Verika
Verikasdroverka, most commonly called Verika, was a part-time Renegade Time Lord. A junior member of the Celestial Intervention Agency, she abandoned her boring technical duty to which even that employ had confined her in favour of joining Rollo in his TARDIS as a companion.
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
Early life[[edit] | [edit source]]
Verika was born on Gallifrey. Her original incarnation was already female; her originally "sought to have their daughter trained in medicine", which she studied for several decades, but her true passion was always gadgetry, and young Verika "spent more and more time in the study of technologies of various types as the years went by". At some point, she met the Doctor, who described her as "a bundle of nerves waiting for the right impulse".
Bregos, her "mentor in the study of Temporal Science", was secretly a high-ranking member of the Celestial Intervention Agency and eventually recruited her into it on the basis of her technical and scientific expertise. However, she found doing technical ground-control work as boring as a normal Time Lord career, being frustrated that her talents as a technician were deemed to be too valuable to "waste" in the field. She eventually started stowing away aboard field agents' TARDISes as they departed for missions; she eventually did this with Rollo, who gladly let her stay on as a full-time companion. (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Iytean Menace (game)"})
The Iytean investigation[[edit] | [edit source]]
On one occasion, with Verika now over 250 years old and into her second incarnation, Rollo and his companions were summoned to Gallifrey to be briefed by Lady Rowella about a new assignment. The discovery of an energy weapon on 1980s Earth as an heirloom from its human owner's Victorian ancestor Colonel Malcolm Fraser had the Invasion worried about alien, and potentially time-active, activity in 1885 London. (GAME: "The Summons" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, Loading...{"namedep":"The Summons","1":"The Iytean Menace (game)"})
There, they discovered that Colonel Fraser had been buying a steady supply of alien artefacts from a pair of crooks called Jack Bannister and Bert Jenkins, who had secretly discovered a buried Iytean starship while trying to dig a tunnel into a bank two years prior. Unbeknownst to them, the ship had been a police vessel transporting an Iytean criminal. With the Iyteans being symbionts, the criminal had hitched a ride in Jenkins's body then transferred itself to Fraser's acquaintance Doctor Henry Jellicoe, causing him to periodically lose control of his body and adopt the malevolent persona of "Ned Hines". With the help of the Colonel's granddaughter Julia Fraser, and that of Thomas Carruthers, the son of his old friend Sir Reginald Carruthers (who had been murdered by Hines), the time-travellers were able to unravel the mystery and eventually neutralise the Iytean as well as ensure the starship would not be rediscovered and thereby derail Earth history any further. (GAME: The Iytean Menace [+]Loading...["The Iytean Menace (game)"])
With the Colonel having been tragically killed over the course of the adventure, the primary possibility depicted in this account was that Verika convinced Rollo to take Julia on as a companion thereafter. (GAME: "The Hunters Home From the Hill" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, Loading...{"namedep":"The Hunters Home From the Hill","1":"The Iytean Menace (game)"}) Other acknowledged possibilities, however, were that Julia and/or Thomas had stowed away aboard the TARDIS without the Time Lord's knowledge, or that neither had left the Victorian era and Julia's disappearance from the historical record was a result of her running away with Thomas to marry him and build a new life in some other part of the world. (GAME: "Tying Up Loose Ends" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, Loading...{"namedep":"Tying Up Loose Ends","1":"The Iytean Menace (game)"})
At any rate, before leaving 1885, Rollo went on one last outing in the city, and had lunch with a writer called Robert Louis Stevenson, telling him about the adventure. It was only when he returned to the TARDIS and told Verika about the encounter that he learned he had just inspired Stevenson to write The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. (GAME: "The Hunters Home From the Hill" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, Loading...{"namedep":"The Hunters Home From the Hill","1":"The Iytean Menace (game)"})
Psychological profile[[edit] | [edit source]]
Personality[[edit] | [edit source]]
Verika enjoyed nothing more than tinkering withgadgetry, but found a life of nothing but technical work too dull. She was "uncertain about her own goals in life", simultaneously having a Time Lord-typical desire for "order and sability", and feeling that she was somehow missing "something", which she tried to make up for by constantly looking for adventure even though she did not perform very well in emergency situations, being "too much the scientist to respond without reflection". (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Iytean Menace (game)"})
Skills[[edit] | [edit source]]
By his second incarnation, in addition to her technical proficiency and medical training, Verika had been trained in laser pistol-armed combat and in the Ice Warrior martial art known as Martian zlynzyx. She was also capable of flying a temporal vehicle such as a TARDIS (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Iytean Menace (game)"})
Physical appearance[[edit] | [edit source]]
In her second incarnation, Verika was a slim, "strikingly beautiful" woman of average height. Her large, green eyes were "very expressive", and her facial features were "fine-chiselled and patrician". She tended to favour practical, masculine clothing, including a variety of one-piece coveralls and jumpsuits. (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Iytean Menace (game)"})
