The Iyteans were an amoeboid, symbiotic species from the planet Iytea in Mutter's Spiral. They experienced a golden age around 3000 years BC.
Biology[]
Physiology[]
The Iyteans were an amoeboid race similar to the Rutans, though smaller in size; an individual Iytean weighed only three to five pounds. They flourished in more or less the same temperature range as humans.
Their bodies were exclusively composed of "multicellular, nonspecialised tissues" which could roughly perform any function from muscular to cerebral, though it meant the Iyteans' senses were extremely limited. Capable of changing shape as needed, for example to squeeze through extremely small apertures (an Iytean could hypothetically seep into soil to escape a dangerous situation), they appeared as a viscous, liquid pool when at rest, and as a "mobile jelly" when active; either way they were translucent.
As a result of this fluid anatomy, they were extremely hard to kill: an unprotected Iytean could only be killed by weapons which could "destroy the entire creature in one attack", such as fire, distintegrators, or rapid freezers. An Iytean could even survive being cut in half, though the halves would be severely disoriented until they could rejoin, and would retain "serious psychological trauma".
Iyteans communicated with each other through a form of "touch-telepathy", requiring either direct physical contact, or through a network similar to a phone landline, made of an "organo-metallic substance". (GAME: "The Iytean Race" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, J. Andrew Keith, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game (FASA, 1985).)
Symbiosis[]
Having evolved from a parasitic strain of life, there Iyteans were reliant on host organisms for mobility and complex sensory inputs. A single Iytean could control animals "up to the size of a terrestrial elephant". However, they had evolved to be symbiotic, protecting their animal hosts against injury and disease in exchange. By using their own biomass to close a wound or hold a fractured bone in place until it healed, they could greatly increase their host's resilience against physical trauma. They could also store an emergency supply of air to remedy suffocation or drowning.
They could also trigger the Iytean Change in their host, temporarily reshaping their host's body to a completely different anatomy, then reversing the change as desired. On their homeworld, the Iyteans typically used this to temporarily grant their possessed bodies greater dexterity, since no life on Iytea had naturally evolved hands. However, a warlike Iytean could instead choose to boost the host's physical strength and bestiality; it was speculated that some legends of werewolves were cultural memories of villainous Iyteans imposing such a change on human hosts.
Typically, however, the Iyteans were not able to successfully possess sapient beings, with the two warring intelligences typically causing insanity for both victim and host. Only by sapping the will of the sapient host with chemicals, or by coming to an explicit understanding with the host, could such a symbiosis be achieved. However, if successful, it would considerably boost the mental powers of the Iytean. (GAME: "The Iytean Race" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, J. Andrew Keith, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game (FASA, 1985).)
Reproduction[]
Iyteans were an asexual species who reproduced by budding; any one Iytean was capable of producing up to one hundred offspring, but they could only do it once in their life, and the process required "tremendous energy, and lengthy periods of preparation and recuperation". Each new Iytean retained the knowledge, memories and even personality of the "parent", only diverging gradually over the course of their now-individualised existence. For this reason Iyteans had little need of written culture, as any Iytean logically carried the accumulated memory of all its ancestors, going back to the earliest days of the race. (GAME: "The Iytean Race" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, J. Andrew Keith, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game (FASA, 1985).)
History[]
The Iyteans evolved gradually from a parasitic race. Their culture evolved slowly, generation by generation, as memories were accumulated. Their technological development was greatly accelerated when the Iytean Change was perfected, allowing the Iyteans to give their hosts better dexterity and eventually achieve interstellar travels. Exploring nearby worlds, they began seeding uninhabited ones with Iytean colonists who could populate such a planet single-handedly via rapid reproduction, but they also discovered non-symbiotic sapient races for the first time, quickly developing a taboo against attempting to possess such beings. They also discovered stasis pods which could slow time by a factor of 100,000:1 for their occupants. (GAME: "The Iytean Race" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, J. Andrew Keith, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game (FASA, 1985).)
Building asmall interstellar confederacy of loosely-associated colony worlds, whose territory extended, in its outer fringes, to the solar system, the peaceful Iyteans became known as "the Galaxy's greatest hedonists". (GAME: "The Iytean Race" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, J. Andrew Keith, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game (FASA, 1985).) However, circa 3000 BC, a malevolent Iytean scientist began experimenting with a will-sapping drug which would allow him to forcibly control sapient hosts. (GAME: "Non-Player Characters" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, J. Andrew Keith, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game (FASA, 1985).) He and his accomplices were discovered by the Iytean peacekeeping force, the Monitor, and were being flown back to Iytea in an Iytean starship when the ship developed an engine failure and crashed on Earth, where the three Monitors on-board decided to keep the six criminals in their stasis pods, bury the ship, and try and fly back to their home planet in a smaller "lifeboat" craft before returning with the means to repair the ship. (GAME: "Dealing With The Unexpected" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, J. Andrew Keith, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game (FASA, 1985).)
Either before, or shortly after, the Monitors made it back to Iytea, the planet was caught in the cross-fire of the Anar-Isari wars and almost completely destroyed. Subsequently, the remaining Iytean colony worlds were picked off by the Sontarans and Rutans. As a result, no one returned for the starship, which remained buried under London for thousands of years. (GAME: "Dealing With the Unexpected" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, J. Andrew Keith, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game (FASA, 1985)., "The Iytean Race" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, J. Andrew Keith, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game (FASA, 1985).) In 1883, it was uncovered by the thieves Bert Jenkins and Jack Bannister. The former accidentally opened a stasis pod and was temporarily possessed by the Iytean scientist, (GAME: "Introduction Story" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, J. Andrew Keith, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game (FASA, 1985).) who then jumped from him to the physician Henry Jellicoe, whom he manipulated into recreating and consuming the will-sapping drug over the next two years, gradually gaining almost complete control. However, his plans to achieve complete dominance over Jellicoe's body and then bud as the first stage of a complete takeover of Earth were foiled in early 1885 by the Time Lord Rollo and his companions, (GAME: "Solving the Mystery" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, J. Andrew Keith, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game (FASA, 1985).) who arranged for the starship to be destroyed or otherwise put out of harm's way. (GAME: "Tying Up Loose Ends" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, J. Andrew Keith, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game (FASA, 1985).) The misadventure would subsequently inspire Robert Louis Stevenson to write The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, removing the aliens from the plot, changing Henry Jellicoe's name to Henry Jekyll, and changing "Ned Hines", the alias the Iytean scientist had adopted while in control of Doctor Jellicoe's body, to "Edward Hyde", an alter ego born purely of Jekyll's own darker impulses. (GAME: "The Hunters Home From the Hill" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, J. Andrew Keith, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game (FASA, 1985).)
However, it was possible that another Iytean criminal, one of the scientist's cronies, had also managed to escape from its stasis pod, and, bonding with a weak-willed human, would go on to influence him to become "Jack the Ripper". Furthermore, the Celestial Intervention Agency speculated that other Iyteans may have survived in stasis across the universe past the species's supposed point of extinction; other ones trapped on Earth may have been responsible for legends of lycanthropy and werewolves. (GAME: "Other Adventures" [+]Part of The Iytean Menace, J. Andrew Keith, The Doctor Who Role Playing Game (FASA, 1985).)
