[Seed] The Dead Woman’s Time Machine.

[Catsmate]

Another minor idea that wasn't really going anywhere. It's basically a skeletal outline for a starting point of a time traveller. One that was intended to get rather complicated and timey-wimey.

The Dead Woman’s Time Machine.
There are a number of classic ways to ‘acquire’ a time machine; build it yourself (this requires skills, knowledge and resources), steal it (often opposed by the current owner), be given it (generally necessitating membership of special organisations or friendship with a time traveller), or find it.
There are a surprising number of time machines scattered around¹, often after their previous operator made one of those unfortunate cultural faux pas that have unpleasant results.

In fact the death of Ulrikka Zaeden was entirely deliberate, or at least accepted, on the part of herself. She knew that the amount of temporal energy she'd absorbed was going to kill her, but sometimes a sacrifice is necessary.
Oh well she’d had a good life she thought, as she sprinted back to her time machine, feeling her intrinsic Artron energy being dissipated by the turbulent multi-dimensional energies surrounding her. She wasn’t going to make it.
She did, but only just. She died on the floor of the lift connecting the entrance to operations deck of the Pine Cone, a wide grin on her face.


Time passed.


Angela Newman was a post-graduate physics student when her life took a sharp left turn. She’d spent two years on her doctorate so far, one of a team developing a portable gravitational-wave detector. The project had started as an attempt to detect gravity wave at stellar scales but had failed utterly. Abandoned by the senior professors before a fresher could say “free beer” a bright Assistant Professor figured out that the gadget could be very useful for small scale detection, including objects underground and underwater. A potentially lucrative little invention…..

Angela had ‘borrowed’ one of the detectors to survey her new house’s garden for buried pipes. Oddly she detected a weird anomaly a few hundred metres away, in the patch of woodland behind the house. The bit that survived the developers because of some weird legal quirk. So she investigated, she was a scientist.
A strange patch of freak gravity, swirling around in the air, a few metres above the ground.
Weird

So, as all good scientists did, she poked it with a stick. A long stick of course and found there was something there. A solid object, somewhat rounded and several metres wide and high.
The next stage of her investigation involved a pair of ladders, some rope, a paintball marker and several poles.


Possibly to be continued.

Comments?









1. There are dozens in the Jurassic period but actually finding one over an extent of 55 million years is tricky.

[tampahawke]

Oh. Please do continue this write up. A time machine not a tardis or Sidrat? I'm in.
On a different note about time machines just laying around, even cannon Who does this. Besides the doctor. There is still the tardis the doc escaped the death particle on galifrey in ( last mentioned as being disguised as a tree Ina forest somewhere), the master is known to have made use of at least 3 different tardises *Tardi??* so at least one if not 2 of them are still sitting abandoned somewhere.
There was the tardis the fam used, but I think that's the one the doctor turned into a crunch dalek trap later that season. And that's not even taking account how many tardiness and "other" time travel machines, devices and vortex manipulators got left behind scattered across the universe during and after the time war. So plenty of opportunities to find one (or be found by one).

[Catsmate]

Dec 20, 2023 20:23:10 GMT tampahawke said:

Oh. Please do continue this write up.

Thanks, I have a few more notes and I'll work on them.

Dec 20, 2023 20:23:10 GMT tampahawke said:

A time machine not a tardis or Sidrat? I'm in.

Actually in my games we have no regular TARDISes, or even appearances from them, despite around thirty time travellers. I have a draft list for my "Fellow Travellers" piece.

• Evander has a saucer shaped time/shape ship.
• Emily Wilson has a pedal/electric trike with a Vortun (Vortex Tunnel Generator).
• A. A. Weaver and Byron have a shipping container with a crude time drive built into it.
• Matthew Randall has a TARDIS-lite, a dimensionally expanded rhombicuboctahedral Time Capsule.
• Morgana and Accolon have a couple of Vortuns, several Temports¹ and a two-seat time hopper (think enclosed motorcycle²)   
  
• Alicia deVere and her associates have a double-decker bus that absorbed a Vortun.
• Marshall Manor Meyer has 'The Drifter' which resembles a horseless carriage.
• Jinjur has a small spacecraft whose warp drive has been modified.
• The Thing In The Basement is a time portal.
• Ogeron has a 'time sled' of the Wellsian type.
• Lilith and Zachery have amassed three time machines (and a couple of temports). A two-person sled type, a smaller version of the Egg and a cube that's an Octachoron internally.
• Cathal Gould started with a cramped hemispherical pod but upgraded.
• Laverna (and her harem) also travel in a Time Saucer.
• 'Smitty' has a Sontaran space-pod whose occupant integrated an osmic generator into it.
• Professor Adam Wagstaff built a time projector.

I like a variety of craft and options....

Dec 20, 2023 20:23:10 GMT tampahawke said:

On a different note about time machines just laying around, even cannon Who does this. Besides the doctor. There is still the tardis the doc escaped the death particle on galifrey in ( last mentioned as being disguised as a tree Ina forest somewhere), the master is known to have made use of at least 3 different tardises *Tardi??* so at least one if not 2 of them are still sitting abandoned somewhere.
There was the tardis the fam used, but I think that's the one the doctor turned into a crunch dalek trap later that season. And that's not even taking account how many tardiness and "other" time travel machines, devices and vortex manipulators got left behind scattered across the universe during and after the time war. So plenty of opportunities to find one (or be found by one).

Absolutely. There could be several SIDRATs that were lost during the War Games, a few TARDISes (I'll go with that), the 'DARDIS' that Ian and Barbara used.....
'Doctor Robert Knox' had acquired a TARDIS.
There was a black market in stolen/lost Vortex Manipulators.







1. Temporal portals.

2. Think one of these, which T wants to buy.....

[Catsmate]

Part II.

Once she’d established that there was in fact a large, Angela estimated twelve metres high and eight wide, ovoid thing floating invisibly about twelve metres above the ground. Which, she had to say, was a little odd.
What the hell was it?

She considered getting some help; there were plenty of others, undergrads and some of her fellow doctoral students, or even a professor. Or she could give UNIT a call. Maybe an undergrad, just in case there was any danger?
Nope this was hers. All hers.

So Angela hired a scissors-lift for the bank-holiday weekend. A neat piece of kit, even if it did weigh two-and-a-half-tonnes; it could safely lift her to a height where she could examine the exterior of the giant floating egg up close.
Assuming it had an inside.

She'd also borrowed a plasma cutter, an angle grinder and bought some work clothing and safety gear. The paint had been in the shed when she'd bought the house. She’d had the pry-bars and bolt cutters. The cargo net had been trickier but in the days of internet shopping, not that difficult.

Setting up the lift, it had been fully charged when it was delivered, Angela trundled it over the the…. the thing. A few dozen paintballs revealed the shape before the gel dripped off, and she maneuvered the machine underneath. A couple of bangs with a stick and a few strokes of paint revealed more of the shape, until the paint slid off. The surface was extremely smooth.
Definitely a large smooth egg, about four hundred cubic metres she estimated.

So, how to get inside?

Angela tried poking it with the sharp end of the prybar, with no effect. Banging it didn’t even make a noise, whatever the egg was made of it wasn’t sonorous.
Despite her irritation Angela grinned to herself as she mentally recited the properties of metals from high school: sonorous and lustrous, malleable and ductile, conductive and basic. So maybe not metal.
Of course there could be a ‘force field’ here.

Angela methodically went over the surface of the ovoid, looking for a hatch or entrance. The process took nearly two hours and left her sweaty and irritated. There seemed to be no irregularities in the surface.
Eventually she sat down on the little platform and sighed, tired and frustrated. How the hell did one open the damned thing? She was absolutely convinced there was an entrance, just as she was convinced that the thing had an interior.
Maybe it was time for UNIT?

No.

She stood up, refreshed, and took a deep breath. "How the hell do I get inside this thing", she spoke out loud.

Several metres below her a short, cylindrical, structure extended silently from the end of invisible object. After a moment's shock, Angela lowered the lift platform down five or six metres and carefully trundled over to the extrusion.

[Catsmate]

Part III.

From ground level Angela looked up at the opening above her. A cylinder about two-and-a-half metres across, made from some greyish material, and perhaps two metres high handing in seemingly empty space.
But where did it leave? Presumably into the egg.
But what was in the egg, she wondered.

She gripped the safety rail and stared upwards while she thought. Obviously it was far too dangerous for her to explore further on her own. She really should call around for some help.
She shook her head. No this was hers.

Angela drove the lifter under the opening and stopped; then she raised the platform until she could touch the opening. It was solid, cool to her touch, and very real. Taking a deep breath, and suppressing reflexive claustrophobia, she rose on the platform until she was inside the cylinder.

Inside there was no light except the sunlight leaking in from the open bottom, no controls or signs. In fact there was nothing.
In a fit of annoyance she used the stick to bang on the top of the cylinder and demanded loudly, "Open up".

And above her the top of the cylinder opened.

Actually, she thought it didn't open so much as, well, not be there.

Another deep breath and she scrambled up, using the safety rail of the platform as a step, before her common sense and self-preservation ganged up on her spirit of adventure.