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Combat Magicks
(Steve Cole) |
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 Name: The Tenctrama
Format:
Book
Time of Origin: Unspecified planet in the distant past; spent a few centuries on Earth before their defeat in Gaul in 431.
Appearances: "Combat Magicks"
Doctors: Thirteenth Doctor
Companions: Graham O'Brien, Ryan Sinclair and Yasmin Khan
History: In the tradition of foes who attempt to combine science with magic, the Tenctrama's plans were significant in scale, rejecting the science that The Doctor relied on in the name of supporting their own way of life. Their plans reached a level where they sought nothing less than the destruction of life on Earth to continue their own cycle of existence, annihilating whole civilisations in order to ensure their own survival.
While their exact origins are unclear, The Doctor speculated that the Tenctrama's original world was destroyed in some past cataclysm, although given the Tenctrama's ruthlessness they may have caused this damage themselves. They were so ancient that they considered The Doctor a child even when aware that The Doctor they faced was well over a thousand years old at this point in their lives. At this point in their existence, the Tenctrama appeared to lack any true physical existence on their own, requiring the energy of other life-forms to manifest a body that could interact with others. As well as being experts in genetic engineering and capable of essentially reanimating the dead, they were also capable of a degree of telepathic influence, although this was limited to putting living humans into temporary trances and they didn't seem capable of outright controlling other living beings on a long-term basis.
When the Tenctrama came to Earth, they initially 'planted' themselves underground to let their essence grow and gain power until they were ready to rise up, located near a small town. The Doctor speculated that they had been present on Earth for over a thousand years, using the dead of the nearby people to gain energy and establish their power base. When evidence emerged that Earth had been invaded by a race The Doctor identified as the Arcturans without her knowledge, The Doctor speculated that the Tenctrama drove that threat off to avoid others contaminating their plans. In any case, the Tenctrama only properly began to act a few hundred years before The Doctor faced them. They started by attempting to sow discord and create a reputation for themselves as witches, producing nine books of prophecy, allegedly foretelling of future conflict and other disasters. The Tenctrama inspired increased interest in their books by offering to sell them to an emperor and then burning most of the books while increasing the price, leaving the remaining three books with the Roman Emperor of the time, warning that they would return to the Empire eventually. The books also predicted the growth of certain crops that were used as a food source by the armies of various armies, which were nourishing if tasteless. Certain parties correctly suspected that the Tenctrama arranged those events themselves, such as provoking conflicts and creating plagues, but there was no way to prove these suspicions and the Tenctrama were still capable enemies.
After a few centuries of waiting as people ate from their tainted crops, the Tenctrama took more explicit action to ensure that conflict unfolded so that they would get the death they sought. The most common strategy was for different Tenctrama offer their aid to different military leaders so that all parties would have to let the Tenctrama help in order to prevail over their enemies, even if there was no real ‘advantage’ when every side had the same assets. This aid could range from having crows seemingly act as spies to providing mutated creatures known as the Strava created from mixing the DNA of various animals into one chimera. The most twisted form of 'aid' the Tenctrama provided was seemingly restoring the dead so that fallen soldiers could continue fighting, but these reanimated bodies had none of their prior loyalties, only attacking the living to further aid the Tenctrama and would turn on their former allies with ease once the Tenctrama were ready to act.
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| Jodie Whittaker |
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When the TARDIS materialised on Earth after passing through the dimensional anomaly that was the Tenctrama's 'ship', the Thirteenth Doctor, Graham O'Brien, Ryan Sinclair and Yasmin Khan immediately ran into Attila the Hun, who presented himself as another soldier to avoid drawing attention to himself. When the group were attacked by zombie crows, Graham and Ryan were separated from the others when they tried to escape by running into the woods, The Doctor managing to disrupt the crows' control signal with the sonic screwdriver only to be knocked out when Attila used the TARDIS force field generator (which The Doctor had previously used to deflect a similar attack) to drive the crows away. While Attila forced Yaz to help him tie up The Doctor so the two could act as his new magical advisors, Graham ran into a group of Romans while Ryan met Licinia Postuma, a member of the Legion of Smoke, a secret group in the Roman Empire dedicated to studying and collecting potentially supernatural or extra-terrestrial artefacts. Ryan managed to make a more positive impression on Licinia when he mentioned his own association with The Doctor, as the Legion were aware of records of The Doctor's role in events at Rome ("Byzantium!" and "The Romans") and Pompeii ("The Fires of Vulcan").
As The Doctor and her companions learned about the Tenctrama's books, Ryan in particular speculated that the books essentially served as a 'battle plan' for the Tenctrama's campaign. When The Doctor and Yaz confronted Atilla's 'personal' Tenctrama, Inkri, at the Catalaunian Plains, The Doctor warned Yaz that the upcoming battle was a fixed point in time ("The Fires of Pompeii" and "The Waters of Mars"), which meant that the battle couldn't be stopped even if they could deal with the Tenctrama. Most worryingly, the knowledge that aliens were involved made the myths that the battle lasted three days with even the dead rising to continue the battle far more significant even before they witnessed the Tenctrama's reanimated dead. Inkri forced The Doctor to make weapons for Atilla's side by threatening Yaz's life, but The Doctor was able to carry out her own tests on the Tenctrama's crops to confirm that they were genetically altered, those who ate the crops being contaminated in a manner that would essentially prepare them to become fuel for the Tenctrama.
When Inkri tried to have The Doctor and Yaz killed as she concluded the risk they posed outweighed any potential benefits, The Doctor was able to use the sonic screwdriver to access the network the Tenctrama used for teleportation, although she could only use it for random short-range jumps as the system wouldn't be fooled for too long. For a time, the best the TARDIS travellers could do was stay alive as the battle waged around them, but they were eventually able to reunite and pool their knowledge. This included Graham's discovery that a healing gel The Doctor had used to heal Attila and left with Graham before they were separated was actually dangerous to the Tenctrama. Those healed with the gel were considered 'tainted' by the Tenctrama, with the result that they couldn't use anyone healed by the gel as part of their plans, and when Graham threw the gel at one of the Tenctrama directly the Tenctrama literally collapsed into dust while trying to attack him.
As the Tenctrama's reanimated dead attacked both sides, The Doctor and her companions were able to convince the leaders to call a truce and take the survivors to safety. Having managed to infiltrate the Tenctrama ship, The Doctor confirmed that they used their own DNA as a final catalyst in most of their creations, which at least confirmed that stopping the Tenctrama would stop their work as well even if she still didn't know how she would achieve that goal. Confirming that the Tenctrama needed the release of death to gain energy from those they had treated, and with the battle escalating as the dead of both sides turned on the living, The Doctor tried to stop the Tenctrama by offering them access to the TARDIS, suggesting that she could take them into a future where they could process their 'food' without having to kill, but the Tenctrama affirmed that they liked to kill and didn't see the point in changing their ways.
As the Tenctrama began to absorb the life still left on the battlefield, they unintentionally gave The Doctor the key to defeat them; while they had to take care when absorbing humans in case they absorbed anyone who had been treated with the healing gel, they failed to realise that The Doctor had also used healing technology to treat Bittenmane, a horse The Doctor had 'borrowed' from Attila earlier. As a result, when Bittenmane was absorbed, the Tenctrama had to expel the horse's energy from their system in order to prevent it contaminating their energy supply. With this as an example, The Doctor was able to quickly use the sonic screwdriver to scan the system as it expelled the energy from Bittenmane and hack the Tenctrama system to force it to expel all the energy they had absorbed, even the energy they would have been able to feed on. The Doctor was also able to configure the system so that the Tenctrama themselves would be converted into energy to sustain the plants, ensuring that they wouldn't be able to manifest again as they were essentially converted into compost. With their ship lost in the teleportation network and unable to return to the real world, The Doctor was confident that the Tenctrama wouldn't be able to threaten anyone again.
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