Out of Time (short story)

Out of Time was the nineteenth and final release and final full story in the Doom's Day multimedia series, released on 6 October 2023 on the Doctor Who website.

It was released in celebration of the 60th Anniversary of Doctor Who.

Summary
The final hour. The final mission. Doom's Day is drawing to an end, and the Doctor is nowhere in sight. Besides Death, what is awaiting her back on New Venice? 🕛

Plot
New Venice lies in ruins, with its famous piers and gondolas destroyed, finally bringing the Human Empire's greatest party to an end. Doom arrives, feeling almost as tired as the planet, having finally run out of time to escape from Death. After going on the run for a whole day in her desperate search to find the correct incarnation of the Doctor, the mysterious white-haired old man, she is finally back where she started.

Doom strides into the remains of the ballroom where the mess began 24 hours previously and sits down on a golden throne as a large shadow falls over her. Realising her time is up, she makes one final hologram call to Terri at the Lesser Order of Oberon and protests that her final assignment has no target for her to take out. Terri insists that there must be, and Doom finally realises that her final target has been her all along. She thinks back to her meeting with the old man on the Grand Balcony just before her chase began and remembers how only when she shot her target did her timeline begin to break down. Doom admits that at that moment, she realised that she had been sent to assassinate her past self; only then did she remember a mission long ago involving the killing of a Cauldron Prince that ended in her being killed on the dancefloor by her own, horrified, self.

Terri insists that she cannot tell Doom who sent the order in the first place but decides to keep the call running to watch Doom die, considering it only polite. However, the shadowy figure that Doom saw resolves itself not into the shape of Death, but into the First Doctor - the one she had been looking for all along. The Doctor talks to Terri directly, admonishing her for slacking on the job and demanding a resolution to Doom's situation. He admits that his TARDIS has been unable to leave New Venice since he arrived with Susan, Ian and Barbara due to it being caught in Doom's temporal anomaly. Demanding to tinker with Doom's vortex manipulator, he begins fiddling with its fast return switch and explains that he will send her back in time briefly to shoot her former self before she does exactly that. Before she can protest, the Doctor activates the manipulator and Doom teleports away.

A few seconds later, Doom reappears, breathless and wearing a sling. While the Doctor's plan was for Doom to assassinate her past self before the paradoxical killing occurred, allowing the anomalies to cancel each other out, Doom instead reveals that she shot herself in the arm, causing her to miss killing herself altogether - while also starting the fire that led to the destruction of the ballroom. As the Doctor grins suspiciously at Terri's hologram, Doom asks about Death; the Doctor explains that it was a Gatherer which feeds off anomalies and causes of them, and should now be focused on whoever ordered the killing. Noticing that Terri's office has suddenly emptied, Doom registers that Terri was the mastermind behind the entire scenario.

Terri, busy clearing out her desk, reveals that with Doom gone over the last day, she has been able wipe out the entire Lesser Order of Oberon to get revenge for never being valued, and has become the Grand Master by default as the only one left. The Doctor, however, reminds her that she has "unleashed a force of temporal retribution" upon herself. Sure enough, as she attempts to leave her office, Terri is set upon by the clawed shadow of the Gatherer, and a grinning skull attacks the screaming Terri before she vanishes forever. It nods briefly towards the Doctor and Doom before the hologram turns off.

The Doctor tells Doom that she should learn a lesson from her ordeal to choose a different path in life instead of causing bloodshed. She thinks back sheepishly to all the times she met his future selves in dramatic circumstances over the last day. As a parting gift, the Doctor gifts Doom an object from around his neck that Barbara had insisted he wears; admitting that the TARDIS likely will not take him to his destination at the theatre, he reminds Doom that the journey is more important. He departs with the advice, "Travel wisely, Miss Doom. It's a long life. Live it well," before leaving in the TARDIS.

Doom picks up the feather boa the Doctor gave her and checks her vortex manipulator - there are no assignments left for her with the Lesser Order of Oberon gone. Watching the sun set over the shore near the ruins of New Venice, she spots an opportunity to make some money from clearing up the Doctor's messes. With a new goal in mind, Doom sets off to start a whole new day.

Characters

 * Doom
 * Terri
 * First Doctor
 * "Death"/The Gatherer

Worldbuilding

 * New Venice still features one of the android string quartet members, broken down.
 * According to Terri, New Venice is home to the Human Empire's great crime families and the seventh most popular assassination location.
 * The First Doctor has theatre tickets for Mamma Mia! but is unaware of it. He states that Ian and Barbara are excited by Susan's description of it, but he assumes it is closer to the Oresteia by Aeschylus due to it being set in Greece, which he considers "sublime". Terri has seen it a dozen times.
 * The Doctor claims to have met Jane Austen, having told her to be careful around staser rifles and stick to nunchucks.

Continuity

 * Doom recalls her encounters with Cybermen, (COMIC: High Noon in Hollywood) Slitheen and Kraals. (PROSE: Extraction Point)
 * Doom recalls her meeting with Jackie Tyler. (AUDIO: A Date with Destiny)
 * Doom mentions meeting River Song. (COMIC: Target Selected)
 * The Doctor finds a fast return switch on Doom's vortex manipulator. (TV: The Edge of Destruction)
 * Doom tells the Doctor that they will meet in his future. (COMIC: The Plastic Population, PROSE: Extraction Point, AUDIO: Dark Space, The Crowd)