The Tourist

Illustration by Bri Crozier.

**The Tourist** was a renegade of the Elder species in one of the 10,000 Drafts. She realised her reality was an “unfinished universe” and escaped in the Black Pyramid, carving out a new place for her, fellow escapees Miranda and Pathway, and their new friends Ashlyn Oswin and Shona Daniels, inside the 10,000 Dawns.

## Character Overview

### Personality

The Tourist was notorious for always doing what she deemed to be the right thing, in a ruthlessly utilitarian sort of way; if she deemed that something had to be done, she was willing to “kill, slaughter, maim, or exterminate” to do it. She was destructive of those around her as a result, although she claimed that she was herself a victim of the violence that chased her throughout her travels. (PROSE: *Go On, Toddle Along*)

After she escaped the 10,000 Drafts, the Tourist went from a deadpan, but willful, individual to someone consumed with a burning thirst to be noticed by the universe.(PROSE: *The Forgotten Heroines of 10,000 Dawns Big Takeover!*) Although she grew to care for her new travelling companions, (PROSE: *Not Forgotten*) the Tourist was initially dismissive of them, lording her greater understanding over them and using them as little more than pawns in her scheme to get herself noticed by the rest of creation — and pointedly not telling them some things. (PROSE: *The Forgotten Heroines of 10,000 Dawns Big Takeover!*, *Remembrance of the Judicator*) She had, for the first period of her travels in the 10,000 Dawns, had some of the darkness literally sucked out of her by her fellow Elder the Resident, turning her into a significantly mellower individual; (PROSE: *The Leader of the Band*) when temporarily reverted to her original, callous self, she had trouble even remembering Ashlyn's actual *name*. (PROSE: *Go On, Toddle Along*)

She described herself as “queer”. (PROSE: *The Forgotten Heroines of 10,000 Dawns Big Takeover!*) She was very much a sexual being, who described “hate sex” as one of the only things which made her happy. She had a one-night-stand with her own Firmament counterpart Lady Aesc, despite despising her as a parody of herself, and later tried her best to seduce Ashlyn Oswin. (PROSE: *Go On, Toddle Along*)

### Physical appearance

The Tourist appeared as a white human-like woman with black hair cropped just above shoulder-length, (PROSE: *The Forgotten Heroines of 10,000 Dawns Big Takeover!*) though, in one account, her curly brown hair was done up in a pompadour. Her skin was smooth and “chameleon-like”; she appeared to be in her 50's, and looked it. She was lean to the point of being “almost cockroach-like”. (PROSE: *Go On, Toddle Along*)

She usually wore a black trenchcoat, black pants, a black tie, a white shirt, and black sunglasses; completing her “edgy” look was a cigarette eternally hanging out of her mouth, (PROSE: *The Forgotten Heroines of 10,000 Dawns Big Takeover!*) with accounts split on whether it was never (PROSE: *Go On, Toddle Along*) or constantly lit. (PROSE: *Remembrance of the Judicator*) Inconveniently, the black jackboots she had ordered never arrived, so she completed the outfit with pink ballerina shoes. (PROSE: *Go On, Toddle Along*) She also wore a watch. (PROSE: *The Leader of the Band*)

### Abilities

The Tourist had the ability to control the size and movement of her Black Pyramid, a ship which travelled through narrative. (PROSE: *The Forgotten Heroines of 10,000 Dawns Big Takeover!*) Her shadow could move on its own accord (REF: *Original Series Bible*) and she displayed the ability to stay alive after seemingly drowning in the temporally-charged liquid drenching the floor of the Time Sewers. (PROSE: *Remembrance of the Judicator*) A literal lightbulb once materialised over her head after she got a particularly clever idea, which she then scrambled to catch before it fell down and shattered on the floor. (PROSE: *The Leader of the Band*)

## Biography

### Origins

The Tourist was originally a member of “a powerful race of beings called the Elders”, who “ruled their universe from the sidelines”. However, she eventually realised that this happened within an unfinished universe, one of the “10,000 Drafts”, sketches of realities discarded by the Firmament when they created the 10,000 Dawns. (PROSE: *The Forgotten Heroines of 10,000 Dawns Big Takeover!*) On a metafictional level, she had been written during “the Bush era”. (PROSE: *The Leader of the Band*)

When asked to introduce herself, she would sometimes go on tangential diatribes about how “no one could ever know her true identity as it was forsaken to the cruel horrors of the universe”. (PROSE: *Go On, Toddle Along*)

### Life in the Drafts

The Tourist once implied that she had been a teacher before choosing the life of a wandering, crusading tourist. (PROSE: *The Leader of the Band*)

After leaving the Elders, the Tourist travelled to dangerous places in the Black Pyramid, fighting evil wherever she found it. (REF: *Original Series Bible*) She was as dangerous as she was angst-ridden, and this led her into an unhealthy relationship with her more grounded fellow Elder, the Resident — which the Resident summarized thusly: “I'll wait for you at home, I'll tend the garden and wait for you to rest your head on my lap after you accidentally burn down an orphanage while trying to save the world again”. (PROSE: *The Leader of the Band*)

### Escape

Realising her position and seeking understanding, the Tourist decided to hop into the Black Pyramid and use it to escape by traveling through narrative. (PROSE: *The Forgotten Heroines of 10,000 Dawns Big Takeover!*) The method in which she did so was arrived at in a joint effort with her frenemy the Resident after a whole year of study, during which the Tourist couch-crashed in the Resident's home. To make sure she would not stand out *quite* so much and be immediately extracted by the Firmament, the Resident decided to suck some of the Tourist's darkness out of her, leaving her dark-themed and deadpan, but not quite as wantonly violent and callous as before. (PROSE: *The Leader of the Band*)

Becoming a "substantially more metafictional being" than she had originally been, (PROSE: *Remembrance of the Judicator*) the Tourist travelled to a universe where all of the 10,000 Dawns were simply fiction created by “a talentless hack”. She learned that her “counterpart” in the finished *10,000 Dawns* “narrative” was the appallingly colourful Lady Aesculapius, and decided that she “didn't want to live like this”. (PROSE: *The Forgotten Heroines of 10,000 Dawns Big Takeover!*)

In a solo adventure in the 10,000 Dawns, the Tourist encountered Lady Aesc in person, helping her defeat the Fabulous Killjoys and save Better Living Industries. Following this adventure, the Tourist had a “drunken one-night stand” with Aesc, whose name she later had difficulty remembering. During her early meddling in the Dawns, she also somehow became responsible for the existence of all life within it. (PROSE: *Go On, Toddle Along*)

### The Colonel

Arriving in one of the Dawns, the Tourist befriended Colonel Eliezer Levenston-Stalworth, a member of the British occupation army in India and staunch imperialist. She helped him and his men fight against the “barbarous hordes” of Yeti and the insidious might of the Robotmen. Somewhere around this time, the Tourist ordered a pair of jackboots to complete her outfit, which didn't arrive for five years. (PROSE: *Go On, Toddle Along*)

### Recruiting the Forgotten Heroines

The Tourist returned to the 10,000 Drafts and helped two other “unfinished” individuals, Miranda and Pathway, escape. She transported them to Dawn 5, where they met up with Ashlyn Oswin, and also created a portal which led Shona to the same place. Explaining the situation to them, she unveiled her plan to rampage across the 10,000 Dawns and broadcast the results from the View, so that the five of them would be “forgotten” no more. The four other Forgotten Heroines enthusiastically agreed. (PROSE: *The Forgotten Heroines of 10,000 Dawns Big Takeover!*)

### Rampaging

Alongside Miranda, Pathway, Ashlyn and Shona, the Tourist travelled to several universes in the 10,000 Dawns and the 10,000 Drafts, “disrupting narratives”. She formed and enacted the project to destroy one reality completely — as it happened, Redacted Pinorva's world — to attract the attention of their “creator”. (PROSE: *Breaking the Narrative*)

At some point, a member of the “fam” other than the Tourist or Ashlyn got “kidnapped and ravished by the Immortal Transphobe”. The Tourist, meanwhile, had to team up with “her own evil past self”, to whose existence she had thus far been clueless, to fend off the space police, who were miffed about the aforementioned “creating all life in the universe” shenanigans. (PROSE: *Go On, Toddle Along*)

The Tourist, having failed to sleep for several days, attempted to give a presentation to Miranda, Ashlyn and Shona on a whiteboard, but it quickly became apparent that her mental faculties needed the rest. She rejected Ashlyn's offer to come sleep with her, claiming melodramatically that as “her inner darkness [was] too great, it would only engulf [Ashlyn] in shadow”. In any event, she did not end up going to bed at all, alone or otherwise, as the serendipitous discovery that Pathway could sing ignited a new scheme in the Tourist's mind to gain the notoriety she needed: form a band.

To achieve this, the Forgotten Heroines travelled to one of the Resident's houses inside the Dawns, with the Tourist only briefly admitting that she'd missed the Resident before demanding that the Resident teach her and her friends how to play musical instruments — with the Tourist learning the drums.

Even though the first round of the “battle of the bands” at the View in which they had entered was a success, the Tourist was then pulled backstage by the Resident, who missed the needy and grimdark Tourist of yore and forcibly returned her darkness to her. The once-again über-dark Tourist planned to ditch her entire crew, but was convinced by an increasingly seductive Ashlyn to instead only leave Shona, Miranda and Pathway behind, leaving Ashlyn and the “dark” Tourist to travel together as a couple. The Tourist subsequently left all but Ashlyn at a convenience store with a curt suggestion to “try the flamin' hot chips”. (PROSE: *The Leader of the Band*)

### Adventures with Ashlyn

Travelling alone with Ashlyn, the Tourist experienced a series of adventures that increasingly resembled darker, grittier versions of adventures of the Doctor in *Doctor Who*. They “stopped reds from stealing Martian death weapons”, sacrificed the Tourist's own people for the safety of the universe, foiled a robot who had been planning to kill the Queen of England and take over the United Kingdom using a robot army, taught a death bot to kill its own kind, and “blew up the Enchanted Wood” in a deed that disturbed Ashlyn herself.

Ashlyn briefly tried to get back together with Graelyn, but their date was interrupted by the Tourist. The Tourist claimed that this was simply because she'd been “bored”, but was secretly trying to “adjust” Ashlyn's personality until she would be willing to have sex with the Tourist and to generally become her companion on a full-time basis.

After the two, at the Tourist's insistence, “helped a bank kidnap and brainwash an intelligent life form”, Ashlyn began to object to the immortality of the Tourist's adventures. She was put in charge of their next adventure by the Tourist, when they travelled to a Moon taken over by seemingly-hostile carnivorous giant spiders. Ashlyn got a sense of goodness from them, believing they were only aggressive because the Space Marines had opened fire first. However, she did let herself blow up the Moon with the bomb the Tourist had provided.

### Kicked out of the Pyramid

Back in the Black Pyramid's control room, the Tourist asked Ashlyn what was troubling her, hoping to proposition her afterwards. This led to Ashlyn explaining her suspicions to a guilty Tourist. The Tourist tried to tell her that it didn't matter and their stories were worth living even if they were patterned after *Doctor Who*, but Ashlyn retorted that she feared the way her story arc would go if she continued to live out a darker version of Clara Oswald's life, such as dying and then having to be resurrected by the Elders at the cost of being forced to live in slavery on their world, birthing time machines.

When it became clear that the Tourist was only interested in her carnally and didn't love her enough to even know her name offhand, Ashlyn pushed the Tourist out of the Pyramid and took it over for solo adventures. The Tourist fell in the world of liezer Levenston-Stalworth, whom she once more rejoined as her advisor. She was found unconscious in a pile of manure, with a delivery-bot waiting by her side with those cursed jackboots she had ordered five years earlier. (PROSE: *Go On, Toddle Along*)

## Behind the scenes

As the character is herself aware thanks to her metafictional qualities within *The Forgotten Heroines of 10,000 Dawns*, the Tourist was originally developed as an early draft of the character archetype who later became Lady Aesculapius.