timedaughter

THE CHARACTER

Character Name: Jenny
Series: Doctor Who
Canon Point: After Zero Space, which is approximately two years post “The Doctor’s Daughter”
Character Age: Technically she’s two years old, but she was born fully grown to an approximate age of 25.
Background: http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Jenny_(The_Doctor%27s_Daughter)

Personality: While the progenation machine that created Jenny provided her with all the social skills and knowledge necessary to live normally in the 61st century, Jenny was "born" using a soldier template. This provided her with a wide array of military and combat knowledge and the motivation to use it. Nonetheless, she was cheerful and affable from the get-go, and immediately demonstrated an eager desire to learn and grow. Her capacity for learning wasn’t a problem - it took less than a day for Jenny to develop ethics and a code of conduct contrary to her programmed training. Her initial disregard for “collateral damage” morphed instead into a great empathy for just about everyone and the desire to help people in trouble. While this was certainly influenced at least in part by her father, it took little to convince her, suggesting that this was always a core aspect of her personality that only required a little encouragement to bring forward.

As the Doctor’s daughter, it's just not in Jenny to sit still. Her most overwhelming motivation is to seek out adventure on new worlds throughout time and space and lend a helping hand wherever she might be needed. She would very much like to see her father again, she isn’t actively searching for him, knowing all too well that neither of them sit still long enough. She has faith that they’ll more or less randomly run into each other again at some point, so in the meantime she concerns herself with more immediate curiosities.

Like her father, Jenny has demonstrated a near-manic ability to think on her feet, a necessary talent for someone who genuinely enjoys throwing herself head-first into danger. She can form fully-fledged plans in the middle of running for her life, multi-tasking on a level that most beings would find stressful to manage even with an abundant helping of adrenaline. For Jenny, it comes naturally. With a little assistance from her Time Lord DNA, she’s able to come up with some truly novel solutions completely on the fly, such as building a DIY vortex manipulator out of scrap so she and her friends can escape a persistent bounty hunter who had them cornered. Finagling her way out of bad situations is more or less second nature to her.

Despite her ignorance on a great many subjects most 21st-century people would find elementary, Jenny’s adaptability can hardly be overemphasized. She’s quick to roll with the punches and find her feet no matter where (or when) she might find herself. It helps that she never stops to dwell or waste time lamenting when things go wrong, she just tries to think of another way to solve the problem.

Jenny is extremely observant and has a keen sense for when something is “too easy” or “feels off,” making it exceedingly difficult to trick her or trap her for any length of time. Seeing her way out of an obvious scam is easy enough, but she’s also able to sense (with a bit of time and mental effort) when she’s being actively manipulated. When an escaped prisoner with a gift for mental influence attempted to alter Jenny’s memories and disguise their identity, Jenny worried at the false memories like a sore tooth, alerted to their deceptive nature by the tiniest incongruencies. She wore away at the weak points until she was able to recover her true memories and peg the prisoner’s true identity.

Because of her natural charm, confidence, and cheerful optimism, Jenny has a tendency to attract friends and allies. While she’s self-sufficient enough to get by without help, she prefers having company and will throw in wholeheartedly with a good person, especially if they’re in a spot of bother. She can be very persuasive and convince conflicted people who are set against her to change their stripes. In the audio novels, she meets Noah, a man of unknown species without any memories who comes out of cryo-freeze right as she’s attempting to steal his ship to escape a criminal. Once Noah enters the picture, Jenny goes out of her way to protect him, even when it means putting herself back in the very danger she was attempting to avoid. While this naturally inspires loyalty in Noah toward Jenny, it’s Jenny’s ongoing selfless loyalty to Noah that’s truly notable. Even after they’re out of danger, Jenny continues trying to help and protect Noah, because Noah is lost and it’s the right thing to do.

As a child of the 61st century, flirting comes quite naturally to Jenny and while modesty is a concept she fully understands, she’s happy enough to shed a little propriety when the occasion calls for it. She’s very open-minded to just about everything, and has little regard for concepts like discrimination (over anything) or judgement toward others based on their choices or lifestyles, so long as no one is being harmed.

Although Jenny is overwhelmingly a good person, she will sometimes “default” to her soldier template when in immediate danger. After her memories were compromised in the middle of a time-jump, she was still perfectly kind and polite when encountering a stranger, but the first thing on her mind was acquiring high-grade weapons to use in self-defense. It was only once she began to recover that she remembered that she now prefers to act without the aid of guns. She’s also far more likely to engage in hand-to-hand combat than run away if attacked. This is an instinct she can’t ever fully turn off, but she does make an earnest attempt to use these skills only when necessary.

Powers/Abilities: Time Lords have a unique physiology that results in a number of level-ups humans don’t have, such as:
- The ability to regenerate a new body when injured to the point of death, or regenerate lost limbs if maimed but not killed
- The ability to hold their breath for absurd lengths of time, thanks to their respiratory bypass system
- Resistance to cold and even very cold temperatures, up to the point they can survive in the vacuum of space for as long as they can hold their breath, or enter a frozen stasis for indefinite amounts of time if they still have oxygen
- Greater strength and durability than humans
- Resistance or ability to process various poisons and radiation (to a point)
- Some telepathic ability
- Most importantly, an innate sensitivity to and understanding of time and anything to do with it, such as time travel, paradoxes, conflicting timelines, etc.

Additionally, Jenny’s military programming have made her highly skilled in hand-to-hand combat and have made her more than proficient in the use of just about any weapon. She’s also very familiar with advanced technology, to the point that she can ably work with it and even build her own devices or reprogram a space ship’s nav system in very little time.

Power Nerfs (if applicable): While Time Lords can seem pretty powerful, their abilities are not generally over-emphasized or overused in the show (or the audio books), and I like to stick to that. Telepathy, for example, is shown to be possible, but is very rarely used. When Jenny stumbled onto a psychic ship no one else had been able to get working, she was able to figure out the interface was psychic very quickly, but encountered quite the learning curve when trying to properly give it commands. Also, without formal training, much of Jenny’s understanding of her abilities is limited, or even absent entirely if she hasn’t yet stumbled into a situation in which she might discover them.

Inventory:
- The clothes on her back
- One dematerialization circuit (not hooked up to anything, kinda useless unless she puts it in something)

Incentives:
- More information about Gallifrey and the Time Lords
- The health and safety of her father and Noah
- Answers about who and what Noah is
- High-quality black tea
- Any potentially valuable bits of future tech, even ones that are currently broken