Charlotte Elspeth Pollard (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
adventuressing) wrote2014-03-21 10:26 pm
adventuressing) wrote2014-03-21 10:26 pm
app for bigapplesauce
The Player
Name/nickname: Cully
Age: 24
Pronouns: she/her, generally, but I won’t take offence if I get others
Contact: im.going.nowhere.very.slowly@gmail.com, Culumacilinte on AIM
Experience: I’ve been RPing in various forms since 2007, both in communities and out. I specialise in EPIC ‘VERSE BUILDING via AIM. Think probably 1000+ pages of AUs branching upon AUs. Lots of sex and tragedy, more often than not.
Currently played characters: Formerly Sam Winchester once upon a time, but poor Sam got dropped by the wayside.
The Character
DW account:adventuressing
Name: Charlotte Pollard
Alias: Charley, Lottie, Charlotte Smith
Age/Birthdate: Born 15 April, 1912, somewhere in her early-mid 20’s. Even she doesn’t know exactly how old she is.
Species: Human
Canon: Doctor Who
Canon point: Post-Blue Forgotten Planet
Played By: India Fisher
Abilities: As far as physical abilities go, Charley’s nothing terribly special. She’s healthy, decently strong, and in fairly good shape; a lifestyle that involves a lot of running for one’s life has ensured that. She’s also acquired on her travels (and especially in her missions working for the Viyrans) a fair amount of knowledge of future and alien technologies. Not to say she’s a technological genius by any standard, but she’s pretty decent at mucking her way through things.
When she comes through the Rift, she gains the ability to take on the appearance of others by wearing their clothes.
Appearance: Charley is a short, youthful-looking woman, perhaps 5’2, and a little chubby. She’s got blonde hair that she generally keeps short, full cheeks that tend towards the rosy, and large, bright blue eyes. Her dress sense tends slightly towards the antiquated-- she did grow up in the 20’s, after all-- but she’s adapted cheerfully enough to a variety of styles. When she arrives, she’ll be wearing the clothes she’d worn for the Viyran’s missions-- a functional, utilitarian black shirt and trousers with boots.
Personality:
Charley is an adventurous, headstrong, brave, romantic young woman. That’s romantic with a capital R. She’s stubborn and rebellious, and absolutely unafraid to give someone a piece of her mind, whether it be a friend-- she does her fair share of shouting at the Doctor-- or an enemy-- rather wonderfully, in her one encounter with the Master, she meets his customary introduction with a fierce, ‘Never heard of you!’ She possesses a remarkable bravery; the kind needed to fight aliens and risk her life, yes, but also the kind to face her own death head on, and do something like kill the man she loves for the sake of the universe.
She can be somewhat on the naive side-- this is the posh girl who left home at 18 to travel the world without seeming to stop and consider the consequences, after all. She wants to see the best of people, and has a great fondness for idealised stories of swashbuckling and romance. In combination with her occasional tendency towards making brash, hasty decisions, that naivety means that she can get herself in trouble, particularly when people turn out not to be what she thinks they should be. She has a predilection for automatically siding with the perceived underdogs in any given situation before she fully thinks the situation through, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending.
She’s also very compassionate; the first time she encountered an alien, her initial impulse was to care for it rather than recoil, thinking it beautiful. And she frequently chivvies her friends out of funks, whether it be with teasing or with genuine tenderness. She likes people, and they generally like her; she seems to have something of a gift for getting people to open up to her. While she’s never afraid to bite and can sometimes be cruel if she’s lost her temper, she doesn’t like to see anyone hurting if she can help it.
That said, she does have a temper, and frequently resorts to snippiness if she’s feeling vulnerable. She’s also given to jealousy; there was definitely tension between her, C’rizz, and the Doctor at first, because she saw him as taking her place, and resented it; she was also incredibly catty towards Perfection, a woman who spent most of her audio appearance flirting with the Doctor. She’s extremely privileged, and as a result, is occasionally selfish and thoughtless.
In conversation, she can be sassy and irreverent, given to banter, which makes her an excellent partner for the Doctor. She’s not afraid to engage in a little judicious self-mockery either, as when she demonstrates to C’rizz the correct way for a companion to implore the Doctor what’s going on.
Since her travels with the Sixth Doctor-- and especially her time with the Viyrans-- she can be a lot more sombre and reflective than she used to be. She’s matured, she’s been hurt; indeed, when she enters the game, she’s coming off the end of a very great hurt indeed. She still has the same wonder and enthusiasm for the universe as ever, it just needs a little more coaxing.
History:
Charley grew up in a very well-off family in the first decades of the 20th century with two younger sisters, Margaret and Cecelia. Peg and Sissy, by all accounts, were reasonably well-behaved young ladies who didn’t cause much trouble, but Charley was the sort of girl who wanted to run off and have adventures, and was apparently given to doing things like housing local travelling people in the attic of their Hampshire manor. Although her mother, Lady Louisa, was strict about etiquette, and often disapproved of Charley’s rebellious streak, she apparently thought her entirely capable of taking care of herself, and much more sensible than her sisters.
When Charley was 18, she ran away from boarding school to disguise herself as a steward and stow away aboard the airship R101, with the goal of meeting a young man in Singapore-- but also simply for the thrill of it. Wanting to travel the world, she styled herself an Edwardian Adventuress. The R101, however, was fated to crash, killing everybody aboard, and it was whilst on the airship that she first met the Doctor. Swept up in the inevitable adventure, he ended up rescuing her from the ship, and taking her along in the TARDIS as his companion.
During their travels, Charley fell quite in love with the Doctor, and he-- arguably-- with her. Neither vocalised these feelings for a long time, but they were definitely there.
Charley’s survival, however, had become a breach in the Web of Time-- she ought to have died, and her continued existence proved a destabilising influence on the continuity of the universe. The Time Lords became aware of this-- the Matrix was falling apart at the seams, and predicting the end of everything that ever was, or would be-- and intercepted Charley and the Doctor. Charley, they said, had become a gateway into the so-called Antiverse. Using Charley as a path into the Antiverse, they discovered that it was inhabited with thousands of Neverpeople-- people whose personal histories had been erased, and who had ceased to exist. Wanting to break back into the positive universe, they sent a casket of antitime through, planning that it should explode, and leave the universe theirs to feed on.
The Doctor, however, materialised his TARDIS around the casket as it exploded, saving the universe, but leaving himself-- and his ship-- to become infected with antitime. Once infected, the Doctor became a creature called Zagreus, a living embodiment of antitime, whom Rassilon, the corrupt founder of Time Lord society, wished to use to destroy a race of so-called Divergents, a species whom he had sealed into a pocket universe. Assisted (and occasionally hampered) by the TARDIS and three not-quite-past-Doctors, Charley discovered the truth about Rassilon and the Divergent Universe, and eventually confronted the Doctor. He begged her to kill him, to save the universe from antitime, and, seeing no other option, she did. However, he then came back to life as Zagreus, and threw Rassilon into the Divergent Universe. During the course of these events, both Charley and the Doctor confessed their love for each other.
Unable to stay in the positive universe lest the antitime destroy it, the Doctor departed for the Divergent Universe, a place without linear time. He attempted to leave Charley behind, but she snuck aboard the TARDIS and joined him. Their first experience in the Divergent Universe was a timeless period of walking, and Charley confronted him about his saying that he loved her, and what that meant. They fought, but eventually (after evolving into a single entity and fighting off a creature made of sound that was sort of their child-- don’t ask, it’s Doctor Who) concluded that they would rather be together, and were glad that they had each other in this strange new world.
Whilst in the Divergent Universe, they acquired another travelling companion, a Eutermesan named C’rizz who had formerly been a monk of the Church of the Foundation, which believed that all things must die and be saved-- and C’rizz had been the one who killed them, until leaving the Church to marry his lover, L’da. But he was forced to mercy-kill her shortly after meeting the Doctor and Charley, and subsequently suffered from a slew of psychological issues. He and Charley eventually became good friends, but there was a certain amount of tension and mistrust in that particular Team TARDIS.
Travelling from zone to zone and searching for the TARDIS, and Rassilon, they eventually discovered the secret of the Divergent Universe; Rassilon had engineered it such that time there was cyclical. Everything repeated, endlessly. The last remaining Divergent (in truth the sound creature from their initial arrival) and Zagreus (having left the Doctor) schemed to get out, but they defeated them, and were able to travel back to their own universe.
They travelled together for some time; confronting the Daleks, having to impersonate French aristocrats from the 1850’s, and other such adventures-- until they arrived at a planet called Utebbadon-Taria, where C’rizz was killed, saving the world. After they left in the TARDIS, the Doctor expressed pleasure that things were back the way they were-- just him and Charley. Horrified that he could be so callous in the face of their friend’s death, and furious at the thought that he preferred her back when she was naive and infatuated with him, Charley demanded that he return her home.
He attempted to, but the TARDIS brought them to the wrong place-- Singapore-- and the wrong time, and Charley walked off before he could try again, leaving a note for him at a hotel saying that he’s the best man she’d ever met and she’d always remember him, and signing herself off, The Girl Who Never Was. Before he got the note, however, they became embroiled in a time-travelling Cyberman invasion, and Charley changed her mind about wanting to leave. She didn’t get a chance to tell him, however, and ended up stranded in the year 500,002, believing that the Doctor had been killed. The Doctor, returning to Singapore, got her note, and, following her instructions not to look for her, never did.
Stranded, Charley constructed a crystal radio to broadcast an SOS. The Doctor picked up her signal-- but it was the wrong Doctor; his Sixth incarnation. Taken by surprise, Charley lied (badly) to him that she had amnesia, and couldn’t remember where she’d come from or how she’d got to the year 500,002. The Doctor was suspicious of her, and mistrusted her, but they did end up travelling together. Charley herself had to adjust to this younger Doctor, who was very different from the one she’d known, but eventually she grew to consider him her best friend, just as the other Doctor had been. But again, she found herself at the centre of a paradox; travelling with the Doctor before he had ever met her.
After they had been travelling together for some time, Charley became infected with a virus. This virus allowed the ghost of a girl named Mila, who had been lurking invisibly in the TARDIS since the Doctor was in his first regeneration, to take over Charley’s body. She assumed Charley’s identity, and carried on travelling with the Doctor in her stead. Charley herself was rescued by the Viyrans, a race of robotic aliens who trawled the cosmos searching for and eliminated viruses such as the one Charley had caught. In exchange for tracking down the Doctor, Charley agreed to help them in their mission. For several millennia she travelled with the Viyrans, kept mostly in cryo-sleep, occasionally awakened to be sent on a mission for them.
Eventually, they tracked down the Doctor, still travelling with Mila-as-Charley. Charley confronted them, and despite initially fighting with Mila, ended up cooperating with her, because saving the world was more important. Mila sacrificed herself, and, knowing that the Doctor would have to forget about the Viyrans-- and about her-- Charley finally told the Doctor everything. She told him a story about a girl who should have died and the man who saved her, and how she fell in love with him. Knowing that he couldn’t know his own future, the Doctor agreed to allow the Viyrans to alter his memories, changing Charlotte Pollard for Mila.
And then, having found the Doctor as she’d asked, she no longer had any need to work for the Viyrans. Wrung out with grief from their goodbye, and at a loose end, she decided-- not a little wistfully-- that maybe she just ought to do what she’d set out to in the first place, all those years ago. To travel on her own, have her own adventures. No-matter how old she might feel in this particular moment, she still had years and years ahead of her. So the Viyrans gave her a personal transporter, a wristband that could take her through time and space. Not as elegant as a TARDIS, perhaps, but it did the job. And she set off.
That’s when the Rift grabbed her.
Writing Sample:
She’s still in the process of figuring out how to work the PT wristband oojah. It’s got settings for coordinates and dates, but if one doesn’t necessarily know the intergalactic coordinates of any given planet, that isn’t much use. Thus far, however, she hasn’t been all that bothered by her dubious navigation skills. It’s been perhaps a fortnight since she left the Viyran ship, and there’s nowhere in particular she’s heading. Just travelling for its own sake. Having adventures. She can’t say that she doesn’t miss doing so with company, but it’s not bad, really. It’s all right.
Her first go sent her to a planet with a surface like smooth silica, and all the life underground in beautifully bored tunnels, everything opalescent whites and pinks and greens. The people were little roboty things, and Charley spent a week with them, befriending a group of-- she supposed they’d be teenagers, by Earth standards, if an inorganic alien lifeform could be said to be a teenager-- and exploring deeper into the planet than anyone had yet ventured. After that, a planet that was all seas (she’d quickly left); after that, someplace called Malleiateos, covered with ochre-fawn-marigold-tawny fields and breathing trees, where a young triad had insisted she stay with them because she looked exhausted. She suspects they’d rather fancied her, but they’d been polite enough to keep it to themselves.
And now? Now… she’s fairly sure she’s in New York. Charley can’t help it; she laughs out loud. She’s still feeling a little disorientated from her arrival, which had been unwontedly rough, like space and time had grabbed her and had to shove her through a minute gap to get her here. She feels disorientated and frazzled, but it feels suddenly, unexpectedly wonderful to be on Earth.
It’s warm, it’s Spring, she’s in a park next to a lake, and she stands for a moment, squinting up at the skyline. Certainly not the 1930’s, she can tell that much. A few people pause to blink at her, but other than having just appeared out of nowhere, she doesn’t stand out much; a young woman dressed head-to-toe in practical, comfortable black, wearing a backpack. She might be anyone.
Unpeeling her wristband and tucking it away into the backpack, she slings the bag back over her shoulder, chooses a direction, and starts walking.
Name/nickname: Cully
Age: 24
Pronouns: she/her, generally, but I won’t take offence if I get others
Contact: im.going.nowhere.very.slowly@gmail.com, Culumacilinte on AIM
Experience: I’ve been RPing in various forms since 2007, both in communities and out. I specialise in EPIC ‘VERSE BUILDING via AIM. Think probably 1000+ pages of AUs branching upon AUs. Lots of sex and tragedy, more often than not.
Currently played characters: Formerly Sam Winchester once upon a time, but poor Sam got dropped by the wayside.
The Character
DW account:
adventuressingName: Charlotte Pollard
Alias: Charley, Lottie, Charlotte Smith
Age/Birthdate: Born 15 April, 1912, somewhere in her early-mid 20’s. Even she doesn’t know exactly how old she is.
Species: Human
Canon: Doctor Who
Canon point: Post-Blue Forgotten Planet
Played By: India Fisher
Abilities: As far as physical abilities go, Charley’s nothing terribly special. She’s healthy, decently strong, and in fairly good shape; a lifestyle that involves a lot of running for one’s life has ensured that. She’s also acquired on her travels (and especially in her missions working for the Viyrans) a fair amount of knowledge of future and alien technologies. Not to say she’s a technological genius by any standard, but she’s pretty decent at mucking her way through things.
When she comes through the Rift, she gains the ability to take on the appearance of others by wearing their clothes.
Appearance: Charley is a short, youthful-looking woman, perhaps 5’2, and a little chubby. She’s got blonde hair that she generally keeps short, full cheeks that tend towards the rosy, and large, bright blue eyes. Her dress sense tends slightly towards the antiquated-- she did grow up in the 20’s, after all-- but she’s adapted cheerfully enough to a variety of styles. When she arrives, she’ll be wearing the clothes she’d worn for the Viyran’s missions-- a functional, utilitarian black shirt and trousers with boots.
Personality:
Charley is an adventurous, headstrong, brave, romantic young woman. That’s romantic with a capital R. She’s stubborn and rebellious, and absolutely unafraid to give someone a piece of her mind, whether it be a friend-- she does her fair share of shouting at the Doctor-- or an enemy-- rather wonderfully, in her one encounter with the Master, she meets his customary introduction with a fierce, ‘Never heard of you!’ She possesses a remarkable bravery; the kind needed to fight aliens and risk her life, yes, but also the kind to face her own death head on, and do something like kill the man she loves for the sake of the universe.
She can be somewhat on the naive side-- this is the posh girl who left home at 18 to travel the world without seeming to stop and consider the consequences, after all. She wants to see the best of people, and has a great fondness for idealised stories of swashbuckling and romance. In combination with her occasional tendency towards making brash, hasty decisions, that naivety means that she can get herself in trouble, particularly when people turn out not to be what she thinks they should be. She has a predilection for automatically siding with the perceived underdogs in any given situation before she fully thinks the situation through, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending.
She’s also very compassionate; the first time she encountered an alien, her initial impulse was to care for it rather than recoil, thinking it beautiful. And she frequently chivvies her friends out of funks, whether it be with teasing or with genuine tenderness. She likes people, and they generally like her; she seems to have something of a gift for getting people to open up to her. While she’s never afraid to bite and can sometimes be cruel if she’s lost her temper, she doesn’t like to see anyone hurting if she can help it.
That said, she does have a temper, and frequently resorts to snippiness if she’s feeling vulnerable. She’s also given to jealousy; there was definitely tension between her, C’rizz, and the Doctor at first, because she saw him as taking her place, and resented it; she was also incredibly catty towards Perfection, a woman who spent most of her audio appearance flirting with the Doctor. She’s extremely privileged, and as a result, is occasionally selfish and thoughtless.
In conversation, she can be sassy and irreverent, given to banter, which makes her an excellent partner for the Doctor. She’s not afraid to engage in a little judicious self-mockery either, as when she demonstrates to C’rizz the correct way for a companion to implore the Doctor what’s going on.
Since her travels with the Sixth Doctor-- and especially her time with the Viyrans-- she can be a lot more sombre and reflective than she used to be. She’s matured, she’s been hurt; indeed, when she enters the game, she’s coming off the end of a very great hurt indeed. She still has the same wonder and enthusiasm for the universe as ever, it just needs a little more coaxing.
History:
Charley grew up in a very well-off family in the first decades of the 20th century with two younger sisters, Margaret and Cecelia. Peg and Sissy, by all accounts, were reasonably well-behaved young ladies who didn’t cause much trouble, but Charley was the sort of girl who wanted to run off and have adventures, and was apparently given to doing things like housing local travelling people in the attic of their Hampshire manor. Although her mother, Lady Louisa, was strict about etiquette, and often disapproved of Charley’s rebellious streak, she apparently thought her entirely capable of taking care of herself, and much more sensible than her sisters.
When Charley was 18, she ran away from boarding school to disguise herself as a steward and stow away aboard the airship R101, with the goal of meeting a young man in Singapore-- but also simply for the thrill of it. Wanting to travel the world, she styled herself an Edwardian Adventuress. The R101, however, was fated to crash, killing everybody aboard, and it was whilst on the airship that she first met the Doctor. Swept up in the inevitable adventure, he ended up rescuing her from the ship, and taking her along in the TARDIS as his companion.
During their travels, Charley fell quite in love with the Doctor, and he-- arguably-- with her. Neither vocalised these feelings for a long time, but they were definitely there.
Charley’s survival, however, had become a breach in the Web of Time-- she ought to have died, and her continued existence proved a destabilising influence on the continuity of the universe. The Time Lords became aware of this-- the Matrix was falling apart at the seams, and predicting the end of everything that ever was, or would be-- and intercepted Charley and the Doctor. Charley, they said, had become a gateway into the so-called Antiverse. Using Charley as a path into the Antiverse, they discovered that it was inhabited with thousands of Neverpeople-- people whose personal histories had been erased, and who had ceased to exist. Wanting to break back into the positive universe, they sent a casket of antitime through, planning that it should explode, and leave the universe theirs to feed on.
The Doctor, however, materialised his TARDIS around the casket as it exploded, saving the universe, but leaving himself-- and his ship-- to become infected with antitime. Once infected, the Doctor became a creature called Zagreus, a living embodiment of antitime, whom Rassilon, the corrupt founder of Time Lord society, wished to use to destroy a race of so-called Divergents, a species whom he had sealed into a pocket universe. Assisted (and occasionally hampered) by the TARDIS and three not-quite-past-Doctors, Charley discovered the truth about Rassilon and the Divergent Universe, and eventually confronted the Doctor. He begged her to kill him, to save the universe from antitime, and, seeing no other option, she did. However, he then came back to life as Zagreus, and threw Rassilon into the Divergent Universe. During the course of these events, both Charley and the Doctor confessed their love for each other.
Unable to stay in the positive universe lest the antitime destroy it, the Doctor departed for the Divergent Universe, a place without linear time. He attempted to leave Charley behind, but she snuck aboard the TARDIS and joined him. Their first experience in the Divergent Universe was a timeless period of walking, and Charley confronted him about his saying that he loved her, and what that meant. They fought, but eventually (after evolving into a single entity and fighting off a creature made of sound that was sort of their child-- don’t ask, it’s Doctor Who) concluded that they would rather be together, and were glad that they had each other in this strange new world.
Whilst in the Divergent Universe, they acquired another travelling companion, a Eutermesan named C’rizz who had formerly been a monk of the Church of the Foundation, which believed that all things must die and be saved-- and C’rizz had been the one who killed them, until leaving the Church to marry his lover, L’da. But he was forced to mercy-kill her shortly after meeting the Doctor and Charley, and subsequently suffered from a slew of psychological issues. He and Charley eventually became good friends, but there was a certain amount of tension and mistrust in that particular Team TARDIS.
Travelling from zone to zone and searching for the TARDIS, and Rassilon, they eventually discovered the secret of the Divergent Universe; Rassilon had engineered it such that time there was cyclical. Everything repeated, endlessly. The last remaining Divergent (in truth the sound creature from their initial arrival) and Zagreus (having left the Doctor) schemed to get out, but they defeated them, and were able to travel back to their own universe.
They travelled together for some time; confronting the Daleks, having to impersonate French aristocrats from the 1850’s, and other such adventures-- until they arrived at a planet called Utebbadon-Taria, where C’rizz was killed, saving the world. After they left in the TARDIS, the Doctor expressed pleasure that things were back the way they were-- just him and Charley. Horrified that he could be so callous in the face of their friend’s death, and furious at the thought that he preferred her back when she was naive and infatuated with him, Charley demanded that he return her home.
He attempted to, but the TARDIS brought them to the wrong place-- Singapore-- and the wrong time, and Charley walked off before he could try again, leaving a note for him at a hotel saying that he’s the best man she’d ever met and she’d always remember him, and signing herself off, The Girl Who Never Was. Before he got the note, however, they became embroiled in a time-travelling Cyberman invasion, and Charley changed her mind about wanting to leave. She didn’t get a chance to tell him, however, and ended up stranded in the year 500,002, believing that the Doctor had been killed. The Doctor, returning to Singapore, got her note, and, following her instructions not to look for her, never did.
Stranded, Charley constructed a crystal radio to broadcast an SOS. The Doctor picked up her signal-- but it was the wrong Doctor; his Sixth incarnation. Taken by surprise, Charley lied (badly) to him that she had amnesia, and couldn’t remember where she’d come from or how she’d got to the year 500,002. The Doctor was suspicious of her, and mistrusted her, but they did end up travelling together. Charley herself had to adjust to this younger Doctor, who was very different from the one she’d known, but eventually she grew to consider him her best friend, just as the other Doctor had been. But again, she found herself at the centre of a paradox; travelling with the Doctor before he had ever met her.
After they had been travelling together for some time, Charley became infected with a virus. This virus allowed the ghost of a girl named Mila, who had been lurking invisibly in the TARDIS since the Doctor was in his first regeneration, to take over Charley’s body. She assumed Charley’s identity, and carried on travelling with the Doctor in her stead. Charley herself was rescued by the Viyrans, a race of robotic aliens who trawled the cosmos searching for and eliminated viruses such as the one Charley had caught. In exchange for tracking down the Doctor, Charley agreed to help them in their mission. For several millennia she travelled with the Viyrans, kept mostly in cryo-sleep, occasionally awakened to be sent on a mission for them.
Eventually, they tracked down the Doctor, still travelling with Mila-as-Charley. Charley confronted them, and despite initially fighting with Mila, ended up cooperating with her, because saving the world was more important. Mila sacrificed herself, and, knowing that the Doctor would have to forget about the Viyrans-- and about her-- Charley finally told the Doctor everything. She told him a story about a girl who should have died and the man who saved her, and how she fell in love with him. Knowing that he couldn’t know his own future, the Doctor agreed to allow the Viyrans to alter his memories, changing Charlotte Pollard for Mila.
And then, having found the Doctor as she’d asked, she no longer had any need to work for the Viyrans. Wrung out with grief from their goodbye, and at a loose end, she decided-- not a little wistfully-- that maybe she just ought to do what she’d set out to in the first place, all those years ago. To travel on her own, have her own adventures. No-matter how old she might feel in this particular moment, she still had years and years ahead of her. So the Viyrans gave her a personal transporter, a wristband that could take her through time and space. Not as elegant as a TARDIS, perhaps, but it did the job. And she set off.
That’s when the Rift grabbed her.
Writing Sample:
She’s still in the process of figuring out how to work the PT wristband oojah. It’s got settings for coordinates and dates, but if one doesn’t necessarily know the intergalactic coordinates of any given planet, that isn’t much use. Thus far, however, she hasn’t been all that bothered by her dubious navigation skills. It’s been perhaps a fortnight since she left the Viyran ship, and there’s nowhere in particular she’s heading. Just travelling for its own sake. Having adventures. She can’t say that she doesn’t miss doing so with company, but it’s not bad, really. It’s all right.
Her first go sent her to a planet with a surface like smooth silica, and all the life underground in beautifully bored tunnels, everything opalescent whites and pinks and greens. The people were little roboty things, and Charley spent a week with them, befriending a group of-- she supposed they’d be teenagers, by Earth standards, if an inorganic alien lifeform could be said to be a teenager-- and exploring deeper into the planet than anyone had yet ventured. After that, a planet that was all seas (she’d quickly left); after that, someplace called Malleiateos, covered with ochre-fawn-marigold-tawny fields and breathing trees, where a young triad had insisted she stay with them because she looked exhausted. She suspects they’d rather fancied her, but they’d been polite enough to keep it to themselves.
And now? Now… she’s fairly sure she’s in New York. Charley can’t help it; she laughs out loud. She’s still feeling a little disorientated from her arrival, which had been unwontedly rough, like space and time had grabbed her and had to shove her through a minute gap to get her here. She feels disorientated and frazzled, but it feels suddenly, unexpectedly wonderful to be on Earth.
It’s warm, it’s Spring, she’s in a park next to a lake, and she stands for a moment, squinting up at the skyline. Certainly not the 1930’s, she can tell that much. A few people pause to blink at her, but other than having just appeared out of nowhere, she doesn’t stand out much; a young woman dressed head-to-toe in practical, comfortable black, wearing a backpack. She might be anyone.
Unpeeling her wristband and tucking it away into the backpack, she slings the bag back over her shoulder, chooses a direction, and starts walking.