Tales from the Matrix - True Stories from TARDIS Logs Retold for Time Tots
Tales from the Matrix - True Stories from TARDIS Logs Retold for Time Tots, or simply Tales from the Matrix, was a book written by Loom Auntie Flavia and published by Panopticon Press in 6803.8 of the Rassilon Era. It was aimed at an audience of Time Lord children and featured accounts of adventures sourced from TARDIS logs, including the Doctor's, with some additional commentary from Flavia. An audiobook edition came to be part of the Wigner Heisenberg Collection, being kept in the Talking Books Section of the Mobile Library.
One adventure featured in the book described the Eighth Doctor's visit to 13th century BC in the company of Charlotte Pollard and a young William Shakespeare, their encounter with the Doctor's former companion Vicki (who now used the name Cressida) and her husband Troilus, and the Doctor's subsequent attempts to prevent Shakespeare from learning anything which might have influenced his later writing of the play Troilus and Cressida. Flavia's addendums for this story largely consisted of criticisms of the Doctor's actions or highlighting instances of his irresponsibility to her audience. Examples included the fact he never bothered to use his Absolute Tesseractulator to guide the navigation of the TARDIS, pointing out that keeping the TARDIS in the easily recognisable form of a police box rather defeated the point of a chameleon circuit, lambasting the Doctor's decision to stay for tea and subsequently drink too much ethanol thus compromising the causal nexus when "the first thing any of us would have done would have been to get out of there quickly", as well as noting that his disclosure of future events was in direct contravention of fifteen universal laws of Time and two local statutes. She also explained the concept of friends to her readers, defining it as "an Earth thing" which was "a bit like having a colleague or fellow student you cooperate with, but without any exams or project targets at the end to make the cooperation meaningful".
Towards the end of the story, Flavia observed that some Time Tots might have gotten the impression from stories in other books that the Doctor was quite clever despite breaking a lot of rules. She said this assessment was correct and that in a crisis he was "just the kind of person you need around" but qualified the statement by revealing he was "just the kind of person to cause one" in times where there was no crisis to speak of. In conclusion, Flavia admitted that some would be shocked by the Doctor's naughtiness during the story, particularly with how he had jeopardised the stability of the futures depending on him all on the basis of a whim. She claimed he thought himself "quite good" at judging how likely to disrupt the Web of Time his whims might be but that his confidence was misplaced due to his belief in two "very wrong" things; firstly, that personal morality was more important than doing the things simply everyone knows are right and secondly, that he was cleverer than everyone else and could always sort things out. Flavia ended this section of the book with the question "He deserved what happened to him next, didn’t he?".
Historiographic Speculator Anctloddoton cited excerpts from Tales from the Matrix in his essay A Suggestive Correlation of The Cressida Manuscripts with other Anomalous Texts of the Pre-Animarian Era as proposed for Collective Consideration. (PROSE: Apocrypha Bipedium [+]Loading...["Apocrypha Bipedium (short story)"])
