In The Land of The Blind started with the scene in which Savine tries to seduce Chrístõ into giving in to her, testing his Time Lord resolve. Savine was the second character I have written who was based on one of the unsuccessful entrants to the Eurovision Song contest of 2007. The Ten story, Intergalactic Salvage, features a dominatrix with lasers in her hands inspired by one such exotic effort to bamboozle people into mistaking a flashy light show and skimpy costume for musical talent. There was another who had a third eye painted on her forehead who had even less chance of qualifying for the final. The phrase ‘In the land of the blind…’ presented itself as a title and I thought of a woman who sees the world through a third eye keeping her people in subjugation by blinding them.

I then went back to the beginning and introduced Paracell Hext as a character. Hext is a dig at the very unlikely names used by MSN technical staff when responding to complaints. The most common are Hext, Shiony, Alvin and Reugene. I wrote back once and told them they would all end up looking bad in my fiction. Reugene was the villain of the Ten story False Gods. Alvin turns up later in the Theta Sigma series as a camp make up artist working for a reality TV show. Shiony is a Gallifreyan civil servant with a nastily small minded mentality who appears in two Marion and Kristoph stories – Hillary’s Lighthouse and Laws of Purity. But Hext, actually gets a much bigger role to play.

Here, in this story, he is an unsympathetic character. He is revealed as the former Prydonian student who engineered the attack on Chrístõ when he was a junior at the Academy that resulted in the scar on his neck obscuring his Mark of Rassilon birthmark. He behaves rather cowardly for a Time Lord now, and Chrístõ is initially hostile to him. He forgives him his past transgressions only because Natalie asks him to do so.

Hext manages to redeem himself in the end. I did have the idea of him dying in the process, but then decided to let him live because he might actually prove useful in the future. Rather than a villain, Hext becomes merely inept at his job as a Celestial Intervention Agency man, and in later stories he and Chrístõ join forces, gaining a certain mutual respect.

Leaving Savine to a possibly gruesome fate at the hands of her former subjects is a strange conclusion to the story. But in fact, with Hext’s TARDIS recovered, and the people given their sight back, that was mission accomplished. What happens to her is no longer Chrístõ’s responsibility. A little of Li Tuo’s hard treatment of the enemy coming through, but no more than she deserved.

And yes, these ARE the characters for Theta Sigma in Baille.

http://www.brl.org/codes/session02/greek.html