Lady Aesculapius

Lady Aesculapius. called Aesc for short, was a member of the Firmament, the powerful species who controlled the bounded multiverse known as the 10,000 Dawns. A renegade, she travelled across all universes aboard her Factory of Crystal.

Early life
Aesculapius was a Firmament. Her teacher when she was young was Professor Meistras, a harsh, twisted individual who frequently killed her current incarnation to "teach her a lesson", who would remain her nemesis throughout her subsequent lives.

Eventually, Aesculapius became a freewheeling space-time-traveller aboard her "Factory of Crystal", (PROSE: Life After Death) or "Foce", interdimensional vessels which could resize themselves as anything from marbles to moons. (PROSE: A Bright White Crack)

Aesculapius had many incarnations, who died in a variety of ways. When possible, she recovered her past bodies and laid them to rest inside her Factory.

She picked up a number of companions, who came and went. They included Graelyn Scythes, Archimedes Von Ahnerabe, and, at a different point in time, Blanche Combine. She also shared single adventures with Rita Andros and Jessica Zhane, but stayed in contact with both women. (PROSE: Life After Death)

Blue-peacoat-wearing incarnation
One incarnation of Lady Aesculapius had curly hair and wore a blue peacoat. She also often wore a slouch cap of the same colour. (PROSE: White Canvas)

The Christmas Needle Agreement
When the Firmament were turned to fiction by Auteur, Lady Aesc tried to find other survivors using her Quantum Whisk, which led her to New York City in 2460. From there, she joined Graelyn and Arch in pursuit of the painted warriors into the Totality. After meeting with Littlejohn on Gendar and being joined by Coloth, Aesc and her cohorts confronted the original Mammoths. They were then betrayed by Auteur and Aesc was made a fictional character. In Auteur's Town, Aesc was the star of a long-running television series which had 276 blu-rays and "wasn't suited to movies" although one was eventually developed. Aesc escaped from fictionality during the Town's destruction and briefly fought a group of Auteur's people with Coloth. Later, she was present at the Needle during the signing of the Christmas Needle Agreement, playing cards with Archimedes Von Ahnerabe, Coloth, and many other aliens. (PROSE: White Canvas)

Final adventure
Travelling with Jason Jackson, Aesc discovered the Utopia Dimension, a world whose inhabitants had developed a "device" which allowed them to destroy other universes. She and Jason were unable to stop them, to their chagrin, but did not initially think much of it, assuming the existence of such a world was a statistical inevitability in an infinite multiverse. However, Professor Meistras, recently reincarnated, learned that Aesc had poked on the far edges of the Utopia Dimension affair and decided to warn her off investigating further by using her own Factory of Crystal to put a booby-trapped parcel in Aesc's control room. Guilelessly opening it, Aesc was killed right in the heart of her Factory, with Jason soon finding her body and panicking, as he hadn't had the chance to learn about her method of resurrective immortality yet. (PROSE: Life After Death)

Solving her own murder
However, Aesculapius was then reborn in a new body, who adopted a new "adventuring look" including black biker boots, checked trousers, a large belt, a "garish" floral shirt, and a grey tweed coat with a colourful enamel hedgehog pin on her lapel.

Revealing herself to Jason Jackson as he stood over her prior body, she decided to keep her survival a secret as part of a ploy to figure out who had killed her in the first place. She sent out invitations to her funeral to all of her friends and acquaintances, including Coloth, Auteur, Rita Andros, Jessica Zhane, Steve, and many more, and also ran an "intergalactic pan-dimensional obituary" to "make sure [her] death [was] the hottest of hot gossip". At the service, which was held in a chapel grown inside her Factory of Crystal, she wore an old Sherlock Holmes costume which had been bought by Graelyn Scythes during her travels with Aesc and left onboard the Factory, and used the thin alias of Aesc's "cousin", "Lady Raesculapius".

She read a short eulogy for herself and then invited the guests to the golden room next to the chapel, where she had set up a buffet. There, she and Jason mingled, and she suddenly had an idea and hurried back to the main control tower of the Factory, where she ran a DNA test on the parcel. The scan was not just inconclusive as she had first assumed, but was explicitly not a match for any individual Aesc had encountered before. Since the deed had obviously been the work of someone who knew her, she realised they must be a fellow Firmament in a new body, from which it was a logical step to blame Meistras.

Returning to the wake, she revealed her true identity, and throwing off the Sherlock cape to debut her new look, to a mostly unsurprised audience. She then exposed her reasoning to the crowd, and Graelyn and Arch stopped Meistras — currently in the body of "a woman with a ginger afro", wearing a purple dress — from making a hasty exit. Meistras admitted to the murder and explicitly warned Aesc away from investigating the Utopia Dimension again, warning her that it could mean her permanent death. She then escaped in her Factory of Crystal together with a mysterious child called Ofelia who appeared to be her charge. Returning to the buffet, Aesc, now settled into her new persona, looked fondly back on the life which had just ended, stating simply that "this was fun". Naturally, contrary to Meistras's intention, the day's events had further spurred her and Jason to investigate the Utopia Dimension. (PROSE: Life After Death)

Wishing Graelyn a happy birthday
Lady Aesc, Jason Jackson and Blanche Combine were among the friends of Graelyn Scythes's from across the realities who answered Archimedes Von Ahnerabe's call for video greetings to send to Graelyn when she had to spend her birthday in quarantine. On this occasion, she was wearing a T-shirt which had I'm Lady Aesculapius written on it. She enthusiastically wished Graelyn a happy birthday, and promised to get her friend Virginia Stens-6 to make Graelyn some cupcakes once she was free to meet people in person again. She then got Jason and Blanche to deliver their own birthday wishes, somewhat awkwardly in both cases for very different reasons. (PROSE: Birthdays are Made for Memories)

Encounters with Chris Cwej
Lady Aesculapius once gave Chris Cwej, who was unaware of her identity at the time, a banana smoothie at Padrano Pier. (PROSE: A Bright White Crack, Barnyard of the Cyberons)

She later aided Chris, Kwol and Larles by giving them a ride in her ship back to the Totality after they realised they were stranded in Dawn 1027. (PROSE: A Bright White Crack)

Behind the scenes
Originating in the short story Never Go On Walks, first published in James Wylder's unofficial Doctor Who poetry book An Eloquence of Time and Space, Aesculapius was a take-off on the Doctor, similar to the likes of the Chiropodist or Iris Wildthyme, essentially serving as her corner of the multiverse's equivalent to him — being a renegade member of the Firmament to match the Doctor's status as a Renegade Time Lord, wielding a Quantum Whisk as a wink to the sonic screwdriver, and travelling with companions in a dimensionally-anomalous space-time ship. The name "Aesculapius" is a reference to this, alluding indirectly to the idea of a "doctor" by being the Latin name for the Greco-Roman God of Medicine.

As the character evolved, she and the lore of the Firmament took on more distinct characteristics; for example, although, like the Doctor, Aesc displayed the ability to escape death many times over, she was shown to revive herself by downloading her consciousness into new bodies. However, winking similarities remained a recurring element of Lady Aesculapius: Series 1, with Life After Death featuring her Master-like nemesis Meistras (and including a red herring character with even greater similairities to the Master), and the story Jason and the Astronauts drew intentional parallels between the process of Aesc changing bodies and a regeneration scene, with Aesc paraphrasing several of the Doctor's lines from their regeneration scenes — "I just want you to tell you that you were fantas-" (TV: The Parting of the Ways) "I’ll always remember when I was me" (TV: The Time of the Doctor) and "I don’t want to go!". (TV: The End of Time)

Lady Aesculapius's incarnations have never been officially numbered. Life After Death served as the transition from one who was characterised by her blue frock coatto a new incarnation, illustrated on the poster of the series.