[App] babylonwood
How many miles to Babylon? It's further than you know...
The Player
User Name/Nick: Aubrey
User LJ: inthemortalcity
AIM/IM: meant to care
E-mail: taibhsearachd@gmail.com
Other Characters: N/A
The Character
Character Name: The Tenth Doctor
Character Journal: thatsortofaman
Series: Doctor Who
Age: 906, if you ask him, but... don't ask him. He lies. Just accept that he is ancient and forever.
From When?: End of Time, just before he decides to step into the radiation chamber.
Abilities/Powers: The Doctor is smarter than you. At least, that's what he'll happily tell you if you give him half a reason to. Being a Time Lord, he's considerably more intelligent than any human, and he's particularly good at finding patterns, fitting a number of seemingly unconnected facts together into something that lets him see the bigger picture.
He speaks a ton of languages (safe to assume any Earth language, and most alien languages extant in his universe too), and he knows a lot of ridiculous facts about just about any subject - physics, history, chemistry, biology, you name it. He's especially good with technology, and can work magic (not literally) with a few random bits of tech and the contents of his pockets at any given point in time. He has a very good memory, but even if he doesn't tend to actually forget things, he still sometimes takes a while to recall the relevant facts, what with all the information he has to sort through.
Time Lords have an innate sense for time, can tell what points in time are fixed and which are mutable, can sense anomalies in time and space, probabilities and potential realities. For the most part, the Doctor ignores this particular sense - it's distracting to have all that in your head - but he can focus and call upon it at any time. He is psychic, with the ability to step into others' minds, see their thoughts and memories and change them if he wishes. As Time Lords go, though, he is not a particularly strong psychic, and he does require physical contact and quite a bit of concentration.
Physically, his abilities are somewhat more limited. He has uncanny aim with projectiles, and has some ability with swordfighting. Mostly, though, he's just very, very good at running. He does appear to be somewhat hardier than your average human, able to recover fairly quickly from things like significant blood loss, one of his hearts stopping, or falling out of a spaceship. If seriously injured, he can go into a healing coma to recover much more quickly than usual, and if about to die, can regenerate, changing every cell of his body to heal the injuries and become a different person. (This will never be used in the game, but it's worth a mention nevertheless.)
Power Limitations: N/A
Inventory
- Very tattered brown pinstriped suit. It should probably be noted that the pockets of his trousers are bigger on the inside, though... not as much as the pockets of his trenchcoat. Which he doesn't have.
- Pale blue dress shirt. See above, re: damage related to crashing through a skylight.
- Red tie. Probably more or less okay.
- Off-white Converse. Also relatively undamaged.
- Pair of brainy specs he doesn't actually need, which is good, because they're broken in three places.
- Slightly broken sonic screwdriver
- Psychic paper
- TARDIS key
- Stuff in his trouser pockets: Quite a lot of twine, a spoon, a sort of walkie talkie from the 32nd century (just the one), spare change from at least four different planets and time periods, some hard candies, and a yellow plastic dinosaur (a Hadrosaurus, if it's important).
Personality: Most of the time, when you catch him on a good day, the Doctor's cheerful and gregarious, very talkative and often rather affectionate, even with people he doesn't know. He has a sort of childish glee about seeing things he's never seen before, finding things he would have said before were impossible (which he says a lot, despite the fact that by now he should have known better). The universe is amazing - human beings, doubly so. He's charismatic, dragging people along with him by sheer force of his personality, and though he's occasionally blunt and tactless it's (generally) not out of a desire to be rude, just that he doesn't much think about other people's feelings unless someone forces him to. He's just a little bit self-absorbed, a little reckless, prone to running off into danger without a second thought, occasionally a little bit childish... alright, more than a little bit, on all counts... but endearing all the same.
However, his mood can turn at the drop of a hat, under the wrong circumstances, and he is not always the carefree, roguish figure he'd like everyone to believe. In the Doctor's world, he determines the standards of what is and is not acceptable, and when someone goes too far over that line, he is the one to mete out punishment. When someone truly angers him - usually by hurting someone the Doctor feels doesn't deserve it, especially by causing harm to someone he cares about personally - he's prone to overreaction, spitefulness, and sometimes downright cruelty. Long before the Time Lord Victorious, he has trouble with his own limits, and with knowing the difference between what he can do and should do. When the Master tells the Doctor he has the right to change history, his response isn't "no you don't," it's "but even then..."
The Doctor believes he's ruthless ("no second chances - I'm that sort of a man"), but in reality, he gives chance after chance to people who don't necessarily deserve it; because he can't be perfectly merciful, he believes himself merciless. The regeneration before him couldn't destroy the remnants of the Daleks, even to save the Earth - having regenerated just after that, this Doctor wants to believe he's the kind of person who could take that responsibility, push the button and do terrible things for the good of the universe.
He feels responsible for everything - except for a lot of the things that might actually be his fault. He feels guilty even for the things he had no control over, the people he couldn't possibly have saved (there's a reason he has the most depressing catchphrase in the history of time). At the same time, he doesn't accept responsibility for abandoning Jack on the Game Station (and then lying to Rose about it), and he doesn't seem to care that he created an actual thinking person just to hide in and then destroy, just that Joan was hurt by the fact that the constructed personality didn't exist anymore. If he feels guilty for the big things - like, say, the necessary destruction of two planets in order to save reality itself - and the things he had no control over, he has no room to feel guilty for the little things, the things it actually hurts to care about because he really is to blame for those.
Because of all this, he doesn't actually like himself that much - oh, sure, he likes the person his companions see him as, he likes to be mysterious and impressive and clever and wonderful, the man Martha told the world about, but obviously he knows the reality too much to believe it himself. However, just because he doesn't quite believe the myth of the Doctor doesn't mean he doesn't want to. He once told Martha "Just walk about like you own the place; works for me," and it wasn't entirely the joke he meant it to be - he used to be the hero who'd breeze in and save the day and make sure everybody lived (at least, that's the way he remembers it, though the reality is... somewhat different), but he can't quite be that person since the Time War.
Here again, the circumstances of his regeneration into the Tenth Doctor affect who he turned out to be, this time around - Nine hadn't been quite clever enough, because if he had been, he could have found a way out of the situation, or pulled one last minute brilliant trick out of his sleeve, Rose wouldn't have had to destroy the Daleks for him, and he wouldn't have died... but maybe he's better now. So he puts everything into being the cleverest, the most brilliant, and making sure everyone knows that he is the smartest person in the room. He's always trying just a little too hard to be brilliant and wonderful and bouncy and charming, the hero who always saves the day and everything the Doctor is supposed to be, like he's subconsciously hoping to eventually convince himself that he is that person.
It's hardly surprising, then, that he tends to panic a little when the bright smile and cocky attitude and "BECAUSE I'M CLEVER!" don't work. It's even worse when he starts to feel like he's losing control of a situation - his first instinct, when faced with something that makes him feel trapped or helpless, is to do whatever stupid, heroic, possibly deadly thing comes to mind, without pausing to worry about the consequences, because at least then, whatever happened was something he chose. When he thought he'd be trapped in one time period without the TARDIS, he jumped into a possibly bottomless pit with barely a moment's hesitation, and for almost a year after he lost Rose, he threw himself into the line of fire time after time: nearly drowning destroying the Racnoss, offering himself up to a plasmavore, challenging the Daleks to kill him (twice)... If he'd simply left Rose on the parallel world, the way he first planned to, he would have missed her, but he wouldn't have been half as damaged by it; it's the fact that he lost her in a way he had no control over that really shook him up.
The Doctor has always had a habit of surrounding himself with people, but this regeneration especially has a tendency to develop extremely codependent relationships with the people he takes along. He needs them to need him. He needs someone to talk to, someone to keep him from being so desperately lonely, someone to be a buffer against himself. What he really needs is someone to pull him back from the edge and tell him when to stop, though that's not anything he'll admit to.
For all that he's quick to point out that he is not human when people mistake him for one, there is something about humans in particular, of all the sentient species in the universe, that he's especially drawn to, and that he even admires - indomitable is one of his favorite words for it, that sheer bloody-minded refusal to give up that led to Rose flying the TARDIS back to him herself, to Martha walking the world for a year, Donna hunting him down for a second chance to travel with him, and the last of humanity building a rocket at the end of the universe... but that's not all of it. Everything's new to humans, and they feel so deeply and intensely about everything - they remind him of very young Time Lords, in a way, and he does get a sort of a contact high off their joy and awe (and the frequent terror and adrenaline rushes) at the things he can show them. Everything in the universe is painted in slightly more vivid colors when he has someone to share it with. (As a side note, it's really worth pointing out that while Ten does love humans as a species... He's really more in love with the idea of humans, and incredibly fond of specific individuals. However, present him with any random human who does not immediately impress him by being clever or brave or otherwise interesting, and he has a tendency to look at them like they're idiots and possibly not trustworthy of tying their own shoes, never mind making important decisions - it's part of what got him into trouble on Midnight. The majority of specific humans just do not live up to his bright and shiny outlook on humanity as a whole.)
Of course, no one can travel with him forever, and combined with his control issues, that's where the problems start. Because, short of dumping them back home after just one or three or ten trips (which... he's tried, but never managed), there's no way to control when and how his companions leave him, every time they do leave, they break his hearts a little, and he spirals just a little more out of control every time he loses that equilibrium. Furthermore, they inevitably end up walking away more damaged, one way or another, than they were when he met them, at least the way he sees it - just being around him is dangerous to the people he cares most about, and he can't ignore that.
So recently, he's compensated for those things, in a misguided, typically self-destructive Doctor-ish way, by altogether avoiding getting too close to anyone. He knows perfectly well that he does need someone to hold his hand, someone to stop him, but if it's a choice between the harm he does himself travelling alone, and ruining one more person's life while he suffers one more terrible loss... Well, that's not really a choice at all. He's happy to work with people for short periods of time, these days, but the more he likes someone, the faster he's likely to run away from them - care too much, keep people too close, and who knows what might happen? For the past two years, since he lost Donna, it's been just the Doctor, alone, against the rest of the universe, and he's somewhat determined to stay that way until he dies - even if, deep down, that thought utterly terrifies him.
History: A very long time ago - or maybe not so long ago, because time is never linear, and that applies doubly when we're talking about Time Lords, or maybe never, because the event in question was technically erased from the timeline - in a galaxy... not so far away at all, really, because it's the same as this one, there was a man who stole a magic box. That man wasn't yet the Doctor, though he would be one day, and that box was old, and all sorts of broken, and the chameleon circuit never did work right - but it could fly, and that was all that mattered. Off went the man and the box, into the Vortex, and the rest is history, as well as the future, and a thousand myths in a thousand places.
To sum up, the Doctor spent nearly his entire life travelling through time and space, usually completely at random, saving cities and planets and every now and then the whole universe along the way. He picked up friends and travelling companions here and there, both on purpose and accidentally, and eventually left them all behind to live their own lives, while he just kept running, to anywhere and anywhen he could. He set new records among Time Lords for the speed at which he burned through his regenerations - although considering the number of life-threatening situations he found himself in on a regular basis, his rate of regeneration probably wasn't half-bad.
And then came the last great Time War, a tremendous battle across time and space between the Time Lords and the Daleks, and the Doctor returned home to help. He fought on the front lines, saw entire systems torn apart and written out of existence, timelines shattered and rebuilt and torn apart again - and when, at the end, the Time Lords were prepared to destroy reality itself, the Doctor did the only thing he could, destroyed both Gallifrey and Skaro, and watched as they burned. And while, at the time, he had been convinced he would be destroyed as well, he survived. He regenerated. And he carried on, the last of the Time Lords.
Since the end of the Time War, the Doctor's been running faster than ever, and doing anything he can not to look back. It's been roughly seven years - on his personal timeline, anyway - and in that time, he's regenerated once already, and lost every friend he's made, usually in the worst ways possible. Also, he found out that when he'd tried to destroy all the Daleks, he had been... far from successful. A few billion Daleks away from successful, in fact. And much later - very recently, in fact - he discovered the Time Lords had survived too, the entirety of Gallifrey held safe in a time lock, until they returned and tried to destroy time itself again.
The Doctor had just managed to return them to the time lock, safe away from the rest of the universe, when a friend unintentionally helped fulfill a prophecy of the Doctor's death. Wilfred Mott had been trapped inside a chamber about to be flooded with radiation, and the Doctor had the choice to let Wilf die there, or take his place in the chamber and be killed. Before he could do either, though, he found himself in Babylon Wood.
First Person Sample: Right, so! While I'm sure quite a few of you are busy playing with your "magic", and debating what god's realm we're in, et cetera... I don't suppose anyone took a break from that long enough to notice my screwdriver lying around? Or possibly hidden in a cupboard somewhere? It's silver, blue at the end, makes a sort of whistling, buzzing noise if you push the buttons, which... you shouldn't do that, if you do find it. Really, don't, just... give it back to me. Please.
Or, if you happen to see an oversized otter... thing running about, I'd like to talk to it. Assuming it... talks...
[There's an awkward pause, and then a faint sigh just before he adds:]
More or less unrelated, would anyone like a fish?
Prose Sample: [The rest of this log is here, for context.]
"Negotiations? What-"
He breaks off with a shake of his head, balling his hands into fists in his coat pockets. If he could just get one straight answer, for once... He drifts off, glancing down the street, watching the Master only from the corner of his eye - but his attention snaps quickly back when he says his name. His nickname. His hearts jump and tumble, for just a second, and the Doctor searches his face, not even sure what he's looking for.
He's sincere. That much is hard to miss - he means it, as much as the Master ever does, and that... is almost more worrying than a lie. Sympathy, concern rises for a moment, and is almost smothered. Sympathy doesn't end well for him, not here. Calisto, and Thane... It didn't exactly go well the last time with the Master, either. Whatever it is, the Doctor doesn't owe him anything, and if he just walked away now...
"I missed you too," he says, voice low and soft. He has, too, and he couldn't save him the last time, but maybe now... Even when the Doctor ought to know better, hope always wins out.
He pulls a hand from his pocket to run his fingers through his hair. It's been a long time since New Delhi's even crossed his mind. When he speaks again, his voice is lighter, almost casual. "I had thought about visiting India, a little while ago. Got a bit sidetracked, but now that you mention it... I imagine there are quite a few people there I might like to have a chat with."
And who might try to take him prisoner and declare him an enemy of the Crown or whatever it is they declare him an enemy of these days. It's a common risk of being the Doctor.
Special Notes: A few important notes on Time Lord biology, just in case it's important and people don't know: he has two hearts, a respiratory bypass system and the ability to exist without oxygen for much longer than a human could, and his body temperature is lower than a human's (noticeably, if you're touching his bare skin, but not alarmingly so). There are lots of other differences between Time Lord and human biology, but those are the big ones.
The Player
User Name/Nick: Aubrey
User LJ: inthemortalcity
AIM/IM: meant to care
E-mail: taibhsearachd@gmail.com
Other Characters: N/A
The Character
Character Name: The Tenth Doctor
Character Journal: thatsortofaman
Series: Doctor Who
Age: 906, if you ask him, but... don't ask him. He lies. Just accept that he is ancient and forever.
From When?: End of Time, just before he decides to step into the radiation chamber.
Abilities/Powers: The Doctor is smarter than you. At least, that's what he'll happily tell you if you give him half a reason to. Being a Time Lord, he's considerably more intelligent than any human, and he's particularly good at finding patterns, fitting a number of seemingly unconnected facts together into something that lets him see the bigger picture.
He speaks a ton of languages (safe to assume any Earth language, and most alien languages extant in his universe too), and he knows a lot of ridiculous facts about just about any subject - physics, history, chemistry, biology, you name it. He's especially good with technology, and can work magic (not literally) with a few random bits of tech and the contents of his pockets at any given point in time. He has a very good memory, but even if he doesn't tend to actually forget things, he still sometimes takes a while to recall the relevant facts, what with all the information he has to sort through.
Time Lords have an innate sense for time, can tell what points in time are fixed and which are mutable, can sense anomalies in time and space, probabilities and potential realities. For the most part, the Doctor ignores this particular sense - it's distracting to have all that in your head - but he can focus and call upon it at any time. He is psychic, with the ability to step into others' minds, see their thoughts and memories and change them if he wishes. As Time Lords go, though, he is not a particularly strong psychic, and he does require physical contact and quite a bit of concentration.
Physically, his abilities are somewhat more limited. He has uncanny aim with projectiles, and has some ability with swordfighting. Mostly, though, he's just very, very good at running. He does appear to be somewhat hardier than your average human, able to recover fairly quickly from things like significant blood loss, one of his hearts stopping, or falling out of a spaceship. If seriously injured, he can go into a healing coma to recover much more quickly than usual, and if about to die, can regenerate, changing every cell of his body to heal the injuries and become a different person. (This will never be used in the game, but it's worth a mention nevertheless.)
Power Limitations: N/A
Inventory
- Very tattered brown pinstriped suit. It should probably be noted that the pockets of his trousers are bigger on the inside, though... not as much as the pockets of his trenchcoat. Which he doesn't have.
- Pale blue dress shirt. See above, re: damage related to crashing through a skylight.
- Red tie. Probably more or less okay.
- Off-white Converse. Also relatively undamaged.
- Pair of brainy specs he doesn't actually need, which is good, because they're broken in three places.
- Slightly broken sonic screwdriver
- Psychic paper
- TARDIS key
- Stuff in his trouser pockets: Quite a lot of twine, a spoon, a sort of walkie talkie from the 32nd century (just the one), spare change from at least four different planets and time periods, some hard candies, and a yellow plastic dinosaur (a Hadrosaurus, if it's important).
Personality: Most of the time, when you catch him on a good day, the Doctor's cheerful and gregarious, very talkative and often rather affectionate, even with people he doesn't know. He has a sort of childish glee about seeing things he's never seen before, finding things he would have said before were impossible (which he says a lot, despite the fact that by now he should have known better). The universe is amazing - human beings, doubly so. He's charismatic, dragging people along with him by sheer force of his personality, and though he's occasionally blunt and tactless it's (generally) not out of a desire to be rude, just that he doesn't much think about other people's feelings unless someone forces him to. He's just a little bit self-absorbed, a little reckless, prone to running off into danger without a second thought, occasionally a little bit childish... alright, more than a little bit, on all counts... but endearing all the same.
However, his mood can turn at the drop of a hat, under the wrong circumstances, and he is not always the carefree, roguish figure he'd like everyone to believe. In the Doctor's world, he determines the standards of what is and is not acceptable, and when someone goes too far over that line, he is the one to mete out punishment. When someone truly angers him - usually by hurting someone the Doctor feels doesn't deserve it, especially by causing harm to someone he cares about personally - he's prone to overreaction, spitefulness, and sometimes downright cruelty. Long before the Time Lord Victorious, he has trouble with his own limits, and with knowing the difference between what he can do and should do. When the Master tells the Doctor he has the right to change history, his response isn't "no you don't," it's "but even then..."
The Doctor believes he's ruthless ("no second chances - I'm that sort of a man"), but in reality, he gives chance after chance to people who don't necessarily deserve it; because he can't be perfectly merciful, he believes himself merciless. The regeneration before him couldn't destroy the remnants of the Daleks, even to save the Earth - having regenerated just after that, this Doctor wants to believe he's the kind of person who could take that responsibility, push the button and do terrible things for the good of the universe.
He feels responsible for everything - except for a lot of the things that might actually be his fault. He feels guilty even for the things he had no control over, the people he couldn't possibly have saved (there's a reason he has the most depressing catchphrase in the history of time). At the same time, he doesn't accept responsibility for abandoning Jack on the Game Station (and then lying to Rose about it), and he doesn't seem to care that he created an actual thinking person just to hide in and then destroy, just that Joan was hurt by the fact that the constructed personality didn't exist anymore. If he feels guilty for the big things - like, say, the necessary destruction of two planets in order to save reality itself - and the things he had no control over, he has no room to feel guilty for the little things, the things it actually hurts to care about because he really is to blame for those.
Because of all this, he doesn't actually like himself that much - oh, sure, he likes the person his companions see him as, he likes to be mysterious and impressive and clever and wonderful, the man Martha told the world about, but obviously he knows the reality too much to believe it himself. However, just because he doesn't quite believe the myth of the Doctor doesn't mean he doesn't want to. He once told Martha "Just walk about like you own the place; works for me," and it wasn't entirely the joke he meant it to be - he used to be the hero who'd breeze in and save the day and make sure everybody lived (at least, that's the way he remembers it, though the reality is... somewhat different), but he can't quite be that person since the Time War.
Here again, the circumstances of his regeneration into the Tenth Doctor affect who he turned out to be, this time around - Nine hadn't been quite clever enough, because if he had been, he could have found a way out of the situation, or pulled one last minute brilliant trick out of his sleeve, Rose wouldn't have had to destroy the Daleks for him, and he wouldn't have died... but maybe he's better now. So he puts everything into being the cleverest, the most brilliant, and making sure everyone knows that he is the smartest person in the room. He's always trying just a little too hard to be brilliant and wonderful and bouncy and charming, the hero who always saves the day and everything the Doctor is supposed to be, like he's subconsciously hoping to eventually convince himself that he is that person.
It's hardly surprising, then, that he tends to panic a little when the bright smile and cocky attitude and "BECAUSE I'M CLEVER!" don't work. It's even worse when he starts to feel like he's losing control of a situation - his first instinct, when faced with something that makes him feel trapped or helpless, is to do whatever stupid, heroic, possibly deadly thing comes to mind, without pausing to worry about the consequences, because at least then, whatever happened was something he chose. When he thought he'd be trapped in one time period without the TARDIS, he jumped into a possibly bottomless pit with barely a moment's hesitation, and for almost a year after he lost Rose, he threw himself into the line of fire time after time: nearly drowning destroying the Racnoss, offering himself up to a plasmavore, challenging the Daleks to kill him (twice)... If he'd simply left Rose on the parallel world, the way he first planned to, he would have missed her, but he wouldn't have been half as damaged by it; it's the fact that he lost her in a way he had no control over that really shook him up.
The Doctor has always had a habit of surrounding himself with people, but this regeneration especially has a tendency to develop extremely codependent relationships with the people he takes along. He needs them to need him. He needs someone to talk to, someone to keep him from being so desperately lonely, someone to be a buffer against himself. What he really needs is someone to pull him back from the edge and tell him when to stop, though that's not anything he'll admit to.
For all that he's quick to point out that he is not human when people mistake him for one, there is something about humans in particular, of all the sentient species in the universe, that he's especially drawn to, and that he even admires - indomitable is one of his favorite words for it, that sheer bloody-minded refusal to give up that led to Rose flying the TARDIS back to him herself, to Martha walking the world for a year, Donna hunting him down for a second chance to travel with him, and the last of humanity building a rocket at the end of the universe... but that's not all of it. Everything's new to humans, and they feel so deeply and intensely about everything - they remind him of very young Time Lords, in a way, and he does get a sort of a contact high off their joy and awe (and the frequent terror and adrenaline rushes) at the things he can show them. Everything in the universe is painted in slightly more vivid colors when he has someone to share it with. (As a side note, it's really worth pointing out that while Ten does love humans as a species... He's really more in love with the idea of humans, and incredibly fond of specific individuals. However, present him with any random human who does not immediately impress him by being clever or brave or otherwise interesting, and he has a tendency to look at them like they're idiots and possibly not trustworthy of tying their own shoes, never mind making important decisions - it's part of what got him into trouble on Midnight. The majority of specific humans just do not live up to his bright and shiny outlook on humanity as a whole.)
Of course, no one can travel with him forever, and combined with his control issues, that's where the problems start. Because, short of dumping them back home after just one or three or ten trips (which... he's tried, but never managed), there's no way to control when and how his companions leave him, every time they do leave, they break his hearts a little, and he spirals just a little more out of control every time he loses that equilibrium. Furthermore, they inevitably end up walking away more damaged, one way or another, than they were when he met them, at least the way he sees it - just being around him is dangerous to the people he cares most about, and he can't ignore that.
So recently, he's compensated for those things, in a misguided, typically self-destructive Doctor-ish way, by altogether avoiding getting too close to anyone. He knows perfectly well that he does need someone to hold his hand, someone to stop him, but if it's a choice between the harm he does himself travelling alone, and ruining one more person's life while he suffers one more terrible loss... Well, that's not really a choice at all. He's happy to work with people for short periods of time, these days, but the more he likes someone, the faster he's likely to run away from them - care too much, keep people too close, and who knows what might happen? For the past two years, since he lost Donna, it's been just the Doctor, alone, against the rest of the universe, and he's somewhat determined to stay that way until he dies - even if, deep down, that thought utterly terrifies him.
History: A very long time ago - or maybe not so long ago, because time is never linear, and that applies doubly when we're talking about Time Lords, or maybe never, because the event in question was technically erased from the timeline - in a galaxy... not so far away at all, really, because it's the same as this one, there was a man who stole a magic box. That man wasn't yet the Doctor, though he would be one day, and that box was old, and all sorts of broken, and the chameleon circuit never did work right - but it could fly, and that was all that mattered. Off went the man and the box, into the Vortex, and the rest is history, as well as the future, and a thousand myths in a thousand places.
To sum up, the Doctor spent nearly his entire life travelling through time and space, usually completely at random, saving cities and planets and every now and then the whole universe along the way. He picked up friends and travelling companions here and there, both on purpose and accidentally, and eventually left them all behind to live their own lives, while he just kept running, to anywhere and anywhen he could. He set new records among Time Lords for the speed at which he burned through his regenerations - although considering the number of life-threatening situations he found himself in on a regular basis, his rate of regeneration probably wasn't half-bad.
And then came the last great Time War, a tremendous battle across time and space between the Time Lords and the Daleks, and the Doctor returned home to help. He fought on the front lines, saw entire systems torn apart and written out of existence, timelines shattered and rebuilt and torn apart again - and when, at the end, the Time Lords were prepared to destroy reality itself, the Doctor did the only thing he could, destroyed both Gallifrey and Skaro, and watched as they burned. And while, at the time, he had been convinced he would be destroyed as well, he survived. He regenerated. And he carried on, the last of the Time Lords.
Since the end of the Time War, the Doctor's been running faster than ever, and doing anything he can not to look back. It's been roughly seven years - on his personal timeline, anyway - and in that time, he's regenerated once already, and lost every friend he's made, usually in the worst ways possible. Also, he found out that when he'd tried to destroy all the Daleks, he had been... far from successful. A few billion Daleks away from successful, in fact. And much later - very recently, in fact - he discovered the Time Lords had survived too, the entirety of Gallifrey held safe in a time lock, until they returned and tried to destroy time itself again.
The Doctor had just managed to return them to the time lock, safe away from the rest of the universe, when a friend unintentionally helped fulfill a prophecy of the Doctor's death. Wilfred Mott had been trapped inside a chamber about to be flooded with radiation, and the Doctor had the choice to let Wilf die there, or take his place in the chamber and be killed. Before he could do either, though, he found himself in Babylon Wood.
First Person Sample: Right, so! While I'm sure quite a few of you are busy playing with your "magic", and debating what god's realm we're in, et cetera... I don't suppose anyone took a break from that long enough to notice my screwdriver lying around? Or possibly hidden in a cupboard somewhere? It's silver, blue at the end, makes a sort of whistling, buzzing noise if you push the buttons, which... you shouldn't do that, if you do find it. Really, don't, just... give it back to me. Please.
Or, if you happen to see an oversized otter... thing running about, I'd like to talk to it. Assuming it... talks...
[There's an awkward pause, and then a faint sigh just before he adds:]
More or less unrelated, would anyone like a fish?
Prose Sample: [The rest of this log is here, for context.]
"Negotiations? What-"
He breaks off with a shake of his head, balling his hands into fists in his coat pockets. If he could just get one straight answer, for once... He drifts off, glancing down the street, watching the Master only from the corner of his eye - but his attention snaps quickly back when he says his name. His nickname. His hearts jump and tumble, for just a second, and the Doctor searches his face, not even sure what he's looking for.
He's sincere. That much is hard to miss - he means it, as much as the Master ever does, and that... is almost more worrying than a lie. Sympathy, concern rises for a moment, and is almost smothered. Sympathy doesn't end well for him, not here. Calisto, and Thane... It didn't exactly go well the last time with the Master, either. Whatever it is, the Doctor doesn't owe him anything, and if he just walked away now...
"I missed you too," he says, voice low and soft. He has, too, and he couldn't save him the last time, but maybe now... Even when the Doctor ought to know better, hope always wins out.
He pulls a hand from his pocket to run his fingers through his hair. It's been a long time since New Delhi's even crossed his mind. When he speaks again, his voice is lighter, almost casual. "I had thought about visiting India, a little while ago. Got a bit sidetracked, but now that you mention it... I imagine there are quite a few people there I might like to have a chat with."
And who might try to take him prisoner and declare him an enemy of the Crown or whatever it is they declare him an enemy of these days. It's a common risk of being the Doctor.
Special Notes: A few important notes on Time Lord biology, just in case it's important and people don't know: he has two hearts, a respiratory bypass system and the ability to exist without oxygen for much longer than a human could, and his body temperature is lower than a human's (noticeably, if you're touching his bare skin, but not alarmingly so). There are lots of other differences between Time Lord and human biology, but those are the big ones.