Authors: Lance Parkin,Lars Pearson
& 2012 - Martha in the Mirror
[22]
The planets Anthium and Zerugma had been at war for centuries. Castle Extremis, a floating edifice in space that was formerly home to the Mystic Mortal Monks of Moradinard, became crucial to the conflict - whomever controlled Extremis controlled the Sarandon Passage. The strategist Manfred Grieg ended the second Zerguain occupation, and was later given a gift: the Mortal Mirror. The Darksmiths of Karagula had built the Mirror on behalf of Grieg’s opponents - he was trapped within its internal dimension, and couldn’t counter-act the third Zerguain occupation.
The tenth Doctor and Martha hid Grieg’s glass diary in Extremis, knowing they would find it in a hundred years’ time.
The Darksmith Legacy
[23]
c 2012 - The Dust of Ages / The Graves of Mordane / The Colour of Darkness / The Pictures of Emptiness / The Art of War
[24]
Earth experienced such a shortage of minerals and metal ores, some corporations began surveying the moon for its mining potential. One such survey found the Eternity Crystal of the Darksmiths - it had been buried for at least a century, and instinctively created humanoids composed of moondust to defend itself with. The tenth Doctor ended the threat and sealed the Crystal within a stasis box, but was then confronted by a time-active Agent the Darksmiths had dispatched to retrieve the Crystal. The Doctor travelled to the planet Mordane in the far future to learn how to destroy the Crystal, but the Agent pursued him through time and captured the item.
The Doctor followed the Agent to the Darksmiths’ homeworld of Karagula... and stole it back again. He experienced a handful of adventures, along with the android girl Gisella, as part of his efforts to destroy the Crystal.
[25]
The Shadow Proclamation eventually ruled that Gisella was the rightful owner of the Eternity Crystal - but she had been reprogrammed, and recognised the Darksmiths’ claim to the item. The Darksmiths went to London, Galactic reference 297/197AHG, to give the Crystal to the fearsome Krashoks who had commissioned it. The Krashoks turned upon the Darksmiths and killed them... but were then stymied by the Doctor, and retreated into the past using a Dalek temporal shift device. The Doctor saved Gisella and secured the Crystal, and they pursued the Krashoks to medieval times...
c 2012 (early autumn to late November) - Iris: Enter Wildthyme
[26]
Terrance - an accomplished thief operating throughout space and time, and the owner of the Great Big Book Exchange in Darlington - went missing and bequeathed the shop to one of its patrons: Simon, age 26. Simon and his friend Kelly fell in with Iris Wildthyme and Panda when the poet Anthony Marville stole the most important item in Terrance’s collection - the glass jar containing the Scarlet Empress Euphemia, a.k.a. the “Objet D’Oom” (as it was called by the F’rrgelaaris). The Empress was crucial to Marville’s plans to open up the Ringpull to gain access to the Obverse, and from there travel to the planet Hyspero to plunder its dark magics. Iris, Panda, Simon, Kelly, Barbra the sentient vending machine and Iris’ ex-companion Jenny became embroiled in this affair, and dogged Marville to numerous locations in space-time. Kelly fell under the sway of Marville’s hypnotic power of speech,
murmur
ism.
Iris, Simon and Panda returned to this era to rest, thinking their other friends had died circa 33,935 on the planet Valcea. They then went to Hyspero, millions of years in the future. MIAOW closed down its Darlington branch.
? 2012 (November) - Hunter’s Moon
[27]
Kobal Zalu, a Galactic Marine Corps lieutenant in a past war between Torodon and the Terileptils, had now met the Doctor “many times”.
The eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory visited Leisure Platform 9, one of ninety such platforms in the Phrygian system. Rory lost a game of Dead Man’s Duel - he was thereby conscripted as prey in a hunt, the Gorgoror Chase. The Xorg Krauzzen criminal cartel had effectively taken over Gorgoror, a moon of the gas giant Zigriz in the Torodon system, and operated the Chase as a hunt for benefit of bored millionaires, weekend warriors and gamblers. The Torodon Confederation, which spanned several star systems, left Krauzzen alone so long as Torodons were not involved. The Doctor posed as a hunter in the Chase to help Rory, and greatly curtailed Kruazzen’s operations. Krauzzen, a cyborg, tried to hunt the Doctor down - but the Doctor increased the magnetic force of a nuclear reactor, causing Krauzzen to plunge to his death.
c 2012 (Christmas) - The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe
[28]
The eleventh Doctor arrived at Amy and Rory’s house in time to share Christmas dinner with them.
By 2012, Countess Gallowglass was operating her mail-forwarding service from a hidden location near Carnaby Street. The seventh Doctor visited the Countess, with Ace, in August to collect his mail. According to the Countess, London should be avoided on 14th July, 2013.
[29]
General Tidos, a dictator affiliated with the Sentinels of the New Dawn, rose to power in Tanganyika, Africa.
[30]
2013 - Autonomy
[31]
Animatronic attractions at Hyperville, the largest shopping mall in Europe, aroused the tenth Doctor’s suspicions. Kate Maguire, now a trainee at Hyperville, aided the Doctor with the Hypercard he had given her in 2009. The two of them destroyed an army of Autons as well as the Nestene’s top Auton assistant, Elizabeth Devonshire. UNIT cleared up the mess, and the Doctor popped back four years to give Kate Maguire the crucial Hypercard.
Erisa Magambo was still with UNIT. The singer Shaneeqi was one of the biggest hits of the past five years, with singles including “Gimmie Love Now” and “All That You Mean”. Her “Don’t Steal My Boyfriend, Girlfriend” was the vid-download No. 1 for nine weeks. She married soccer player Paul Kendrick - who was actually an Auton that was developing some glimmering of autonomy, and was destroyed during these events.
The eleventh Doctor claimed that the “truth” about a famed celebrity - who had arrived on Earth after falling through a dimensional rift - would be revealled to the public a “few years” after Amy’s time. However, he couldn’t remember if this revelation applied to the winner of
X Factor
, the winner of
American Idol
, the winner of
South Korea’s Got Talent
or Lady Gaga.
[32]
2014 - The Sentinels of the New Dawn
[33]
Cambridge University now had a heliport, just off Wilberforce Road.
The Sentinels of the New Dawn emerged as an ascendant coalition of high-ranking scholars, scientists and politicians who officially promoted a “greener, fairer future”, but in reality was a tool by which its elite members sought power. The Sentinels’ scientists were having some success creating biomechanoids, including a human-bird monstrosity that resembled Heliodromus: a mythical punisher of the damned. The group was also trying to develop a concentrated form of the ebola virus - and a cure for it - so they could cause a widespread contagion after positioning themselves to restore order.
(=) The Sentinels built a time dilator using Terri Billington’s schematics, and created a wormhole linked to Billington’s prototype dilator in the 1970s. They hoped to attain enough control of time travel to retroactively empower their members, and to foresee their opponents’ decisions. The third Doctor and Liz visited this time, and upon returning home destroyed Billington’s work - retroactively preventing the Sentinels from creating their time-dilation device.
The eighth Doctor visited a house in Kent and saved a cat.
[34]
c 2014 (late autumn) - Warlock
[35]
Organised crime continued to rely on the profits of drug trafficking. Dealers now used sports cars to get around, and the British police were forced to use Porsches to keep up with them. Soon, Porsche were even making a special model for them.
In an attempt to win the Drugs War, the International Drug Enforcement Agency (IDEA) was set up. A pooling of Interpol and FBI resources, IDEA had a number of well-publicised successes against drug dealers, forcing many of them underground. IDEA was based in the King Building in New York, the old headquarters of the Butler Institute, and its methods often brought them into conflict with local police forces.
For around a year, IDEA had been aware of a new street drug called Warlock by many of its users. The seventh Doctor sent Benny to infiltrate IDEA’s headquarters to learn more about Warlock, as it was granting people psionic abilities and seemed to defy analysis. He tried to contact Vincent and Justine Wheaton, who had settled down and were expecting a child, to locate their associate Mrs Woodcott - an expert on Warlock. An IDEA team learned about Vincent’s powers, but an attempt to capture Vincent resulted in his psionically manifesting an opponent’s hatred as a fireball that destroyed Canterbury Cathedral. The event was attributed to a freak ball-lightning effect.
Ace investigated a research lab near Canterbury that was kidnapping animals and using Warlock to exchange their minds with people. The Doctor’s cat Chick, a resident of his house in Kent for about a year, was captured and euthanised. The Doctor and his allies found Vincent and ended the research lab’s activities. The mind of a Kent resident, Jack, remained trapped in a dog, but the Doctor took possession of Jack’s human body.
Creed McIlveen, an undercover IDEA agent, saved Justine Wheaton from a forced prostitution house that threatened to terminate her pregnancy. Grateful to Creed, Justine became his lover. Harry Harrigan Jnr, the head of IDEA, had been using Warlock to transfer his mind into younger bodies, and now intended on doing so with Creed. A further discharge of Vincent’s powers released the alien intelligence within Warlock, and it left for space after incinerating Harrigan.
Justine left her husband for Creed. Vincent departed with the dog named Jack.
At the start of 2014, the Home Office introduced compulsory HIV blood tests. In June the next year, MI5’s Harry Sullivan told UNIT that the blood of a survivor of the Quadrant Incident might hold a cure to the condition.
[36]
Ambrose Northover’s aunt Gladys died in 2014. Her body had vanished from its grave by 2020, taken by Malohkeh of the Silurians.
[37]
Victoria Waterfield had created a new life for herself - she was a wife and a mother, and was soon to be a grandmother. She’d never told her family of her origins and adventures in time - and suspected that time was running out, as her memories were fading.
[38]
The eleventh Doctor warned that the psionic abilities of George, a Tenza disguised as a young boy, might re-manifest around puberty, as it was “always a funny time”.
[39]
c 2015 - Benny: Present Danger: “Excalibur of Mars”
[40]
Knight-General Ancelyn Ap Gwalchma broke his leg playing a charity football match for benefit of his Squires Academy in Wessex.
(=) The Deindum moved Deimos and Phobos out of Mars orbit to use as a power source, capitalising upon an other-dimensional weak spot within Phobos. Winifred Bambera used her husband’s bionodal travelling armour to take the reactivated Excalibur to Mars, where she encountered a time-travelling Bernice Summerfield, and found a chamber built for the sword by Merlin. Benny sheathed Excalibur in a sword room, enabling it to act as a gravitational anchor that drew Deimos and Phobos back into orbit. This also anchored the moons in the past, preventing their loss from ever happening. Merlin told Benny that Excalibur must remain on Mars for several million years at least.
2015 (7th June) - “The Lunar Strangers”
[41]
The cow-like inhabitants of Dryra had settled into a peaceful existence, but two of their number - Ravnok and Vartex - released a killer virus to provoke the population into action. Ravnok and Vartex subsequently buried a treasure on Earth’s moon, but were then captured and sentenced to three thousand years in prison. They soon escaped, and returned to find that a Moon Village had been built over their treasure. The fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough caught Ravnok and Vartex red-hooved trying to sabotage the Moon Village’s reactor. Commander Jackson shot Vartex, and Ravnok suffocated on the moon’s surface. The Doctor revealled that the “treasure” was actually cheese - the currency on Dryra.
2015 (21st October to 13th November) - The Eight Truths / Worldwide Web
[42]
Storms battered the Caribbean, and the President of Cuba blamed the problem on climate change.
Britain had spent £75 million on the Terra Nova space project, which had a tracking station in Buckinghamshire. A Terra Nova satellite sent to obtain water samples from Mercury went missing only two days after NASA lost contact with one of its solar probes. The eighth Doctor and Lucie aided authorities concerning the mystery. The Eightfold Truth’s membership had increased fivefold in the last five years, and the group continued to advocate a self-help regimen of meditation using Metebelis crystals provided to its members. The organisation had converted the old BBC Television Centre into a residential block with lecture rooms. Journalist Kelly Westwood tried to prove the group fraudulent with her books
The Octopus Cult
and
Don’t Believe the Truth
.