The Corsair

[Deleted]

Canon

Tenth Incarnation (Penelope Cruz)

Name: The Corsair. (She's been called a lot of other names as well, most of them rude.)
Age: Somewhere in her tenth century, but she stopped counting the years about two centuries back.
Gender: Currently female, but that varies.
Species: Time Lord
Planet of Origin: Gallifrey
Occupation: Privateer. Thief. Explorer. Swashbuckling hero. Deniable agent of the Celestial Intervention Agency (forcibly retired). Former Assyrian god. Rescuer of Good Looking People from Dangerous Situations

Physical Description: The Corsair's tenth life is a small-built woman of Spanish descent. Her hair is straight and glossy black, and she wears it shoulder length. Her eyes are the color of chocolate, and frequently twinkle, and her face is expressive and animated. She's got a killer smile, too. She swaggers when she walks, and her body language suggests that she either doesn't care or she frequently forgets that she's barely 5' 4" in stocking feet.

Her fashion sense tends towards the idiosyncratic, and could be described as either 'pirate chic' or 'Ren Faire nerd'. She typically wears black jeans tucked into black boots, with an untucked white poet's shirt and a black vest. Over this she wears a gold-trimmed black highwayman's coat, often accessorized with a black leather satchel. A battered black hat with a wide brim completes the effect.

Well, technically the tooled weapons belt completes the effect. That, and the ludicrously sharp basket-hilted rapier and main gauche (both honed to an edge only three molecules thick and temporally locked to make them all but indestructible), and the stazer tooled to look like an old-fashioned and quite functional flintlock. But the belt's been fitted with a low-level perception filter, so most people don't notice them.

Past Lives:

First Incarnation

(Errol Flynn)

Second Incarnation

(Jean Peters)

Third Incarnation

(Maureen O'Hara)

Fourth Incarnation

(Jeff Chandler)

Fifth Incarnation

(Kiera Knightly)

Sixth Incarnation

(Robert Newton)

Seventh Incarnation

(Geena Davis)

Eighth Incarnation

(Geoffrey Rush)

Ninth Corsair

(Cyril Nri)

Personality: "Well, let me think. I've been described as reckless - something which I dispute, incidentally, because it's only reckless if you don't have a plan. Also charming and roguish, and I shan't dispute either charge.

"Oh, and naughty. Musn't forget naughty, although you'd have to ask Lady President Flavia about that. A gentleman doesn't kiss and tell, after all. Even when he's a lady.

"I prefer to think of myself as adventurous and spontaneous - a good word that, don't you think? Spontaneous. Rolls right off the tongue, it does. Lots of sibilants. Anyway, I've also got something of a low threshold for boredom. Which has been known to cause me to make decisions that - even though they worked out for the best, in the end - may not have been the objectively best decisions I could have made at the time.

"Still, it's all a laugh, isn't it? Give me an uncharted horizon and a sturdy ship, or a port with handsome lads and beautiful lasses, or a ripping good fight, and I'm happy as a... uhm... those molluscs native to this world. What are they called? Oysters? Happy as an oyster?

"That's ridiculous, you know. How do you measure the happiness of a nearly-mindless bivalve?"

History: All of the children of Gallifrey, at the age of eight, stare into the Untempered Schism and are forever marked by the vision of Time itself. Some go mad. Some lose themselves to the visions of past and future. Some run and never stop.

The little boy that would grow up to be the Corsair nicked the ceremonial ring worn by the Officiant of the Untempered Schism.

Although of an age with the group of Academy hooligans known as "the Deca", the future Corsair wasn't quite that level of troublemaker. He was a bit of a petty thief - he never took anything important, but he often took things he found interesting - and he had a penchant for exploration that caused him to be marched back to the Academy by the Chancellery Guard more than once, to give explanations to the Headmaster. But he was dedicated to his studies, earned good marks, and graduated from the Academy with a solid 72% on his finals.

Still and all, it was probably just as well that he'd expressed an interest in both the Office of Spatio-Temporal Control and the Celestial Intervention Agency. Left to his own devices, he'd probably have turned out as bad as the Doctor.

To tell the truth, he probably did anyway. But, at least as an agent of the CIA, when he did disreputable things of questionable legality, he was doing them at the behest of the Time Lords. Usually.

He got the first of his trademark Ouroboros tattoos on his first mission for the Time Lords, incidentally. He was sent to Port Royale in the 17th century (Anno Domini) to look into whether or not the Faction Paradox was manipulating the Brethren of the Coast. They weren't. It was the English governor that was being manipulated. The end result was an enduring fascination with Earth pirates of the Age of Sail, a tattoo, and an earthquake that sank two-thirds of the city.

It was a bit of a shock the first time he was killed - in a sordid bit of business in a back alley on New Tortuga in the Atropos Reach. Didn't even involve the Time Lords. Just a dispute about whether some dice were loaded (they weren't) and whether or not he'd been cheating (he had been). Theoretically, of course, Time Lords aren't even restricted to humanoid forms when they regenerate. But still, he hadn't expected to wake up a she.

Gender instability is a known but extremely uncommon Regenerative condition. But she had it, clearly, and she decided that it wasn't all that big a deal - gender discrimination, after all, was such an archaic concept on Gallifrey that most Time Lords had never even heard of the concept. So, she learned to walk again - her center of balance had shifted radically, after all - and went back to work.

Most Time Lords disapproved of the Corsair. Maybe it was her (or his, depending on the Incarnation) flippant attitude. Or the way he (or, sometimes, she) went native and stopped trying to fit in on the Homeworld. But Renegades liked her (him) because, even though he technically represented Authority, he really just didn't care about all that drivel. (Ask the Doctor about the two times he work up in prison with him, and the one time he work up in the Bank of England vaults with her, all three times after going on a pan-galactic pub crawl. The Doctor might even tell the truth about it.)

Although the Corsair was involved in the Time War - ask her about Clarkor Nine, sometime - she didn't die in it. No, he perished in his ninth Incarnation, while engaged in the Fourth Universal Survey Expedition. He was lured in, his TARDIS was eaten, and he was chopped up for spare parts. They didn't even ask if he was using that arm, spine, or liver.

Imagine her surprise, then, to wake up on the world that had eaten her TARDIS. The Power that had done so had kept him in stasis, not quite dead, as a source of additional spare parts. But something had killed the Power that ruled that world, and the stasis fields died with it. And the Corsair died with the stasis fields, and woke up again.

And she was cranky, and hungry, and depressed about her TARDIS, and she couldn't even properly kill anything to relieve her mood. The only other things on the planetoid were Time Lord fragments, and dead TARDIS hulks. So, after sulking for a bit, she had an idea.

The core of her rapier was hollow, you see, and filled with a core of TARDIS coral. That coral just happened - if by "just happened" you mean "because I plan ahead for emergencies, thank you very much" - to have a back-up copy of the soul kernel of her TARDIS. And so, with tools and parts scavenged from the TARDIS corpses, she built a new ship and then energized and activated it with the contents of her hilt.

The new ship's a little... quirky. And it still needs work. A lot of work. But hey, after finding out that Gallifrey was gone(!), it got her to a green and pleasant land where she can settle down and get her bearings. And figure out what happened to the Homeworld. And finish fixing her ship up, assuming that's a task that will ever be finished.

And, hey. Earth's got rum. So it's not all bad.

Addition Medical Information: The Corsair suffers from Gender Instability Syndrome, which causes her to randomly change sex as well as appearance when regenerating. The Corsair has also used nine regenerations, currently placing her in her tenth life.

RP Sample: "Y'see," the Corsair said, topping her mug back off, "here's the thing..."

The empty bottle of Captain Morgan clinked on the table next to the three other empties. She'd polished off three and a half of them on her own, drinking steadily and heavily over the last hour. Once, the bartender had tried to cut her off. She'd responded by climbing up on the bar and doing an elaborate tap dance routine while singing Tom Lehrer's "Element Song". Twice, to the general enthusiasm of the patrons.

The bartender had relented after that. As she'd said, if she'd been drunk she wouldn't have been able to dance like that.

"This stuff," she continued, waving the mug at her companion, "is water. I've had real rum, mixed with gunpowder and lit right up. That had a kick to it, I assure you."

With an ironic gesture like a toast, she downed half the contents of the mug at one go and then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "Ahhh... still, it's tasty water, isn't it?"

Her companion, tried valiantly for the fourth time to get a word in edgewise. He'd tried half an hour ago, only to have the Corsair declare that "talking's thirsty work" and insist that he get a pint down himself before they started. "So anyway," he said, "I..."

"Hold it right there, mate," she said, slamming the mug down. "First things first." The chair legs scraped across the wood flooring as she pushed herself to her feet. "Gotta pump out the bilges, if you take my meaning." She laughed at his expression - half scandalized and half resigned - then strode across the bar and towards the twin doors marked with stylized human silhouettes. Wracking her memory, she managed to recall that women should use the door with the silhouette of a wide triangle over the lower body.

As she reached for the doorknob, and explosion blew out the storeroom. The overpressure hurled her a half-dozen feet through the air and sent her sliding and rolling into a table. Shaking her head to clear it, she looked up to see several squat figures in full-body space armor doubletiming through the hole.

Rolling, she scrambled on hands and feet for a few paces before getting back to her feet. "Let me guess?" she shouted at her companion as the shooting began, "this is what you wanted to talk to me about?"

[Deleted]

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