Rollo
- You may be looking for Rolo.
Rollonovoradnavashir, most commonly called Rollo, was a part-time Renegade Time Lord. A benevolent interventionist, he was a founding member of the Celestial Intervention Agency and, in later years, was on call to perform assigment for them, though in-between assignments he travelled freely in his TARDIS in pursuit of his own agenda. Like the Doctor, he had a number of companions.
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
Early life[[edit] | [edit source]]
Rollo was a lifelong opponent of the Time Lords' non-interventionist policy, which led to him becoming one of the original founders of the Celestial Intervention Agency. (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Iytean Menace (game)"}) However, he found the life of a full-time agent or overseer too restrictive, and was one of many theoretical CIA agent to adopt the lifestyle of a Renegade Time Lord, preferring to pursue his own agenda and whim in his travels while remaining on alert for the occasional summons from Gallifrey that would alert him to an assignment for which his skills would be especially well-suited. (GAME: "The Summons" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, Loading...{"namedep":"The Summons","1":"The Iytean Menace (game)"})
Acquiring companions[[edit] | [edit source]]
Over the years, he accumulated many companions. One was a fellow Time Lord, Volusa, who had joined the CIA after resigning from the Citadel Guard. Another, Verika, began travelling with Rollo when she stowed away on his TARDIS just as it was leaving Gallifrey on CIA business; she had joined the CIA in the hope of travelling the universe, and found the life of a ground engineer restrictive. Rollo was not the first field agent on whose TARDIS she had hitched a ride, but was the first to allow her to stay on a permanent basis.
During a visit to mid-20th century Chicago, where Rollo was investigating a plot of the Master's, the TARDIS's chameleon circuit made it take the form of a "coin-op phone booth". Jim Waters, a member of a biker gang the Master was in the process of decimating, tried to hide inside the booth and thus stumbled directly into Rollo's TARDIS control room, subsequently becoming his companion.
When one of his human companions became injured, Rollo voluntarily abducted Edinburgh surgeon Michael Duncan into his TARDIS, intending it to only be temporary. However, he had a few false starts in trying to get him home, over the course of which Doctor Duncan came to enjoy the life of a time-traveller, eventually rescinding his request to be taken home altogether.
Lieutenant David Smythe, a young British naval officer born in the late 18th century, became a companion of Rollo's after he was rescued from the Sontarans by him and Volusa, stowing away in the TARDIS at the last minute as the two Time Lords departed from his time-zone.
Steven Reynart, a teenaged child prodigy, similarly stowed away aboard the TARDIS, having overheard that it was a time machine, after Rollo briefly, accidentally materialised it in one of Steven's father Michael Reynart's archaeological digs in Old Sydney in the 26th century.
At some point, he was also joined by Erin Grant, a young officer on an Imperial starship of the Earth Empire in the 29th century.
At some point, Rollo materialised his TARDIS inside an elevator in a London office building in 1985; overlaying itself over the real elevator, the ship disguised itself as one. When Jody Lockhart tried to use the elevator in question, she thus found herself inside the TARDIS; in her confusion, she bumped into the dematerialisation switch, thus causing herself to become accidentally shanghaied by Rollo as one more 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, Rollo, then in his fifth incarnation, and his companions — then including Verika, Erin Grant, and at least one another from the above list, a human — 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]]
Rollo was an "extremely intelligent and talented individual". His manner was "talkative, outgoing, and with an indefinable air of superiority about him". (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Iytean Menace (game)"}) He frequently lost track of time when he was enjoying himself, ironically enough for a Time Lord; (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)"}) gifted with an "incurable wanderlust", he found it hard to stay in any one place and time for long periods of time. He more generally tended to lose interest in things around him if not constantly stimulated. He enjoyed games of chances, and liked to put his skill at sleight-of-hand to use to spike up the game, but only when his opponent could do the same in turn — turning it into an overt game of skill — or was trying to trick him in some way.
He had "a strong sense of justice and fair play" and was a "confirmed pacifist"; he never resorted to violence as a solution to his problems except in direct self-preservation for himself or those around him, and even then, preferred judo or other martial arts with comparatively lesser chances of dealing his opponents any serious bodily harm. However, he was also a lifelong opponent of the Time Lords' non-interferventionist policy, on ethical grounds, which led to him contributing to the foundation of the Celestial Intervention Agency. (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Iytean Menace (game)"})
Skills[[edit] | [edit source]]
By his fifth incarnation, Rollo had mastered "various sleight-of-hand tricks". As an educated Time Lord he had working knowledge of both Earth and Galactic history, TARDIS technology, Temporal Science, spatial navigation, cartography, and engineerign (whether chemical, electrical or mechanical). He was also a skilled player of four-dimensional chess, a prized game on Gallifrey. He was a skilled diplomat and negotiater, and a good liar. (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Iytean Menace (game)"})
Physical appearance[[edit] | [edit source]]
In his fifth incarnation, Rollo was tall and "slim to the point of being frail". He had dark hair, streaked with gray around the temples, and was clean-shaven. He had no set outfit but favoured "dark, solid colours and loose clothing"; (GAME: "Player Characters" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, Loading...{"namedpart":"Player Characters","1":"The Iytean Menace (game)"}) while in Victorian England he adopted a black cape and top hat, but discarded them as soon as he left the time-zone. (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)"})
