Lady Aesculapius

Lady Aesculapius was a Firmament who had met Chris Cwej in the Totality. She had a ship in which she took Cwej, Kwol, and Larles on. (PROSE: A Bright White Crack)

Behind the scenes

• "Aesculapius" is the latin name of the Greco-Roman god of healing and medicine.

Invalid appearances

One of Lady Aesculapius's incarnations, as depicted on the illustration to NOTVALID: Life After Death.

Originating in the short story Never Go On Walks, first published in James Wylder's unofficial Doctor Who poetry book An Eloquence of Time and Space, Aesculapius played a part in two crossovers between the 10,000 Dawns series, Faction Paradox and the DWU, namely the novella White Canvas and an installment of her own series, Life After Death. These stories are, however, not considered valid sources on this Wiki.

When the Firmament were turned to fiction by Auteur, Lady Aesc tried to find other survivors using her Quantum Whisk, which led her to New York City in 2460. From there, she joined Graelyn and Arch in pursuit of the painted warriors into N-Space. After meeting with Littlejohn on Gendar and being joined by Coloth, Aesc and her cohorts confronted the Original Mammoths. They were then betrayed by Auteur and Aesc was made a fictional character. In Auteur's Town, Aesc was the star of a long-running television series which had 276 blu-rays and wasn't suited to movies. Aesc escaped from fictionality during the Town's destruction and briefly fought the Firmament with Coloth. Later, she was present at the Needle during the signing of the Christmas Needle Agreement, playing cards with Archimedes, Coloth, and many other aliens. (NOTVALID: White Canvas)

After opening a booby-trapped letter, one of Lady Aesculapius's incarnations, which was far from the first, was killed. As she was a member of the Firmament, she was able to survive by downloading her consciousness into a new synthetic body. However, to discover who had actually killed her previous self, this new Aesculapius instead let the universe assume she had really died, and attended the funeral of her previous body in disguise as her own cousin, "Raesculapius". She eventually discovered that it had been her long-time nemesis Professor Meistras who had done the deed. (NOTVALID: Life After Death)

Based on the Doctor

Aesculapius served as the 10,000 Dawns version of the Doctor. She was a renegade member of the Firmament, (NOTVALID: White Canvas) the 10,000 Dawns equivalent of the Great Houses, and had the ability to escape death many times over. Unlike the Time Lords however, Aesculapius renewed herself by downloading her consciousness into new bodies (through cloning devices similar to looms). Other similarities included her travelling with companions in a time machine, including Graelyn Scythes and Archimedes Von Ahnerabe, and having an arch-enemy called Meistras (which translates to Master).

The similarities between this character and the Doctor were made increasingly clear when, during her first regeneration scene in the Lady Aesculapius: Series 1 story Jason and the Astronauts, she paraphrases several of the Doctor's lines from their regeneration scenes including; "I just want you to tell you that you were fantas-" (TV: The Parting of the Ways) "I’ll always remember when I was me" (TV: The Time of the Doctor) and "I don’t want to go!" (TV: The End of Time)