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...