THE RANI

The Female Time Lord known as the Rani (a Hindu word that means a reigning queen) is an imperious, amoral character, without qualms or conscience.  She considers all other species as vastly lesser forms of life, to be exploited or butchered as her needs may be.   Her only passion in life is in her experiments, which are frequently highly dangerous and often lethal to other beings.

She, the Doctor, and the Master are all of the same age, 953 as last given, and attended the Academy together.  While the Doctor specialized in thermodynamics, the Rani concentrated on biochemistry.  A genius in this field, she is less well versed with physics, but has a tremendous grasp of time theory..

After an experiment went awry--she turned the President's mice into horrendous monsters that devoured his pet cat--she was unwisely exiled from Gallifrey by the Time Lords.   They had hoped that forced absence from her scientific apparatus--she had neither family or friends--would make her more malleable.  As usual, the Time Lords erred.   Instead of wanting to return to her home world, the Rani took her place on the planet of Miasimia Goria.

She enslaved the native race, placing them under her absolute control.  However, she wanted their work rate to be increased, and she fed them an experimental drug that went wrong.  It deprived the natives of the ability to rest, and their overtaxed minds then twisted, sending them on rampages of uncontrollable fury.  The only way that she could temper these attacks was to steal from the brains of human beings the chemical that enables them to sleep, and then feed this to the Miasimians.

She set up her base of operations on the Earth, in various stages of its more violent history; the Trojan Wars, the Dark Ages, the American War of Independence, and finally the Industrial Revolution in England.  Using her machinery and her skill with disguises, she managed to extract the pitifully small quantities of the chemical from the minds of her victims and then fed it to the Miasimians.  On her final visit to the Earth, however, things did not go so well for her.

By coincidence, the Master had selected the same time and place as the setting for one of his elaborate traps for the Doctor.  On learning that the Rani was present, the Master managed to hold hostage her vial of the brain extract, and forced her to aid him in his scheme for revenge.  Though the Rani had neither a desire or taste for revenge, she had no choice but to aid him.  From her point of view it became vital that she do so once the Doctor discovered that she was operating on the humans, since he felt compelled to stop her.

The rani had grown several dozen special parasitic worms that sapped the will, leaving victims of her pets suseptible to her mind control.  Using her hypnotized minions and the sleep-deprived humans, she and the Master attempted several times to kill the Doctor, without success.  He, meanwhile, had discovered the Rani's plans and he worked against her to combat them.  He sabotaged the rani's TARDIS, setting a trap for her and the Master.  Narrowly evading horrific "land mines" that the Rani had planted, which turned animal life into trees, the Doctor forced both the Rani and the Master to escape in her TARDIS.

The Doctor had set the controls to overload, and the forces in the timeship hurled the pair against the walls, and pinned them there, unable to reach the controls until they burned out.  Meanwhile, a fetus of a Tyrannosaurus Rex that she was growing was accelerated by time spillage into a ravenous adult which menaced her and the Master.   Somehow, though, both survived the attack.  The Rani jettisoned the Master as soon as she could, and returned to her own plans.

Abandoning Miasimia Goria (either from lack of interest or other, unexplained, reasons), the rani attempted her grandest experiment: manipulation of time on a huge scale.  She had discovered what was apparently an asteroid composed entirely of "Strange Matter".  This odd material was the core of an exploded star, matter compressed in on itself by gravitational collapse.  The densest known material, it produces stange gravitational effects, and the Rani knew that if it could be triggered into exploding, the resulting energy release could be harnessed and used to produce a vast amount of chronons--the component particles of time.

The asteroid was in the same system as the planet Lakertya.  The Rani knew the inhabitants of this world as a lazy, pleasure-loving race who would give her no trouble.   To be certain, she laid her plans well, enlisting the brutal aid of the bat-like Tetraps in controlling the Lakertyans.  She also took two hostages--the Lakertyan ruler, Beyus, and his daughter, Sarn.  Both were much more technologically minded and compliant than the rather brutal Tetraps.  Finally, she installed within the Lakertya Centre of  Leisure a globe containing millions of insects, whose sting would be deadly to the native race.  In the event that the Lakertyans would not obey her bidding, she would release the insects and destroy the entire intelligent race.

Then she set about kidnapping the greatest geniuses of all time, harnessing them together and pooling their mental abilities to create an artificial mind.  The only known way of controlling Strange Matter was to use other Strange Matter--which she did not possess.  She needed the pooled mind to tell her how to control the Strange Matter without her own supply, and to calculate the exact trajectory of the rocket that would ignite the Strange Matter and initiate her scheme.

The key to the plan was to form helium 2, which would strike the atmosphere of Lakertya and produce a flood of chronons.  The resulting reaction would, naturally, kill every living being left on the planet, but that was of little concern to her.  The problem was that she simply couldn't design the controlling mechanism properly, nor did her collected minds have sufficient intelligence to finish the calculations.  What she needed, unfortunately, waas the Doctor.

She had mastered remote control units for TARDISes, and using one of these, she dragged the Docotr's TARDIS violently out of the space-time vortex.  In the resulting crash, the Doctor was injured, and regenerated.  Seizing her chance, the Rani took advantage of his post-regeneration shock and induced partial amnesia into him.  She fooled him into believing that she was actually his companion, Mel, and managed to get him to repair her broken machinery.  Then she hooked him into the mind-set.

What  she had not anticipated was that his personality would disrupt the bonding of the minds into one great thinking apparatus.  He induced psychic schizophrenia instead, and she was forced to isolate him.  However, the Doctor had enabled the brain to complete its task, and the rani set her plan into motion, then headed for her TARDIS to escape the impending destruction of Lakertya.  The Doctor and the natives managed to sabotage the controls, however, and the rocket launched too late to explode the asteroid.  If this were not bad enough, the rani's escape was dashed when she entered her TARDIS.  Her Tetraps had discovered that she had intended to allow them to perish, and instead they hijacked her TARDIS.  The Rani was taken captive by the Tetraps, who intended to use her genius to help their own people.

Since her capture, nothing has been heard from the rani.  It would be premature to say that she may not yet escape the Tetraps and return to her insane experiments.

The Rani