How To Steal Timeships & To Influence Time Lords (short story)

How To Steal Timeships & To Influence Time Lords
Contents
Hero(es)	The First Doctor
Villain(s)	Jenny Nowhere The Great Intelligence
Featuring	Andro Fabian Unnamed Junior Time Technician (unconscious) Magnus (mentioned) Rassilon (mentioned) Percival Lankin (mentioned) Miss Erehwon's TARDIS Yog-Sothoth (mentioned) Semple (mentioned)
Setting	Gallifrey, 89067986779811167562948736197891674912223184th Universe
Technical Specs
Length	1789 words
Crossover(s)	Doctor Who
Crew
Writer(s)	Aristide Twain
Background
Dates	April the 23rd, 2023 (release)
Original link	[1]

How To Steal Timeships & To Influence Time Lords was a short story written by Aristide Twain in 2023. A fan fiction, it crossed over an alternative version of the Doctor Who universe with plot elements from Scott Sanford's Jenny Everywhere stories, serving as a Sanford-backed prequel to PROSE: Set Up to Blow Up.

Contents

Plot

On Gallifrey, slacking Time Lord Technician Andro is reflecting on the dullness of his job, and how much he dislikes his overachieving coworker Fabian, when the unthinkable finally happens after all those decades of half-watching the security feeds: nearly all the alarms in the Old Workshops start ringing, including the paradox alarm and the shobogan alarm. Reluctantly going over to Fabian's side of the room, he finds the older Technician frantically trying to get a clear reading, with Fabian explaining that he's getting multiple life signs, and that someone — or multiple someones — may be trying to steal one of the faulty TARDISes kept in the Workshops, bizarre as the idea seems.

Down in the Workshops, one of these someone, a Time Lord with long white hair, dressed in Earth-style clothes, is hurrying on his way. He freezes upon hearing the sounds of a scuffle behind him, and turns around to face a strange, threatening-looking blonde woman in non-Gallifreyan clothes, who addresses him as “Doctor”. Though she is unarmed, she is clearly dangerous, having just knocked out a brown-haired girl wearing a Junior Time Technician's uniform. The Doctor initially assumes she is a fellow Time Lord also trying to steal a timeship, asking him if she is a new form of his friend Magnus, but she reveals otherwise, gloating that she has come to this very universe for the purpose of stealing a TARDIS — and not just a TARDIS, but the one he himself intended to steal.

Not seeing the significance of stealing one Ship or another, the Doctor lets Erehwon step into the ship he'd been looking at thus far, and she dematerialises. Hearing Andro and Fabian rushing into the Workshops, however, he reasons that the woman must have been trying to distract him, and rushes into the nearest functional-looking TARDIS instead before taking off.

In flight in the Time Vortex, however, Erehwon belatedly realises that the interior of the ship she's stolen isn't at all what she'd expected, instead being pitch-black. Making herself glow with shifting power to see the controls, she tries to rectify this, and is confronted by a cold, disembodied voice which addresses him as the Doctor and gloats about having derailed the Doctor's destiny. It soon transpires that this is the voice of another ancient evil, the Great Intelligence, a splinter of Yog-Sothoth, who was also trying to highjack the Doctor's destiny. Screaming in frustration, Nowhere decides to steer the ship somewhere quiet where she and the Intelligence will be able to work out an arrangement.

Meanwhile, safely aboard his proper, Type 40 TARDIS, the First Doctor reflects that its simple white interior is “the most beautiful thing he's ever seen”, blithely thanking the woman in spirit for turning him away from the Type 44 he'd been looking at.

Worldbuilding

Universes

• Although the First Doctor believes himself to be from the Third Universe, the story is revealed by Nowhere to take place within the 89067986779811167562948736197891674912223184th Universe, one of an infinity of universes with their own versions of the Time Lords, all of whom were made to believe by the Council of Frogs that their reality snagged the prestigious “Third Universe” designation, going home with “a little casket, to be opened only in the gravest of emergency, holding the true knowledge of [their] official number”. Erehwon claims this is all documented in The Infinity Rassilons, a book by Percival Lankin.

Other

• Andro is on his second life while Fabian is on his eleventh.
• Looking over Jenny Nowhere, the First Doctor notes how she wears “no cape, no golden collar, no sigil — no House or Chapter identification of any kind”.
• The Doctor recognises the brown-haired girl's “simple, practical maroon uniform” as “the clothes of a Junior Time Technician, someone who'd fast-tracked through the Academy just to get their hands on a real TARDIS sooner — if only as a repairman”.
• When departing from Gallifrey, a decisive Doctor thinks to himself that he is “not spending another day on this planet of vampires and valeyards”.
• The pitch-black interior of the TARDIS is the result of the Great Intelligence “hardwir[ing] the desktop theme as Semple Black”.

Continuity

• This story serves as a prequel to PROSE: Set Up to Blow Up, where a version of Jenny Nowhere had been shown to possess a ship implied to be a TARDIS, with a pitch-black interior.

Behind the scenes

Background

The story's original upload contained the following commentary:

This may not make a lot of sense unless one has both seen The Name of the Doctor, and read Scott Sanford's recent Jenny Everywhere side-story, Set Up to Blow Up (https://scott-sanford.dreamwidth.org/53506.html). If anyone's wondering why Susan isn't there, well, firstly this is because this isn't the real Doctor Who universe anyway (just something very like it); but also, it's because I'm rather fonder of Birth of a Renegade's notion that the Doctor found her already hiding in the TARDIS… And then, there's Lungbarrow, of course…

—Aristide Twain

Indeed, the story's events derail a variant of a scene seen in the TV episode The Name of the Doctor, where the villainous Great Intelligence has travelled back along the Doctor's timelines trying to tear apart their history, and Clara Oswald splinters herself along the Doctor's timestream as well, appearing in various incarnations throughout their lives to nudge events back on track. The scene in question depicts Clara's brief meeting with the Doctor on the day the Doctor left Gallifrey, advising him against stealing a particular TARDIS in favour of the Type 40 he is fated to use. The nature of the Intelligence's interference in this timezone is not clarified in the episode; How To Steal Timeships & To Influence Time Lords imagines it to be that the local Intelligence had outright possessed the TARDIS from which Clara distracts the Doctor.

The story contained a number of other allusions to obtuse points of Doctor Who continuity.

• The names of the two technicians watching the Doctor on the security feeds, Andro and Fabian, are taken from the credits and scripts of The Name of the Doctor, though they are not mentioned oncreen. They are here identified as explicitly Time Technicians, a Gallifreyan occupation mentioned in various other Doctor Who sources.
• “The Infinity Rassilons by Percival Lankin”, a book which allegedly discusses the Time Lords' many alter-universal counterparts, is a reference to The Infinity Doctors by Lance Parkin, a Doctor Who anniversary novel with much to say on Doctor Who continuity and the coexistence of different versions of the Doctor Who universe. "Percival Lankin" would be used again as a stand-in for Lance Parkin in Aristide Twain's Love & War, written as part of the licensed Doctor Who spin-off Dionus.
• Although The Name of the Doctor made no reference to it, earlier printed Doctor Who material had identified the Great Intelligence as an aspect of H. P. Lovecraft's eldritch being Yog-Sothoth. This is seemingly known to Jenny Nowhere, who quips “Good old Yog” upon learning that she is in the presence of a splinter of this universe's version of the Intelligence. The idea that the original Yog-Sothoth had a variety of splinters, with one of them implicitly becoming the Intelligence, was later elaborated upon in Aristide Twain's short story The Book of the Snowstorm, written as part of the licensed Doctor Who spin-off Coloth.
• The First Doctor's line referring to Gallifrey derogatively as “a world of vampires and valeyards” alludes to a similar line in the novel Cold Fusion, where the First Doctor, shortly before making his escape, pledges to take a newborn Susan “far from this world of vampires and valeyards”.
• After coming to the beginnings of an agreement with the Intelligence about travelling together in the TARDIS the Intelligence has possessed, Nowhere exclaims: “Fire up those crystals, Cardinal!”. This was an attempt at a catchphrase proposed for the Doctor himself in an infamous unfilmed 1990s Doctor Who reboot, where the Doctor's TARDIS would have been possessed by and controlled by the disembodied spirit of the Doctor's own grandfather, Cardinal Barusa.
• The final line of the story, where the Doctor mentally reflects that his newly-stolen TARDIS is “the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen”, alludes to the TV story The Doctor's Wife, where the Doctor states that these were his first words upon entering the TARDIS for the first time.

Read online

The story can be read for free on ArchiveOfOurOwn.org.