The Taking of Planet Five said:
Mictlan was – in its origin – a metaphysical bomb shelter. Removed from space-time, it and its occupants (if the two could in any real sense be distinguished except at the most simplistic of levels) were, in theory at least, immune to the time winds, to the possible changes being, or to be, wrought by the war. In theory, even if the Enemy had turned primordial Gallifrey into atoms or defused Omega’s stellar manipulator, or aborted the Time Lords’ history in any way, Mictlan should have remained – a node of information from a previous space time preserved after its collapse by the lack of a causal connection between itself and the war.
The Celestial Intervention Agency, latterly the Celestis, had, how ever, been careful to provide for the possibility that the theories maybe wrong. Beyond Mictlan, projected there in the same way as Mictlan itself, were the recordships. Black-box TARDISes, so called for their basic shape – for in that eventless void there was nothing for a TARDIS’s chameleon circuit to resemble – each continually scanning Mictlan, recording it, checking it.
In theory, even if Mictlan was affected by a space-time event, the black boxes, still further removed from the cause, should show the alteration against the copy of Mictlan’s specifications in their cores. Still, precisely because those mechanisms had themselves to reside in further bubbles of space-time anchored outside the micro-universe of Mictlan, their consultation was not, could not be, routine. Only the imprecision of the attack, if it was an attack, had left even enough memories to make the Celestis wish to consult their records.
Realising this, they were still further alarmed. Perhaps even now they were being further diminished, this time in ways more certain and more sure. Perhaps each following stroke was more absolute in its annihilation. Perhaps already they were a shadow of themselves.
