Fantom Chapter 6, part 4.

   “Hold!”
   The adjudicator looked round angrily.  “Who said that?” she hissed.  Agnes stepped forward.
   “I did,” she said loudly, to cover her fear.  “That’s how the story goes.  You can’t just change it.”
   “You little fool,” the woman hissed.  “You’ll be next.”  She turned back to Ruth.
   Or tried to.  Her attention elsewhere, she had placed her high-heeled shoe on Iolanthe’s discarded veil.  Ruth saw it, and as the adjudicator turned back and raised the sword once more she pulled.  With a cry of fury the woman fell backwards.  The baton she used to conduct the fantoms fell from her sleeve.  Patrick leapt forward and grabbed it, then helped Ruth to her feet.  
   “Over here!” Tom shouted, running for the wings.  The others followed, as the other performers and audience began to wake from shock.  They made for where they had left the TTC, but it was guarded by a fantom.  Behind them they could hear sounds of pursuit rapidly spproaching.
   “It’s no good,” Ruth said desperately.  “She’ll never let us escape.”
   “Maybe I can distract it while you get past,” Tom said, looking at the fantom.  It looked back at him and grunted, but did not move.  
   “Here,” Patrick said, passing the baton he had picked up to Adam.  “You know how to conduct, can you get them to obey you?”
   Adam waved it experimentally.  The fantom’s gaze shifted to him.  
   “They’re right behind us!” Agnes said.
   Adam raised his arms and began to beat time, strongly and confidently.  The fantom looked puzzled (as much as its’ stony face could display any emotion) and began, slowly to move to the side.
   “You’ve done it!” Agnes shouted.  
   “That might slow them up,” Adam said, as the creature moved off in the direction of their pursuers.
   “Come on,” Tom said, “We’ve got to get to the TTC.”
   The time capsule’s doors slammed behind them and Tom and Patrick pushed the bars into place.  Adam sat down at the keyboard.
   “When to?” he said.
   “Anywhen!” Agnes said.  “Anywhere but here.”
   Tom was at the other keyboard, typing hurriedly.   “Go!” he said.  
   The familiar shaking began.  Ruth sank down on a seat and leant her head against the wall.  It had all happened so quickly.  She was relieved to have escaped, but the pent up tension hadn’t yet earthed itself...
   “Tea?” Patrick asked, filling the kettle.
   That did it.  Ruth started to laugh, and then found tears rolling down her cheeks.  It was the sheer normality of it that got her.  Ten minutes ago she had been waiting for her death in front of hundreds of people, and now Patrick was making her tea, as if the last few months had never happened.  
   “Are you ok?” Agnes asked, puzzled.  Ruth nodded, wiping the tears from her cheeks.
   “Sorry,” she said.  Patrick sat down next to her.  “It’s all right,” he said.  “She didn’t hurt you?”
   “No,” Ruth replied.  “But if we ever meet her again she’ll kill us all, I know it.  We’ve made her look a fool.”
   “Maybe we’ve shown people they can defeat her too,” Adam said.
   “I don’t think it’s as simple as that,” Ruth said.  
   They landed.  “Where are we?” Agnes asked.
   “Back in York,” Tom said.  “Before all this happened- the day after we left for Buxton.”
   They stepped out of the TTC into a deserted, grimy street.  Something was wrong.
   “Look,” Tom said, pointing at a big poster on the end of a row of houses.  It showed a giant picture of the adjudicator, smiling triumphantly, with a caption saying: “Work and obedience will save our nation! It is your patriotic duty to report all skivers, paracites and deviants to the appropriate authorities.”
   Their hearts sank.  “What’s happened?” Adam asked.  Ruth shiverred.  Looking down, she realised she was still wearing her the thin dress of her Iolanthe costume, complete with wings.  The others were still in costume too.
   Agnes had got her phone out and was looking at news websites.  “She’s running the country.  Everything’s changed.  But it doesn’t make sense.”  
   Patrick pointed to the date in the corner of the screen.  It was three years in their future.
   “Look her up on wikipedia, if it still exists,” Adam said.  “Maybe it’ll tell us how she came to power.”
   It did.  But it wasn’t cheerful reading.  Depressed and cold they went back into the TTC.
   Tom looked at the screen.
   “I got the date wrong,” he said.  “Must have been because I was in a hurry.  
   “If that’s the future with her in charge, I don’t think I want to live there,” Adam said.
   “Don’t worry,” Patrick said bitterly.  “I don’t think she’d let us live for very long.”   
   “What are we going to do?” Tom asked.  “We can’t go back to our time or the future without coming within her reach.  Where can we go?”
   Patrick made more tea.  The other were almost silent, someone occassionally putting foward a suggestion that someone else would quickly point out a problem with before silence returned.  Ruth sat in a corner, still shivering a little.  After a while (and two cups of tea) she looked up.
   “We’ve got to stop her,” she said quietly.  
   “Us?”  Tom said.
   “Yes.  It was our time travel that got us into this mess, our wanting to change history just a little bit allowed her to change it a lot.”
   “All we did was bring a score back.  How were we supposed to know what that would do?”
   “We couldn’t.  But it didn’t even work- our wanting to save Thespis actually resulted in it being destroyed.”
   “But they were already destroyed before we ever travelled back in time,” Adam objected.  “It’s not our fault.”
   “But if we hadn’t gone back in time she would never have had her chance to come to power,” Patrick said.  “Ruth’s right there.”
   “We started it, so we’ve got to stop her.” Ruth said somberly.  “Whatever the cost to ourselves.”
   “But- can we? I mean, we know what’s going to happen in the future.  If we go back and get rid of her,  isn’t that changing history too?”
   “That’s why we can't use time travel to defeat her. We've got to do it in the present- our present.  The past isn’t ours to change, but the future- we change the future just by living in the present.”  Ruth stood up and began to type the date into the computer.
   “Now?”  Agnes asked.
   “Will there be a better time?”  Ruth turned to look at them all.  “If we're weak enough to tarry- we might loose our nerve.  Besides, where else can we go?”
   “Can’t we at least get some weapons or something?  She’ll be armed,” Adam said.
   “Would you use them?” Ruth asked.  “I don't think I could.”
   “Then what are we going to do?”  Tom said.  “Adam’s right, it’s no use just going straight back to when we left.  We need a plan.”
   “We’ve got to use her own weapons against her,” Ruth said.  She picked up the baton.

The story continues...