The Redjay

Personality
Roda is best known for having a very untameable and untrusting personality. She is outwardly playful, flirtatious and confident, the kind of person likely to be caught laughing often and playing with a friend. If Roda cares for someone she will defend them with her life, and she has always harboured a want to have children, despite her belief that because of Pythia’s Curse she is infertile. However, she is also wild and dangerous, and should definitely not be underestimated for her size, or so-called obsession. Roda has trained extensively to be able to hold, fire and aim a full-sized arrow and knows how to use it, and can hold her own in a fight against up to three other people if she needs to; she is violent, and has a short temper, especially when it comes to protecting those that she cares a lot about. Although Roda is not as barbaric as the Time Lords always made her out to be she is far from a traditional Gallifreyan, and behaves in a manner many Time Lords would consider primitive. Despite all of this she is strong-willed and focused, able to put aside her insecurities and weaknesses in the face of other things. Roda is flirtatious and knows how to use her gender, and although she is heterosexual has little distinction between species or number of partners, trying to, in at least one sense, think for her own happiness.

The biggest downfall of Roda’s character is also her greatest strength. She has an obsessive Robin Hood complex, and will break the law without a moment’s hesitation if she thinks whatever she has broken and entered for will better the poor she will give it to. Although she never breaks a promise willingly, in the case of putting Robin Hood ahead of friends she might do so without realising, despite her will. She tries to stick to the law, knowing the trouble she has gotten into before, but subscribes to a strong ‘what would Robin do?’ idea, and is often reckless. Roda will run into a task with a logical plan, that she has thought out and knows will work, more intelligent than she realises, but won’t stop to think of the implications, often believing that the end justifies the means. However, she is loyal, and not easily swayed, but willing to make deals with the enemies in drastic circumstances. Roda would even sell her life for the success of a many’s aim. Although competitive, she has no love of glory, and can almost be said to be shy, preferring to hide behind ‘the Redjay’.

Despite her confident demeanour, Roda has a tendency to put a shield up around her troubles. Her claustrophobia is an almost constant threat to her lifestyle – put Roda in a room even an inch ‘too short’ and she could cease up, and in one any smaller than that, or dark, or windowless, and Roda will curl up and panic. She doesn’t let anybody, even the Doctor, know how much small spaces scare her nor how much her memories of Gallifrey unnerve her despite her love of the planet, although the Doctor is the only one who knows her well enough to understand. She doesn’t like to accept how well even her friends know her, shielding her thoughts and putting those she cares for ahead of her, often at the loss of her own health or freedom. Roda also hurts herself often enough – through injury or torture – to often not realise when she is hurt, causing her to pass out before she even knows she’s bleeding. Similarly, despite everything and her hardness, there is still a desperate part of Roda that like her Time Tot self is shouting out for attention, affection and for someone to be proud of her, for those things she never had when she was younger.

Visual Style
The Redjay makes a point of looking confident, but in fact has a lot of underlying issues with anxiety, and due to her deliberating claustrophobia and tendency to avoid getting within a person’s space. She stands ‘tall’ and doesn’t let anybody give her any abuse easily, but will take a beating to protect a friend. She stands with her legs slightly apart for bracing, often with one foot facing forward and one a little behind and facing the side, having grown accustomed over the years to holding a bow and arrows correctly. If Roda is feeling unnerved by something or someone, she will rest her arms around her stomach. Roda prefers to fight rather than run and will rarely do the latter unless something has genuinely scared her. Clothing wise, Roda doesn’t wear a lot of accessories, but has taken to wearing a claddagh ring for the last couple of hundred years. It is currently worn on her right (unfavoured) hand with the ring turned inwards, to show that her heart has been captured. Preferably she dresses in a more medieval, men’s garb, but in more modern times Roda prefers to wear casual fitted shirts, jeans, and occasionally shorts. She sleeps in boxers and an oversized t-shirt, and doesn’t wear shoes unless she ultimately has to.

Although she stands tall, Roda’s regenerations from her second onwards have always been incredibly short. She is now on her sixth, and stands at just over five feet and three inches, and as always is remarkably slim, but rounded enough for it to be healthy. Her figure is not due to bad health (although the original weight loss following her first regeneration was) but due to her lifestyle and the active timetable she keeps, as well as a tendency, when busy, to substitute food for coffee. Roda has a relatively flat chest for a woman of her ‘age’, but her only voluptuous body part is her hips. She has stronger wrists from repetition of firing an arrow, but smaller feet, and long legs for her size. Roda’s entire body is peppered with freckles, but her face and back especially. Roda has four strange scars on her body that are uncharacteristic of Time Lords, due to a bad first regeneration. There is one scar on her left shoulder, and three on her lower right torso, one grazing further to the side of her hip. The bullets that caused the wounds are still embedded in her, and tend to cause her heightened exhaustion after adrenaline rushes due to a diluted blood poisoning.

In this regeneration her hair is shoulder-length and a sort of red/caramel shade of brown, and has a slight wave to it that is caused by the damp of so much time spent in the United Kingdom. Her eyes are almond-shaped and a slightly blue shade of green, with lighter rings in the middle, and her pupils are often slightly dilated from withheld stress or lack of sleep. She has a ski-jump nose, and when she doesn’t need to blend in with the crowd for whatever reason she wears cobalt blue body paints on her arms (spirals on each shoulder and elbow and a ring around each wrist) and on her face (one eye covered, a line above the other, two dashes on her nose, and triangular curves on either side of her jaw) that are characteristic of the ‘Redjay’ that is wanted by the Shadow Proclamation. Roda has never been willing to deny who she is, but is capable of blending if she dresses down and washes her face, and removes the plethora of red feathers tied and waxed into her hair – this later gesture is one she prefers never to have to do, and would rather hide them somehow.

Habits
Roda’s worst habit is panic attacks in the face of small spaces or crowded areas; her claustrophobia is enough for her to abandon all reason, and it often takes a trusted friend or a slap to the face for her to snap out of it. Normally level-headed, she can be an entirely different person undere these circumstances. Roda, however, has a tendency to think of a plan and put it into action before considering all of its implications, most often successful but generally with injury to herself or some kink in the plan. She rarely remembers to take care of herself and is regularly injured or battered, but so long as whoever or whatever she was trying to protect or achieve is safe or complete, she doesn’t mind. Roda has been known to stubbornly refuse medical care or rest until she literally passes out. If nervous, Roda will play with her red feathers, and she feels exceeding uncomfortable without them, possibly hiding behind the persona of the Redjay, and has a habit of covering her torso if she is scared in a defensive manner.

If there is something on Roda’s mind, she will retreat to the workshop in her TARDIS and whittle new arrows, sometimes making small sculptures or frames to remind herself of the way her father used to dabble in woodwork despite his lack of skill when she was younger. She has serious trouble keeping her hands still at the best of times, and prefers to be on the mood, not only claustrophobic but cagey if she has to be still too long. When Roda is content, she also sings in the shower, and when on her own occasionally, and she still behaves like a modern day Robin Hood to the universe on a more than weekly basis despite that it breaks the law in many galaxies – one reason why she likes to be always on the move. Roda refuses to spend any of the money she ‘makes’ on herself, considering it impeaching her honour as a thief/Robin Hood to steal for herself and not for the poor.

Roda is definitely not a morning person, but can stay awake at night long into the early hours of the morning. A brief stint on twenty fifth century Earth when her TARDIS was resting once that forced her to rent a room in an apartment and get a job in a coffee shop gave her an early morning dependence on caffeine, and unless there is no time at all for it, you are not likely to get a sensible action out of her before seven am if she has not drunk a mug of coffee the size of her head. Roda, however, habitually adds a lot of milk and a little sugar to her coffee, and follows it up with a cold shower and usually another mug whenever she is in her TARDIS, to wake her up enough in the morning to get everything done then. She dislikes being too busy to have time to herself and likes to get all her ‘chores’ done in the few hours after she wakes. Of course, Time Lords do not need a lot of sleep, but Roda makes a point of having at least three hours a night so that she can stay on her toes, partly because so much time spent blending in while in the Greenwood has made the action a habit.

History
When Meyerodeon met Dahle in the Prydonian Academy, he left school and told his best friend that he had met the most beautiful Gallifreyan woman ever born. That same day, he swore to marry her, and when they graduated the Academy, Meyer proposed, and married Dahle a few months later. Half a century later, Dahle and Meyer decided to loom, Pythia’s Curse in place, and Rodageitmososa was loomed, a tiny baby girl with her mother’s hair and her father’s eyes. But when Roda was only two years old, Dahle ‘vanished’, something that Meyerodeon never spoke about. When Roda was old enough to understand that she wasn’t coming back, she was old enough to assume that her mother was dead, and clung to her father, desperate to keep his attention so that he wouldn’t abandon her too. She had no memory of her mother, but grew up incredibly close to her father instead, inquisitive, stubborn and wild. She always reminded Meyer of Dahle. But where Dahle had been motivated by a level-headed streak and a perseverance for her family, Roda had nothing to focus her attentions on, intrigued but never captivated by her father’s work in his library. Until the day she turned eight years old, and was inducted into the Prydonian Academy.

The Untempered Schism was known to drive Time Tots mad, or to fear, or to greatness. Roda had never heard stories of the Schism inspiring someone before. She told her father what she had seen, but no one more, fearing that she had been driven mad, and that the effects were yet to hit her. The Schism told her about a figure named Robin Hood, and how different planets, star systems and galaxies had different variations of him. It told her of how he robbed the rich to give to the poor, and how his methods were just and his heart pure, and Rodageitmososa fell in love. What did it matter that they didn’t use currency on Gallifrey, and that there was no apparent need for a Robin Hood figure? Silurians, Draconians, Humans... They all needed something, and they did use a currency. And Roda knew, from that point on, that she knew what she wanted to do with her life when she graduated. Unfortunately, the Time Academy had different ideas, and eventually even Meyer grew weary of Robin Hood and Roda stopped telling him about him too. She took out books about him from the library when and where she could, on the sly, and bit by bit any grade in school started to fall. Although she revelled in Isomorpholgy and Sol Studies, Roda spent so much time in Isolation Study before she graduated that she developed a crippling claustrophobia, and professor had to come up with new punishments.

Through a combination of punishment and occasional hard work, Roda survived and passed enough to not be expelled, but when Meyerodeon was murdered everything went from bad to worse. Left on her own in a now dead House, Roda was taken in by Lord Rassilon himself, the then Earl of Prydon, for a handful of years, her father’s land put into the hands of the Chapter until she was old enough to take them. Roda was only a teenager at the time, and without any family figures started to crave Rassilon’s approval, spending a little bit more time on her studies to impress him. It was likely these few years that secured Roda a pass at all, making up for lost time and time yet to be lost. Meyer’s murder was never solved and nobody was ever brought to justice, and as Roda matured she moved out of Rassilon’s ‘house’ and into a dormitory in the Academy. There, Roda started to get into fights, her hot temper fired up whenever someone insulted her family or her strange behaviour. Tough, Roda often won these fights, and spent more time in detention. Her ‘relationship’ with Rassilon began to sour, and Professor Castrivax, one of her teachers, seemed to develop a vendetta against her.

Roda’s first TARDIS flight lesson was nothing short of a disaster. Although she had trained studiously, excited at the prospect that with own TARDIS she could leave Gallifrey, Roda managed to crash and almost destroy the TARDIS, due to a collision with another TARDIS which was never brought to light. Roda swore, when the other TARDIS showed up on the monitor of hers, that the Seal of Rassilon had appeared, but when she questioned Rassilon he only shouted and threatened her in return. Without proof, Roda was forbidden to take her test again for a number of years, and was not able to graduate, as such, until a year later than most would. She started to resent Rassilon and distrust him, and Rassilon for his part started to make a habit of pointing out and punishing every single mistake Roda had made or continued to make while waiting to leave. He took each of her faults personally and saw to all disciplinary action himself, taking away her access to her father’s belongings and removing all trace of Robin Hood from the library. Passing her test the second time, she left Gallifrey as quickly as she could, and planned to never look back. Much as she loved Gallifrey more than any other place and perhaps more than Robin Hood, the memories were more than she felt she could stand without eventually snapping.

Roda’s first stop was Sherwood Forest, Sol-3, twelfth century; although she didn’t approach Robin Hood or his Merry Men on that trip it had always been Sir Robin of Locksley, Earth’s Robin Hood, who had interested her the most in her studies of him. After that, she spent some time on her own, visiting places which had interested her in the past either for their relationship with a Robin Hood figure of some sort or to the colour red, investigating a Time Lady who had appeared to her by the same name a few times in her childhood. Roda wanted answers, a hatred of being left in the dark both physically and metaphorically having grown from her Tothood, and was determined to prove that she was an independent Gallifreyan who could take care of and make a name for herself. But the red feather that Roda had once found inside a book on Gallifrey and wore in her ponytail got her into trouble in the fifty first century, when a group of Time Agents arrested her – mistaking her for ‘the Redjay’ – for the theft of an item of jewellery Roda had found in Sherwood Forest. Unable to convince them that she was not who they thought she was, Roda eventually managed to escape with the help of a rogue agent, but was shot four times before she could reach her TARDIS. The knowledge that the agent had had her mother’s name fresh on her mind, Roda passed out, only just managing to beg her TARDIS to take her to friends.

Crash-landing on Gallifrey with the bullets embedded into her back and shoulder by the regenerative energy, Roda’s regeneration was half halted by the shock and trauma of the bullets. Her landing put her TARDIS in repair again, and Roda slipped into unconsciousness, damaging the Patrex Academy in her landing and spending time in a Zero Room, treated with Elixir of Life. A family friend nursed her back to health, but as soon as Roda could walk she was ordered to be removed from the Patrex Academy, and had to move into Galegochaelax’s accommodation. Having succumbed to a post-regenerative depression while in the hospital, Roda refused to eat or to see friends, and for a number of weeks stayed in her room without moving. It wasn’t until Gail’s wife, in a moment of desperation, asked Roda is Locksley would behave the same way that Roda finally moved, promising to return and thanking them for everything they had done before taking her TARDIS and returning to Sherwood Forest again. Realising that her timeline had been crossed somewhere down the line, Roda added more feathers to her hair and took the name of Redjay before going to Nottingham, slowly but surely earning Robin Hood’s trust. It took months, but he agreed to teach her to fire a bow, and take her in as one of his Merry Men. Roda also met Will Scarlet, and struck up a romantic relationship with him, the man who from that point on would always give her a place to stay in the Greenwood and supply her with arrows. Will built her a bow, and Roda was finally accepted when she was able to beat Little John in a duel, retaining the scars from her bad regeneration. Growing close to the forest, Roda only left when the Shadow Proclamation, tipped off about her criminal behaviour pre-regeneration, tracked her down.

Roda appealed to Gallifrey for help, returning home, but was put on trial for seventeen breaches (through her actions) of the Non Interference Policy. Rassilon’s plan had worked, and Roda was exiled, her mind severed from the Matrix and sent on her way. Scared she would bring the Shadow Proclamation back to Sherwood Forest Roda did not return, instead keeping to the vortex and other planets in a bid to knock them off the scent for a number of years, hoping that the Council would keep one last promise made to her that if she handed herself in to their authorities they would remind the Proclamation that their laws did not extend to Gallifrey and vice versa. She didn’t know if they ever did, but in her travels Roda first met the Doctor, on Arkanis Major, in his fourth regeneration. Both of them apprehended for telling ‘fiction’ – neither having known it to be outlawed on the planet – they were forced to work together to escape, and struck up a friendship which would only get stronger over the years despite the Doctor’s belief that Roda could be ‘more like Leela than Leela sometimes’. Roda travelled with the Doctor for a few months before returning to her own TARDIS, and eventually, to Sherwood Forest, visiting on and off and careful not to cross her own timeline with two government groups and the Time Lords willing to arrest her on the slightest error.

Roda regenerated twice more (once by drowning when her respitory bypass did not last long enough, mistaken as a witch, and once by execution in Nottingham for her part with the Merry Men – the latter did not ruin her relationship with them but meant that she could not visit any later than the exact date of her hanging) before she met the Master. For thwarting his ten year dictatorship on Bandraginus Five over the precious ore Oolion, the Master swore to have revenge on Roda, and brutally broke a handful of her ribs before she overpowered him, causing him to flee and saving the planet. The residents of Bandraginus Five took her in as a Zorro-like legend, and Roda for her part made a habit of being there to help the planet whenever it was needed, naming herself its defender unofficially. She met the Master a handful more times, the relationship becoming more and more sour despite occasional moments of physical attraction, and then accidentally crossed her own and Gallifrey’s timeline to be killed by the Tenth Doctor’s Valeyard while attempting to help him, crushed by Big Ben’s collapse in the thirtieth century and regenerating through wounds from her own arrows. The Master came across her while dying, and while he refused to help her on the grounds that it was how things had to be, he did not end her life by hindering her regenerations and did indeed dig her out of the rubble. Roda forgave the Doctor but did not stop fearing him until the Time War. However, due to the Master’s trickery Roda had played a part in a past regeneration of the Doctor’s, making them ‘even’.

When the Time War broke out Roda was time-scooped back to Gallifrey like all the renegades, and opted to fight on the front lines in Arcadia, to defend the planet she still adored and the innocent people on it. However, before she left the Visionary learnt that Roda carried the potential for pregnancy, being one of the last living Time Ladies with a direct female blood relative who was born and not loomed and had given birth in the past – her mother, Dahle. A part of Roda’s mind was added once more to the Matrix against her knowledge to protect that potential, and Roda went to Arcadia, fighting under the newly promoted Captain Arcotrax, a literature expert promoted to a much higher rank by the act of surviving where his commanding officers did not. He struck up a friendship with Roda for reminding her of her father, and the two were nigh inseperable until Roda was capture as a prisoner of war by the Daleks, and never saw Arcotrax again. In Dalek company for a number of weeks Roda saw many of her fellow Time Lords tortured and murdered, and was tortured herself, but was ‘spared’ by the Daleks need for prisoners to help in the labour on their Crucible. When Roda finally rebelled against aiding the opposite side she was shot, her right heart going into temporary paralysis, and survived by regeneration. Putting her straight back to work the Daleks let her live as the war dragged on and their needs were greater, but with a handful of other prisoners Roda managed to escape the Crucible.

Although she returned to Arcadia to fight further, it was to find the planet fallen, and Arcotrax nowhere to be seen. Believing him dead she mourned only a couple of hours before Rassilon called all Time Lords in battle back to Gallifrey, having returned to his position as Lord President for the duration of the war. It was there that he explained his wish to accelerate their species to beings of consciousness alone, stating that he would not die and neither would their great race. Those that protested were to be made an example of, and Roda – a protestor – was brought to Earth along with Rassilon and the other to who protested so that an eye could be kept on her. Refusing to kneel before Rassilon even under threat of execution, Roda was held back, and pulled back through the vortex by the Doctor and the Master’s actions. However, when the Master tapped into conciousnesses which were capable of breaking him back through the Time Lock, Roda’s (recently protected by the Matrix) was one of the first he reached, and she was pulled back through along with him and three others, including Professor Castrivax and the ex Lady President.

The last to leave the planet they were left on and thus not privy to other Time Lords’ presences due to her weak telepathy, Roda’s damaged TARDIS brought her to Sol-3, and Roda spent a fortnight in Torchwood Three’s company before convincing Captain Jack Harkness that she was a friend of the Doctor’s, not a threat, and safe. Roda did not recognize Jack as one of the Time Agents from her first regeneration, and Jack (for his part in missing memories) did not remember having electrocuted and imprisoned her, and the two became if not quite friends, trusting of each other. Roda left with a promise to behave herself, and set off figuring out exactly how she had escaped the Lock, determined to make sense of it all. She knew that the Doctor (alone, in her knowledge) was also outside the Lock and kept an eye out for him, unaware of the cracks in time and space bar a sense of foreboding that would leave any time-aware being nauseous.