The Colonel
The Colonel was the chosen alias of a renegade Time Lord in the Celestial Intervention Agency's employ. Father to Leora, the Colonel was a contemporary of the Doctor's, whose life story he closely mirrored, down to having his own feud with the Master. The Colonel would go on to become a Scientific Advisor for the North American version of UNIT.
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
Early life[[edit] | [edit source]]
In his "early years", the Colonel spent some time "researching Terran affairs" in 21st century Great Britain, in the course of which he adopted an upper-class British accent when speaking English. (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"})
The Monk knew the Colonel before going renegade, and once considered gifting him a bow-tie made out of a silverleaf palm leaf when the Corsair refused the gift. (PROSE: The Bloodletters [+]Loading...["The Bloodletters (novel)"])
The Colonel was a Cardinal of the Prydonian Chapter at the time of the Prydonian Academy Revolution, (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) during which the Colonel's son, fighting on the revolutionaries' side, was killed. (GAME: The Legions of Death [+]Loading...["The Legions of Death (game)"], PROSE: CIA File Extracts [+]Loading...["CIA File Extracts (novel)"]) The revolution had been fomented by the Master, and was, at least by some accounts, the occasion both of the Master's flight from Gallifrey and of the Doctor and Susan's escape from Gallifrey. (PROSE: Birth of a Renegade [+]Loading...["Birth of a Renegade (short story)"]) was also the occasion of the Doctor and the Master's flight from Gallifrey. (PROSE: Birth of a Renegade [+]Loading...["Birth of a Renegade (short story)"]) Blaming the Master for causing his son's disgraceful death in starting the Revolution, the Colonel swore a vendetta against his fellow Time Lord. (GAME: CIA File Extracts [+]Loading...["CIA File Extracts (novel)"])
Retirement to Earth[[edit] | [edit source]]
In the aftermath of the Prydonian Academy Revolution, his daughter Leoradrusendalular took him to an early retirement on Earth for safety (PROSE: CIA File Extracts [+]Loading...["CIA File Extracts (novel)"]) in secret via a detour on a Celestial Intervention Agency assignment, and he settled down without a TARDIS or any other reminder of his painful past, "leaving everything behind, even his name" in "self-imposed exile". He took the name of "the Colonel" because he was "posing as a retired English military officer residing in the United States in the late 20th century", and lived for years with occasional visits from Leora as his only link to Gallifrey. (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) He came under scrutiny by the High Council, but, as he had not been guilty of any breach of the non-intervention policy, the Council left him unmolested. (PROSE: CIA File Extracts [+]Loading...["CIA File Extracts (novel)"])
New allegiances and new friendships[[edit] | [edit source]]
When the Celestial Intervention Agency began to take an interest in the Master, Leora, being herself a CIA operative, persuaded the Colonel to come out of retirement for the same purpose, (GAME: The Legions of Death [+]Loading...["The Legions of Death (game)"]) contacted the Colonel to make him one of the CIA's agents on Earth. To better keep abreast of events, he joined the branch of UNIT on the West Coast of North America as a scientific advisor, (PROSE: CIA File Extracts [+]Loading...["CIA File Extracts (novel)"]) and was given a TARDIS. (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) His interest was further stoked by a direct encounter with the Master, who, having been thwarted a few too many times in England by the Third Doctor — whom the Colonel scorned for too often letting the Master slip away — had attempted some scheme in North America. (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"})
At UNIT, he worked under Colonel Martin, to general confusion. Martin ended up assigning another troublesome recruit, hot-blooded Sergeant Roderick Mitchell, to the ad hoc position of Scientific Liaison Officer, meaning he was to act as the Colonel's bodyguard and minder. The two got along, and, after Mitchell stumbled upon the Colonel's TARDIS, agreed to take him on as a companion on various adventures fighting Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans and the like.
He acquired another companion in the form of Lisa Drake, a history student and the daughter of one of Colonel Martin's friends, through whom she'd heard about the Colonel's alleged expertise on military history. Excited to meet him, Lisa visited his home with her father, and, snooping around while the men talked in search of interesting documents, stumbled upon the Colonel's TARDIS, disguised as a wardrobe. She convinced him to take her along on a "jaunt" through history, and, with her becoming "addicted" to the thrill of time travel, he reluctantly took her on as a full-time companion.
Yet another was the Viking warrior Sven Langbard, who stowed away on the Colonel's TARDIS after a mission which saw the CIA dispatch the Colonel to the 11th century to defeat a stranded Sontaran who'd set himself up as the overlord of Sven's native region after appearing aboard Sven's longship and commandeering it.
In addition to these conventional companions, the Colonel's adventures often saw him teaming up with Leora, who had a TARDIS and companions of her own. In addition to joining forces with her father and his "team" on some CIA-given missions, she sometimes, if reluctantly, joined him on his "periodic wild goose chases after the Master". (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"})
Travels in Time & Space[[edit] | [edit source]]
During the Colonel's travels with Lisa Drake, the two ran into Christopher Columbus in 15th century Spain and Lisa excitedly asked him about his discovery of the "New World", not realising that it was 1490 and Columbus had yet to embark on his famous voyage. (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"Player Characters","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) Lisa became keen to see the Crusades, but with aiming the Colonel's TARDIS any specific way proving difficulty, with unwanted landings at the Battle of Waterloo, the Dalek invasion, and the Spanish Armada, the latter of which Lisa found to be only a mild improvement on the first two. (GAME: "The Sybil's Prophecy" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"The Sybil's Prophecy","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"})
Britain, 43 A.D.[[edit] | [edit source]]
At some point, with the Colonel now over 800 years old and in his fourth incarnation, (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) a mysterious signal seemingly coming from a TARDIS stationed in 43 AD Britain drew any of the Colonel's TARDIS, Leora's TARDIS and the Third Doctor's TARDIS to investigate, (GAME: "Temporal Anomaly" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"Temporal Anomaly","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) to the disappointment of Lisa Drake, now on her fourth attempt to get the Colonel to show her the Crusades. (GAME: "The Sybil's Prophecy" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"The Sybil's Prophecy","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"})
Unable to pinpoint the exact location of the rogue TARDIS, they could only land within a few miles of the pulse-wave's source, in what turned out to be southwestern Roman Britain, somewhere between Londinium and Camulodunum, in an empty battlefield. (GAME: "Temporal Anomaly" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"Temporal Anomaly","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) Lurking on the edges of the battlefield, a group of Roman soldiers who had survived the ahistorical skirmish — led by Marcus Cornelius Falco — witnessed the arrival of the TARDIS or TARDISes. (GAME: "Field of Battle" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"Field of Battle","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) Taking them prisoner, Falco was willing to trust that they were not spies, (GAME: "Falco's Story" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"Falco's Story","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}, "Field of Battle" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"Field of Battle","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) but insisted on having them accompany his men back to Emperor Claudius's main camp in an effort to warn him about the new, massing force of barbarians they had encountered — which the Time Lords and their companions knew should not have existed, and could only be the work of the other renegade Time Lord. (GAME: "Player Options" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"Player Options","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"})
The journey was long and arduous, and may have involved some members of the party being captured by further barbarian ambushes; (GAME: "Player Options" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"Player Options","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}, "In the Briton camp" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"In the Briton camp","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}, "In the Roman camp" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"In the Roman camp","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) the captured companions may have included Sandra (GAME: "In the Roman camp" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"In the Roman camp","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) as well as Rod Mitchell (GAME: "In the Roman camp" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"In the Roman camp","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}, "General Adventure Procedures" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"General Adventure Procedures","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) and Mikhyl Nevenskoi. (GAME: "In the Briton camp" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"In the Briton camp","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) Eventually, the remainder of the group made it to the camp, where, if Falco had not been among those captured, he was able to confirm that the strange travellers were not spies, and secure them an interview with the Emperor. However, due to internal politics of the camp, Claudius was not sure whether to believe their claims of a new army. He agreed to stay the advance for a day or two, however. (GAME: "In the Roman camp" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"In the Roman camp","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) In the night, the camp was infiltrated by the group of would-be kidnappers under hypnotic control. Recognising some of his men among them, Falco realised the truth of the time-travellers' claim that the locus of the mystery was in the Sacred Wood, and helped them sneak away from the camp. (GAME: "Shadows in the Night" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"Shadows in the Night","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"})
Though ambushed by the Britons, they did end up back at the Sacred Wood when the hypnotised barbarians opted to drop the prisoners there as tributes for their god — who, to the surprise of the ever Master-obsessed Colonel, turned out to be none other than a regenerated form of the War Chief. Upon realising that there were members of his own kind among the party, the War Chief was eager to gloat, and explained the nature of his scheme, whose ultimate aim was to take control of the entire Roman Empire by capturing and hypnotising Claudius, then outfitting the brainwashed Roman army with laser pistols. (GAME: "In the Briton camp" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"In the Briton camp","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}, "The Sacred Wood" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"The Sacred Wood","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}, "The War Chief" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"The War Chief","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) Dumped in a containment cell within the War Chief's TARDIS until it was time to brainwash them, the time-travellers managed to escape, possibly with the use of the non-brainwashed Briton Branimandua, (GAME: "Escape" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"Escape","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"}) and the War Chief's plan was foiled when his hypnotic machines were destroyed, though he himself managed to escape. Vespasian was then safely returned to the Roman camp, allowing history to go back on track. (GAME: "Ending the Adventure" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"Ending the Adventure","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"})
Back onboard the Colonel's TARDIS, the Colonel was needled by Lisa who was strongly insisting on seeing the Crusades at last. Irritated, the Colonel took off, pointedly letting his ship take us where the whim took it — only to be belatedly informed by Leora that Marcus Cornelius Falco was still onboard. Falco, however, proved interested in joining the crew as a new companion, something to which the Colonel reluctantly acquiesced — particularly because Lisa had already told Falco about Rome's future, which would make dropping him back into history irresponsible. (GAME: "The Sybil's Prophecy" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"The Sybil's Prophecy","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"})
One day, young lady, your mouth will do more than a dozen Time Lords can undo.
Later activities[[edit] | [edit source]]
A few decades into his life on Earth, the Colonel was invited back to Gallifrey as a lecturer for the Prydonian Academy. His criminological lectures on the activities of other renegade Time Lords, such as the Master, were incorporated in the CIA's databanks about the individuals in question. (PROSE: CIA File Extracts [+]Loading...["CIA File Extracts (novel)"])
A group of adventurers may have been led by a Time Lord going by "The Colonel". (PROSE: I Walk in Eternity [+]Loading...["I Walk in Eternity (feature)"])
Physical appearance[[edit] | [edit source]]
In his fourth incarnation, the Colonel appeared as a tall, striking-looking , middle-aged man with a shock of iron-grey hair and a "severe military moustache". Owing to an interest in 20th century England in his formative year, he typically dressed in early-1930s formal evening dress, including a top hat. His posture was slightly stooped and he walked with a slight limp, although as a Time Lord he was still stronger than he looked; the walking stick he carried served to conceal a TARDIS Remote Computer Link. (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"})
Psychological profile[[edit] | [edit source]]
Likened by "one Gallifreyan" to an even more cantankerous version of the First Doctor, the Colonel was "crusty and abrupt", being "accustomed to quick obedience", though he was an expert negotiator when he needed to be, and "decisive and charismatic" in a crisis. He was, however, "prone to fits of brooding and lethargy" in the absence of anything to keep his mind occupied. He had a "soft spot" for his daughter, with whom he could be "very tender and cooperative".
After the death of his son, he developed an obsession with exacting vengeance upon the Master, pursuing that goal even to the point of neglecting other ongoing issues if he caught even the faintest hint of the Master's involvement. However, his sense of justice was such that he refused to kill the Master outright, leading to him reluctantly letting him flee on several occasions where he saw no non-violent way to apprehend him. (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Legions of Death, Loading...{"namedep":"Player Characters","1":"The Legions of Death (game)"})
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