Taxon App
Character name: Fitz Kreiner
Genre (TV/books/etc): books
Fandom: Doctor Who
Canon point: between the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels History 101 and Camera Obscura
Why this Character and Canon point?:
I feel like I need a change of pace, so I am aping a scruffy, easily-confused comic relief sidekick. No, Fitz is quite a different critter: a smoking, drinking, wannabe playboy who is perfectly at home knocking about time and space. Unlike Glitch he’d be intensely genre-savvy and up on pop culture, at least through the mid-twentieth century. In addition to all that we have a great little Whoverse cast and I’d love to be a part of it, even if he is from another era. "His" Doctor is very different from the tenth incarnation, so their interactions (and Fitz's with Taxon's still fairly anti-Doctor citizens) will be interesting.
As for the canon point, it is a time when he wanted to go on an adventure of his own without the Doctor, and Taxon will definitely provide that for him. By this point he’s very well versed in sci-fi alien weirdness so he’ll adapt pretty well to getting kidnapped. That said he is still a traveler and a self-styled citizen of the universe, so even though he does enjoy immersing himself in local cultures he'll still want to get back to his own TARDIS and his own Doctor.
Programmed Possession: a 1953 Fender Telecaster guitar, nicked from the TARDIS
Abilities/Weaknesses:
Skills-wise, Fitz has worked many odd jobs but mainly considers himself to be a musician. He can sing and play guitar very well, and also knows several other instruments. As a baseline human (okay a clone of a baseline human) he does not have any special powers, but when the TARDIS reconstructed him she augmented his memory and cognitive skills, making him very good at puzzles like crosswords and anagrams. He also has a knack for impressions and accents which he uses to defuse tension with a joke, or to get into a character. When in peril he can think on his feet and talk his way out of many situations, and if that doesn’t work then six years (give or take) as a companion of the Doctor has taught him the art of running and hiding.
Running would be easier if he quit would smoking, something he has attempted occasionally but without any long term success. Women are another weakness, and on numerous occasions he’s dropped everything to aid a damsel in distress, and he can be easily distracted by a nice rack or a shapely pair of legs. He has a lot of insecurities stemming from a life of cynical self-doubt, and while much of that has been alleviated in his travels Fitz’s confidence can still be easily rattled. His general immaturity and inability to take things seriously can also get him into trouble.
Psychology/Personality:
Fitz's personality was largely shaped by his early childhood. As a half-German growing up in London during the second world war, he had to develop many defense mechanisms to survive the abuse he and his family were subjected to. Beneath his flippant, apathetic surface persona is a core of cynical disillusionment, and at the center of that core he's internalized much of the hatred that's been flung at him. He carries around a lot of self-doubt, and is very privately certain that he is inherently "not good enough."
For most of Fitz’s life he has wanted to be anyone but himself. He tends to vanish into fantasies where he's the suave, dashing hero who always gets the girl, instead of the hopeless, scrawny loser who never had a chance. Traveling with the Doctor, being the hero (or the hero's loyal sidekick) and saving people and planets has helped him realize his own worth. The Doctor gave Fitz a chance to start over and heal some of the scars of his youth by helping others, and to a degree it has worked. Sticking up for the downtrodden comes naturally to Fitz, and he is especially protective of children and animals.
He's quick with a wisecrack and generally doesn't take things too seriously, very much an overgrown kid. If given the choice he would rather mooch around parties, get smashed, and chat up girls than fight alien baddies. That said he's hardly the womanizer he makes himself out to be, if anything he's more of a hopeless romantic who falls in love too easily. He's looking to fill the lonely void in his life but still isn't quite sure how to go about it.
Very, very quietly, Fitz is also a bit of a nerd. He makes many references to the fantasy and early science fiction books he read in his youth, and when choosing an alias he tends to go with the names of famous spies and detectives. He possesses a surprising amount of common sense and a practical sort of intelligence, not that he'd appreciate hearing that. No matter how long he hangs around with (and hero-worships, and wants to be) the Doctor, Fitz still firmly believes it is better to be cool than smart.
History:
Fitz was born in London in in 1936, his mother English and his father a German liberal who fled his homeland when Hitler came to power. When the Blitz started he and his family were tormented mercilessly by their neighbors, to the point where his mother refused to send Fitz to the countryside for fear of what would be done to him. Even so, the neighborhood kids celebrated V-E Day by kicking him down the street, and he suffered persecution for his heritage well into his adult life.
His father died when he was quite young and his mother was institutionalized for her mental illness when he was in his teens, forcing Fitz into foster care. He finished school and began an inglorious career filled with dead-end jobs which he supplemented by playing guitar under the stage name "Fitz Fortune." His life was going nowhere slowly, until the age of twenty-seven when he met the Doctor and Samantha Jones. Through a complicated series of events it was discovered that his mother's madness was the result of alien interference. The ensuing adventure left Mrs. Kreiner dead and Fitz a prime suspect in her murder. What better way to leg it than in a time machine? It took a while for Fitz to adapt to life aboard the TARDIS. He frequently felt left out of close bond the Doctor and Sam shared, to the point where he left for a while (1967-1969) to be with a girl.
Then there was a confusing mess involving Faction Paradox, the chaos-worshipping Time Lord voodoo cult. Yes, really. They captured Fitz, and while the Doctor was too busy to rescue him he...joined their ranks. A copy of Fitz was also created, and when this copy died it was "remembered" back into being by people who had known the copy. This process was repeated until the Doctor met the many-times-diluted and only vaguely Fitzish Fitz-clone and, thinking the original Fitz was dead, had the TARDIS remember him back into all of his Fitzy glory.
This pissed off the original Fitz quite a bit, but he's dead now so whatever. It should be noted that canon is noncommittal on exactly why Fitz 2.0 is so much more agreeable than Original Recipe, but it is hinted that the TARDIS may have just remembered him nicer.
At roughly this point Sam left and the Doctor carried on traveling with Fitz and a bitchy redhead named Compassion who...turned into a TARDIS. Which was handy since the original TARDIS got destroyed. The Doctor and Fitz traveled around in Compassion while being pursued across time and space by crazy flapper President Romana, who wanted to use Compassion to breed more humanish TARDISes to fight a time war. No, not that one, another one. In any case Gallifrey still got exploded (or erased from time, depending on the author), the Doctor got dumped in the 1890s to recover, and Compassion left Fitz in 2001 to wait for him before buggering off to parts unknown.
There is good news and bad news when Fitz finds the Doctor: on the one hand the original TARDIS has regrown itself. On the other the Doctor has amnesia and doesn't remember Fitz, or how to operate his timeship. However he is Doctorish enough to take on Anji Kapoor as a new companion, and the three of the continue on knocking about the universe. The Doctor wants adventure, Anji wants to go home, and Fitz wants to make sure the Doctor's lost memories STAY lost as the trauma of remembering might kill him. Fitz takes this time to come to terms with the fact that he is a clone of himself, with marginal success.
The trio go on to have many adventures, visiting planets of cartoons and fairy tales, places where time is used as a weapon, and spend a year and a half in an eighteenth century brothel. Most recently they ended up in Spain during its civil war to find out who or what was changing how events were perceived. Fitz went to Guernica to get a first hand account, turned thirty-three, and decided it was time he had an adventure of him own.
Arrival Post (Third Person)
"Adios, Spain! Next stop, the Moulin-"
Fitz blinked. He'd been expecting the TARDIS console room in all its pseudo-Gothic/Victorian glory, not a bare space devoid of roundules. There was a chance the ship was still reconfiguring itself after its long dormancy, and the absence of the engine's subtle hum seemed to confirm this.
"...Rouge. I thought you said you'd fixed it, Doctor," he chided and turned, but there was no Doctor, no Anji, and no doors leading back out to Barcelona, 1937. Instead there was his guitar propped against a pedestal, on which sat a device that reminded him of Anji's mobile. "What the hell is going on?"
It had been a long couple of weeks, and he wasn't sure how much weirdness he could handle. They'd started at the Paris exhibition, which had led to Fitz going to Guernica (the drone of bomber engines, the distant sound of explosions, the stream of refugees bleeding and dying) while the Doctor and Anji were stranded in Barcelona for months, waiting for war to break out. It had happened after Fitz rejoined them and...he flexed his fingers like the medic had told him, wincing as the motion pulled at the cuts on his palm. He needed to keep doing that to retain mobility, if he ever wanted to play again.
He picked up the Telecaster first and settled it on his back, the familiar weight a comfort. Then he grabbed the mobile, and spun sharply when the doors opened behind him.
"Christ," Fitz muttered, then held up the device like a walkie talkie and put on his best Sean Connery. "HQ, this is Special Agent Kreiner, I'm in some chrome funhouse and I've lost Kapoor and the Doctor. This was not in the mission briefing, please advise. Over."
He wasn't exactly expecting a response, but if you give the man enough props he was going to use them.
Additional Third Person Sample:
It really wasn't his fault this time.
The Doctor had told him to "stay here," and that was exactly what Fitz had done: not moved from his assigned spot. Why would he? It was a nice grassy hillside under a pleasant if slightly yellowy sky, aside from the sudden and worrying disappearance of the TARDIS and Anji it was like being on holiday at last. So while the Doctor took it upon himself to go in search of his ship and his other companion, Fitz laid down, tipped his trilby over his eyes, and dozed in the alien sunshine.
He woke with the (all too familiar) sense that something was amiss. When he reached to move his hat he discovered that his hands were bound to the earth, as were his feet.
"What-" Fitz began and shook his head to dislodge the hat. Blinking, he noticed that despite still being prone on the same patch of grass, the landscape was trundling along to either side of him. He also noted the root-like bindings lashed across his middle, which looked like how the stuff holding his wrists and ankles felt.
He was being kidnapped by some turf. Knowing Anji would never let him hear the end of it Fitz struggled against the bindings, at which point the grass slammed back into the ground, roots anchoring it (and Fitz) firmly to the soil. Once it was clear that he wouldn't try to escape again it lifted back up and continued on its way.
"You cheeky sod," Fitz muttered, unable to help himself.
Genre (TV/books/etc): books
Fandom: Doctor Who
Canon point: between the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels History 101 and Camera Obscura
Why this Character and Canon point?:
I feel like I need a change of pace, so I am aping a scruffy, easily-confused comic relief sidekick. No, Fitz is quite a different critter: a smoking, drinking, wannabe playboy who is perfectly at home knocking about time and space. Unlike Glitch he’d be intensely genre-savvy and up on pop culture, at least through the mid-twentieth century. In addition to all that we have a great little Whoverse cast and I’d love to be a part of it, even if he is from another era. "His" Doctor is very different from the tenth incarnation, so their interactions (and Fitz's with Taxon's still fairly anti-Doctor citizens) will be interesting.
As for the canon point, it is a time when he wanted to go on an adventure of his own without the Doctor, and Taxon will definitely provide that for him. By this point he’s very well versed in sci-fi alien weirdness so he’ll adapt pretty well to getting kidnapped. That said he is still a traveler and a self-styled citizen of the universe, so even though he does enjoy immersing himself in local cultures he'll still want to get back to his own TARDIS and his own Doctor.
Programmed Possession: a 1953 Fender Telecaster guitar, nicked from the TARDIS
Abilities/Weaknesses:
Skills-wise, Fitz has worked many odd jobs but mainly considers himself to be a musician. He can sing and play guitar very well, and also knows several other instruments. As a baseline human (okay a clone of a baseline human) he does not have any special powers, but when the TARDIS reconstructed him she augmented his memory and cognitive skills, making him very good at puzzles like crosswords and anagrams. He also has a knack for impressions and accents which he uses to defuse tension with a joke, or to get into a character. When in peril he can think on his feet and talk his way out of many situations, and if that doesn’t work then six years (give or take) as a companion of the Doctor has taught him the art of running and hiding.
Running would be easier if he quit would smoking, something he has attempted occasionally but without any long term success. Women are another weakness, and on numerous occasions he’s dropped everything to aid a damsel in distress, and he can be easily distracted by a nice rack or a shapely pair of legs. He has a lot of insecurities stemming from a life of cynical self-doubt, and while much of that has been alleviated in his travels Fitz’s confidence can still be easily rattled. His general immaturity and inability to take things seriously can also get him into trouble.
Psychology/Personality:
Fitz's personality was largely shaped by his early childhood. As a half-German growing up in London during the second world war, he had to develop many defense mechanisms to survive the abuse he and his family were subjected to. Beneath his flippant, apathetic surface persona is a core of cynical disillusionment, and at the center of that core he's internalized much of the hatred that's been flung at him. He carries around a lot of self-doubt, and is very privately certain that he is inherently "not good enough."
For most of Fitz’s life he has wanted to be anyone but himself. He tends to vanish into fantasies where he's the suave, dashing hero who always gets the girl, instead of the hopeless, scrawny loser who never had a chance. Traveling with the Doctor, being the hero (or the hero's loyal sidekick) and saving people and planets has helped him realize his own worth. The Doctor gave Fitz a chance to start over and heal some of the scars of his youth by helping others, and to a degree it has worked. Sticking up for the downtrodden comes naturally to Fitz, and he is especially protective of children and animals.
He's quick with a wisecrack and generally doesn't take things too seriously, very much an overgrown kid. If given the choice he would rather mooch around parties, get smashed, and chat up girls than fight alien baddies. That said he's hardly the womanizer he makes himself out to be, if anything he's more of a hopeless romantic who falls in love too easily. He's looking to fill the lonely void in his life but still isn't quite sure how to go about it.
Very, very quietly, Fitz is also a bit of a nerd. He makes many references to the fantasy and early science fiction books he read in his youth, and when choosing an alias he tends to go with the names of famous spies and detectives. He possesses a surprising amount of common sense and a practical sort of intelligence, not that he'd appreciate hearing that. No matter how long he hangs around with (and hero-worships, and wants to be) the Doctor, Fitz still firmly believes it is better to be cool than smart.
History:
Fitz was born in London in in 1936, his mother English and his father a German liberal who fled his homeland when Hitler came to power. When the Blitz started he and his family were tormented mercilessly by their neighbors, to the point where his mother refused to send Fitz to the countryside for fear of what would be done to him. Even so, the neighborhood kids celebrated V-E Day by kicking him down the street, and he suffered persecution for his heritage well into his adult life.
His father died when he was quite young and his mother was institutionalized for her mental illness when he was in his teens, forcing Fitz into foster care. He finished school and began an inglorious career filled with dead-end jobs which he supplemented by playing guitar under the stage name "Fitz Fortune." His life was going nowhere slowly, until the age of twenty-seven when he met the Doctor and Samantha Jones. Through a complicated series of events it was discovered that his mother's madness was the result of alien interference. The ensuing adventure left Mrs. Kreiner dead and Fitz a prime suspect in her murder. What better way to leg it than in a time machine? It took a while for Fitz to adapt to life aboard the TARDIS. He frequently felt left out of close bond the Doctor and Sam shared, to the point where he left for a while (1967-1969) to be with a girl.
Then there was a confusing mess involving Faction Paradox, the chaos-worshipping Time Lord voodoo cult. Yes, really. They captured Fitz, and while the Doctor was too busy to rescue him he...joined their ranks. A copy of Fitz was also created, and when this copy died it was "remembered" back into being by people who had known the copy. This process was repeated until the Doctor met the many-times-diluted and only vaguely Fitzish Fitz-clone and, thinking the original Fitz was dead, had the TARDIS remember him back into all of his Fitzy glory.
This pissed off the original Fitz quite a bit, but he's dead now so whatever. It should be noted that canon is noncommittal on exactly why Fitz 2.0 is so much more agreeable than Original Recipe, but it is hinted that the TARDIS may have just remembered him nicer.
At roughly this point Sam left and the Doctor carried on traveling with Fitz and a bitchy redhead named Compassion who...turned into a TARDIS. Which was handy since the original TARDIS got destroyed. The Doctor and Fitz traveled around in Compassion while being pursued across time and space by crazy flapper President Romana, who wanted to use Compassion to breed more humanish TARDISes to fight a time war. No, not that one, another one. In any case Gallifrey still got exploded (or erased from time, depending on the author), the Doctor got dumped in the 1890s to recover, and Compassion left Fitz in 2001 to wait for him before buggering off to parts unknown.
There is good news and bad news when Fitz finds the Doctor: on the one hand the original TARDIS has regrown itself. On the other the Doctor has amnesia and doesn't remember Fitz, or how to operate his timeship. However he is Doctorish enough to take on Anji Kapoor as a new companion, and the three of the continue on knocking about the universe. The Doctor wants adventure, Anji wants to go home, and Fitz wants to make sure the Doctor's lost memories STAY lost as the trauma of remembering might kill him. Fitz takes this time to come to terms with the fact that he is a clone of himself, with marginal success.
The trio go on to have many adventures, visiting planets of cartoons and fairy tales, places where time is used as a weapon, and spend a year and a half in an eighteenth century brothel. Most recently they ended up in Spain during its civil war to find out who or what was changing how events were perceived. Fitz went to Guernica to get a first hand account, turned thirty-three, and decided it was time he had an adventure of him own.
Arrival Post (Third Person)
"Adios, Spain! Next stop, the Moulin-"
Fitz blinked. He'd been expecting the TARDIS console room in all its pseudo-Gothic/Victorian glory, not a bare space devoid of roundules. There was a chance the ship was still reconfiguring itself after its long dormancy, and the absence of the engine's subtle hum seemed to confirm this.
"...Rouge. I thought you said you'd fixed it, Doctor," he chided and turned, but there was no Doctor, no Anji, and no doors leading back out to Barcelona, 1937. Instead there was his guitar propped against a pedestal, on which sat a device that reminded him of Anji's mobile. "What the hell is going on?"
It had been a long couple of weeks, and he wasn't sure how much weirdness he could handle. They'd started at the Paris exhibition, which had led to Fitz going to Guernica (the drone of bomber engines, the distant sound of explosions, the stream of refugees bleeding and dying) while the Doctor and Anji were stranded in Barcelona for months, waiting for war to break out. It had happened after Fitz rejoined them and...he flexed his fingers like the medic had told him, wincing as the motion pulled at the cuts on his palm. He needed to keep doing that to retain mobility, if he ever wanted to play again.
He picked up the Telecaster first and settled it on his back, the familiar weight a comfort. Then he grabbed the mobile, and spun sharply when the doors opened behind him.
"Christ," Fitz muttered, then held up the device like a walkie talkie and put on his best Sean Connery. "HQ, this is Special Agent Kreiner, I'm in some chrome funhouse and I've lost Kapoor and the Doctor. This was not in the mission briefing, please advise. Over."
He wasn't exactly expecting a response, but if you give the man enough props he was going to use them.
Additional Third Person Sample:
It really wasn't his fault this time.
The Doctor had told him to "stay here," and that was exactly what Fitz had done: not moved from his assigned spot. Why would he? It was a nice grassy hillside under a pleasant if slightly yellowy sky, aside from the sudden and worrying disappearance of the TARDIS and Anji it was like being on holiday at last. So while the Doctor took it upon himself to go in search of his ship and his other companion, Fitz laid down, tipped his trilby over his eyes, and dozed in the alien sunshine.
He woke with the (all too familiar) sense that something was amiss. When he reached to move his hat he discovered that his hands were bound to the earth, as were his feet.
"What-" Fitz began and shook his head to dislodge the hat. Blinking, he noticed that despite still being prone on the same patch of grass, the landscape was trundling along to either side of him. He also noted the root-like bindings lashed across his middle, which looked like how the stuff holding his wrists and ankles felt.
He was being kidnapped by some turf. Knowing Anji would never let him hear the end of it Fitz struggled against the bindings, at which point the grass slammed back into the ground, roots anchoring it (and Fitz) firmly to the soil. Once it was clear that he wouldn't try to escape again it lifted back up and continued on its way.
"You cheeky sod," Fitz muttered, unable to help himself.