Heart of TARDIS (Dave Stone)

 Name: The Jarakabeth

 Format: Book.

 Time of Origin: Known on Earth as demons in the past; typically dwell on another plane of existence; the Fourth Doctor confronted one on Earth during the 1970s or 1980s (Precise date unspecified).

 Appearances: "Heart of TARDIS"

 Doctor: Directly confronted the Fourth Doctor, but its plans were more directly defeated by the Second Doctor, even if the Second Doctor never knew what he was dealing with.

 Companions: 1st Romana, Sergeant Benton, and The Brigadier directly assisted the Fourth Doctor in confronting the Jarakabeth; Jamie McCrimmon and Victoria Waterfield unknowingly aided the Second Doctor in stopping the Jarakabeth’s plans (They knew what they were dealing with but were ignorant of the identity of the creature responsible for the crisis); K9 was being repaired in the Fourth Doctor’s TARDIS during this adventure.

 History: The interesting thing about the Jarakabeth is that not only are they essentially demons - although The Doctor noted that they are more technically energy-based life forms, suggesting that Romana refer to them as quantum-based dynamically self-referential pattern matrixes; ‘demons’ were simply what ancient Earth culture interpreted them as -, but the fact that they are one of the few races The Doctor has encountered which are not interested in a mass assault on Earth, the Jarakabeth that faced The Doctor being a renegade from its people. Another somewhat ironic point about the Jarakabeth is the fact that, although it took two Doctors to defeat their plot, the younger Doctor of the two incarnations involved was never even aware that the Jarakabeth were involved in the crisis he was dealing with - or even that there was another version of himself assisting his efforts in the first place -, despite the fact that he was The Doctor that was primarily responsible for defeating their plan.

 Although the Jarakabeth - who prefer their name not to be spoken because it translates in a demon dialect as an embarrassing term, much like the English surname ‘Crapper’ - describe themselves as a whole as simply wishing to live rather than actually being evil by any definition - one of them noting that, as immortals, they can afford to be kind even when they don’t have to -, every species throws up the occasional aberration. In this case, the ‘aberration’ was a Jarakabeth that was summoned by notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, eventually taking control of Crowley’s body at the moment of his death. Taking advantage of Crowley being recruited by the American government to serve as a magical consultant - similar to their recruitment of Nazi rocket scientists after the war, ‘magic’ in this case referring to an ability to manipulate higher-dimensional powers - to the ‘Golgotha Project’. Having brainwashed the American town of Lychburg to believe everything they were told, Crowley provided the Americans with a magical artefact that could turn belief into reality. To test the artefact’s military potential, the Golgotha Project convinced the population that the Gates of Hell were opening, creating a dimensional rift that destabilised when something (Later revealed to be a prototype TARDIS) crashed into it. A subsequent nuclear strike knocked the entire town out of alignment, leaving it in a stable singularity for the next few decades, the residents confined to the town while being subtly influenced by the controlling consciousness to stop anyone registering that there should be more to their world than just Lychburg, the town itself existing in a historical anomaly due to the controller’s ignorance of what a town ‘should’ be like, resulting in such anomalies as fifties’ rockers, mobile phones, icemen in horse-drawn carriages and microwaveable burritos existing in the town.

 This stability was eventually ended when the Second Doctor’s TARDIS crashed into it, The Doctor having shut off some of the TARDIS’s security protocols that prevented the ship materialising in a reality other than their own in an attempt to bypass the Time Lord anti-theft programs that allegedly prevented him from steering the ship himself (The idea being that stolen TARDISes would be unable to take the thief where he wanted to go). With The Doctor now trapped in Lychburg - the rift having shifted the TARDIS’s internal dimensions so that he and his companions would be unable to enter it -, he, Jamie and Victoria were left to investigate a recent spree of murders in Lychburg, The Doctor suspicious about the brutal similarity of the murders despite them taking place miles apart from each other (Eventually revealed to be the controlling intelligence influencing other residents to kill anyone who questioned its reality). Although The Doctor swiftly realised from the available evidence that he was stuck in a miniature universe on the verge of collapse, he was unable to convince the entity of the danger, the entity reaching out to control the other citizens to capture The Doctor and his friends.

 Back in the real world, Crowley - now head of DISTO(P)IA, the DIvisional department of Special Tactical Operations (Provisional) with regard to Insurgent and subversive Activity - concluded that the only way to solve the problem of the anomaly’s recent disruption was to ‘recruit’ The Doctor’s assistance (Naturally unaware of The Doctor’s presence in the anomaly). To this end, he arranged for the Prime Minister to send DISTO(P)IA agent Katharine Delbane into UNIT, allegedly to expose its secrets and bring it directly under government control while really giving Crowley the opportunity to infiltrate the base and kidnap The Brigadier, using the resulting chaos as an excuse to take control himself. With UNIT having contacted The Doctor for help - the call being answered by the Fourth Doctor and Romana -, The Doctor began his investigations, only for he and Romana to be swiftly captured by Crowley’s forces. Although The Doctor initially refused to obey Crowley, Romana - having been filled in on the cause of the anomaly by the Time Lords during her captivity - was able to take the Fourth Doctor’s TARDIS into the anomaly, linking the ancillary generator rooms of the Second and Fourth Doctor’s TARDISes so that the Fourth Doctor could travel into the anomaly.

 As he and Romana prepared to travel through the resulting rift, Crowley confronted them, revealing his nature as a Jarakabeth (Although The Doctor admitted that he’d known the creature wasn’t the real Crowley from the beginning) and his plans to escalate the rift caused by the project to unleash chaos and reshape the universe. Although The Doctor pointed out that Crowley’s plan was doomed by its very nature - since he was unleashing primal chaos, he couldn’t hope to control it after he’d released it onto the universe, and he would be destroyed along with the rest of the universe, self-referential constructs and a sense of identity being impossible to maintain in a realm of pure chaos -, Crowley refused to accept that his plans were doomed. Fortunately, he was nevertheless prevented from proceeding with his plans when he was attacked by Deblane, really an avatar created by the other Jarakabeth to monitor Crowley, Delbane keeping Crowley occupied while The Doctor and Romana retreated through the rift into the Second Doctor’s TARDIS.

 With the Second Doctor having accidentally caused one of the citizens of Lychburg to stab himself when he was trying to plant a transceiver on The Doctor so that he could be controlled by the entity, the entity’s control of the realm was disrupted long enough for The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria to find the prototype TARDIS at the heart of the anomaly, controlled by its ‘pilot’, the last of the Gallifreyian woprats (A creature resembling a spider/rat amalgamation). When Victoria screamed at the sight of it, Jamie promptly killed the creature with his dirk, but this only made the disruption worse as the universe lost the controller that had been keeping it stabilised, pushing it ever closer to collapse. Fortunately, the Second Doctor was now able to access his TARDIS once again after the Fourth Doctor had put the interior and exterior dimensions back into phase - although the Second was unaware who had done it and simply assumed that someone had been fiddling with his console -, giving the Second Doctor the chance to do something terribly clever (What this was exactly was never specified) and evacuate the entire town of Lychburg into the TARDIS, leaving the Fourth Doctor and Romana to return to their version of the ship.

 Although Crowley and Deblane were equally matched in a fight drawing on their respective powers, Crowley became so focused on the combat taking place on the higher dimensions of reality that he neglected to pay attention to the more basic levels of existence. As a result, he was crucially distracted from the fight when The Brigadier grabbed his foot - his and Delbane’s bodies currently floating in mid-air as their minds clashed -, giving Delbane the chance to destroy Crowley completely. When the Fourth Doctor and Romana returned, the creature inside Delbane apologised for the criminal Crowley's behaviour, explaining that it would now simply retreat back into the depths of Delbane's mind, allowing her to live out the rest of her human life in peace without realising her true nature. With Lychburg’s population restored, and Delbane now working officially for UNIT, The Doctors departed from their respective adventures, although the Second Doctor mourned his inability to save the man who’d tried to plant the transceiver on him while Romana was frustrated that she and the Fourth Doctor went through all that effort simply to open a door.