A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)

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A Brief History of Time Lords was a book intended to be a Gallifreyan history textbook, written and amended through time by its author.

Publisher's summary

The Time Lords are an immensely civilised, and immensely powerful, race. Yet we know very little about them, save that they can live forever (barring accidents) and possess the secrets of space and time travel. Their history has been shrouded in myth and mystery. Until now.

A Brief History of Time Lords unlocks the secrets of this ancient, legendary alien race - a civilisation that inflicted some of its most notorious renegades and criminals on the universe, but was also the benevolent power that rid the cosmos of its most fearsome enemies. Drawn from the ancient records of Gallifrey, and handed down from generation to generation, this remarkable book reveals the Time Lords in all of their guises: pioneers and power-mad conspirators, time-travellers and tyrants, creators and destroyers.

Be careful who you share it with.

Plot

Preface to the First Edition

In all of its history, there can be only one constant regarding the planet Gallifrey.

Lies.

Or more accurately, the lies of Rassilon and his inner retinue of Time Lords. While a Level 5 planet would say that "history is written by the victors", the Time Lords understand that history is re-written by the future. As a result, even the contents of this record, with its time sensitive pages may not be entirely accurate. All the author can promise is that it is one truth about the Time Lords, one that the old men in funny hats are determined to keep hidden away.

The Shining World of the Seven Systems

Within their protective bubbles, the Time Lords can out-sit eternity. And when they look beyond their cities, they sneer at the Drylands, the ancient trees, the weeds, the sludgy snow, and the looming mountains.

The truth of it is that Gallifrey is a beautiful planet, full of rich colours. Once, the author muses, the early inhabitants of the planet must have marvelled at their world, not just its beautiful wilderness and majestic mountains but also the wildlife, just as colourful as the wilderness that birthed them. Officially, Gallifrey is the only planet in the universe not have its eco-system ravaged by its dominant species, with no extinction occurring as a result of the Time Lords' actions.

Unofficially, that's another lie. The Last Great Time War killed all animals but the flies. And indeed, it was the Time Lords who fought the war. The Gallifreyans, who comprise the overwhelming majority of their world's population, lived outside the cities as simple farmers, whose crops feed even the Time Lords.

At the age of eight, every Gallifreyan child is taken from their family and brought to the Untempered Schism to assess whether or not they will become a Time Lord. As the author notes, the greatest fear of any seven year old was not that they'd fail, but rather succeed. Succeed and be sealed away in a bubble, doomed to shut out their previous life forever more.

The Citadels

Gallifrey has two main cities. The Capitol and Arcadia. The structures of both metropolises reaching deep into the bowels of the planet.

The Capitol is divided into eight Sectors. Sector 1's main tower houses the Panopticon, a vast hexagonal chamber (with each side, possibly, honouring one of the six Founders of Gallifrey) in which great events of state were held. Elsewhere in the tower is the Capitol Museum, where the symbols of presidential office are on display, along with examples of every kind of robe of state, from the President and the Gold Usher to the Chapter Cardinals.

Sector 2 is the political heart of the Capitol, housing an enormous assembly room for meetings of the full High Council, a conference room for the Inner Council and other small gatherings, as well as the President's office.

Sector 3 is entirely dedicated to the Chancellor and the Chancellery Guard while Sector 4 contains the Castellan's office, the courtrooms, and the Security Compound, which itself comprises detention rooms, interrogation cells, and several execution rooms, most of which were officially disused.

Sector 5 comprises hundreds of libraries, records rooms and archive stores and leads directly into Sector 6, which houses the various Chapters of the Time Lord Academy, the largest structure in the Capitol after the Panopticon, and the main force-field control area for the transduction barrier that shields Gallifrey.

Sector 7 is dominated by the Communications Tower, from which Space Traffic Control and Temporal Control monitored and logged every passing vessel in Gallifrey's vicinity. It is also rumoured to be the site of Gallifrey High Command's War Room, together with an extraction chamber — although the existence of such chambers is officially denied.

Finally, Sector 8 is home to the Time Travel Capsule landing bays and an array of repair shops. Below the repair shops lies the TARDIS Graveyards, where TARDISes that reached the end of their lifespans are dispatched. Somewhere in the citadel, a set of chambers are said to be allocated to the Celestial Intervention Agency, but no one outside the Agency knows exactly where those chambers are with a conspiracy theory even opining that architectural configuration keeps their command centre moving. Below all that lies the Panopticon Vaults, where the Eye of Harmony was kept. Below those are the Cloisters, the physical location of the Matrix, guarded by the Cloister Wraiths. And beneath all of that, buried near the very core of Gallifrey, lie the Time Vaults, where all the forbidden weapons of the Omega Arsenal were locked away.

Here the author notes, that the edifices of glass and metal surround his kind to such an extent that no one can realistically be expected to take it all in. The Communications Tower alone is fifty-three stories tall.

So, the author asks, who exactly is meant to be impressed by all the glamour?

The Dark Times

The Time Lords, the author muses, are an odd lot. As a race, they know virtually everything about every alien species, yet they very little about their own history. And they admit to even less than what they know.

Where, for instance, did regeneration come from? Everyone on Gallifrey can do it but was it a natural ability or another of Rassilon's creations? And why thirteen incarnations? The Time Lords have long (always?) been able to grant more regenerations, so where did the limit come from?

Perhaps, the author theorises, the answer might lie in Gallifrey's history with Karn, the resting place of the Sisterhood of Karn, guardians of the Sacred Flame, granter of eternal life, and what remains of Pythia's following.

Once magic had been exiled to the red planet, Gallifrey, riding a technological surge unrivalled until the rise of the Dalek Empire, went off to build an empire, spreading out like a particularly haughty disease. When these early Gallifreyeans encountered other races however, they took it upon themselves to "shepherd" these lower life-forms with what races they couldn't conquer outright being allied with to form the Fledgling Empires.

One species, the Racnoss, who drew power from the dangerous huon energy, an energy form that unravelled the atomic structure. The Empires went to war with the Racnoss and wiped them all out (save one of course, it would later turn up on Earth 4.6 billion years later). Officially all huon energy was destroyed, unofficially it was quietly incorporated into Gallifreyan travel technology.

Or perhaps, the answer comes from the Time Scoop (something the author leans more towards given that its mundane name is more indicative of an earlier era). The Time Scoop was used to pluck lifeforms out of time and deposit them into the Death Zone where they would fight for the amusement of the Gallifreyans (and eventually someone erected a force field around the Zone when the abducted aliens grew increasingly powerful). Eventually, Rassilon made himself known and managed to get the Time Scoop retired, though, the author notes, he never dismantled it outright.

During the Time War, the author reflects, the Time Scoop would be reactivated to find bestial monstrosities to use as weapons. Something that, incidentally, proved that extinctions had happened on Gallifrey as Rassilon resurrected beasts from the planet's prehistory. Idly, the author wonders if any are still around.

The Old Time

Whatever the truth of Rassilon's rise, what is accepted is that it gave way to the Old Time as more detailed records began to be kept. Almost certainly so Rassilon would never be forgotten. When exactly The Book of the Old Time was written, no one knows. But a decent guess can be made based on the lack of Omega in the book's pages.

A contemporary of Rassilon, Omega was another renowned engineer and scientist. Partnering with Rassilon, their first major creation was validium, a living metal. Unfortunately for the duo, the living metal's sentience made it too difficult to control. Setting a pattern for the future, the validium was locked away in a nigh-impenetrable vault where it would be casually stolen with no one the wiser.

Instead, Omega and Rassilon began working on their time travel theories. As they soon realised, time travel required an enormous energy source. To counter this, they developed two complementary theories. The first was that if the time vehicle's interior dimensions were much larger than its exterior ones, the power cost would be cut down. This was the birth of dimensional transcendentalism. The issue of actually getting this massive power source led to the birth of the first stellar manipulator, prosaically dubbed the Hand of Omega.

Despite his eagerness however, Omega got his sums like totally wrong and was swallowed by the first black hole, being deposited into the anti-matter universe. On the plus side though, he left behind the power source, and a chance for Rassilon to not only get the sums right but place himself at the centre of history.

With the power source, the Eye of Harmony, the Gallifreyans became the Time Lords as Rassilon began fortifying Gallifrey, shielding it behind the transduction barrier. The Hand of Omega was subsequently disassembled before it was locked away in a nigh-impenetrable vault where it would be casually stolen with no one the wiser.

The Artefacts of Rassilon

Each of the artefacts was imbued with stupendous power despite their primitive appearance. The author reckons that their simplistic appearance was not only to preserve mystique but yet another way for Rassilon to be remembered. However, the author believes that the Time Lord founder failed to account for the inevitable stagnation that resulted from such disguises.

The Eye of Harmony, an exploding star in the act of becoming a black hole and suspended in a permanent state of decay, was placed within the Obelisk of Rassilon, thanks to the shielding of the Sash of Rassilon, within the Panopticon.

The Eye, set in an eternally dynamic equation against the mass of the planet, was sealed to prevent the black hole from consuming Gallifrey. The raw artron energy that flowed from the Eye was then siphoned off into new time travel capsules with each containing a mathematically modelled subset of the Eye, holding a splinter of the black hole within them. Access to this power source was granted through the Rod of Rassilon.

A second artefact was known as the Great Key of Rassilon, which would grant absolute power if used with the Rod and the Sash. Confusingly, the Key of Rassilon was another artefact, it granting access to the Matrix. The Matrix seems to have borne from the idea that the average Time Lord lives for roughly four to five thousand years with that knowledge and experience being something Rassilon was eager for future generations to use. At the moment of death, a Time Lord's brain was scanned and all of their memories and experiences were uploaded into the Matrix, itself a living computer, its algorithms able to generate prophecies. Rassilon, being Rassilon, attached some pseudo-religious nonsense to his last great invention in the form of the confession dial, a ritual act of purification.

Befitting its creators, the Matrix had a massive sense of drama, one of its first prophecies speaking of the Hybrid, a creature, said to be cross-bred from two warrior races, that would "stand in the ruins of Gallifrey and destroy a billion, billion hearts to heal its own." But as the prophecy was billions of years off, it was quietly ignored.

The Law Giver

Among Rassilon's many means to ensure his legacy was establishing the Laws of Time, or more accurately, he dramatically said something that, with the benefit of hindsight, bore a great similarity to the basic laws of physics. Another law was the baffling and dangerous The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey. Baffling because it doesn't contain any laws and dangerous because it's actually a key to Shada, a half completed prison. And like all other great artefacts of power, the book's importance was forgotten before it was locked away in a nigh-impenetrable vault where it would be casually stolen with no one the wiser.

Like all great tyrants, Rassilon's reign eventually came to an end when he sealed within the Tomb of Rassilon, or perhaps he voluntarily retired into it when he realised the end was nigh. Though the Black Scrolls of Rassilon, the Harp of Rassilon, and the Portrait of Rassilon, instructions were left to enter the Tomb and claim the Ring of Rassilon for the gift of immortality. But as Rassilon had come to realise, immortality was a curse with the Ring trapping these would be tyrants as living stone.

Such a shame then that he forgot that attitude entirely when the Time War came.

The Record of Rassilon

Though the Time Lord empire had long since been dissolved, and the former colonies liberated, exploration continued apace. Before the non-interference policy, the Time Lords influenced the Vogans, to the point of the Seal of Rassilon adorning the aliens' society, banned miniscopes, though such technology is remarkably similar to Time Lord paintings, unsuccessfully arbitrated the war between the Rutan Host and the Sontaran Empire, and went to war.

When the Great Vampires ravaged the cosmos, the Time Lords led the defence. The creatures' energy makeup prevented any energy weapons from being used and, according to The Record of Rassilon, great bowships were constructed, their steel bolts disrupting the monsters' form. The Great Vampires were hunted to extinction with the war, officially, causing the Time Lords to lose their lust for violence. All it would take was one more crisis for isolationism to sink in.

And that came when the Time Lords went to Minyos. The Minyans, in their primitive state, saw the Time Lords as gods and readily accepted the technological gifts until they grew powerful enough to kick the Time Lords out. Eventually the Minyans learnt how to split the atom which led to them, eventually, splitting Minyos, with the Minyans fleeing in ion-drive starships.

Almost immediately, the non-intervention policy took hold and the era of stagnation followed.

Galactic Ticket Inspectors

Any good oligarchy will always try and get the unpleasant bits out of the way first. Staying out of the affairs of other planets was easy enough, but how then were the Time Lords supposed to make sure that no other races develop time travel? To rectify this logical fallacy, the Law of Non-Interference in the Affairs of Other Planets has a few side-steps written in, namely the founding of the CIA. The CIA's purpose was simple: Maintain Gallifrey's supremacy over the cosmos while leaving everyone back home none the wiser.

Well nearly everyone. There were a fair bit of Renegade Time Lords who sought, for whatever reason, to leave Gallifrey and visit the larger galaxy. Most of them were quickly found and towed back home so they could be punished over their flouting the Laws of Time and a failure to fill out the paperwork necessary for flouting the Laws of Time. The punishment for unauthorised departure from Gallifrey was, more often than not, exile from Gallifrey. Rather like how a Level 5 planet will execute those who have suicidal thoughts.

The prime example of this is, of course, the Doctor (who provided the name for this chapter). As the story goes, the Doctor grew bored of Gallifrey's sterile culture and stole a faulty TARDIS to travel the galaxy where he righted wrongs, fought monsters, and abducted humans. Eventually he was found, hauled back to Gallifrey, given a slap on the wrist, and sent out to right wrongs, fight monsters, and abduct humans. Occasionally he'd pop back to Gallifrey, but that was the size of it until the Time War.

Of course, there are hidden meanings based on the Doctor's inventory when he fled Gallifrey. He travelled in a faulty Type 40 TARDIS, taking with him the validium, the Hand of Omega, the President's daughter, and the moon (though in fairness, he only lost the moon). Rather than being bored, the Doctor fled out of fear (though someone really should ask him of what). The prevailing theory seems to be that the Doctor feared what he, or anyone else, could do with all of Gallifrey's power and stole the most powerful artefacts he could find to hide them out in the galaxy.

And so it was the Doctor went, fighting the good fight, defeating the Dominators and their Quarks, the Yeti, the Ice Warriors, and the Daleks. Helping those in need and taking a vow to never be cruel or cowardly, while never giving in or up (and yes, becoming a boyhood hero of the author's). But all good things come to end and after an affair with the War Lords, the Doctor scarified his freedom so that the Time Lords could return the aliens' captive humans back to their own time periods, unable to do so in his own malfunctioning craft.

Agency Secret

The authorities however, chose not to make an example of the Doctor. A Malfeasance Tribunal (#309906) was held, but the CIA had realised that the Doctor, despite violating the official Time Lord policy, was carrying out the unofficial one. Though the transcripts indicate that the Doctor, then in his second body, was forced to regenerate into his third, evidence suggests that the CIA recruited the Doctor to be one of their agents. Why exactly this engagement was cut short, the author doesn't know, but he suspects that the security systems on Space Station Camera, where the Doctor had been sent to prevent the Kartz-Reimer module, caught the Doctor on tape and exposed the CIA, forcing them to have the Doctor regenerate.

Before too long, the Doctor was regenerated and exiled to Earth in its 20th century. But soon enough, the CIA was back to using him as an agent in their fights with the Master, most notably when the villain sought out the Doomsday Weapon on Uxarieus. Other trips included a stopover at Peladon to aid the Galactic Federation in the 39th century or helping out with the Mutt problem on Solos.

Free Agent

Even the CIA soon realised that the Doctor was getting tired of being treated like a yo-yo and would one day refuse, doubly so given that his third self was far less amicable than his second. The opportunity to "reward" the Doctor came in the form of Omega.

Having survived the black hole, Omega had become the mad king of a realm of anti-matter from which he began draining the power of Gallifrey so he could return to the regular universe. At wit's end, the Time Lords used the Time Scoop to abduct the First and Second Doctors and have them aid their next incarnation. Together the three Doctors defeated the mad founder, reversing the energy drain, and allowing the anti-matter universe to become a new power source for Gallifrey. With the Doctor gallivanting off around the cosmos once again, the CIA stepped back, lest the upper echelons of Time Lord government discover their interference, only contacting the Doctor again, albeit obliquely, to have him investigate a Dalek army on Spiridon.

Their silence was broken when the Matrix foresaw a time when the Daleks had exterminated all other life in the universe. Rushing into things, the CIA intercepted the Doctor, now in his fourth body, mid-transmat beam and dumped him on the Dalek homeworld of Skaro, shortly before the monsters first evolved. The Doctor, despite his qualms and objections, was given the mission of affecting the Daleks' development to make them less aggressive, if not prevent their creation outright, or at the very least, find some innate weakness.

He failed. Spectacularly. Whatever unintended consequences or temporal rewrites, the Doctor had disproved the Skarosian belief that only their world held life. As a result of the Doctor, the Daleks' creator, Davros, refocused his ambitions from conquest of Skaro to the subjugation of the universe. And even this was not the end of the catastrophe, for the Last Great Time War would result from this failed pre-emptive strike.

But the war was far off. Too far off, too unlikely, even for a Matrix prophecy. So the Doctor and the CIA continued their business as usual with the Doctor eventually finding himself on Karn. Though he managed to restart the Elixir of Life (it was suffering from a soot buildup), the more surprising discovery was that Karn was the hiding place of the deposed Time Lord tyrant Morbius. Perhaps, after this, the CIA had plans to try and recruit the Doctor once again and may very well have succeeded.

Had crisis not struck Gallifrey again.

A State of Decay

As an organisation, the CIA kept itself very busy, inventing new technologies such as the Time Ring. The rest of the Time Lords entered into a state of rapid atrophy, content to hide behind the transduction barrier, and shift through old records, for no reason other than the act itself. With no reason to change, the Time Lords became an impotent race that had forgotten their true power and that they were, quite literally, sitting on one of the greatest powers sources in the universe. The artefacts were now nothing more than ceremonial trinkets, ceremonial robes became everyday dress and even the architecture declined, something best seen when the one compares Gallifrey's majesty and mystique when the War Lord was tried to how it was rebuilt, in a manner much like a spaceport lounge, after Borusa became Lord President.

Now officially, the 406th President of Gallifrey was assassinated by the Master on Presidential Resignation Day. High Chancellor Goth, the chosen successor based on the resignation honours list, heroically tracked down the Master and killed him, at the cost of his own life. In the aftermath, Lord Cardinal Borusa, a once revered tutor at the Academy, simultaneously became Chancellor and Acting President.

Unofficially, not one word of that is true. Having reached the end of his thirteenth body, the Master was at death's door on the planet Tersurus, one of the Outer Planets, where he was discovered by Goth. In exchange for a lift back to Gallifrey, where the renegade sought to heal himself using the Eye of Harmony, the Master promised Goth power. On the Master's behalf, Goth accessed the APC Net and beamed a summons to the Doctor, intending for him to be the scapegoat for killing the President. Though Goth claimed that he'd been unable to resist the Master's mental powers, he is on record as admitting that was not the chosen successor. Willingly or not, Goth concealed a staser within his robes and fired on the President, killing him, while the Master framed the Doctor. Soon thereafter, Goth perished attempting to access the Matrix once again. The Master soon made his attempt to steal energy from the Eye of Harmony which healed him enough that he was able to run away to a TARDIS, though his or Goth's is a matter of debate, and escape. In the aftermath, Cardinal Borusa amended the record to paint Goth as a hero and remove the Doctor's role in events. Politely asked to leave, the Doctor happily did so, with neither man realising the full scope of the political crisis that they found themselves in.

In the immediate aftermath of the President's death, the Doctor, set to be executed for the assassination, had invoked Article 17 of the Constitution (No candidate for office shall in any way be debarred or restrained from presenting his claim). With Goth's death, the Doctor, as the only other candidate, had won by default. But with the 407th President having stepped out, the High Council realised that it lacked supreme power. After rebranding itself as the Supreme Council, the Council, after some loophole exploitation, made Borusa Acting President and was ready to settle down, content that the Doctor would never return to assume his title.

Then the Doctor did just that.

The Invasions of Gallifrey

One way or another, the Doctor had chanced across the Vardans and their plan to conquer Gallifrey. Whether out of a genuine belief that the Time Lords deserved to be conquered or out of tough love, the Doctor helped the energy beings invade his home planet. Few Time Lords resisted, some, such as Castellan Kelner, graciously helped. All this was, of course, a giant distraction. The Vardans operated on a broadcast wavelength. With enough of them in one place, the Doctor was able to track the signal and activate a modulation rejection pattern, sending the invaders back home.

What no one had counted on was the Sontaran Special Space Service. Having used the Vardans to punch a hole in the transduction barrier, the stocky conquerors quickly seized control of the planet, killing Kelner and other would be collaborators, before the Doctor used the De-mat Gun to wipe out the invaders.

Once Again, Omega

The Doctor then left Gallifrey again, this time properly allowing Borusa to become President with the Supreme Council becoming the High Council once again. At some point after this, Borusa regenerated, with the new incarnation of the Council proving ineffectual at best. The only one who seemed to know what he was doing was Councillor Hedin, who was the cause of the next crisis.

Somehow, Hedin made contact with the still alive Omega, whom he viewed as a public hero, and helped him create a new body based off the regenerated Fifth Doctor. Though Omega could only have gotten the required biodata through someone on the High Council, the Doctor was sentenced only to be saved by Omega whom he then defeated.

President Eternal

Now nearing retirement and having ruled Gallifrey, openly or otherwise, for so long, Borusa regenerated once again, his stubbornness increasing as he sought any means to ensure his rule lasted forever. Somehow Borusa discovered Rassilon's legacy of immortality and sought to possess it. He sent Thalia and Zorac into the Death Zone to scout the place only for the traps to kill them both, likely seconds after entering. Needing someone more resourceful, Borusa used the Time Scoop to abduct the first five incarnations of the Doctor and sent several of his old enemies to cover his tracks.

Whatever his madness, Borusa chose well for the Doctors did breach the Zone's traps and entered the Tomb where Borusa claimed immortality only to wind up trapped as an avatar of living stone on the despotic founder's tomb. With no President, Chancellor Flavia made the Doctor the new CIC of Gallifrey with him giving her deputy powers until he returned to the Capitol.

Why they expected him to return at all, the author has no idea.

Decadence & Degeneration

What happens next is not quite clear. What is know for sure is that the Doctor was finally deposed for neglecting his duties and that Gallifrey's increasing instability in its high command was finally exposed. Roughly around this time, a metamorphic symbiosis regenerator was stolen by non-Gallifreyan scientists. With this being, essentially, just breaking and entering, no one did anything about it, which left the door opens for three Andromedans to steal secrets from the Matrix.

Knowing that the Time Lords would eventually figure out the theft, the Andromedans hid on Earth. When the theft was finally discovered, a magnetron was used to shift Earth a few light years away and renamed Ravalox, even as its surface was burnt. Ravalox hardly went unnoticed however and the Doctor, now in his sixth body, soon discovered what became of Earth. To cover up their dirty secrets, the High Council set up an inquiry into the Doctor, with Inquisitor Darkel trying him on Space Station Zenobia. Initially, the Doctor was tried with transgressing the First Law of Time and genocide before a shocking reveal about the prosecutor caused the trial to erupt into a scandal.

Calling himself the Valeyard, the prosecutor was allegedly an amalgamation of the darker sides in the Doctor's nature, formed sometime between his twelfth and final incarnations. Such a revelation led to the High Council being deposed and Gallifrey falling into chaos, with the Master briefly taking control of the Matrix. With all charges against him dropped, the Doctor was offered the chance to become Lord President again.

He declined.

Novices of the Untempered Schism

As each child is taken from the Drylands and marched towards the Capitol, they are taken to the Untempered Schism, a gap in the fabric of reality from which the whole of the Time Vortex can be seen. When the prospective Time Tot is taken to the Schism, one of three things will happen. They will run away, they will go mad, or they will be inspired. Like most matters relating to the Time Lords, the official record is a poor reflection of the truth, being a collection of accepted ideas that suggests that everyone was like Pandak III. What might history look like, the author wonders, if everyone's story was told.

While a great many who were inspired; such as Engin, Spandrell, Androgar, the Woman, and Kenossium; achieved great prominence, some; such as Andro, Fabian, and Runcible; became simple public servants or were drafted into the ranks of the Chancellery Guard such as Andred, Hilred, or Maxil.

Worryingly, a good number of Time Tots seem to have gone mad, not only the corrupt Borusa or Goth, or the mad tyrant Morbius, but contemporaries of the Doctor such as the Monk, the War Chief, or the Rani. Of those who went mad however, the one who attained the most infamy however is undoubtedly the Master.

Officially there is no record of any Time Lord adopting such an alias with no biodata extract on them existing. Unofficially, the Master is bad. He is cunning, resourceful, has prodigious mental powers, is brilliant at mathematics, and, more than any other Time Lord, is Rassilon's creation.

When the Master was eight, he was taken to the Schism were he heard the Drumming. Based off the heart beat of a Time Lord, this sound was implanted by Rassilon on the last day of the Last Great Time War to serve as a link via which Rassilon could save Gallifrey, the Master being driven insane was little more than a side-effect. In the Master's early days, he was but a simple troublemaker, at least until the Third Doctor was exiled to Earth. Making the planet's destruction and/or conquest his new pet project, the Master allied with a variety of beings; the Nestene Consciousness, the Sea Devils, Axos, the Dæmons, the Daleks, and even a Chronovore. Owing to a variety of circumstances; pride, carelessness, and a taxing lifestyle; the Master, by the time that the Doctor was on his fourth body, had already burnt through all thirteen of his lives. Though the Master tried to grant himself more regenerations, he managed to extend his life by possessing the body of Tremas, though such a measure was temporary at best, given the Trakenite lifespan. Nonetheless, the Master not only managed to have the Fourth Doctor regenerate but outlasted the next two Doctors before his Trakenite body gave out.

Captured by the Daleks, the Master was executed only to survive beyond death thanks to a Deathworm Morphant. Using this form and its abilities, he crashed the Doctor's TARDIS in San Francisco where he took over the body of a human paramedic, Bruce. The Master baited a trap for the recently regenerated Eighth Doctor. The trap failed and the Master was sucked into the Eye of Harmony. What happened to him afterwards, no one is quite sure but for all intents and purposes, he was dead.

If only because he was explicitly resurrected during the Time War, envisioned as a perfect warrior for the conflict. Though the Master unleashed his chaos on the battlefield, it ultimately became too much even for him. When the Cruciform fell, the Master fled to the Silver Devastation at the end of the universe. There he hid himself as "Professor Yana" until the Doctor arrived and unwittingly caused the Master to break his Chameleon Arch. Regenerating once again, the Master, calling himself "Harold Saxon", fled to Earth in the 21st century, conquering the planet and turning it into a large scale weapons factory from which he would wage a war of galactic conquest. Defeated once again, the Master, for the first time in his lives, chose death, rather than be the Doctor's prisoner. Naturally though, this did not last long and, thanks to a cult of followers, the Master was brought back to life. Largely. His body leaking energy, the Master became even more unhinged, scavenging energy sources from wherever he could, before transplanting himself onto every human being, turning the species into the Master Race. With so many copies of the Drumming however, Rassilon was quickly able to move Gallifrey to Earth's space/time coordinates, whereupon he reverted the Master Race to normal before the Tenth Doctor banished both him and the Master back to the Time War, taking Gallifrey with them. Of course, as is now popularly known, Gallifrey was not destroyed and neither was the Master. Regenerating after, or perhaps because of, these events, the Master became a woman, now calling herself "Missy." Fleeing Gallifrey, Missy attempted to sway the Twelfth Doctor to her side with a Cyberman army, which failed, before last being seen surrounded by Daleks as the Dalek City collapsed around her.

It should come as no surprise that many of the Outsiders' most prominent members were among those who ran away. Nor Azmael, given how many of his pupils became Renegade Time Lords. Others of note included the Corsair, Drax, K'anpo Rimpoche, and the Doctor himself, even if the official record on him is rather unflattering. There are two standouts among those who ran away.

The first is Romanadvoratrelundar, Romana for short, who was a prodigy at the Academy. When the Fourth Doctor undertook a quest for the Key to Time, Romana was assigned as his assistant, learning rapidly from her many experiences in the galaxy. Once the Key was reassembled, Romana chose to regenerate, taking on the form of Princess Astra of Atrios. In this body, she had even more adventures with the Doctor; such as preventing Davros from aiding in the Dalek-Movellan War, saving Earth from the last of the Jagaroth, or halting the trade of Vraxoin. But all good things come to an end, and Romana was recalled to Gallifrey. Irrevocably changed by her adventures, Romana had no desire to go home. Fortune smiled on her when the TARDIS fell through a Charged Vacuum Emboitment and into E-Space. The TARDIS eventually returned to N-Space but Romana had stayed behind, choosing to help the Tharils. One way or another, she did eventually return to Gallifrey and became Lady President, possibly in the wake of the Ravalox affair. The scales eventually balanced out for Romana as she would be abducted during the Etra Prime incident, an early sign of the Time War.

The other who ran away, is one of the Time Lords' greatest, and longest enduring, mysteries. Calling herself "Susan", no one is quite sure who she is or where she came from. Some say she thought up the acronym "TARDIS", that she is direct descendant of Rassilon or some other founding father of Gallifrey, or that she was Pandad VII's daughter. No one knows her true name, though some sources suggest that is either "Arkytior" or "Larn."

What is known is that she was the Doctor's first companion, claiming to be his biological granddaughter, fleeing Gallifrey with him when she was just a child. With him, she ventured to Akhaten, Quinnis, Skaro, Marinus, the Sense Sphere, and several of Earth's most notable time periods. The two settled in London for several months in the 1960s before travelling again. When last seen, "Susan" settled down in 22nd century London, marrying a human named David Campbell (or possibly David Cameron). When the Doctor received his Malfeasance Tribunal however, no attempt was made to discover her fate, something the author suspects is due to so little about her past being official knowledge and the judges not wishing to highlight their ignorance of her.

Gallifrey Falls...

What started the Last Great Time War? The Fourth Doctor's failed attempt to undo the Creation of the Daleks? The Seventh Doctor blowing up Skaro? The Etra Prime incident? The Master surviving his Dalek execution? For that matter, who won? Fought in every time zone, the war rewrote history with only one man truly knowing how it ended. And even he was wrong.

What is known is that during the Tenth Dalek Occupation, the Dalek army vanished from time and space to go fight in the war. The Dalek Emperor and his army were met by a fleet of bowships, Black Hole Carriers, and N-Forms, all time scooped from Gallifrey's past. The first year of the war saw the death of Davros. The Sontarans were banned from joining, with the conflict devastating the other higher species, stripping the Gelth of their physical forms, killing the Animus and its Carsenome, and finally driving the Eternals from reality while the lower races remained blissfully ignorant.

To cope with the war, the Daleks had re-engineered their armors to draw power from the background radiation caused by time travel. As the war dragged on however, the Daleks' ideals of racial purity became diluted so much so that the Emperor created the Cult of Skaro, a group of Daleks with independent thought. One way or another, the Cult managed to acquire both a Void Ship and the Genesis Ark, a Time Lord prison containing millions of their brethren. Retreating into the Void, the quartet passed the time by developing new theories on how to evolve the Dalek race into something stronger.

On Gallifrey, the Omega Arsenal was emptied while the soldiers were re-engineered with hard drives into their brains. The soldiers complained of premonitions, visions of their whole race dying, but the War Council dismissed these as hallucinations. As the war dragged on, the Time Lords lost any regard for the weaker species of the galaxy, whole planets and civilizations being sacrificed to ensure Gallifrey. And time itself would soon resurrect those races so they could die again. As well as other horrors, the Skaro Degradations, the Horde of Travesties, the Could've Been King, the Army of Meanwhiles and Neverweres, the Time War had well and truly become hell. Backed up against the wall, the Time Lords resurrected their founder, Rassilon. The founding father delegated most of the fighting to the War Council however while he sealed himself and the High Council in a pocket dimension to work on the Ultimate Sanction, a plan to destroy the universe while the Time Lords would ascend to become creatures of pure consciousness.

Throughout the war, the Doctor had remained a conscientious objector, helping out victims wherever he could. When near Karn, the Doctor tried to save Cass, a gunship pilot, only to die in the effort. Resurrected by the Sisterhood of Karn, the Doctor was persuaded to join the Time War, drinking a special potion to regenerate into the incarnation known as the "War Doctor." For the later decades of the war, the War Doctor led the Time Lords' armies, from the Tantalus Eye to Skull Moon, but even his involvement could not stop the war's momentum.

The Dalek Empire assaults Gallifrey.

For the majority of the war, Gallifrey was safe, protected by sky trenches. Then the Dalek Fleet broke through and sent the army down to Arcadia. Properly invaded for the first time in its history, Gallifrey was lit ablaze with even the Capitol's glass being shattered. Bolstered, every Dalek ship converged on the planet, intent on bombing it out of existence on what was to be the last day of the Time War.

Witnessing Arcadia's fall, the War Doctor ran out of options and breached the Time Vaults to steal the Moment, a weapon so powerful, capable of destroying whole galaxies, that its operating system had become sentient. Gaining wind of this, but unable to find the Doctor, Rassilon accelerated his plans.

The Visionary had foreseen that two Time Lords would survive Gallifrey's fall, the Doctor and the Master. To save his race, Rassilon implanted the drumming into the Master's head and then sent a White-Point Star to Earth to make the link physical.

On Gallifrey, the War Doctor fled to the Drylands. Vowing to one day count all the Time Tots he was about to kill, the Doctor activated the Moment. In a single second, both races, both empires, both planets, were destroyed. The Doctor bore witness and walked away as the only survivor of the Last Great Time War.

...No More

Regenerating at the war's end, the new Doctor (whom it will be convenient to refer to as the Ninth Doctor) denounced his previous incarnation and swore to become the Doctor once again, driven by his enormous guilt, a guilt that he stopped from consuming him only by insisting that it had ultimately been worth it.

But the Daleks, as always, survived. First it was one. Then it was found the Dalek Emperor had survived, his ship having fallen through time, and raised a new army out of Daleks out of humans but the Doctor sang a song and the Daleks ran away.

But they came back soon enough, with the Cult of Skaro finally free. The Tenth Doctor's clashes with them saw all but one destroyed who had managed to save Davros from his death with the Kaled managing to raise the short lived New Dalek Empire.

As the Tenth Doctor neared the end of his life, the Master returned to his. Now properly off his rocker, the Master created the Master Race with one his vessels finding the White-Point Star. With the physical link made, Gallifrey disappeared from the last day and reappeared over Earth, intending to take the blue planet's place in the galaxy. Forced to relive his reasoning for using the Moment, the Doctor unhesitatingly made the same choice and sent Gallifrey and Rassilon back into hell.

Time is a funny thing. The Tenth Doctor had, just a few years prior, as he was having one last dance before his impending regeneration, met the Eleventh Doctor and helped him, along with their Warrior self, save Gallifrey from destruction. The Doctors, using three TARDISes, froze Gallifrey in a single moment in time and shunted it into a parallel pocket universe, in a manner much like a stasis cube. The Daleks, more or less, wiped themselves out as a gigantic spherical firing squad. The universe dusted itself off and moved on, the Time Lords and Daleks becoming nothing more than a myth.

The calculations to pull this off would have taken centuries. Perhaps even a dozen lifetimes. And indeed Lord Androgar notes that the entirety of the Doctor's regeneration cycle was present but the General refused to confirm this.

Gallifrey Rises

Gallifrey was saved. Not exactly in a better position than before, but it was saved.

Rassilon now faced several immediate problems. Restoring the planet to the universe was quite easy, but figuring which universe was theirs, less so. Fortunately, the Matrix had registered a split in the fabric of a reality, a time field manifesting as cracks in the skin of the universe. Assuming that this was the right way out, the question now became, when and where to exit.

Pick the wrong space/time coordinates and the Time War would restart. Seizing control of the last of these cracks, Rassilon broadcasted the Question. If the Doctor answered and spoke his true name, then the Time Lords would return.

Time Lords, as a race, are very good at making mountains out of molehills. Rassilon's transmission, sent out from the remote world of Trenzalore, repeated throughout all of time and space, invoking fear in every sentient being who heard it. The Silurians, the Judoon, the Terileptiles, the Slitheen, all sent a fleet to investigate with even the Daleks joining in. In trying to create the safest possible moment for Gallifrey's return, Rassilon had created the most dangerous.

Arriving first, the Church of the Papal Mainframe erected a forcefield around the planet and enforced an uneasy truce. The Doctor, having also heard the transmission, was sent down by the Church to investigate and decoded the message. Unwilling to abandon the planet or his own people, the Doctor mounted a one man defence of Trenzalore, knowing that one day, the Daleks would fully invade the planet to finally end the Time War.

And when they did, the Doctor had exhausted all twelve of his regenerations. Weakened and defeated, the Doctor finally gave up, content to finally die. The Doctor's companion, Clara Oswald, appealed to the Time Lords to help the Doctor and they bestowed upon him a new regeneration cycle. The energy boost allowed the Doctor to defeat the Daleks and regenerate once again, the time field closing behind them.

It wasn't a total loss though, the Time Lords had confirmed that they'd found the right universe. Deciding on a quieter return, Rassilon slipped Gallifrey back to its original spatial coordinates but now at the extreme end of the time continuum for its own protection.

As Gallifrey rebuilt, with all evidence of the Time War being neatly scrubbed away, Rassilon turned to the next problem on his list. The Visionary's vision of "Gallifrey falling" had been proved inaccurate. Now fearing that such a fall would be the work of the entity known as "the Hybrid", Rassilon set out to discover the truth behind this creature. Possibly because of Missy's whispers, Rassilon became convinced that the Twelfth Doctor held the knowledge he sought. Ordering the death of Clara Oswald, Rassilon trapped the Doctor in his confession dial, one that would only open if the Doctor confessed what he knew about the Hybrid. Four and a half billion years later, after punching his way out, the Doctor confessed that he knew what the creature, claiming that the Hybrid destined to conquer Gallifrey and stand in its ruins "is me".

The author breaks from his omniscient, and deadpan, narrative here to reminisce about that fateful day. The author was but a boy, seven years old, staring into the eyes of the Oncoming Storm and was the first one whom the Doctor spoke to. The Doctor came to the barn where he had once lived, and the author then lived, to eat some soup and draw a literal line in the sand. Soldiers, the General, and the High Council were all sent but the Doctor refused to speak until Rassilon finally presented himself. The Doctor had but four words for Rassilon the Redeemer, "Get off my planet." Unable to talk his way out of it, Rassilon ordered the Doctor's execution only for his soldiers to finally turn on him. That evening, a lone shuttle, its ion trail visible from the Drylands, left the Capitol, another carrying the High Council not far behind it. Rassilon, the Lord High President and last of the Founding Fathers had finally left Gallifrey.

For what it's worth, the author doubts that the Doctor was the Hybrid. In fact, he's not even convinced that the Doctor ever knew that the Hybrid was. In all honesty, the Doctor, mad with grief for Clara Oswald, probably wanted to scare the Time Lords as revenge for killing his love. Certainly he was right to say that Hybrid was not half-Dalek, the Daleks don't allow half-Dalek, but other candidates exist. A girl, a mix of human and Mire who was said to outlast the universe. Another girl, part-human part-wolf who allegedly poured the Time Vortex into the head of the Dalek Emperor. A human/Time Lord mixture brought about by a biological metacrisis. A woman conceived in the Time Vortex itself, born half-human, half-Time Lord. Though none of these quite fit the mould.

What if, the Hybrid was not one person but two? A rogue, irrational, and passionate Time Lord and a young human woman so very similar to him with both willing to push each other to the extremes?

To the author's disappointment, but lack of surprise, the Doctor did not stay on Gallifrey after he'd banished Rassilon. He didn't retake the office of Lord President or bring peace to planet. Instead, he risked the Web of Time to save Clara's life.

For once in his lives, he failed. Dropped off back on Earth by a time looped Clara, with his memories of his love blocked, the Doctor reunited with his beloved TARDIS and took off into the galaxy, righting wrongs, fighting monsters, and abducting humans.

Characters

to be added

References

Notes

  • Some descriptions of the Time War are directly lifted from Russell T Davies' "Meet the Doctor" article from the Doctor Who Annual 2006: Time Lords using Bowships, Black Hole Carriers and N-Forms from their past, the Dalek Emperor sending an army into the Vortex and using the Deathsmiths of Goth, the Forest of Cheem watching in despair, the destruction of the Greater Animus and its Carsenome, and the Eternals fleeing from reality. It also reuses the phrasings of President Romana's "Etra Prime incident" as a starting point of the war and her failed attempt at a peace treaty with the "Act of Master Restitution".
  • The text on the Master claims that there are many rumours about his fate following Doctor Who. Some state that he was saved inside the Vortex by the mythical Esterath, other saying that he remained trapped in the Doctor's TARDIS, his mental resources transferred into an android, acting as the Doctor's companion or pet. Others said that he was, finally, dead.
  • The section on Salyavin proposes a theory that, due to temporal instabilities, the events of his encounter with Skagra unfolded "on at least four occasions, involving at least two different incarnations of the Doctor". This is a reference to the various retellings of TV: Shada.
  • When listing off the things that the Doctor left Gallifrey with, "the President's daughter" is included alongside Gallifrey's moon. This is a reference towards brief one-off lines included in TV: The Magician's Apprentice and Hell Bent, which reference the Doctor losing "the moon" and stealing the "President's daughter." Alongside this passage is an illustration with all of the other things mentioned to be stolen, and in the place of the President's daughter is an image of Susan Foreman. This would suggest that the President at the time of the Doctor running away from Gallifrey was possibly the Doctor's off-spring. However, the book fails to recognise that the Doctor truly is Susan's grandfather, later going on to mention several stories which suggest that she was not his granddaughter.
  • Susan being referred to as a direct descendant of Rassilon or another founding father is a reference to PROSE: Birth of a Renegade and the suggestion that Susan was taken into the Doctor's care, as referred to in PROSE: Lungbarrow.
  • When describing Susan settling down on Earth, it is stated that she stayed with a human either named Campbell or Cameron. This is a reference towards an alteration to David Campbell's name in PROSE: Doctor Who and the Zarbi, listing it instead as Cameron.
  • When describing possibilities of the Hybrid, there are indirect references to Ashildr, the Bad Wolf, the DoctorDonna, and River Song.

Continuity

External links

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