Starkey

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Starkey (Regeneration) or Starkey Sobol

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Starkey
Main aliases:	Stark Reality
Species:	Human
Affiliated with:	K9 Unit
Place of origin:	Earth
First appearance:	Regeneration
Appearances:	see list
Main actor:	Keegan Joyce

You may be looking for Starkey (The Chase).

Starkey was a rebellious fourteen-year-old orphan who operated for a time under the pseudonym "Stark Reality" and became the master of K9 Mark 2 in the mid-21st century.

Biography

Origins

Charles and Marie Sobol had a son whom they experimented on as part of their radical research in alien immunology. They also experimented on themselves. The subjects of accusations and rumours, they disappeared whilst their son was still young and their treatment of him was considered "insane" by Alistair Gryffen, although K9 Mark 2 believed that there might be an explanation for their actions.

Starkey did not know who his parents were, although he heard voices and saw faces when he was young and thought that they could be memories. His blood plasma produced alien antibodies which made him immune to alien pathogens and he had a mark on his arm which he would later find became itchy when confronted with errors in the timeline. Gryffen would later deduce that the Sobols were Starkey's parents, a deduction which Starkey and K9 accepted as fact. (TV: Oroborus ^[+]Loading...["Oroborus (TV story)"])

Growing up

Starkey was left an orphaned and a troubled youngster, with little memories of his past. (TV: Regeneration, Oroborus, The Last Precinct) By the age of 14, he was operating as a political agitator called "Stark Reality". He also had followers who wanted to be his accomplices, like Jorjie Turner. (TV: Regeneration)

Starkey spent some time in a virtual reality detention facility, where he was overlooked by Custodians. (TV: The Custodians)

Meeting K9

One night, Starkey and Jorjie escaped CCPCs and stumbled into Alistair Gryffen's house. Starkey accidentally unplugged the Space-Time Manipulator and brought through four Jixen warriors and K9 Mark 2. A Jixen sprayed him with its enemy-fluid whilst K9 self-destructed, killing three of the Jixen. Starkey retrieved K9's regeneration unit. Shortly thereafter, K9 rebuilt himself. Darius Pike informed the police robots and Starkey was arrested and taken to a detention facility operated by the Department. There he was put into a virtual reality detention facility. Jorjie hacked into his detention program and communicated with him. The surviving Jixen tried to kill him, but Starkey escaped. K9 gave Starkey a dog whistle as an apology for nearly killing him and told him that "wherever you are, it will call me to your side". (TV: Regeneration)

As the Jixen was hunting him, Starkey had to stay at Gryffen's house. When K9 discovered that the Jixen was heading in the direction of Dauntless Prison, he headed there to track it. Starkey wanted to help, and asked Darius to come with him. Darius agreed but only on the condition that Starkey left when they were done. Starkey and Darius arrived in the prison, but were soon captured by CCPCs. They were thrown in their cells by Thorne, the governor of Dauntless Prison who would later become a dangerous enemy. Jorjie arrived to help, Darius gave her a keycard he swiped from Thorne. She used it to free Starkey and Darius, along with the other alien prisoners. They ran with the aliens but when Starkey looked behind them, he was confronted by a Jixen. Starkey was then saved by K9. Exploiting the Jixen's tracking ability, Starkey put his jacket, which had Jixen slime on it, in a cell.

The Jixen tracked the slime to the cell and Starkey closed the door on him. Suddenly, a Department officer arrived, who revealed himself to be a Meron and attacked K9, he advanced on Starkey, but he was saved by the Jixen who used its call to scare the Meron off. Though K9 was low on power, Starkey and him managed to unite with Jorjie, Darius and the aliens. Darius opened the gate, and everyone went out, but were met by June Turner, Jorjie's mother, who demanded that they returned to their cells. The Jixen struck again and attacked K9 and June. June told Jorjie to set her locking device to self-destruct. Darius grabbed it and threw it to Starkey, who attached it to the Jixen which was destroyed. He was struck by the Jixen's energy attack, which resulted in him fainting. He awoke in Gryffen's house where, honouring his deal with Darius, decided to leave, but not before thanking K9 for saving his life. Later, Starkey was vandalising a Department message when he was met by CCPCs. Starkey was soon joined by K9, who was "ready for action". (TV: Liberation)

Moving into Gryffen Manor

Starkey hid from the Department with the help of K9, who attempted to cook baked beans. Jorjie caught up with him, at which point Darius alerted them that Gryffen had disappeared. Making contact with a soldier from the year 2618, they learnt that an alien known as a Korven, who failed to invade Earth in 2480, had travelled back in time to abduct Gryffen, intending to leech his mind to create a device to cool the Earth. Tracing phosphane gas to the Korven's lair, Starkey was captured by the alien while K9 was impaired by the gas. Fortunately, however, Jorjie and Darius caught up with the delirious K9, who neutralised the Korven when Starkey instructed him to cook beans. Starkey and K9 were granted a place at Gryffen Manor by the Professor. (TV: The Korven)

After Gryffen helped K9 to recover a fragment of his lost memory, Starkey and K9 went out and were witness to a supposed bomb threat by rogue dissidents at a ferris wheel, with Inspector Drake and CCPCs arriving on the scene. Starkey, however, determined that the threat was a mere publicity stunt, calling out Drake for not doing anything. The bomb was neutralised by K9, with he and Starkey receiving praise from a thankful crowd. Back at the manor, Starkey was sceptical to learn that, by the word of the bounty hunter Ahab, K9 was apparently responsible for the murder of Zanthus Pia, President of the Galactic Peace Assembly in the year 50,000. Taking K9 to Darius' secret storage facility in the sewers, Starkey defended K9 when Jorjie and Darius voiced their doubts. As they slept, K9 came to the conclusion that he was a murderer and so chose to surrender himself when he was intercepted by Ahab and Drake. However, while being dragged into the STM's vortex by Ahab's laser lasso, K9's fragment was clarified, revealing that Ahab was the murderer, and that he was in league with the Jixen. By throwing a hot cupful of tea at the cold laser, Jorjie caused Ahab to be propeled through the vortex into space. Following the incident, June arrived at the manor and announced K9 was under her jurisdiction, entrusting him and his young friends to Gryffen, who were now known as the K9 Unit. (TV: The Bounty Hunter)

Exploits with the K9 unit

Walking with Jorjie and K9, Starkey witnessed and recorded the arrest of an activist protesting CCPC violence. However, his recording was confiscated when Jorjie threw a stone at the CCPC. As a result of this incident, June had Jorjie enrolled in Magdalene Academy alongside the activist, Vibeka. Observing that the students displayed a change in behaviour upon receiving bracelets, Jorjie called Starkey to investigate, and Gryffen and K9 found that the bracelets contained a cerulium, a substance which removed free will. This revelation came too late to stop Jorjie from receiving a bracelet, however, K9 was easily able to destroy it via his photon beam. Starkey and K9 accompanied Jorjie as she returned to school with a fake bracelet, with K9 freeing the students by destroying all the bracelets, which were exposed as having been provided by a Department robot disguised as a student. (TV: Sirens of Ceres)

At the manor, Starkey and the Professor felt a sudden sense of fear which was spreading throughout London as Darius supposedly found a monster waiting beyond the hole at the bottom of an old wardrobe at a junkyard. As K9 could not understand the emotion of fear, Starkey and Jorjie made a vain attempt to scare him. Investigating the wardrobe, Starkey determined that the hole was seen through one's fear while K9, much to his fright, found a Jixen within the wardrobe. Though Drake attempted to use a bomb to destroy K9, he was able to escape in time, returning to his friends who congratulated him on experiencing his first feeling. (TV: Fear Itself)

On a stormy night, a trio of non-corporeal lifeforms came through the STM, taking on the appearance of Gryffen's lost family, and manipulating him into doing their bidding. Starkey convinced him that he, Darius and Jorjie were like family to him. Gryffen broke free of the apparitions' control, sending them back through the STM. (TV: The Fall of the House of Gryffen)

When Nehetka and Geb of the Anubians, a race whom K9 had liberated in his past, arrived on Earth, Gryffen was the first to fall under their hypnotic control. He banished Darius from the house when he irritated the Anubians. Jorjie and Starkey were then hypnotised and Darius tried to convince K9 something was wrong but he was too occupied with remembering his past. Darius used Mariah to knock Geb out, using the Ankh on his chest to take control of the Anubian spacecraft and, with K9, defeated the Anubians when they attempted to take over the Department and freed Starkey and the others. (TV: Curse of Anubis)

During his time at the Gryffen household, Starkey tried to find out who his parents were. Following a chance encounter with an Oroborus, Gryffen discovered that Starkey was probably the son of two alien immunologists, Charles and Marie Sobol. The Sobols had experimented on him as a baby, granting him an alien immune system, and they themselves had disappeared some time afterward. (TV: Oroborus)

An accident in the STM resulted in Jorjie being sent to 23 November 1963. K9 and Starkey were sent to retrieve her. They encountered Darius' great-grandfather, William Pike and saved him from the clutches of Barker, an MI6 agent with a surprising resemblance to Thorne, preventing Darius from being erased from history. Gryffen, with June's help, was able to bring them back. (TV: The Cambridge Spy)

With the rest of the K9 Unit, Starkey witnessed the appearance of a black hole and white hole within the STM whose collision risked destroying the world. After losing contact with K9, who had left to retrieve his regeneration unit at the Millennium Dome, Starkey left with Jorjie to find him. While looking for K9 at the dome, Starkey and Jorjie almost kissed but were interrupted by CCPCs. Finding that K9 had been used by Thorne as a conduit to generate a space time portal which was opened when Gryffen was forced to use the temporal stabiliser in the STM to save the world, allowing the Korven invasion vanguard to arrive, it was there that Starkey and Jorjie learned that Lomax, the head of the Department, was in fact the Supreme Leader of the Korven Pan-Dimensional Army and that Thorne was working with him, having had himself implanted with Meron DNA by the Korven. Ultimately, however, the invasion was stopped when Gryffen, entering the dome having overcame his agoraphobia, called out the STM's voice-activated termination code, destroying the machine and the Korven vanguard with it. Along with the rest of the K9 Unit, Starkey was distraught to see K9 "die" having expended his remaining energy to save them from Trojan, only to be deeply relieved when the regeneration unit returned and rejuvenated K9's life. (TV: The Eclipse of the Korven)