Four billion years in Earth's past, a group of aliens called Salaxalans landed on Earth; however, a mistake caused by their engineer – who used an Electric Monk to irrationally believe the proposed fix would work – caused their landing craft to explode, killing the Salaxalans. The ghost of the Salaxalan engineer roamed the earth, watching human life develop, searching for a way to undo its mistake, and waiting to find a sympathetic soul that it could possess. In the early 19th century, the ghost possessed Coleridge, and influenced his writing of "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", but found the poet too 'relaxed' on laudanum to be useful. It discovered that Prof. Chronotis possesses a time machine disguised as his rooms at the college. At the aforementioned Coleridge dinner, the ghost influenced Prof. Chronotis to use the time machine to perform the magic trick, using the opportunity to lure the Electric Monk and its horse to Earth. However, the ghost found the Monk unusable for its purposes. The ghost subsequently attempted to possess MacDuff, resulting in his odd behaviour, before finding its sympathetic host in Wenton-Weakes.