Koschei (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
learntobeyou) wrote2012-07-04 02:21 am
learntobeyou) wrote2012-07-04 02:21 am
[OOC]
Name: Koschei
Species: Time Lord/Wanderer
Canon: Doctor Who (AU)
*Pre-existing powers: Psychic ability, though he's both better at and more likely to use it for blocking other people from his mind than he is to go into somebody's; he could, though, if he wanted to, especially if said person had no shield. Regeneration -- this is this body's first regeneration, so he has another twelve left.
*Rift Change: A bit of the psychic presence from his TARDIS (named Grace by their traveling partner) has broken off and stayed with Koschei on this side of the Rift, as a presence in his head.
Personality: The most that the majority of people will see from Koschei is a sort of polite blankness. He doesn't open up well to strangers, or at least not most strangers. He's not cruel, but there's a definite coldness. He's the sort of person who, when first approached by someone he doesn't know, seems like he's waiting for the conversation to end and let him go back to what he was thinking of before. It's not that he tries to put people off; he's just a bit awkward with social situations, and that's the second thing people see, once they get past the absolute basics. Skipping straight to full-blown adulthood, and then spending years of his life in the company of people who treated him like a neccessary evil, or a tool to be used, at best, left him with a bit of a gap in the area of dealing with people he wasn't supposed to be subservient to or plotting to kill.
The awkwardness doesn't go away when you get to know him better, either, but he does warm up to people, more quickly than would be expected from initial impressions. To those that do manage to get him to open up and become friends, he is loyal without fail, and he will give everything he can to take care of them. Those he cares about are put well above himself in Koschei's mind, and are treated accordingly.
Something else that doesn't help the awkwardness is Koschei's almost single-minded focus on whatever he's built his life around at the time. At first, this was the War, and the drums -- which pushed him to fight, and to win, and to hurt -- reinforced that, if not caused it outright. After deserting the Time Lords, taking care of Theta became Koschei's driving force, with taking care of his TARDIS a less driving, but almost equally important obsession. There's always been another desire, another quest underneath it all: to find out who he is, to uncover the half-there memories that would trickle in, to find a name he felt fully comfortable with, just to know what his past entailed as a whole. But it was always secondary, both because there was no real way to accomplish it, and because of a quiet, never fully admitted to fear of what might be uncovered. Since coming through the rift, that quest has had to be all but abandoned, and all of Koschei's drive has been focused on trying to find a way home, which is what, eventually, drove him to Chicago, in the hopes that high activity would lead to a higher amount of knowledge.
Koschei does have a sadistic streak in him, one that he would dearly like to blame on the drums entirely, as a seperate entity. Whether or not that's true is difficult to tell; the desire to fight was implanted in him, but he's always taken more enjoyment out of doing it then was strictly neccessary. It's not that he'll hurt just anyone, or hurt without reason, but when a reason does come up, he takes more pleasure in the act than he'd ever admit to. The fact that it's a realm in which he feels fully comfortable doesn't help, either; it's not much that comes to him completely naturally, and what does tends to be things he will hold on to: taking care of his ship, and the job, which was about strategizing and planning, yes, but was also, often, about fighting and causing pain. Despite overall not being sure of himself, and not being very comfortable in his own skin, Koschei does manage to take pride and even be selfconfident when it comes to those things he is good at, and knows he's good at.
Uncomfortable in his own skin is really the best way to describe Koschei, in short. He doesn't entirely know who he is or what he wants, and he's doing his best to piece it together, a scrap at a time.
(As for Grace: She is just as obsessive as her pilot -- she has been infected with the drums, and she was a fighting TARDIS from the start, and wants to fight, badly, because that's what they were made for, and that's what they're good at. But she also finds just about everything fascinating: people and places and events and anything, anything new especially. She makes friends quickly, though no one has ever been as important to her as Koschei, or Theta, who wasn't her pilot, but gave her a name, and was theirs, or at least that's how Grace sees it. She is quick to defend what's hers -- and the more she likes you, the more you are hers -- and she's very, very good at those defenses, but she's also a lot more open, and to a lesser extent, more trusting than Koschei ever managed to be.)
History: The first thing you have to know is that once upon a lot of times, there was a Time Lord who called himself the Master. He used to go by another name, but eventually most people forgot that one, and he was just the Master. And he was brilliant, and charming, but he was also ruthless, vain, sadistic, obsessive, and oh yes, completely insane by the time he died, if not before then. The second thing you have to know is that the Time Lords were fighting a war, and it was getting to the point of desperate times. And desperate measures were taken: to help them fight the war, they ressurected the Master, because in all his brilliance and ruthlessness, he would be a perfect warrior to fight in their Time War. Except, since he had no love for his people, a little bit of a precaution was taken: first, they gave him the desire to fight, to make staying in their war the best choice. Second, they locked his memories away behind an iron door in his head -- not gone, in case locking them away changed the man too much to be useful, but not easily accessible, either.
That would be where Koschei's story begins: waking up strapped to a table with no memories, no name, and no purpose except a driving urge to fight that manifested as a drumbeat in his mind. No memories changed, though, as he started to live his life; little thing trickled through, distant and fuzzy and he was never fully certain they were real memories and not just products of his imagination, or stories he'd forgotten hearing and was now claiming as his own past. Not enough to know who he was, but enough to give himself a name, and to make him feel restless.
The more he fought for the Time Lords -- more importantly, the more he won, and also the more he came back after fighting -- the more of his own independance he won as well, though never enough that they would stop referring to him simply by his job as a soldier, and never enough to take away his resentment. Enough that he could bond with the TARDIS they kept giving him, though, and enough that he could occasionally take off when he wasn't needed, go for trips with the TARDIS, stretch his legs, and try to jog a memory.
On one of those jaunts, he met a man that shouldn't exist: a metacrisis, half Time Lord and half human, who the TARDIS let in as they sat parked on a whim. Neither of them really knew at the time how important the men they used to be were to each other, but they attached to each other nonetheless. Koschei finally followed the impulse to run, now that he had something besides resentment to take him away; the guilt at becoming a deserter never really left him, but he buried it in taking care of Theta. He gave Theta a name, another half-remembered relic from memories that might not be memories at all, and Theta gave the ship a name, and the three of them drifted happily around the universe, staying where things were calm and they would be under the radar, away from the Time Lords.
Until, nearly a year ago, Koschei flew through a Rift, and landed on an alternate Earth, with both Theta and Grace, his ship, ripped from him. Since then he's been wandering, starting where he landed in this world's Greece, looking for information on the world, the rifts, and most of all, how to get home again.
Species: Time Lord/Wanderer
Canon: Doctor Who (AU)
*Pre-existing powers: Psychic ability, though he's both better at and more likely to use it for blocking other people from his mind than he is to go into somebody's; he could, though, if he wanted to, especially if said person had no shield. Regeneration -- this is this body's first regeneration, so he has another twelve left.
*Rift Change: A bit of the psychic presence from his TARDIS (named Grace by their traveling partner) has broken off and stayed with Koschei on this side of the Rift, as a presence in his head.
Personality: The most that the majority of people will see from Koschei is a sort of polite blankness. He doesn't open up well to strangers, or at least not most strangers. He's not cruel, but there's a definite coldness. He's the sort of person who, when first approached by someone he doesn't know, seems like he's waiting for the conversation to end and let him go back to what he was thinking of before. It's not that he tries to put people off; he's just a bit awkward with social situations, and that's the second thing people see, once they get past the absolute basics. Skipping straight to full-blown adulthood, and then spending years of his life in the company of people who treated him like a neccessary evil, or a tool to be used, at best, left him with a bit of a gap in the area of dealing with people he wasn't supposed to be subservient to or plotting to kill.
The awkwardness doesn't go away when you get to know him better, either, but he does warm up to people, more quickly than would be expected from initial impressions. To those that do manage to get him to open up and become friends, he is loyal without fail, and he will give everything he can to take care of them. Those he cares about are put well above himself in Koschei's mind, and are treated accordingly.
Something else that doesn't help the awkwardness is Koschei's almost single-minded focus on whatever he's built his life around at the time. At first, this was the War, and the drums -- which pushed him to fight, and to win, and to hurt -- reinforced that, if not caused it outright. After deserting the Time Lords, taking care of Theta became Koschei's driving force, with taking care of his TARDIS a less driving, but almost equally important obsession. There's always been another desire, another quest underneath it all: to find out who he is, to uncover the half-there memories that would trickle in, to find a name he felt fully comfortable with, just to know what his past entailed as a whole. But it was always secondary, both because there was no real way to accomplish it, and because of a quiet, never fully admitted to fear of what might be uncovered. Since coming through the rift, that quest has had to be all but abandoned, and all of Koschei's drive has been focused on trying to find a way home, which is what, eventually, drove him to Chicago, in the hopes that high activity would lead to a higher amount of knowledge.
Koschei does have a sadistic streak in him, one that he would dearly like to blame on the drums entirely, as a seperate entity. Whether or not that's true is difficult to tell; the desire to fight was implanted in him, but he's always taken more enjoyment out of doing it then was strictly neccessary. It's not that he'll hurt just anyone, or hurt without reason, but when a reason does come up, he takes more pleasure in the act than he'd ever admit to. The fact that it's a realm in which he feels fully comfortable doesn't help, either; it's not much that comes to him completely naturally, and what does tends to be things he will hold on to: taking care of his ship, and the job, which was about strategizing and planning, yes, but was also, often, about fighting and causing pain. Despite overall not being sure of himself, and not being very comfortable in his own skin, Koschei does manage to take pride and even be selfconfident when it comes to those things he is good at, and knows he's good at.
Uncomfortable in his own skin is really the best way to describe Koschei, in short. He doesn't entirely know who he is or what he wants, and he's doing his best to piece it together, a scrap at a time.
(As for Grace: She is just as obsessive as her pilot -- she has been infected with the drums, and she was a fighting TARDIS from the start, and wants to fight, badly, because that's what they were made for, and that's what they're good at. But she also finds just about everything fascinating: people and places and events and anything, anything new especially. She makes friends quickly, though no one has ever been as important to her as Koschei, or Theta, who wasn't her pilot, but gave her a name, and was theirs, or at least that's how Grace sees it. She is quick to defend what's hers -- and the more she likes you, the more you are hers -- and she's very, very good at those defenses, but she's also a lot more open, and to a lesser extent, more trusting than Koschei ever managed to be.)
History: The first thing you have to know is that once upon a lot of times, there was a Time Lord who called himself the Master. He used to go by another name, but eventually most people forgot that one, and he was just the Master. And he was brilliant, and charming, but he was also ruthless, vain, sadistic, obsessive, and oh yes, completely insane by the time he died, if not before then. The second thing you have to know is that the Time Lords were fighting a war, and it was getting to the point of desperate times. And desperate measures were taken: to help them fight the war, they ressurected the Master, because in all his brilliance and ruthlessness, he would be a perfect warrior to fight in their Time War. Except, since he had no love for his people, a little bit of a precaution was taken: first, they gave him the desire to fight, to make staying in their war the best choice. Second, they locked his memories away behind an iron door in his head -- not gone, in case locking them away changed the man too much to be useful, but not easily accessible, either.
That would be where Koschei's story begins: waking up strapped to a table with no memories, no name, and no purpose except a driving urge to fight that manifested as a drumbeat in his mind. No memories changed, though, as he started to live his life; little thing trickled through, distant and fuzzy and he was never fully certain they were real memories and not just products of his imagination, or stories he'd forgotten hearing and was now claiming as his own past. Not enough to know who he was, but enough to give himself a name, and to make him feel restless.
The more he fought for the Time Lords -- more importantly, the more he won, and also the more he came back after fighting -- the more of his own independance he won as well, though never enough that they would stop referring to him simply by his job as a soldier, and never enough to take away his resentment. Enough that he could bond with the TARDIS they kept giving him, though, and enough that he could occasionally take off when he wasn't needed, go for trips with the TARDIS, stretch his legs, and try to jog a memory.
On one of those jaunts, he met a man that shouldn't exist: a metacrisis, half Time Lord and half human, who the TARDIS let in as they sat parked on a whim. Neither of them really knew at the time how important the men they used to be were to each other, but they attached to each other nonetheless. Koschei finally followed the impulse to run, now that he had something besides resentment to take him away; the guilt at becoming a deserter never really left him, but he buried it in taking care of Theta. He gave Theta a name, another half-remembered relic from memories that might not be memories at all, and Theta gave the ship a name, and the three of them drifted happily around the universe, staying where things were calm and they would be under the radar, away from the Time Lords.
Until, nearly a year ago, Koschei flew through a Rift, and landed on an alternate Earth, with both Theta and Grace, his ship, ripped from him. Since then he's been wandering, starting where he landed in this world's Greece, looking for information on the world, the rifts, and most of all, how to get home again.