User:NoNotTheMemes/The Master's early life

Incarnations of the Master+
Original regenerative cycle+
Interim+
Renewed regenerative cycle+
Ambiguous+
Other realities+

There were a variety of different and contradictory accounts of the Master’s early life before leaving Gallifrey. By the time he existed in a cadaverous form, the Master had wiped all records of his existence as a Time Lord from Gallifrey’s own record, making himself an enigma in whose sheer existence some Time Lords refused to believe. (TV: The Deadly Assassin) The CIA later compiled new files on the Master, but their information about his early life was spotty, drawn largely from the Doctor’s own oral accounts, and they were particularly unsure of the circumstances of his departure from Gallifrey and of his part in the “War Chief incident”. (PROSE: CIA File Extracts)

Nevertheless, there was much evidence to support that the young Master was a contemporary of the young Doctor, the two having attended the Time Lord Academy together before growing further and further apart leading up to both Time Lords’ decision to leave their Homeworld. (AUDIO: The Destination Wars, PROSE: CIA File Extracts, et al.)

Beyond those broad strokes, however, even the regenerative history of the Master, including in what incarnation they took on the name of “the Master”, was a matter of debate. (PROSE: Divided Loyalties, The Legacy of Gallifrey, et al.)

Birth and origin

According to all accounts, the Master was born on Gallifrey, home planet of the Time Lords (TV: The War Games, The Time Warrior, Death in Heaven) “the oldest and most mighty race in the universe” (TV: The Sound of Drums), to the House of Oakdown. (PROSE: Divided Loyalties)

The name he was born with consisted of thirty-two letters; (PROSE: Lords and Masters) it was “mellifluous” and, as per the Gallifreyan custom, could never be revealed to a non-Time Lord. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons)

The Master has remarked upon having a family including a father, (TV: The End of Time; AUDIO: I Am The Master; PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) mother, (AUDIO: Masterplan, I Am The Master) and eventually a daughter. (TV: The Witch’s Familiar; PROSE: The Liar, the Glitch and the War Zone)

Youth and upbringing

The renegade Time Lord, later known as the Master, looking into the Untempered Schism. (TV: The Sound of Drums)

Like all Time Lords, the Master was taken from his family at the age of eight for the selection process. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) During the ceremony in which he gazed into the Time Vortex through the Untempered Schism, he went mad, (TV: The Sound of Drums) due to a rhythm of four beats being implanted into his head. (TV: The End of Time) This malady manifested itself as the constant drumming he heard ever after, worsening with time. (TV: Utopia, The Sound of Drums, Last of the Time Lords)

He would later comment to Wilfred Mott that growing up on Gallifrey was not something one could call childhood, but “more a life of duty”. (TV: The End of Time)

Education

The Master and a young Doctor became friends on their first Day at the Academy, (TV: World Enough and Time) with both being tutored by Borusa, (AUDIO: Masterplan) and the Doctor quickly developing a “man-crush” on his new friend. (TV: World Enough and Time) The Master later speculated that the Doctor had had an actual crush on them from the start. (AUDIO: The Bekdel Test)

Sharing the same heritage and upbringing, (AUDIO: Dominion) the Master developed a strong bond with the Doctor, (TV: The Sea Devils, The Sound of Drums, World Enough and Time) with UNIT scientist Osgood even describing the Master as the Doctor's "childhood friend". (TV: Death in Heaven) The Second Doctor recalled that he and the Master had everything in common, except that the Master enjoyed being scared of the dark "a little too much", (PROSE: The Menagerie) while the Third Doctor told Jo Grant that the two were "inseparable" due to their shared interests, such as a desire to break the non-interference policy. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils) The Twelfth Doctor recalled how he and the Master had a pact to explore every star in the universe together. He was “fairly sure” that the Master was in a male body at the time, but wasn’t certain due to how long it had been. (TV: World Enough and Time) The Master and the Doctor enjoyed building "time flow analogues" to disrupt each other's experiments. (TV: The Time Monster)

According to a dream the Fifth Doctor had under the control of the Celestial Toymaker, the Master had belonged to a clique of ten young Time Lords with the collective name of the Deca prior to taking on his title. (PROSE: Divided Loyalties) He was also part of the "Gallifrey Academy Hot Five" band, in which he played the drums. (PROSE: Deadly Reunion) The Master was in charge of organising end of term parties, although the Eighth Doctor later noted that they weren't very good. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)

The two youths would play in the fields near the Master's father's estates, with pastures of red grass near Mount Perdition. (TV: The End of Time) They would also sneak out of the Capitol and drink with the Shobogans, (PROSE: The Eight Doctors) with the Master picking a fight with six drunken Shobogans during one of these outings. (PROSE: UNIT Christmas Parties: Christmas Truce) The Master also taught his friend hypnotism, and would often hypnotise people as a joke, (PROSE: The Dark Path) but would go unpunished for it, as well as other misdemeanours, always finding a way to avoid his comeuppance. (PROSE: First Frontier)

During their childhood, the Master and the Doctor were mercilessly and viciously bullied by a boy called Torvic; the Doctor was eventually forced to kill the bully to save his friend's life. The Doctor was later confronted by the personification of Death, who insisted he become her disciple, but the Doctor refused and suggested Death make the Master her champion instead. Death agreed, and the Doctor subsequently forgot about their deal. (AUDIO: Master)

Whilst at the Academy, the Doctor and the Master travelled into Gallifrey's past in search of Valdemar. They found nothing of the Old Ones except for warnings. The Master was fascinated by the power that Valdemar represented, while the Doctor was horrified. (PROSE: Tomb of Valdemar) The Master also showed a fascination with the Necronomicon. (PROSE: The Nameless City)

At the Academy, the Master was a "teacher's pet" and won gold stars, while the Doctor was the class dunce, (PROSE: Time and Relative) though the Doctor was Borusa's favourite. Ultimately, the Master did not perform well at the Academy. Despite being better at metabolic control, (AUDIO: Masterplan) and earning a higher degree in cosmic science than the Doctor, (TV: Terror of the Autons) he was not skilled in practical matters, (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey) and the Doctor's grades were overall better than his. Because of this, the Doctor received the prizes and praise that the Master so desperately wanted. The Seventh Doctor theorised that this may have been the cause of the Master's hatred towards him, (PROSE: Survival) with Eighth Doctor believing that his jealousy over Borusa was the cause of the Master's hatred towards him. (AUDIO: Masterplan)

When the Time Lords created the Consolidator to conceal various dangerous historical secrets from the rest of the universe, unwilling to destroy the items or races in the ship in case they proved useful later, the Doctor and the Master were assigned to come up with a solution where their peers had failed. The Master had the idea of using a black hole to tear a rift in time and send the Consolidator into the distant future, where the future Time Lords could deal with it, but the Doctor declined to have his name put down on the calculations as he questioned the ethics of the assignment. However, when the experiment was actually attempted, the Consolidator was apparently destroyed by a mistake in the calculations when it struck the edge of the black hole, leaving the Time Lords to hush the matter up. (PROSE: Harvest of Time)

As the Doctor grew up, he came to understand that he and his friend were not the same. (TV: Death in Heaven) Following an incident at the Academy in which the Master did not keep his word, he and the Doctor had a falling out, (PROSE: Last of the Gaderene) eventually leading the Doctor to realise that the Master stood against everything he believed in. (AUDIO: The Destination Wars)

The Master was on an Academy research project when the Doctor was expelled from the Academy. (PROSE: Divided Loyalties)

In one of his earliest schemes at the Academy, the Master befriended one of his professors, Salyavin, to gain access to Gallifrey's most restricted libraries and find The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey. The Master himself failed to find the book, and ended up letting the innocent Salyavin bear the consequences of his breach of Gallifrey's laws; Salyavin ended up stealing the book anyway, reasoning he might as well if he was to be blamed for it, (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey) and was imprisoned on Shada, from which he later escaped, renaming himself "Professor Chronotis". (TV: Shada)

Title

The time in which the Master had chosen his title differs across accounts.

Some accounts alleged that the Master had chosen his title while he was beginning to “hone his talents” at the Academy, (AUDIO: The Destination Wars) gaining his nickname because he was a bully to less domineering students than himself. (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey)

Other accounts indicate that the Master had gone by the name “Koschei” at the Academy (PROSE: Divided Loyalties) and would continue to use that title after leaving Gallifrey; (PROSE: The Dark Path) it was only after swearing vengeance on the Second Doctor that he rejected that name and became "the Master". (PROSE: The Face of the Enemy)

Career

After graduating, the Master was involved in "field work" studying historical interplay and temporal structures. However, he was reprimanded for various minor breaches of the non-interference policy. (PROSE: CIA File Extracts) Still maintaining a "friend[ship] of sorts", the Master and the Doctor were pioneers and inventors among their people, (AUDIO: The Destination Wars) agreeing that Gallifrey should be more interventionist, although the Master's theories in this regard seemed excessive even to the Doctor. (PROSE: CIA File Extracts) Missy claimed she had a daughter and that, while still on Gallifrey, the Doctor gifted the Master a dark star alloy brooch, after an event which involved his daughter occurred. (TV: The Witch's Familiar)

Following the Morbius Crisis, however, the Master was recalled to Gallifrey and assigned to the Prydonian Academy as a teacher of mathematics and computer science. (PROSE: CIA File Extracts)

Eventually, the Master had the job of truant officer, and he performed his job with punctuality, self-discipline, and meritorious conduct. (PROSE: Time and Relative) He once attended a ritual in Arcadia where he gave Susan a toy that was actually a disguised communication node that would locate the Doctor if he ever left Gallifrey. (AUDIO: The Toy) Susan was afraid of him. (PROSE: Time and Relative)

According to the writings of Postar the Perfidious, the War Chief, (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey) who according to some accounts would later became the Master, (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon) had once been on the High Council of Gallifrey alongside the Doctor. (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey)

Leaving Gallifrey

On the day that the Doctor left Gallifrey, the Master was desperate to know where he went. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir) He used the node he gave Susan to locate the Doctor, but found that the node had established a connection with Nyssa, a companion of the Fifth Doctor. The Master tried to take control of Nyssa but was stopped by the intervention of the Doctor. (AUDIO: The Toy) When retired CIA agent Maris was hired to find the Doctor, the Master, helped by the the Rani, used a chronal mine to kidnap her. They interrogated Maris on the whereabouts of the Doctor, and were displeased when she told them she didn't know. They were about to kill her when her employer extracted her from the area. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir)

The Master ultimately left Gallifrey on the same day the Doctor did, (COMIC: The Glorious Dead) in a Type-45 TARDIS, (PROSE: The Dark Path) that he had also stolen (COMIC: The Glorious Dead) when the Quadriggers were still working on it. (AUDIO: The Destination Wars) One Time Lord stated that the Master left Gallifrey because, like the Doctor, it was "too peaceful for [him], [with] not enough happening". (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon) The Fifth Doctor believed that the Master left Gallifrey because he was also leaving. (AUDIO: The Toy)

According to one account, when the Doctor escaped Gallifrey, the Master was in line for a promotion to Head Truant Officer, but his career depended on catching the Doctor and Susan and preventing any violations of the non-interference policy. (PROSE: Time and Relative) The Second Doctor was once nearly captured by a Time Lord "truant officer" going by the name of "Pavo" who used a small silver baton as a weapon and had hypnotic abilities. However, after Pavo's own law-abiding nature was compromised in the course of the mission, Pavo let the Doctor go, erasing his and his companions' memory of the encounter. (AUDIO: The Black Hole)

The Master shooting Slann, as told by his "Tremas" incarnation. (PROSE: Birth of a Renegade)

According to another source, during a period of civil unrest on Gallifrey, the Master led many students of the Time Lord Academy in a revolt against the corrupt Lord President, Pundat the Third, and attempted to recruit the Doctor and convince him to take the position as President, but he decided not to interfere with the current constitution. When Pundat died of stress soon after the revolt, his chosen successor was the evil Chancellor Slann. The students had found the last of Lord Rassilon's descendants, Lady Larn, a seven-year old child adopted by Councillor Brolin, who was being groomed as a future president. They decided on a second coup, but were overheard by the authorities when trying to convert the Doctor again, and bloody reprisals against the students followed. The Doctor and Larn escaped from Gallifrey after this. Believing the students ready for another coup, the Master assassinated Lord President Slann. However, the students weren't ready and he took this opportunity to steal a TARDIS and flee Gallifrey as a renegade. (PROSE: Birth of a Renegade)

Potential early incarnations

The Monk

Main article: First Monk

The Master disguised as a Monk in medieval Northumbria. (TV: The Time Meddler)

The CIA’s files recorded that the Master’s sixth incarnation had been a clean-shaven black-haired man who disguised himself as a Monk in medieval Northumbria in an early experiment to mess with humanity’s causal nexus. His plan was foiled by the First Doctor, who shrunk his TARDIS. Attempting to get revenge on the Doctor, the Monk then teamed up with the Daleks, but after the failure of the scheme, was exterminated by his “allies”, thereafter regenerating into the first of a series of bearded incarnations who used the name of “the Master”. (PROSE: CIA File Extracts)

Indeed, one account suggested that the only fellow Time Lord the Doctor had faced before Omega had been the Master. (PROSE: The Three Doctors)

However, most other accounts cast implicit doubts on the accuracy of the CIA’s information regarding this purported incarnation of the Master: according to other accounts, he was an incarnation of a different Time Lord contemporary of the Doctor’s, whose real name was Mortimus (PROSE: No Future) and who was also known as “the Time Meddler”. (COMIC: 4-Dimensional Vistas) one incarnation of the Master encountered a later regeneration of the Monk, and both agreed, and confirmed to outside observers, that they were two different Time Lords. (AUDIO: Too Many Masters)

War Chief

Main article: The War Chief

The Master acting as the War Chief for the War Lords. (TV: The War Games)

While according to one account, the Master had made a friend in a boy called Magnus (who would one day become a Renegade as “the War Chief”) on their first day at the Academy, (PROSE: Divided Loyalties) other accounts indicated that the War Chief was an incarnation of the Master: the Keeper of the Matrix, who knew of the War Games affair, stated that the TARDISes stolen by the Time Lords who came to call themselves the Doctor and the Master respectively were the only two TARDISes which had been stolen by the time of the Third Doctor’s exile on Earth. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon) Accordingly, in another account, the War Chief noted that he and the Doctor, with their two stolen TARDISes, were two-of-a-kind in the universe. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the War Games)

After the War Chief was fatally shot by the War Lord’s guards, (TV: The War Games) he managed to escape in his TARDIS. The Time Lords, about to apprehend the Second Doctor, detected his presence, but he got away before his TARDIS could be de-energised, while the Doctor “was not so lucky”. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons) After being trapped in a monstrous half-regenerated state, the War Chief had an encounter with a later incarnation of the Doctor in Nazi Germany during which he was seemingly killed. However, the Doctor’s companion Ace caught a glimpse of him having finally managed to regain a youthful, healthy appearance shortly before the end of this adventure. (PROSE: Timewyrm: Exodus)

When a messenger warned the Doctor about the reemergence his old enemy (in a new incarnation), he noted to the Doctor that he “now” called himself “the Master,” having first identified him by his Time Lord name. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons)