An elemental, sometimes elemental force (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street [+]Loading...["The Adventuress of Henrietta Street (novel)"], Sometime Never... [+]Loading...["Sometime Never... (novel)"], TV: The Giggle [+]Loading...["The Giggle (TV story)"]) or capitalised as Elemental, was defined by Sabbath Dei as a being who was "an ultimate constituent of reality". (PROSE: Camera Obscura [+]Loading...["Camera Obscura (novel)"])
The term was widely employed to refer to miscellaneous beings of varying physicality and power. The Time Lords were considered elementals of time in many accounts, making the Doctor themself an elemental.
History
Elementals of time
The Time Lords, and their TARDISes, were frequently documented as "elementals" of time. Though also used before it, including by members of the species, (PROSE: Love & War [+]Loading...["Love & War (short story)"], The God Who Came For Christmas [+]Loading...["The God Who Came For Christmas (short story)"]) the term was most widely used in the post-War universe, serving as a placeholder name for the species for lack of any more specific information on them. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street [+]Loading...["The Adventuress of Henrietta Street (novel)"], Camera Obscura [+]Loading...["Camera Obscura (novel)"], Love & War [+]Loading...["Love & War (short story)"], etc.)
During his second encounter with the Princess, the God of the Inner Mysteries referred to his "tree" as "one of the great elementals". Shortly before the outbreak of the Cosmic War, President Felixian III referred to himself as "Supreme Being and Commander of the Elemental Forces". (PROSE: Love & War [+]Loading...["Love & War (short story)"])
The term was notably used for the Eighth Doctor by the 18th century occultists and tantrists among whom he mingled during his time with Scarlette in the 18th century. Though they often used the simple term of "elementals" to refer to the Doctor's people, they were well aware of other groups and types of elementals, with Lisa-Beth Lachlan once writing about the Doctor's people as "the Doctor's tribe of elementals". When they were summoned back to him, Anji Kapoor and Fitz Kreiner were initially taken to also be "elementals"; as time went on, however, it became apparent that they were simply "other human beings, [or] at least very minor elementals". (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street [+]Loading...["The Adventuress of Henrietta Street (novel)"])
When encountering Sabbath Dei again, the amnesiac Doctor expressed distaste for the term. Sabbath was undeterred, however, insisting that it was an appropriate classification for a being who was "an ultimate constituent of reality". (PROSE: Camera Obscura [+]Loading...["Camera Obscura (novel)"]) Sabbath would later explain that his own usage of the term was informed by the way his supernatural patrons, the Council of Eight, had spoken of the Doctor as a "Rogue Element" within the universe, in what he interpreted as an alchemical sense. The Doctor was the "one elemental force" which the Council was unable to control. (PROSE: Sometime Never... [+]Loading...["Sometime Never... (novel)"])
What have you been doing – studying up on the legends of my presumed people, the so-called Elementals? I wish you’d stop using that word, by the way. Whatever I may be, it’s not a chameleon or a sprite.
By the 24th century, Meta-Historians had settled on a cladistic terminology of "Time Elementals", coined by Leiter Formosis, as a neutral way of referring to the extinct beings who had once ruled the cosmos. The humanoids were called Lesser Time Elementals while their living "ships" were referred to as Greater Time Elementals, (PROSE: Love & War [+]Loading...["Love & War (short story)"]) a term also used by Abraytha Janus Colefia. (PROSE: The Cathedral of Winter [+]Loading...["The Cathedral of Winter (short story)"])
Others and unidentified
In the same account which documented the 18th century usage of "elementals" for the Time Lords, the babewyns, (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street [+]Loading...["The Adventuress of Henrietta Street (novel)"]) understood in other accounts as manifestations of the Yssgaroth Taint, (PROSE: The Book of the War [+]Loading...["The Book of the War (novel)"]) were also called "ape-elementals" or "beast-elementals", and indeed, the Doctor believed them to be embodiments of a particular aspect of existence, who had been allowed to take material forms in the three-dimensional universe due to the instability in the "element of time" that the destruction of Gallifrey had spelled. The climactic one-on-one fight between the Doctor and the King of Beasts was thus a battle of "rival elementals". (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street [+]Loading...["The Adventuress of Henrietta Street (novel)"])
(…) it is from the horizon that the apes come. They are, believes the Doctor, aspects of ourselves. They are our own ignorance given flesh, born of the place where thought and being are twined. Should we reach the horizon, we will find our own ignorance staring back at us in the shape of these bloody, murderous animals.
The Fourteenth Doctor described the Toymaker as an "elemental force" who acted "beyond the rules of the universe", with his existence being bound only by the rules of play. The Doctor confessed that it "unravelled" him to face an opponent who did not played by "all the laws [he] cl[u]ng to". On another occasion he referred to the Toymaker as an "elemental force with the power of a god". (TV: The Giggle [+]Loading...["The Giggle (TV story)"]) Notably, "elemental forces with the powers of gods" was also a phrase used to describe the actual Lesser Time Elementals in another account, (PROSE: Love & War [+]Loading...["Love & War (short story)"]) with linked sources suggesting that the original being who embedded the rules of play within the fabric of reality as an alternative to rationality was indeed a native of the Morning Star, but left it in its earliest days due to disagreeing with the other founders about how the universe should be designed. (PROSE: The Two Auteurs [+]Loading...["The Two Auteurs (short story)"], The Book of the Snowstorm [+]Loading...["The Book of the Snowstorm (short story)"])
Kelpies, shape-shifting water spirits, were once described as "elemental water-entities". (HOMEVID: Kelpie [+]Loading...["Kelpie (home video)"])
The Elemental faced by the Fifth Doctor was an energy being with an affinity for technology. (COMIC: The Stockbridge Horror [+]Loading...["The Stockbridge Horror (comic story)"]) Having first encountered it as an invisible, lonely "force" haunting an abandoned starship, the Doctor and Maxwell Edison thought themselves rid of it. (COMIC: Stars Fell on Stockbridge [+]Loading...["Stars Fell on Stockbridge (comic story)"]) However, it later resurfaced and temporarily managed to possess the Doctor's TARDIS. (COMIC: The Stockbridge Horror [+]Loading...["The Stockbridge Horror (comic story)"])
The Eighth Doctor twice encountered a fire elemental which had been created by a powerful release of light from an o-region, an isolated part of the universe that was almost a mini-universe unto itself. (PROSE: Time Zero [+]Loading...["Time Zero (novel)"], The Burning [+]Loading...["The Burning (novel)"])