Women Love Fest - Day Four - River Song
Archaeology after the advent of time travel is more of a hands-on-experience field, than an academic one.
It suits her like she knew it would.
--
There's a planet in the Betelgeuse system that's had 400 different dominant species in the last 10 million years.
Her required bio-paleontology class goes there on a group trip, to learn the basics of diagnostic categorization.
She goes back by herself, slightly before she's been officially given access to a time jumper.
She goes back and back and back until, 10 million years back, she finds it. A little rubber novelty monster from twenty-first century earth on a pedestal in the middle of a primordial swamp.
There's a note inside in loopy, effortlessly ungrammatical High Gallifreyan. The language that can shape the universe.
"Everyone gets a chance," it says.
--
Her thesis is a defense of Great Man Theory, that outdated lens through which the Victorians viewed history.
It was pretty well abandoned millennia ago, as her advisors tell her.
But she knows better than almost anyone how entire movements, religions, civilizations can hinge on one person at one precise moment in time. How often they hinge on one particular person, at every precise moment in time.
--
She learns how to use a bow, goes back to earth, calls herself Hippolyta. Almost gets married.
She learns how to use a sword, goes back to earth, calls herself Boudicca. Almost stops Rome in its tracks.
She tries not to kill when it isn't necessary, but she never forgets that she's capable of it and she becomes sort of famous in her own right.
She makes up her own legend.
--
She spends a week in sixteenth century Jamaica, sipping tea with the governor's wife, swilling rum with pirates, dicing with the soldiers that man the fort.
She's looking for the Doctor, sure.
But she's also looking for a good time.
--
Melody Pond, the greatest war criminal in the universe, the woman who killed/kills/may kill the Doctor, Amy Pond's little girl/best friend/worst enemy, stops being Melody Pond.
She decides to be River Song.