Lost In Time: A Doctor Who Fanfiction

Chapter 89 - Past Interference

Lyssa narrowed her eyes at him. "Complicated how?" she asked suspiciously.

The Doctor drew in a deep breath and leaned down close to her ear, lowering his voice. "You remember how I said the Emperor survived three assassination attempts during his reign?"

Lyssa nodded slowly. "You also said you didn't think any happened tonight," she whispered back.

He crinkled his nose. "Well, in my defense, those three assassination attempts were all supposed to happen in the future. This is a fourth - well, technically the first, if you really want to be accurate - attempt that never got documented in the history books. Wonder why. It seems like the sort of thing one would want remembered. Unless you were the assassin, of course. Probably don't want to go down in the history books as being really bad at your job-"

"Doctor!" Lyssa hissed, drawing his attention back to the matter at hand. There was a startled noise from Dr. Smith, but she kept her gaze on the Doctor. He grimaced, glancing at Dr. Smith before offering a quick apology and pulling her away a few steps. "Assassination attempt. Tonight. How?"

"Right." He looked her over quickly. "You should be far enough along... Can you feel it? That itching at the back of your mind, your hair standing on end?"

She concentrated, frowning as she realized that the hair on the back of her neck was raised as if she'd been frightened, and there was the faintest sense in the back of her mind that something was off, barely noticeable unless she was concentrating on it. "Yeah," she said in surprised realization. "What's that mean, though? Am I... sensing something, or whatever?"

He nodded. "A fixed point in time. The peace that the Emperor-elect is responsible for bringing in the future is a fixed point in time, thus making his survival of the Midnight Dance a sort of fixed point as well. He has to live long enough to be there," he explained quickly, looking over his shoulder.

"A fixed point in time? Like with Suki having to die?" Lyssa frowned. "I'm not all dizzy like I was on Satellite 5, so it's not a broken one, right?"

"No, not broken," he confirmed, a grim expression settling on his face. "Means that someone's getting close to it, though."

She sucked in a breath, staring at him with wide eyes. "Wait, like, they're trying? Not just a by-product of trying to assassinate the Emperor, they're actually trying to break a fixed point?"

He grimaced. "Could be either, could be both. The main issue is, if Sondar dies tonight, Time will react in a big, and most likely unpleasant way to try and fix it. Since the biggest fixed point is the peace, there would likely still be peace eventually, but it would be due to several long and bloody wars that subdued all the surrounding countries to the point that there wasn't enough people left to try and revolt."

She took a deep breath and let it out again slowly. "Okay. So that's obviously not a good thing. Uh... what can we do about it? Can we stop it, or is it something that's already happened and we need to try and fix it before it's too late?"

"If we act quickly, there's still time," the Doctor muttered, pulling out his sonic and discretely scanning the room, examining the results with a frown on his face. "I was waiting in the punch line when I decided to take a look around, make sure everything was going as it should be. Also, I noticed a small gray box in the shrubbery that shouldn't have been there and was possibly sending out signals it shouldn't have. So that may have been part of it..." he trailed off, frowning in thought.

"Doctor!" Lyssa drew him impatiently back to the present once more. "Focus!"

"Right. Sorry. I scanned the box, turns out it's part of a Tenzonic Machine - a device that puts out signals that make an object appear however you want it to. For instance, you could make a table look like a curtain, or a banana look like a pear," he grimaced at the thought, as if he could taste such a travesty.