universes that could burst existence around them at any moment.

"How come we can't see or feel anything, like we did just before the house disappeared the second time?" Donna asked.

"If I had to guess, I'd say it's all part of the illusion that's hiding the true nature of the anomaly," the Doctor mused. "There are actually hundreds of timelines and universes spiraling off of this house, even now. I can feel them, restless and churning, just itching to burst into being. Everything here is on the brink of an explosive temporal collapse."

He surveyed all visitors around them again. None of them were aware that they were standing in the epicenter of what was essentially a space-time bomb of catastrophic proportions.

"Is it safe to stay?" Donna asked quietly.

"The simplest answer is no, it's definitely not safe to stay here." For once, the Doctor gave her a bluntly honest answer. "But," he continued, "we can't leave yet. I need to know why the Charter decided it was their right to interfere with this anomaly in particular, and what they're planning to do with it. Then we should go, preferably before something destabilizes the partial time-lock on the house and we get caught in the effects of the nexus point for eternity, or sucked into the Void."

Donna put her hands on her hips. "Well, then, I guess we better start looking for the Charter."

"We're looking for people in 'science coats', according to Morgan," the Time Lord added recalling the girl's letter. At Donna's quizzical look, he explained further. "I read a letter in that painting studio by the front door, written by a little girl named Morgan. I think she's Lex's sister. She mentioned that people in 'science coats' were spying on the house, probably referring to some kind of standardized lab coats."

Donna rolled her eyes. "Oh, wonderful," she grumbled, "we're looking for secret agent scientists with the ability to freeze causal nexus points."

"That's the spirit!" the Doctor said. "Now, where do you want to start?"