Fractured Reality application
**SEASON SIX SPOILERS ARE WHITED OUT FOR ANG'S BENEFIT**
Player name: Emmy
Journal: tazing
AIM: lackofsatin
Email: halfthewaffles at gmail
Other characters: Parker
Character name: Amelia Jessica "Amy" Pond
Age: 21
Canon: Doctor Who
Canon point: During 5x12 "The Pandorica Opens," after she's knocked out by the Cyberman.
Totem: Her engagement ring. Normally, when spun, it will spin on the band with the jewel pointing upwards. During a fissure, it will spin on the jewel. Since in Amy's current timeline, her fiancé doesn't quite exist (he's a plastic replica of himself and she doesn't remember him), she still believes the ring belongs to the Doctor. However, it's an important trigger for her and on some level she knows it's important to her, and I'd like to play with the effect that having it will have on her.
Weapons: n/a
Abilities/powers: Amy has Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, at least to a certain extent. As the Doctor puts it: "You grew up with a time rift in the wall of your bedroom. You can see what others can't, remember things that never happened." When something is erased from history, Amy can still remember it, though she has a difficult time doing so if it's from her own personal timeline. Things close to her that are erased (ie. her parents and her fiancé) require a lot of prompting before she remembers they exist. But in general, if time is altered, Amy will have some sense of what happened in the original timeline.
For example:
5x01 "The Eleventh Hour" Amelia says she hasn't "got any parents," as they were erased from history. After the Doctor talks about his love, and subsequently hate, for apples, Amelia recalls to him that her mother used to carve faces on apples to make her like them.
5x02 "The Beast Below" Amy presses "forget," and twenty minutes are wiped from her memory. Later, she has disjointed flashbacks to the video she watched during those twenty minutes (this is after she's figured out what the video was about).
5x03 "Victory of the Daleks" Even after interacting with them, Amy has no memory of the Daleks, even though they invaded the Earth at least twice during her lifetime (most notably at the end of season 4, at which point Amy would have been 19-ish).
5x05 "Flesh and Stone" Several clerics walk, one by one, into one of the cracks, touch the light from it, and are erased from history. As soon as each one goes, the others forget he was ever there, but Amy remembers them all perfectly well and doesn't understand why the others have forgotten. The Doctor says that she remembered them because she's a time-traveler, which "changes the way you see the universe."
5x09 "Cold Blood" When Rory dies next to a crack and is consumed by it, the Doctor tells Amy that she can at least remember him if she tries hard enough. Her concentration is broken and she forgets him.
5x10 "Vincent and the Doctor" Amy cries a lot, but doesn't understand why. Vincent says that she's in mourning.
5x11 "The Lodger" Amy spends a lot of time staring at her engagement ring, but other than obviously feeling some connection to it, she doesn't understand what it is.
5x12 "The Pandorica Opens" Amy believes the Doctor when he says the engagement ring belonged to a friend he lost. After spending some time talking to Rory, she finally remembers him.
5x13 "The Big Bang" Young Amelia paints a picture of stars, even though stars never existed. Meanwhile, the Alliance having created a Roman legion from Amy's memories, Rory is alive again, as a Roman. The Doctor says that all the Alliance should have gotten from Amy's memories was a Rory-shaped body, but because of the way Amy's mind functions thanks to her relationship to the cracks, they got "[his] heart and [his] soul" as well (ie. plastic!Rory is "realer" than he should be). Later, the Doctor tells Amelia that he "stole, well, borrowed" the TARDIS, and described it as "brand new and ancient, and the bluest blue." At her wedding, Amy is given River's blank blue diary, and Rory brushes it off as, "that old wedding thing." The phrase "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" triggers Amy's memories of the TARDIS and the Doctor, bringing them back into existence.
6x01 "The Impossible Astronaut" The Silence (or rather, the nameless grey aliens in suits) have the ability to completely erase any memory of themselves from a human's mind. They can only be remembered by someone if that person is looking at them. The woman in the bathroom forgets the Silence each time she looks away from it, and every time she sees it, it's as though she's seeing it for the first time. Amy forgets the Silence like everybody else when she's not looking at one, but unlike the woman in the bathroom, she can remember every previous time she saw the Silence as long as she's looking at one.
6x13 "The Wedding of River Song" AU!Amy is able to remember the original timeline, though she gets some of the details wrong (mainly Rory's appearance). She mentions that the only way she can properly hang on to the memories is to keep drawing what she remembers.
Since this "power" is weird and vague and idek, I'm cool with anything being done to it/with it/whatever. I'm just. UNSURE.
Apart from the sci-fi stuff, she can pick locks and pockets.
Location: Amy will be bringing with her the Pond family home. It's two stories, with a blue front door and a overgrown lawn with a swingset and an old garden shed. The inside features a kitchen, living room, and some other unimportant rooms on the ground floor, with six rooms on the upper floor, and a staircase leading up into the ceiling. Or the attic or something. Two of the six rooms on the upper floor are occupied bedrooms: one is Amy's and one is her aunt Sharon's. The other three are mysteriously disused, as though some other people used to live there but don't anymore. The sixth room is a dirty old place with a gooey wooden table and some crates and peeling paint that Amy didn't know existed until recently. Amy's bedroom is painted blue, with an old rug, an armchair, and an over-crowded nightstand with a tv on it. There is still a crack in her wall (but it's a sealed crack, so no more escaped prisoners or anything running through it). The room is littered with childhood art projects depicting the Doctor. Her wedding dress is still hanging on the back of the closet door, but she won't know what the hell it is because there's no Rory in this timeline.
Personality: Amy seems to have been raised secularly. Her first onscreen appearance is her praying to Santa Claus. From this, it's safe to assume that her parents didn't raise her to believe in God, but that doesn't stop little Amelia from believing. God's not in the picture? Okay, she'll pick another higher power to pray to. Little Amelia has a sense of wonder about the universe, a sense of something outside herself; she's the kind of kid who believes in wishing on stars, who doesn't suspect the motives of strangers, and who thinks that, somewhere out there, there are magical adventures waiting for her to have them.
She's creative, artistic, and imaginative. As we later learn, she painted, created dolls, and drew comics. She seems to enjoy mythology - her favorite story was Pandora's Box - which speaks to a love of a good story over real history. This is reflected in her love of art, specifically Vincent van Gogh - and I'm assuming the post-Impressionist style in general, which is all about subjectivity and human perception. She's got some serious obsessive tendencies, though, and once she latches onto something, it would take a whole lot to get her off it: all the art she creates is related to the Doctor and her childhood encounter with him. And as we learn in "The God Complex," young Amelia transferred her need for faith in a higher power from Santa to the Doctor, effectively deifying him in her eyes. This need for meaning in life and a higher power to believe in is so strong that, no matter how many times the Doctor lets her down, no matter how much she questions or doubts him, she will never lose her faith in him until he literally sits her down and explains to her that he ruined her life and will inevitably kill her.
As a child, she takes just about everything in stride. The Doctor's oddities never bother her, meeting her future self locked in a box is no problem, Daleks are a little freaky but no big thing, etc. etc. She is, for a small child, remarkably fearless. But she's also lonely. At seven years old, she was completely self-sufficient: she knew how to cook, how to clean, and seemed to have no problem with her Aunt Sharon being out at night. From the way her relationship with Aunt Sharon is presented, it seems that while Sharon tried to be a loving caretaker, she had no idea how to raise a child, so Amelia practically raised herself. Even the way Amelia spoke set her apart from everyone else in the village: as people frequently remind her, she's the only Scottish girl. The fact that she was willing to leave everything she ever knew behind at the drop of a hat to run away with a stranger speaks to the fact that nothing in Leadworth meant very much to her.
When we meet her again, after a twelve-year gap, some things have changed, but there are ways in which Amelia is still stuck in the past. She's all grown up, but she seems to have lost track of who she's meant to be. She trades names, accents, and costumes like an actor in a play, trying to escape being the little girl who waited up all night in her garden for a man who never came back.
There's a sense that she forced herself to grow up too quickly, taking on a shorter, less "fairytale" name, distancing herself as much as possible from her naive younger self. She demands the respect deserved by an adult, bossing everyone around and expecting them to bend over backwards for her. Even Rory is sometimes treated as nothing more than a convenience. Her own respect must be earned, even by the likes of the Doctor. Amy puts on an extremely confident front, and while some of it is genuine - she's very flirty, and she knows she's extremely good-looking (even bordering on narcissistic on occasion) - most of it is just a front, hiding her insecurities and fears.
As grown-up as Amy tries to be, she suffers from a serious Peter Pan complex. She doesn't want to grow up: she fears responsibility of adulthood, the facing up to reality and the letting go of dreams. The real world is almost theoretical to her, like something temporary that she doesn't have to take seriously, and she seems unable to regard things like jobs and relationships the way an adult should or would. She's a kissogram "because it's a laugh" and Rory is her "sort-of boyfriend." Her job is a reflection of the lack of connection she feels to her real life: it involves putting on costumes and going to parties and kissing people. She never has to be herself, and she never has to get to know anyone, let alone form lasting relationships. It's also silly, a party job, something fun and ridiculous instead of the tedium of a nine-to-five grind. Working in a professional environment, or being forced into the structure of a routine, would probably drive Amy bonkers. She thrives on excitement and spontaneity.
One thing Amy's certain of, and that is her own outsider status. Leadworth is shown to be a very small town, in which everybody knows everybody and there aren't any secrets. Growing up, she was sent to four different psychiatrists, and it's pretty clear that everybody knows this and has labeled her a bit mad. Rather than trying to conform and accept the townspeople's version of reality in order to fit in, Amy, like a rebellious teenager, went out of her way to make herself even more different. Her refusal to fit in or to accept any version of reality that she doesn't like is symbolized by her stubborn refusal to let her accent change.
This dichotomy in Amy, her internal struggle between adulthood and childhood, reality and imagination, is symbolized by the two men in her life. There's her fiancé Rory, who is sweet, steadfast, and a bit dull. To her, their impending marriage represents the end of adventure and the beginning of proper adulthood. After having lived with him in boring domestic bliss in sleepy Upper Leadworth for five years with a baby on the way, Amy can't think of anything nice to say about that lifestyle. She'd much rather be in the TARDIS, with her imaginary friend the Doctor, who whisks her away for thrilling near-death experiences on far-away worlds. Leadworth, and the stagnation it represents, is a nightmare. The other side of the coin is the Doctor, and his madcap world of adventure and danger. The Doctor is both the cause of and solution to Amy's problems: the cause of her issues and the gap between her and the "normal," boring and people of Leadworth, and a way for her to escape reality into the world she's been imagining since she was seven. The Doctor's life is everything she wants.
And yet, Rory is the love of her life. She loves him more than she understands, and he loves her more than she can bear. He's the kind of guy who calls her up during his stag party to tell her he loves her and if he weren't marrying her in the morning, he'd ask her to marry him right then, and she's the kind of girl who runs away on the night before their wedding because, no matter how much she loves him, she's terrified of commitment. This terror stems from being abandoned her entire life. Amy's idea of people is that they promise you wonderful things and then let you down. And this is reinforced time and time again: her parents vanish, the Doctor leaves, and finally Rory dies, and even if Amy can't remember it all, she's lived her whole life with the constant feeling that something's missing, it's important, and she can't get it back.
When she remembers her relationship with Rory, she recalls all the little details that nobody would think are important, but which obviously matter a great deal to her. Everything about him and the time they had together means so much to her, but she masks the depths of her feelings with harassment and insults, distancing herself because she can't really believe that he'll stick around. She changes the subject whenever he wants to have a serious conversation, and she shows affection by being jokingly rude and dismissive. She's never even told him that she loves him. Physical affection is alright, and big passionate kisses are all well and good, but when called upon to put her feelings into words, she relies on inferences to get her point across. She even cheats on Rory on the night before their wedding. Despite all of this, she can't quite understand his point of view or why he might be insecure in their relationship. She treats him like an idiot whenever he questions how much she loves him or whether she'd rather be with the Doctor. She doesn't always seem to be able to associate her actions (ie. cheating on Rory) with their direct consequences (ie. Rory freaking out).
Needless to say, she's massively affected by the deaths of loved ones. When Rory dies the first time, she can't even comprehend how reality could be real without Rory, and is willing to kill herself for a chance to see him again. And when he dies the second time, this time for real, she refuses to leave his side and has to be physically dragged into the TARDIS. Even then, she tries to wrench the controls from the Doctor and take them back to where Rory's body is. The death of the Doctor leaves her sitting by his side, hugging her knees to her chest and rocking back and forth, begging him to wake up, like a child. While River and Rory are able to continue on afterwards, working through who may have killed him, all Amy can say is, "It doesn't matter. He's dead, nothing matters."
The Doctor's death takes place after a massive reboot of the entire universe, theoretically fixing Amy's life and most of her issues, but I'd say that's a fair model for how she'd react to his death in cracked!timeline too, as is what she does when she has the opportunity to save him: Having been told several times by River that they can't disturb the timeline, Amy, regardless of the consequences, picks up a gun and shoots the Doctor's murderer, even though it could collapse the timeline, even though the killer is a little girl. From this, it can be presumed that Amy would go to any lengths to protect the people she cares about.
The other result of Amy's abandonment issues is that she can't trust anyone to get too close, or to be vulnerable. She doesn't trust anyone but herself to save her, or to be there for her when she needs them. It's because of this that she, as writer Steven Moffat puts it, "is so determined not to be a victim, she's in permanent danger of making herself one." She's sarcastic, cocky and brash in the face of danger, to the point of carelessness. She can't resist a sign that says "keep out," orders like "don't open that door" go straight over her head, and if she saw a big red button that said "END OF THE WORLD BUTTON, DO NOT PRESS!" she's exactly the type who would press it, just to show that she wasn't scared to do so.
She's impulsive, great at thinking quickly but never thinking anything through. Given a situation where she only has to do one quick, clever thing to fix the problem, she'll handle it with relative ease. She's pretty smart and resourceful and good at keeping her head in horrible situations. But she's no master manipulator and long-term planning isn’t her forte. When she first meets the Doctor as an adult, she wallops him with a cricket bat and handcuffs him to a radiator, but her only plan beyond that is along the lines of 'be authoritative.' She very much acts in the moment without giving a lot of thought to what happens next.
She's also capable of extreme practicality. When faced with a little boy wired up to a machine, she doesn't immediately start tearing apart the machine and trying to free him, she finds a weapon and finds the people in charge, knowing that's the most rational, if not the most caring, course of action. She also asks the annoying practical questions that most other people don't think of (ie. "There's a light on top of your time machine. Do you have to change the bulb?"). She's insatiably curious, always questioning everything she sees, and sometimes when she's nervous, she'll just run on and on asking endless nitpicky questions. Long, dry discussions bore her, though, and she's been known to doze off during diplomatic negotiations even with the fate of the Earth in the balance. She's vivacious, she likes action. And she's a bit of a joker - she can come off as a nagging little sister to the Doctor, poking fun at him even when he's had a bad day.
When it comes to the big things, she always tries to do what's right. She may be closed off, and she may be commitment-phobic, but it never stops her from trying to connect, and often succeeding in understanding the emotional nuances of situations. She never does anything by half. She's passionate, and she'll always go the extra mile, even if it means getting her heart broken all over again. This is especially true of her relentless attempts to turn Vincent's life around, to prevent him killing himself even though she knows it happens in the end. She gets overwhelmed sometimes, with questions and curiosities and the huge madcap universe, but never lets that stop her or slow her down. The closest of near-death experiences only make her want to go home for a quick pitstop. As much as she tries to be a cynical and disillusioned grown-up, she's still very much the little girl trying to escape her boring life into a world of adventure.
History: Amelia Pond lived with her aunt, Sharon, in the sleepy English village of Leadworth, since as far back as she could remember. She must have had parents at some point, but she didn't anymore. When she was a little girl, there was a crack in her bedroom wall, through which she heard voices. Nobody believed her, so she prayed to Santa to send somebody to fix the crack, and right on cue a blue box crashed into her garden shed, a man fell out of the box, and he fixed the crack. He said his name was the Doctor and he would be back in five minutes.
Amelia believed him.
Later, when she told Aunt Sharon this story, it was dismissed as childish fantasy, which became an obsession, and as the years dragged on, abandonment issues that were dealt with by a series of psychiatrists rather than Aunt Sharon, none of whom stayed around for very long because any time they told young Amelia that the Doctor wasn't real, she bit them.
Twelve years went by since the Doctor's disappearance, and Amelia grew up, started going by Amy, got a job as a kissogram and a boyfriend who was a nurse. And then the Doctor came back. She refused to trust him even when he said that the world was about to be incinerated by intergalactic police chasing a multiform that had escaped through the crack in her bedroom wall all those years ago. He asked her to believe for just twenty minutes. She did. He saved the world and disappeared again.
Life in Leadworth continued on. Amy got engaged to the nurse, and on the night before her wedding, the Doctor came back. He whisked her off to distant lands and times: Starship UK in the 29th century, Churchill and the Daleks in WWII, and River Song and the crash of the Byzantium in the 51st century. That last one took its toll, as Amy was nearly killed by the Weeping Angels and a crack in the fabric of time that would wipe anything that touched it clean out of existence. Returning home safe and sound against all odds, Amy, in a fit of adrenaline, came onto the Doctor rather over-aggressively. In a panic, the Doctor shipped off her and her fiancé, Rory, for a romantic holiday in 1580's Venice, where they got to battle fish from space and save the city from sinking.
Rory and Amy made amends and Amy asked Rory to stay on with her and the Doctor, traveling the universe. Between stops, they were waylaid by someone calling himself the Dream Lord. He presented them with two realities: one in which they were traveling in the time machine as usual, and one in which they were living in sleepy Upper Leadworth, Rory and Amy married with a baby on the way. If they died in the dream, they would wake up in reality, and if they died in reality they would simply die. When Rory was killed in Upper Leadworth, Amy realized that if that was reality, it wasn't one worth living in without Rory, so she crashed a VW bus into her house, killing herself and the Doctor. They woke up in the TARDIS, but the Doctor figured out that both realities were actually dreams, and decided to blow all of them up.
That little adventure brought Amy and Rory a lot closer together. But their next adventure stuck them in the middle of an impending war between humanity and Silurians - the original owners of planet Earth who wanted it back. The Doctor managed to sort out a negotiation so humans could keep the planet, at least for a while, but one particularly angry Silurian tried to shoot him. Rory jumped in the way of the blast and was killed. He also happened to fall right next to a crack in time and was absorbed by the light, which wiped him from history and Amy's mind. The only thing he left behind was the engagement ring he'd given her, tucked safely away in the TARDIS.
Though Amy had no memory of her dead fiancé, the Doctor decided to be extra nice to her regardless, and took her to an exhibit of her favorite artist: Vincent van Gogh. And then back in time to meet Vincent van Gogh. Amy tried her hardest to help Vincent overcome his depression. In the end, he killed himself anyway, but not before sending one last message to the Doctor - a date, 102AD - on a picture of the TARDIS exploding. Amy and the Doctor arrived at Stonehenge in 102AD, where they found River and a legion of the Roman army. Beneath Stonehenge was the Pandorica, a mythical box said to contain the deadliest creature in existence. It had been guarded by a cyberman, but he was falling apart, only his arm left in the Pandorica chamber. The arm was enough, however, to electrocute the Doctor and shoot a poison dart at Amy. She tried to fight off the cyberman's reassembled body, but was too woozy, and ended up being rescued by a legionnaire whose face she didn't see before she passed out.
3rd person sample: --
1st person sample: [Amy is using a videophone to communicate as she's walking along the beach. She seems a bit woozy and out of it.] Doctor? Doctor, are you here? Hello? Is this a side-effect of that robot, or--
[She pauses, groans, and puts her hand to her head.] Oh, for god's sake, is there anybody there? Anybody with aspirin? [She makes a face, then after a moment she shakes it off, and keeps walking. The camera swings around to point at the city.]
So am I on another planet now? How'd that happen? The Daleks and all the rest of them, did they get the Pandorica? Did whatever was inside it do this? Or is this Earth in the future or something? [She stops again, and the camera moves so you can see at least part of the horrified look on her face.] How long was I unconscious?
[She holds the camera up so it's pointing properly at her face again.] Doctor? Doctor, if you're there, you have to answer me! Are you alright? Did the TARDIS... It didn't... Did it? Doctor!