Hazel learns from Humanity

Hazel Ninegate's journey to adulthood after being turned to a child by an elixir of Kaelyn's.

Day 1: England, 880 AD

Hazel, Age 1

Baby Hazel is stuck in a mud-patch. A wolf is coming to eat her. She cannot get away, and her infant limbs are too feeble to do anything. She curses her destiny, and at the last moment is saved by a young boy who happened to be out in the woods. The boy hurls a rock at the wolf and scares it away. The boy sees this baby in the woods, and, unsure of what to do, takes it back to his home, where his parents discuss what to do with this "foundling." Hazel seethes with frustration at the uselessness of this infant form and contents herself with imagining pleasurable revenge-scenarios, but for now, she has no choice but to accept the ministrations of a small, three person family barely struggling to survive as serfs, and who are now even more stretched thin by having one more mouth to feed.

Day 2: England, 881 AD

Hazel, Age 2

England, 881 AD - After a year of being tended to by the small family that took her in, and raging against her fate, Hazel has decided to simply wait for her body to mature enough that she can work simple tools and escape. For now, then , she puts up with their bland meals and pedestrian lives, watching coldly as they struggle from day to day just to survive. She finds the conditions barbaric and primitive and lacking. The boy who saved her is rambunctious, playful, energetic and annoying. She wishes he were gone.

Day 3: England, 882 AD

Hazel, Age 3

Having settled into the mundane everyday life of being fed and listening to the petty quarrels between the members of the household, she has determined they are in the lowest-rung of a feudal hierarchy that is exploiting their labor for profit. Unable to get out of their situation, they are simply working like cogs in the machine until they die. She mocks them mentally for not rebelling, and continues to observe, waiting for her body to mature enough so that she can take action to escape this benighted place and time. She notes her "parents" are too busy and worn out to even bother trying to teach her how to read or write-- she's not convinced they know how to, either. How disgustingly primitive. And the Big "Brother" is just a waste of space, filled with useless amounts of energy and rambunctiousness that just erode at her ability to think for any extended periods of time.

Day 4: England, 883 AD

Hazel, Age 4

Hazel is beginning to master her growing body, and can speak, but deliberately plays stupid in order to not raise the suspicions of the superstitious family or townsfolk. Her adoptive parents treat her well, bu the sense that she is a strain on their ability to provide for themselves is evident, even if they try to hide it. She's increasingly roped into silly children's games with her "brother" and his friends, and is able to get a better glimpse of the world around her. It is a fetid place filled with disease and danger, and if not for her resilient Gallifreyan biology, she probably would have caught innumerable diseases by now. She has also begun to piece together the political structure of the village, and knows who the "leaders", the TRUE leaders and their influencers are, but for the moment has no real interest in them as she cannot wait to grow a bit more and run away from this place. .

Day 5: England, 884 AD

Hazel, Age 5

Near the middle of the year "Brother" is killed in a freak accident, trampled and gored by oxen, which he had always been exceptionally skilled with handling. Hazel is stunned that the once-noisy fixture in the homestead is suddenly gone forever, and moreso stunned that she misses his overly-ebullient presence so. With the lack of their son to be the farmhand, Hazel's adoptive parents struggle even harder to make ends meet, not being able to afford to hire help. Having no choice they try to get Hazel to work with them in the fields. It is hot, grimy, inefficient work and Hazel hates every moment of it. As she works, she considers that this is the only life her "parents" have ever known, and even if they were desirous of bettering their station in life, these circumstances would have afforded them no opportunity to do so. Given the state of medical knowledge and the strain on their older bodies, she doesn't see them lasting long having to do full-time field work. Bored and waiting for her body to mature a bit more, she decides to occupy her mind with determining what can be done to alter this situation... .

Day 6: England, 885 AD

Hazel, Age 6

Hazel continues to work in the fields, feeling her small body become stronger with the pressure of manual labor. She has moved on from despising her lot in life to solving the practical problem in front of her- increasing the efficiency of the crop yield so that her adoptive parents do not kill themselves in the field-- after all, it wouldn't do for the place she was currently using for shelter to be taken away before she was ready to strike out on her own. She scouts out a cave complex located within a hillside area and creates a study area where she can work and study in peace. Lacking proper scientific tools, she is forced to go back to first principles to generate the things she needs. She forgoes sleep in order to sneak out at night and prepare, doing her best to be stealthy. But in a small village, there are always eyes watching...

Day 7: England, 886 AD

Hazel, Age 7

Hazel's initial experiments in crop yield growth have proven successful - by introducing a custom slurry of nutrients into the soil she has overcome the issue of depletion caused by a lack of crop rotation. This introduces a new problem, however, as there is now more work to be done to harvest the crops, and her adoptive parents can't handle the strain on their own. They cut a deal with some locals to assist in return for a cut of the potential profit- one of them is a strapping young lad whom the father of the family distrusts, seeing him as a potential rival to his wife, even though the boy is actually innocent of any intentions in that regard. An atmosphere of tension grows in the household between the parents.

Hazel finds the discord irritating and pointless, but moreso than usual. She wants them to get along so she can concentrate, but also, she realizes, because she doesn't want their family unit to collapse. She remembers her own real parents and how her father, The Corruptor, had drifted further and further away from her mother, becoming obsessively fixated on manipulating the rising star Rassilon, who was ascending the ranks of Gallifreyan society. She realized that here, in this simple home, for all its annoyances, the two humans had actually made a point of attending to her to the best of their ability regardless of their circumstances, and now that nucleus of "family" was threatened.

She ponders if something should be done about this boy. Her body is growing well, and soon she will have the strength to do as she pleases....

Day 8: England, 887 AD

Hazel, Age 8

Tensions in the household continue to increase. Hazel has not taken any action against the young farmhand in the past year because she has determined he is the only thing really keeping the family from starvation (plus, slightly the fact that he is completely innocent and that she might be able to turn him into a henchman given the right dosage of mind-altering substances if she can track them down) The father of the family is growing increasingly irrational about the farmhand's presence, however, and every night is filled with paranoid arguments and accusations against the mother. There is not a night Hazel does not have to force herself to sleep for all the sounds of fighting. She is tempted to flee now, but needs her body to at least hit puberty so she can exert more powerful biocontrol over it. Given the intensity of the arguments, she predicts a 95% probability things will escalate into violence soon...

Day 9: England, 883 AD

Hazel, Age 9

As predicted, one hot July day the father of the family completely misreads a situation between the mother and the farmhand, and begins to beat her. Hazel does her best to avoid the fracas, but then the father turns his sights on her, blaming all women for being untrustworthy and treacherous. He accuses Hazel of being a drain n their resources who contributes little and cursed the family by coming in and somehow causing the death of his reliable son via witchcraft. The father is completely unhinged and suddenly takes a blunt shovel with the intent of bashing Hazel's head in. She frantically goes to cover herself as best she can, but is shocked when her adoptive mother jumps in the way and takes a severe blow to the head, crumpling.

Shocked at both the sudden attack and act of selfless protection, on pure instinct, Hazel grabs a knife and lunges forward, first severing her "father's" tendons to drop him to the ground and then finishing him with a slice to the carotid artery. Once the white-hot panic, rage and confusion subside, she calms down and takes stock of what happened. It was her first time experiencing unhinged madness at such a direct and personal level, and she remembered that night long ago in the Ten'Aino kitchen when she herself had suffered such a break. Was that what it was like from the outside? Setting that aside to ponder later, she tended as best she could to the mother, and then coldly regarded the corpse of the father.

The pigs ate well that night.

Day 10: England, 889 AD

Hazel, Age 10

The disappearance of the farmer was explained away by the discovery of his bones in the forest, in circumstances that suggested the remains of a wolf attack. The wife he injured never fully recovered from the attack, suffering severe migraines and a lack of stable balance that prevents her from fully helping around the farm any longer. The farmhand helper employed by the family continued to work the land along with Hazel so that he could have his usual share of the crops as payment, but has already indicated that afterwards he would probably be moving on to one of the other farms where there was more manpower available as the work was too taxing without extra help. Hazel realizes that everything has suddenly become completely precarious and she has less than a year to leave... ...But she looks at the kindly, smiling face of the woman who saved her with no thought of reward, who continues to struggle with even the simplest tasks of every day life and realizes that if she goes, there will be no one to help this person at all, who most likely die within the next year. Hazel made her decision.

Day 11: England, 890 AD

Hazel, Age 11

Determined to repay her debt, Hazel created a psychotropic drug to addle the mind of the farm-hand and convince him to stay on with the family farm. She has also perfected the nutrient mix for the family crops so that they are fresher and healthier-looking than those of the other farms in the area, increasing demand, and profit, which she re-invests in the aging home and her own secret, ramshackle laboratory hidden within the local caves. There are those, however, who suspect the abundance of the crops to be the direct result of the two "witches" in Hazel's home having "sacrificed" the man of the family in some arcane ritual - the fact that the farmhand is strangely obedient to Hazel only confirms their suspicions. Eager to get their hands on what now seems to be prize farmland, the local leaders decide to stoke this superstitious flame...

Day 12: England, 891 AD

Hazel, Age 12

The local leaders having taken an "interest" in Hazel's farm, they first attempt to infiltrate her family by sending young suitors out to seduce her (remember the era)-- instead, she charmingly brainwashes them into "rejecting her" for various reasons and instead has them return home to spy on their families and steal for her. Well aware that she is one misstep away from facing down torches and pitchforks, she actually sabotages her own crops to make them seem "normal" but launders the stolen loot to keep the household afloat. She notices that her "mother" seems weaker than before, but it doesn't seem that the head injury is the cause. She begins to turn her mind towards her eventual escape, but for some reason doesn't give it all the urgency she once felt towards the subject.

Then, one night, she wakes to find the fields aflame...

Day 13: England, 892 AD

Hazel, Age 13

With the fields destroyed, the feudal lords come to try and collect on the property, but Hazel is able to make the payments based on the savings she has accreted, which have all been depleted. Various other landowners offer thinly veiled promises of "help" that are tantamount to giving the property over to them, plus Hazel basically selling herself to them for the privilege. She is old enough at this point to simply walk away, but yet she remains. She tells herself it's a point of principle, that she wants to humiliate the people who did this to her hard work, but the truth of the matter is revealed when she finds herself more preoccupied with concern for her adoptive parent's well-being than her desire to escape. Noting to herself there was time she would have just killed the woman for being a distraction, she amuses herself briefly with the thought that she always *could* and just chooses not to, and then fixes her intellect on the problem of rebuilding the farm AND getting revenge.

Day 14: England, 893 AD

Hazel, Age 14

Hazel takes employment at the local tavern as the latest serving-wench in order to ostensibly regain some income, and endures the various indignities of the position as she very carefully listens for any clues as to who might have done damage to the farm. She eventually manages to work out who all the players are, and with tiny doses of mind-altering substances slipped into a few of their drinks, she sets them on a suicidal course to lay waste the lands of the people who employed them, implicating another faction in the village leadership as the culprits. Thus began a nasty series of moves and countermoves all of the humans' own volition, and while their farms burned, Hazel's (and a few others she made sure would remain untouched for plausible deniability) began to take up the slack in terms of business....

Day 15: England, 894 AD

Hazel, Age 15

Hazel, having successfully turned the landowners against one another, has bought herself a measure of peace amidst the chaos. She cannot take advantage of the respite, however, as she comes home one day to discover her foster mother collapsed on the ground, breathing shallowly. She suspects someone has poisoned her in revenge...

Day 16: England, 895 AD

Hazel, Age 16

At first, Hazel could not determine what was wrong with her foster parent, but after collecting secret blood samples at night and spending many weeks analyzing the results in her very primitive bio-lab, she realizes the problem - cancer.

To Hazel's people, Cancer was a solved problem - with the right technology, which, of course, was nowhere to be found in 895. Hazel is furious that she's trapped in such a stupid time and place with no ability to do anything about this. She knows that on the planet there were many ruins f ancient civilizations and alien crash sites that might give her enough technology to build some kind of a treatment machine, but to get to any of them would require an extensive trip, and her "mother" was getting sicker by the day, and only seemed to desperately want her company. Wracked by her inability to do anything, Hazel uses what pharmacology she can to keep the old woman in comfort until she inevitably passes away. Hazel is devastated, and for a time, just seems to mentally shut down.

Day 17: England, 896 AD

Hazel, Age 17

Hazel is still tending the farm, basically on mental autopilot, determined to at least get the old woman's final crop out to market before leaving, when she finds her farmhand dead in the field, clearly murdered, with a note that accuses _hazel_ of murdering the old woman in order to complete her Satanic takeover of the land. Hazel is pretty sure this superstitious nonsense is being used as a cover by the feudal lord to just get his hands on her fertile land. She is carrying his body to the farm's burial plot when she spies four men lurking around the main house, waiting for her. She sneaks up on three of them and quietly slits their throats with an improvised stone knife. The fourth, eh sidles up to, pretending to be weak, scared and helpless, and then once she gets close enough she uses her formidable Time Lord strength (plus what she built up farming each day) to cripple the man and drag him into the house. After a few hours of torture, she gets all the information she needs. Once more, the pigs eat well.

Day 18: England, 897 AD

Hazel, Age 18

The final crop doesn't get delivered. Hazel's farm burns to the ground by her own hand. Hazel has decided to disappear. But not to the future. Not yet. She spends the next year in a variety of guises. She makes sure to know who everyone in the village is, and their habits, both secret and public. She watches the children, and their faces. She watches the parents, and their faces. She watches the lords, and their faces. She prepares.

Day 19: England, 898 AD

Hazel, Age 19

A year of preparation. Of inoculation. Of carefully ensuring that the children and the innocent have their food supplies tainted with a special drug that will protect them for what is to come. A great feast, poisoned. The corrupt, self-murdering as they rejoice in the spoils of their brutal, inhumane extortion,, taking their fill of Hazel's custom cocktail which slowly percolates in their system. A night of pleasure, and a morning when a third of the town simply does not wake up. Warning words from a "Witch" burnt into the door of the former Lord casting a curse upon any who would dare take advantage of the good people of the town. A lone visitor to a solitary unmarked grave, leaving flowers before she departs to the hills, to sleep deep within the mountainside in centuries of slumber until the time is right to awaken once more...