On the surface of Kallintura, in a stone temple in a ruined city, next to a crystal mounted upon a large staff, the Doctor materialized.

 He dusted himself off, and popped his battered straw hat back onto his head. As an afterthought, he turned the staff so that the crystal was no longer aligned with the walls.

 "That was almost *too* easy," he congratulated himself. "Time tots ... I mean, really." He chuckled to himself as he began to walk toward the temple's exit. "Pour in a healthy dose of his greatest enemy -- the Imprexa -- and sprinkle liberally with any old Time Lord mumbo jumbo, and you're sure to drive a paranoid 'Evil From the Dawn of Time' mad enough to trap itself in an unreal sub-dimension of its pocket-dimensional prison. And imagine -- an overweight me with terrible tastes in fashion! I've yet to encounter the monster that can withstand the power of my imagination. Oh, you should have been there, Ace -- I had Zalaxal so confused thinking he was me twice over, and then..." The Doctor paused, and looked around the sandy, concrete building. "Ace?"

 He quickly scanned the room, and then realized what he would have done had he been in Ace's shoes and seen himself disappear after touching the crystal. "Oh, no! Ace, what have I done?" He quickly ran back up to the crystal, and observed that Ace's footsteps had stopped just in front of it. Momentarily torn between leaving his companion to an eternity as Zalaxal's plaything and braving the over-complex, nightmarish reality he had tricked Zalaxal into creating, he knew he really had no choice. As much as it pained him to do so, he restored the staff to its proper orientation, and hesitantly reached out to touch the crystal.

 "Ace!" the Doctor called physically through the dust and debris falling from the ceiling. "Ace!" the Doctor called telepathically through the interference Zalaxal was creating as he attempted to restructure his already dwindling universe. There was no response, so he jumped across the chasm and headed toward one of the exits.

 As he emerged into one of the corridors in the Capitol, he found himself confronted by a group of young children, all exactly identical, and all with navels. "I want to *play*," the one in the lead said. Abruptly, the children all changed form into hideous mutant insects, mandibles snapping and claws thrashing. The Doctor turned and ran. How could his plan have gone so hideously wrong? He and Ace should have been long gone by now, years and light-years away from Zalaxal who would easily entertain himself for the rest of eternity by playing and destroying things in his prison of madness. But now they were both trapped here too, with Zalaxal, and he wasn't sure he could find a way out again.

 "Ace!" he called again, with frustration, anger, and remorse.

 He turned back to his viewscreen and laughed as the mutant Time Tots surrounded the Doctor and bore down on him ...