Saturday, January 17, 2015

Some fun facts about "Eve of the Eternal"

I don't have much to say about "Cypnov" today, so I'll update instead with a small extra about "Eve of the Eternal." The Perennials is a story that is still in the process of planning, and "Eve of the Eternal" itself took a great deal of planning and development. I'd say that, for the time being, I've completed it, although I have a tendency to review and revise my stuff even after I think I've finished it. It's the writer's curse.



1. The fundamental idea behind Rose's enslavement/possession by Eve was inspired by "The Stone Rose," The Girl in the Fireplace, and the Star Trek episode "The Best of Both Worlds," in which Jean-Luc Picard is captured and assimilated into the Borg collective.

2. The galaxy the Helials are from, MGC 13-7-2, is a real galaxy. It's an elliptical galaxy about 68 million light years away, almost thirty times the distance between Earth and the Andromeda galaxy.




3. In the earliest outlines, "Eve of the Eternal" included Sarah Jane Smith and K-9 as characters, but in the end I couldn't quite fit them in, so I cut them. They're not very likely to appear in later stories, something I'm sad about, but they wouldn't have much purpose that couldn't already be fulfilled by UNIT or Torchwood.

4. In the original draft (not the one to appear on fanfiction.net), the Void Ship was built by the Eternals, who were intended to be the antagonists of The Perennials. But after some development, and after I'd seen a few episodes from the Tom Baker series featuring the Eternals, I found that they didn't quite fit what I had in mind. But then the idea of the Helials occurred to me, and I used that instead.

5. Series 3 and 4 are mostly the same as in Doctor Who, but Rose's fall into the Void, and the course of the series in future, required some small changes. Most importantly, in Series 4, none of the talk about disappearing planets occurred. Adipose 3 was destroyed by a supernova, and the Pyroviles at Pompeii were exiled from their planet, and so forth. There will be a lot of tense, exciting stories in future, but I will not pursue the same idea of the Daleks' reality bomb that Russell T. Davies did (mainly because I thought the idea pushed believability a bit too much).


6. Jackie and Mickey will appear later in the series. The Doctor will not escape unscathed. :)

7. Many thanks go to my mother and brothers for their help with The Perennials, much of which was the result of speculative conversation about Doctor Who, and what we think should have happened after Series 3.


Saturday, January 10, 2015

Cypnov Map

As promised, here is a global map of Cypnov. All of the important places are on there. Occasionally some others will be mentioned, but for the time being, this is the geographic distribution readers need to know:



Thursday, January 8, 2015

Cypnov: Some Concept Art



Cypnov cover art:  
The second story in the Perennials saga takes place on an alien world called Cypnov, which is home to a bird-like race called "Radilians." I first came up with these creatures on the Maxis game Spore, in which I designed a turquoise, winged creature with a thick, curved tail, which normally arches behind its back like a scorpion's tail. The tail is tipped with a leathery pouch which can spit poisonous barbs. 


The cover art, as it appears on fanfiction.net, was a tricky mixture of Photoshop and hand drawing. The sketch of Rose and her Radilian companion (who, for the sake of avoiding spoilers, I will not identify here), was mostly done using markers and colored pens.

When designing their armor, I used elements of Roman armor as well as some armor designs from Skyrim. The original sketch was not done with the kind of lighting the background required, and so I also had the difficult task of adjusting the coloring, using a mixture of orange and black color gradients, to fit the background. The original image of Rose and the Radilian is here presented:





Radilian design: When I first designed the Radilians on Spore, I had not started writing The Perennials yet, let alone a blog where I post concept art, so I didn't save any images. This image is as near a reconstruction as I could get. 

As the Radilians are a flying race, writing and revising Cypnov entailed the difficult task of constructing such a world. The Radilians' culture and their technology would center on their ability to fly.

The Radilians' culture, as will be further explained as the story progresses, is based on a mixture of Prussian and Japanese culture and history. The Radilians, like feudal Japan, are an honor culture based on knights and warlords, but they also are a highly militaristic race, like the Prussians.

Friday, December 26, 2014

"Amaranthine"


"She was Amaranthine. Whatever that meant. And she made her own way."
--Last line of Eve of the Eternal

In The Perennials, Rose is a very different person from Rose Tyler in Doctor Who, no surprising consequence of being ten thousand years old. As part of this change, from here on out, Rose will frequently call herself Rose Amaranthine rather than Rose Tyler.

I first thought of the name "Amaranthine" when I was writing Cypnov, the second part of the saga. I don't remember exactly where I came across the term, but I learned about the amaranth flower as a symbol of immortality. Of particular significance is the story from Aesop's fables, "The Rose and the Amaranth," which I thought fit post-Void Rose so well that I couldn't resist the reference:

"A Rose and an Amaranth blossomed side by side in a garden, and the Amaranth said to her neighbor, 'How I envy you your beauty and your sweet scent! No wonder you are such a universal favorite.' But the Rose replied with a shade of sadness in her voice, 'Ah, my dear friend, I bloom but for a time: my petals soon wither and fall, and then I die. But your flowers never fade, even if they are cut: for they are everlasting."

I thought this was very interesting, especially since the amaranth flower isn't actually a particularly attractive flower (as the story suggests), but amaranth blossoms do have a longer lifespan than most other flowers. As such, the amaranth has always been a symbol of longevity. The word comes from Greek, a combination of the words amarantos ("unfading") and anthos ("flower").

I also decided that it would be of particular irony if the Helials gave Rose that name, instead of Rose choosing it. While it was Helial technology that made Rose ageless, the Helials themselves weren't directly involved in Eve's actions, so I decided that when they first brought Rose on board the Eternal, they attempted to extract as much information from her damaged mind as was possible. They only thing they could extract was the image of a blue rose, which strongly resembled a flower from their home world. The Helials, correctly guessing that the flower signified Rose's name, thus called her by the name they associated with that image. The flower was called a "denekh," which means "without age," because like the Helials, the denekh is biologically immortal. Thus, though the Denekh resembles Earth roses, the word is linguistically closer to "amaranth" than it is to "rose." Therefore Rose's Taledrevan name, in English, is Amaranthine.

I picked a blue rose because it is a symbol of enigma and complexity, such as is Rose's character throughout The Perennials.






Tuesday, December 23, 2014

She's ageless now, right?

When I published the first version of Eve of the Eternal on fanfiction.net, once I revealed that Rose has been made ageless, I got a lot of comments like, "Oh, now she can give the Doctor his forever now?" Well, yes, she could, but here's something important to know about me and my writing style. I don't just hand over happy endings to the characters in my stories. Happy endings are boring. I have to put them through hell first.

In this case, concerning the relationship between Rose and the Doctor, I think Rose's biological immortality would build more obstacles than it would eliminate, especially since this wasn't a sudden, "Oh, you're ageless now" moment for Rose. She's been like this for a really, really long time. For the Doctor, it's sudden. The Rose he remembers is the one from before Canary Wharf. Neither he nor Rose know who she is now, only who she used to be. That in of itself is a problem. Rose has a long road ahead of her, a long way to go before she's ready for a relationship.

Also, I believe that suddenly having an indefinite lifespan would be emotionally traumatic for a human. A lot of decisions we make, we make when we do because we don't live forever. Also, Rose now has the same curse as the Doctor and Jack. She can't allow herself to get close to anyone else from Earth without suffering a great deal of pain, because she will outlive them. Rose is cut off from her own world.

Those are only two reasons that Rose is not, in fact, going to have an immediate, unrestrained romance with the Doctor. However, note the words "immediate" and "unrestrained." I never said she isn't going to have an intimate relationship with the Doctor. Just don't expect graphic sex. I don't show that in my stories.

Rose's agelessness was something that I put a great deal of thought into, and part of the reason I set up Eve of the Eternal the way I did was to avoid making Rose ageless according to the usual clichés. I didn't want Bad Wolf to have anything to do with it, for starters; and I really wanted to avoid turning Rose into a Time Lord. With no intended offense to my fellow fanfiction writers, the Bad Wolf thing has been done so many times that to me it's become virtually meaningless; and I really hate turning Rose, or any of the Doctor's companions, into a Time Lord. I did that once in an early story that I never published (and probably never will), and I hated it in that story. I've only seen this done well in a couple of other fanfictions, out of hundreds.

Just avoid it. Please.

Monday, December 15, 2014

Concept art: A Few Rough Sketches



 Rose under Eve's influence: 
This is a rough sketch used for the colored cover image on fanfiction.net and in the last post. Here you see basically what Rose looks like after Eve seizes control of her brain and her body, and the cybernetic implants. The original purpose for the implants, again, was life support, but Eve hijacked that to control Rose. The large one on her left temple is an adaptor between Rose's brain and the Void Ship's mainframe; it's where Eve is mostly located. The tubes and wires attached to Rose's face and scalp perform nanosurgery on her damaged brain, and by the time the Doctor finds her, her neurons are completely repaired. The collar on her neck is directly connected to Rose's brain stem. It performs involuntary reflexes, like breathing and her heartbeat, keeping her alive until her central nervous system is functional enough to perform those functions independently.

Void Ship exterior:
The ship's shape is a truncated icosahedron, which I picked to convey the connection between this ship and the Daleks' Void Ship, but to also convey that the Helial Void Ship is much more sophisticated than the Daleks' crude imitation.

When two hexagonal sides (the hexagon being an important shape in Helial culture) line up with a gravitational center, they open a portal into the ship.









Void Ship interior: 
A schematic diagram of the interior structure of the Eternal. 

A. Mainframe core
B. Central control room
C. Main corridor
D. Entry point
E. Computer systems matrix
F. Helial living quarters
G. Liquid energy generator (one of twelve)
H. Internal heating
I. Primary reactor
J. Gravity funnel
K. Pulsar reflector
L. Upper pole
M. Mainframe engineering
N. Water manufacturing
O. Cooling
P. Secondary reactor
Q. Lower pole


Rose's bionic left hand:
The story for how Rose lost her left hand isn't completely clear, even to her, but lose it she did, and the Helials replaced it with a prosthetic that is directly connected to her nervous system, so she can control it just as easily as she would a normal hand. The fingertips and the palm of her hand contain rubbery touch receptors that are in fact more sensitive and advanced than the touch receptors in normal skin. The hand is also detachable, connecting to a cybernetic stump that, like the implant on Rose's left temple, is an adaptor between nerves and electrical wiring. The hand's grip is also significantly stronger than that of a natural hand.

Eve can also open direct connections with the Eternal's software through this hand. 






Security cubes:
The ship's security robots, which also function as repair droids when needed, though only about a foot in length, width, and height, can fire a powerful incinerator beam from its corners, one which can reduce an organic life form to ash in a split second. The incinerator also contains enough energy to break through most force fields, and is even hot enough to burn through a Dalek's casing. The cubes also contain adaptive capabilities, enabling them to learn from their targets and adapt their shielding to advanced weaponry. Thus, every time a cube is destroyed, the other cubes become stronger. The cubes can also generate an energy beam that can lift solid objects, as well as tap into machinery and computer software using the same mechanics as a sonic screwdriver.

The cubes are only dangerous when the mainframe of the Eternal feels threatened. At all other times, though they survey the activity within the ship, they ignore all life forms within the ship until something triggers the defense protocols.








Friday, November 14, 2014

"Eve of the Eternal" Commentary, Part 2: The White Guardian, Rose in Captivity

The White Guardian

The scene in Chapter Two when the White Guardian appears inside the Tardis was a unique moment which set up the course of both Eve of the Eternal and the story arc encompassing the whole series of The Perennials. Much of what goes on in this scene reflects everything I feel that Doctor Who overlooked, and much of what I think should be said concerning the Time Lords, the Time War, and what happens next. Much of the discussion here began as conversations I had with my brothers and my mother after we saw the last few episodes of Series 4. I think I've mentioned before that I wasn't very happy with the conclusion of Series 4, the reasons for which I may discuss in a later post.

The White Guardian was a character who first appeared in The Ribos Operation, a Fourth Doctor episode which aired in 1978. In that episode, the Guardian sent the Doctor on a long and dangerous mission to retrieve the segments of the legendary Key to Time; the Doctor was of course successful, but in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of the evil Black Guardian, he disassembled the Key and scattered its remnants. The nature of the Guardians of Time isn't ever fully explained in Doctor Who, nor have they appeared in the new series, but they are connected to the Eternals, and wield an almost god-like power. It is implied that the Time Lords, or at least the Doctor, had heard of the Guardians before the Doctor encountered the White Guardian, but aside from the different roles of different such Guardians, their role in the Universe was never made completely clear, except that they will remain in those roles until the Universe no longer needs them.

In The Perennials, the White Guardian appears to herald the coming of a new era in the history of the Universe, a post-Gallifrey era, which he cryptically calls the "Age of the Perennials." Here the Guardian also links his first meeting with the Doctor to his survival of the Time War, and that for a reason yet unexplained, he has again chosen the Doctor for a special mission, a bigger one than the previous quest for the Key of Time: a designated protector and champion of the Universe in this new age. The Doctor's role as a protector was always unofficial and hit-and-miss before; now there's something bigger going on which the Guardian doesn't clarify. All the Guardian tells the Doctor is that he will not be alone in this mission: there will be two others with the same role, who the Doctor has already met.

The identities of these other protectors are not disclosed in the chapter, but are heavily implied. One is stranded on Earth for the time being, the other is trapped outside space-time. It's obvious enough.

I also thought the scene was important because of the Guardian's words concerning the Time War, especially his remark that there was only one significant difference between humans and Time Lords: that humans understand that they are mortal. It is a sharp rebuke to the Time Lords as a whole, including the Doctor, for their previous arrogance and presumptions concerning time itself and their role with regards to time. The Time War was the fault of the Time Lords; but another important point is the revelation that the Doctor was not actually the only survivor. This is elaborated on in a later story, but nonetheless, even if more Time Lords survived, the civilization they built is destroyed and will never rise again. They have lost their powers and their privileges.

When I began the revision of Eve of the Eternal, I considered cutting this scene; but in the end I decided against it because there was too much of import.


Rose in Captivity

"Bloody, self-repairing ships!"
-- The Doctor, Eve of the Eternal

Imagine waking up to learn that you've been living in a dreamscape for literally thousands of years; and that you were in that state because a computer had hijacked your mind and was using your own subconscious to subdue you. Still better, that computer's purpose is to run the operations of a ship that is drifting outside of space-time. And finally, said computer, in an effort to keep you alive and permanently enslaved in this manner, had rewritten your DNA to make sure you would never age. 

This is Rose Tyler, also and henceforth known as Amaranthine. This is what the Doctor, Donna, Martha, and Jack find in the Void Ship Eternal. 

As explained in the previous post, Rose shouldn't have survived her fall into the Void at all, and everyone rightly thought she didn't. Even she knows she should have died, and it was only through a fluke that she survived. In fact, were it not for the timely actions of her rescuers, Rose wouldn't have survived. The lack of oxygen in the Void in of itself was fatal, but what ultimately destroyed her wasn't suffocation, but the effect of both concrete and abstract nothingness upon her conscious mind. Her rescuers immediately put her on life support in an effort to repair her, both in body and in mind. And that's how this all started. 

The reason for her enslavement is similar to the plot of The Girl in the Fireplace.  The Void Ship she is trapped on was severely damaged when the Daleks trapped in the Void attacked it in a desperate effort to escape the nothingness of their prison. When the mainframe's primary memory base was destroyed in the attack, only four operations remained intact: the self-defense, which successfully destroyed the Dalek invaders, though nearly was itself destroyed in the process; the life-support systems, which enabled the ship to maintain a livable environment despite the damage; the backup data; and finally the self-repair systems. These four operations survived because they were independent systems of the mainframe. When the Dalek threat was eliminated, the self-repair system came on, but just as was the case in The Girl in the Fireplace, it had to find some replacement of the primary memory base, so it could restore the backup, and they found it: the damaged but reparable brain of Rose Tyler. 

The difference between this and the scenario in The Girl in the Fireplace is that, with regard the latter, the self-repair did not need to physically remove her brain from her body (thank heavens). Her captivity is of a cybernetic nature, but she is not a bionic zombie like a Cyberman; her situation is more like her possession by Cassandra O'Brien in New Earth. The mainframe of the Eternal took over Rose's mind, and Rose herself, her consciousness, was tucked away into her subconscious, where she'd remain asleep and unaware of what had happened to her. 

The irony of this is that her cybernetic imprisonment originated as a life-support system, coupled with a neural repair system similar in nature to nanogenes. In the above picture, the implants you see on Rose's face and neck weren't originally instruments to force her into a dream state; they were designed to keep her alive after her fall into the Void.

Dreamscape
The mainframe, designated Eve, subdues Rose by keeping her in her subconscious mind, an easy feat, since her subconscious was the only part of her mind that survived exposure to the Void undamaged. Eve has no control over Rose's subconscious, which is completely subject to her rules, her mode of thinking. But Rose's consciousness, already in a very inert, comatose state because of those few seconds in the Void, is easily transferred to her subconscious without her being aware of there ever being a transfer. Thus, as Eve slowly repairs her neurons, and Rose's consciousness begins to build up again, it is like she was reborn in a dreamscape, and she knows nothing else; she doesn't even consciously remember who she is. But while her conscious memory was severely damaged along with the rest of her conscious mind, as she lives in the dreamscape, her old memories buried in her subconscious start bleeding through in different dream constructions; familiar images to her, starting with the most fundamental, those she has known the longest, that formed who she was, such images as her mother and father and Mickey, or the Powell Estate; then over time they start building up to more recent images just as significant, like the Doctor and the Tardis. Some images are more subtle, like the wolf. Others are more overt, like Cybermen or Daleks. But the point is, though her memories aren't conscious, they aren't nonexistent. 

In the captivity of her subconscious, Rose can't quite connect the happenings of time, and so she is only vaguely aware of time passing. She lives in a haze, with the subconscious sometimes reminding her of reality, but her conscious mind, for a very long time, was too heavily damaged to think beyond that. But Eve, in the process of repairing Rose's neurons, slowly rebuilds the possibility of a conscious mind, and over time Rose begins to remember who she is; but just as in the film Inception, the dreams feel real to her while she's living in the dreamscape, even though some elements of those dreams don't quite follow the rules of the real world. For the first stage of her captivity, Eve doesn't even need to attempt to control Rose's subconscious; her subconscious mind, with the lack of a conscious mind, has already subdued her. 

Ethrae
When Rose begins to become aware again, Eve constructs the world of Ethrae, which Rose finds herself in during intervals in which she slips from the dreamscape. Ethrae, heavily based on a real alien world, is meant to fill Rose with a feeling of quiet and comfort. Rose is still mostly in a state of sleep throughout all this, and she remains asleep for a very long time, but when she starts to awaken, she finds herself in Ethrae, and over time she starts to accept this as the real world, but don't forget that she's still only half conscious during these intervals. 

Thus Rose's captivity is set to a perfect system, so flawless that for a very long time Rose isn't consciously aware that she's even in captivity; then the disruption starts. Something external starts to occur within the Void that starts shaking Rose from her incredibly long sleep. The source of the disruption will be revealed in a later story, but it opens a second breach in the Void, one strong enough to pull a dysfunctional Void Ship into reality; this doesn't immediately happen, but it's a heavy enough disruption that even Eve cannot hide the real world any longer. For the first time in a very long time, Rose Tyler awakens. She comes into full consciousness, remembering who she is, where she is, and how she came to be there. Ethrae is revealed to be an elaborate illusion which was planted in Rose's head to distract her from reality. It is a consciousness Eve cannot tuck away anymore; it's embedded in both the conscious and subconscious mind. Rose, for the first time, is aware of her situation, and she knows how to fight back. 

The Void Ship
Rose survived the Void because of a fluke: she was rescued seconds after her fall by a second Void Ship, a very different one from the sphere she and the Doctor encountered at Canary Wharf. The existence of the spherical Void Ship was a surprise to the Doctor, who had always thought Void travel to be purely theoretical, but somehow the Daleks had built one; yet it always puzzled me that the Daleks, devoid of imagination as a general rule, had managed to build something that the Time Lords hadn't thought possible. The explanation given in Eve of the Eternal isn't that the Cult of Skaro invented the technology; they stole it and used it to create a crude imitation of a masterpiece of space-time manipulation: an existential vessel.

Such ships are the invention of the Helials, an alien race/empire almost as ancient as the Time Lords and just as powerful; the Helials were never a problem for the Doctor before because they and the Time Lords were locked in a sort of cold war for many thousands of years, each avoiding the other because of their fear of the other. The only thing the Time Lords had, which the Helials did not, was an intrinsic connection with the Time Vortex; so while the Time Lords mastered time travel and time manipulation, Helial science took a totally different direction. The Helials became largely interdimensional by nature. They had a stronger connection with the Void than with the Time Vortex. This is why the Helials perfected a technology the Time Lords thought impossible. 

The Doctor generally kept away from the Helials' empire, as did most Time Lords; but during the Time War they tried to forge an alliance with the Helials, only to find that they'd vanished. This disappearance was a great mystery to the TIme Lords; while they were not the only civilization to vanish during the Time War, the odd thing about the Helials' disappearance was that only the race and some of its technolgoy was gone; but their cities and colonies remained. The species vanished, not the civilization. Furthermore, the Time Lords never found out what happened exactly, not until the events of Eve of the Eternal. Without the knowledge of such a technology as Void travel, the Time Lords didn't realize that the Helials hadn't vanished from existence; they had vanished from the universe. They had hidden their entire race inside the Void, and they witnessed Rose's entry into the Void. They rescued her, not out of altruism, but to find out why a human, of all things, had been pulled into their hiding place.

There are a number of important differences between the Daleks' Void Ship and the Helials' Void Ship, the most obvious being its shape. The Daleks chose a simple spherical shape; the Helials a more complex polyhedric shape, the truncated icosahedron. A Helial Void Ship is bigger on the inside, like a Tardis; but the Daleks do not possess the intellect or imagination to build such a structure. The Dalek Void Ship had no navigation; but Helials have no difficulty controlling when or where they emerge from the Void. A Dalek Void Ship cannot enter the Void without breaching the walls of the universe; but a fully functional Helial Void Ship can easily slide through those walls without causing significant damage. And most strikingly, a Dalek Void Ship is just a ship; but a Helial Void Ship, because its inside is a different dimension from the outside, can externally transform into a singularity, a black hole, without causing damage to its inside. Of course, this ability ideally is used in outer space, because like all black holes, anything that crosses the event horizon will be pulled in and destroyed. If a Void Ship went into singularity mode on the surface of a planet, it would probably destroy or severely damage that planet. 

Of course, the Helials hiding in the Void implies that they could come back out. But that's a story for later.