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.

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:

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.