Ned Hines

"Ned Hines" was the alias adopted in Victorian London by an Iytean symbiont after he took partial possession of the body of Doctor Henry Jellicoe. According to one account, Jellicoe and Hines were the true inspiration for The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Biography
The Iytean originally lived around the year 3000 BC, and was a scientist among its own kind in the golden age of the flourishing Iytean Confederacy. However, it began to study the possibility of bonding with a sapient vessel instead of an animal, something which was highly taboo in Iytean culture; it discovered that such an alliance, if successful, would allow the Iytean to double its mental capacities, granting it great power. With complete control, it could even force the Iytean Change upon the host. However, this could only be fully achieved by feeding the host a willpower-sapping chemical over an extended period of time.

Eventually, it was captured by the Monitors, the Iytean police corps, along with five accomplices. They were forced out of their possessed bodies placed in stasis pods on an Iytean starship; they were being flown back to Iytea for trial when the ship crashed on Earth. The Monitors decided to bury it there and try to get back to Iytea in a smaller craft, then return with the means to repair the starship. However, the planet was then caught in the Anar-Isari wars and destroyed before they could do so. As a result, the Iytean criminals remained buried in stasis for nearly five millennia.

Finally, in 1883, it was unearthed by chance by a pair of thieves, Jack Bannister and Bert Jenkins. The latter accidentally opened the scientist's stasis pod, and the symbiont tried to possess him. It was unable to fully control him, but the spasmic flailing caused by their warring wills caused Bannister to believe Jenkins was having a seizure and to take him to a reputed physician, Doctor Henry Jellicoe, who was known for treating nervous conditions and for often treating poor patients for free. As the Doctor examined him, the Iytean left Jenkins's body and jumped into Jellicoe's instead.

Wary of repeating its earlier mistake, it lay dormant within him until an opportune time. At a dinner, however, Jellicoe was presented by his friend Sir Reginald Carruthers with a vial of green chemical powder which was really a key ingredient of the will-sapping drug, which Bannister and Jenkins had retrieved from the starship and then sold to Carruthers. The Iytean planted the desire to study it in Jellicoe's mind, and, after he took it home with him, engineered a lab accident which caused Jellicoe to consume some of it. Now in control of Jellicoe's body for spells of six to eight hours at a time after he consumed the drug, the Iytean was free to impose the Iytean Change upon him, temporarily transforming his host's body to a squatter but hardier and stronger form. He created the alias of "Ned Hines" for this new persona, and began using his time as Hines to resume the hedonistic lifestyle which had been denied to him by the lack of a body, while also planning a long-term takeover the Earth.

When he came to, Jellicoe had no memory of being possessed by the symbiont, though he remembered everything "he" had done as Hines. As a result, he believed his fortuitous "lab accident" had led to him discovering a drug that had created an alter-ego within his own mind, acting out his own dark impulses. Though he felt guilty about it, Jellicoe became addicted to this feeling of amoral abandon, and began taking the drug regularly of his own accord. However, his supply of green powder ran out, even though the Iytean had yet to finish completely taking over Hines to the point where he would no longer need regular doses of the drug to keep him subdued permanently. He stole two additional vials from Sir Reginald Carruthers's house, but by early 1885, this too had run out. He realised he needed to get the location of the buried starship from Jack Bannister and Bert Jenkins, and murdered Reginald while trying to get their location out of him.

However, after unraveling the mystery and discovering the Iytean starship's location, a team of time-travellers associated with the Celestial Intervention Agency, led by Rollo, were able to stop Hines's plan before he could fully overpower Jellicoe and then give birth to a hundred spores carrying his memories, who would find hosts and reproduce in turn until all of Earth was under their control. Subsequently, Rollo shared the story with Robert Louis Stevenson, who was thus inspired to write The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. (GAME: )