Post by The Doctor on Sept 16, 2011 2:18:53 GMT -5
Doctor Who, Story Arc 1.1: To Err Is Human
[/i][/b]It all began with a war.
One war, and an old enemy revived in large part due to the Doctor's own mistake.
The Tel'naak were a proud and mighty people, whose civilization spanned the cosmos; the height of their majesty was during Earth's twentieth and twenty-first century, where dozens of world held their colonies, and their ships travelled the stars by the thousands... at least, until the Dalek came, and called fire down upon their cities, and devastation upon their people. Millions died within mere months as the war raged on, an ever-losing battle that became little more than a desperate effort to slow the Dalek's inevitable advance. As the war grew more and more bitter, the Tel'naak fury and disgust with their sorry lot grew and grew... and as might befit the helpless, they began to seek someone to blame. Someone easier to confront than the Dalek fleets.
Tracking the recent rise of this new Dalek threat to Earth, during one of its great wars, they discovered that it was the Doctor who had inadvertently restored this bane to the universe, And so, mired in endless war and watching their loved ones pile upon the mounds of the dead, the grieving and furious Tel'naak civilization saw the Doctor as the de facto criminal responsible for the loss of their world. And so, on one seemingly innocuous visit to 21st Century Earth, the Doctor found himself ambushed, captured and taken to a small facility, light years from the planet, mankind... and his TARDIS. He was subjected to a largely inconsequential trial, pointless because there was hardly a man there who did not consider the Time Lord guilty... including the Doctor himself.
For what was seen, to the Tel'naak, as an unforgivable crime against the civilizations of the entire sector, the Doctor is sentenced to Death, followed by Life Imprisonment... an unusual sequence that only a Time Lord could truly appreciate. The first part was simple, almost humane, with the Twelfth Doctor painlessly 'killed' and regenerated into his Thirteenth body... as close to a death sentence as could be carried out without ending his punishment prematurely. The second half of his sentence, however, proved a great deal more creative... and far more cruel. Using a Chameleon Arch, the Tel'naak changed the Doctor's physiology, turning him from a Time Lord to one of the human race. However, they did not change what he was inside, his mind or his memories, and the oversight was deliberate; for the mind of a Time Lord simply cannot remain within the body of a human, not for any particular length of time... not without dire consequences. Knowing that the incompatibility would imprison the Doctor in ways no jailcell could, the satisfied Tel'naak were more than happy to return the dazed, battered Time Lord to the planet he had spent so long protecting... Earth.
By the time the Doctor returned to the very same spot he had been taken from, now in all ways a stranger to those who knew him, he was already beginning to fade. He couldn't remember where he had left the TARDIS... couldn't even really remember what it was... he didn't know what planet he was on, what time period he was in, and as time stretched outwards, he began to lose all sense of who he was. Allies he might have called upon, places he might have turned to, all that useful knowledge... just out of his reach. Even his sonic screwdriver, programmed and keyed to only a few users based on their genetic signature, was useless in his hands... fortunate, given he barely knew how to use it. Lacking even the most basic sense of society's rules, the hungry human made the sad mistake of breaking into a closed supermarket in search of food. The act of burglary summoned the police... and the subject's clear lack of stability soon decreed he would be better off placed under medical observation.
For two months now, the Doctor has languished within the confines of the Cardiff Wellness Center, a victim to his own deterioration, and to the limitations of his human body. His concentration and memory has all but failed, his once brilliant mind a scattershell of the worst kind, with violent outbursts born of a helpless, confused rage keeping him medicated more often than not, in a near stupor. He has also been repeatedly and harshly disciplined for increasingly ingenious, though sadly unsuccessful, plots to escape from his confines... even after he had long forgotten where he might go. The time remaining to him is limited, however; already the strain of a Time Lord's mind has begun to affect him physically, in ways even his captors had not anticipated, eating away at him both outside, and in; with months remaining before his health fails altogether, and his former captors not even keeping tabs on him, all truly seems lost...
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Here's what we need!
-A to-be-Companion, preferably an employee in the Institution that the Doctor is being held in; the intention is they meet, and he somehow convinces her that he isn't (only) a crazy person, that he indeed has some higher calling, and greater skill, his fractured psyche aside. Helping him break out of the institution is a likelihood, and we could even throw in some alien-esque threat to be fended off and outsmarted... a bounty hunter stalking the halls of the asylum!
-Someone from his past willing to help him in a more practical sense, i.e. tracking down those responsible for the state he's in and convincing them/forcing them to restore the Time Lord. Possibilities include Captain Jack Harkness or River Song; whoever they are, they should either 1) Possess some means of space/time travel, such as a Vortex Manipulator, or 2) at least know how to fly the TARDIS. They should also know the Doctor, and his exploits, to some extent, as they might have to plead his case to his judge and jury in a sort of Space Appeals Process. =D
-Not particularly needed, but welcome, is someone wanting to NPC the race/council responsible for the Doctor's human state; I'm fine playing them myself, but always welcome to a fresh mind to bounce things off of. n.n
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