Martha Jones

Appearance
Martha is 25 years old and stands 5’2” in stocking feet (but has a tendency to wear shoes with at least a slight heel). She’s dark-skinned, with dark, straight shoulder-length hair, which she usually wears pulled back in a ponytail or bun. On her right shoulder, she has a tattoo of a butterfly, with “raha”, the Iranian word for “free”, written under it.

History
See here for pre-game history. Martha is from a couple months after Journey's End.

Personality
Martha is primarily driven by her need to protect others, as evidenced by her choice to become a doctor. In her first appearance in Doctor Who, she considered it her duty to help save a hospital full of people stranded on the moon (and, in the alternate universe put forth in “Turn Left”, she winds up dead after giving a fellow intern her oxygen mask). Throughout the season, her protective instincts continue to be roused – she keeps the Doctor safe while he’s human, then provides for him while they’re trapped in the 1960s. She walks the Earth by herself for a year to save the Doctor, Jack, her family, and the rest of the human race. By mid-Season 4, she sees herself as responsible for the entire planet, as evidenced by her position in UNIT, and by the end of the season, she’s willing to sacrifice everything to keep the human race from suffering.

She would give anything to keep the people she cares about safe – and, in fact, she tends to be overprotective, a definite byproduct of helping to glue her shattered family back together after the Master’s reign. She’s seen the aftermath, and she refuses to let it happen again.

Martha is still very much haunted by the events of the year that never was. She suffers from mild post-traumatic stress disorder – she finds it difficult to sleep (because she spent a year being hyperalert at all times, snatching sleep whenever and wherever she could get it), and when she does, she has nightmares. These nightmares generally take the form of her perception filter failing and Toclafane descending on her and killing her, but have also featured her family members’ heads inside the metal spheres, among other things. For obvious reasons, she can’t seek out treatment – and it’s almost devolved into absolute stubbornness by now: even when she’s around people who know what she’s been through, she can’t talk about it. She has to stay strong for her family, because they were damaged even more than she was, and she’s the only person holding them together. Admitting to her problems would be admitting to weakness, and she’s scared to death of falling apart.

Once a brilliant young woman living life to the fullest, Martha has settled down into a more sober and responsible role – she left the Doctor to finish her degree and stay with her family, after all. Though her appetite was whetted by her travels with the Doctor, she knows that remaining on Earth is more important – but she still looks at the stars from time to time and wonders what else is out there, what she hasn’t seen yet – and she’s filled with a sort of wistful regret for what could have been. But if there’s one word to describe Martha, it’s dedicated – dedicated to her family, to her job, to protecting the Earth from alien threats. That isn’t to say that she never lets her hair down to have fun – she’s just uncharacteristically mature and responsible for her age, and she knows when it’s time to get serious and get to work.

She has a bright and inquisitive personality, something that aids her in her investigations of alien actions on Earth. She has a secret love of research, and can often be found going through UNIT files in her spare time, looking for just the right information to link with her current investigation, or just trying to learn more in order to be prepared for potential threats. She can be impossibly stubborn sometimes (all right, most of the time), and refuses to be viewed as inferior or second-best to anybody. She has an independent streak a mile wide, which sometimes causes problems when working with others – like, for example, the Doctor. If she thinks that something is stupid, she’s not afraid to voice an opinion about it – and if you want her to do something that she thinks is stupid, she simply won’t. Martha wants to know the reasons for things – she won’t just follow orders blindly (something that has proven to be a bit difficult in UNIT). If you want her respect, you have to earn it.

Though she’s the middle child of her family, she acts like the oldest – she shepherded her family through her parents’ divorce, then kept on acting as the peacemaker between her parents (and her siblings) for several years. Now she’s the healer, the one keeping them all together. It’s a role that comes as naturally to her as breathing – though what she really wants is someone who she isn’t afraid to admit her weakness to, someone who doesn’t rely on her for everything. She wants to be able to let her guard down, and she can’t do that around her family.

Martha has a not-so-secret fondness for shopping (especially for shoes). She also managed to get addicted to Chinese takeaway during her time as an intern (working in a hospital means that you don’t have much time to cook), and she and the Doctor once went on a quest for the best chocolate milkshakes in the universe. Though she prefers coffee to tea, she takes her tea with milk, no sugar. As far as alcohol goes, she drinks from time to time – she’ll settle down with a glass of white wine to de-stress, and when she goes out, she might drink a rum and coke. She also collects illustrated anatomy books.