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The Ultimate Treasure
(Christopher Bulis) |
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 Name: Dexel Dynes
Format:
Book
Time of Origin: An Earth colony in the future,
exact planet and time of origin unspecified.
Appearances: "The
Ultimate Treasure" and "Palace
of the Red Sun"
Doctors:
Fifth Doctor and
Sixth
Doctor
Companions: Peri Brown and Kamelion
History: In the strictest sense of the word, Dexel
Dynes wasn't actually an enemy of The Doctor's; he wasn't interested in
ruling the world, he seemed perfectly content with the amount of money
he had, and he never so much as tried to kill somebody else. However, he
was an amoral journalist who didn't care how many people had to suffer
or die so long as he got an interesting story out of it, so this easily
merits him a position as an adversary of The Doctor even if he never acted
directly against The Doctor himself.
Dynes initially encountered the Fifth
Doctor and Peri when they took a shopping trip to the 31st century to try and give
Peri a chance to get over Kamelion’s recent death and adapt
to her new life of alien encounters. After witnessing a murder, The Doctor deduced that the victim’s dying words - a set of galactic
co-ordinates - were the location of the legendary treasure of Rovan
Cartovall, that had been missing for five thousand years. Travelling
to the coordinates, The Doctor and Peri encountered Dynes there after
he’d followed the Marquis te Rosscarrino and his niece Arnella,
accompanied by Professor Thorrin and his assistant Willis Brockwell,
intending to broadcast what the Marquis was up to across the galaxy.
Arriving on the planet Gelsandor, Dynes was permitted to record the
others as they went on a quest to prove their worthiness to receive
the treasure, the Gelsandorans wishing to observe them to better
understand humanity.
Having passed the first test, The Doctor was subsequently
forced to help the other participants succeed in the ‘quest’ while
Peri was taken back to the ships as a hostage to ensure The Doctor’s
good behaviour, learning just how amoral Dynes was when he refused
to even help her escape. As The Doctor and his new ‘allies’ progressed,
Peri’s kidnappers attempted to bypass the traps by flying over
them, but the ship crashed and Peri was subsequently reunited with
The Doctor. Crossing to the final room in the quest (Where Dynes
waited to see how things turned out), the seekers were presented
with four doors; one door would take them back to their ships, a
second would give them their greatest desire, a third would take
them to Rovan’s material treasure, and the fourth would open
to the ultimate treasure.
Each member
of the party chose differently, with varying results; those who went
after the actual treasure suffocated in the airless atmosphere that
had been used to preserve the treasure, those who sought their greatest
desire were left in a virtual simulation, and the others simply returned
to their ships. As The Doctor chose the door to the ultimate treasure,
he confirmed his belief that Rovan had vanished to start a new life
with nothing; having grown bored by the limits of his power, he realised
that the Universe itself, with all its limitless possibilities, was
the ultimate treasure. As The Doctor and Peri left Gelsandor, Dynes
departed as well, but he was shocked to examine his cameras and learn
that all the films had been removed; the Gelsandorans had allowed
to observe the hunt, but not to broadcast it for entertainment, leaving
him with no proof and nothing to explain why he’d spent so
long away from his company.
Some time
after this, Dynes managed to find a means of rebuilding his reputation
by recording the exploits of Glavis Judd, a tyrannical dictator who
subtly took over his home planet before going on to conquer others,
defending his actions by claiming that he was acting to 'free' the
people of various planets from oppressive leaders (In reality, Judd
often created the situations he then set out to 'solve', but Dynes
didn't care about that so long as he got a violent story as a result
of Judd’s actions). In the end, Judd's expansion was forcibly
put on hold when he attempted to 'liberate' the planet of Esselven
and the rulers departed before he could capture them, leaving him
facing the problem of a safe containing all of the information necessary
to successfully run the planet, but he was unable to open the safe
without a member of the royal family; opening it with explosives
would destroy its contents, and the safe was genetically encoded
to open only for the royals.
While
Judd searched for the Esselven royals, they retreated to a pleasure
planet that had been created several years back, and began attempts
to reinforce the shielding that surrounded the world. Unfortunately,
the planet was already an unusually dense planet orbiting a white
dwarf star, the intense gravity already significant distorting time
and space in the area, and their attempts to enhance the shield resulted
in time being the shield flowing five hundred times faster than it
did outside. The strain of this power caused the nuclear reactor
in the Winter Palace to melt down, and although the engineers shut
down the Summer Palace’s reactor in time they were all exposed
to massive doses of radiation in the process. The family retreated
to the woods until the radiation decayed to a safe level, but the
damage to the systems had corrupted their robot servants’ programming,
causing them to drive their masters away when they tried to return.
The resulting glitches in the computer network caused an interactive
drama called The Princess of Aldemaar - a historic romance where
characters were portrayed by holograms - to begin playing in an infinite
loop, perpetually repeating once the story had concluded. Despite
the fact that the characters never even registered the robots - or,
indeed, anything that didn’t connect directly with the story
- the robots still loyally served the illusionary Lords as the real
things, while the actual descendents of Esselven’s royal family
eked out a miserable existence in the woods as ‘Scavengers’.
 |
Palace of the Red Sun
(Christopher Bulis) |
|
Eventually,
around five hundred years after the original accident - which translated
as being only a year outside the shield - the Sixth
Doctor and Peri materialised
on the planet in one of the gardens, deciding to take advantage of the
opportunity to relax while the TARDIS tried to figure out their location
(The temporal distortion of the field made getting an accurate lock on
the planet’s coordinates difficult). While exploring their surroundings,
the two of them were subsequently separated, Peri being mistaken for a
scavenger while The Doctor had a narrow escape from the robot gardeners.
Having each discovered allies in their attempts to learn the mystery of
the world - Peri ‘recruiting’ the scavengers while The Doctor
befriended a robot called Green-8 who had evolved sentience due to a malfunctioning
self-repair subroutine - The Doctor and Green-8 travelled to the palace
to shut down the projection system.
When Judd’s
fleet arrived, he had his ships launch an all-out assault on the shield,
opening a brief hole in the shield that Dynes managed to slip through in
his ship. Arriving on the planet, Dynes dispatched various cameras searching
for the Esselven royals, one of which encountered Pri. Telling Dynes about
the scavengers’ mistreatment at the hands of the Lords in exchange
for information about Judd, Peri subsequently headed off to the palace
after disposing of Dynes’ camera, where she met up with The Doctor
and Green-8. Researching Judd in the databanks, The Doctor vowed to end
his reign of terror, and, aided by Green-8 and Oralissa (A hologram who
had also developed sentience over the centuries), The Doctor managed to
trick Judd and Dynes into thinking that the palace was about to explode,
driving them off while he took a short hop into the future - no more than
a few minutes - in the TARDIS.
As Judd
and Dynes left the shield, The Doctor quickly manipulated the shield to
bring time back into sync with the rest of the galaxy, leaving Oralissa
and Green-8 to help the scavengers re-educate themselves to return home.
Judd and Dynes, on the other hand, found themselves transferred over five
hundred years into the future, with Judd learning that his ‘Protectorate’ had
collapsed after his departure and he was believed to be only a madman who
thought he was Glavis Judd, and Dynes was forced to accept that he was
now a forgotten has-been, his sensationalistic, tabloid reporting style
literally a thing of the past, and his skills only good for making documentaries
about the old days due to his unique insight into the world gone by. A
harsh fate, but, given Dynes’ clear amorality about the fates of
innocent people so long as he got what he wanted, one he richly deserved. |
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