Time Tot

Time Tot was one of the names for a young Time Lord. (PROSE: Big Bang Generation, AUDIO: Trial of the Valeyard, COMIC: Weapons of Past Destruction, WC: Shada)

Many cases of a Time Lord life cycle seemed to include a phase similar to human childhood. Like human children, Gallifreyan children slept in cots. (TV: A Good Man Goes to War) They were once physically children and that at least some lived in homes with others of their own gender before going off to join the Academy or the army. (TV: The Sound of Drums, Listen) A Gallifreyan ninety years old might still have been considered a "kid", (TV: The Stolen Earth) but after the age of two hundred years they wouldn't be seen as young. (TV: The Time Warrior) However, some Time Tots were loomed, used traditional House terms like "cousin," and had caretakers, (PROSE: Apocrypha Bipedium) similar to childrene (PROSE: Against Nature) or loomlings. (PROSE: Unnatural History)

Children were entertained with nursery rhymes (TV: The Five Doctors, AUDIO: Zagreus) and stories such as Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday. (TV: Night Terrors, PROSE: Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday) There were specialised books for Gallifreyan children, including Every Gallifreyan Child's Pop-Up Book of Nasty Creatures From Other Dimensions. (AUDIO: Shada, WC: Shada, PROSE: Shada) As a Time Tot, Romana I had a copy of the Gallifreyan nursery book Our Planet Story. (AUDIO: Shada, PROSE: Shada) Flavia had once written a story book for Time Tots titled Tales from the Matrix - True Stories from TARDIS Logs Retold for Time Tots. She was credited as "Loom Auntie Flavia." (PROSE: Apocrypha Bipedium)

The First Doctor played hide-and-seek with the First Rani as a Time Tot, with his ninth incarnation recalling that his skill at finding her "drove her nuts". He held the Time-Tot hide and seek championship for forty-two years in a row. (COMIC: Weapons of Past Destruction) As a Time Tot, the Doctor believed humans to be a myth. (PROSE: The Shining Man)

The Valeyard claimed to have been created as a Time Tot on a mud planet orbiting Etarho during a period when the Eleventh Doctor was experimenting with ways to break the twelve-regeneration limit imposed on Time Lords by Rassilon. At the young age of twenty, the Valeyard was found wandering the mud swamps of the planet by a group of scavengers, who kindly gave him food to eat and, when they learned what race he belonged to, sent him to Gallifrey. The Time Lords examined the Valeyard's biodata and found that it was an exact match with the Doctor's sample. Knowing that this meant that the Valeyard was a temporal anomaly, they sent him to a Shadow House. The Sixth Doctor believed there was a grain of truth to this story. (AUDIO: Trial of the Valeyard)

Time Tots were told the tale of the Ancients of the Universe on Gallifrey. (PROSE: Big Bang Generation) They were also told of Altrazar, a city lost in time. (AUDIO: The Trouble with Drax)

According to the Valeyard, there was a risk of emerging from a regeneration as a Time Tot rather than an adult Time Lord. (AUDIO: Trial of the Valeyard) Indeed, River Song recounted that, following her first regeneration, she was "a toddler in the middle of New York". (TV: Let's Kill Hitler)

There were other names for Time Lord youths on Gallifrey; the Eighth Doctor recalled the term "loomling" from his younger days in the House of Lungbarrow. (PROSE: Unnatural History) During the War in Heaven, several Great Houses called their youth childrene. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved..., Against Nature)