The End of the World (audio story)

 was the thirty-eighth Bernice Summerfield audio story released by Big Finish Productions. It was the fourth story of the eighth season.

Publisher's summary
"So for a long time – years now, really – I've had this growing suspicion that everything was, well, everything was just wrong..."

Jason Kane – author, adventurer, hero and inveterately polysyllabic hyperbolist. Now join him on his most exciting adventure yet!

He's going to Hell and back on an impossible quest to stop a man with the powers of a god. Along the way there's monsters and explosions and unseemly contretemps in the odd posh restaurant.

The battle will be hard and require every last iota of Jason's famous cunning. What can possibly go wrong?

[ Bernice Summerfield is away.]

Plot
After Jason and Mira deliberately get themselves kicked out of the Maison Celestial on one of the Mim spaceships in orbit of the Braxiatel Collection for their own entertainment, Jason admits to Mira that he is worried about Braxiatel. He explains that he and Benny should be married with a son and daughter by this point and how he believes that Braxiatel removed them as they did not fit into his continuity. He also tells her about how Ms Jones and Kothar seemed to be playing to somebody else's script and how Ms Jones, who came from the future, was paradoxically killed as a child two months ago. He attempted to acquire her body, but it and all records from the Stonehauser Medical Facility disappeared.

Jason deactivates the dimensional translators and flies himself and Mira into fractured time, where he attracts the attention of an Enormous Space Octopus and is towed to Station Zero, formerly known as the Tartarus Gate. They visit Jason's former employer, Agragazar, who gives him a mind-sucker which will extrapolate a coherent timeline and allow Jason to find the specific points in fractured time that he is looking for despit parts of his life having been entirely deleted. With Mira linking into his mind to serve as a lifeline, Jason puts on a holographic suit at the first set of coordinates and watches himself on Jaris telling Benny about his past. He remembers his sister, Lucy, and wonders how he forgot about her and why he had never gone back for her.

Rather than simply observing, Jason dives back to the 20th century and visits his childhood home, telling his father, Peter, that he is attached to a Child Protection Taskforce and will be monitoring the house in case the missing teenaged Jason returns. In truth, he hopes that this will protect Lucy and sets up a trust fund for her which Peter and their mother will be unable to touch. After an upset Benny who does not wish to talk to him, he returns alone to the Collection with data on Ms Jones, the Stonehauser Medical Facility and evidence of the timelines having been altered. He tells Adrian that he is going to speak with Braxiatel and Adrian says that he will send Peter his way later.

Jason accuses Braxiatel of killing Ms Jones twice in order to keep her from revealing that the war between the Mim and the Draconians was not part of established history and of getting rid of Keith and Rebecca, which Braxiatel admits that he did as they would have distracted Benny from being at his side. He also confesses to having merged his time machine with the Collection in order to make altering the timelines easier, which included rewriting history after Mira was killed by the Fifth Axis so that he could hypnotise her into being his spy. When Jason attempts to leave with the newly-arrived Peter, Braxiatel hypnotises the boy into killing him; he tells Jason that he was never good enough for Benny.

Cast

 * Jason Kane - Stephen Fewell
 * Bernice - Lisa Bowerman
 * Agragazar - Paul Chahidi
 * Mira - Caroline Lennon
 * Adrian - Harry Myers
 * Braxiatel - Miles Richardson

Worldbuilding

 * Jason and Mira eat calamari at the Maison Celestial.
 * Jason tells Braxiatel that he and Bernice were meant to have two children: Keith and Rebecca (and no Peter).
 * A conversation in which Jason told Bernice about his abusive father took place on the planet Makrath.
 * The Fifth Axis invasion of the Braxiatel Collection is mentioned.
 * Jason has been investigating Clarissa Jones and her family who worked on board the Stonehauser Medical Facility.
 * Jason uses the principle of Fractured time to get to the "End of the World".
 * Braxiatel mentions Ker'a'nol.
 * Braxiatel tells Jason the Braxiatel Collection is now his TARDIS.

Continuity

 * Mira was first mentioned in PROSE: Ship of Fools and first appeared in PROSE: The Mary-Sue Extrusion.
 * Jason and Bernice first discovered they'd have two children. (PROSE: Return of the Living Dad)
 * The conversation between Bernice and Jason concerning his abusive father is reproduced practically word for word from PROSE: Death and Diplomacy.
 * The Enormous Space Octopuses first appeared in PROSE: The Infernal Nexus.