(no subject)
Name/Alias: Jayce
Personal Journal: onlytheblue
E-mail: withoutthorns@gmail.com
AIM/MSN/Other IM: AIM: thebluesuitedone
Character Name: The (Tenth) Doctor
Source: Doctor Who - Shortly after The Satan Pit (specifically near the beginning of the novel The Art of Destruction)
Genre: Sci-fi
Personality: What one notices about the Tenth Doctor at very first glance is likely to be his boundless manic energy. He dances, he hops, he bounces, and he runs to and fro without any sign of ever tiring or even running low on his energy. He gestures wildly when he speaks, especially if he's presenting or explaining something, he tackles investigations exuberantly hands-on, and is often openly gleeful at discoveries or curiosities--especially when these discoveries lead to or are inherently dangerous. He often appears to rush so quickly into situations that he doesn't stop to think it through before he does or says things, which tends to lead to him flouting social conventions or blurting out incredibly rude statements without intending to.
He's openly affectionate and happily willing to hug anyone he comes across without question. He is jovial and cheerful, often wearing a wide grin and laughing along with any humor he encounters whether or not it's appropriate at the time. Perhaps as a part of his lack of thinking things through, and the flip side of his inadvertent rudeness, he is quick to shower those who meet his approval with praise--even if they're in the process of trying to kill him.
He is enthusiastic in his adoration and will pick out even the simplest achievements to lavish praise upon.
For the most part, this manic energy is a front. The constant cheer and manic cackling, while often holding a certain sincerity, is simply a cloak for the brooding guilt he feels for his part of the Time War, which destroyed his species. Even through his constant cheer, there are darker undercurrents that show themselves in times of stress. Should someone or something he cares about be threatened, the glee and mirth he shows will often dissolve to a much more somber persona. While he always extends mercy to anyone he comes across regardless of what they do, this incarnation of him will only offer it the once. As he once remarked himself his tenth life is the sort to give 'no second chances'. Should someone scorn his offer of mercy, the wrathful, vengeful side of him awakens and rains with all the fury and destruction of a monstrous storm. His previous lives earned the monikers 'Oncoming Storm', 'Destroyer of Worlds', and 'the Bringer of Darkness', and these his fury lives up to, even adding to the list as 'the Dark Lord' during his lifetime. Indeed, he is capable of a great darkness and his fury can be deadly, especially when his grief an guilt add to his anger.
Besides that anger and guilt, he keenly feels the fact that he is the last of his kind and race, and harbors a great loneliness because of it, which he never quite dispels even when surrounded by friends. He is very, very old, at least nearly a thousand years and very likely almost twice that, and behind his manic energy that age weighs heavily on him. He is well aware of how much shorter the lives of those around him are, and how briefly they stay near him. He's witnessed the births of civilizations and lived long enough to watch them die, and for all that he spends his life racing across the universe mending and saving all the lives that he can, and witnessing all the wonders the universe has to offer...his fondest dream would be to have a short and simple life, as humans do. It is his dream and the one adventure he knows he can never have.
This yearning an regret is ever present under his exterior, and usually means he keeps the people he cares about at an arms length both so that he can remain distant and ignore the fact that they will all age and die long before him, and so that he won't be further tempted and tormented by a life he cannot reach for.
With his age also come a great arrogance. On top of his thousand years of experience, however, he is beyond brilliant, clever, and capable of seeing and things no other creature can...so a good amount of that arrogance is well justified. Sometimes this arrogance leads to poor choices, or to wild recklessness in the face of danger due to his supreme confidence that he'll find a way to sort it out in the end. This recklessness lead him to be banished from England and Earth by Queen Victoria after she witnessed one of his adventures (a banishment he immediately flouted, of course). His arrogance sometimes blinds him to the painfully obvious, or to basic morals or courtesies--all of which his companions and close friends must point out to him for him to realize this. While he is vain and proud, he is not conceited or disdainful of others. In fact, he is fully capable of complimenting someone's intelligence while simultaneously crowing about his own, and is often genuinely in awe--without a hint of sarcasm or derision--of the accomplishments of others.
Fundamentally, he remains a good man. He is compassionate and often kind, and he is fully aware of how far he is capable of falling. He fears and hates the part of him the legends speak of, and does his best to keep himself free of that darkness. He surrounds himself in friends and loved ones to distract and pull him away from his loneliness and his age, and he most especially looks to his traveling companions to ensure that should he slip into that darkness someone will be there to stop him. He lies to himself and to others often in attempts to hide and suppress his darker natures, choosing to run from conflict and battle whenever possible, rather than engage in it.
He detests weapons, especially guns, and will almost always refuse to use them, but he is fully capable of violence if he deems it necessary, and has on occasion been accused of fashioning people themselves into weapons to fight battles for him. In truth, this has rarely been his intention. Often people around him change their ways by example or in an effort to impress him, rather than by his own design.
Even more than his tendency toward pacifism, though, he's driven to protect and to save others. Nearly, if not all, of his violence and anger comes in the form of protecting the weak or in saving the life of a person or people or even creatures. Failing to save even lives he knows he can't eats at him, piling onto the guilt he already feels at the others he failed to save and the lives he's been forced to take over his lifetime. Despite his failures, however, he still keeps on trying to protect and to save anyone that he can, and keeps in his memories those he can't, especially those who sacrifice themselves in his place.
Notably, the Doctor is a bit of a pop culture buff. He's very fond of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century Earth culture and achievements, having read and loved all of the Harry Potter books, and considering himself a big fan of Charles Dickens. He is also familiar with Agatha Christie, keeping a copy of one of her novels in the console room. He's quoted Lion King, Ghost Busters, Ian Dury, and Kylie Minogue, and also enjoys Elvis Presley. He's also aware of Sherlock Holmes in his world. A few of his earlier regenerations claim to be friends with Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, and shortly in his future it's implied his helping on a case with an 'Inspector Lestrade' will inspire the stories of Sherlock Holmes and Watson themselves (with Watson taking the place of Rose). Also of note, it's heavily implied a future regeneration of himself will be Merlin, and he's briefly encountered a time, space, and dimensional traveling Transformer in crossover work.
History: Little is known of his youth, or really of any time before about 250 years old. No one else who knows for sure is still alive and he'll never tell the truth...and rarely the same story twice. What is known is that he's among forty-four (later forty-five) cousins either born or loomed into existence (he won't keep that straight either) to the House of Lungbarrow. He had a very isolated and lonely childhood, though whether this is due to being half-human (as he once suggests and later denounces) or for some other reason is unknown. At some point in his childhood or once he joins the Prydon Academy--required to achieve the title of Time Lord, a TARDIS, and the ability to regenerate--he befriends a fellow Gallifreyan who goes by 'Koschei'. Due to all of his misbehaving and lack of actual schoolwork, he fails his first time through the Academy, and only barely passes with a score of 51% his second time through. At some point during or after this he marries a fellow Gallifreyan, whom he has children with. For awhile, the Doctor apparently tried to settle down and be a proper Time Lord. It's notable that, while he passed the Academy, he apparently did not earn a TARDIS for himself. At some point after his grandchild was grown, he grew restless with Gallifreyan life, and while wandering a TARDIS junkyard he found a Type 40 capsule open and ready to be piloted.
On a whim, he took his granddaughter with him and fled Gallifrey, willfully becoming an exile in exchange for freedom from the culture which stifled him his first two hundred years.
At some point after he escaped, he chose to stop for awhile on Earth, where his granddaughter, Susan, elected to attend school. Due to her unusual behavior, she caught the attention of two of her teachers, who eventually followed her back to the TARDIS and discovered the truth. Because of the risk of them saying something to someone in contact with the Time Lords, the Doctor felt he had no choice but to flee Earth...and take Susan's two teachers with him. Although he didn't know it at the time, his decision to take with him two humans would impact his life even more than his choice to flee Gallifrey. Through their interference with his usual methods and their insistent moral code, the two of them laid the groundwork of changing the Doctor from a careless Gallifreyan rebel, to the figure of hope that the Doctor would one day be seen as.
Eventually, on another later stop at Earth during its occupation by the Daleks, Susan fell in love with one of the human resistance fighters. Once the threat of the Daleks was vanquished, he chose to lock Susan out of the TARDIS in an effort to ensure she wouldn't miss her chance to be happy with the one she found, no matter how much it pained him to say goodbye. This would be the first of the endless goodbyes to follow in his journeys. After Susan, her teachers also eventually found their way home with his help. Although he ended up traveling with others afterward, none would ever again stay as long as Susan.
Eventually, the goodbyes became almost a part of the hello, and an unspoken acceptance that everyone who traveled with him would inevitably leave--usually far before he'd prefer them to.
When he first encountered a form of the Cybermen, hailing from a sister planet of Earth, they activated a device meant to drain the life and energy of the Earth in an effort to save their planet. While he was able to stop the Earth from being destroyed by the device, the drain was too much for his aged body, triggering his first regeneration. His second life regained some of its youth, and he set out to explore with his companions with a renewed energy. Most notably, he met a Scotsman named Jamie McCrimmon, who traveled with him consistently until he chose to break certain laws of time for the sake of a planet, and the Time Lords meted out judgment on him for it. Alongside triggering his second regeneration and stranding him on Earth with a crippled TARDIS, the punishment included wiping the memories of Jamie and his other companion of the time of all of their memories of him, beyond their first adventure.
His third life showed the age the strain of the forced regeneration put on him, and as he was trapped on Earth, he spent much of his time working with the human organization UNIT. While he often butted heads over methods, he forged an alliance with UNIT which endures throughout his life, however tenuously.
Among the notable friendships he forged while in UNIT were Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart; who would maintain contact and friendship (if not actually travel with him) throughout all of his regenerations up until his current one, and well into the Brigadier's old age; and Sarah Jane Smith, who would travel with him once he regenerated again and fled to the stars, and who would also remain his friend (though far less frequently in contact) throughout his current regeneration, even aiding him and emulating his lifestyle on Earth long after his gift of K-9 broke down. On the other end of the spectrum, his third life would be when he re-established more constant contact with his childhood friend, Koschei, who since became a renegade as well, and took on the name 'the Master', instead. As cordial as their old relationship was, he found himself almost constantly at opposing ends with the Master, and maintained a far more antagonistic relationship than before.
Among his most notable acquaintances in his fourth regeneration, younger and more chipper than his previous lives, were Leela of the Sevateem, who chose to stay behind and marry another Time Lord on a visit to Gallifrey, Romana, a Time Lord who helped him assemble the key to time and eventually chose to stay behind in a parallel universe, and a boy genius named Adric, who would stay with him into his fifth regeneration. After suffering an unfortunate fall, the Doctor suffered a dodgy regeneration, which required the aid of a shade of his future self to ensure a successful transition. His fifth self turned out the most youthful and reasonable of his lives so far. For a time, he traveled with a fairly sizable group of companions, including Adric from his past life, with whom his relationship shifted somewhat due to his changed personality. Eventually he stumbled across a plot by the Cybermen just before the fall of the dinosaurs. In the attempt to unravel the plot in time, Adric was caught on the spaceship headed for Earth, and crashed to his death aboard what would become the death of the dinosaurs.
The guilt of Adric's death haunted the Doctor for the rest of his fifth life, to the point where he never really recovered from it. The others he traveled with were also affected by the death, and in the end he also had to say goodbye to them. While he did continue on and pick up other travelers; such as Turlough, who spent a portion of his time attempting to kill the Doctor; and Peri, who he eventually gave up one of his lives for; his last thoughts remained on his guilt over Adric's death.
The complications of his method of poisoning death made his sixth life unstable. Wild and rougher than his last life, his sixth life was prone to mood swings and fits of emotion, such as his nearly strangling Peri after regenerating, and held to date the loudest sense of fashion of any of his lifetimes. During his lifetime, he found himself held on trial by the Time Lords once again, only to discover his own future self had orchestrated it in his bitterness. Among the others he met after Peri left his company was Mel, a woman with whom the trial had confused their timelines as far as 'first meetings' went, and who tended to spur him to lose the weight his sixth life had put on.
His next regeneration ended up caused by a particularly brutal TARDIS crash, and his seventh life turned out far more reserved and wily than his previous regenerations. He gained a penchant for playing up the enigma of his persona, and improved his relationship with Mel for the remainder of her time with him.
Eventually she chose to travel on with someone else, and he took on Dorothy Ace, one of his younger and louder companions, with whom he traveled a good deal of time. Eventually his own manipulative nature and a certain amount of heart break caused by the death of a loved one drove Ace away, and for the most part he traveled on his own until his TARDIS crashed in San Francisco. There, he met his end once again through an unfortunate combination of a gang shooting and incompatible human medical practices.
His eighth regeneration took some time due to the foreign chemicals inside his body, and also suffered from acute bouts of amnesia throughout his life. His eighth life was somewhat more relaxed and impulsive than his previous lives, and also tended to be prone to falling in love with his companions, such as Doctor Grace, who helped him to remember his identity initially, and who helped to thwart one of the Master's plots. While she declined an offer to travel with him, his eighth life continued on as chipper as ever. Again, little is known for sure about his eighth life, except that during this time the Last Great Time War broke out between the Time Lords and the Daleks. While he initially avoided the conflict, detesting violence, when he bore witness to a Dalek gunning down an innocent child, he determined allowing the war to play out on its own would only be causing more deaths than necessary. Thus, he fought on the front lines against the Daleks, and witnessed such horrors from both sides that he refuses to speak of any of them even now.
Eventually, in the twilight of the war, after the Master himself was slain in one of the earlier battles, the Time Lords became so desperate to win they discarded all of their morals and ideals, and concocted a plan which would secure them victory at the price of the rest of the universe. With no other recourse, the Doctor activated one of the Time Lord's most terrible weapons, the Moment, and destroyed all of the Time Lords and the Daleks together. While he might have hoped to catch himself in the time lock and die with them, he ended up only on the tail end of the explosion, and thus the resulting crash only triggered his next regeneration.
His ninth life was taller and rougher than his previous ones, bearing all of the scars and weight of the war he lived through...and the guilt and loneliness of ending his own species. For a very brief time he stumbled through time, attempting to maintain a semblance of his old life, but his work was sloppy and his will to live was nonexistent. After the war, much of his mercy and compassion also suffered, which made him a harder and colder lifetime than his others, and nearly undoing the work of his previous companions. Fortunately, it wasn't long before a young human girl saved his life. Won over despite himself, the
Doctor invited the girl, Rose Tyler, along with him. He took her to the end of Earth, back to visit Charles Dickens' last Christmas, to the middle of World War II, and even to the death of her own father, and along the way rediscovered the innocence and compassion of the universe through Rose's eyes.
When they discovered the Emperor of the Daleks survived the Time War and determined to make a full Dalek fleet out of the population of the Earth, he was ready to give up everything to stop them, sending away Rose and the TARDIS to safety, and setting up a device which would once again wipe out the Daleks...and everyone else on Earth. when it came time to activate the terrible device his bravery failed him, and he couldn't bring himself to wipe out another species for the sake of stopping the Daleks, even if it meant his own death. At the last minute, the TARDIS and Rose returned in a blaze of light.
Rose had looked into the heart of the TARDIS and become a time entity, capable of reshaping the universe. With a wave of her hand she annihilated the Daleks and then restored to life their other traveling companion. Unfortunately the weight of all that knowledge and power proved too much for her human mind and body. Before long, her mind began to burn, and he chose to give up another life to save hers.
In the chaos of the regeneration, he left without their recently revived traveling companion, whom Rose had unknowingly made an abomination of time in reviving. Still unstable due to the dodgy regeneration, he piloted them both to Rose's home and collapsed into a regenerative coma for a day or two. As it happened, he landed on Earth right before Christmas, and just at the cusp of an alien invasion, which he was mostly unable to help with much of the time due to his regeneration sickness. When some of Rose's mother's tea spilled on the wiring of the TARDIS beneath where Rose moved him for safe keeping, the tea fumes helped him complete his synaptic restructuring, and roused him from his regeneration coma just in time to intervene in the Sycorax' ultimatum and save the Earth. His timely rescue not only saved the Earth at the cost of his hand--which he fortunately had just enough regeneration energy left to regrow--but proved to his doubting companion that he was indeed the Doctor despite his changed face.
His tenth regeneration was once again youthful and energetic, and far more easy going than most of his other regenerations, healed somewhat from the Time War, and heavily dependant upon the human viewpoint and support of Rose. He took her once again to post-Earth time, but this time showed her the New Earth which would be made after the original Earth burned. As well as showing her the hope of a new Earth afterward, he followed a distress signal to a hospital with medicine far beyond its time. When Rose became possessed by the same woman who attempted to kill them in their trip to the end of Earth, he reluctantly worked alongside the woman, Cassandra, in a dual effort to rescue the residents of the hospital and tortured humans and free Rose. After the consciousness of Cassandra finally faded away, he took Rose to the stars again, with renewed energy.
Along the way, they rescued Queen Victoria from an assassination attempt by a werewolf alien and were both knighted and banished from Earth for their actions, and reunited with Sarah Jane Smith, whom he hadn't properly seen since his fourth life. Together with Rose's pseudo-boyfriend Mickey and Sarah Jane they investigated Deffry Vale School, where the students were being drugged and forced to solve the Skasis Paradigm, a riddle with the keys to creation hidden inside it. The reappearance of Sarah Jane, who lived a full life between their encounters, forced him to face the ultimate mortality of his current companion, and contributed to tempting him to help solve the riddle, alongside the thought of bringing back the Time Lords as they were meant to be. Before he could be swayed completely, however, Sarah Jane intervened, urging him that the familiar farewells were a requirement for the time he had with people such as his companions to matter.
After the sobering reminder of Sarah Jane, he elected to prepare himself for the eventual loss of Rose, and brought along Mickey to help himself become independent once more. On their first trip out after picking up Mickey, they found themselves on a mysteriously empty space ship, connected to 18th Century France, and specifically tracking the life of a French courtesan best known as the Madame de Pompadour. A long time fan, he quickly became enamored with her, and spent much of his adventure on the station working to help her on his own. When he ultimately chose to rescue her from the rogue repair droids on the station, he dove through one of the time windows to do so, sending a shock wave through the system which severed all connections and briefly stranded him in the 18th century alongside the Madame. Fortunately, through luck, sentimentality, and poor stone-masonry, he was able to return to his proper century and TARDIS after only a few hours. Impressed by the Madame's initiative, he offered to take her along with them as well, but due to the time discrepancy through the time windows, in the time it took to prep the TARDIS for travel the Madame de Pompadour sickened and died waiting for him.
Although somewhat shaken by this, he recovered well enough once he began traveling with Rose and Mickey again. He quickly regained not only his old cheerfulness, but the dependency on Rose he'd meant to dispel, occasionally forgetting about Mickey entirely, much to his companion's chagrin. Eventually, through one of his absent minded spells regarding Mickey, the TARDIS charged into a rift in reality and crashed through the void into a parallel universe.
The crash and incompatible vortex nearly killed the TARDIS, and for a short time he thought he might be trapped in this parallel world. Fortunately, it wasn't long before he discovered one emergency back up crystal still functioning, and nursed it back to health using ten years of his own energy. However, the crystal would still take twenty-four hours to recharge enough to jump-start the TARDIS, which left he and his companions temporarily stranded on a mirror Earth.
Among the differences in the parallel universe were Rose's father's massive success and lack of an accident, and Mickey's grandmother not having fallen down her flat's worn out stairs. These two enticing discoveries led to both companions running off against his advisement...and once Rose convinced him to take her to visit her alternate parents, encountering the parallel Cybermen at their creation. Although her parallel mother was converted into a Cyberman, her father and a group of rebels including the parallel Mickey--called Rickey--helped the Doctor, Rose, and Mickey to stop the Cybermen invasion before the Earth could be overrun by them.
After this adventure and the death of Rickey, Mickey chose to stay behind and help with clearing out the remnants of the Cybermen on the parallel world, despite the knowledge that the Doctor would seal the rift to the parallel world forever once he left. After Rose's attempt to tell her parallel father the truth about herself failed, and a tearful goodbye between she and Mickey, the Doctor took her back home for a visit with her living, biological mother. While the two of them recovered from that particular adventure, their adventures were somewhat more somber, until the two of them once more bounced back from it.
Once they did, however, their adventures went back to usual, with the two of them perhaps becoming even closer than before the loss of Mickey.
On an attempted trip to go and see Elvis, the two of them instead end up at the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II, and stumbled across a plot by an alien known only as the Wire, who attempted to devour the essences and faces of everyone intending to watch the coronation via television. While Rose fell victim to the Wire as she investigated, the Doctor was able to find a way not only to stop the Wire, but to undo all of the damage it did, restoring Rose and all of the Wire's previous victims. Triumphant, the two of them once more rode off through time, exploring the universe with more joviality and confidence than ever before.
Eventually, they landed on a small mining base somehow orbiting a black hole, and in a sudden violent Earthquake, the TARDIS fell into the depths of the asteroid the base was drilling into. Lacking any hope of back up or supplies to go after the TARDIS, it seemed this time the Doctor would truly be trapped in an almost normal life with Rose, far away from either of their homes. All was not as it seemed, however. After a week living on and helping with the operations of the base, the drilling finished, and the Doctor quickly volunteered to go with one of the researchers, Ida Scott, down to explore what might reveal the cause of the gravity well which allowed the base to orbit the black hole at all. While down there, a malevolent voice taunted he and the others on the base, claiming to be the Beast at the center of all Devil legends, and baffling the Doctor with the claim of somehow being born and imprisoned in the rock before time itself. Although they discovered a great trap door which most likely led to the Beast's prison cell, the Doctor for once chose to err on the side of his better judgment, and turned back toward the base instead.
When the cord which carried their lift from the base to the asteroid core snapped suddenly, the Doctor and Ida became trapped in the ruins of a great city underground...and with woefully dwindling air supplies in their suits. With communication between themselves and the base severed, the Doctor saw no other choice than to salvage what was left of the cord connected to the lift, and rig a pulley device to safely lower himself into the Beast's pit. Eventually, however, the cord ran out...with still yet an endless abyss of darkness beneath him. With dangerously little oxygen left, and no other reasonable recourse, the Doctor decided to gamble with the darkness and release his harness, plummeting from the cord just as communication between the base and the asteroid re-established.
However long he fell, either his oxygen depleted or the impact of the ground, which shattered his helmet's visor, knocked him unconscious for a time.
Fortunately once he awoke he found himself unharmed, and the room he landed in not only flooded with oxygen but sufficient heat to sustain him. The walls of the cavern depicted much the same story that the Beast himself espoused, and as he explored the enclave he quickly found himself face to face with the massive, towering Beast, chained to a far away wall of the cavern. It didn't take long for him to deduce that the roaring, snarling creature before him held none of the craftiness nor cleverness the Beast earlier displayed...and therefore determine that his mind had actually possessed the body of one of the researchers on the base. He determined as well that there was a fail safe to the prison in place to prevent such an escape...but to trigger it would send not only the Beast and himself hurtling into the black hole, but all of the base survivors and Rose. While this gave him the pause the Beast intended it to, he did not remain indecisive long. After so long traveling with Rose, he found it wasn't a matter of choosing the universe or Rose, but of doing what he could to save the universe, and trusting Rose to do likewise.
In a turn of good fortune, once the asteroid's gravity well collapsed and the rock began to shake apart, the Doctor actually found himself flung right into his lost TARDIS. Although he had only time for one trip before the planet fell into the black hole, he had earlier witnessed the rocket taking off with the survivors and Rose, and therefore was able to rescue a slightly oxygen deprived Ida instead, although at the cost of the unconscious Ood-servants still trapped in the base. Feeling victorious as ever, he was able to spot the rocket--having freshly ejected the possessed crew member and therefore damning the mind of the Beast to the black hole--and use the TARDIS to tow the rocket and all of its passengers safely free from the pull of the black hole.
After helping a dizzy and disoriented Ida Scott out of the TARDIS and onto the rocket ship, the Doctor and Rose share an ecstatic reunion, and cheerfully bid farewell to the survivors of the Sanctuary Base. Afterward, the two of them soldier on through time and space, dutifully ignoring the Beast's taunts, and continuing their adventures as carefree ever. The adventure he and Rose were on before he wakes is vague, except for the memory of landing in 22nd century Africa.
Powers/Abilities/Unique Items: His skeleton has an extra pair of ribs, he has two hearts, and...well. Redundant organs. Two of every organ humans have one of and four of every organ humans have two of. (He even has two stomachs) Except livers, he only has one of those. He has a tertiary lobe in the back of of his brain that handles all of the automatic functions of his body--to let the rest of his brain think. He has a nerve cluster along his left clavicle that regulates metabolism and will render him unconscious if it's hit too hard. His retinas, along with your average rods and cones have octagons that give him amazing night vision.
His blood is a reddish-orange and darker than human blood, and lacks hemoglobin (though what it does have is similar to it). His blood has an 'unique artron signature' (which serves to identify him, to allow easier travel through time and occasionally to provide power to certain devices), and temporal platelets that make his wounds heal faster. He also has a respiratory bypass which can shut off all connection to the outside world from his lungs and stores enough oxygen to be active for twenty minutes with it. He can speak while bypassed--because it can let air out--but not smell, because it won't let more in.
His internal body temperature is 60 F, though his skin temperature is whatever room temperature is. His blood pressure is 70/70 mm Hg. He is allergic to ginger, it whacks out his metabolism (sometimes to a beneficial effect, like triggering an automatic detox, but usually just by removing his control over it and allowing things such as alcohol and drugs to affect him), and is deathly allergic to aspirin. Consuming/inhaling it will give him an embolism that even regenerating won't save him from, even touching it could make him sick. However if he has chocolate on hand, that combats the effect of aspirin (via detoxing). He lacks a prostate gland because he regulates everything that would on his own.
His skin smells faintly of honey and has extra layers, making it resistant to things like poison ivy, sun burns, cuts, and radiation.
When mortally wounded, he is capable of 'regenerating' and changing his face. His DNA has three helixes (four, actually, but the fourth is irrelevant unless his TARDIS is present), and the third helix is what activates and allows him to change. When injured beyond repair, his body is flooded with a specific hormone to induce the process. This can only work if at least one of his hearts are beating at the time, regeneration cannot be triggered after death. The hormone activates a flood of special cells which repair all damage to his body before the regeneration. The rest of the energy is used transforming every cell into a new one, building him a new body (which will reflect a slightly different side of his core personality).
If something, such as a bio-matching receptical happens to be nearby, the excess energy can be channeled into that instead of the regeneration. This, however, is the only known way to stop the regeneration once the healing has been done. After a regeneration, he has about fifteen to twenty hours of 'settling', in which his body is still full of excess energy. Generally this means he needs to sleep off his regeneration through most of this time, but it also means that if he loses a limb or the like while within that time, his body can regrow it without difficulty. He can only do this twelve times in his lifespan, and as it stands he's used nine. -- This function can occasionally be suppressed by outside forces, but even if it isn't, it can be interrupted mid-regeneration by inflicting another lethal wound on him, or prevented entirely if he's killed too quickly. Regardless, it's not an option I'm interested in ever exploring, except perhaps in some sort of short-term plot ending in his eventual death and return to this regeneration.
He has a perfectly photographic memory.
Due to his minute control over his systems, and simply by the way much of his digestive and nervous systems are built, he is impervious to most drugs and alcohol. On the flip side, he's more sensitive to magnetic shifts, which when acute, can completely scramble and throw off his thought processes.
He is capable of perceiving 170 different levels of the electromagnetic spectrum, including some ultraviolet ones, and thus tends to be able to recognize the differences between species regardless of how similar they might normally appear. Should he actually pay attention, anyway.
His sense of smell and taste are so acute he can tell the chemical composition of something by taste, including blood type.
His blood and platelets are so advanced that they can fight off almost any virus or disease immediately, and if introduced to human blood is capable of 'teaching' that resistance to the blood and person with the blood. Because it lacks a type, any human (and likely most humanoids) can take the donation.
Because it carries oxygen and nutrients so much more efficiently than humans, any human injected with it would feel energized and refreshed. Furthermore, the platelets allow him to heal wounds at an incredible speed--cuts heal in a few hours and broken bones heal within a day or up to a week depending on the severity of the damage.
The respiratory bypass allows him to cut off his breathing and hold his breath, while still being able to talk for up to twenty minutes--the system makes it almost impossible for him to choke, be strangled or be hung. It also prevents him from being affected by anesthetic, cyanide, and the squeaky voice caused by inhaling helium gas. He is resistant to mercury poisoning, but not to mustard gas. If the twenty minutes pass without his being able to breathe, he can enter a trance and go without breathing for hours more, but the longer he remains in a trance the less likely he'll be able to awaken from it.
He is capable of telepathy: reading minds and personal histories, and can sense whether others are capable of telepathy and the extent they are capable of.
He can also block memories while telepathically connected to someone.
He is capable of absorbing lethal amounts of energy and radiation from another person into himself, but depending on the amount of it, may need to regenerate afterward to save himself. Furthermore, he is capable of donating his energy to another vessel, but it will knock off years or decades of his life to do so.
He is capable of surviving extreme temperatures, from -270 degrees for up to six minutes to 392 F for up to several minutes. At -700 degrees, he will immediately lose all control of his body and appear dead, but remains conscious (and can regain control if warmed before his body starves).
He can easily go two days without water, and a week without food and show no signs of strain. If he goes 40 days without food and water, however, he will be delirious.
He is highly resistant to radiation, depending on the type he can easily handle fifty times the amount of radiation that would immediately kill a human for five minutes. If he expels the radiation into a nearby object in that time, he will suffer no noticeable damage. Enough radiation, however, will require a regeneration to survive...although he can survive hours with a lethal dose before he eventually succumbs to the damage.
He has about three times the physical strength of a human his size, and can remain conscious under G Forces that would kill a human.
He is capable of surviving lightning strikes with only mild damage to him.
He requires only one to six hours of sleep every two days, unless gravely wounded, in which case he may lapse into a healing coma to heal, allowing him to heal even major burns or diseases in a day or two. The coma, however, makes him appear dead, and his body temperature can drop so far as to allow frost to form over him, but one of his hearts will still beat once every ten seconds. Should he have time, he could go into a trance/coma and protect himself from severe damage from a fall of over two hundred feet.
He can sense the movement of anything he is on, including a planet, and any changes in gravity upon it.
Magnetic fields give him goosebumps.
He can measure the size of a room down to the centimeter simply by looking at it.
He can tell the time period he is in just by smell, and sense the age of an object by looking at it.
Temporal disturbances and anomalies make him nauseous, and things which don't belong (IE: Jack, who is a 'fixed point' and defies time by forcing it to bend around himself instead of flowing through it properly) can cause him physical pain to look at. Proximity to paradoxes give him headaches.
He can see time lines, and in fact often does. Although he is capable of seeing the past, he can also see the future, both the established time line for what the current events are leading to and alternate time lines. "What is, what can be, what must be, and what can never be." He is also capable of distinguishing if an event currently going on is 'fixed' (what must happen) or if it's 'in flux' and can go any direction. -- In the city of Genessia, something might be clouding or causing all of the timelines to become convoluted, preventing him from doing much with it.
The sonic screwdriver, as it sounds, is a tool which manipulates sound waves to move and affect things at a distance, almost always technological. Objects can be switches or wires or even agitating molecules to heat something up or fuse something together or separate. It lacks the capability of affecting wood, however, and is harmless to anything organic. The most it is capable of is agitating or tickling something organic. (This is very likely an intentional design limitation, because the Doctor refuses to use weapons to harm anything organic, and is reluctant to harm anything sufficiently sentient and robotic.) It's also incapable of budging deadlock seals, due to the complexity of the lock.
The psychic paper, which is a paper infused with psychic energy that presents to almost anyone or anything exactly what he (or sometimes they) want to see. He uses this as a form of ID to go wandering into places he wouldn't otherwise be allowed, or to end questions about why he's somewhere he shouldn't be, or to provide openings to ask questions he couldn't otherwise ask. Seriously, he uses it almost as much as his sonic screwdriver. Telepathic beings or people of exceptional genius are immune to the effects of psychic paper, and occasionally getting the paper too wet will ruin the signal.
The TARDIS is a time and space ship the size of a 1950s British police box on the outside, and...considerably more massive on the inside. The TARDIS itself is sentient, but works on a level of consciousness so separate from linear life that her actual communicative abilities make her appear to be only semi-sentient instead. She's telepathically linked to him, so that either one can sense wherever the other is at any time, and can sense the general health and physical sensations--perhaps even emotions--of the other. The link is somewhat lopsided, as...if the TARDIS were to be cut from him or die, he will be psychologically traumatized but capable of surviving the damage, but if he were to be cut off from his end of the connection or killed, the TARDIS would die unless quickly connected to someone else compatible. She is capable of traveling anywhere in time and space by disappearing one place and reappearing another, but it is not uncommon for her controls or connection to the proper time vortex to be choked, and thus prevent her from moving anywhere except in the city--or select areas of the city--should that be preferable.
Physical Description (OCs only!): N/A
World/Setting Description (OCs only!): N/A
Communicator Sample: [The communicator flicks on with a sharp trill and the hint of a fading flash of blue. Considering the angle, it's clearly propped up on a table, and a man in pinstripes is kicked back in his seat, feet propped up and crossed on the table. Most of his attention is on some sort of mess of wires, which probably came from all the gutted bits of tech strewn across the table and floor. Given the distance from where he's sitting, it's quite possible this is one of those accidental entries, except after a moment he sets the device down, sits up straight, and leans forward.]
Genessia! City of archways and stylish jewelery! You've got top points as far as impromptu kidnappings go: well-kept streets, food and water...and spending money! [He waves the packet of currency at the camera, apparently highly amused by this.] It's not every day you're kidnapped and forcibly given valuables. Well, I say 'every day'...I mean not every day while you're on twenty-second century Earth. Usually that sort of culture avoids Earth. Too many cultural gaffes in every meeting until both cultures learn a bit more cross-cultural tolerance and patience. I'd say...forty-third century?
[He squints at the roof beyond camera a moment or two, as if mentally confirming that, before focusing once more on the screen.] Now! Even if there were a desperate group of Aerie pirates into kidnapping that happened to swing around twenty-second century Earth in the middle of a crisis, this architecture is nothing like Aerie designs.
[He sits back in his chair again.] So! City of Genessia! You're not Aerie and you're not Earth. You've left me a welcome note, so you've obviously brought me here by design and aren't looking to keep me entirely in the dark. [He flashes the camera a charming smile.] I'm the Doctor. Now, if Genessia itself isn't a sentient city, and I don't think it is...it's your turn.
Prose Sample: There were an endless number of universes sprawled across reality. Once upon a time there was an institute on Gallifrey dedicated solely to tracking and studying their differences. On occasion an issue would raise up about their dangers, but the Council always kept the walls in pristine condition, so that they could be drawn shut should the need arise. When the Time War began in earnest the institute was put on extended hiatus, and the walls were slammed shut to guard against incursion or the Daleks attempting to bring along reinforcements. When Gallifrey burned, the keys to safely opening the walls were lost with them. With the loss of the Eye of Harmony, the power to travel through them at all was lost.
The Doctor had never been all that keenly interested in parallel universes: there was still so much to explore and experience and so many people to meet in his own that he'd never finish it even in his own considerable lifetime. What point was there to look after an infinite number of similar and not-so-similar parallels which he would never have the time or the ability to explore himself? He'd only feel as if he were missing out. It was all the better now that they were sealed. Barring freak accidents--which were admittedly not all that uncommon in his lifetime--parallel universes would never enter or affect his life again. They might as well not even exist at all, and thus it was to his benefit that they'd never really held much interest to him in the first place.
Yet for his lack of interest in them, and the unlikelihood of encountering them, this was not the first time the concept came to mind in recent memory. In fact this body seemed inevitably drawn to thinking of them. How the power of the Skasis Paradigm could unlock and open the walls of the universe if he wished it to, the thought of a parallel universe somewhere out there where Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson lived a life free of his and the future's influence. A life she lived longer. Its fixation even stretched back to dreams of the Bad Wolf's reach stretching out across the walls as he slept off the effects of the regeneration.
Really, for scarcely a stray thought directed toward them in two centuries, he was beginning to border on an unhealthy obsession with parallel universes. Another few centuries at this rate and he'd settle down somewhere and found his own institute for the study of parallel realities.
He shuddered, and the ship vibrated in humor. What he took to be good-natured humor, given he'd done nothing to upset the TARDIS recently, but what still earned an annoyed look. "Well you'd be a part of it, too. I'd run out of chalkboards trying to write up those sorts of calculations manually." The ship was silent in response. "Not that I'd have any-Mickey!" He grinned over at the young man who wandered in without missing a beat. For all he'd helped save the world more than once now, Mickey was still new to the traveling bit...and new travelers were often unsettled by his holding up one-sided conversations with the TARDIS.
Besides that, he'd been hoping to see Mickey or Rose wander in for some time, anyway. He needed someone to watch the monitor while he ran a few diagnostics in a different room. "Brilliant, come here. I need your help. See this button right here? I need you to just...hold it down--like that! Yes. Just keep holding it until I say otherwise. Right! Be back in a jiff!"
He started toward the interior door, before he stopped and turned back around, frowning. "Actually--have you seen Rose? I'll need her help with something, too."
Personal Journal: onlytheblue
E-mail: withoutthorns@gmail.com
AIM/MSN/Other IM: AIM: thebluesuitedone
Character Name: The (Tenth) Doctor
Source: Doctor Who - Shortly after The Satan Pit (specifically near the beginning of the novel The Art of Destruction)
Genre: Sci-fi
Personality: What one notices about the Tenth Doctor at very first glance is likely to be his boundless manic energy. He dances, he hops, he bounces, and he runs to and fro without any sign of ever tiring or even running low on his energy. He gestures wildly when he speaks, especially if he's presenting or explaining something, he tackles investigations exuberantly hands-on, and is often openly gleeful at discoveries or curiosities--especially when these discoveries lead to or are inherently dangerous. He often appears to rush so quickly into situations that he doesn't stop to think it through before he does or says things, which tends to lead to him flouting social conventions or blurting out incredibly rude statements without intending to.
He's openly affectionate and happily willing to hug anyone he comes across without question. He is jovial and cheerful, often wearing a wide grin and laughing along with any humor he encounters whether or not it's appropriate at the time. Perhaps as a part of his lack of thinking things through, and the flip side of his inadvertent rudeness, he is quick to shower those who meet his approval with praise--even if they're in the process of trying to kill him.
He is enthusiastic in his adoration and will pick out even the simplest achievements to lavish praise upon.
For the most part, this manic energy is a front. The constant cheer and manic cackling, while often holding a certain sincerity, is simply a cloak for the brooding guilt he feels for his part of the Time War, which destroyed his species. Even through his constant cheer, there are darker undercurrents that show themselves in times of stress. Should someone or something he cares about be threatened, the glee and mirth he shows will often dissolve to a much more somber persona. While he always extends mercy to anyone he comes across regardless of what they do, this incarnation of him will only offer it the once. As he once remarked himself his tenth life is the sort to give 'no second chances'. Should someone scorn his offer of mercy, the wrathful, vengeful side of him awakens and rains with all the fury and destruction of a monstrous storm. His previous lives earned the monikers 'Oncoming Storm', 'Destroyer of Worlds', and 'the Bringer of Darkness', and these his fury lives up to, even adding to the list as 'the Dark Lord' during his lifetime. Indeed, he is capable of a great darkness and his fury can be deadly, especially when his grief an guilt add to his anger.
Besides that anger and guilt, he keenly feels the fact that he is the last of his kind and race, and harbors a great loneliness because of it, which he never quite dispels even when surrounded by friends. He is very, very old, at least nearly a thousand years and very likely almost twice that, and behind his manic energy that age weighs heavily on him. He is well aware of how much shorter the lives of those around him are, and how briefly they stay near him. He's witnessed the births of civilizations and lived long enough to watch them die, and for all that he spends his life racing across the universe mending and saving all the lives that he can, and witnessing all the wonders the universe has to offer...his fondest dream would be to have a short and simple life, as humans do. It is his dream and the one adventure he knows he can never have.
This yearning an regret is ever present under his exterior, and usually means he keeps the people he cares about at an arms length both so that he can remain distant and ignore the fact that they will all age and die long before him, and so that he won't be further tempted and tormented by a life he cannot reach for.
With his age also come a great arrogance. On top of his thousand years of experience, however, he is beyond brilliant, clever, and capable of seeing and things no other creature can...so a good amount of that arrogance is well justified. Sometimes this arrogance leads to poor choices, or to wild recklessness in the face of danger due to his supreme confidence that he'll find a way to sort it out in the end. This recklessness lead him to be banished from England and Earth by Queen Victoria after she witnessed one of his adventures (a banishment he immediately flouted, of course). His arrogance sometimes blinds him to the painfully obvious, or to basic morals or courtesies--all of which his companions and close friends must point out to him for him to realize this. While he is vain and proud, he is not conceited or disdainful of others. In fact, he is fully capable of complimenting someone's intelligence while simultaneously crowing about his own, and is often genuinely in awe--without a hint of sarcasm or derision--of the accomplishments of others.
Fundamentally, he remains a good man. He is compassionate and often kind, and he is fully aware of how far he is capable of falling. He fears and hates the part of him the legends speak of, and does his best to keep himself free of that darkness. He surrounds himself in friends and loved ones to distract and pull him away from his loneliness and his age, and he most especially looks to his traveling companions to ensure that should he slip into that darkness someone will be there to stop him. He lies to himself and to others often in attempts to hide and suppress his darker natures, choosing to run from conflict and battle whenever possible, rather than engage in it.
He detests weapons, especially guns, and will almost always refuse to use them, but he is fully capable of violence if he deems it necessary, and has on occasion been accused of fashioning people themselves into weapons to fight battles for him. In truth, this has rarely been his intention. Often people around him change their ways by example or in an effort to impress him, rather than by his own design.
Even more than his tendency toward pacifism, though, he's driven to protect and to save others. Nearly, if not all, of his violence and anger comes in the form of protecting the weak or in saving the life of a person or people or even creatures. Failing to save even lives he knows he can't eats at him, piling onto the guilt he already feels at the others he failed to save and the lives he's been forced to take over his lifetime. Despite his failures, however, he still keeps on trying to protect and to save anyone that he can, and keeps in his memories those he can't, especially those who sacrifice themselves in his place.
Notably, the Doctor is a bit of a pop culture buff. He's very fond of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century Earth culture and achievements, having read and loved all of the Harry Potter books, and considering himself a big fan of Charles Dickens. He is also familiar with Agatha Christie, keeping a copy of one of her novels in the console room. He's quoted Lion King, Ghost Busters, Ian Dury, and Kylie Minogue, and also enjoys Elvis Presley. He's also aware of Sherlock Holmes in his world. A few of his earlier regenerations claim to be friends with Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, and shortly in his future it's implied his helping on a case with an 'Inspector Lestrade' will inspire the stories of Sherlock Holmes and Watson themselves (with Watson taking the place of Rose). Also of note, it's heavily implied a future regeneration of himself will be Merlin, and he's briefly encountered a time, space, and dimensional traveling Transformer in crossover work.
History: Little is known of his youth, or really of any time before about 250 years old. No one else who knows for sure is still alive and he'll never tell the truth...and rarely the same story twice. What is known is that he's among forty-four (later forty-five) cousins either born or loomed into existence (he won't keep that straight either) to the House of Lungbarrow. He had a very isolated and lonely childhood, though whether this is due to being half-human (as he once suggests and later denounces) or for some other reason is unknown. At some point in his childhood or once he joins the Prydon Academy--required to achieve the title of Time Lord, a TARDIS, and the ability to regenerate--he befriends a fellow Gallifreyan who goes by 'Koschei'. Due to all of his misbehaving and lack of actual schoolwork, he fails his first time through the Academy, and only barely passes with a score of 51% his second time through. At some point during or after this he marries a fellow Gallifreyan, whom he has children with. For awhile, the Doctor apparently tried to settle down and be a proper Time Lord. It's notable that, while he passed the Academy, he apparently did not earn a TARDIS for himself. At some point after his grandchild was grown, he grew restless with Gallifreyan life, and while wandering a TARDIS junkyard he found a Type 40 capsule open and ready to be piloted.
On a whim, he took his granddaughter with him and fled Gallifrey, willfully becoming an exile in exchange for freedom from the culture which stifled him his first two hundred years.
At some point after he escaped, he chose to stop for awhile on Earth, where his granddaughter, Susan, elected to attend school. Due to her unusual behavior, she caught the attention of two of her teachers, who eventually followed her back to the TARDIS and discovered the truth. Because of the risk of them saying something to someone in contact with the Time Lords, the Doctor felt he had no choice but to flee Earth...and take Susan's two teachers with him. Although he didn't know it at the time, his decision to take with him two humans would impact his life even more than his choice to flee Gallifrey. Through their interference with his usual methods and their insistent moral code, the two of them laid the groundwork of changing the Doctor from a careless Gallifreyan rebel, to the figure of hope that the Doctor would one day be seen as.
Eventually, on another later stop at Earth during its occupation by the Daleks, Susan fell in love with one of the human resistance fighters. Once the threat of the Daleks was vanquished, he chose to lock Susan out of the TARDIS in an effort to ensure she wouldn't miss her chance to be happy with the one she found, no matter how much it pained him to say goodbye. This would be the first of the endless goodbyes to follow in his journeys. After Susan, her teachers also eventually found their way home with his help. Although he ended up traveling with others afterward, none would ever again stay as long as Susan.
Eventually, the goodbyes became almost a part of the hello, and an unspoken acceptance that everyone who traveled with him would inevitably leave--usually far before he'd prefer them to.
When he first encountered a form of the Cybermen, hailing from a sister planet of Earth, they activated a device meant to drain the life and energy of the Earth in an effort to save their planet. While he was able to stop the Earth from being destroyed by the device, the drain was too much for his aged body, triggering his first regeneration. His second life regained some of its youth, and he set out to explore with his companions with a renewed energy. Most notably, he met a Scotsman named Jamie McCrimmon, who traveled with him consistently until he chose to break certain laws of time for the sake of a planet, and the Time Lords meted out judgment on him for it. Alongside triggering his second regeneration and stranding him on Earth with a crippled TARDIS, the punishment included wiping the memories of Jamie and his other companion of the time of all of their memories of him, beyond their first adventure.
His third life showed the age the strain of the forced regeneration put on him, and as he was trapped on Earth, he spent much of his time working with the human organization UNIT. While he often butted heads over methods, he forged an alliance with UNIT which endures throughout his life, however tenuously.
Among the notable friendships he forged while in UNIT were Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart; who would maintain contact and friendship (if not actually travel with him) throughout all of his regenerations up until his current one, and well into the Brigadier's old age; and Sarah Jane Smith, who would travel with him once he regenerated again and fled to the stars, and who would also remain his friend (though far less frequently in contact) throughout his current regeneration, even aiding him and emulating his lifestyle on Earth long after his gift of K-9 broke down. On the other end of the spectrum, his third life would be when he re-established more constant contact with his childhood friend, Koschei, who since became a renegade as well, and took on the name 'the Master', instead. As cordial as their old relationship was, he found himself almost constantly at opposing ends with the Master, and maintained a far more antagonistic relationship than before.
Among his most notable acquaintances in his fourth regeneration, younger and more chipper than his previous lives, were Leela of the Sevateem, who chose to stay behind and marry another Time Lord on a visit to Gallifrey, Romana, a Time Lord who helped him assemble the key to time and eventually chose to stay behind in a parallel universe, and a boy genius named Adric, who would stay with him into his fifth regeneration. After suffering an unfortunate fall, the Doctor suffered a dodgy regeneration, which required the aid of a shade of his future self to ensure a successful transition. His fifth self turned out the most youthful and reasonable of his lives so far. For a time, he traveled with a fairly sizable group of companions, including Adric from his past life, with whom his relationship shifted somewhat due to his changed personality. Eventually he stumbled across a plot by the Cybermen just before the fall of the dinosaurs. In the attempt to unravel the plot in time, Adric was caught on the spaceship headed for Earth, and crashed to his death aboard what would become the death of the dinosaurs.
The guilt of Adric's death haunted the Doctor for the rest of his fifth life, to the point where he never really recovered from it. The others he traveled with were also affected by the death, and in the end he also had to say goodbye to them. While he did continue on and pick up other travelers; such as Turlough, who spent a portion of his time attempting to kill the Doctor; and Peri, who he eventually gave up one of his lives for; his last thoughts remained on his guilt over Adric's death.
The complications of his method of poisoning death made his sixth life unstable. Wild and rougher than his last life, his sixth life was prone to mood swings and fits of emotion, such as his nearly strangling Peri after regenerating, and held to date the loudest sense of fashion of any of his lifetimes. During his lifetime, he found himself held on trial by the Time Lords once again, only to discover his own future self had orchestrated it in his bitterness. Among the others he met after Peri left his company was Mel, a woman with whom the trial had confused their timelines as far as 'first meetings' went, and who tended to spur him to lose the weight his sixth life had put on.
His next regeneration ended up caused by a particularly brutal TARDIS crash, and his seventh life turned out far more reserved and wily than his previous regenerations. He gained a penchant for playing up the enigma of his persona, and improved his relationship with Mel for the remainder of her time with him.
Eventually she chose to travel on with someone else, and he took on Dorothy Ace, one of his younger and louder companions, with whom he traveled a good deal of time. Eventually his own manipulative nature and a certain amount of heart break caused by the death of a loved one drove Ace away, and for the most part he traveled on his own until his TARDIS crashed in San Francisco. There, he met his end once again through an unfortunate combination of a gang shooting and incompatible human medical practices.
His eighth regeneration took some time due to the foreign chemicals inside his body, and also suffered from acute bouts of amnesia throughout his life. His eighth life was somewhat more relaxed and impulsive than his previous lives, and also tended to be prone to falling in love with his companions, such as Doctor Grace, who helped him to remember his identity initially, and who helped to thwart one of the Master's plots. While she declined an offer to travel with him, his eighth life continued on as chipper as ever. Again, little is known for sure about his eighth life, except that during this time the Last Great Time War broke out between the Time Lords and the Daleks. While he initially avoided the conflict, detesting violence, when he bore witness to a Dalek gunning down an innocent child, he determined allowing the war to play out on its own would only be causing more deaths than necessary. Thus, he fought on the front lines against the Daleks, and witnessed such horrors from both sides that he refuses to speak of any of them even now.
Eventually, in the twilight of the war, after the Master himself was slain in one of the earlier battles, the Time Lords became so desperate to win they discarded all of their morals and ideals, and concocted a plan which would secure them victory at the price of the rest of the universe. With no other recourse, the Doctor activated one of the Time Lord's most terrible weapons, the Moment, and destroyed all of the Time Lords and the Daleks together. While he might have hoped to catch himself in the time lock and die with them, he ended up only on the tail end of the explosion, and thus the resulting crash only triggered his next regeneration.
His ninth life was taller and rougher than his previous ones, bearing all of the scars and weight of the war he lived through...and the guilt and loneliness of ending his own species. For a very brief time he stumbled through time, attempting to maintain a semblance of his old life, but his work was sloppy and his will to live was nonexistent. After the war, much of his mercy and compassion also suffered, which made him a harder and colder lifetime than his others, and nearly undoing the work of his previous companions. Fortunately, it wasn't long before a young human girl saved his life. Won over despite himself, the
Doctor invited the girl, Rose Tyler, along with him. He took her to the end of Earth, back to visit Charles Dickens' last Christmas, to the middle of World War II, and even to the death of her own father, and along the way rediscovered the innocence and compassion of the universe through Rose's eyes.
When they discovered the Emperor of the Daleks survived the Time War and determined to make a full Dalek fleet out of the population of the Earth, he was ready to give up everything to stop them, sending away Rose and the TARDIS to safety, and setting up a device which would once again wipe out the Daleks...and everyone else on Earth. when it came time to activate the terrible device his bravery failed him, and he couldn't bring himself to wipe out another species for the sake of stopping the Daleks, even if it meant his own death. At the last minute, the TARDIS and Rose returned in a blaze of light.
Rose had looked into the heart of the TARDIS and become a time entity, capable of reshaping the universe. With a wave of her hand she annihilated the Daleks and then restored to life their other traveling companion. Unfortunately the weight of all that knowledge and power proved too much for her human mind and body. Before long, her mind began to burn, and he chose to give up another life to save hers.
In the chaos of the regeneration, he left without their recently revived traveling companion, whom Rose had unknowingly made an abomination of time in reviving. Still unstable due to the dodgy regeneration, he piloted them both to Rose's home and collapsed into a regenerative coma for a day or two. As it happened, he landed on Earth right before Christmas, and just at the cusp of an alien invasion, which he was mostly unable to help with much of the time due to his regeneration sickness. When some of Rose's mother's tea spilled on the wiring of the TARDIS beneath where Rose moved him for safe keeping, the tea fumes helped him complete his synaptic restructuring, and roused him from his regeneration coma just in time to intervene in the Sycorax' ultimatum and save the Earth. His timely rescue not only saved the Earth at the cost of his hand--which he fortunately had just enough regeneration energy left to regrow--but proved to his doubting companion that he was indeed the Doctor despite his changed face.
His tenth regeneration was once again youthful and energetic, and far more easy going than most of his other regenerations, healed somewhat from the Time War, and heavily dependant upon the human viewpoint and support of Rose. He took her once again to post-Earth time, but this time showed her the New Earth which would be made after the original Earth burned. As well as showing her the hope of a new Earth afterward, he followed a distress signal to a hospital with medicine far beyond its time. When Rose became possessed by the same woman who attempted to kill them in their trip to the end of Earth, he reluctantly worked alongside the woman, Cassandra, in a dual effort to rescue the residents of the hospital and tortured humans and free Rose. After the consciousness of Cassandra finally faded away, he took Rose to the stars again, with renewed energy.
Along the way, they rescued Queen Victoria from an assassination attempt by a werewolf alien and were both knighted and banished from Earth for their actions, and reunited with Sarah Jane Smith, whom he hadn't properly seen since his fourth life. Together with Rose's pseudo-boyfriend Mickey and Sarah Jane they investigated Deffry Vale School, where the students were being drugged and forced to solve the Skasis Paradigm, a riddle with the keys to creation hidden inside it. The reappearance of Sarah Jane, who lived a full life between their encounters, forced him to face the ultimate mortality of his current companion, and contributed to tempting him to help solve the riddle, alongside the thought of bringing back the Time Lords as they were meant to be. Before he could be swayed completely, however, Sarah Jane intervened, urging him that the familiar farewells were a requirement for the time he had with people such as his companions to matter.
After the sobering reminder of Sarah Jane, he elected to prepare himself for the eventual loss of Rose, and brought along Mickey to help himself become independent once more. On their first trip out after picking up Mickey, they found themselves on a mysteriously empty space ship, connected to 18th Century France, and specifically tracking the life of a French courtesan best known as the Madame de Pompadour. A long time fan, he quickly became enamored with her, and spent much of his adventure on the station working to help her on his own. When he ultimately chose to rescue her from the rogue repair droids on the station, he dove through one of the time windows to do so, sending a shock wave through the system which severed all connections and briefly stranded him in the 18th century alongside the Madame. Fortunately, through luck, sentimentality, and poor stone-masonry, he was able to return to his proper century and TARDIS after only a few hours. Impressed by the Madame's initiative, he offered to take her along with them as well, but due to the time discrepancy through the time windows, in the time it took to prep the TARDIS for travel the Madame de Pompadour sickened and died waiting for him.
Although somewhat shaken by this, he recovered well enough once he began traveling with Rose and Mickey again. He quickly regained not only his old cheerfulness, but the dependency on Rose he'd meant to dispel, occasionally forgetting about Mickey entirely, much to his companion's chagrin. Eventually, through one of his absent minded spells regarding Mickey, the TARDIS charged into a rift in reality and crashed through the void into a parallel universe.
The crash and incompatible vortex nearly killed the TARDIS, and for a short time he thought he might be trapped in this parallel world. Fortunately, it wasn't long before he discovered one emergency back up crystal still functioning, and nursed it back to health using ten years of his own energy. However, the crystal would still take twenty-four hours to recharge enough to jump-start the TARDIS, which left he and his companions temporarily stranded on a mirror Earth.
Among the differences in the parallel universe were Rose's father's massive success and lack of an accident, and Mickey's grandmother not having fallen down her flat's worn out stairs. These two enticing discoveries led to both companions running off against his advisement...and once Rose convinced him to take her to visit her alternate parents, encountering the parallel Cybermen at their creation. Although her parallel mother was converted into a Cyberman, her father and a group of rebels including the parallel Mickey--called Rickey--helped the Doctor, Rose, and Mickey to stop the Cybermen invasion before the Earth could be overrun by them.
After this adventure and the death of Rickey, Mickey chose to stay behind and help with clearing out the remnants of the Cybermen on the parallel world, despite the knowledge that the Doctor would seal the rift to the parallel world forever once he left. After Rose's attempt to tell her parallel father the truth about herself failed, and a tearful goodbye between she and Mickey, the Doctor took her back home for a visit with her living, biological mother. While the two of them recovered from that particular adventure, their adventures were somewhat more somber, until the two of them once more bounced back from it.
Once they did, however, their adventures went back to usual, with the two of them perhaps becoming even closer than before the loss of Mickey.
On an attempted trip to go and see Elvis, the two of them instead end up at the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II, and stumbled across a plot by an alien known only as the Wire, who attempted to devour the essences and faces of everyone intending to watch the coronation via television. While Rose fell victim to the Wire as she investigated, the Doctor was able to find a way not only to stop the Wire, but to undo all of the damage it did, restoring Rose and all of the Wire's previous victims. Triumphant, the two of them once more rode off through time, exploring the universe with more joviality and confidence than ever before.
Eventually, they landed on a small mining base somehow orbiting a black hole, and in a sudden violent Earthquake, the TARDIS fell into the depths of the asteroid the base was drilling into. Lacking any hope of back up or supplies to go after the TARDIS, it seemed this time the Doctor would truly be trapped in an almost normal life with Rose, far away from either of their homes. All was not as it seemed, however. After a week living on and helping with the operations of the base, the drilling finished, and the Doctor quickly volunteered to go with one of the researchers, Ida Scott, down to explore what might reveal the cause of the gravity well which allowed the base to orbit the black hole at all. While down there, a malevolent voice taunted he and the others on the base, claiming to be the Beast at the center of all Devil legends, and baffling the Doctor with the claim of somehow being born and imprisoned in the rock before time itself. Although they discovered a great trap door which most likely led to the Beast's prison cell, the Doctor for once chose to err on the side of his better judgment, and turned back toward the base instead.
When the cord which carried their lift from the base to the asteroid core snapped suddenly, the Doctor and Ida became trapped in the ruins of a great city underground...and with woefully dwindling air supplies in their suits. With communication between themselves and the base severed, the Doctor saw no other choice than to salvage what was left of the cord connected to the lift, and rig a pulley device to safely lower himself into the Beast's pit. Eventually, however, the cord ran out...with still yet an endless abyss of darkness beneath him. With dangerously little oxygen left, and no other reasonable recourse, the Doctor decided to gamble with the darkness and release his harness, plummeting from the cord just as communication between the base and the asteroid re-established.
However long he fell, either his oxygen depleted or the impact of the ground, which shattered his helmet's visor, knocked him unconscious for a time.
Fortunately once he awoke he found himself unharmed, and the room he landed in not only flooded with oxygen but sufficient heat to sustain him. The walls of the cavern depicted much the same story that the Beast himself espoused, and as he explored the enclave he quickly found himself face to face with the massive, towering Beast, chained to a far away wall of the cavern. It didn't take long for him to deduce that the roaring, snarling creature before him held none of the craftiness nor cleverness the Beast earlier displayed...and therefore determine that his mind had actually possessed the body of one of the researchers on the base. He determined as well that there was a fail safe to the prison in place to prevent such an escape...but to trigger it would send not only the Beast and himself hurtling into the black hole, but all of the base survivors and Rose. While this gave him the pause the Beast intended it to, he did not remain indecisive long. After so long traveling with Rose, he found it wasn't a matter of choosing the universe or Rose, but of doing what he could to save the universe, and trusting Rose to do likewise.
In a turn of good fortune, once the asteroid's gravity well collapsed and the rock began to shake apart, the Doctor actually found himself flung right into his lost TARDIS. Although he had only time for one trip before the planet fell into the black hole, he had earlier witnessed the rocket taking off with the survivors and Rose, and therefore was able to rescue a slightly oxygen deprived Ida instead, although at the cost of the unconscious Ood-servants still trapped in the base. Feeling victorious as ever, he was able to spot the rocket--having freshly ejected the possessed crew member and therefore damning the mind of the Beast to the black hole--and use the TARDIS to tow the rocket and all of its passengers safely free from the pull of the black hole.
After helping a dizzy and disoriented Ida Scott out of the TARDIS and onto the rocket ship, the Doctor and Rose share an ecstatic reunion, and cheerfully bid farewell to the survivors of the Sanctuary Base. Afterward, the two of them soldier on through time and space, dutifully ignoring the Beast's taunts, and continuing their adventures as carefree ever. The adventure he and Rose were on before he wakes is vague, except for the memory of landing in 22nd century Africa.
Powers/Abilities/Unique Items: His skeleton has an extra pair of ribs, he has two hearts, and...well. Redundant organs. Two of every organ humans have one of and four of every organ humans have two of. (He even has two stomachs) Except livers, he only has one of those. He has a tertiary lobe in the back of of his brain that handles all of the automatic functions of his body--to let the rest of his brain think. He has a nerve cluster along his left clavicle that regulates metabolism and will render him unconscious if it's hit too hard. His retinas, along with your average rods and cones have octagons that give him amazing night vision.
His blood is a reddish-orange and darker than human blood, and lacks hemoglobin (though what it does have is similar to it). His blood has an 'unique artron signature' (which serves to identify him, to allow easier travel through time and occasionally to provide power to certain devices), and temporal platelets that make his wounds heal faster. He also has a respiratory bypass which can shut off all connection to the outside world from his lungs and stores enough oxygen to be active for twenty minutes with it. He can speak while bypassed--because it can let air out--but not smell, because it won't let more in.
His internal body temperature is 60 F, though his skin temperature is whatever room temperature is. His blood pressure is 70/70 mm Hg. He is allergic to ginger, it whacks out his metabolism (sometimes to a beneficial effect, like triggering an automatic detox, but usually just by removing his control over it and allowing things such as alcohol and drugs to affect him), and is deathly allergic to aspirin. Consuming/inhaling it will give him an embolism that even regenerating won't save him from, even touching it could make him sick. However if he has chocolate on hand, that combats the effect of aspirin (via detoxing). He lacks a prostate gland because he regulates everything that would on his own.
His skin smells faintly of honey and has extra layers, making it resistant to things like poison ivy, sun burns, cuts, and radiation.
When mortally wounded, he is capable of 'regenerating' and changing his face. His DNA has three helixes (four, actually, but the fourth is irrelevant unless his TARDIS is present), and the third helix is what activates and allows him to change. When injured beyond repair, his body is flooded with a specific hormone to induce the process. This can only work if at least one of his hearts are beating at the time, regeneration cannot be triggered after death. The hormone activates a flood of special cells which repair all damage to his body before the regeneration. The rest of the energy is used transforming every cell into a new one, building him a new body (which will reflect a slightly different side of his core personality).
If something, such as a bio-matching receptical happens to be nearby, the excess energy can be channeled into that instead of the regeneration. This, however, is the only known way to stop the regeneration once the healing has been done. After a regeneration, he has about fifteen to twenty hours of 'settling', in which his body is still full of excess energy. Generally this means he needs to sleep off his regeneration through most of this time, but it also means that if he loses a limb or the like while within that time, his body can regrow it without difficulty. He can only do this twelve times in his lifespan, and as it stands he's used nine. -- This function can occasionally be suppressed by outside forces, but even if it isn't, it can be interrupted mid-regeneration by inflicting another lethal wound on him, or prevented entirely if he's killed too quickly. Regardless, it's not an option I'm interested in ever exploring, except perhaps in some sort of short-term plot ending in his eventual death and return to this regeneration.
He has a perfectly photographic memory.
Due to his minute control over his systems, and simply by the way much of his digestive and nervous systems are built, he is impervious to most drugs and alcohol. On the flip side, he's more sensitive to magnetic shifts, which when acute, can completely scramble and throw off his thought processes.
He is capable of perceiving 170 different levels of the electromagnetic spectrum, including some ultraviolet ones, and thus tends to be able to recognize the differences between species regardless of how similar they might normally appear. Should he actually pay attention, anyway.
His sense of smell and taste are so acute he can tell the chemical composition of something by taste, including blood type.
His blood and platelets are so advanced that they can fight off almost any virus or disease immediately, and if introduced to human blood is capable of 'teaching' that resistance to the blood and person with the blood. Because it lacks a type, any human (and likely most humanoids) can take the donation.
Because it carries oxygen and nutrients so much more efficiently than humans, any human injected with it would feel energized and refreshed. Furthermore, the platelets allow him to heal wounds at an incredible speed--cuts heal in a few hours and broken bones heal within a day or up to a week depending on the severity of the damage.
The respiratory bypass allows him to cut off his breathing and hold his breath, while still being able to talk for up to twenty minutes--the system makes it almost impossible for him to choke, be strangled or be hung. It also prevents him from being affected by anesthetic, cyanide, and the squeaky voice caused by inhaling helium gas. He is resistant to mercury poisoning, but not to mustard gas. If the twenty minutes pass without his being able to breathe, he can enter a trance and go without breathing for hours more, but the longer he remains in a trance the less likely he'll be able to awaken from it.
He is capable of telepathy: reading minds and personal histories, and can sense whether others are capable of telepathy and the extent they are capable of.
He can also block memories while telepathically connected to someone.
He is capable of absorbing lethal amounts of energy and radiation from another person into himself, but depending on the amount of it, may need to regenerate afterward to save himself. Furthermore, he is capable of donating his energy to another vessel, but it will knock off years or decades of his life to do so.
He is capable of surviving extreme temperatures, from -270 degrees for up to six minutes to 392 F for up to several minutes. At -700 degrees, he will immediately lose all control of his body and appear dead, but remains conscious (and can regain control if warmed before his body starves).
He can easily go two days without water, and a week without food and show no signs of strain. If he goes 40 days without food and water, however, he will be delirious.
He is highly resistant to radiation, depending on the type he can easily handle fifty times the amount of radiation that would immediately kill a human for five minutes. If he expels the radiation into a nearby object in that time, he will suffer no noticeable damage. Enough radiation, however, will require a regeneration to survive...although he can survive hours with a lethal dose before he eventually succumbs to the damage.
He has about three times the physical strength of a human his size, and can remain conscious under G Forces that would kill a human.
He is capable of surviving lightning strikes with only mild damage to him.
He requires only one to six hours of sleep every two days, unless gravely wounded, in which case he may lapse into a healing coma to heal, allowing him to heal even major burns or diseases in a day or two. The coma, however, makes him appear dead, and his body temperature can drop so far as to allow frost to form over him, but one of his hearts will still beat once every ten seconds. Should he have time, he could go into a trance/coma and protect himself from severe damage from a fall of over two hundred feet.
He can sense the movement of anything he is on, including a planet, and any changes in gravity upon it.
Magnetic fields give him goosebumps.
He can measure the size of a room down to the centimeter simply by looking at it.
He can tell the time period he is in just by smell, and sense the age of an object by looking at it.
Temporal disturbances and anomalies make him nauseous, and things which don't belong (IE: Jack, who is a 'fixed point' and defies time by forcing it to bend around himself instead of flowing through it properly) can cause him physical pain to look at. Proximity to paradoxes give him headaches.
He can see time lines, and in fact often does. Although he is capable of seeing the past, he can also see the future, both the established time line for what the current events are leading to and alternate time lines. "What is, what can be, what must be, and what can never be." He is also capable of distinguishing if an event currently going on is 'fixed' (what must happen) or if it's 'in flux' and can go any direction. -- In the city of Genessia, something might be clouding or causing all of the timelines to become convoluted, preventing him from doing much with it.
The sonic screwdriver, as it sounds, is a tool which manipulates sound waves to move and affect things at a distance, almost always technological. Objects can be switches or wires or even agitating molecules to heat something up or fuse something together or separate. It lacks the capability of affecting wood, however, and is harmless to anything organic. The most it is capable of is agitating or tickling something organic. (This is very likely an intentional design limitation, because the Doctor refuses to use weapons to harm anything organic, and is reluctant to harm anything sufficiently sentient and robotic.) It's also incapable of budging deadlock seals, due to the complexity of the lock.
The psychic paper, which is a paper infused with psychic energy that presents to almost anyone or anything exactly what he (or sometimes they) want to see. He uses this as a form of ID to go wandering into places he wouldn't otherwise be allowed, or to end questions about why he's somewhere he shouldn't be, or to provide openings to ask questions he couldn't otherwise ask. Seriously, he uses it almost as much as his sonic screwdriver. Telepathic beings or people of exceptional genius are immune to the effects of psychic paper, and occasionally getting the paper too wet will ruin the signal.
The TARDIS is a time and space ship the size of a 1950s British police box on the outside, and...considerably more massive on the inside. The TARDIS itself is sentient, but works on a level of consciousness so separate from linear life that her actual communicative abilities make her appear to be only semi-sentient instead. She's telepathically linked to him, so that either one can sense wherever the other is at any time, and can sense the general health and physical sensations--perhaps even emotions--of the other. The link is somewhat lopsided, as...if the TARDIS were to be cut from him or die, he will be psychologically traumatized but capable of surviving the damage, but if he were to be cut off from his end of the connection or killed, the TARDIS would die unless quickly connected to someone else compatible. She is capable of traveling anywhere in time and space by disappearing one place and reappearing another, but it is not uncommon for her controls or connection to the proper time vortex to be choked, and thus prevent her from moving anywhere except in the city--or select areas of the city--should that be preferable.
Physical Description (OCs only!): N/A
World/Setting Description (OCs only!): N/A
Communicator Sample: [The communicator flicks on with a sharp trill and the hint of a fading flash of blue. Considering the angle, it's clearly propped up on a table, and a man in pinstripes is kicked back in his seat, feet propped up and crossed on the table. Most of his attention is on some sort of mess of wires, which probably came from all the gutted bits of tech strewn across the table and floor. Given the distance from where he's sitting, it's quite possible this is one of those accidental entries, except after a moment he sets the device down, sits up straight, and leans forward.]
Genessia! City of archways and stylish jewelery! You've got top points as far as impromptu kidnappings go: well-kept streets, food and water...and spending money! [He waves the packet of currency at the camera, apparently highly amused by this.] It's not every day you're kidnapped and forcibly given valuables. Well, I say 'every day'...I mean not every day while you're on twenty-second century Earth. Usually that sort of culture avoids Earth. Too many cultural gaffes in every meeting until both cultures learn a bit more cross-cultural tolerance and patience. I'd say...forty-third century?
[He squints at the roof beyond camera a moment or two, as if mentally confirming that, before focusing once more on the screen.] Now! Even if there were a desperate group of Aerie pirates into kidnapping that happened to swing around twenty-second century Earth in the middle of a crisis, this architecture is nothing like Aerie designs.
[He sits back in his chair again.] So! City of Genessia! You're not Aerie and you're not Earth. You've left me a welcome note, so you've obviously brought me here by design and aren't looking to keep me entirely in the dark. [He flashes the camera a charming smile.] I'm the Doctor. Now, if Genessia itself isn't a sentient city, and I don't think it is...it's your turn.
Prose Sample: There were an endless number of universes sprawled across reality. Once upon a time there was an institute on Gallifrey dedicated solely to tracking and studying their differences. On occasion an issue would raise up about their dangers, but the Council always kept the walls in pristine condition, so that they could be drawn shut should the need arise. When the Time War began in earnest the institute was put on extended hiatus, and the walls were slammed shut to guard against incursion or the Daleks attempting to bring along reinforcements. When Gallifrey burned, the keys to safely opening the walls were lost with them. With the loss of the Eye of Harmony, the power to travel through them at all was lost.
The Doctor had never been all that keenly interested in parallel universes: there was still so much to explore and experience and so many people to meet in his own that he'd never finish it even in his own considerable lifetime. What point was there to look after an infinite number of similar and not-so-similar parallels which he would never have the time or the ability to explore himself? He'd only feel as if he were missing out. It was all the better now that they were sealed. Barring freak accidents--which were admittedly not all that uncommon in his lifetime--parallel universes would never enter or affect his life again. They might as well not even exist at all, and thus it was to his benefit that they'd never really held much interest to him in the first place.
Yet for his lack of interest in them, and the unlikelihood of encountering them, this was not the first time the concept came to mind in recent memory. In fact this body seemed inevitably drawn to thinking of them. How the power of the Skasis Paradigm could unlock and open the walls of the universe if he wished it to, the thought of a parallel universe somewhere out there where Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson lived a life free of his and the future's influence. A life she lived longer. Its fixation even stretched back to dreams of the Bad Wolf's reach stretching out across the walls as he slept off the effects of the regeneration.
Really, for scarcely a stray thought directed toward them in two centuries, he was beginning to border on an unhealthy obsession with parallel universes. Another few centuries at this rate and he'd settle down somewhere and found his own institute for the study of parallel realities.
He shuddered, and the ship vibrated in humor. What he took to be good-natured humor, given he'd done nothing to upset the TARDIS recently, but what still earned an annoyed look. "Well you'd be a part of it, too. I'd run out of chalkboards trying to write up those sorts of calculations manually." The ship was silent in response. "Not that I'd have any-Mickey!" He grinned over at the young man who wandered in without missing a beat. For all he'd helped save the world more than once now, Mickey was still new to the traveling bit...and new travelers were often unsettled by his holding up one-sided conversations with the TARDIS.
Besides that, he'd been hoping to see Mickey or Rose wander in for some time, anyway. He needed someone to watch the monitor while he ran a few diagnostics in a different room. "Brilliant, come here. I need your help. See this button right here? I need you to just...hold it down--like that! Yes. Just keep holding it until I say otherwise. Right! Be back in a jiff!"
He started toward the interior door, before he stopped and turned back around, frowning. "Actually--have you seen Rose? I'll need her help with something, too."