My name is not "Damien Draegonne."
That name belonged, actually, to the kindly physician who cared for me when I was fished out of the Vernian Sea. Lacking a name of my own, I took his when he suffered his untimely demise. But it was Flora, of course, who gave me my nom de guerre. "Aside from the rather obvious pun, it is perfect for you, given that you are erratic, enigmatic, extraterrestrial, and an exile." She dubbed me Mister E.
Sorry, I seem to have gotten ahead of myself. Linear time can be so constraining, you understand.
Where was I? Ah yes, fished out of the sea. It was the steamship
Panthalassa that found me (a splendid name for a vessel, I think). I was curiously undamaged, without a nick, bruise, or scar, but half-drowned and with no memory. How I came to be there in the sea was anybody's guess. It was assumed I fell from some ship. At any rate, the
Panthalassa was there searching for a meteorite that had plunged from the sky. It had been seen by several local fishermen, accompanied by what was called the "groaning" or "wheezings" or a Great Engine. Given the proximity of these waters to
New Babbage, a city filled with Steamlords and Evil Genii, it was possible the meteorite in question had actually been yet another Infernal Engine. The
Panthalassa was there to make certain that was not the case. I was transferred to a smaller vessel and sent into the city while the crew continued their search.
Doctor Draegonne took me in, and in the confines of his sanitarium I attempted to recover from my amnesia. I could recall only the vaguest impressions--a terrible War, ships burning against a black sea, death all around. During one session, the good doctor pressed me for the name of the place I was born. I produced "Gallifrey," but neither of us could locate it on any map.
What was clear, however, was that my knowledge of medicine and science was extraordinary, even in a setting like New Babbage. It was this knowledge that won Dr. Draegonne over, allowing me even to assist him in the treatment of other patients. As he came to trust me I made the acquaintance of his daughter, Flora.
She was, in retrospect, rather smitten with me, and I suppose the first indication that I was something other than a man should have been the fact that I was not, like all the young men falling over themselves to court her, captivated by her beauty. I appreciated her first class mind, her will, but her physical endowments were all but lost upon me. She began calling me "Mister E" even before my true nature was discovered, finding it tedious to refer to me as her father did as "Patient 23."
Only when the Panthalassa returned to port, and the newspapers made much of her curious discovery, did I begin to remember who I was. For she had discovered, at the bottom of the Vernian Deep, a strange stone vault, an artifact marked with strange runes and which hummed and vibrated as if alive. When they dragged it on board, many of the superstitious sailors claimed the relic "sang" to them in their sleep, giving them dreams of impossibly distant places. Only when she came ashore in New Babbage did I too hear her siren song, and understood that it was meant for me.
She was calling.
Dr. Draegonne and Flora assisted me, at great personal effort, in getting into the warehouse where the artifact was being stored. All New Babbage's finest minds were studying her, but could not, in fact, even figure out how to open her doors. But in the dead of night, the three of us sneaking in, she opened for me at the slightest touch, and I remembered it all.
...I had been a member of the Arcalian Chapter at the Academy, a student in my one hundredth and sixty-seventh year when the Time War broke out. Like so many others, I was drafted. Stationed aboard the black hole carrier "Regulon's Wrath" I was at the battle of the Laughing Darkness when the Horde overcame us, led by the Could-Have-Been-King. We were destroyed, the ship was burning, collapsing into a singularity, when the Fallen Hour came to save me. She was one of the ancient Travel Capsules our ancestors used to make themselves the Lords of Time, a relic that had been gathering dust in my family's ancestral estate. My father had woken her and sent her to rescue me. And so, to my great shame, badly wounded and dying of radiation poisoning, I boarded the Fallen Hour and escaped. Programmed by my father to "save me," she followed her instructions the only way she knew how. She fled the confines of our own space-time continuum, sensing that Gallifrey and my people would all be lost, and bore me into a parallel one, this "Second" or "Linden" space. Badly damaged by the effort, she materialized near the city of New Babbage and fell into the sea...
And so it all came back. I was a
Time Lord, one of the few remaining ones, a survivor of a destroyed planet and civilization. And the
Fallen Hour, my living, semi-sentient Time Travel Capsule, had saved me from joining my race in oblivion.
