The Monk (The Bloodletters)
- You may be looking for the Meddling Monk.
An Archon of Time nicknamed "the Monk", or sometimes just "the monk", acted as the Corsair's mentor on Cartago. He was knowledgeable about the ancient history of the Homeworld, and was also an expert fencer. He was a friend of the Colonel's.
Biography
On Cartago
The Monk was a resident of Cartago, a colony of the Homeworld. Because the Governor was busy with an emergency on Cartago, the Monk had to travel to the Homeworld with the Governor's young child when, at the appropriate age, (PROSE: The Bloodletters) 8 years old, (TV: The Sound of Drums) tradition demanded that the boy go undergo initiation (PROSE: The Bloodletters) by staring into the Untempered Schism. (TV: The Sound of Drums) As the boy prepared to stand before the Tourbillon, the Monk told him:
Later, after the boy dropped out of Cahlough Academy and returned to the Homeworld, the Monk agreed to teach the boy "fencing, sailing and gunnery", against the Governor's wishes. Thus, the boy started taking fencing lessons with the Monk in the wild areas around the domed city of Cartago, using silverleaf palm tree as targets for practice.
On one occasion, having grown worried that the boy did not take his training seriously, the Monk decided to teach him "like the tiger", by inducing a moment of great panic at the same time as he showed a particular move so that the method would burn itself in the boy's mind. With little warning, the Monk thrust at the Corsair and actually stabbed him through the shoulder with his blade, being careful not to hit any bones or important arteries. Afterwards, the Monk took the boy to "a downclass bar full of hoydens and showboats" and took the opportunity to teach him how to clean a wound with alcohol, "pull it apart and ensure that the muscles were laying right", and finally to pack and bind it. They agreed to keep the incident a secret from the Governor.
On another day, they went fishing together in "an aquifer below the southern plate-steppes", which was technically illegal. The Corsair let himself be sold expensive multi-coloured bait by the Riverfolk, who claimed they'd be more visible in low-light condition; when he realised, the Monk laughed at his pupil's expense, given that the fish in the river were blind. As they fished, the Monk also told the Corsair about the war with the vampires, claiming that the Homeworld's star system had been artificially made a binary system during the War rather than naturally being one — which surprised the Corsair, who disbelieved it at first. (PROSE: The Bloodletters)
Career as a Renegade
Eventually, the Monk "went renegade". Even after they parted ways he sometimes bumped into the Corsair, by now also a Renegade. On one such meeting, the Monk told the Corsair that he was in the process of regularising his legal status on the Homeworld, although this ultimately did not pann out.
He once met a female incarnation of the Corsair, by then also a wandering renegade, for the first time, and complimented her on her new face. Two hundred years later from the Monk's perspective, but fifty years earlier from the Corsair's, the same incarnation found herself in "a seedy spaceport near the end of the Humanian era" when she was accosted by the Monk, himself in a new incarnation. He claimed once again that his tangles with their people's laws were "all resolved" by his point in time, though the Corsair doubted it, recalling how he'd expressed similar hopes in his previous incarnation. In any case, the Monk informed a shocked Corsair of the recent death of the President Kodachrome in the Ghost Wars. (PROSE: The Bloodletters)
Behind the scenes
As pointed out on the copyright page of The Bloodletters, Ryan Fogarty's Monk is a sci-fied-up variation on a public domain comic character, originating in Joe Millard's "Corsair Queen" comics begun in Buccaneers Comics #25 (1951).
In the first Corsair Queen story, The Tigress of the Seas!, shortly after the Governor (whose name was given as Cedric Evans) returned to Cartago from an official visit to another unspecified colony, Cartago was ransacked and burnt down by a pirate crew. The Governor's Daughter escaped with the help of a seasoned sailor nicknamed Monk", whom the Governor had assigned to protect his daughter but who ended up teaching her "roughneck ways" instead. The two then snuck aboard the pirates' nearly-abandoned vessel and took control of it, before sinking the pirates' rowboats with their own ship's cannons. Taking control of the ship, the girl named herself "the Corsair Queen" and swore revenge on all other pirates, with the Monk remaining by her side. Fogarty's depiction construes "the colony of Cartago", the setting of Millard's Buccaneer Comics #25, as a colony planet of the Homeworld instead of the 18th century British colony implied in the original.
Although Fogarty's Monk is established indirectly as a Time Lord by being of the same species as the Colonel (appearing under license), he should not be confused with the BBC-owned character of the Monk as originally played by Peter Butterworth, to whom Fogarty had no license. Indeed, it is unclear that the two characters could possibly be the same: the Monk is depicted as older than the Corsair, themself older than the President Kodachrome (implicitly the Doctor) — whereas the BBC Monk is usually depicted as a close contemporary of the Doctor's.
