B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (233 page)

2603 - Benny: The Grel Escape
 [915]

A party of time-travelling Grel from circa 2648 deemed Peter Summerfield - the child of a Killoran and a body-jumping sorceress of legend - as worthy of further study, and attempted to capture him. Peter proved capable of activating Benny and Jason’s time rings, and the Grel pursued them to various points in space-time. The time rings temporarily matured Peter’s body, and he killed the Grel following them.

2603 - Benny: The Bone of Contention

Legends claimed that the inhabitants of the Mancor Sector fashioned skeletons around which cosmic storms would combine to form the Shadow Swans, creatures that terraformed worlds for their creators to inhabit. The Wishing Bone of Perlor was said to be a bone from one such Swan, and to bring good fortune upon whomever possessed it. The government on Perlor traded the Bone to the Galyari aboard the Clutch in exchange for weaponry, but fell to a rebellion anyway. The new Perlor government asked Benny to negotiate the return of the Bone. She found that a Galyari youth, Griko, had been grown around the Bone in the hope of creating a Galyari warrior who could overcome his race’s deep-rooted fear of the enigmatic Sandman. Griko broke his conditioning, and was killed to prevent his destroying the entire Clutch. The Galyari compensated the Perloran for the loss of their artifact.

Braxiatel wanted an army of Cybermen that could protect the Collection, and usurped the Cyber-tombs on Cantus. The blissful summer that Braxiatel had promised Ronan McGinley came to an end, and McGinley was forcibly installed as the Cantus Cybermen’s Cyber-controller.
 [916]

c 2604 - 100: “The 100 Days of the Doctor”
 [917]

The sixth Doctor and Evelyn aided an expedition funded by Irving Braxiatel, and led by Bernice Summerfield. Evelyn had many good talks with Benny, but judged that she drank too much and had a lot of relationship issues.

2604 - Benny: The Relics of Jegg-Sau

Benny went to the abandoned planet Jegg-Sau to search for the lost treasures of Robert Eliot Whitman. The Kettlewell-style Robots inhabiting the planet - including one designated K-103 - had gone mad for their isolation, and sought to form a new colony with robotic replicas of human beings. Any human that acted irrationally would be replaced, as the Robots did when Ethan Kalwell - a descendant of Professor Kettlewell - came in search of his ancestor’s inventions. The interstellar Red Cross dispatched rescue ships to retrieve Benny, but the Robots attacked them after absorbing enough energy to enlarge in size. The Red Cross jets brushed aside Benny’s pleas for clemency, and wiped out the Robots.

2604 - Benny: Masquerade of Death

Benny found a copy of a play,
The Masquerade of Death
, and fell prey to a complex virus embedded in the text. She was comatose for four days, and dreamed of a storybook land with characters such as the Queen of Spring, the Duke of Autumn, the Matriarch of Winter and the Player of All Seasons. She used storyland logic to wake herself up.

On Etheria, Abbot Primus greatly enjoyed watching the Galactic Snooker Championship.
 [918]

2604 - Benny: Silver Lining

Benny found a tomb of Cybermen on Tysir IV while giving an archaeology consult. The Cybermen hoped to weaken humanity with a plague, but Benny sealed the Cybermen within their tomb, and they were destroyed when it blew up.

2604 - Benny: The Tree of Life

The entrepreneur Hugo Tollip bought a jungle planet that he renamed Tollip’s World, and initiated research to commercialise or even weaponise the variety of DNA found there. Benny helped to prevent Tollip from transplanting a Tree of Life off world, fearing it would defensively create a virus powerful enough to wipe out humanity. Tollip was killed, and the hammies stored within the Trees were revived.

2604 (24th December) - Benny: The Heart’s Desire
 [919]

Benny became embroiled in a diversionary game between the Eternals Hardy and Barron on Marlowe’s World. She captured the prize of their game - a shard of Enlightenment - and used it to wish away a pulsar that was headed towards the Braxiatel Collection. For good measure, she turned Hardy and Barron into mortals. She then threw the Enlightenment shard out an airlock, confident that another Eternal would instantly claim it.

2605 - Benny: The Kingdom of the Blind

Benny came into telepathic contact with the enslaved descendents of the Halavans while examining artifacts from the lost civilisation on Petreus III. The Monoids had become increasingly cruel slave-masters, giving the Halavans numbers for names, and forcing any slave who developed the power of speech to forfeit one of their other senses. Benny aided the Halavans in regaining their telepathic gestalt, which enabled them to overpower their masters. The vengeful Halavans - despite Benny’s plea for mercy - psionically stripped the Monoids of their names and removed their ability to speak. They also used their mental prowess to destroy the Monoid planet, and set course back to Petreus III.
 [920]

The CroSSScape were gestalt beings who had transferred their minds into a datascape. The sudden appearance in the datascape of a box that couldn’t be opened filled the CroSSScape with misery and loathing, and they theorised that their god - who had been imprisoned within the Tartarus Gate, a legendary gateway to Hell - could open it for them. To find the Gate, the CroSSScape presented themselves as a benevolent religious order that used an edifice, simply called “the Factory”, to reverse natural disasters by rolling back time on doomed worlds. The CroSSScape spent a year looking for the Gate and finally located it on Cerebus Iera, a desert world prone to freak electrical storms.
 [921]

2605 (23rd September to 14th November) - Benny: A Life in Pieces: “Zardox Break” / “The Purpura Pawn” / “On Trial”
 [922]

Earth had an official Acquisition of Alien Artifacts Department. A girl group, the Glitta Bitches, were working on a new Tri-D movie.

Marck Morton became governor of Verum - the contested moon of Aequitas - and negotiated a peace that granted Verum independence. However, Morton was murdered on 23rd September, 2605. Jason Kane - who had leveraged his career as a xenoporn author and become a major celebrity on the resort planet Zardox, partly due to the salacious reporting of his exploits in
Aventures de la Frontière Nouvelle
- was charged with the crime, and thought to have killed Morton to steal a relic of the old empire, the Purpura Pawn, from him.
 [923]

Jason’s trial began on 12th November; Benny helped to establish his innocence on 14th November. As they returned to the Collection, a bomb destroyed the courthouse, killing one hundred and thirty-one people. The crime was blamed on parties who had opposed Verum’s independence, stoking political tensions.

On 1st December, Aequitas cut all ties with Verum. On 2nd December, the Earth Empire dissolved Verum’s government and secured the moon with peacekeeping troops; this instigated an era of hatred and terrorist incidents. On 2nd January, 2606, an Earth official named Matthew Barrister died in a shuttle explosion, after confiscating the remaining Ceatul Empire relics. The items officially went missing, but the Purpura Pawn, somehow, wound up in Braxiatel’s possession.
 [924]

2606 - Benny: The Goddess Quandary
 [925]

The leaky roof of the Etheria monastery was one of the Wonders of the Galaxy.

Benny had completed a documentary on the legendary warlord Aldebrath for the Tri-D Broadcasting Company, and the monks on Etheria invited her to learn whether their planetoid system contained his final resting place. Tri-D’s central news bureau was on Angola V. Benny’s friend Keri, a journalist for Tri-D, documented the search.

Benny found Aldebrath’s ship, the
Fervent Hope
, in one of Etheria’s outer planetoids. Aldebrath’s mind was in the ship’s computer systems, and she used her love-inducing telepathy to stop a religious uprising. Keri’s reputation had suffered after she botched an expose on the multi-zillionaire Stellis Gadd, and Benny ended their friendship after learning that Keri had hampered her search to get a better story. Benny took Aldebrath and the
Fervent Hope
back to the Collection, only to find that Clarissa Jones, one of the Collection’s administrators, had gone missing...

2606 - Benny: Parallel Lives: “The Serpent’s Tooth” / “Hiding Places” / “Jason and the Pirates” / “Parallel Lives”
 [926]

Clarissa Jones abruptly kidnapped Peter and disappeared. Benny followed them to Atwalla 3, a medieval world in the Fallan Nebula where women had no rights. She went undercover as a man, joined some knights on a successful quest and was rewarded by being married to Jesh, the daughter of Emperor Jodal. Benny bluffed Jodal into thinking that a virus had been devised that would let the Atwallan breed with other species - an act that would, in time, destroy the Atwallan bloodline. Jodal considered Benny’s threat to unleash the virus unless he granted the Atwallan females equal rights.

Jason joined the search for Peter late, having been delayed - or so he told Benny - owing to an escapade where he had to join some pirates led by Buggering Barnabas Jimmity Jim-Bob Hullabaloo, aboard their ship
The Black Pig
.

Benny, Jason, Bev and Adrian confronted Clarissa on the suburban worlds of Thuban. Clarissa said she was from the future, and that she wanted to raise Peter to avoid the life that Benny suspected was in wait for him. She relented and returned Peter to Benny, but a scuffle led to Bev killing Clarissa as she drew a gun on Adrian.

Bernice’s cat Wolsey died from natural causes, and was buried in the Collection’s garden. Bev and Adrian were now in relationship. Temporal distortion revised the history of the Collection’s gardener, Hass - he was no longer a Martian, and always had been a Yesodi, a jellyfish-like being capable of generating a vast store of radiation within its pressure suit.
 [927]

2606 (January) - Benny: The Lost Museum
 [928]

Benny and Jason went to salvage exhibits from the Trib Museum, as the dictatorial regime on the planet housing it had fallen. Jason quelled the carnage by tricking each faction into thinking that the other had backed down.

2606 (February) - Benny: The Crystal of Cantus
 [929]

The Galyari performed a production of
Macbeth
on Berkoff IV.

The crystal that allowed Ronan McGinley to control the Cybermen on Cantus was killing him, and a new Cyber-controller was required. Braxiatel tried and failed to install Jason as the new Cyber-controller; Benny learned of his treachery, and Jason broke Braxiatel’s mental conditioning. Benny used the crystal to eradicate the Cantus Cybermen, then destroyed it. His machinations exposed, Braxiatel departed from the Collection. In his absence, the Draconians made a claim to planetoid KS-159.

2606 - Benny: The Tartarus Gate
 [930]

The Craxitanian government was so grateful to Benny for finding their prized temple, they rewarded her with ten boxes of their famed champagne.

The CroSSScape captured Bernice, thinking that - thanks to her body having already accommodated the mind of a goddess - she could serve as the physical host to their god. The Factory regressed time on Cerebus Iera to when the Tartarus Gate - a black hole, held in perfect balance - had last been opened, and the god transferred across. The god cast the CroSSScape into the Hell that lay beyond the Gate, and was then trapped in a datascape box.

2606 - Benny: Timeless Passages

Important manuscripts had been lost when a giant space aardvark accidentally inhaled the Splendid Biblious Spiroplex of the ten billion sapients of Zoomos Prime. Rare documents in this era included
The Atrocity Exhibitions
,
The Augenblick Presidency
by Robert Dallek and
Aristotle’s Poetics, Part 3: Smokey is the Bandit
. The Adjudicators were still active.

The origin of the Labyrinth on the planet Kerykeion was unknown, but it contained one of the biggest collections of human publications outside Earth, with more than two hundred million books, including the only known copy of
Gay Bulgaria
. A corporation, Omni-Spatial Mercantile Dynamics (OSMD), sought to buy Kerykeion because the Labyrinth’s passages stretched into different points in space-time, which is how the original librarians there acquired their collection.

Bev Tarrant was now administrating the Braxiatel Collection, and sent Bernice to purchase rare books from the Labyrinth before the OSMD buy-out. Benny met - and destroyed - a murderous cyborg sent from the future by OSMD’s descendents.
 [931]
The librarian Hermione Wolfe wound up owning the Labyrinth, and cut a deal with the Braxiatel Collection as to the Labyrinth’s holdings.