User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-197.86.143.126-20200606192351/@comment-197.86.143.194-20200710113734

As for the final Chapter of Divided Loyalties (novel), how do we know it is unreliable? Easy. Let's go back to that quote from Page 96:

"All but three of the Deca were on their first regenerations and were forbidden to regenerate, should the whim take them, until after their five-hundredth birthdays. If Gallifreyans could be said to have birthdays. Vansell, Ushas and Rallon had already become junior Time Lords and were now in their final semesters, whereas the rest still had two to go before they received the Rassilon Imprimature - the genetic coding that gave them their regenerative powers, the ability to withstand time travel, the telepathic connection to TARDISes, time rings and all the other transtemporal feats of Gallifreyan engineering."

But, in the Final Chapter of the same book(Page 248) we get this little gem:

"Jelpax, on the other hand, was probably Cardinal Borusa's proudest achievement - the only one of the Deca to stay the course, graduate and eventually join one of the major recorders, keeping an eye on matters arising in four or five minor galaxies. It was his team who foresaw a future where the Daleks had achieved domination over all other species."

So, logically, if Jelpax was the only one of the Deca to graduate then he was the only one who has the power of regeneration, along with all the other Time Lord gifts.

Or, Divided Loyalties is a Celestial Toymaker-induced dream state. It is not a literal depiction of events in the Doctor's(or anyone else's for that matter) past. It's about the Toymaker being sadistic, and uh, toying, with his victims for his own amusement. If you start cherry-picking that there are both a "Koschei" and a "Magnus" in a DREAM at the same time, and take that to be a literal fact, then it follows that "neither of them" were ever able to regenerate, or control a TARDIS, or ever actually even became a Time Lord. Whereas, we know that "both" The War Chief and The Master were Time Lords. In fact, the same Time Lord.