Fantom Chapter 2, part 4.

   So many memories.  The chorus left, principals entered and departed, entered and departed.  Here came the chorus again.  This had been the first song they had done the movements too, and Ruth had been terrified when the directors put her and her partner at the front to lead the line on.  She had seen later that this was because they were among the smallest, but at the time, with no idea how to act, it had been rather frightening, and she had felt that she didn't have a clue what she was supposed to be doing.  But she had muddled through again, and by the time they got to show week that had worn off.
   Five solid minutes of pretending to flirt (she remembered how hard it had been to get any reaction out of her partner) while staring at a pink spotlight, afraid to move when all the audience's eyes would be on the principal right in front of her.  Agnes sat next to her was trying not to giggle, as Tom, who had been her partner on stage leaned over and whispered something in her ear.  Looking down at the stage she saw the same thing happening, as it had every night.
   Then the act one finale.  As the house lights came back on once the cast had left the stage she turned to Agnes.
   "So, believe us now?"
   "How the heck did you do it?" Agnes said.
   "Shh," Patrick said, looking round.
   "There'll be cast downstairs," Tom said.  "We'd better stay up here, at least me and Agnes and Ruth."  Patrick and Adam’s past selves had not yet arrived at university.
   "Watch out for the techies, though," Ruth said.    
   They explained, in quiet voices and whispers, how they had found the box and made it work, and about their trip to see The Mikado.  "But why?" she said.  "I mean, if you've got a time machine why go back in time and give it to your past self?"
   "We haven't worked that out yet," Adam said.
   Ruth was thinking.  Why indeed?  What would lead you to do that?  You would know it would change your own past.  Presumably that was what their future selves- or future Tom, anyway- wanted, to change their future.  But that was dangerous.  You might accidentally change something that meant you wouldn't invent the time machine, meaning you couldn't have had a time machine to change the future...you could create a paradox.  And what would happen then?  Future Tom was taking a risk, and it wasn't like Tom to do that.  There must be a reason why he was willing to risk changing history.
   The lights dimmed again, and Ruth forgot her questions.  Act two passed quickly.  As Marco, played by Ernest (how he had changed in the intervening years, and yet in some ways he was just the same) sang the jazzed-up version of his solo she suddenly remembered that on this night the next song by the female chorus had got horribly out of time.  Here they came- and yes, they were badly out for a couple of bars, but they were soon back on track.  It was not as bad as she had remembered it.
   It was over, hats had been thrown in the air and (mostly) caught, bows had been taken, an encore sung and much applause given.  Quietly and quickly they slipped away back to the TTC before the cast had come downstairs to greet friends and relatives.  Adam and Tom entered the code to send the capsule home.  Patrick put the kettle on.
   Ruth looked round at the others.  “We’ve got to find out more about this thing,” she said.  
   “It’s amazing!” Agnes said.  “You could go anywhere!”
   “The classic thing to do would be to go back on bet on something you know is going to happen,” Patrick said.  “Anyone know anything about horse racing?”
   “Or put money in a bank account in 1900 and when you get back the interest’s built up,” Adam said.  “Not sure how that would work though...”
   “We could take a video recorder back to the 1960’s, and record all the missing episodes of Doctor Who,” Tom said excitedly,  “and hide them somewhere, and then find them when we get back to the present and give them to the BBC.”
   Missing things, Ruth thought.  Lost...
   “We could go back and rescue a Thespis score,” she said.  The others looked at each other in excitement.
   Thespis.  Every G&S enthusiast knew the story.  Librettist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan had written fourteen collaberations.  Thirteen survived.  The first, Thespis, did not.  Or, more accurately, the libretto did, but almost all the music had been lost, no one quite knew how.  Ruth had read the words and tried to imagine the missing music, but somehow, without the music, it was difficult to see what the show would have been like.  Some of the song lyrics and dialogue were amusing, some didn’t seem to make much sense.  But as the first collaberation from the pair that had gone on to make such a mark on musical and theatrical history, it held an interest much greater than the sum of it’s parts.  The prospect of hearing it, seeing it performed was- indescribable.
   “We could go to the first night,” Tom said.  “The first night of a Gilbert & Sullivan performance- ever!”
   “What are we waiting for?”  Agnes said.

The story continues...

Fantom Chapter 2, part 3.

   They had forgotten, however, that there was a rehearsal the following evening.  It was a rather frustrating one, as although all the cast had been called, the chorus spent a lot of time sitting around while principals were taught the moves for the preceeding scene.  They were late starting too, because the musical director came in saying he couldn’t get into the cupboard where the keyboard was kept, because someone had taken the key out, and Patrick looked guilty and produced it from his jacket pocket.  They had forgotten to return it after their adventure the night before.  
   Once the rehearsal had finished (late), they were too tired to investigate the machine further, but sat in a corner of the bar to make further plans.
   “What about tomorrow night?”  Ruth said.  Tomorrow was Friday.
   “Agnes is coming to stay for the weekend,” Tom said.  “But I suppose I can bring her along, if we don’t mind letting her in on the secret?”
   “I don’t mind,” Ruth said.  Agnes was an old friend, a former G&S member who had somehow managed to escape York.  
   The others agreed.  But Agnes herself took rather more convincing.
   “You’re joking,” she said, when they met up the next day and told her of their adventure.
   “We’re not,” Tom assured her.  “Here it is.”  They paused outside the door in the corridor.  Ruth herself suddenly had doubts.  Was all that had happened just some kind of dream?  Would they open that door and find just somebody’s office.  She looked down at the key in her hand.  No, it couldn’t be a dream.
   Patrick opened the door and they went in.  It didn’t seem crowded, even with five of them.
   “It just looks like an office,” Agnes said.  “It’s no Tardis.  Why should I believe it can travel in time?”
   Tom and Adam had gone to the controlls.  “Pick a date,” Tom said.  “Some time, some place that you know happened.”
   “16th February 2004,” Ruth said.  Tom keyed the date in.  
   “What happened then?”  Adam asked.  
   “The Gondoliers,” Ruth said.  My first G&S show.  And yours too I think?” she added, turning to Agnes.
   “Yes,” she replied.  “But-”
   “Central Hall, then,” Tom said, looking round at the others.  “Ready?”  They nodded.  
   “Here we go!”  Adam began to play.
   “I’d sit down if I were you,” Ruth said to Agnes, taking her own advice.
   The room juddered.  Agnes sat down hurriedly next to Ruth.  “I really thought you were joking,” she said shakily.  “Is it really true?”
   “Every word,” Ruth said.
   The room settled down.  Cautiously, Patrick opened the door a little, just enough to see the foyer full of stewards in red sashes selling tickets and programmes to audience members on the way to take their seats.
   Agnes was stunned into silence.
   “If you two were in this show-” Adam began.
   “Me too,” Tom interrupted.
   “Well, if you three’s past selves are here somewhere, what if they see you?” Adam said.  “I mean, it’s not usually seen as a good idea to meet yourself-”
   “They’ll be on stage, and we’ll sit at the back of the audience so they don’t recognise us,” Patrick said.   “It’ll be ok, you can’t see much from the stage with all the lights.”
   “I don’t think the cast went into the audience,” Tom said, considering.  “I think it’ll be all right.”
   “At least we don’t have to get changed this time,” Ruth said.  “That bustle was a pain in the backside!  Come on!”
   They stepped outside, trying to look inconspicuous, and headed for the steps up into the auditorium.  
   "Put something over your t-shirt," Ruth hissed suddenly at Patrick.
   "What?"
   "It's advertising a show we're not doing for another two years!"  He quickly dodged back into the TTC and came out wearing a jacket.
   They sat at near the back and to the side, so as not to be too noticeable from the stage.  The lights dimmed and the overture began.  
   So many memories awoke in Ruth.  Gondoliers had been her first experience of being on stage, apart from a few Christmas plays and class assemblies.  When she had arrived nervously at her first rehearsal, after getting too close to the G&S stall at fresher's fair, admitting that she liked G&S and being handed a pen and clipboard without the chance to refuse she had expected to be asked to leave within a couple of weeks.  She barely knew what a soprano was, let alone if she was one, and had been rather alarmed on being handed the music score, with pages where there were so many lines of music that eight bars covered two pages.  It hadn't helped that the first piece they'd sung was one that most of the group (as she found out later) already knew pretty well, which was rather intimidating to the newcomers trying to pick their way through the score.  But she had muddled through rehearsals, with the help of the CD.
   She had expected to be nervous backstage, waiting to go on.  But she hadn't been.  Perhaps she had been too excited.  Sitting there watching as she danced onto stage, part of a long line of chorus (twice as many as they got these days, she thought glumly) she remembered the excitement, remembered most of the moves.  Of course she remembered the music.  She had sung it several times since.  There was something hypnotic about the first twenty minutes or so of The Gondoliers, once she started she couldn't stop...

The story continues...