A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)

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

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

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

Be careful who you share it with.

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

Lies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Law Giver
Among Rassilon's many means to ensure his legacy was establishing the Laws of Time, or more accurately, he dramatically said something that bore a great similarity to the basic laws of physics. Another law was the baffling and dangerous The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey. Baffling because it doesn't contain any laws and dangerous because it's actually a key to Shada, a half completed prison. And like all other great artefacts of power, the book's importance was forgotten, and it was dumped in a vault to be quietly stolen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Had crisis not struck Gallifrey again.

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

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

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

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

Then the Doctor did just that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He declined.

Novices of the Untempered Schism
to be added

Gallifrey Falls...
to be added

...No More
to be added

Gallifrey Rises
to be added

Characters
to be added

Continuity
to be added