Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart became the personal bodyguard to Howard, the son of Earth President Fiona Dickens, and recruited Benny to investigate the president’s increasingly strange behaviour. They stopped the clone-Dickens - who threw herself to her death - from pushing the Earth Empire into open warfare with various alien races. The clone of Benny from The Jason Kane Show became Earth president, while the original Dickens and Howard went travelling with Kadiatu.
Simultaneous to these events, Jason Kane learned that, owing to Braxiatel’s machinations, large portions of his timeline had been altered or deleted altogether. Jason threatened Braxiatel with exposure - in response, Braxiatel goaded Peter into thinking that Jason was a threat to Bernice. Peter’s savage side took over, and he killed Jason.
Jason’s associate Mira threw off Braxiatel’s conditioning, and started a new life with a Jason-clone.
2607 (31st December) - TW: “Overture” [944]
Jack Harkness visited the planet Zog. An alien representative gave him a sonic failsafe to curtail its sleeper agents on Earth, 1941, and Jack duly sent it back to his former self.
2607 (December) to 2608 - Benny: The Wake [945]
The dance version of “Abide With Me” was played at Jason’s funeral, and his xenoporn books were republished. A provisional government was now running the Collection. Bernice continued teaching at the Collection for a time, but deduced Braxiatel and Hass’ involvement in the Mim’s downfall. Lacking the evidence and support to challenge Braxiatel directly, Benny snuck away from the Collection with Peter, and went on the run in a spaceship.
2608 - Benny: Beyond the Sea [946]
Galaxo-Starbucks-Disney copyrighted the name “Atlantis” when it opened up The Real Atlantis. Benny took a job producing a documentary of a lost civilisation on the watery world of Maximediras, which was rebranding itself as a tourist stop. Isolationist members of the micro-organisms who inhabited Maximediras animated some cadavers, and tried to push the human colonists off world. Benny curtailed the rogues, and the micro-organisms’ government invited the colonists to share the planet with them.
Peter was transported back to 65,000 BC; Benny followed him after unearthing the time ring that he lost in a lava flow. They separately returned to their native era, after Benny made a side trip to 1893. Upon her return, Benny had manuscripts of some unpublished Sherlock Holmes adventures. These included The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel and The Cautionary Tale of Ludvig Cooray - the latter of which involved the disappearance of the nephew of a minor German aristocrat. [947]
2608 - Benny: The Diet of Worms [948]
On Earth, the Depository served as an archive for cultural and literary giants whose works had survived the Dalek Wars, including Martin Luther, Charles Darwin, Wilkie Collins and Barbara Cartland. Earth Central halved the Depository’s budget, and a bibliotaph, Myrtle Bunnage, wanted to regain this funding by giving the impression that paper-eating worms had infested the facility. The worms consumed a manuscript by Cartland that contained extra-terrestrial paper, and thereby gained the ability to recite any text they ate. Bernice contained the situation and saved the worms - who were now the sole source of documents written by Luther, Darwin and Cartland.
c 2609 - The Company of Friends: “Benny’s Story” [949]
Hired by Countess Venhella, Bernice excavated 50-million-year-old rock on Epsilon Minima and thereby found the buried TARDIS key, which summoned the eighth Doctor’s TARDIS. Venhella believed that TARDISes were an enslaved species, and tried to liberate the Doctor’s Ship with a manumitter - a forbidden Gallifreyan device. Improper use of the manumitter created cracks in the fabric of the universe, and threatened to unleash ravenous monstrosities. The Doctor and Benny were briefly flung back to Epsilon Minima’s past, but returned - whereupon the Doctor sealed the space-time cracks. He and Benny shared some adventures before he successfully took her home.
(=) 2609 - Benny: Glory Days [950]
Bev and Adrian aided Benny in breaking into Finger’s bank to gain entry to a vault there owned by Braxiatel. They found within a painting that Benny had created while wearing her time ring - in case of emergency, Braxiatel could download his consciousness into a cloned body via the painting’s temporal link. Benny altered the painting’s history...
... and in so doing, averted Finger’s ever being founded. A beer seller stood in its former location.
Cloning had come a long way since its use on specialised farm worlds. Ocean’s 14 1/2 had been released. The Collected Works of Jason Kane had topped the adult charts since Jason’s demise.
2609 (Sunday, 18th June to Saturday, 24th June) - Benny: The Vampire Curse: “Predating the Predators” [951]
While Peter stayed on Fomalhaut IV, Benny joined an expedition arranged by the Fomalhaut Museum of Forerunner Artifacts to the Blood Citadel of the Alukah - an ancient race of vampires. She was present at the excavation of the tomb of Re’Olena, a servant of Lord Ekimmu who was banished as punishment for laughing. Olena awakened, and started a vampire insurrection at the First Colonial University on Murigen - a planet with three suns (Fea, Macha, and Nemhain), and was home to the Lavellans. Olena’s vampires attempted to seize the intergalactic quantum tunnel system being developed by the Lavellan professor “Stassy” Leustassavil, hoping to create a transgalactic vampire empire with Olena at its head. Leustassavil opened tunnels that eradicated Olena and her vampires in Murigen’s suns.
2609 - Benny: Absence [952]
Benny and Peter stopped off on the cluster world of Absence - which was deep in human space and hundreds of light years from anyone hostile - while en route to Venus to collect Jason’s immense royalties. Needing funds to leave Absence, Benny flipped burgers while Peter was hired to assist with an expedition sponsored by Interspatial Systems Acquisitions (ISA) into Absence’s interior. The Technocult - a cyber-culture that could store the entire holdings of the Labyrinth of Kerykeion on the inside of a ball bearing - took an interest in Absence, and it was suspected that the world’s interior was evolving. The founder of ISA, Lamarque Aslinesdes, was killed by Cindy, a sentient prototype environmental suit built by his company.
2609 - Benny: Venus Mantrap [953]
The government on Venus was responsible for two artificial moons: Eros and Thanatos. Eros had a reputation for romance, but industry drove Thanatos, which was installed with Venusian warhives and rockets. Eros had an orbital spaceport. Thanks to an agency run by Megali Scoblow, a disgraced former academic who Benny had met on Mars in 2595, the rich and influential on Eros could hire “love drones”. These used state of the art cerebral-profilogical mapping techniques to match their clients’ conscious and subconscious desires. The penalty for owing certain types of lockpicks on Eros was five years in Earth’s Lunar penal colony; on some of the outer worlds of the solar system, the sentence was death.
Benny tried to acquire Jason’s royalties from his publisher, Velvet Mandible, while Peter stayed with his father in Dallas. The Trans-Galactic Taxes and Duties Division of Outland Revenue claimed most of Jason’s fortune, pursuant to duties under Section 32: erotica and explicit fiction import to the Xlanthi Clachworlds. Benny capitulated, as an appeal would mean spending six months on the ice moon of Flisp, which only got two days of sun a month.
N’Jok Barnes - the half-Venusian, half-human ambassador representing Venus on Eros - tried and largely failed to ratchet up tensions between Eros and Venus so he could look heroic while resolving the “crisis”. He came out of the incident unscathed - unlike his co-conspirator, Eros’ Vice Chancellor Safron Twisk, who was left disgraced when he publicly read aloud a passage from Barely Humanoid - one of Jason’s pornographic novels - that Benny had fed into his autocue.
Samuel Frost murdered President Summerfield and sent her body in a shuttle to Eros - as a means of getting Benny’s attention. [954]
2609 - Benny: Secret Origins [955]
Benny went to the ruins of Buenos Aires when Samuel Frost - her purported longtime nemesis, whom she didn’t remembe
r - kidnapped Peter. During the confrontation, Frost was killed. An android from the future, Robyn, sought to undo Buenos Aires’ demise; her temporal powers enabled Benny, whose body remained in bed, to accompany her though time as a temporal projection. They encountered Frost in 2002 and 2212, and neutralised his obliteration of Buenos Aires after identifying his origin year as 1937.
Benny accepted an assignment to preserve a church on the war-torn planet Jovellia as an Antique Faith Environment. While doing so, she aided a lifeform that changed states of being in space - but was currently trapped on Jovellia as a series of black crystals - to attain the next phase of its lifecycle. [956]
2610 - Benny: Dead and Buried [957]
Braxiatel fabricated a “lost civilisation” on the planet Jovada as bait for Benny. He had her put into stasis when she excavated the site, preventing her from interfering with his plans...
2610 - Benny: Resurrecting the Past [958]
Adrian and Peter found Benny and revived her from stasis. Braxiatel now believed that his people were doomed, and purchased the ocean planet Maximediras to adapt into a new home for the Time Lords he hoped to “resurrect”. He relocated Maximediras’ eight thousand residents, and moved the energy field near the Braxiatel Collection to Maximediras, hoping it would become the Time Lords’ new power source.
Simultaneously, Braxiatel’s operations against the Deindum entered a new phase... Braxiatel Protective Mechanoids (BPMs) were dispatched to kidnap various individuals, who were scanned in a former moonrock processing facility on Earth’s moon. Braxiatel was searching for an individual who, when dispatched into the time-space rift to the Deindum’s homeworld in the future, would alter the Deindum’s development so they wouldn’t develop time travel, and would have a less aggressive and paranoid nature. Bernice was Braxiatel’s failsafe - consigning her to the rift would have curtained the Deindum’s advancement. Before that could happen, the android Robyn accidentally fell into the rift, which then closed.
(=) Robyn’s inorganic matter had no effect on the Deindum’s evolution, and they became immensely powerful beings that manifested as large, glowing reptilian heads. The Deindum sent troops back through time to conquer habitable space in the twenty-seventh century in the name of their empire...
(=) 2610 - Benny: Present Danger / Escaping the Future
The Deindum established a base on Maximediras, and from there conducted campaigns in the past and present to the stability of their timeline. They were a danger to every civilisation in the galaxy. In their wake, the Braxiatel Collection was overrun with refugees. Braxiatel, Bernice and their allies coordinated resistance efforts, but the Deindum succeeded in overcoming their coalition... [959]
Bernice suggested to Braxiatel that manipulating the Deindum at a crucial point of their development would erase their invasion from history. Braxiatel concurred, even though the effort would expend more than half of the Maximediras energy rift, preventing him from resurrecting his people. The Deindum sabotaged their efforts - to retroactively undo this defeat, Hass opened up his containment suit on Maximediras, killing the Deindum there and every living thing. The Deindum overwhelmed the Collection; Peter, Adrian and Bev were left behind as Benny and Braxiatel travelled four million years ahead in his TARDIS, successfully implemented their plan, and historically nullified the Deindum invasion.
Benny found herself in an unknown era on the planet Raster - one of twenty inhabited worlds where the disciplines of history and archaeology had been outlawed. She travelled in stasis to the worlds’ capital, the planet Zordin, and awoke to find that Zordin looked like Earth, and that the Great Leader had just renamed it “Atlantis...” [960]
2616 - Benny: Epoch: Judgement Day [961]
Benny escaped from “Atlantis” using a stasis chamber, and awoke in 2616 aboard Mars Base Grantham-Echo-Four. The version of Irving Braxiatel who had encountered Benny just once - on Dellah in 2593 - left a message that he could reunite her with Peter, and that she should rendezvous with him on the planet Legion...
In 2618, the human military organisation Global Command considered the Korven the most dangerous and destructive race of the age. [962] Circa 2620, crystal towers were constructed on Rigel VII, an Earth Empire colony. [963] Some, if not all, of the crystals used by the Snakedancers of Manussa were created. [964]
Mark Morton’s illegitimate child - the historian and playwright Kristoffa Taillor - came to own a copy of Bernice Summerfield’s diary, and studied it to learn more about his parents’ deaths. Taillor found that no official records existed pertaining to Bernice Summerfield, Jason Kane, Adrian Wall, Bev Tarrant and Irving Braxiatel. In 2647, Taillor was fatally poisoned at an orbiting restaurant, The Final Rest. A Life in Pieces, a collection of texts concerning Morton’s murder, was subsequently published. [965]
A party of Grel went back in time to capture Peter Summerfield and study him. [966] The Arrow of Righteousness set out on its holy journey some time before 2650, the pilgrims inside frozen in meditation. [967]
c 2650 - Midnight [968]
The tenth Doctor brought Donna to Midnight, an airless but beautiful diamond world bathed in extonic sunlight. Donna preferred to sun herself in the Leisure Palace rather than take the Crusader tour to the 100,000-foot sapphire waterfalls. The Doctor and his fellow tour passengers were menaced by an entity that possessed them in turn - it repeated words spoken aloud, then predicting words before they were said. The tour hostess threw herself and the entity’s core host, Sky Silvestry, into the radiation-saturated planetscape, killing them both.
The Crusader 50 shuttle bus ran on micropetrol.
By this point, the Lost Moon of Poosh had been stolen through time to become part of the Daleks’ reality bomb. [969] In 2660, Fridgya was devastated in the fifth Thargon-Sorson war. Its cryo-morts would remain undisturbed for many thousands of years. [970]
2673 - Shadowmind [971]
This was the time of Xaxil, the twenty-fourth Draconian Emperor.
Thousands of years before, the Shenn of Arden had discovered “hypergems” that boosted their telepathic ability. Around 2640, one group of Shenn began to hear a mysterious voice from the sky that ordered them to construct kilns. This voice was the Umbra, a sentience that had evolved from carbon structures on a nearby asteroid.
The planet Tairngaire was now heavily populated and a member of a local alliance of planets, the Concordance, with its own space fleet that had recently seen action in the nasty Sidril War. In 2670, colonists from Tairngaire set up camp on the planet Arden. The Colonial Office decreed that the natural features of the planet should be named after characters from the works of Shakespeare. Accordingly, the main settlement was called Touchstone Base, and there was a Lake Lysander, a Titania River and a Phebe Range of mountains.
After completing wargame trials in the Delta Epsilon system, the CSS Broadsword was recalled to Tairngaire by Admiral Vego and sent to investigate the situation at the Arden. All contact had been lost with the settlers, and five ships dispatched to investigate also vanished. It was discovered that the Shenn were secretly operating in New Byzantium by inhabiting artificially constructed human bodies. The Umbra was building “shadowforms”, extensions of its power. The seventh Doctor, Benny and Ace located Umbra and blocked off the sun’s rays, effectively rendering it unconscious.
c 2675 - The Sandman [972]
The Clutch, the fleet of ships containing the Galyari race and numerous tag-alongs, returned to the homeworld of the Cuscaru. A Cuscaru ambassador returned a piece of the Galyari’s destroyed Srushkubr, but this catalysed the neural energy tainting the Galyari. The long-dead General Voshkar was reborn in a monstrous body, and tried to return the Galyari to warfare. The sixth Doctor and Evelyn’s involvement resulted in Voshkar’s demise. The Clutch departed into space, and resumed business as an intergalactic flea market of sorts.
During the twenty-seventh century, a Haitian deciphered the Rihanssu language, allowing a peace treaty that ended the war between Earth and that race. [973] Th
ere had been examples of humanity oppressing native species for centuries. The Swampies of Delta Magna, for example, had been displaced and oppressed. Slavery was formally reintroduced on many worlds. [974] The time-sensitive Tharils had once been the owners of a mighty Empire, with territory stretching across several universes including N-Space and E-Space. Now slavers had captured them. The Tharils were a valuable commodity, as they alone could navigate the ships using warp drive based on Implicate Theory. Many humans became rich trading in Tharils. One privateer, a veteran of Tharil hunts on Shapia commanded by Captain Rorvik, vanished without trace following a warp drive malfunction. [975]
Twenty families founded the colony of Kaldor City. The people there came to forget their origins, and had no contact with other planets. [976]
2680 - The Highest Science [977]
Authorities on Checkley’s World had made the planet Hogsumm to resemble the fabled planet Sakkrat, hoping to capture the criminal Sheldukher and retrieve the Cell that he stole. A slow time converter set up on Hogsumm created a Fortean Flicker that moved objects through time, including a group of hostile Chelonians and some train-riders taking the 8:12 from Chorleywood in 2003.
In 2680, Sheldukher and his crew revived from stasis and landed on “Sakkrat”. Sheldukher committed suicide while resisting arrest, and the Cell was killed also. Sheldukher’s Hercules devastator atomised a large area of the planet. The Chelonians and the train-riders, known to the Chelonians as the EightTwelves, were left frozen in a stasis field.
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