I’m horrible. Jessin was always supposed to have a scar on his cheekbone, but my first idea for how he got it was just being shoved and hitting his head on something sharp when he fell.
Now he’s getting mistaken for his clone (who he’s never met and doesn’t know exists) by someone who’s out for said clone’s blood and getting a slave brand cut into his face.
So. Jessin. I don’t have a visual representation because I can’t settle on a design for him. I know a few things about his appearance: he has pale orange eyes in all four of his regenerations, and his skin is completely opaque (as opposed to translucent as in humans and most Gallifreyans).
Simply put, he’s part TARDIS coral. In Ten’s console room, you can see the coral in its natural state in the columns. All TARDISes are grown from coral, manipulated into the exo-shell and internal dimensions and augmented with objects made from Block Transfer equations. (Block Transfer Mathematics can make “real” objects out of nothing but a series of equations; I don’t fully understand it either.) The coral makes up the base structure of a TARDIS, and the equipment used therein is made up of Block Transfer Equations.
Jessin, like all current members of his House, Nulltide, is a Gallifreyan with recombinant DNA composed of 80% Gallifreyan and 20% TARDIS coral. Nulltide’s genome was modified by hand to accept the coral DNA during its first generation in an effort to become what the House members sought to understand.
The founder, Caestus, was a brilliant engineer who developed technology powerful enough to stop the tides of the Arcadian Ocean and allow the city of Arcadia to be build without the threat of destruction looming over everyone’s heads. When her work was rendered obsolete by the ocean being burned away, she turned her attention to developing technology for TARDISes, and found them impossible to understand due to their semi-autonomous nature and ability to reject things that they felt did not suit them. So she gave up after a few centuries and remarked to her cousins, “We cannot hope to understand that which we are not.”
Renva took this a bit too literally, deciding to solve the problem by having their next generation become (part) TARDIS. He stole TARDIS coral from the Black Hole Shipyard, integrated it into the House’s loom, and started creating new cousins. Everything went downhill for a while; the rest of House Nulltide found out and realized that they couldn’t turn him over to the High Council for tampering with their genome because they’d strike all of Nulltide from history, not just Renva. They had to fix his mess without alerting anyone else.
Caestus thought his solution was brilliant and worked with him to stabilize the hybrid DNA, as the initial genome was highly volatile and caused their new cousins to die within days or hours of being created. After many trials, many deaths, and their Housekeeper begging them to stop because she couldn’t take losing any more children, they finally stabilized it enough. It wasn’t perfect, though.
Their new cousins only had three regenerations (four total bodies) instead of the usual twelve, and with each regeneration, their DNA would become more and more unstable until it ripped itself apart during a failed fourth regeneration. They had an insatiable longing for the Time Vortex, to the point where they’d steal a TARDIS, disable her curiosity circuit, and stay in the Vortex with her until someone came to retrieve them. Eventually the other Nulltide cousins figured out how to engage the hybrids enough to drown out the pull of the Vortex.
House Nulltide is forbidden from becoming Time Lords because of their past renegade problem. They can take classes at the Patrex Academy but cannot attend the Time Academy in any capacity. Nowadays, they’re brilliant TARDIS engineers and have developed almost all defense systems on TARDISes Types 38 and later. Part of the reason for their success is their ability to speak to TARDISes as if they were fellow Gallifreyans. It looks to outsiders like they’re talking to themselves when they do, as TARDISes are purely telepathic. They consider TARDISes to their sisters, while TARDISes see them as nieces and nephews, as they are the hybrid children of one of their own.
Their existence is unsettling to pure Gallifreyans at best and mildly painful at worst. It’s very similar to the uncanny valley—they look almost exactly like pure Gallifreyans, but there’s always something off (the opaque skin, the pale orange eyes, the spacey attitude, the way they just know things they have no way of knowing). Other Gallifreyans can sense that there’s something “wrong” with Nulltide, but they can’t pinpoint what it is, and that’s enough to put them on edge.
Jessin himself is the youngest member of House Nulltide, barely 116 years old when he leaves Gallifrey. That makes him about 14-15 in terms of how humans develop. He was attending the Patrex Academy and had been about to graduate with a focus in TARDIS Repair and Maintenance, but unfortunately, he got expelled. Young Gallifreyans, much like young humans, can be rather cruel when they can tell there’s something not normal about an individual. Some classmates of his from more respected Houses told him they wanted help studying for exams, rigged a console to explode in his face, and made him take the fall for it.
He’s used to being one of the smartest people in the room, especially where TARDIS repair is concerned, having created a method to save dying TARDISes who are deleting their own pocket dimensions due to a failed subroutine at just shy of 95 years old. He created this method to save a Type 50 he’d been working on since he entered the Patrex Academy, but he only figured it out fully when it was too late to save her.
When the Master arrived on Gallifrey (not by choice, mind you) sometime before Castrovalva, his TARDIS was suffering from the same failed subroutine, and Jessin was quick to jump on the chance to save her. The Master wasn’t too thrilled by the idea of taking a companion, especially one so young, but faced with his TARDIS’ imminent death, he had no other choice. Things get especially complicated when the other reason Jessin is so willing to help is revealed: he mistook the Master for the Doctor, since they’re both Prydonian Renegades with Old-Type TARDISes.
Away from Gallifrey for the first time in his life, racing against time to save a dying TARDIS, and worrying about the stability of this new branch timeline he’s created, Jessin is Stressed. It’s starting to hit him that while he is brilliant, outside of TARDIS repair, he doesn’t know much of anything at all. And on top of that, he’s starting to doubt that his new friend is who he says he is, because he doesn’t act much like the Doctor at all.
Jessin is sweet and naïve. He prefers to believe most beings are well-intentioned and kind even if he knows that’s not true, and he tries to focus on the best-case scenario outcomes because considering the less-than-ideal possibilities stresses him out a lot. He’s also insecure about his age relative to his intelligence, often getting frustrated when people dismiss him as a child or as ignorant when they won’t bother explaining anything to him. Where other Gallifreyans find him unsettling purely due to his hybrid nature, he finds non-hybrids and non-TARDISes very confusing and funny, but he’s willing to make an effort to understand them.
He has trouble paying attention to everything happening in his physical environment because TARDISes are so much more interesting and can keep his attention with very little effort. This has led to others remarking that he’s “Not quite here.” There are times when he comes across as rude due to not paying enough attention to the beings around him. He rambles a lot, mostly because he gets off track. For example, he’ll start talking about topic A, which is tangentially related to topic B, and mid-sentence switch to talking about topic B.
He loves to collect broken alien tech and see what he can make out of it. It’s very rare for the things he makes to work the way he intends them to, if they work at all, but he has fun and it keeps his hands busy. When he isn’t messing with some random bit of alien tech or working on repairs, he’s usually rubbing the grip of his multipurpose sonic tool or playing with the hems of his clothes while he tries to figure out something to do. He’s also very particular about the things he makes and collects, gets agitated when people move them or touch them without asking, and doesn’t care much for trying to name his creations.
I need to stop before I go on for another two pages. His story is very long and complicated, and he is just the embodiment of the anxieties of being a gifted kid whose peers caught up in high school, growing up as a neurodivergent queer kid in a very Catholic community, my dissociation from being truly human, and my experiences with idolizing the wrong people for the wrong reasons. I want him to wear Ouji and/or Boystyle because he has absolutely no happy ending and his entire story is one big Break the Cutie and he needs something cute and happy, goddamnit!
So you have Jt’, who is a Kin’ts’n-made modified clone of Jessin, who is a Gallifreyan/TARDIS coral hybrid and the reincarnation via looming of Caestus, who is a full-blooded Gallifreyan and the founder of House Nulltide.
