#heartshaven's headcanons

[daughterofheartshaven]

I love all of this. Headcannoned.

(also uh is Marvin actually a name? I've seen jokes but gonna be real I thought it was just "let's take Narvin and make it sound more boring")

time lord names seem to follow a few patterns:

Complete Nonsense. this is where you get the likes of sartia or vansell or hallan. usually has a long full name

mythological, particularly greek mythological, references. see: ulysses, eris, pandora. usually has a long full name

a modified english word. this can be a name or just an ordinary word: narvin (marvin), andred (andrew), innocet (innocent). usually has a long full name

a sort of double-barrel name format, e.g. irving braxiatel, fuldanquin borusa. less common than the others. the latter name is invariably used to address them, but there's nothing stopping you from using the first name. doesn't appear to have an accompanying long full name

renegade names, or more accurately, titles. the doctor, the master, the rani - this is the one most familiar to nuwho. usually the people who use these names had a name that fitted into one of the above four categories, but said name is no longer used or known

house names seem to do something similar:

Complete Nonsense. see: catherion, dvora

[noun] [noun] format, or something adjacent. see: lungbarrow, oakdown, heartshaven

mythological references, again most often greek. for example, ixion

[daughterofheartshaven]

Using the Doctor Who EU to recontextualize the whole Timeless Child thing

Or, why the Doctor is a dhampir.

Salutations!

Maybe you saw my essay here about how Gallifrey wasn't actually destroyed by the Master using the Expanded universe as my evidence. Now, I want to tackle The Timeless Children's other controversial plot point - the titular Timeless Child's relationship with the Doctor. Also, perhaps you have heard of the Doctor Who book Lungbarrow, and how it connected the Doctor to a mysterious figure called the Other in Gallifrey's ancient history. So how are those connected? Was the Doctor really the Other? And just what is the story of the Timeless Child?

So let's talk about the Timeless Child. Let's talk about the Other. Let's talk about Patience. Let's talk about Division. And let's talk about vampires and where regeneration really comes from.

Shall we get started? Buckle up for another ride into the endless pit that is the Doctor Who expanded universe.

Okay, ground rules first. Anything seen on tv, happened. I can recontextualize as much as I want (and I'm gonna do that, believe me) but it still has to fit with everything we see onscreen. I also have to use all of an EU source if I use it. No picking and choosing bits. However, that same loophole applies to EU material - I can recontextualize those as much as I want, too.

With that out of the way, let's meet the stories that are our players. I'm going to be sorting them into medium by category this time.

Tv stories:

Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children: The controversial Thirteenth Doctor episodes. I'm assuming you're familiar with if you're reading this.

Fugitive of the Judoon: The Thirteenth Doctor story that introduced the Fugitive Doctor. I'm assuming you're familiar with this.

Flux: The Thirteenth Doctor story that followed up to the Timeless Child plot points in a way that is very relevant to this discussion. I'm assuming you're familiar with this.

A Good Man Goes to War: An Eleventh Doctor episode that established some of the history of the Time Lords

The Brain of Morbius: A Fourth Doctor story. Notable for this discussion because it featured brief images of ten faces that were implied to be incarnations of the Doctor from before the First Doctor. These are collectively known as the "Morbius Doctors".

State of Decay: The Fourth Doctor tv story that established the series lore on vampires

Books:

Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible: the Seventh Doctor book that laid the groundwork for Lungbarrow and its Gallifrey Lore

The Pit: A 90s Who book with some vampire lore

Goth Opera: A 90s Who book with some vampire lore

Damaged Goods: A 90s Who book with some vampire lore

Cold Fusion: A book starring the Fifth and Seventh Doctors that is notable for introducing the character of Patience

Lungbarrow: the big Gallifrey Lore book. I will be going over this one in depth

Interference: Shock Tactic: A 90s Who book with some vampire lore

The Infinity Doctors: A very confusing Doctor Who book (this will get explained later)

The Book of the War: The first book in the Faction Paradox series

Audios:

Zagreus: A Big Finish story starring the Eighth Doctor and Rassilon

Patience: A Big Finish story starring the Eighth Doctor

Comics:

The Tides of Time: A 70s comic starring the Fifth Doctor

The Bidding War: A 2010s comic with some vampire lore

Monstrous Beauty: A 2020s comic with some vampire lore

Origins: A recent comic that features the Fugitive Doctor

Okay, so there are kinda four threads running together that tell a more complete story, but were all written independently of each other. The story of the Timeless Child and Division, the story of the Other, the story of Patience, and the story of the Yssgaroth War. Let's go through them in order.

Also while the Other, the Timeless Child, Patience's husband, the Fugitive Doctor, the Infinity Doctor, the Morbius Doctors, and the Doctor are all presented as more or less the same character who all call themselves "the Doctor", I will be referring to them all separately. I have a few reasons for doing this which will become clear later, but it's also helpful for reasons of clarity.

Prologue: Where all this mess came from

So in the 70s, there was a tv story called The Brain of Morbius. Morbius was a Time Lord president who decided it was Morbin Time, tried to conquer the universe, and caused a civil war on Gallifrey in just about the only interesting thing to happen on Gallifrey between Rassilon's presidency and the Doctor being loomed. He was killed, but one of his followers managed to save his brain and is trying to make Morbius a new body so it can be Morbin Time again. The Time Lords decide to throw the Doctor at this problem, and he ends up getting into a mind-bending contest with Morbius (who was by that point in an artificial body). During this, both Morbius and the Doctor's past incarnations are shown on a screen, and then we see ten new faces while Morbius says, "How far, Doctor? How long have you lived?". A lot of people assumed those faces were Morbius's, but the intention from the producers was that they were prior faces of the Doctors (I will be referring to these incarnations as the Morbius Doctors moving forward, as that is how they are generally reffered to in the fandom). Trouble is, the rest of classic who completely ignored that.

Oh and if you're worried, while Morbius won the mindbending contest, it left him disoriented enough that he was able to get mobbed by the Sisterhood of Karn and pitched off a cliff, averting the renewal of Morbin Time.

And with that out of the way, let's get on to the real attractions.

Part 1: The Timeless Child and Division

So this story is the most straightforward of the three. In Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children, it is revealed that in Gallifrey's prehistory, a Gallifreyan scientist named Tecteun travelled off-world (in her world's first exploration of another planet) and found the Timeless Child by a portal to another universe. She took the Timeless Child back to Gallifrey and discovered that the Timeless Child had the ability to regenerate. Tecteun was able to synthesize this regenerative power and give it to her own people, becoming one of the founders of modern Time Lord society in the process. Later on, the Timeless Child and Tecteun were both recruited into something called Division, a time-active-interventionist group that skirted around or outright ignored Gallifrey's laws. It is also stated that the Timeless Child's memory was wiped - at least once, possibly more than once - in order to control them. It's also suggested that Tecteun seems to have regrets about all of this, given how she left a message for the Timeless Child in the matrix about it.

This is where the story gets fuzzy. The next time we see anything, the Timeless Child has evolved into the Fugitive Doctor. She is seen working for Division in the flashbacks in Flux and Origins, but following Origins, she goes on the run from them. The events of the Fugitive Doctor's flight from Division play out in Fugitive of the Judoon. She is able to assassinate Gat, the Time Lord seeking her capture, and while it comes at significant personal loss, there is nothing to indicate that the Fugitive Doctor is unable to make a clean getaway.

By the story presented in Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children, however, the Fugitive Doctor is assumed to have been captured with her memory wiped to eventually become the Doctor. Let's put a pin in that assumption, though. That same story also shows the Fugitive Doctor and the Morbius Doctors being a part of the Doctor's past.

Tecteun, meanwhile, had become head of Division (if she wasn't head of it to begin with). Origins briefly shows her leading Division at the time of the Fugitive Doctor, and she is finally shown meeting the Doctor proper in Flux. There, it is revealed that she had started considering the entire universe a scientific experiment, but due to the Doctor being considered too much of a rouge element, she decided to use antimatter called flux from outside the universe to destroy the universe, with Division being safe outside the Universe. She also released a pair of Great Old Ones, Swarm and Azure, with the intention that they would kill the Doctor. Tecteun's plan was that the old universe would be destroyed, and that Division would conquer the universe that the Timeless Child originated from.

This plan did not work.

Swarm and Azure instead killed Tecteun and destroyed Division, before being destroyed by an entity only known as Time (and I could go on a whole tangent on what her deal is, but I'm gonna save that for another post). It's not shown explicitly in the show, but I also believe Time removed the destruction of the flux from the universe as well (mostly because planets explicitly destroyed in Flux are shown still existing in the future of the series).

In any case, during the Flux event, the Doctor was able to recover the archive where the Timeless Child's wiped memories were stored, but she ultimately decided not to access them.

It's never stated which universe the Timeless Child comes from in the show, but we're gonna circle back to that. It's also not stated how long Tecteun ran Division between its founding in early Gallifreyan history and its destruction during the Flux event. We're coming back to this, too.

Part 2: The Other

Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible establishes two very important things about Gallifreyan history. One, all Time Lords became sterile early in their history - shortly after the conclusion of their war with the vampires (more on that war in a bit). Since then, instead of having sex, they have big cloning machines called Looms that make new Time Lords. And two, Rassilon (the founder of Time Lord society) had two major co-founders - Omega, and one other whose name was lost to time. He gets called just "the Other."

Rassilon and Omega were both established as characters in the classic series, but the Other is an invention of the books in the 90s (from the reader's perspective at least - he was a behind the scenes idea from the last few seasons of classic who, but he was never explicitly mentioned onscreen). He gets cryptic references all over the Virgin New Adventures book line, but this only gets concrete in their final Seventh Doctor book, Lungbarrow.

Where we get to know them in the book, Omega is presumed dead, and the Other and Rassilon are having a falling out. Omega's death is weighing heavily on the Other, and he thinks Rassilon is going power-mad and is trying to have the Other killed. Omega's last and most impressive creation, the stellar manipulator called the Hand of Omega, is quite possibly the Other's only friend by this point. The Other wants to leave the planet and so he tells his family to escape, and then confronts Rassilon with his intentions. Rassilon Does Not Like This and tries to have the Other stopped, and blocks all spaceports to make this happen. The Other then calmly walks into the primary generator for the looms and is never seen again.

And then, ten million years later, out from a loom, comes the Doctor. The Doctor's looming process was unusual, with the Doctor later claiming he could remember just before it happened, waiting to be born. (Although given the Doctor was five years old at the time he said this, that may be a little suspect). In any case, the Doctor lives a fairly normal life for a while, until he is found by the Hand of Omega which sees in him its old master. Shortly thereafter, the Doctor is confronted by the Time Lord Glospin (explaining his deal is a little complicated but he's a part of the same Family House as the Doctor is, the titular House Lungbarrow), about some irregularities in the Doctor's biology before being driven off by the Hand. It's ambiguous if either of these were the deciding factor, but the Doctor takes the Hand and leaves Gallifrey shortly thereafter.

Of course there's one last little piece left to take care of. If you're familiar with Classic Who, you may know that when we first met the Doctor, he was travelling with his granddaughter, Susan.

Lungbarrow claims that the Doctor's first trip in the Tardis was to travel back to Gallifrey's prehistory and meet the Other's granddaughter, the last child born before the Time Lords became sterile. She recognizes the Other in the Doctor, and considers him her grandfather. The Doctor doesn't quite recognize her, but takes her on as his first companion in the Tardis. And thus, Susan joined the Tardis crew.

The other thing that's important is uh that Lungbarrow has an actual plot. And said plot is only tangentially related to the above. Everything I just said is presented as three flashbacks in Lungbarrow - one straight narrative sequence (the argument between Rassilon and the Other), one where the Doctor shares his memories of leaving Gallifrey (basically everything that happens with Glospin, the Hand of Omega, and the Doctor first leaving Gallifrey), and one where several characters enter the Doctor's subconscious and have a dream sequence (including the Other walking into the Looms and the Doctor meeting Susan). The subconscious trip has some moments to it that are super trippy and metaphorical, and I'm gonna use that fact later. But for now, on to part 3!

Part 3: Patience

Like I said earlier, Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible is the story that establishes that all Time Lords are sterile. At the end of a civil war in Gallifrey's ancient history, the leader of the losing side, Pythia, cursed the people who would become Time Lords with sterility before killing herself. (Her followers, by the way, left Gallifrey and eventually became the Sisterhood of Karn). The Time Lords, desiring to avoid extinction, created breeding engines known as Looms, which would create new Time Lords through what was effetely cloning. That's the story presented in Cat's Crade: Time's Crucible, anyway. But if you look at other places in the EU, this story starts to crack. An Earthly Child introduces Susan Forman's explicitly biological son, for example. And in Lungbarrow, the Time Lord Andred is able to get a human, Leela, pregnant, although the character's future appearances in Big Finish are notably child-less, suggesting the pregnancy failed somehow (either that or the child removed themselves from history as part of joining faction paradox and became the character known as Intrepid, but this is a tangent).

So are Time Lords sterile? Yeah, I think so. For the most part. But we know that not all of them are. A rare few can still reproduce sexually. There is another Time Lord who had a biological child that I've yet to bring up, as well. Her true name was lost to time, so we know her only as Patience.

This is her story.

The character of Patience has some truly strange origins, even for the Doctor Who EU. In the 1982 comic The Tides of Time, the fifth Doctor briefly sees an illusion of someone who looks familiar to him, created by the demon Melanicus using something called the Event Sythesizer (no, I'm not going to explain that). The art shown is close enough to Second Doctor companion Zoe Herriot to assume that's who the author and artist intended the illusion to be of, but that's not the direction later stories went in.

The character of Patience was introduced proper in 1996's book Cold Fusion. It also features the Fifth Doctor, in an earlier point in his life then The Tides of Time. In it, a prototype Tardis crashes into a planet that is later colonized by humans. The humans discover one pilot, comatose, who by all rights should be dead. She isn't. They take her back to their big fancy lab and attempt to find out more about her with basically no success.

Enter the Doctor. (And also Tegan Jovanka.)

When the Fifth Doctor stumbles into this, he is able to help the pilot complete her first regeneration. She is unable to remember much of anything from prior to her regeneration and is from Gallifrey's distant past. She is, biologically, something of a proto-Time Lord: she speaks a different language then the Doctor naturally, she only has one heart, and a few other things. She's explicitly more-or-less a contemporary of Rassilon.

Not having a name for herself, she adopts the moniker "Patience" on Tegan's unintentional suggestion. Despite all this, Patience and the Doctor recognize each other on some level, and neither really have any ideas as to why - the Doctor shouldn't even be able to recognize the dialect of Gallifreyan she speaks, as it is dead by his time. Patience has some garbled memory of fleeing from arrest as ordered by Rassilon (with the implication being that any fertile Time Lords were having their births stopped so that the loom-born were to inherit Gallifrey). Patience's escape came with the help of her husband, whom authorial intent confirms as one of the Morbius Doctors. In any case, in the present day, Patience is starting to properly recover when she is shot in the back of the head, apparently killing her. Her body then disappears. The Fifth Doctor's memory of Patience is lost shortly thereafter when the Seventh Doctor orchestrates the Fifth Doctor losing his memory of the whole adventure in order to preserve the timelines. The Seventh Doctor only met his prior self after Patience's body had vanished, meaning that the Doctor's entire memory of Patience was erased - except, perhaps, for some vague recollection which we see in The Tides of Time.

While Patience's fate is followed up in the book The Infinity Doctors, The Infinity Doctors is a very strange book that doesn't really contribute much to this ongoing discussion. The Infinity Doctors is deliberately evasive about which Doctor it stars, with its protagonist being sometimes implied to be the First Doctor and sometimes the Eighth. It's very possible that Patience and Omega (yes he's here but I'm not going to explain that) are the only characters in the story from the Whoniverse as we understand it, with everyone else being from a different universe. I might do a breakdown of The Infinity Doctors someday, but now is not that day.

The only other information we have about Patience comes from the 2021 audio story fittingly entitled "Patience". In it, the Doctor tells uses an ancient artifact that takes the form of a deck of cards called the Paradoxica to analyze time and hide his companions - Liv Chenka, Helen Sinclair, Tania Bell, and Andy Davidson (yes, the Torchwood character. no, I'm not explaining that either) - from the Judoon. The narrative is interspersed with the Doctor telling a fairy tale about a woman completing an impossible task (emptying an ocean with a bag that had a hole in it) and receiving the child she desired once she had spent an eternity completing this task. The story ends with the confirmation that this woman was Patience, and that she gave the Doctor the Paradoxica. How this happened is left unsaid - either she gave it to her husband who became the Doctor, or this happened during the events of Cold Fusion.

Part 4: The Yssgaroth War

Unlike the other narratives I've just rambled off, the Yssgaroth War is much more of a patchwork from various places around the EU, so this is gonna be even more scattered than I have been thusfar.

State of Decay, for being a story set in the pocket universe called E-Space, ended up being one of those foundational Gallifrey lore episodes of the classic series. That's the serial that established that at the dawn of time, the Time Lords fought and won a massive war against the vampires.

Yes, you read that right. This is one of my favorite pieces of Doctor Who lore.

State of Decay establishes that the Great Vampires were massive bat-like creatures who could drain the life from entire planets and who created more traditional vampires as their servants. Rassilon lead Gallifrey against them, and ordered the construction of "bowships," which were giant spaceship crossbows that could be used to stake the Great Vampires. The Great Vampires were ultimately defeated by the Time Lords. EU sources generally agree that this was the biggest war the Time Lords ever participated in until the Time War ten million years later.

The book The Pit would add a couple of new details about the conflict. It would rename the Great Vampires "Yssgaroth" and claim that the Yssgaroth originated from outside the universe - the early time travel experiments overseen by Rassilon ripped a hole in reality and the Yssgaroth were what came through with intent to consume the universe. These details are supported by Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible and Interference: Shock Tactic.

A couple more recent comics have fleshed out the Yssgaroth War a bit. The Bidding War further reinforces that the Yssgaroth are from outside our universe, with it showing that during the Time War, the Time Lords opened a rift to the Yssgaroth dimension in an attempt to use them as a weapon against the Daleks. Monstrous Beauty was the first story to show us the War proper, depicting Rassilon personally leading forces against the vampiric army.

And this would all be interesting but irrelevant to our discussion if not for two stories published in the early 2000s that both seek to recontextualize the Yssgaroth War and the Time Lord's rise to power.

Let's start with Zagreus. The story as a whole is dedicated to deconstructing Rassilon's façade as a benevolent and reasonable ruler and instead reveals him to be a xenophobic tyrant who wished to remake the universe in his image - something that lines up with pretty much all of Rassilon's appearances post-Zagreus. As part of this, the vampire Lord Tepesh states that before the war, the vampires were peaceful and Rassilon provoked them because he feared their power. Tepesh is presented by the narrative as an unreliable narrator, but the point he makes is still worth noting.

The other story I need to talk about is The Book of the War. While the book's primary focus is The War in Heaven (for the uninitiated, that's basically spin-off series Faction Paradox's version of the Time War), it does give a lot of relevant information about the Yssgaroth War. First of all, it gives the timing of the War being right after Gallifrey established History as a concept - by "anchoring the thread" and making a linear history, the Time Lords accidentally let the Yssgaroth into the universe. While this contradicts some of the timings given by some of the sources mentioned above (other sources agree that it was the early experiments that caused the Yssgaroth to enter the universe not the final establishing of History and mastery over time), this can be excused since The Book of the War is an in-universe document and so may not be completely accurate. What makes this book relevant is that it also theorizes that the Time Lord's regenerative capabilities were stolen from the vampires. Even for an unreliably narrated book, this is treated as speculation, but as a concept, that is fascinating.

Interlude: when regeneration happened

There is some inconsistency in all of these sources as when regeneration first became a property of the Time Lords. The Timeless Children has it come shortly after they discover interstellar space travel, and far before time travel, but several of the VNA-era books (including Cold Fusion and I think Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible) depict early time-travelling Gallifreyans as being without regeneration. The tv episode A Good Man Goes to War states that regeneration came about as a result of exposure to the Time Vortex. My personal take is that The Timeless Children showed Tecteun discovering regeneration, and initially only shared it amongst herself and her elite (Rassilon, etc.). After the Looms went into effect, they started Looming more and more Time Lords with regenerative capabilities, until eventually it's a shared trait among all Time Lords. After ten million years, the artificial origins of regeneration have been lost to time, but the symbiotic nature of the Time Lords to Tardises and the Time Vortex has meant that a being conceived in a Tardis could be engineered to have limited regenerative capabilities.

Part 5: Bringing it all together

So back to the Doctor and Gallifreyan history. Uh, how does this all make one cohesive story?

Okay so our story starts with Tecteun and finding the Timeless Child by a portal to another universe. She takes said child home, discovers from it the secrets of regeneration, and so on and so forth. Tecteun, Rassilon, and Omega become the three founders of Time Lord society.

So that's the first thing there. The Other, as revered in Time Lord history, isn't the Doctor or some version thereof. The founder whose name was lost to time was Tecteun. And Tecteun discovered regeneration from the Timeless Child. This child, for whatever reason, starts calling themselves the Doctor.

But wait? Wasn't there some theories running around that the the Time Lords stole regeneration from vampires? And that vampires initially weren't as hostile to the universe before Rassilon saw them as competition?

Yes, yes, there were. It's simple, really. The Timeless Child was from Spiral Yssgaroth. They're a vampire.

(I really wish I had been clever enough to come up with that on my own, but I'm not. Pretty much everything else here is out of my own brain, but that is a fan theory I saw on the internet.)

In any case, the Yssgaroth War was motivated, at least in part, by the Vampires' outrage that their secrets and child had been stolen. But, as history records, they were defeated.

And for a time afterwards, Tecteun and Rassilon continue to rule Gallifrey together. But Omega's apparent death shortly after the end of the Yssgaroth War weighs heavily on them both - and they're both ambitious enough to not quite appreciate the other being their equal. Trouble is, they kinda need each other. Rassilon, despite his posing, isn't a scientist - he's a politician. He needs his scientists to continue to work miracles, and Omega is already gone, so that just leaves Tecteun. Tecteun, for her part, is no leader. She wants power but doesn't have the people skills. And she still cares deeply about her people and about the vampire she has come to see as her child. The two drift apart - Tecteun becoming the leader of Division which she took increasingly off-world while Rassilon becomes more and more the sole face of leadership on Gallifrey.

Eventually this reaches a boiling point. Tecteun and Rassilon have lost all trust in each other. Tecteun makes preparations - including leaving the message in the Matrix we saw in Ascension of the Cybermen / the Timeless Children. She and Rassilon then have the confrontation that we saw in Lungbarrow. But Tecteun doesn't throw herself into the looms - she takes herself off Gallifrey through technology Rassilon doesn't know about and begins to cut Division's ties with Gallifrey altogether. Division has already begun recruiting across the universe, so she figures she can leave Rassilon to his one planet. Notably, she also leaves the Hand of Omega behind on Gallifrey, where it is eventually put in a vault and forgotten about. She maintains contact with Gallifrey only through her agents, one of which is the Timeless Child.

For their part, the Timeless Child has gone through several incarnations. They've had their mind wiped to hide that they're not Gallifreyan, and they have then been the Morbius Doctors, including Patience's husband. The Timeless Child has had a personal life (as seen by their marriage to Patience), but they're increasingly being a full-time agent of Division.

In any case, right now the Timeless Child is the Fugitive Doctor. And she plays along with Tecteun for a while. However, following the events we see in Origins, she goes on the run. Tecteun has Division track her to Earth, where the events of Fugitive of the Judoon play out. The Fugitive Doctor manages to get away as we see, but she doesn't know of any way to get away from Division long-term (as Big Finish is currently exploring) - and, away from Tecteun's influence and protection, she's starting to work out that she's not the Gallifreyan she thinks she is.

In an act of desperation, she pilots her Tardis back to Gallifrey - on the very same day Tecteun left. She takes Tecteun's place in Lungbarrow's story, and throws herself into the Looms, where she dies, dissolving into the giant vat of Gallifreyan genetic material.

This leaves Tecteun searching time and space desperately for the Timeless Child. At first, the Timeless Child seems nowhere to be found. But eventually Tecteun discovers that there is a time traveler called the Doctor out and around the universe. An investigation into the Doctor reveals that they've been all over the universe. Trying to just grab them and do a memory wipe isn't an option because they've done too much. Tecteun doesn't realize this Doctor is a different person to the Timeless Child, to the Doctor they left a message in the Matrix for.

Tecteun had probably never been that good of a person, but she used to care. She used to care about Omega, but he's gone. She used to care about Rassilon, but they burned too many bridges. She used to care about her vampiric child, but she takes this as a betrayal. And whatever good left in Tecteun dies.

Tecteun decides to destroy the universe and start over in a new one where she can control everything, so she picks a point far in the future where Gallifrey will have been destroyed naturally so her home planet will be unaffected. By convivence, one of the Doctor's most common destinations - Earth - happens to be at that point. Tecteun initiates the Flux event in Earth's time and releases Swarm and Azure to finish the Doctor off.

The Doctor stumbles into this, but she's operating off incomplete information from the Matrix. She doesn't realize that she's not the Timeless Child, since the Master seemingly destroyed any records that she could check his claims against. So when Tecteun and the Doctor confront each other, they both assume that the Doctor is the Timeless Child.

And this becomes a moot point because the Doctor finding Tecteun and Division HQ allows Swarm and Azure to find it as well. They kill Tecteun and destroy Division. If you're reading this, you probably watched Flux, you know how this goes.

It's not clear if Rassilon is aware that Tecteun died shortly after their argument. He certainly comes to the conclusion that she won't be an ongoing concern anymore, and, as the last survivor of Gallifrey's founding trio, uses his remaining lives to rule Gallifrey unopposed. With no one to oppose him, he removes Tecteun's name from record - as far as he's concerned, she betrayed him and does not deserve to be remembered.

Ten million years pass.

The House of Lungbarrow looms a new Time Lord, but, for whatever reason, this particular Time Lord has a significant amount of the Timeless Child's genetic material mixed into their genetic soup. This new Time Lord chooses to call themselves the Doctor - in unconscious echo of their genetic predecessor. Their amount of vampiric genetics makes them genetically distinguishable from other Gallifreyans if close examination is done, but for a while no one has any reason to do this.

This is also why I get to call the Doctor a dhampir - they're not a true vampire, but have a nontrivial amount of vampiric genetics - or, to use the terms of The Book of the War, they carry the Yssgaroth Taint.

These genetics are still enough to get the attention of the Hand of Omega, which has been mothballed for those Ten Million years. Maybe the Hand sees the Timeless Child in the Doctor, or maybe it's just intrigued by someone who isn't just another Time Lord. In any case, Glospin confronts the Doctor, the Hand drives Glospin off, and the Doctor leaves Gallifrey with it.

He also leaves with Susan. She isn't from the dawn of Gallifrey. Instead, she is a Loomed Time Lord of the Doctor's era who found herself ostracized and disliked. That being said, she found community with three other Time Lords: the Doctor, the Master, and another Time Lord named Braxiatel. The four of them are all outsiders from their own Houses, and so consider themselves a house unto themselves, and Susan, as the youngest, began referring to the Doctor as "Grandfather", as that term is reserved for the head of a House (something that is established in The Book of the War), as she views him as the head of their little house of four.

In any case, the Doctor and Susan leave Gallifrey. The Master loses his mind when he realize he got left behind, steals a Tardis himself and heads out after the family he thinks abandoned him. Braxiatel stays behind and becomes a successful politician and art collector.

A couple hundred more years pass.

We're now in the events of Lungbarrow. The Doctor shares his memory of leaving Gallifrey with some of the fellow members of his House. However, he edits Susan out of the memories he shows - technically, he went through the criminal justice system for this, but Susan never did and he doesn't want her to. Gallifrey has seemingly forgotten about her, and he wants to keep it that way.

And then he has his vision trip dream sequence where he sees the past and sees the Timeless Child walk into the Looms. He then sees a memory of himself meeting Susan. This isn't literal - it's symbolic of Susan and the Doctor's relationship changing and evolving as they left Gallifrey. The Doctor knows this isn't literal, but it's in his best interests to act like it is - he's not in control of this dream sequence and several other people are there (including one of the Doctor's enemies), and he still wants to protect Susan, so he goes along with that story.

The Doctor continues their life and eventually gets to the Thirteenth Doctor where she meets the Fugitive Doctor in Fugitive of the Judoon. When she scans herself and the Fugitive Doctor, the two register as the same entity. However, Time Lords are not biologically identical across regenerations - the Doctor has to have something specific to herself that she is looking for.

And she actually has one. At some point in the Doctor's life, they found a genetic quirk that has persisted across their regenerations. They don't know it, but it's the Yssgaroth Taint. Since the Doctor has never encountered another Time Lord with the Taint, she is by this point assuming it's a quirk of her own biology, so takes her sonic detecting the Taint in the Fugitive Doctor as confirmation that the two are the same.

And then shortly after the Doctor meets her genetic predecessor, the aforementioned stuff with Tecteun happens. It's possible that the Doctor themselves has noted the ambiguities in their backstory and heritage but given that there were several thousand years of life between the Seventh and Thirteenth Doctors, it seems likely that they don't think to try to analyze it that closely.

And that's a wrap! If you have any thoughts on all of this, I'd love it if you would share them! Thank you!

[the-worms-in-your-bones]

The last of the Gallifrey short trips notes: Erasure

There are earthquakes on gallifrey (i mean idk why there wouldn’t be, planets are going to planet after all, but still feels like something to note)

Heartshaven has a wine cellar → there’s gallifreyan wine, wonder if it’s any different to human wine since human alcohol doesn’t really affect time lords, or is it just for the taste

Also why were they at heartshaven

The house is not well reinforced → commonality among houses, or just heartshaven

Narvin: says something heartfelt, narvin immediately after: i never said that

‘The rise of the killer cats of ginseng … the cia didn’t handle that one at all well, but luckily we made sure no record exists today’ → ??? please tell me more about this

‘A rare moment of a time lord cover up that actually benefited all gallifrey’ → i do wonder what the extent of what they had to cover up was, like did this involve just deleting some records, or deleting some memories (or maybe even people, let's be real here, though i guess they wouldn’t exactly remember if that happened since they would have never existed) and how did it benefit gallifrey, save them from embarrassment? Prevent it from destabilizing their society and/or government? What are we talking here

Loyalty meant everything → the blind trust of gallifrey and its institutions (this is somewhat just part of how narvin is, but also we see this with some other time lords in the invasion of time, so i wonder how common of a trait the whole blind loyalty thing is among time lords)

‘I don’t know how many years it goes back, i was younger then’ → i’m begging the writers to stop being allergic to telling me narvin’s age, please anything but he’s at least two hundred (my personal headcanon is anywhere from 600-900 by the start of the series, which isn’t exactly a small range, but it’s fine, i can deal with that) (← lies)

‘The high council had been monitoring a world’ → i wonder how much the monitoring of potential threats (and/or whatever is of interest) falls to the high council and what falls to the cia, when does it become enough of a thing for the high council to get involved vs when is it just something for the cia to deal with

There’s an apc net prediction, so maybe that’s when the high council gets involved, otherwise it’s just the cia monitoring things for themselves

‘Universes, all of them’ → the time lords have some amount of power and control over other universes, or at least have access to them, this would make sense as we see the everything with the axis

‘One of my seniors’ → narvin isn’t yet at the point of being only a step or two below vansell yet, but as is mentioned later, he’s above the status of junior agent (trying to figure out how the various agencies and organizations on gallifrey work one step at a time, this would be a lot easier if the writers weren’t constantly disagreeing on things, but alas, what else is to be expected)

‘Matrix keepers rarely got involved with the day to day running of the capitol, preferring to spend their days observing and seeking the ability to read truthful timelines from the cloister wraiths. For the head of their little clique to emerge from the catacombs was a sign, and not a good one’ → so yes the matrix houses all of time lord knowledge and can to an extent predict the future, but it seems that these things are very jumbled, the matrix keepers keep to themselves, presumably spending that time trying to interpret the matrix, because it seems that unless you have control over the matrix (like say the president would) it’s hard to navigate or get accurate information from (which would make sense given what we see of it in the show, it’s just a jumble of random things, bits of memories smashed together), also the ‘truthful timelines’ bit, does the matrix predict events along multiple timelines, can they see all the possible futures? I wonder what learning to differentiate between a possible future and a probable one is like, like what makes a future more likely to happen then another and how does one learn to discern that (also kind of love the whole ‘well if they thought it was important enough to actually tell us about we’re a bit fucked aren’t we’ like sure they might just use technology to communicate their findings/predictions, but it is a little funny to me to imagine that they stay down there until they encounter something possibly apocalyptic)

‘This was the sort of job for which you���d normally summon a junior grade time lord’ → i need to make a chart of time lord ranks or something (also the ‘give them a time ring’ part, junior time lords don’t have tardises? (i actually think i’d heard that somewhere before, but idk where it was) if this is the case, i think it makes it a bit funnier that vansell gives narvin the time ring here)

‘Be back in a nanosecond’ → again, don’t actually know where it comes from (if it comes from anywhere at all and isn’t just popular headcanon) but isn’t there something about time lords sticking to the passage of time on gallifrey even if they don’t other places, so like if gallifrey experiences a week of time they also do, unsurprising that the cia would be breaking this rule if it exists (also just like stick to the fucking bit and call things spans)

‘Gallifrey disappearing, indeed the entire rassilonian time era being lost’ → interesting the implication that if the rassilonian time era didn’t happen that gallifrey would just be gone (at least that’s what i’m taking this as, it could very well be that that era didn’t happen because gallifrey disappeared) (also when is the rassilonian era (the past???) i should maybe figure out the gallifreyan timeline, or like at least some of it)

‘It is narvin’s destiny’ → guy just wants to do his job, keeps getting sucked into prophecies and shit, this is so funny to me

‘Vansell was strange at the best of times’ → not really lore relevant at all, but i do love that they take pretty much any opportunity to insult vansell, designated guy that no one likes

‘He produced a time ring and slid it on my wrist’ → time rings bracelet sized then (or can they come in different sizes)

‘Very rudimentary time travel’ → like sure there are levels to all types of technology, but i’d love to learn about the differences between advanced vs rudimentary time travel, would i understand any of it, no i’m not a physics guy, but i still think it’d be interesting

And there it is, the whole ‘no one else can have this power but us’ thing, like oh these other people are using time traveling abilities to change history, they’re erasing people from existence, possibly even planets, can’t have them doing that, only we’re allowed to do that

‘Any measures’

Yeah if we can’t stop them from using time travel to erase people from existence we’re going to show up and use time travel to erase them from existence → it’s moments like these where i wonder if they even hear what they’re saying, or if they’ve just accepted that this is perfectly okay for them to do because they figured it out before everyone else and know how to use time travel responsibly (probably a mix of both honestly)

‘Time tots, no children, just children’ → okay yes, narvin not knowing what children are for a second is funny, but this does have some interesting implications, it could go one of two ways a) time tots are exclusive to time lords, so other species kids aren’t called that, which is likely for the obvious reasons of why would anyone else call their kids time tots, but then if this is true, it also feels like narvin would probably be less quick to correct himself (though maybe not because he’s cia and it’s his job to know about things, os it’s very plausible he would know this), or b) time tots and children are distinct things on gallifrey, time tots is used to talk about only those who are going to become time lords, and likely this comes with different treatment, time tots are meant to learn things for when they go to the academy, children however, well given how obsessed time lord society is with status, i doubt much care would be given to those who are predetermined to not become time lords

Time lords can identify species by telepathy (well, i’m assuming given the condition that they actually know the species in the first place)

Narvin also seems to be able to tell that the doctor is the doctor → time lords identify each other telepathically rather than by appearance (would make sense given regeneration) and given the doctor’s status as a renegade and ex president, it would make sense that a cia agent would know his psychic signature (yep, next line supports this, the doctor’s famous now, though i guess that happens when you air out your divorce across the citadel and then get the planet invaded after becoming president and then leave an alien there)

‘Arresting him, and taking him home, was very high on all cia priority lists’ → idk, the fact that i know narvin just isn’t going to even make much of an attempt at arresting the doctor is really funny to me, guy who simultaneously is good at his job and also sucks at it

Narvin just tries to tell him he’s under arrest ‘in the name of the high council’ → kind of interesting, just the assumption that most time lords would just obey something like this (at least that’s what it seems) and the bafflement when that doesn’t work (something something, your average time lord is very bad at thinking for themselves)

This is narvin’s first off gallifrey mission, yet he seemingly has passed the rank of junior time lord (wonder how one does that)

Time ring translates much like a tardis would (something something time lord technology very heavily built on the fact that they are a psychic species

Narvin briefly confused by the fact that the doctor is wearing colors that don’t align with his chapter → the institutions of time lord society are so baked in that he just doesn’t consider anything else could be true for a moment (this does make me curious about casual everyday clothes though, are they all in chapter colors? Also like what is narvin wearing, i truly just imagine this man in his cia robes 24/7)

Narvin’s never been off world before → i mean he did say this was his first off world mission so that makes sense, but idk it was technically a possibility

Also he just doesn’t know if colors exist on other planets → they aren’t told things about other worlds, they say that they sit and observe, but they don’t even do that do they, most time lords don’t learn much about worlds outside of gallifrey, why would they, that could make them want to leave

‘Who knew what similarities to time lord culture there were across the stars’ → similar to my above point, if they learn about other cultures and see that there are similarities it makes it harder for them to keep their status as gods over time, because they start to see that those people that they looked down on are actually people and not just lower beings

Has to cite legal clauses and all that, even if they mean nothing to the people he’s saying them to → something something it’s all about ceremony and tradition among the time lords

‘How much damage he had done to the reputation of the time lords and gallifrey’ → i’ve said this many times before, and i’ll say it again, but everything with the time lords is about perception, the actual reality of a situation does not matter as long as they can make the people they want perceive it how they want them to perceive it, and that’s the real reason that renegades are dangerous, not because they’re out there interfering with timelines and other species, the time lords already do enough of that (despite what they say), they’re dangerous because they are interfering in a way that isn’t approved of by the time lords, that doesn’t fit within the neat image that they have built for themselves

‘The only people responsible enough to utilize time travel’

‘Only time lords can sense them’ → something something being exposed to that much time energy changes the dna of a species and the time lords have spent so much more time around time than the other temporal powers that they are more adapted to it than pretty much any other species

‘Sub coordinator narvin’ → i forget what i was going to say here, something something rank, something something narvin’s timeline (?) (actually how does the doctor know narvin’s rank, i don’t think i remember him saying it, is there some sort of difference in the uniform, or does the doctor just know who narvin is (something in narvin’s psychic signature?))

Time rings can remotely access the matrix

Time lords can spot time breaches/scabs in time → though it does seem to need training to actually be able to do as narvin refers to have been trained to do it for the cia

Time lords can psychically translate things without technological assistance, but do seem to need to concentrate

‘Legendary time lord’ → they’re seen as kind of mythical creatures

‘As a member of the cia i’m not particularly trained in negotiation’ → you know narvin, i would love to know what you are trained in (actually it seems to be a lot of seeing through illusions and using psychic abilities to see and know things others might not, as well as intelligence gathering, timeline reading, and how to interfere in the timelines, but it is a lot more fun to make fun of them for being bad at everything for an organization that is supposedly very powerful)

‘What i am reasonably well trained in is being straightforward, blunt, and using the fastest solution’

‘President of the high council of the time lords’ → look i’m not going to write it down everytime they say the president’s full title (probably) but i would like to know just what being the president of gallifrey entails when it comes to who you rule over

‘Just pride at a job well done’ → time lords trained both to suppress emotion/empathy and see other species as lesser, so that they care less when they are responsible for their destruction

‘Over these past few years’ → how long of a period of time does the gallifrey series take place over, because that’s a hell of a lot of stuff to happen in just a few years

‘A better time lord, a better gallifreyan’ → little gallifreyans and time lords being different moment

[magicofthepen]

not sure if i'm late for the character asks but... braxiatel and sartia?

Sorry for hanging onto this ask for ages — you weren’t too late, I was just trying to figure out an answer to one (1) question and then I waited so long that I forgot about this ask….and I still don’t have an answer to that one (1) question, but I figure I’ll just post what I’ve got, it’s been so long already 😄

SARTIA

favorite thing about them: she’s so hard to pin down, I’m fascinated! she’s such a good actress and has all these masks, and it’s so interesting to try to pick apart how much is true? she leaves Romana to die and then later wants the guy on the crew to rescue her, she tries to tempt Romana into ruling the universe with her and then says she wants it all to herself - she’s bitter but really good at pretending to be sweet, she’s a mess of contradictions and layers and we get so little time with her that there’s so much open space to analyze and headcanon!

least favorite thing about them: I should say ‘left my favorite character to die and emotionally traumatized her’ but um. that’s one of the interesting bits. so really it’s that she’s only in the two audios? she has such an interesting slash horrifying dynamic with Romana, bring her back!

brOTP / OTP / nOTP: I’m condensing the relationship asks into one because Sartia really only has one important relationship in her actual episodes — her relationship with Romana. and I have a lot of feelings about the toxic, abusive mess of their friendship! I want to know more about it! I love thinking about their dynamic in school together and the many possible outcomes of them meeting again when they’re older, and the ramifications of this relationship on Romana’s life. and I also love thinking about a teenage crush turned sour as part of that history (aka i do kinda ship them but in a fucked up way because hey. there were gay vibes in Sleek). and I think Romana needs to absolute stay away from Sartia, holy shit. so it’s uhhhhh complicated. (it gets even more complicated when you throw AUs into the mix — long story short, I have a lot of feelings about their relationship, but what exactly those feelings are, and how much I’m rooting for their relationship vs. wanting them to stay away from each other, depends on the universe. ….and yes this is partially about Romana The Promise by @presidentromana, highly highly recommend this fic, it will break your heart.)

random headcanon: Sartia and Romana got up to Shenanigans together during their Academy days. we know Academy era Romana decides to wander down to the catacombs. we know Sartia finds forbidden places exciting. Sartia definitely goaded Romana into poking around some weird places where they weren’t allowed. and yes, Romana was willing to go along with Sartia’s plans because Sartia was the only person who would hang out with her, and she didn’t want Sartia to drop her because she wasn’t interesting enough….but also Romana was into it. Sartia was also good at convincing Romana to take the blame if they ever got caught because Sartia knew that Romanadvoratrelundar, heir to the House of Heartshaven and top student of their year, could get away with a lot more. and she liked knowing that she could make Romana do things for her. (and this is how we get Romana instantly covering for Sartia in Sleek.)

unpopular opinion: I don’t have any, so instead you get an unoriginal Sartia opinion (but one that’s very important to my view of her character): I don’t believe Sartia’s friendship with Romana was always an act. yes, she does end up stringing Romana along and enjoying her suffering, but Sartia’s so bitter at Romana. it feels raw, personal. she’s cruel, but she’s also angry, and that anger makes it seem like she had some kind of genuine attachment to Romana. but Gallifrey doesn’t teach its children how to process jealousy and anger in a healthy manner. (related: I’m ridiculously attached to @presidentromana’s Sartia backstory, also highly highly recommend The Most Arrogant of the Species, aka The Fic That Made Me Sympathize With Sartia.) 

song i associate with them: ….I may have spiraled and made a whole Sartia playlist. but if I had to pick one song: Ignorance by Paramore was the first song I added to the playlist. “If I'm a bad person, you don't like me / Well, I guess I'll make my own way / It's a circle, a mean cycle / I can't excite you anymore / Where's your gavel? Your jury? / What's my offense this time? / You're not a judge, but if you're gonna judge me / Well, sentence me to another life” - for Sartia @ Romana vibes, these lyrics especially remind me of the end of The Thief Who Stole Time

favorite picture of them: there aren’t any pictures other than the audio cover :(

BRAXIATEL

I’ve only heard Brax in Gallifrey, so this is going to be about that version of the character!  

favorite thing about them: his….theatrical-ness? I’m not sure what the exact word I’m looking for is, but it’s some combination of the voice acting and his sense of humor and flair for the dramatic that makes him a really interesting personality for the other characters to bounce off of and a very entertaining character to have around. (this is very poorly described and I’m thinking more of the early seasons here, but idk Brax just has a Vibe that makes him really engaging to listen to?) (this is what happens what I get asked about characters I haven’t thought a lot about, you get vague statements about Vibes 😄)

least favorite thing about them: please Big Finish stop using Brax as a deus ex machina….I’m really tired of Brax being used as a plot device to get Romana out of trouble, it does a disservice to both characters. (if there was more complex emotional follow up - especially when Brax is overruling her own choices to save her - that could be interesting! but they never explored that in any satisfying way, so it’s just deeply irritating.)

brOTP: Brax and Romana -  in a “this friendship is deeply complicated and kinda messed up and very interesting” way. the mentorship dynamic is so intrinsic to their relationship - Brax guides her and believes in her but also puts her on a pedestal (the image of her as this Magnificent President), Romana leans on his guidance and also puts him on a pedestal in a different way (as someone who has answers, who can get her out of trouble). they both have so many masks - and some they let slip around each other, but others they put on for each other. she is more than his shining student-turned-president, and he is more than her trustworthy teacher-turned-advisor, but they want to be seen that way. and so, inevitably, they fail to live up to those masks and it hurts. but there’s a history of trust and affection that’s hard to shake, no matter how much hurt is in the way, and that creates such a complex dynamic! (it’s a fascinating relationship that I think I would be much more interested in if there wasn’t that overt layer of one-sided romantic interest.)

OTP: none. I can read and enjoy shippy fic with him, but I don’t really ship him with anyone? 

nOTP: romantic Brax/Romana, sort of, except for when a fic Hits Me (I went into more detail here and here)

random headcanon: this was the question that was killing me because I realized….I’m not sure I’ve spent enough time thinking about Brax to develop any solid headcanons? My lack of knowledge about Benny has made me super hesitant to develop any definitive opinions and headcanons even about Gallifrey!Brax, so I probably have a Brax headcanon somewhere, but I keep drawing a blank whenever I’ve gone to answer this question, oops.

unpopular opinion: …I’m not super interested in him? I found him an entertaining and interesting character to have around in the early seasons, but then I kinda lost interest once I realized he wasn’t actually a main character and his relationships with the other characters weren’t going to grow and develop as the series continued (I also talked more here about how I felt like I should ‘reserve judgement’ on Brax, but that ended up resulting in me just….not forming any major opinions about Brax or interest in his character). although I am interested in hearing him in the Benny stuff - maybe because it seems like he’s a more important part of the narrative there?

song i associate with them: I don’t really have one, although I remember liking this playlist by @patrexi!

favorite picture of them: this one by @stillthesunkenstars and this one by @nighthair-art

[daughterofheartshaven]

SO assuming both the War Chief and Pavo are the Master (which I do), then the answer is...

The first Master intentionally regenerated so he could have a younger body (Flashback, DWM comic)

The second Master got shot by the Meddling Monk (The Black Hole, Big Finish audio)

We don't know how the third Master died, but I headcanon her as the Master who was on Gallifrey when the Doctor left (as seen in Celestial Intervention: A Gallifreyan Noir, short story in the Twelve Angels Weeping collection), and probably the Master who stole a Tardis herself

The fourth Master died due to exposure to a black hole forming around his Tardis and tearing him apart. Due to the sheer violence of this, this cost him more then one regeneration. How many is not specified, but it is at least three. I am saying it was six regenerations - since that lines up with how many incarnations of the Master we know about. (The Dark Path, a Virgin Missing Adventure book)

The ninth Master (this is the one James Dreyfus played on Big Finish, btw) died in a Trastevarian jail, with this regeneration needing the Sisterhood of Karn's Elixir of Life in order to be completed successfully.

The tenth Master was shot by the War Lords (the War Games, a tv story).

The eleventh Master was killed in a nuclear reactor explosion (Timewyrm: Exodus, a Virgin New Adventures book).

Delgado's Master was the Master's twelfth incarnation, whilst the Doctor was only on their third at the time. This begs the question... what on earth was the Master doing that caused so many regenerations? I mean, presumably planet takeovers, but how clumsy was he? What sort of slapstick, Wile E. Coyote shenanigans was he getting into that made him burn through so many bodies in such a relatively short amount of time? I need to know! I need a montage sequence set to 'Dumb Ways To Die'!

[timeladyjamie]

I wanna continue with my meta’s concerning the Great Houses of Gallifrey, especially with Oakdown, although I think it will mostly be headcanon on my part. I even wanna make the House Emblems and what not. 

I was even planning some for Dvora and Heartshaven too. 

[daughterofheartshaven]

A quick Timeline of Romana

I was rebloging something by a mutual and I realized that I have a very specific order of Romana's different stories in different mediums in my head and that might actually be relevant to share here given how many of my mutuals are Romana fans. As usual, I assume Last Great Time War is the same as The War In Heaven. So here we go. I'm starting with Romana's return from E-Space. Anything in bullet points is a headcanon I made to reconcile different stories

Blood Harvest / Goth Opera: Romana II returns from E-Space and takes a place on the Gallifreyan High Council

The Chaos Pool: takes place while Romana is on the High Council, but before her Acencion to Presidency

Happy Endings: Romana becomes President

The Apocalypse Element: Romana's Presidency is interrupted by the Etra Prime incident and the disaster that followed

Neverland / Zagreus: Romana meets Leela, and is forced to watch the Doctor remove himself from the universe

Lungbarrow: Romana has a run-in with a Doctor from the past, from before he left the universe, and has to be very carful to avoid letting either the Doctor or the CIA know that she knows the Doctor's future

The Gallifrey Series (and a couple misc. audios that have Romana II as president): Lots of things happen, but the big one is that the Time War starts

following the end of the Gallifrey series, Romana escapes the Time War and flees into Gallifrey's past at the cost of her current incarnation's life. Now in her third incarnation, she Spearheads the Nine Gallifreys project to give herself a different Gallifrey to work with - avoiding a paradox - and begins preparing her Gallifrey for the war she knows is coming

Luna Romana framing narrative: Romana III prepping her Gallifrey for war

The Shadows of Avalon / The Ancestor Cell: Romana comes into conflict with the Doctor (still from before he left the universe), and her plans end in disaster as her Gallifrey is destroyed before it can even reach the war

The Gallifrey Chronicles: The Doctor is implied to resurrect Romana and the other citizens of her Gallifrey

Now that she has lost any chance she had at making a difference in Gallifrey's stand in the War, Romana flees Gallifrey and reconnects with the Tharils before the war starts.

The Little Book of Fate: Romana, now running refugee support from the Time War, meets the Doctor from before they came into conflict (and before he left the universe). They are able to work together, but Romana still has to conceal all she knows about his future.

Romana eventually gives up on Gallifrey and the Time War and, with her third body dying, flees to the end of the universe (much like the Master did, but without a chameleon arch).

Tomb of Valdemar framing narrative: Romana III dies at the end of the universe and we meet her fourth incarnation - a dark skinned woman

Gallifrey returns and Romana finds her way back to it. At some point, she regenerates again into someone with freckles and ginger hair

Cwej: Down the Middle: Romana is implied to be actively trying to help Chris behind the scenes, and appears at the very end to negotiate with him regarding the end of the Cwejen Uprising against Gallifrey

Notes:

Does Romana ever find out that the Doctor returned from the Divergent Universe? It seems likely, but from the Doctor's perspective, Zagreus appears to be the last time they met.

If you want me to elaborate on any of this, I'd be happy to! Just let me know.

[daughterofheartshaven]

Doctor Who - how Mary Shelly became a companion of the 8th Doctor but then later didn't recognize the 13th Doctor

This is in a series of Doctor Who expanded universe reconciliations. If you see a contradiction in the Doctor Who expanded universe, you can drop me an ask and I will come up with an explanation for it.

Ask by @silvermaple6

If you are not familar, in the Big Finish audios, Mary Shelly (yes the Frankenstein author) was briefly a companion of the Eighth Doctor, but later met the Thirteenth Doctor on tv in a way that made it clear that Shelly had never met the Doctor before and clearly assumed the Doctor had not met Shelly before either.

So shall we explain how that worked?

A quick list of stories I will be refrencing:

Tv:

The Haunting of Vilia Diodati: The tv episode where the Thirteenth Doctor meets Mary Shelly

The Unquiet Dead: The Ninth Doctor tv episode that first established the effects of the Last Great Time War

Human Nature / The Family of Blood: A Tenth Doctor two-part story that was an adaption of a Seventh Doctor novel

Not Tv:

Mary's Story: The first story where Mary Shelly becomes a companion of the Eighth Doctor. While it is not the only audio story to feature Shelly as a companion, it is the only one that is actually relevant to this discussion

Terror Firma: an Eighth Doctor story set after he travelled with Shelly

Lies in Ruins: An audio story featuring the Eighth Doctor towards the very end of his life during the Last Great Time War.

Human Nature: A Seventh Doctor novel that was adapted into a Tenth Doctor tv episode

Shadow of a Doubt: A two-minute video published during the Doctor Who Lockdown events, starring Bernice Summerfield. You can watch it on youtube right here, and I recommend you do so - it's pretty good and also the crux of my argument.

The Book of the War: the first book of the Faction Paradox series and one of my favorite things to cite in an argument like this.

Okay I don't know if this would be fun for anyone else, but if this were me, I would totally look over the stories and try to guess what the arguments would be. Now is your chance to do that if you want. Also I should disclaimer in here that I continue to assume the Last Great Time War and Faction Paradox's War in Heaven are the same conflict, although that's not really that important to my overall argument. A full justification for that assumption is still in the works.

Okay actual essay time.

So The Unquiet Dead established that the Last Great Time War rewrote a lot of history. And if you're thinking "well hang on is this just rewritten by the Time War" then yes that is my reason, but I also have a lot more evidence to back this up.

Time to talk about Human Nature.

So Human Nature was a book that was loosely adapted into a Tenth Doctor story. The two stories share only a central concept (the Doctor turns into human and the villains are family who want to steal his being-a-time-lord), a setting (England right before WWI), and a couple of crucial characters (Joan Redfern, Tim, and Hutchinson). Besides that, the two versions of the story are quite different.

One notable difference is the villains. In the book, we have the Aubertides - a family of six shapeshifting aliens with distinct personalities and motivations, but strong loyalty to each other. Over the course of the book most of them die, but some escape. The very first one to die is Aphasia - who at the time was disguised as little girl with a murderous balloon.

In the tv show, we have the Family of Blood - a family of four gaseous aliens who are much more united. At the end of the story, the Doctor captures all of them and imprisons them in various places. The youngest of the Family, the daughter, was imprisoned in a mirror along with the corpse she was possessing - a little girl with a balloon.

When the tv adaptation was first made, the Daughter having the same appearance of Aphasia was a simple nod to the fact that the Family of Blood was this version's version of the Aubertides. But Shadow of a Doubt made this whole situation much more interesting.

Shadow of a Doubt was written by Paul Cornell, author of both the original Human Nature and its adaptation, as well as the creator of Benny Summerfield, who was the companion of Human Nature. In it, Benny meets the Daughter trapped in the mirror and recognizes her as Aphasia. The Daughter denies being Aphasia, claiming that was a different her

This confirms three points:

both versions of Human Nature happened in the Whoniverse

both versions of Human Nature are telling the same story - there weren't just two extremely similar situations.

Aphasia and the Daughter are variations on each other

It's not clear exactly why two versions of the same events happened, but my best guess is the giant history-altering war that happened between the Seventh and Tenth Doctors, since it is the only event shown to do large amounts of rewriting of history.

The situation with Human Nature sets a precedent for analyzing this sort of situation, so I feel like that makes a decent case for Shelly's life to have been rewritten by the War.

But come on. I haven't even gotten to talk about any stories with Shelly in them yet.

So Mary's story is the first story with Shelly as a companion. It is also notable for featuring two different versions of the Eighth Doctor. We have Young Eight - this is the Doctor who Shelly begins travelling with - and Old Eight, who has fallen out of a great battle and is deeply injured. It is implied, but not confirmed, that Old Eight is from the era of the Time War. There is some further evidence for this - Old Eight namechecks companions by the name of Gemma, Charley, Ssard, Compassion, Trix, Destrii, Lucie, Alex, Todd, and Rita. All but the last two were established Eighth Doctor companions at the time of Mary's Story's release, but Todd and Rita were unknowns.

Roughly a decade later, Lies in Ruins comes out. It features the Eighth Doctor embroiled in the Time War, and introduces a companion named Ria. Ria is close enough to "Rita" that I believe Old Eight is referring to Ria in Mary's Story, which means for Old Eight, Mary's Story takes place after Lies in Ruins and so definitely in the Time War.

All of this is to prove that Shelly was at least tangentially involved in the Last Great Time War. Furthermore, she only one step removed from a minor wartime power - the Book of the War shows that Lord Byron would later become a recruit of Faction Paradox, a cult that (somewhat successfully) desired to set itself up as a third faction in the War.

So yeah, the changes of history in the War could totally have rewritten Mary Shelly's life specifically without specifically effecting much around her. So when she does not recognize the Doctor or any sci-fi concepts in The Haunting of Vilia Diodati, it is because he history in which Shelly travelled with the Doctor no longer existed.

As for why the Doctor did not recognize her, we have two options.

Firstly, it is possible that the Doctor's memories of this were lost when his memories were altered by Davros. Terror Firma reveals that Davros captured the Doctor and altered his memories of a specific point in his life - specifically Davros removed all memories of the Doctor's companions Samson and Gemma. Mary's Story, and the Doctor's travels with Mary Shelly, are explicitly set during a time in which the Doctor is on break from Samson and Gemma, so it is very possible that when Davros removed the Doctor's memories of Samson and Gemma, his memories of travelling with Shelly were also lost.

The other option is that the Doctor lost his memories of Shelly during the Time War. The Starship of Theseus (among many other stories) shows that while the Doctor can sometimes remember altered timelines, this is in no way a constant, with him remembering the new reality instead of the old one as the War creates it. So it is possible that the Doctor lost their memories of travelling with Shelly because the history those memories were created in was removed.

In any case, when Shelly and the Thirteenth Doctor come face to face, neither knows that in another life they were friends.

[daughterofheartshaven]

I mean like, I totally believe that he usually is cold unless he's wearing that many layers. Most incarnations of the Doctor and most other Time Lords we see are very heavily clothed. I think this is both to prevent accidental telepathy and because Gallifrey is very warm naturally, so almost everywhere on Earth is too cold without lots of layers.

I once again saw a screenshot of Ten wearing a lot of tops, so eventually I came up with this idea of "an alion" (an alien onion) /😉 winks at Discord chat people/

[daughterofheartshaven]

Using the Doctor Who EU to show how Gallifrey survived the Chibnall era

So. I'm actually a big fan of the Chibnall era of Doctor Who. That being said, I still don't like some of it's plot points, and so, consequentially, I have a handful of headcanons that use the Doctor Who expanded universe to address those, and I feel like they are worth sharing. We're gonna start with Gallifrey's destruction at the hands of the Spy Master. I don't like it for a number of reasons, but I think the biggest one is, like, how did the Master even do that? How did he destroy Gallifrey so completely while also leaving enough bodies behind to make the CyberMasters?

Well, let's find out. Buckle up, because this is gonna get complicated.

Okay, ground rules first. Anything seen on tv, happened. I can recontextualize as much as I want (and I'm gonna do that, believe me) but it still has to fit with everything we see onscreen. I also have to use all of an EU source if I use it. No picking and choosing bits.

With that out of the way, let's meet the stories that are our players:

Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children: the tv episodes that gave us the most details about the Master destroying Gallifrey. I'm gonna assume if you're reading this, you're familiar with.

Hell Bent: the other big Gallifrey episode of the new series. I'm assuming familiarity with it, too.

The Time of the Doctor: The only other tv episode I'm going to reference, again for Gallifrey reasons.

Down the Middle: a prose short story collection first released in 2020, and the crux of all the arguments I will be making here. While not licensed by the BBC, it does feature licensed use of prose companion Chris Cwej (among many other things) making it a valid part of the expanded universe. The first installment of the Cwej series. I will be talking about pretty heavy spoilers for Down the Middle here, so go away if you don't wanna see that.

The Dark Path: a book featuring the Second Doctor and, notably, the Master, released in 1997.

Alien Bodies: a book featuring the Eighth Doctor, released in 1997.

The Taking of Planet 5: a book featuring the Eighth Doctor, released in 1999.

The Book of the War: a... book (it's hard to define) that is styled as an in-universe guide to the world of Faction Paradox. If you're not familiar with, Faction Paradox is a sci-fi series that spun out of elements of Doctor Who books. It contains nothing owned by the BBC, but does contain elements and characters from Doctor Who books (specifically the Eighth Doctor Adventures book series), making it also a part of the expanded universe.

The Clockwise War: a comic serialized in Doctor Who magazine, and later released in a collection of the same name. Features the Twelfth Doctor and Bill Potts.

And Today, You: an installment of the Cwej series released in 2023. Set some time after Down the Middle from the perspective of Chris Cwej and the Time Lords.

Okay. Let's get started. Because of copyright restrictions, different parts of the expanded universe use different terms for concepts, events, and characters that are or could be interpreted to be the same. I'm going to go through some of the books I just mentioned and define how they approach these terms and the lore/worldbuilding they establish, so when I actually start making arguments, I can refer to these concepts in a consistent manner.

The only thing The Dark Path brings into this is that it established that Koschei was a name the Master used before calling himself the Master. That book does a lot of other great stuff, but that's the only thing relevant to this discussion.

Alien Bodies was the first book to introduce an arc about a future War (called the War in Heaven) across time between the Time Lords and some unnamed Enemy. While the Gallifrey of the Doctor's present was not yet a part of the War, they were aware of the war and trying to prepare themselves for it. This thread gets continued throughout the series of the Eighth Doctor Adventures book series, with Gallifrey becoming more militant and dangerous in preparation for the War.

So, uh... this sound familiar to anybody?

Legally speaking from the perspective of copyright, the War in Heaven as introduced in Alien Bodies and the Last Great Time War of Doctor Who's new series cannot be confirmed to be the same conflict. That being said, I totally think they're the same thing. Mostly just because "a massive war in space and time that was after the start of the Eighth Doctor but before the Ninth Doctor in which Gallifrey and the Time Lords went from a passive people to warmongering maniacs and the universe was nearly destroyed in the process" is a description that fits both the War in Heaven and the Last Great Time War and, like, the fact that the show and the expanded universe never references there being two conflicts like that. Not everything works perfectly together, but that seems reasonable in a War that heavily involves changing time and history. I'll hopefully do another big post like this weaving all of the War in Heaven stuff with Last Great Time War stuff together a bit more seamlessly, but for now, I'm going to take it as stated that the conflicts are the same.

That tangent aside, one of the books that was seeding Alien Bodies' upcoming War in Heaven was The Taking of Planet 5, which notably introduced the idea of the Nine Gallifreys. More specifically, the idea was that the Time Lords had made at least nine identical copies of Gallifrey to be used as decoys in the war - and that it was possible that multiple Gallifreys thought they were the original.

If you're thinking "oh, so the Master destroyed a copy of Gallifrey, not the original," then, well, yeah. So did the guy who came up with the idea of the Nine Gallifreys in the first place. And that is where this is going. But that actually doesn't answer how the Master was able to raze a Gallifrey. We've still got a lot more digging to do.

The Book of the War was the first release of the Faction Paradox series, and it took the War in Heaven idea and divorced it from Doctor Who. It still had the same players and was explicitly set in the same continuity as the Eighth Doctor Adventures books it had launched from - just with some things renamed to avoid having to get license from the BBC. The Time Lords became the Great Houses, Gallifrey became the Homeworld, and so on and so forth. But this is still the same War in Heaven, and so I consider it still an account of the Last Great Time War.

One thing The Book of the War introduced was the Cwejen. To make a long story very short, the Time Lords spliced the timeline of one of their agents, Chris Cwej (former companion of the Seventh Doctor, although that's not actually relevant to anything happening here). By doing so, they were able to start manufacturing time-clones (look. I'm doing a lot of simplifying here) which were then considered a new species called the Cwejen. The Cwejen were used as agents and as foot solders during the War. (This is basically Doctor Who's equivalent to Star Wars's Clone Troopers.)

Okay, now we're ready for Down the Middle. This is where things get really fun.

Down the Middle is set after the conclusion to the War in Heaven, which I am claiming was the Last Great Time War. Thus, from Gallifrey's perspective, it is set after Gallifrey returns to the universe, as shown in Hell Bent. It features the Time Lords, or, well, the Superiors. Much like Faction Paradox, the Cwej series can't explicitly say things like "Time Lords" or "Gallifrey" without getting copyright struck by the BBC, so they say "The Superiors" and "The Base of Operations." I'm gonna stick with the BBC terms for sake of consistency though.

Down the Middle follows Chris Cwej, still as an agent of the Time Lords, as he does missions for them. It also spends a lot of time looking into the Cwejen and what their life was like after the end of the War. The first like 80% of the book is very good but also not relevant to what I'm doing here, but towards the end of the book, the High Council of the Time Lords decides to execute Chris for... reasons (look I'm trying to not spoil stuff). However, Chris proves harder to kill then expected, and he guns down the Time Lord President before escaping. This would be bad already, but the Time Lords decided to broadcast Chris's execution to all the Cwejen to make an example of him or something.

This backfires. Badly.

The Cwejen, outraged and inspired, rise up against the Time Lords. The Time Lords are completely blindsided by this, and by the time they get their act together the rebellion is too big to be stopped. Chris Cwej, exhausted from the events of... previous stories in the book... and not wanting to be in a second war following his survival of the War in Heaven, takes a stasis pod to an empty planet and puts himself into stasis without any real intention of ever coming out of it. In Chris's absence, a Cwej named Thomas Mackeray becomes the leader of the Cwejen Uprising.

This brings us to the last story in Down the Middle, Rebel Rebel.

The plot of Rebel Rebel is as follows: The Cwejen uprising has been raging for fifty years. A Cwejen named Tina visits the ruins of Gallifrey's Capitol and finds the head of a cyborg - in the first edition, it was a Cyberon and in the second edition it was a Cryptopyre (I'm gonna circle back around to this) - and uses it to access the data from the cyborg's hive mind. This data contains the resting place of Chris Cwej. Tina and her girlfriend Frey use this information to travel to Chris Cwej's resting place, where they dig him up and revive him. Tina and Frey want to escape the warzone raging between the Time Lords and Cwejen, so they take Chris Cwej to Thomas Mackeray, hoping Mackeray will grant them safe passage from the war in return for Chris giving official support to Mackeray's rebellion.

The problem is that Mackeray is a bloodthirsty tyrant who has become no better then the Time Lords. He's currently held up on a former Time Lord structure called simply the Tower. The Tower has the power to change history, and Mackeray wants to use it to destroy Gallifrey from before its natives became the Time Lords to wipe the Time Lords from history (It's implied that some Time Lords are still around, although they are fighting a loosing battle against the Uprising). Mackeray can't use the tower himself, but Tina and Chris both could. When Chris refuses to give Mackeray support, Mackeray throws Chris down to the bottom of the Tower. Frey is able to save him from falling to his death, but in doing so, she uses up much of her life energy and is left near death and also at the bottom of the tower. Chris and a dying Frey explore the bottom of the tower, and they find there is actually a Time Lord down there. He seems to be imprisoned. He claims Mackeray has no idea he's down there. And he's only identified as Koschei.

Oh and btw the copyright page of Down the Middle says that the character of Koschei is copyright to the person who wrote The Dark Path (David A. McIntee). Chris and Frey just discovered the Master.

The Master tells Chris that he can save Frey's life and give both Chris and Frey safe passage to the top of the tower if Chris promises to listen to the Master's words at a time of the Master's choosing. Chris is aware that it's a trap, but it's Frey's only hope, so he agrees. The Master heals Frey, then hypnotizes Chris. Chris blacks out. When he wakes, the Master is gone, but he is able to get back to the top of the tower.

It's not specified which incarnation of the Master this is, but the dialogue fluctuates rapidly from polite conversation to unhinged mania in a way that feels very Spy Master. He goes on a rant about how he wants to painfully murder all the Time Lords, then tries to pass it off as a joke. He also claims to have been locked in the Tower after trying revolt against the Time Lords, but also claims he would rather them in power over Mackeray. Visually, he is described as being blurry and painful to look at, which is explicitly a result of being in the core of the Tower with all the intense time energy being thrown around. I don't have conclusive proof that this is the Spy Master, but I think it fits.

In any case, Chris and Frey return to the top of the Tower, where Chris confronts and defeats Mackeray and accidentally begins the Tower's destruction. He then tries to use the the Tower to change history to remove the Cwejen Uprising and the bloodshed it has caused from history, but the Master takes telepathic control of Frey and uses her to stop him from doing the job properly - and the Tower fully destructs before he can get another chance. The universe is left as a combination of how it was before the Cwejen Uprising and how it was after that.

Before I proceed, I need to circle back around to a few things. I totally believe that the Master was imprisoned by the Time Lords after a failed revolt - a revolt he started after stumbling across the secret of the Timeless Child in the Matrix. I think he's trying to play the Cwejen and the Time Lords against each other, and his telepathic gambit at the end was an attempt to leave both destroyed or subdued. Also, I promised I'd circle back to the Cyberon and the Cryptopyre. The Cyberon are an imitation Cyberman owned by BBV. When Down the Middle was first published, BBV and Arcbeatle Press (Down the Middle's publisher) were working together and sharing IPs. Since then, BBV has come under controversy for shady behavior, and Arcbeatle has cut ties with BBV - hence changing the Cyberons to the Cryptopyres. Arcbeatle plans to publish more stories with the Cryptopyres in the future, but with the information we currently have, I am going to consider the Cryptopyres to be a subset/offshoot of the Cybermen, much like the Cyberons are implied to be related to the Cybermen (or as strongly implied as BBV can get away with without being sued).

So, how did the Master destroy Gallifrey? The Cwejen uprising destroyed the place (while leaving enough bodies for the Master to use later), possibly with the Master's help. Then he used Chris Cwej to wipe the Cwejen Uprising from history, ensuring that the army that had ransacked Gallifrey couldn't turn against him without rewriting the destruction of Gallifrey itself, He would later bring the Cybermen to Gallifrey's ruins, leading to there being broken Cybermen on Gallifrey (after the events of The Timeless Children), and Tina would later find a Cyber-head on Gallifrey to lead her to Chris.

There's one small problem with this though. I still haven't recapped the final scene of Rebel Rebel (oh and btw I have actually managed to avoid spoiling some of it so if this sounds good please please check out Down the Middle I love it so much). After this whole mess, Chris is contacted by the Time Lords. They survived after all. The Time Lord who contacts Chris (who is strongly implied to be Romana, by the way) tells him that Gallifrey exists again and is really angry at him, but also can't do anything about it because they don't want to kick-start the Uprising all over again. Romana and Chris come to a basic agreement that Chris will work to help repair the residual damage left by the Uprising, and Romana agrees that Chris will no longer work for the Time Lords directly.

So... how did that happen? Well, do you remember what I said about the Nine Gallifreys Project? An earlier story in Down the Middle sates that even after the War, the Time Lords still have the technology to create Gallifreyan cloneworlds. So I believe that when the universe was setting itself into the new timeline that Chris was trying to create (and that the Master hijacked), the Time Lords were able use that technology to mean that in the resultant timeline of the universe, there were Gallifreys at the same time. One where it was destroyed by the Cwejen, and one where the Cwejen Uprising never happened, with the latter hidden somewhere and the former where you would expect Gallifrey to be. The Master was completely ignorant of this, discovered the destroyed Gallifrey, and concluded his plan had worked.

I have a couple pieces of outside evidence to support this. In Hell Bent, Ashildr/Me is seen in the ruins of Gallifrey right before the end of time with the implication that she had been brought to Gallifrey by the Time Lords; if the Time Lords had been wiped out by the Cwejen (or the Master, or whatever) then it wouldn't make sense for her to have survived. To paraphrase the Doctor, she's immortal. Not indestructible. Similarly, in And Today, You (set after the events of Down the Middle), Chris is aware of the appearance of the Fourteenth Doctor and the events of the Flux. It's possible that the Time Lords could have looked into the Doctor's future, but the general expanded universe consensus is they don't do things like that, so I take this as more evidence that Gallifrey and Chris survived through the Thirteenth Doctor's era.

Okay the last thing I want to do is talk about why the Time Lords handled this situation in the way they did. Why let the Master think Gallifrey was dead? Why let the Doctor? If the Time Lords know about the Fourteenth Doctor, then they would also presumably know that the Doctor thought Gallifrey dead. It does come up a lot in the back half of the Thirteenth Doctor's era.

I think the answer comes in Hell Bent. The Doctor shows up on Gallifrey, and then immediately leads a military coup that exiles the Time Lord government. Shortly afterwards, he shoots down General Kenossium, one of his biggest supporters, because Kenossium was trying to prevent the Doctor from breaking the laws of time. The Doctor is a hero to Gallifrey, sure. But he's also incredibly dangerous to it. Whatever government put itself together in the aftermath of Hell Bent has an excellent reason to fear the Doctor returning, because he could tear anything they do to shreds. And they know he would, because he has. Not too long after that, in The Clockwise War, Gallifrey is nearly brought to its knees by an entity known as the Absence. At the start of Down the Middle, an off-worlder manages to assassinate the Time Lord president. It was stated in The Time of the Doctor and Hell Bent that Gallifrey needed to hide from its many enemies, and it was clearly doing a pretty bad job of it.

At the same time, the Cwej series shows that the Time Lords are actively trying to rebuild their powerbase after the War. They don't want to just run and hide, they want to hide while climbing back up to their former glory. And the best way to keep Gallifrey safe was to fake its death. Now the whole universe thinks Gallifrey is dead and gone - including its two most dangerous renegades. So long as the Doctor thinks Gallifrey is dead, he can't confront Gallifrey's underhanded power grabs. So long as the Master thinks Gallifrey is dead, he can't ever threaten it again. So long as the universe thinks Gallifrey is dead, they won't try to destroy it. Gallifrey is safe to rebuild its powerbase.

If you have any thoughts on my theory, please do let me know! And I'm hoping to be posting more in-depth headcanons like this tagged under "heartshaven's headcanons" so keep an eye out for that if you enjoyed this. I really enjoyed typing all this out, so thank you for reading!

[daughterofheartshaven]

A Guide to the Chapters and Houses of Gallifrey

About a month ago @toaasted-bread asked me about my headcanons about the Chapters of Gallifrey. I typed up this as a response and then promptly forgot to post it. Better late then never, I hope.

Let's talk about the Chapters and the Great Houses! Some of this is headcanons, but I'll try to cite things when it's relevant.

So there are six chapters of Gallifrey: The Prydonian Chapter, the Arcalian Chapter, the Scendeles Chapter, the Patrex chapter, Cerulean Chapter and the Dromeian Chapter. Prydonian, Arcalian, and Patrex were established in The Deadly Assassin (classic who tv), Cerulean and Dromeian in Lungbarrow (a book), and Scendeles in The Ancestor Cell (another book). These are the six.

Each of the chapters has an associated color. Prydonians have red, Arcalians have green, Patrexes have purple, Ceruleans have blue, and Dromeians have silver. Scendeles's color is not stated anywhere, but I headcanon it to be yellow (I'll get back to this)

Every Time Lord is part of a Great House. Each Great House is sorta the equivalent to a Time Lord family, although some Time Lords form families outside their Houses (for example, the Doctor and Braxietel are brothers, but they are of different Houses). The majority of the Houses have presumably not been named, given that Gallifrey has a population of billions, and the only house who's size we know (House Lungbarrow) has 45 members. Each house has its own individual Loom. Many were named after their founders, such as House Fordfarding and House Mirraflex. House Rassilon existed prior to Rassilon, but was renamed in his honor.

Before I jump into the different houses, I'm gonna say now I treat Faction Paradox's War in Heaven and BBC's Last Great Time War as the same conflict, so will be pulling from both. Now let's have some Houses!

House Arpexia: A politically powerful house with a focus in reason, science and truth. It's members were more likely to have night vision and hallucinations. The Corsair is a member of this House

House of Artronides: The house Hallan belongs to

House Bluewood

House Blyledge: A house explicitly in the Prydonian chapter

House Brightshore: A house known for its wealth and power. Livia Corallis belongs to this House.

House Catherion: A House that was destroyed centuries prior to the Time War when a scientific experiment destroyed its Loom

House Deeptree/Redlooms: These are two names for the same house that Andred belonged to (the books and audios gave different names of Andred's House, so I just headcanon them as the same House with different names). It's part of the Arcalian Chapter

House Duskeriall: house of Goth. A Brief History of Time Lords claims that Goth (and, by extension, House Duskeriall) were part of the Prydonian Chapter. I don't tend to weigh non-narrative texts as strongly when considering stuff, but nothing else contradicts this

House Dvora: One of the most politically powerful Houses, if not the most powerful. Morbius and the Master were both from this House. A part of the Dromeian Chapter. Almost all of that is headcanon and I'm gonna need to defend that, so let's put a pin in this for now.

House Everston

House Fordfarding

House Heartshaven: A Prydonian House. Romana belongs to this house.

House Hellfrost: a House that notably remained loyal to Morbius after the Gallifreyan civil war. I suspect it is Dromeian because of that.

House Ixion: a House that petered out at some point in Gallifreyan history

House Jurisprudence: The house Darkel belongs to.

House Lineacrux: Stated to wear yellow robes, hence my believing them to be of the Scendeles Chapter, since every other chapter already has a color. A house of notable political power.

House Lungbarrow: A Prydonian House. The Doctor belongs to this House, and the people we see in Hell Bent are presumably also members of House Lungbarrow. I also believe the Woman we see in The End of Time was a member of House Lungbarrow - specifically a Time Lord named Innocet.

House Meddhoran: Notable for introducing non-Gallifreyan biodata into their Loom during the Time War

House Mirraflex: A politically powerful house that became a military leader during the Time War

House Neutronides

House Rassilon: the House Rassilon, and possibly Omega, was a part of. I think Rassilon was part of the Prydonian chapter, but I'm not 100% sure of that.

House Stillhaven: The only house aside from House Lungbarrow to oppose Rassilon's Ultimate Sanction. As punishment, Rassilon experimented on the members of the House after the War but before he was exiled from Gallifrey.

House Tracolix: A house that briefly held political power during the Time War, but made some disastrous alliances with the wrong people (namely an empowered rogue Tardis) and quickly lost power after they were betrayed

House Urquineath: Another House that faded away prior to the start of the Time War

House Wetrix

House Wetstone

House Witforge: A House in the Patrex chapter. Narvin is a member of this House

House Xianthelipse: A House that gained prominence during the Time War through it's willingness to experiment to create new weapons.

I promised I'd come back to House Dvora, which was introduced in The Book of the War. As written, the House is pretty clearly intended to be Prydonian and be Romana's house, but this is never made explicit. I headcanon it otherwise since the House of Heartshaven exists and I think it's more interesting to have some relevant houses that aren't Prydonian. House Dvora does claim to be Morbius and the Master's house, and on the cover of Vengeance of Morbius, Morbius is wearing the colors of the Dromeian Chapter, which is why I claim Dvora is a Dromeian House.

One more note - you may have noticed that some of the Houses were no longer in existence, which if that continued would (eventually) lead to the extinction of the Time Lords. However, the Time Lords have protocols in place for the creation of new Houses, which were used at least twice in "modern" era. In both cases, the founders (Grandfather Paradox and Lolita) had an agenda beyond "make a new House" so neither House got listed above, but that does show such a thing is possible.

So, like, how does this all work? The way I picture it is thus: each House is Gallifreyan genetic bloodline, with their DND and biodata being used to Loom (clone) new Time Lords. So Time Lords that share a Loom are genetically and biodata-ily similar to each other. Each Chapter is the Time Lord equivalent an ethnic or cultural heritage - it's not actually much like that, but that's the closest equivalent I can make to human culture. Most Time Lords associate strongly with their houses by default, but by the Doctor's time, this is starting to break down - the Doctor's friend group at the Academy included people from multiple Chapters. (Also while the Doctor has referenced going to the Prydonian Academy specifically, the audio Time in Office clarifies that all chapters go to this academy, with "Prydonian Academy" being a commonly used name for it for some reason).

[magicofthepen]

💡☀️⭐ for knock the ice from my bones? (haven't read anything else you've written unfortunately)

send me questions about my fic! 

thank you for sending these!!

💡- What was the motivation behind the story?

ooh Backstory Time: so this is my first Gallifrey fic! (okay, All These Restless Ghosts is also my first Gallifrey fic, because that was the first one I finished and posted, but the first Gallifrey writing I ever did was for the fic that ended up becoming knock the ice from my bones.) 

I wanted to write a character study about Romana and relationships post-Etra Prime, continuing through the Gallifrey audios, but I hadn’t written fic in years and didn’t have a good understanding of the scope of such a project. so I ended up with about 3k of a post-TAE, pre-Gallifrey audios Romana character study before stopping. plus maybe an additional 15k of headcanons and notes and ramblings about Romana and her personal relationships. (fun fact: the og Romana Headcanon Doc ended up being the basis of a lot of my other fics, although many of the headcanons evolved over time.)

this was in summer 2019, for reference. so I set that fic idea aside to work on All These Restless Ghosts/Eye of the Storm/So Cold It Burns/the original Echoes Between Us. but I liked the idea of reworking the Apocalypse Element/Neverland/Zagreus stuff that I’d written into a character study just focusing on that time period. so that idea ended up on my long list of Stuff To Write Eventually.

skip ahead to summer 2020, when it landed on my list of Active Projects. but while the original idea was to focus on Romana’s struggles with forming relationships, I realized that identity should really be the main theme of this fic. (aka Romana struggling to figure out who she is after Etra Prime, as she’s constantly having who she’s not thrown in her face.) I re-outlined it and drafted the new version - which meant lots of new scenes, but also lots of fleshing out scenes that I’d already written, which were pretty sketch-like in the 3k version. (actually, if anyone’s interested, it might be fun to post a “before and after” comparison of a scene?)

that draft is pretty close to the final version - although the “italics” bits were the big thing I added later. I felt like it needed something to better tie the individual scenes into one cohesive character analysis…hence the “there was once” refrain, which shifts as Romana’s sense of identity is destabilized more and more, and shifts again to “there is” when she manages to claim a sense of identity at last. (one of the tricky bits of this fic for me was wanting to tell a story that had some sort of conclusion, while also knowing that the effect of Etra Prime on Romana’s sense of self lasts far longer than the scope of this fic. so I basically asked myself ‘how does she get from where’s she at post-TAE to where she’s at in Weapon of Choice?’ and went from there.)

☀️ - Was there symbolism/motifs you worked in?

the “there was once” sections (the storytelling motif)! these snippets of stories Romana tells herself about who she is, the story changing each time, until all of these contradictory, not right ideas are racing together in her head and is she any of these people? who even is she anymore? 

the “there was once” language is meant to evoke parables with simple characters and themes because Romana’s trying so hard to tell herself this nice, neat story…..but the effects of trauma are so much more complicated than that, and so the simple story never sticks. 

leaning on the language of storytelling was also important to me because telling herself a story about herself is something we actually hear Romana doing in the aftermath of Etra Prime. and I know the fanfic is a Fun Joke thing, but I also wanted to explore it (indirectly, the fic never explicitly references it, but the implications are there) as a kind of coping mechanism. 

If the Daleks never existed, who would she be? A young student who took to the stars and decided the whole universe was worth knowing? An experienced traveler who said that staying behind was worthwhile, too? A bold politician who believed that where you're from might be just as important as where you’re going? What would people mean, when they said Madam President, daughter of Heartshaven, Romana?

If she is destined to be the villain of this story, would she be the hero in a different one?

The walls of the presidential suite trap sound. If she screams, no one can hear. If she paces into the hours of the morning, feet wearing the same tired tracks on her rugs, no one will know.

If she tells herself a story, one where she made the right choices, where she didn’t fail, wasn’t trapped, never disappointed anyone who believed in her — if she tells herself a pretty lie because sometimes it’s the only thing keeping her breathing, who will ever care?

⭐ - What’s a scene/paragraph you’re proud of?

whoops I already posted an excerpt…and this is already so long so I’m going to go with a short-ish moment - the one time I let Romana have the catharsis of an emotional breakdown (and also the tragedy of the only person she can let herself cry around is her robot dog). 

A metallic whirring cuts through her thoughts, and she flinches, eyes darting to exits and potential weapons before a part of her remembers that sound.

“Mistress?”

“K9?”

Twenty years. He’s still here.

K9 rolls out onto the carpets of her sitting room and cheerfully explains how the interim president had his circuits maintained and found his databanks of knowledge useful at times for dealing with a minor crisis. She doesn’t speak for a full microspan.

Then she lets herself stumble, fall to her knees to reach out one hand to the robot dog who was her only companion for so many years. There is something bubbling in her throat that she can’t name, something she hasn’t let herself feel in so long. She presses a hand to his cool metal exterior and blinks and blinks.

“Mistress? Is something wrong?”

She shakes her head, but her eyes are burning and her chest is tight and she buries her face in her arms.

“I missed you,” she whispers, her voice breaking at last, “I missed you.” And here in her old rooms, next to the only old friend she has left, she cries for the first time since Etra Prime.

[daughterofheartshaven]

That would go very nicely with my interpretation that a few time lords (Andred, Patience, Susan) are actually fertile - they just happened to win that specific lottery

ok so one of the weird tardiswiki articles that gets circulated around tumblr a lot is an article on prostates that has a single line about the First Doctor not having a prostate:

and i know a lot of weird shit happens in Doctor Who books. trust me, i've read many of them. but i just could not imagine how the Doctor's lack of a prostate could possibly be relevant to a 2006 short story so curiosity won over and i read the story which was pretty standard short trips fair about a holiday town being stuck in the 1930s while people from the 1990s start to accidentally come in and experience racism (i guess?) and after a few pages i start to get more confused about how a prostate is relevant here and then we open a scene with this:

and i mean... i don't know why we needed to know that but thanks? i feel like this line meant to drive in the fact that the Doctor is an alien and yadda yadda but it really just reads like the First Doctor is trans. good for him i guess.

[daughterofheartshaven]

Oh that's clever I like that

Ok now I’m thinking that they renamed children time tots when they started looming specifically to change that stage of life from whatever childhood means to specifically preparing to be a time lord

[daughterofheartshaven]

I kinda think about it like.

Death and Time chose their champions because they could see who they were going to be. In Flux, Time makes reference to events in the Doctor's future. I don't see why Death couldn't do the same. Death didn't make the Master into who he was, she just kinda looked at who he would become and said, "dibs".

And she then proceeded to not tell anyone about that because, like, why would she? And in that one audio story where she removes her influence and the Master isn't that bad of a guy, that's not actually what's going on, that's "how badly can I gasslight this one dude who thinks he's important enough to standoff against me?"

Because Death is an Eternal. And Eternals, as we see in their first onscreen appearance (tv story Enlightenment), are always deeply bored. Death's games with the Doctor are just her entertaining herself.

That's my take on it anyway. Because I think if we say the Master is evil because of Death or Rassilon or the cosmic energy forcing himself to be Like That, then he becomes a very boring character. But a Master who slowly lost their morals after realizing that her best friend left Gallifrey and didn't take her with him is a much more interesting character to me.

i'll be real with you i think the backstory of the master being marked out as death's champion and the doctor as time's champion is a fun but boring explanation of how the master and his ideology came into being but whatever it's fine

[daughterofheartshaven]

THIS IS PERFECT THIS IS FANTASTIC THIS IS AMAZING. Headcanoned.

i wish dreamland had some closure, but i also love causing emotional damage, so: just as mirror, signal, manoeuvre's opening is framed around a series of voicemails from nat and josh that sarah won't reply to, i could imagine a coda framed around something similar. the first voicemail is from josh - never replied to, because he's dead. the rest are from nat, at first asking sarah if she's okay, what happened, etc. those go on for a bit. when it becomes clear sarah isn't responding, they begin to peter out, until eventually there's a period of silence, before - sarah, i'm going to josh's funeral. are you coming? nothing. nothing again. half-hearted attempts to get sarah to listen, ranging from begging to demanding to quietly breaking down. none are answered. somewhere at the end: sarah, there's something suspicious going on at deffry vale high school. i thought you might want to check it out.

nat never calls again.