Post by Catsmate on Apr 1, 2014 16:33:36 GMT
He looked around him at the destruction. Good, no-one was paying much attention to an insignificant young journalist, too busy gawking and speculating.Tara was nearby, keeping overwatch, ready to intervene if someone looked as if they were going to accost him.
He triggered the scanner and waved it over the rubble of the church. The small machine beeped softly and he looked at the display. "Fulgarite", he thought. He hadn't expected it to really be a gas explosion but now they knew. The destruction had been caused by an anachronistic and powerful chemical explosive.
He triggered the scanner and waved it over the rubble of the church. The small machine beeped softly and he looked at the display. "Fulgarite", he thought. He hadn't expected it to really be a gas explosion but now they knew. The destruction had been caused by an anachronistic and powerful chemical explosive.
It's London, 1907. The seventeenth of May to be exact. Yesterday the Brotherhood Church on Southgate Road in Stepney was demolished by a huge explosion, initially thought to be a gas leak.
However speculation is rife that it was a bombing of some sort and there's a police investigation in progress. The Russian embassy has already issued a denial that the Tsarist secret police, the feared Okhrana, was behind the occurrence.
Why the Russians? The church housed the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, and was packed with over three hundred delegates as well as onlookers. Most of them are now dead, killed in the blast, the collapse of the building and the fire. Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky are amongst the dead, along with Rosa Luxemburg and Maxim Gorky and a host of other leaders who never became household names.
The leadership of the future Soviet Union is gone, the men (and a few women) who led the second (October) 1917 revolution and brought down the Kerensky government are mostly dead.
With Luxemburg dead will the German Social Democrats support the Great War and vote funds for it? Will the war start on schedule in 1914? What effects will the blast have in Britain? At least some of the radicals with blame the government for it. And a lot of people are going to blame the Russians; it's not three years since Russian warships shelled British fishing boats in the Dogger Bank incident, might the future Anglo-Russian Entente (supposed to be signed at the end of August 1907) be at risk? And with it the Triple Entente?
This is a pretty blatant change to history, but a somewhat subtle one; most of the effects won't be seen for several years. Is there someone waiting to guide history onto a completely new track?
Assuming the party arrive after the explosion they need to find out and then travel back and stop them; a more conventional Doctor Who storyline has the party arriving in advance and preventing the attack without detailed afterknowledge of the effects.