"Decaying" Master

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	Time Lord, Deathworm Morphant, Human
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Incarnations of the Master
First cycle
Between cycles
Second cycle
Third cycle
Other universes
More ambiguous

After losing the body of Bruce Gerhardt to the Eye of Harmony, the Master was rescued from death by a being named Esterath and resurrected into the body of a deceased vagrant so that he could partake in the fight for the Glory. After Kroton emerged the winner, he used his newfound powers to banish the Master back into the Eye of Harmony, but he eventually escaped again by manipulating the dreams of Edward Grainger. The Master then used the powers of a Deathworm Morphant to continue to survive by possessing various bodies, until he was finally killed by the Ravenous.

Biography

A day to come

Upon coming into contact with the Bruce Master again, the Eighth Doctor told him he had met his future incarnations, but then added that, even had he not met them, he would have known that the Master would somehow escape the Eye of Harmony after being "dropped" into it. (AUDIO: Day of the Master)

Backstory

After being placed on trial by the Daleks, (TV: Doctor Who ^[+]Loading...["Doctor Who (TV story)"]) the Dalek Litigator judged the Master guilty, ordering him to be exterminated as his punishment. (AUDIO: Vengeance) Before he was executed by the Daleks on Skaro, he made a final request: for the Seventh Doctor to transport his remains back to Gallifrey.

However, en route, the Master used a Deathworm Morphant to interfere with the TARDIS, causing a timing malfunction that resulted in an emergency landing in San Francisco during the final days of 1999, where the Doctor was struck down in a gang war and the Master managed to escape the TARDIS and hide inside a bag belonging to ambulance driver Bruce Gerhardt. The Master later forced his way into Bruce's body, killing him and taking over his body. Now in Bruce's body, the Master tried to steal the body of the Eighth Doctor, only to fall into the Eye of Harmony, (TV: Doctor Who) where he would remain trapped for a long time, (AUDIO: The Lifeboat and the Deathboat) until Bruce's body was unable to survive in the Eye and slowly came apart. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)

Fight for the Glory

Nearing his ultimate destruction, the Master was rescued from the Vortex by a being named Esterath, the controller of the Glory, the focal point of the Omniverse. The Master was told that it was time for the Glory to gain another controller, but the power had to be fought for. The Master assumed that the battle would be between himself and the Doctor. After gliding over the many realities throughout the Omniversal Spectrum for what he described as seeming like "centuries", the Master was resurrected into the body of a recently deceased vagrant on the streets of 2001 Brixton. Some weeks afterwards, due to a symbiotic link he had formed with the Doctor's TARDIS when it consumed part of his essence after he passed through the Eye of Harmony, the Master was transported onto the Moon during one of the Doctor's adventures. The symbiotic link between the Doctor's TARDIS and the Master had also given the latter the ability to influence the flight of the TARDIS, which he used to send the craft to times and places which would weaken the Doctor's self-belief and confidence. The Master subsequently used this link to trail the Doctor for some time without his enemy suspecting. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)

He was present in London during the crisis resulting from Grace Holloway's attempt to merge human and Time Lord DNA but was using the alien DNA of a Morphant by mistake. He killed Duncan, an MI6 agent, with his TCE. (COMIC: The Fallen)

The Master begins to disappear after being banished by Kroton. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)

The Master later made contact with Sato Katsura, a Japanese samurai unwillingly rendered immortal as a result of his involvement in the Doctor's adventures, and recruited him to become his follower. At his behest, Sato adopted the identity of "Cardinal Morningstar" and became the leader of the Church of the Glorious Dead, instigator of a holy war that altered the history of Earth, a planet now renamed "Dhakan". After revealing his plot to him, the Master won a sword fight with the Doctor by stabbing him, but then learned that the true battle for the Glory was between Sato and the Doctor's companion, the Cyberman Kroton, of which Kroton was the victor. Amongst his first acts as the controller of the Glory were to cleanse the TARDIS of the Master's influence and to place the Master somewhere that he could not escape. The Master declared he would survive and return. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)

Trapped in the Eye of Harmony

The Master was left imprisoned in the singularity of the Eye of Harmony, where he commanded infinite power, but could only wield it from within the confines of the Eye. The Master became externally perceived as a Great Black Eye beyond time, which frightened the Time Lords of Ulysses' era, was worshiped as a god in the post-War Kingdom of Beasts, (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) and poisoned the Eighth Doctor's second heart. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street)

During his imprisonment, the Doctor came to speak to the Master where he dwelled in a room with his face on a screen. The Master spoke to the Doctor in the room on several occasions, telling him that he was an "old friend". After the defeat of the Council of Eight, the Doctor spoke to him about the death of Miranda Dawkins and if it was worth the cost of him saving the universe. (PROSE: Sometime Never...)

The Master later appeared to the Doctor within a mirror in the TARDIS, where he asked the Doctor what was going on inside his head. The Doctor was unable to answer the question before the image in the mirror returned to that of the Doctor's reflection. (PROSE: The Deadstone Memorial)

The Master had a longer conversation with the Doctor from within the Eye of Harmony. The Master showed the Doctor a vision of Marnal's investigation of the Shoal. When the Doctor pressed him about what happened to Gallifrey, the Master teased him with offers to bring it back and to return his memories. The Master then became angry over the circumstances of his imprisonment, and threatened to use all of his power to detonate a fusion device and have his revenge, but the Doctor sealed up the Eye of Harmony before he had the chance to carry out his plan. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)

Escaping the Eye of Harmony

The Master eventually escaped the Eye of Harmony by influencing the dreams of Edward Grainger to unravel the Doctor's timeline, by killing Edward Grainger whilst he was an infant in 1906. (PROSE: Forgotten) Though his Morphant form had sublimated to a gaseous state, the Master was still capable of using its powers to possess new bodies. (AUDIO: Mastermind) However, while in the body of Sir George Steer, he was stopped by an older Edward Grainger from 2006 and Violet after being hit with a rolling pin and being removed from George. (PROSE: Prologue) The Master then managed to evade the Doctor's detection, and possessed the body of a human named Richard. (PROSE: Forgotten)

Surviving on Earth

After possessing Richard, the Master killed Violet out of revenge. However, he discovered his possession had caused the host body to decay at an accelerated rate, so he was forced to steal more bodies to prolong his survival. Realising that the First World War was rapidly approaching, the Master decided to migrate to America to avoid the conflict and boarded a ship to go there in 1912. Ironically, he had boarded the RMS Titanic, unaware of its eventual fate, and escaped in a lifeboat when it sank.

Arriving in New York City, the Master took possession of a member of the Hudson Dusters, quickly becoming the leader of the gang and calling himself "Don Maestro". After twenty years of living in his current body, he occupied the body of his host's son, Michael, and moved to Las Vegas where he owned a casino. He accumulated money to fund experiments towards the elongation of the lifespan of his host body. Fearing the eventual decay of his body, the Master used his money to buy a penthouse to isolate himself from infection. After years living in isolation, his host's son confronted him with the knowledge that he had possessed both his father and his grandfather in some way. He then trapped the Master in the penthouse.

The Master trapped in the Vault. (AUDIO: Mastermind)

After UNIT were alerted to the presence of penthouse, they discovered the Master in a comatose state. He was imprisoned in the UNIT Vault, awakening every five years for one hour, before returning to a coma. After fifteen years living in the Vault, the Master awoke for a third time and was interrogated by UNIT officers Ruth Matheson and Charlie Sato. However, he managed to hypnotise both of them and escape his imprisonment. Discovering that UNIT had recovered his TARDIS from a sealed tomb in the Valley of the Kings, he used it to escape from the Vault. (AUDIO: Mastermind)

Reaching the end

The Master contacted Earth from the planet Glox from his TARDIS, disguised as a sound studio. As he told humans about how he brought Glox's civilisation to its ruin, he implanted into the listener a telepathic order. When the Fourth Doctor discovered his hideout, the Master ordered one of the listeners to connect telepathically to his TARDIS and become a replica of him; he then sent him out to face the security of the place and be killed in his place, while he escaped. (AUDIO: I Am The Master)

Death

I shouldn't be here! I died! I'm... the end of... the line...The "Decaying" Master's last words

After arriving on the planet Parrak in search of the tomb of one of Rassilon's leading engineers named Artron, the Master used his TARDIS to extract all water on the planet's surface throughout its history to use as an incentive for his workforce to keep obeying his rule. His overall plan was to use the Tomb of Artron to revive himself, using the unlimited regenerative energy Artron had discovered on Kolstan.

Nearing the end of his life and getting increasingly more desperate, the Master allied himself with the Eleven, with the intention of betraying him once the tomb was opened. However, the Eleven had used the Master to gain access to Artron's matrix brain, which he used to lead the Ravenous to the Doctor. Upon the Ravenous' arrival, they took greater interest in the Master, believing that the flavour of all of his lives was superior to that of the Doctor's. The Ravenous feasted on him and the Master died, his body being left on Parrak. (AUDIO: Planet of Dust)

However, when the Celestial Intervention Agency sent the "Bruce" Master, the "War" Master and Missy to return Artron's brain print to Parrak to help fuel the technology to grant new regenerative cycles to Time Lords, the Masters used the technology for themselves as part of the deal, and resurrected the corpse of the dead Master, giving him a new body and regeneration cycle in the process. (AUDIO: Day of the Master)

Undated events

• While in the form of a "snake", the Master visited the Scoundrels Club, as he always did when having gained a new physical form, and he sat in his favourite chair, taking notice how his snake form went unnoticed. (PROSE: Dismemberment)

Alternate timelines

In one version of the Last Great Time War, the Master's resurrection by the Time Lords damaged the Doctor's TARDIS's control console, with the lingering trauma of the Master's extraction from the TARDIS causing it to adopt a new appearance shortly after the Doctor regenerated at the conclusion of the Time War. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Time War)

In an aborted timeline, the Decaying Master was brought to the ruins of Kiameth with four of his other incarnations, as well as Kamelion and Jo Grant by accident, by the Saxon Master, who intended to use the Attornium to take their lives in a desperate bid for his own survival after he had unleashed a sentient entropy wave. When the Masters decided to sacrifice Jo for fun, they were interrupted by Missy, who used the time scoop to scatter the Masters along the timeline of Kiameth, to see if any of them would find a chance of redemption by either stopping the wave or salvaging something from its aftermath. The Decaying Master found himself at a beach house on an isolate planet, where, with his decaying appearance hidden by a perception filter put on his wrist by Missy, he formed an attachment with a woman named Kitty. After he spent weeks living with her under the name of "Jeremy", the Bruce Master arrived at the beach house, and eventually convinced the Decaying Master to show Kitty his true appearance, reasoning that she had grown to love him enough to look past it. However, Kitty was horrified by his decaying body. Returning to the Saxon Master's castle, the Decaying Master was convinced by Missy to use the Attornium to stop the entropy wave by feeding on it, but the War Master, having realised that the wave was their own future incarnation, discreetly poisoned himself and his other incarnations and turned off the Attornium. The resulting paradox erased the Saxon Master's arrival on Kiameth, bringing the universe back to normal. (AUDIO: Masterful)

Psychological profile

Personality

He though of himself as being "elegant and charming", with humans not to be "worthy" of hosting his mind, and hated being called insane. (AUDIO: I Am The Master) However, the "Decaying" Master was very open with his satisfaction in killing innocents, even claiming that mere petty vengeance was enough motivation to do so, (AUDIO: Mastermind) as well as his own amusement. (AUDIO: I Am The Master) He was also petty, turning Earth into a religious dictatorship to spite the Doctor, (COMIC: The Glorious Dead) and killing Violet solely because she foiled his attempt to kill Edward Grainger. (AUDIO: Mastermind)

When angered, the Master would use "real power" to "smash everything up" for "fun", as he deemed scarring people for amusement as being "for children". However, her found it a comforting thought how "evil always originates in the attempt to eliminate evil in others", and found the concept of morality to be pure hypocrisy due to how people always viewed themselves as the "goodies". (AUDIO: I Am The Master)

He was more respectful to the Web of Time than his other incarnations, being particularly careful to avoid paradoxes. (AUDIO: Masterful) He would live for the moment, as found that time travel removed the interest from the present, (AUDIO: I Am The Master) and preferred to "pick [him]self up and move on" when he failed. (AUDIO: Masterful)

During the period of his life when he was forced to possess various human bodies to survive, the Master would take on minor personality traits and quirks from the bodies he possessed, and, as a result, he started to fear that his "essence" would eventually become too diluted if he were to jump to another body too frequently, and began to go to great pains to make sure his bodies lasted as long as possible by only possessing members of the same bloodline. However, as he would later admit to Charlie Sato, the Master began to somewhat enjoy the experience of being human as the years went by, and even toyed with the idea of dropping his plans of restoring his Time Lord body and just remain in a human body. (AUDIO: Mastermind) Whilst a perception filter disguised his decayed appearance, the Master became genuinely happy in the company of Kitty, and was distressed when she rejected him upon seeing his true form, acting solemn afterwards. (AUDIO: Masterful)

As his body began to shut down, the Master gained a sense of calm, due to the constant pain he felt in his decaying body being reduced by his body parts shutting down as he died. As he was being consumed by the Ravenous, the Master commanded the Eighth Doctor to save himself and ensure his death was avenged as he threw the Doctor his TARDIS key. (AUDIO: Planet of Dust)

Skills

The Decaying Master was effectively cunning, using his link to the TARDIS to send the Doctor to specific locations to later show him the folly of his worth, (COMIC: The Glorious Dead) and acquiring a casino in Las Vegas to accumulate the money needed to fund the experiments to elongate the lifespan of his host bodies, while also becoming head of the Hudson Dusters, and controlling part of the mafia. (AUDIO: Mastermind)

A patient incarnation, the Decaying Master simultaneously juggled a grand plan to achieve divine power with a pettier plan to morally humiliate the Doctor during the fight for the Glory, (COMIC: The Glorious Dead) and also, while trying to remain undetected in the history books, possessed a line of men from the Maestro family to ensure he had a succession of bodies that he could adjust well to, passing from father to son once there was a grandson alive to inhabit later on. (AUDIO: Mastermind)

Appearance

The Master as a preacher. (COMIC: The Fallen)

After gaining a new body, the Master resembled a black street preacher with a balding head. (COMIC: The Fallen) After revealing himself, he replaced his clothes with a more regal outfit. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)

When trapped on Earth in the 20th century, the Master wore whatever his hosts wore normally, to avoid detection. He discovered each body he possessed would inevitably revert to a decayed appearance, despite his best efforts to prolong them. (AUDIO: Mastermind) By the time of his death by the Ravenous, the Master had continued to rot away, wearing a hooded cloak to conceal himself, and was covered in bandages, with the Eleven comparing him to a mummy. (AUDIO: Planet of Dust)