Meistras

Meistras
Species:	Firmament
Job:	Teacher
Place of origin:	10,000 Dawns
Appearance:	Life After Death

Professor Meistras was a Firmament, a member of the godlike species who ruled the 10,000 Dawns. As such, they had the use of a Factory of Crystal, which enabled them to travel through the multiverse with ease and also gave them the ability to be reborn in a new body with completely new DNA if their current body was killed.

Biography

Meistras was Aesculapius's teacher when Aesc was young, and often killed the younger Firmament to "teach her a lesson". In following centuries, Meistras kept up this habit even after Aesc escaped from Firmament society, continuing to view it as their twisted responsibility to educate her the hard way on various topics. When Aesc and her companion Jason Jackson got close to the secret of the Utopia Dimension, Meistras, who had recently been reincarnated as "a woman in a black and purple velvet dress with a large orange afro", used her Factory of Crystal to deposit a booby-trapped parcel in Aesc's own Factory, killing her current body.

The reborn Aesc pretended to be dead for good and, posing as her own cousin, organised a large funeral to gather all possible suspects in one room. She was eventually able to pin the killing on Meistras and identify her current incarnation, who had come to the funeral in the company of a mysterious little girl called Ofelia. After Meistras explained to Aesc that she had killed her to warn her off investigating the Utopia Dimension, which would spell her permanent dath, Meistras and Ofelia escaped aboard Meistras's Factory of Crystal. (PROSE: Life After Death)

Behind the scenes

With Aesculapius being a Doctor pastiche, her nemesis Meistras likewise fills a similar role to the Master as a strangely playful long-term nemesis of the same species, with a ship of the same type as the hero's. Her name, Meistras, is the Lithuanian word for "Master". The suggestion is not so much that Aesc and Meistras are thinly-veiled versions of the Doctor and Master, as that they fulfill the same role for the 10,000 Dawns that the Doctor and Master do for the Totality.

A major difference between the two hero-villain relationships lies in Meistras being a former teacher to Aesculapius, rather than a classmate of the same age. Indeed, despite their long association, Life After Death and other works in the 10,000 Dawns series make it clear that Aesc and Meistras were never friends.

Notably, a character who appears throughout Life And Death as a red herring disguising Meistras's actual guilt and identity, comically named at the very end of the story as simply "Steve", was physically described as highly reminiscent of the classic image of the Master: his appearance as a man with dark, slicked-back hair, a black goatee with light grey stripes through the edges, wearing "a dark grey, almost black suit with a closed collar" and black gloves, was clearly reminiscent of Roger Delgado's incarnation, while the "flowing crimson robe with an absurdly high collar and elegant gold embroidery" is similar to that put on by Eric Roberts's incarnation of the Master at the climax of the 1996 TV movie, a reference emphasised by the description of the character as "having certainly dressed for the occasion".