Interlude
It was the best of THE DARK TIMES; it was the worst of THE DARK TIMES.
Arissa slams the book shut and throws it across the room in disgust with no regard for the ancient binding or crumbling pages within. It thuds against the far wall before hitting the floor, leaving her instantly ashamed. One simply doesn’t throw books, no matter how inane the book may be.
“I know, I know.” She acknowledges, rising off the couch to retrieve the tome. “But come on, ‘the best of THE DARK TIMES’?” She quotes. “Times that were so dark, they are spoken about in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS? How could there possibly be any ‘best of’ times?”
She inspects the book, and satisfied that there was no permanent damage done, returns it to its place on the bookshelf.
“The problem with THE DARK TIMES is that not too many people made it out of them alive. It’s difficult to learn the history when so little history exists. So, we’re left with all these half-truths and myths and legends, and most of them involve the Doctor in some way, shape, or form, which automatically makes the truth of the stories suspect in my mind.”
She whirls suddenly, glaring skyward. “You used my name. I thought we agreed, no names?” The author starts to type something about “literary license”, but is cut off—“No, no, no! I’m doing you a favor. Don’t forget that. Stick to the terms of the deal.” She warns. Then sighs, rubbing a hand through her short hair. “Well, it’s out. Can’t take it back now, can we?”
She begins to pace the confines of the pyramid’s control room, walking around the black silk couch, between the pool table sized control panel and the gold felt covered pool table, in front of the giant viewscreen that dominated one wall of the room, and past bookshelves stuffed full of leatherbound first editions, signed copies of the dead sea scrolls and other documents from all over the universe. She bypasses the open doors that lead out onto the terrace that overlooks the ruined city. 2020 is out there and she inherently knew it would contribute nothing of value.
There’s only so much paradox a mind can take, after all.
Arissa thought she was almost at capacity herself. She found her memories changing from moment to moment, adding to her frustration. It was one thing to know something and be confused by contradictory evidence, and quite another to suddenly realize the thing you knew wasn’t what you knew at all, and the evidence wasn’t contradictory, because IT was correct all along, and you knew that. She shakes her head vigorously trying to dislodge the chaos. She even considers reconsulting Andrew Kearley’s “The Complete Adventures” for reference, but that website, (and all other subsequent Doctor Who websites for that matter), while normally rock-solid kept displaying File 404 error messages as if the internet itself was giving up.
Without consciously knowing that she’s doing it, Arissa moves back to the control panel and begins laying in a course. The Pyramid ship responds to her touch, sealing off exterior bulkheads and lifting gently off the towers it was resting on. The buildings crumble into their own pyramid-shaped piles of debris, but the sound dampers are already on, so inside she hears nothing but the distant throb of the engines from somewhere deep inside the ship.
“There’s really only one way out of this.” She reasons. “I don’t appreciate being forced into it, mind you, but if you’re being affected by these temporal shifts more than just having to change the upcoming podcast schedule every week—well then drastic measures it is.”
The Pyramid ship hangs over the ruins, tears a hole in the fabric of reality with the sound of a door stopper being sprung by a precocious kitten, and vanishes.
“Next stop, THE DARK TIMES,” Arissa says grimly.
