Ruby City App

PLAYER
Name: Tara
Age: 36
Personal Journal: stories_in_time
E-mail: stormwolf10(at)gmail(dot)com
AIM/MSN/etc: before.the.war on AIM, stormwolf10

CHARACTER
Name: Charlotte Elspeth "Charley" Pollard
Canon: Doctor Who
Age: Early 20s
Timeline: End of the Charlotte Pollard spinoff, Series 1, "The Viyran Solution"
If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: N/A

Personality: From the very start, Charley was never going to be your standard Companion. Many end up on the TARDIS through accident, or because tragedy left them with nothing, or simply because they were bored and they needed someone to sweep them away.

Not Charley. When the Eighth Doctor first meets her, she had already embarked on her own adventure using her own resourcefulness to get on the doomed airship, the R101. Before she even met the Doctor, she had styled herself an "Edwardian adventuress" (though this is due to the adventure novels of the era that she read, not from being from that era, as she was born a couple years too late for that) and had decided to prove a young male friend wrong about her competency by promising to meet him in Singapore by New Year 1931. And so, she ran away from the boarding school she and her sisters attended, got a young steward drunk, stole his uniform and passed herself off as said steward aboard the maiden voyage of the R101. She was, of course, completely unaware that the airship was doomed to crash, killing everyone on board.

Once she joins the Doctor in his travels, she is of course an enthusiastic partner, finding herself in adventures she didn't even have the frame of reference to dream of. Due to her adventurous attitude, she takes the bizarre wonders of the universe incredibly in stride for a girl who up until then wasn't even going to experience television for another few years. Of course, Charley didn't start out proficient in advanced scientific things, but she muddled through enough to survive the dangers of traveling with the Doctor.

Besides technology, Charley also tends to be unfazed for the most part by alien species. She even tries to convince the Doctor to keep a vortisaur as a pet, giving it the name "Ramsay", after the Prime Minister of her time period, Ramsay MacDonald. Everywhere they end up, she treats everyone like people, which is also remarkable for a high born girl of her age, when most other girls like her had servants they barely acknowledged as existing, let alone treated like a human being.

In fact, when she goes back in time and ends up being trapped in a house, reliving her cook's suicide over and over again, the woman tells Charley that she loved her because Charley was the only one who seemed to care about her. When Charley was declared dead to the household after the crash of the R101, the cook went into a deep depression and killed herself that winter because, with Charley "dead", there was nobody left to care about her anymore.

This was a huge clue to the Doctor and Charley that saving her life had done deep damage to the Web of Time. When the Time Lords finally caught up with them to deal with the situation, the Doctor tried to flee to save her from whatever they had in mind, Charley saw what he was trying to do and cleverly hit a switch to cause the TARDIS to go back so she could face the consequences. Her bravery was further displayed when a creature called a Neverperson (who had tricked the Time Lords into bringing Charley and the Doctor into the timeless Divergent Universe) gave the Doctor a way out of Time's destruction: she gave him a staser gun and told him to shoot Charley. With Charley dead, the time line would repair itself. Even though the Doctor refused, Charley was courageous and begged him to kill her. If killing her would save the universe, she was willing to sacrifice her life.

Another unique aspect to Charley's story is how she is one of the rare companions that the Doctor falls in love with, and she for him. And, even more rare is that they both said it to each other on multiple occasions. The Doctor's initial obliviousness to just how important that love was to her angered her a great deal and, like she had done many times before, she did not shy away from giving him a piece of her mind. Despite being in love with the Doctor, she was never so overawed by him that she wouldn't tell him off when he was being particularly blockheaded. When she thought that perhaps he didn't meant it when he said he loved her, she scolded him severely and explained to him just how precious the words were. He did actually mean it, but his obliviousness to how much it meant to her had hurt her.

Charley does, of course, have her flaws. One of her biggest was a jealousy and proprietary nature over the Doctor. When they took on another companion named C'rizz, she wasn't really openly hostile to him, but there was a tension because of the fact that she wanted it to always just her and the Doctor. When C'rizz unwittingly betrayed them because he was told he'd see his dead fiancee again if he did, Charley spared no time turning on him, verbally lashing out at him. When she, C'rizz and the Doctor were separated, and the Doctor was rescued by another woman, Charley's attitude was less than generous towards the woman. Sure, it did turn out that she was a danger to them all, but Charley had no way of knowing this. She merely lashed out because Rassilon had gotten it into her head that the Doctor had found a new girl and was leaving her behind.

One of other flaws is her quick temper and penchant for hasty decisions made in anger that she'd later regret. When C'rizz died and the Doctor hid his feelings to the point where it looked to Charley like he didn't really care, she raged at him, not even letting him explain before she demanded that he take her back to Earth because she was done with him. Of course, an adventure got in the way, but in the end they were still separated: she thinking the Doctor was dead, and he (having lost the memory of the entire adventure, starting when they left the TARDIS after landing) thinking she had simply walked out on him, leaving him a note with the reception desk of the nearby hotel. On the good side of things, despite telling him not to go looking for her, she did not leave him with angry words. She praised him as the best man she ever knew, and told him that it was just time to go, as they'd chanced their luck once too often.

In reality, Charley had been shipwrecked on a desert island. With her resourcefulness, she found a crystal set in the wreckage, fixed it up, and sent out an SOS. To her astonishment, she heard the sound of the TARDIS, but when she stumbled in the door she did not find her Doctor, but an earlier incarnation: the Sixth Doctor.

By this point, she had grown up a great deal and took all she'd learned about the Web of Time to heart. She did her best to hide who she was, knowing that if this was an earlier incarnation of the Doctor, he was not supposed to know who she was or anything that happened, since that was his future. Unfortunately, that made this Doctor very suspicious of her, but she endured his mistrust because she had learned the hard way the consequences of fiddling with someone's timeline. And so, like River Song, she was a companion who traveled with the Doctor in the wrong order.

Charley and the Sixth Doctor didn't end up traveling together for long. A stowaway on the TARDIS infected her with a virus that made her become invisible while the stowaway took her form, making the Doctor think the other girl was Charley. She was eventually cured by a group of virus-hunting robots called the Viyrans, but they had taken her away, separating her from the Doctor. With the promise that they would alert her when they saw the Doctor again, Charley agreed to work for them. It is unclear how long she did that while the Doctor was traveling with the false Charley, since the Viyrans would put her in cryo sleep for millenia at a time. It is not clear what her role was in working for the Viyrans, but I have a feeling it was as a liaison to humanoid races they encountered. Her ease with people and her ability to go with the flow when it comes to other cultures makes liaison the most likely job.

Unfortunately, when they finally found the Doctor again, it proved to be the final end of their relationship. With the Doctor fully aware of their very secret mission, the Viyrans determined that his mind had to be wiped of everything to do with them. Charley knew that the Doctor would resist having his memory wiped, forcing the Viyrans to do it over and over again until it burned his mind out and killed him, so she elected to tell him the whole story of his future, how he would save her in another incarnation, fall in love with her, and eventually die without regenerating. (Because, of course, this is what she thought had happened.) She knew that giving him this information would make him agree to have his memory wiped so that he didn't have that foreknowledge. 

Life after the Doctor has made her grow even more into her own. Charley now has the confidence and independent spirit to take on the universe without the Doctor's help. Once she freed herself of the Viyrans and stopped their plans to wipe out all life in the universe, thinking that life was a virus that needed to be removed, she took the little shuttle she'd been given to do missions for the Viyrans and in her usual "dive head first into the unknown" fashion, she piloted her shuttle into an astronomical phenomenon called the Ever and Ever Prolixity as it was collapsing in on itself, just to see where she would find herself when she came out the other side.

Background: here

Abilities:

Resourceful - A life with the Doctor has taught her how think quickly on her feet and how to do what she can with what resources she has available.

Brave - The upside of being reckless is that you also tend to be brave. No matter how frightened she might be, she is always willing to sacrifice herself for what's right.

Adaptable - Charley has a remarkable ability to roll with the punches in any situation. Where a girl of her era would see an alien, no matter how innocuous, and scream (and probably faint dead away), Charley approaches them calmly and treats them like any other person. When you deal with temporal anomalies and a completely new world every day, being able to roll with the punches is helpful.

First Person:

...I think I pressed the right button on this blasted thing. Oh! Yes, there we are.

[The young woman in the video looks around herself, then back to the screen with an awkward smile. Charley is used to finding herself in strange places. Not that she's used to finding herself alone in a strange place. She supposes she could have ended up in a far worse place.]

Okay, it says to introduce myself, so...

[She takes a breath.]

I'm Charlotte Pollard. My friends -- well, most people, really -- call me Charley.

I suppose that since there are signs in this train station that I'm not the only one who found themselves here under strange circumstances?

Third Person: ((No longer really canon, thanks to the Charlotte Pollard spinoff series.))

"Charlotte?"

Charley stared off into the distance at the little blue box and the blond figure curled up next to it. He would be asleep for a little while, they assured her, and then he would move on, not knowing anything of what happened. The memory wipe had been a success. Everything of the Viyrans, their mission, and his time with her was gone. She took a deep breath, trying not to cry. She had cried enough for her loss. For his part, he will see her again, meeting her for the "first" time two lifetimes from now. There was nothing left for her but to cope and go on. Alone.

Goodbye, Doctor...

"Charlotte."

She lifted her eyes up, up, up to the tall robot creature standing next to her. The Viyran turned it's bulky metal body to her and bent as if it was looking at her.

"The mission is finished here, and we will fulfill the final part of our bargain," it said in its metallic voice that was just vaguely human enough to not be completely cold, and yet was still rather unnerving, "Where is it you wish us to take you?"

"I..." Charley still wasn't sure. In fact, she wasn't sure she cared. She couldn't go home; the time and place she came from had written her off as dead years ago. Nobody could have survived the crash of the R-101. "It doesn't matter, really. Any world where I can blend in and live my life is fine."

The last thing she knew, she had been put back into her cryo pod in preparation for the long space flight to a suitable planet. The freezing process hurt, but only for the briefest moment before the blackness took her. And then, the breath rushed back into her as she awoke suddenly, coughing and gasping, her hands clutching the seat in front of her. Seat? What in the world...? How did she end up on a train?

It took her a moment to uncurl her fingers from the white-knuckled death grip she had on the seat, but it took no time at all for the urge to leave the train propelled her towards the door and out. A breeze blew Charley's hair into her eyes and she brushed it away as she peered around the platform. People milled about, completely unfazed by a nearly empty train coming from and going to nowhere. Did this happen to them every day? It would seem so, she realized, when her eyes caught sight of the sign with instructions for newcomers.

"Watch?" she muttered to herself, "What wh-- ooohh." Charley's fingers wrapped around the watch she found dangling from a silver chain around her neck. That was strange; she certainly didn't have that before, and the Viyrans weren't known for giving out fashion accessories to their unconscious passengers. Everything was explained, however, when she finally began to read the signs around her.

"Please announce yourself promptly in order to receive aid and information," she read out loud. Well, that was convenient! They never were given the means to "receive aid and information" when she was traveling with the Doctor. Usually, they were directed to a lot of guns and probably a damp, dirty cell. Yes, she really could see herself surviving in this Ruby City quite nicely.

And so, she flipped open the watch, fiddled with the buttons a bit, and began her message...