Compassion

Compassion
Main aliases:	Laura Tobin, Civitata, Type 102, Mary Culver, Nancy Sinatra, M'Pash, Kuan Yin
Species:	Human, Remote, TARDIS
Place of origin:	Anathema
Mother:	The Doctor's TARDIS
Children:	103-forms
First appearance:	Interference - Book One
Appearances:	see list
Main voice actor:	Jackie Skarvellis

Iterations of Compassion
Other forms of Compassion V

Compassion V was the fifth and last in the sequence of Remote operatives sequentially remembered from Laura Tobin. She travelled with the Eighth Doctor and Fitz Kreiner in the TARDIS, which rewrote her biodata to make her the first and only Type 102 timeship. She became mother to all Type 103s during the War in Heaven and eventually established herself as the City of the Saved.

Biography

Origin

Compassion was originally Laura Tobin, a native of Ordifica. She was one of the few to survive its destruction, transported by Faction Paradox to the Remote colony Anathema in 1799. Over the millennia it took for the ship on which Anathema was based to reach Earth, all the colonists were remembered using biomass inside remembrance tanks. Compassion was the result of this process.

She was part of the Remote faction that met the Eighth Doctor on Earth, accompanied by Kode, the remembered version of Fitz. She became so altered by the signals from Earth that she decided to travel with the Doctor and Kode. (PROSE: Interference - Book Two)

When Lolita visited the Doctor's TARDIS while Compassion and Fitz were sleeping, the TARDIS used Compassion's body to speak with Lolita. The TARDIS alluded to plans for becoming a mother. (PROSE: Toy Story)

Initial travels

As Compassion came from a media/signal orientated culture she always wore an earpiece or receiver. To protect her from any "harmful" signals she might encounter during their travels, the Doctor interfaced her receiver with the TARDIS systems. (PROSE: The Blue Angel) Despite this, Compassion tended to help the Doctor simply because the strength of his world-view provided her with an appealing signal to obey, even as she expressed some doubt and disdain that the Doctor's intervention actually accomplished anything that couldn't have been sorted out on its own. (PROSE: The Taking of Planet 5) The Doctor sometimes tried to encourage Compassion to take a more active role in ordinary human lives, such as assigning Compassion to spend more time investigating a corrupt company on a distant colony. (PROSE: Frontier Worlds) While the Doctor was straightening events on Mictlan, he left Compassion on Earth in 2012 with a list of things to accomplish while living a normal life for a few months. (PROSE: The Shadows of Avalon)

Early life as a TARDIS

After the destruction of the TARDIS in a dimensional rift, the signals that it had been unknowingly transmitting to Compassion's receiver had unforeseen results, warping her biodata along Block Transfer Computations. This culminated in her "rebirth" as a sentient Type 102 TARDIS when she was knocked off a tall tower and dematerialised for the first time. (PROSE: The Shadows of Avalon)

With his own TARDIS apparently destroyed and the Time Lords seeking Compassion for breeding stock for their own sentient TARDISes, the Doctor and Fitz used Compassion to go on the run. (PROSE: The Shadows of Avalon) Compassion began referring to the Doctor as her "tenant." (PROSE: The Fall of Yquatine)

Afraid of being tracked down by the Time Lords, the Doctor purchased a randomiser on the planet Yquatine and installed it in Compassion without her permission. The installation and operation of the Randomiser caused her a great deal of pain, to the Doctor's horror, but her systems quickly integrated it and she was unable to remove it. She eventually forgave the Doctor for installing the device, an act which he convinced her was for her own protection. (PROSE: The Fall of Yquatine) Compassion came to be less concerned with her inability to control her destinations, finding the actual travel through the Time Vortex so exhilarating that the destination was unimportant. (PROSE: Coldheart)

Eventually, Compassion was drawn to Romana III's Gallifrey by the presence of the Edifice just before the Faction Paradox attack and Gallifrey's destruction. Compassion finally rejected her randomiser, expelling its remains into the Edifice along with her occupants. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) Finding the Doctor mere moments after he had destroyed Gallifrey, she worked with him to compress the entire contents of the Matrix in his head, thus creating a way to resurrect the Time Lords long after their extinction. The act of placing the Matrix inside the Doctor's head surpressed his memories. Compassion did little to help with this as, with the Time Lords gone, she was able to roam time and space freely. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) She took the Doctor and the TARDIS — now totally drained of all its energy — to 19th century Earth, then took Fitz Kreiner to 2000 so he could meet the Doctor after the TARDIS had repaired itself. She then left to explore the universe. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell, Escape Velocity)

Compassion initially believed the destruction of Romana III's world marked the prevention of the War, (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) but she quickly reentered the War's influence and became part of the Wartime history of the Homeworld of the War King. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Activity in the War

Most timeships were powered through a link directly to the Homeworld, (PROSE: Warring States) but Compassion was cut off from this source, either because the Homeworld deemed her a "subversive influence" (PROSE: The Book of the War) or because the Eye of Harmony had been destroyed. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) Instead, she fed off time-active biodata inside her. Initially she used travelling companions (PROSE: Warring States) like the Gallifreyan technician Nivet (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) and Carmen Yeh, who Compassion met in Alaska in 1758 and travelled with for three years.

While travelling with Carmen, Compassion came to an agreement with the War King to create a "second front" for the War in Heaven. This resulted in the creation of the 103-form timeships. (PROSE: The Book of the War) Her first child was Antipathy, a dangerous and psychotic failure whom the Houses (on Compassion's advice) attempted to kill immediately after his birth. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...) Compassion warned the War King that House Lucia was a major event in his near future. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

She possessed the body of Mary Culver and helped Cousin Eliza defeat Queen Charlotte (AUDIO: In the Year of the Cat) and rescue Cousin Justine from the prison planet of the Great Houses. (AUDIO: A Labyrinth of Histories)

Compassion travelled to Beijing in 1900 where she created a time loop involving Octavia Sutherland of Faction Paradox and Liu Hui Ying. Compassion fed of the chi energy of their witchblood, so she structured events so that either Octavia or Liu would enter the White Pyramid and return to her the jade casket, which acted as a battery for their chi. When either one of them was drained, Compassion would return to the start of the time loop and begin the process again. She did this several thousand times before Octavia and Liu became friends and united against her. She left intending to find herself an alternative means of powering herself. (PROSE: Warring States)

City of the Saved

Main article: City of the Saved

In an attempt to provide a safe haven for humanity during the War, Compassion lodged herself between her universe and the next. By doing this she was able to change her interior dimensions to create the City of the Saved. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...) Fearing being compromised by any one of the hostile War powers, Compassion established a number of additional safe havens for humanity, contingencies or bolt holes, beyond the end of the universe within the bodies of her timeship children and accessible via the Downtime Gate. (PROSE: God Encompasses)

Legacy

While trying to remind the Eighth Doctor of his past, Fitz Kreiner referred to a time when he and the Doctor travelled the universe in a "stroppy redhead". He later silently hoped Anji wouldn't turn out to be like Compassion - whom he though of as "the TARDIS bitch queen from hell". (PROSE: EarthWorld)

When the Eighth Doctor was recovering from a vitreous time contamination with Mary Shelley in 1816, he mentioned Compassion among various other companions. (AUDIO: Mary's Story)

On Earth during the War in Heaven, shortly before the Ghost Point, Compassion was a legendary human/machine hybrid rumoured by many to exist. (PROSE: This Town Will Never Let Us Go)

The Thousand and Second Night contained a mention of "Civitata, who was a city and woman both and the embodiment of Allah's mercy". (PROSE: Head of State)

Appearance

Compassion had coppery-red hair, freckles, and pale skin. She was 1.64 metres high. (PROSE: The Book of the War) Her freckles were once described as being "far too symmetrical to be natural". (PROSE: Warring States) A fictionalised version of Compassion was played by Nicole Kidman. (PROSE: Interference - Book Two)

While with the Remote and while travelling with the Doctor and Fitz before becoming a TARDIS, Compassion wore a Remote receiver in one of her ears. (PROSE: Interference - Book One, The Blue Angel et al) When she was arrested on Skale, the receiver was torn out of her ear and impounded. (PROSE: Parallel 59)

After becoming a TARDIS, Compassion could change her appearance at will, but she usually tried to maintain her original appearance. She once disguised herself as an Anthaurk. (PROSE: The Fall of Yquatine)

Abilities

Once she became a TARDIS, Compassion's senses extended into other dimensions. She could generate a force field around her and deliver painful electric shocks if attacked. She once accidentally overloaded the brains of four humans trying to contact them via her telepathic circuits, temporarily disorienting them; by contrast, she was later able to act as a filter when the Maker spoke to Fitz, adjusting Fitz's perceptions so that he could process the Maker's telepathic message without being driven completely insane. (PROSE: The Space Age)

TARDIS interior

As a TARDIS, Compassion's internal dimensions were mapped to her psychology, full of twisted forests (representing the state of emotion existing beyond the civilised self and Compassion's new awareness of her humanity) and dark, echoing spaces she forced the Doctor and Fitz to inhabit (the Doctor attributed this decision to her subconscious terror at what she had become "punishing" him and Fitz like a woman will scream abuse at the father of her child while giving birth).

When the Doctor and Fitz first entered Compassion, they found themselves in an ornate corridor decorated with portraits of the Doctor's friends, family and past selves in varying artistic styles, progressing to another corridor with doors leading off to Compassion's subconscious — with such contents as Awful Truths, Hopes for the Future and That Dream About Fitz, the last featuring Fitz's voice screaming about something — along with a narrow bridge over the dark chasm of her unconscious leading to the console.

Her console hovered over her subconscious blackness on a stone platform, the console itself being completely black and possessing harsher angles than the Doctor's original TARDIS, with a large crystal as its centre. The controls moved constantly, subject to how helpful Compassion felt towards the Doctor at the moment and her own uncertainty about what she had become. (PROSE: The Shadows of Avalon) Compassion used her newly found psychic abilities to influence Fitz's dreams; he admitted to suffering from nightmares when they travelled together, until they reached an understanding. (PROSE: The Fall of Yquatine)

Behind the scenes

• Madame Xing in Halflife was strongly implied to be Compassion.

External links

• Compassion at the Faction Paradox wiki