App for sirenspull
Player Information
Name: star
Age: 28
AIM SN: koenmakun
email: koenmakun (at) gmail.com
Have you played in an LJ based game before? Yes
Currrently Played Characters: None
Conditional: Activity Check Link: n/a
Character Information
General
Canon Source: Doctor Who with related spin-offs (Short Trips, audios, comic books, Eighth Doctor Adventure novels)
Canon Format: Primarily TV show with some expansion from EU sources
Character's Name: The TARDIS
Character's Age: Very, very old, but trapped in a body of a 30-40 year-old
Conditional: If your character is 13 years of age or under, please clarify how they will be played. n/a
What form will your character's NV take? Her NV looks a bit like a cell phone with a mini-Seal of Rassilon embedded on the outside. The seal begins to glow whenever the NV is receiving information.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities: Space and time travel, existing in all space and time at once, time sensitivity, indestructible outer shell, chameleon circuit, advanced warning systems, actually, just most things on this list.
Seeing as on Siren’s Port she’ll be stuck in a body rather than being a space ship, in her canon episode she displays time sensitivity, so we’ll go with that. Her attack type is intellectual, as she isn’t a fighter, but she’s smart enough to build things.
Conditional: If your character has no superhuman canon abilities, what dormant ability will you give them? n/a
Weapons: None.
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History: Quick history reference points pre-canon point:
TARDIS Technical Index Anything anyone ever wanted to know about TARDISes
Down and dirty synopsis of the Doctor's TARDIS
Specific spin-off canon sources for TARDIS history
Short Trips: Companions - The Lying Old Witch in the Wardrobe
Big Finish Audio: Colditz
Big Finish Audio: Zagreus
Big Finish Audio: Unregenerate!
Eighth Doctor Novel: The Shadows of Avalon
Eighth Doctor Novel: The Ancestor Cell
Tenth Doctor comic: The Forgotten
When the Doctor was young, the TARDIS was all ready quite old, though how old is difficult to tell. Old enough to be a “museum piece” and scheduled for decommission when the Doctor stole her - or was stolen, as the case may be. Regardless of circumstances prior to the fateful day when the TARDIS left her doors unlocked so the Doctor could “borrow” her, the fact remains they’ve been together for centuries and their existences are intertwined and complimentary. Everything he’s experienced, she has as well, either directly or through observation.
There are some significant moments during their time together that have impacted her more than others. His traveling to Earth, for instance, and her being stuck in the form of a 1950s police call box has had the longest and perhaps most direct impact, considering it’s changed the very way in which the Doctor refers to her. She’d never have been “the blue box” for her madman if not for that one chameleon circuit malfunction.
During their adventures, the TARDIS has endured quite a bit of potential damage, from falling through the Earth’s crust, being trapped in caves, exploding, stuck in a recursive loop inside another TARDIS, dropped in a Dalek crucible, removed from time, forced into separate dimensions, bridged time lines, been infected by anti-time, worshipped as a god, self-destructed and, of course, the Time War, during which she was an accomplice to the destruction of the Time Lords, as well as her brother and sister TARDISes.
Since the Time War, her travels with the Doctor haven’t necessarily changed. She’s still managed to visit parallel universes and pocket dimensions, fight Daleks, again be dropped in a Dalek Crucible, die, be given the Doctor’s life, catch fire, explode, save the universe and watch the Doctor die. There are four moments in particular since the Time War that are significantly important, however, and those are her temporary merge with Rose Tyler, her death in Pete’s World, being dropped in the Dalek Crucible and her being trapped in a human body.
At the end of the Ninth Doctor’s life, he left the TARDIS with Rose on Earth while he fought Daleks on a space station in the future. In order to reach him, Rose ripped part of the TARDIS’ console off, exposing her Heart. The energy from the TARDIS’ Heart possessed Rose, helping her pilot the ship back to where the Doctor, where they were able to destroy the Daleks using the power of the Vortex and resurrect Jack Harkness, making him a Fact. Before she could completely burn Rose away, the Doctor took the TARDIS’ power into himself, regenerating into Ten and saving Rose’s life.
There are two points during the Tenth Doctor’s life where the TARDIS is a central focus. When they punch through dimensions to find Pete’s World and the Cybermen, the strain of the journey depletes the TARDIS’ energy, effectively killing her. The Doctor sacrifices years of his own life to revive her, literally breathing life back into her core so they can escape back to their universe where she can refill her energy at a Rift.
Later during his life, the Doctor and his companions are abducted by the Daleks. With Donna trapped inside, the TARDIS is dropped into the Dalek Crucible, one of the other things in the universe capable of destroying a TARDIS. Much like with Rose, the process releases the Vortex energy in her Heart, which leads to the Doctor-Donna and Donna-Doctor, without whom the Daleks could not be defeated.
The TARDIS would not play such a pivotal role again until the Eleventh Doctor received a message from the Corsair, another renegade Time Lord. Punching their way outside the universe, the Doctor, Amy and Rory find themselves stranded on the asteroid House after the TARDIS appears to die. There they find a woman named Idris, who is in fact housing the TARDIS’ sole after House forced it out so he could eat her ship self. Amy and Rory are kidnapped by House when he possesses the TARDIS’ ship self, so Idris and the Doctor work together to build a new console out of the remains of her sisters to rescue their companions. House is banished and the TARDIS returns to being only a ship.
Significant moments during the Doctor’s life previous to the Time War include:
First Doctor: He stole her from Gallifrey, saying she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. With his granddaughter Susan, they wound up on Earth, where the TARDIS took her current shape of a 1950’s police call box after her chameleon circuit malfunctioned.
Second Doctor: The Doctor and the TARDIS are returned to Gallifrey, where the Doctor is accused of breaking the Time Lord’s laws of non-interference and forcibly regenerated into the Third Doctor.
Third Doctor: The Doctor and the TARDIS are exiled to Earth, where the TARDIS sleeps, unable to fly since the Time Lords removed her materialization circuit. Only after the Doctor meets up with the Master again do they obtain the necessary part for her to function, waking her from her forced shut down.
Fourth Doctor: During the Fourth Doctor’s adventures, her and the TARDIS very often encounter the Master and his TARDIS (which is often cited as being called Lolita among fans and some spinoff material, though she has no acknowledged name.) These encounters often involve direct confrontation between the two ships, including Time Rams and a recursive loop, in which the TARDIS is trapped inside Lolita, allowing the Master to follow the Doctor to Logopolis, which leads to the destruction of a third of the universe and the Fourth Doctor’s death.
The Fourth Doctor is also the first to discuss the eventual entropic death of the TARDIS while sitting in her Cloister Room.
In the spinoff Short Trips story “The Lying Old Witch in the Wardrobe,” the TARDIS traps Romana in her wardrobe while she’s regenerating into Romana II, takes her form and goes out on a date with the Fourth Doctor to see exactly how it is he feels about the Time Lady. In the end, she releases Romana and returns to her normal ship self.
Fifth Doctor: Just after his regeneration, the TARDIS is sabotaged by Adric (who is being controlled by the Master) and sent hurtling toward Event One, or the Big Bang. She’s saved by Tegan and Nyssa piloting her to Castrovalva, which also turns out to be an elaborate setup by the Master to kill the Doctor. Later attempts to sabotage her by Turlough at the behest of the Black Guardian also result in her having to jettison rooms and engage in emergency evacuation procedures for the Doctor and his companions.
Sixth Doctor: Put on trial by the Time Lords, the Doctor recounts several of his travels with the TARDIS and Peri, and later Mel, only to realize he’s confronting a possible future version of himself called the Valeyard.
In the spinoff audio “Her Final Flight,” the Doctor is hynotised into believing he and the TARDIS are stranded on a planet with Peri, where the TARDIS is worshipped as a god. However, her core is exposed, sickening the natives who come to worship her, and in order to save the people Peri has adopted as her own, the Doctor must self-destruct the TARDIS. In the end, he realizes it’s a ruse and stops the detonation, but not before she loses almost all of her interior.
Seventh Doctor: During the Seventh Doctor’s life, the TARDIS assists him in hunting down Fenric, which in turns helps Ace learn more about herself and confront her past. She also watches the Doctor as he’s shot down in a gang fight, leading to his regeneration into the Eighth Doctor.
In the spinoff audio “Unregenerate!” the TARDIS protects the Doctor from going mad during a Time Lord experiment by using their bond to keep him focused and to fight off the grafting of another TARDIS’ mind on his. The Time Lords, in an attempt to better control the TARDISes, are attempting to graft them onto alien beings, rather than keep them as ships. Almost all of the attempts fail when the TARDIS conscious goes insane and kills its host, though a few manage to survive. One of them pilots the TARDIS to where the Doctor is, while the TARDIS conscious in the Doctor’s mind is transferred to a mutli-form being. The experiment is ended and the TARDIS’ brother and sister remain behind to protect the data and keep it from Time Lord hands. After the adventure, Mel notes that the Doctor and TARDIS are an “old married couple” when the Doctor says he and his ship understand one another.
In the audio “Colditz,” the TARDIS avenges the capture and near-rape of Ace by ripping her captor in two after trapping him in her doors and then dematerializing.
Eighth Doctor: In his plan to destroy the Doctor, the Master steals the TARDIS and manages to open her Eye of Harmony, exposing Earth to intense time energy and warping the fabric of reality. If the Doctor can’t close the Eye, Earth will be fractured and erased, the Doctor along with it. In the end, he’s able to thwart the Master, who falls into the Eye and is trapped in the TARDIS’ black hole core for an indeterminate amount of time.
In the spinoff novels “The Shadows of Avalon” and “The Ancestor Cell,” the TARDIS is destroyed in an explosion when a rift opens between Earth and the pocket dimension of Avalon. It’s later revealed in “The Ancestor Cell” that she was actually caught between two time lines - one in which the Doctor becomes an evil Faction Paradox member and the other where he follows the established course of not trying to destroy the universe. Straddling the time lines as she is, the TARDIS spends millennia waiting for the Doctor to return to Gallifrey, consuming energy and expanding over the planet as a giant skeletal flower infested with giant bone spiders. The Doctor eventually pulls her into one time line, but the energy released destroys Gallifrey and reduces the TARDIS to a sliver, which regrows as the Doctor waits on Earth, the Matrix trapped in his head.
The “Shadows of Avalon” is also the book where Laura Tobin, known as Compassion, is changed into the Type 101 TARDIS, an experiment the TARDIS had begun earlier in the books by feeding the Remembered human her biodata, effectively making her the TARDIS’ daughter. Compassion goes off on her own after “The Ancestor Cell” and eventually begins breeding the Type 102 TARDIS.
In the spinoff audio “Zagreus,” the TARDIS and Doctor and infected by anti-time, leading both to be “possessed” by the entity Zagreus. The TARDIS takes on the Brigadier’s form so she can gain the trust of Charley, Romana and Leela in order to kill them; she also tortures the Doctor at Rassilon’s behest, saying he promised her freedom. During one session, when the Doctor says he would do anything for Charley because they're friends, the TARDIS responds with her friendship speech: "Fool, that's not friendship, that's love. Blind, heedless love. Shall I tell you about friendship? Friendship is standing shoulder to shoulder in the face of life and death; friendship is there when love's candle has burned and gutted; friendship stays loyal when the enemy is at the gates; friendship is never sacrificed, never surrendered. I was your friend, Doctor, your TARDIS, your friend ship. How many adventures did we share, how many billions of miles did we travel together? How long was it before you betrayed me?"
The audio ends with the Doctor, TARDIS and Charley leaving for the divergent universe, where time doesn’t exist and the Doctor and Charley go on a series of adventures with C’rizz to find her and return home.
Point in Canon: The end of S6x04, The Doctor’s Wife
Conditional: Brief summary of previous RP history: n/a
Character Personality: Constant is the one word that always comes to mind when describing the TARDIS’ personality. She’s the only thing that’s there for him no matter what, having travelled with him consistently since first leaving Gallifrey hundreds of years ago. The Doctor would not be the Doctor without his blue box; they are a part of each other.
That isn’t to say the TARDIS reflects the Doctor’s personality completely, however. She’s aggressive, assertive and argumentative just as quickly as she is affectionate and altruistic (in relation to the Doctor). During her time trapped in the human Idris’ body, each of these facets come out, along with her confusion at the loss of feeling all time at once. She’s a “mad, bitey lady” who’s willing to cannibalise the remains of her sisters because it will aid the Doctor. She just does it while arguing with him like the old married couple they are.
She’s not without her fixations and attachments, of course. She refers to Rory as the “pretty one,” but her allegiance is very obviously to the Doctor, going so far as to telling him she loves him just before returning to her police box form as Idris finally dies. She’s mostly dismissive of others, showing no reaction when Auntie and Uncle die save that her and the Doctor need to hurry. It could be because she has little real concept of mortality as relating to humans, considering her “life” lasts approximately a couple hours before the body she’s trapped in finally dies. She shows no concern for her own well-being either, voluntarily jumping into an open-sided TARDIS console room with the Doctor to chase her ship self back into the universe. When the majority of your existence has been as an indestructible ship that exists in all of space and time, such considerations take a back seat. What might be common sense to a human doesn’t matter to her and it demonstrates a facet of her alien thought processes and priorities.
That isn’t to say the TARDIS was always so dismissive of others. Before the Time War, when the universe was more ordered and routine, the TARDIS was very often temperamental and jealous. For every dozen or so times she protected the Doctor, she also responded possessively, going so far as to imprison Romana II to make sure the Doctor doesn’t love the Time Lady. During Eight’s run with Charley, his affection and attachment are all major points that Charley brings to bear against him, arguing how the only thing he cares about in the universe is his ship. The same ship who tortured and tried to kill him and delivered the aforementioned friendship speech as her justification.
While straddling time lines as the Edifice, the TARDIS is infested with giant bone spiders that kill anyone other than the Doctor; spiders she designed and created to protect herself. She even tries killing Compassion, whom she created. She risks the lives of all those on Gallifrey because of her fixation on the Doctor.
Her brutal killing of Kurtz in “Colditz” also shows she feels strongly toward some companions, a trait that carries over after the Time War but not to the same extent. Even though the Doctor screams at her to stop, the TARDIS still murders the soldier because he was the one who imprisoned and hurt Ace. She’s so determined to punish those who harm what is hers she doesn’t realize she’s hurting Ace, as well. She’s morally ambiguous at best and amoral at worst. It is something that, again, shows itself in her callous attitude toward Auntie and Uncle’s deaths.
That amoral behavior also led to her creation of Compassion. When the Doctor found Laura Tobin, she was still human - a Remembered one, meaning she was a clone, but human nonetheless. Without permission or even without letting anyone know what she was doing, the TARDIS began feeding Laura TARDIS biodata, slowly restructuring the woman’s DNA to create a new form of TARDIS. There was never any considering for whether Compassion wanted to become a ship, or for the pain she’d have to endure in the process. The TARDIS simply links herself to the woman and begins changing her.
The Time War, like the Doctor, changed her, though. In the comic “The Forgotten,” instead of outright fighting the enemy that’s trying to hurt the Doctor, the TARDIS instead takes the form of Martha and helps the Doctor work out what’s happening to him, allowing him to defeat Escartr'ss. She also grants him his desire to see his granddaughter again, taking Susan’s form and letting him know that she’s always understood why he left her behind. Whether she’s speaking strictly as Susan or using her own knowledge of the Doctor and his desires is debatable, but by comforting him, the TARDIS shows at least some understanding of compassion and a desire to please her pilot.
When it comes down to it, that’s what she wants most. Her actions and thoughts are almost all based exclusively around the Doctor, a man she loves and over whom she obsesses. He is her focal point and raison d’etre and everything she does is connected to him in some way.
Conditional: Personality development in previous game: n/a
Character Plans: Where the Doctor goes, she goes, basically, though in particular I’m looking to get her involved a lot with figuring out the Darkness and other scientific studies. Learning more about what it means to be alive in the sense of humans, rather than a sentient time ship, will also be some of the things I’m pushing her toward, though I suspect she won’t do well with laws at first.
Appearance/PB: Blue will always be her colour.
Writing Samples
First Person Sample
Thief? Thief, are you there? It’s happened again. I think. Or is it the first time? When are we? Oh, it doesn’t matter. Doctor? Doctor, I need you!
[the NV flickers to life as the TARDIS taps relentless at its screen, tinkering with the device a few moments more]
What a curious little device. How do you suppose it works? It’s most certainly a centralized processor and self-contained power source. Fascinating.
[she tilts her head, seemingly distracted, then blinks as she realizes that, oh yes, she was looking for someone]
Have you seen my thief? He must be here. I can’t be anywhere he isn’t, you see. Well, I have and I will be, but it doesn’t work that way. We’re always together. And I need to tell him good-bye. Or was it hello? They’re the same word in some languages, you know. Apparently they understood better than most. [pouts] Linear time is just much too confusing.
Thief! [taps on the screen some more] Where’s my thief? Thief, come find me!
Third Person Sample
The first thing she became aware of was ground. Or was it the wind? It was certainly something elemental and the TARDIS squirmed. Then stopped. She couldn’t squirm, ships didn’t squirm. Ships flew and landed and made vwoosh noises and changed desktops, but they didn’t squirm.
Going very still, the TARDIS let her eyes roam the large field she’d found herself in. Eyes. Not scanning systems, not cameras, not light wave detectors, but eyes. And hands! she noted as she looked down. Funny, she could remember having hands before, but that had been a long time ago, hadn’t it? Or a long time in the future? Was it recently or far away? And why did she have eyes and hands at all? Or a rear end, for that matter, that ached where she sat? She shouldn’t have these things, not again and not ever, depending on when she was.
The ‘when’ must have been later, then, because she remembered doing this before. But she remembered a lot of things that hadn’t happened yet. Merlin, for instance. Was the Doctor Merlin yet? No, he was still Gandalf. She was sure he was still Gandalf. So this had to have been later and she must have had this body before. But it had died. She’d told the Doctor hello and dispersed back into her ship self, so how was she in a body again that should by all rights not exist? Maybe the body was earlier and she was later?
With a frustrated sigh, the TARDIS pushed Idris’ body to its feet, wobbling a bit as she adjusted to having legs again at all, and surveyed her area. It was, indeed, a large football field … thing. Baseball diamond? Some Earth sport; it didn’t matter. What mattered was her proper self wasn’t parked nearby, so this wasn’t the work of House. And her Doctor wasn’t nearby, either, if the general lack of people was any indication. Nor was the orange one or the pretty one. Curious and frightening, all at once.
“Thief?” she called quietly, rubbing her throat. Words. That was odd again. So was her tongue on her teeth. She didn’t think she’d ever get used to this. Or this being alone thing. She needed to find her pilot and quickly, if for no other reason than to figure out what had happened and get them both back and exploring the universe again.