Post by The Master on Sept 7, 2011 16:52:17 GMT -5
Canon
Sort of. The name is, anyway.
Name: The Could've-Been King
Age: Indeterminate, but younger than the start of the Last Great Time War
Species: Chronal Fragment Gestalt
Planet of Origin: Gallifrey. A million maybe, possible, fragmentary Gallifreys.
Occupation: Anarchist. Agent of Chaos. Living abomination. The Untempered Schism, given flesh.
Physical Description: Variable. He's not a shape-shifter per se, but the details change when he isn't in line of sight. The shade of his hair may change, or the arch of his eyebrows, or the shape of his face. But only a being with an intuitive sense of the passage of time would notice - a Time Lord, one of the Great Race, part of the Monad Host, beings like that.
At "birth" he was a broad, stocky redhead with green eyes. He wore jeans and heavy boots, a black turtleneck sweater, a black canvas duster, and a black fedora.
Personality: Mercurial, to say the least, although dangerously bi-polar would be far closer to the truth. He's filled with a manic energy, always shifting or fidgeting or pacing or gesturing, never able to sit still. He acts like he has the attention span of a coked-up mayfly, and yet his manifold allusions and asides and interruptions always seem to lead back around through labyrinthine channels to his original purpose and point.
History:
The Meddler never had a son, but the Could've-Been King is very much his child.
The Meddler's final actions to bury his true name and true past in mazes of paradox, the enactment of the Grandfather paradox, left him a mass of loosely-attracted noospheric and biodata fragments. This is the root cause of his inability to communicate telepathically, a self-inflicted maiming that refracts any contact through a thousand thousand short-lived echoes and ghosts of what could be and what might have been.
Within the tangled temporal chaos of the Last Great Time War, the Could've-Been King emerged full-formed from those echoes - a mad Athena, bursting forth from the head of a crippled Zeus. At first, he seemed nothing more than a second Meddler, an improbable history that should have been cancelled out.
But he proved to be more than that, and less.
He was a living gateway, a connection to pasts and futures that never where or that could have been but weren't. He could sift those fragmentary improbable universes for knowledge. He could, through force of will and for a brief time, bring individuals from those universes into the main timeline. With a sufficient source of power, he could raise an army of the neverborn.
But he had his own agenda. He was a living sum over all histories, more closely akin to the Weeping Angels than the Time Lords. He was unable to comprehend the deterministic, near-Classical physics of the macroscale universe, and he seethed with anger over the way he and his own were relegated to unexistence by by the indifference of the observer effect and the callous brutality of the Time Lords, who abrogated to themselves the role of observer.
At the end, when the Dalek Fleet smashed the transduction barriers and Hell was unleashed in the Nine Shining Worlds of the Seven Systems, the Could've-Been King turned on everyone, Dalek and Time Lord alike. He cut the living heart out of a Type 102 TARDIS and consumed it, drawing on her connection to the Eye of Harmony to draw nearly unlimited power. He led his armies of meanwhiles and maybes and neverweres in a shattering offensive against the ground forces of both sides, while flights of fancy engaged the Dalek saucers and War TARDISes in space-time.
He was confident he would win. There were a million maybe-victories out there, all he had to do was bring one of those possible universes through, and make it real.
And then the Doctor triggered the Moment. The entire history of the Time Lords, the Daleks, the entire Time War, was reduced to information and buried in a singularity so dense and so heavy that it warped space-time to the point that it vanished completely from the universe.
There was no escape. Only a mad thing, attuned to the Vortex and acting from the outside, could release them. The last moments of the Time War raged, endlessly, over and over and over again. He was trapped. Forever.
Or so it would seem.
Sort of. The name is, anyway.
Name: The Could've-Been King
Age: Indeterminate, but younger than the start of the Last Great Time War
Species: Chronal Fragment Gestalt
Planet of Origin: Gallifrey. A million maybe, possible, fragmentary Gallifreys.
Occupation: Anarchist. Agent of Chaos. Living abomination. The Untempered Schism, given flesh.
Physical Description: Variable. He's not a shape-shifter per se, but the details change when he isn't in line of sight. The shade of his hair may change, or the arch of his eyebrows, or the shape of his face. But only a being with an intuitive sense of the passage of time would notice - a Time Lord, one of the Great Race, part of the Monad Host, beings like that.
At "birth" he was a broad, stocky redhead with green eyes. He wore jeans and heavy boots, a black turtleneck sweater, a black canvas duster, and a black fedora.
Personality: Mercurial, to say the least, although dangerously bi-polar would be far closer to the truth. He's filled with a manic energy, always shifting or fidgeting or pacing or gesturing, never able to sit still. He acts like he has the attention span of a coked-up mayfly, and yet his manifold allusions and asides and interruptions always seem to lead back around through labyrinthine channels to his original purpose and point.
History:
The Meddler never had a son, but the Could've-Been King is very much his child.
The Meddler's final actions to bury his true name and true past in mazes of paradox, the enactment of the Grandfather paradox, left him a mass of loosely-attracted noospheric and biodata fragments. This is the root cause of his inability to communicate telepathically, a self-inflicted maiming that refracts any contact through a thousand thousand short-lived echoes and ghosts of what could be and what might have been.
Within the tangled temporal chaos of the Last Great Time War, the Could've-Been King emerged full-formed from those echoes - a mad Athena, bursting forth from the head of a crippled Zeus. At first, he seemed nothing more than a second Meddler, an improbable history that should have been cancelled out.
But he proved to be more than that, and less.
He was a living gateway, a connection to pasts and futures that never where or that could have been but weren't. He could sift those fragmentary improbable universes for knowledge. He could, through force of will and for a brief time, bring individuals from those universes into the main timeline. With a sufficient source of power, he could raise an army of the neverborn.
But he had his own agenda. He was a living sum over all histories, more closely akin to the Weeping Angels than the Time Lords. He was unable to comprehend the deterministic, near-Classical physics of the macroscale universe, and he seethed with anger over the way he and his own were relegated to unexistence by by the indifference of the observer effect and the callous brutality of the Time Lords, who abrogated to themselves the role of observer.
At the end, when the Dalek Fleet smashed the transduction barriers and Hell was unleashed in the Nine Shining Worlds of the Seven Systems, the Could've-Been King turned on everyone, Dalek and Time Lord alike. He cut the living heart out of a Type 102 TARDIS and consumed it, drawing on her connection to the Eye of Harmony to draw nearly unlimited power. He led his armies of meanwhiles and maybes and neverweres in a shattering offensive against the ground forces of both sides, while flights of fancy engaged the Dalek saucers and War TARDISes in space-time.
He was confident he would win. There were a million maybe-victories out there, all he had to do was bring one of those possible universes through, and make it real.
And then the Doctor triggered the Moment. The entire history of the Time Lords, the Daleks, the entire Time War, was reduced to information and buried in a singularity so dense and so heavy that it warped space-time to the point that it vanished completely from the universe.
There was no escape. Only a mad thing, attuned to the Vortex and acting from the outside, could release them. The last moments of the Time War raged, endlessly, over and over and over again. He was trapped. Forever.
Or so it would seem.
