Susan Foreman

[Deleted]

Canon

Name:
Susan Foreman – Arkytior – Susan Jillian English

Age: 489 years.
Gender: Female.
Species: Time Lady.
Planet of Origin: Gallifrey.
Occupation: Painter.

Physical Description: In her original incarnation, Susan isn’t the type of girl that would stand out in a crowd. Her stature is small; she is barely over five feet. She sometimes stands on the tips of her toes and straighten her back in an attempt to appear taller, but she isn’t about to let the Doctor or Ian know that. She has brown eyes and her black hair is cut close to her head. She has an impish smile and delicate features. As she’s Gallifreyan, she ages much slower than a normal human, which causes some trouble as David begins to grow old and she still looks like a teenage girl. She rectified the problem by getting a grey wig and putting on make-up to make herself appear older.

Let’s fast forward to her next incarnation. She looks similar to her first body. She chose this body because it reflected her dead son. She dealt with her biggest grievance first; her height. Her new body is tall and lanky and, to make up for her height complex, she usually wears tall high-heels to make her feel better about her height. Her black hair comes down to her chin. Her eyes normally a standard shade of blue, but during her episodes of psychic energy, or when ‘Arkytior’ takes over, they’re paler. Her right arm has burns and scars on it from the vortex manipulator she used to own.

Her third incarnation is the tallest. Unlike her first regeneration, this one was much messier, and she needed a ‘helping hand’ to aid it along. Her hair is long and brown, and she keeps it down most of the time except when she’s painting. Her eyes are very strikingly blue, mixing pale and dark to resemble a cloudy sky. She’s pale and thin, giving her an overall ethereal China doll appearance. She’s covered in light freckles. Her manner of dress is bizarre at times. She wears bizarre outfits to hunt for mythical creatures – heart-shaped sunglasses, bright green oven mitts and four-inch heels were the standard for gremlins – and her clothes don’t seem to match.

Personality & History: Susan’s original personality was a bit too loyal. She loved her grandfather fiercely, and she was comfortable knowing that he loved her just as much. Only occasionally did she doubt things that he would do – when he kidnapped Ian and Barbara, and when he suggested they leave the caveman to die, and, later, when he left her. He had been the one to ‘save’ her from Gallifrey, although she never found out where they were running or what they were running from. She depended heavily on her grandfather, taking his hand or gripping him when she was nervous or scared. He was her rock and she was his conscience.

He was all she could remember, and although she had grown used to that idea, it still haunted her. Why hadn’t they stayed on Gallifrey? Why didn’t she know her grandmother? Her parents? She had been a curious child since birth, always losing herself in her grandfather’s library. (Literally and metaphorically, the TARDIS generally led her back to the console safely, although she’d been lost for hours that seemed like days once.) Despite this curiosity, she was still nervous when her grandfather took her to other worlds. Earth, in particular, was his favorite. But it seemed as though every time they visited Earth, something terrible would happen.

The Daleks were the catalyst for one of the most terrible events in the young Time Lady’s life. It wasn’t a secret that the young Time Lady didn’t think the life her grandfather led wasn’t for her. She had been whisked around from place to place all during her life without any sort of stability. Anyway, when she and her grandfather were trying to save the Earth from the threat of the Daleks, it was there she met David Campbell. She was immediately smitten with him, and, although it was a long way from ‘love’, it seemed to be enough for her grandfather to leave her. She’d bitten her tongue and buried her feelings, instead focusing on trying to love David.

It was during the years that she was trapped on Earth with him that she began to develop a hatred deep-seated in abandonment. She can’t remember much about her life with David, only a few of the basics, and even those are beginning to fade. Neither the Doctor nor Susan knows why her memories have been wiped. All Susan knows is that it’s enough to send her into a panic-attack. She remembers losing control on a TARDIS and blowing it up. She remembers the Master killing her husband. She remembers her son trying to be like his great-grandfather and fight the Daleks, only to be shot to death before he could regenerate.

In her defense, she had kept her sanity fairly well. But cradling the corpse of her son was the tipping point for Susan Foreman. She regenerated, and all the feelings of inadequacy and hatred came bubbling forward. She was cold and cynical with a sharp tongue. She was the epitome of bitterness and couldn’t understand why people loved her grandfather. He’d abandoned her and led to the deaths of her son and husband. Everything good that she had ever had was snatched away from her because of that man, and she hated him. Hated him.

She has a reputation for her use of her psychic powers, although she’s not nearly as in tune with them as she was her last incarnation. She can only delve into basic memories and surface thoughts of humans if they didn’t have any training to block her. She can communicate with other Time Lords, although she rather prefers not to, given her hatred of her species. This incarnation is cruel and manipulative, using her words to turn people against each other. When she first regenerated, she would invade the minds of the vulnerable and lead them to harm themselves. That soon grew boring.

In this incarnation, she was cursed with a fragment of whom she used to be, often leading to ‘schizophrenic’ episodes when she interacts with her previous incarnation in her head. Due to the violent days leading towards her regeneration – a suicide, really – she’s unstable. The Daleks destroyed the time line she was in, leading her to begin to forget her life since the Doctor left her with David. When the Daleks did this, they infected her – on accident, most likely – with a type of radiation from the Vortex. Because of this radiation, she’s dying… very slowly, and it destroys her memories from not only of when the Doctor left her, but also before then, ripping away all the good emotions she had ever felt until only there was only hatred to keep her company.

The vortex radiation culminated in her eventual insanity. Unable to cope with two beings inside of her body, Susan snapped. Ace McShane and the morph, Raya, found her and called the Doctor for assistance. He trapped Arkytior and put her under a Chameleon Arch, wiping her memories and replacing them.

Susan Jillian English grew up with fairytales. She was a very imaginative child – her mother would read her stories ranging from the Grimm fairytales to Don Quixote. She’d go hunting for gremlins with her mother, utilizing crazy outfits to gain their attention. Her grandfather lived with them in place of her father and he would take her out to gaze at the stars and teach her the constellations. She believed in her imaginary friends – gremlins, goblins, fairies, and unicorns – with all of her being. Her mother assumed it was just part of her age, and she was going to wait to tell Susan gently that they were all part of her imagination.

Unfortunately, she never got the chance. Susan’s memory of what happened has been repressed, but the effects of her family’s murder (which, in reality, was the culmination of Arkytior’s violence and rage) made a lasting impression on her. She could no longer separate fictional from reality, creating her own little world and living in it constantly. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was fourteen, and was sent to live in a home for “mentally unwell” children. She had two psychiatrists during this time – Dr. Smith (the Doctor) and Dr. Ryce. She much preferred Dr. Smith.

She was effectively on her own when she was eighteen. Her mother and grandfather had left her a large enough inheritance to get by on it. She attended university and majored in history. Susan isn’t well known for her paintings yet, but she isn’t a ‘struggling artist’. After she graduated from the university, Dr. Smith recommended that she look into sharing a house with someone, and referred her to Marisol DeLaVega. She still continues her appoints with both Dr. Smith and Dr. Ryce. She sees Dr. Ryce three times a week and Dr. Smith occasionally.

In this incarnation, Susan is a very dreamy sort of person who doesn’t quite get the grasp of fitting in with the rest of the humans. She excelled in her philosophy courses, often contributing tidbits of her own advice. She has the wisdom of her true age, but only for brief moments of time. Sometimes what she says doesn’t make sense and she says things that she doesn’t mean without realizing it. The most prominent example may be her calling Gavri Keâts “Alex” because of his resemblance to her son. She gets puzzled when people insist that his name is Gavri, because in her mind that’s exactly what she’s been calling him.

She has both hallucinations and delusions. When she misplaces something or messes up, she blames it on the gremlins playing tricks on her. She hears the Drekavac – her Arch’s way of dealing with the Vashta Nerada – screaming inside her head. She used to scream with them to drown them out, but it freaked out Marisol. The veterinary assistant told her to use headphones, so now she listens to music when the screaming gets loud. Sometimes she doesn’t understand what’s going on which leads her to be manipulated easily.

She hates taking her medicine. It makes her lethargic and silences the voices in her head. She gets confused without the voices, because it’s always the voices who talk to her and tell her how to act, if only at a subconscious level. She mostly doesn’t notice the voices until they’re gone. Marisol touches on Susan’s obsession of chocolate and maple syrup and sometimes makes her the “Magic Pill Pancake” breakfast special… just without Susan’s knowledge of the ‘magic pill’ bit.

Additional medical information: Allergic to aspirin.

[Ace McShane]

Approved