History
Rose grew up in a flat in the Powell Estate, a council estate in southern London. Her father, Pete, died in an accident when she was only six months old, leaving her mother, Jackie, to raise her alone. Her life was remarkably ordinary. As a child, her greatest accomplishment was taking the bronze in an under-sevens' gymnastics tournament. She did well on her GCSEs, but left school to live with her then-boyfriend before getting her A-levels. When that relationship ended spectacularly, she moved back in with her mother, and started working as a shopgirl at Henrik's department store. She got together with Mickey Smith, a young man who also lived on the estate. She had a routine, a mundane life that she was expected to settle for because, while it was not spectacular, it wasn't bad.
And then one night, when she was heading down to drop off the lottery money with the Henrik's chief electrician, the shop dummies started moving. And a strange man grabbed her hand and told her to run. He rescued her from the murderous dummies, and blew up the shop. And that was her first meeting with the Doctor. On their second meeting, a disembodied plastic arm tried to strangle them both, and he told her to forget about him and go back to her life.
Rose wasn't willing to give up that easily. She searched for any information about him, and found a man named Clive who was compiling data on the Doctor's previous appearances throughout Earth's history. At first, Rose didn't believe what she was hearing, writing Clive off as a lunatic. But then she met the Doctor for the third time, when he turned up in time to save her from a plastic replica of Mickey, who had been replaced based on the assumption that someone close to her would be able to use her to find the Doctor. They escaped from the replica into the Doctor's ship, the TARDIS, which came as yet another shock to Rose, especially when it in effect teleported across London. This time, rather than brushing her off, the Doctor explained what was going on, that a living plastic entity known as the Nestene consciousness was staging a conquest of Earth so as to turn it into a protein planet. From the details he gave, she was able to pick out the entity's most likely location, and together they defeated the entity and rescued Mickey, who had been kept alive to provide a template for his plastic doppelganger.
In the wake of that adventure, the Doctor invited Rose to join him. She refused initially, but regretted doing so almost immediately; when he returned to offer the added incentive that not only did the TARDIS travel in space, it also traveled in time, she did not hesitate to come on board.
The first place he took her was to see the end of the world. It shook her greatly, and even more so did the fact that it happened while no one was looking, while they were all trying desperately to survive a plot set in place by a money-hungry woman named Cassandra. But despite her misgivings, upon finding out that the Doctor's own world had burned and that he was alone in the universe, she decided to stay with him.
Subsequent adventures included dealing with gas-based lifeforms that possessed human corpses in a bid to regain a world for themselves, the defeat of a group of aliens, the Slitheen family, who had infiltrated the upper echelons of the British government in a bid to spark off world war three, and encountering the apparent last of the Daleks, the other species involved in the Time War that had wiped out the Doctor's people. Rose had to come to terms with the effect her disappearance had on those closest to her; a miscalculation had her gone twelve months rather than twelve hours. The prolonged absence devastated her mother and had Mickey suspected of her murder. Though she did leave again in the end, it wasn't without word this time, and was with the promise that she would come back.
Eventually, Rose was able to work up the nerve to ask to go back to the day her father died, so that she could hold his hand and know that he wouldn't die alone. Once there, however, she couldn't do it, and a second attempt saw her instead tackling him out of the way of the car that should have killed him. The disruption of the timeline in such a manner caused a wound in time, allowing in creatures called Reapers that acted to sterilize said wound by consuming everyone in it. In the end, Pete figured out that the only way to fix things was for him to die as he should have. He ran out in front of the car that had been supposed to kill him, which had been caught in a time loop due to the damage done to reality. This time, Rose did hold his hand as he died.
During a visit to the London Blitz, tracking an unknown vessel flagged as dangerous that fell through the Time Vortex to Earth, the duo met up with Captain Jack Harkness, an intergalactic conman. He'd used the vessel as bait, thinking they were Time Agents, as he'd once been. Unfortunately, the vessel, a med-ship, contained small nanites, called nanogenes, that sparked off a sort of plague, turning everyone who came in contact with the nanogenes into effective zombies. After the three managed to halt the plague, Jack joined up with them.
During their travels, the three of them were caught in a transmat beam, which pulled them into what seemed to be game shows turned deadly, where the losers would be disintegrated. In reality, the disintegration ray was actually a secondary transmat system, beaming people into a hidden area of space on the edge of the solar system. In that hidden area lurked the Daleks, slowly rebuilding their species using genetic material from the captured humans. Faced with an imminent Dalek invasion, along with the fact that the only way to stop them would kill everyone on both the space station they were using as a base and on Earth, the Doctor tricked Rose into the TARDIS and sent her back to 21st century London, where she would be safe. She was devastated by this, and despite Jackie and Mickey's pleas, refused to let matters go. Unfortunately, she had no idea how to fly the TARDIS, and was on the verge of giving up when she spied, scattered all across the vacant lot in which she was sitting, the words Bad Wolf. She'd been seeing and hearing them everywhere during her travels with the Doctor, and decided that instead of a warning, they had to be a message, telling her that there was a way back.
With the help of Jackie, Mickey, and a large yellow truck, she opened the heart of the TARDIS and absorbed the Time Vortex inside, becoming the Bad Wolf and gaining nigh-unlimited power. She returned to the Doctor's side in time to wipe out the Daleks, ending the Time War, and resurrected Jack, who had fallen protecting the station. Unfortunately, the power of the Time Vortex inside her head was killing her. The Doctor absorbed it from her and returned it to the TARDIS before taking off, stranding Jack. When Rose woke, she remembered nothing that had happened during her interlude as the Bad Wolf, stating that it was as though those memories were forbidden. Her salvation had come at a cost; the Doctor couldn't survive absorbing the Time Vortex, either, and there was no one to step in and save his life. Fortunately, his species had the ability to regenerate when close to death, saving them from destruction but altering every cell of their bodies.
Unfortunately, this terrified Rose. At first, she was unwilling to believe this new man was the Doctor. Not the real Doctor, not the one she'd come to know. He didn't look right, didn't sound right, and fell into a coma even as yet another alien threat loomed on the horizon. Once he woke and defeated the invaders, she was able to come to terms with the fact that he was, though changed, still the Doctor, and she continued her travels with him.
These continued travels were no safer than the ones that had gone before. Whether in a far-off galaxy or on Earth, in the past or in the future, the pair continued to stumble onto trouble. During one such adventure, prompted by Mickey calling them back to Earth to look into bizarre events surrounding a school, Rose met one of the Doctor's former companions, a woman named Sarah Jane. The two initially didn't get on at all, but eventually developed a rapport after realizing it was foolish to bicker over the Doctor as though he were a normal man. Rose had to come to terms with the fact that while she could spend her entire life traveling with the Doctor, she would eventually grow old and die, while he, who could live for centuries, would move on. With this bruising fact to take in, she was not as gracious as she should have been when Mickey, who had before been happy to stay back on Earth playing tech support, opted to come with them.
The ease with which Rose ignored Mickey, the fact that she did not need him in truth, contributed to his decision to stay behind when they ended up falling through a rift into a parallel world, one in which Rose's father was still alive, and so was Mickey's gran. He believed he was needed there, both by his gran, and by the people who were left to clean up a disaster that had been sparked off by a dying industrialist's decision to improve humanity by turning them into machines. While Rose was able to accept Mickey's decision, it hurt; the rift between dimensions would be sealed off when she and the Doctor left, and she would never be able to see Mickey again.
That, at least, was the assumption. But then came the army of ghosts: strange, hazy humanoid shapes turning up all over the world every day in predictable shifts. Rose and the Doctor discovered these on a trip back to Earth, and the Doctor managed to trace the anomaly allowing their appearance. It originated at Canary Wharf, a high rise housing the London branch of the Torchwood Institute, created by Queen Victoria to arm Britain against alien threats. Torchwood had discovered a temporal anomaly, which they had learned to excite, accounting for the appearance of the ghosts. The Torchwood operatives captured the Doctor and Jackie, who had accidentally been brought along for the trip, while Rose snuck off to investigate on her own. She came upon a basement laboratory which housed another anomaly, a sphere that despite being visible and tangible appeared nonexistent to all sensors. It was a Void Ship, created to survive in the Void between realities.
In the laboratory, Rose also found Mickey, who had crossed back to that reality in search of the Cybermen who had escaped from the alternate dimension. Those were the actual forms of the ghosts, and their forerunners had managed to infiltrate Torchwood, controlling several techs. These techs opened the rift further than it had been before, allowing an army of Cybermen out and awakening the Void Ship, initially assumed to have been used, if not constructed, by the Cybermen. This assumption was erroneous. Instead of Cybermen, it contained Daleks. Four of them, the Cult of Skaro, who had escaped the Time War with a mysterious piece of Time Lord technology known as the Genesis Arc. This turned out to be a prison ship which, once opened, released millions of Daleks into the skies of London. Human casualties were less than they might have been because the Daleks and the Cybermen attacked each other first, battling over who would be the conquerors of the world.
The Doctor devised a way to deal with both the Cybermen and the Daleks. Having come through the Void, both were tainted by it, and if the rift was fully opened, they would be sucked in. Unfortunately, so would anyone who had traveled from one dimension to another across the void, including the Doctor, Rose, Mickey, and Pete, who had come in with a team from the alternate reality's Torchwood. As he had before, the Doctor sent Rose away, this time to the alternate dimension, along with her parents who, having each realized the other was still alive, were not inclined to be separated. And as before, Rose refused to stand for this, using the device designed by Torchwood to jump across dimensions to return to the Doctor's side. He tried to convince her to leave, even stating that the rift would be sealed by his actions, and she wouldn't see her mother again. She refused. She'd made her decision a long time before, and she was staying with him.
It wasn't to be, however. Though the Doctor had secured devices that would allow them to resist the pull of the Void before the breach sealed, Rose had to choose between holding on to hers, and pulling back the lever on her side that was slipping and would, if it slipped all the way to the off position, shut the breach prematurely. She chose the latter, and try as she might, she could not hang on to the lever once it was locked. She was sucked towards the Void, and only avoided being trapped inside it for eternity because Pete appeared at the last moment to pull her back to the alternate reality. The breach sealed itself, and Rose was trapped on the wrong side.
Having had a fair amount of experience dealing with aliens, Rose had just the sort of skills needed by the alternate dimension's Torchwood. She joined them, and that became her life. One night, however, she had a dream that the Doctor was calling her. She, her family, and Mickey followed the dream until they reached a place in Norway called Bad Wolf Bay. There, an image of the Doctor appeared, exploiting a small crack remaining between the two dimensions to say goodbye. It was not large enough for either to join the other, however, and any passage between the realities would likely destroy both. Rose, weeping, admitted that she loved him, but the crack sealed before she could hear his reply.
She had no choice but to keep going. To keep working with Torchwood, defending this new Earth against threats that were present in that reality as well. But as ever, she wasn't willing to give up. She began working with the scientists on a device that might allow her to cross between dimensions, to get back to her own. They hadn't even begun testing before she was spirited away, however, finding herself in Econtra.