B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (336 page)

Jo: “And that was the secret of life? A daisy? Honestly, Doctor.”

The Doctor: “Yes, I laughed too when I first heard it. So, later, I got up and I ran down that mountain and I found that the rocks weren’t grey at all, but they were red, brown and purple and gold. And those pathetic little patches of sludgy snow, they were shining white. Shining white in the sunlight.”
 [261]

The same mentor told the Doctor ghost stories about the Vampires.
 [262]
Satthralope, a member of House Lungbarrow, sacked the hermit because he was a bad influence and too expensive.
 [263]

The Doctor was interested enough in Gallifreyan history to take the unusual step of learning the dead language of Old High Gallifreyan.
 [264]
The Doctor admired Salyavin.
 [265]
He was frightened by stories of the Fendahl.
 [266]
He always wanted to be a train driver.
 [267]
The Doctor took up trainspotting as a hobby.
 [268]
His first train set was a Hornby, Double-O.
 [269]

The Doctor’s mother told him a nursery rhyme about Zagreus, which spoke of people disappearing up paradoxical staircases.
 [270]
When he was an impressionable age, she also told him scary stories about Grandfather Paradox.
 [271]
The Doctor read
Arabian Nights
when he was a Time Tot.
 [272]

On Gallifrey, the Toclafane were spoken of in fairytales, much like the bogeyman on Earth.
 [273]
The Doctor was told as a boy that there was no point being an explorer, as the Time Lords had already discovered everything.
 [274]

The children of Gallifrey were taken from their families at age eight, and brought to the Academy. Each novice was taken for Initiation, and made to stand in front of the Untempered Schism: a gap in the fabric of reality. From there, each novice would see the whole of the Vortex, and stare at the raw power of time and space. Some novices would become inspired, some would run away, and some would go mad.

The Master looked into the Vortex while he was a child, and some believed this was the beginning of his madness. Rassilon and the High Council of Time Lords, trapped in the time-lock of The Last Great Time War, seeded the heartbeat of a Time Lord through the Vortex and into the eight-year-old Master’s mind as a means of facilitating their escape. Throughout his lives, the Master was made to hear the sound of drums as a call to war.
 [275]

The Doctor chose his name, as did the Master.
 [276]
The Doctor claimed that he didn’t spend centuries at “that poxy academy” just to be called “Mister.”
 [277]
The Doctor worked as a courier in the vast spaceport Desiree during his gap century, although he was fired because he kept getting lost.
 [278]
When the Doctor was “just a kid”, only 90 years old, he visited the Medusa Cascade, a rift in time and space that reached into every dimension and every parallel reality.
 [279]
At some point, he sealed the rift of the Medusa Cascade single-handed.
 [280]
The Doctor’s real name burns in the Cascade of Medusa.
 [281]

The Academy Years

The Doctor was a member of the Prydonian Chapter but came to forsake his birthright.
 [282]
When the Doctor was on Gallifrey, Cardinal Lenadi led the Prydonians.
 [283]

Gallifrey’s highest peak, Mount Cadon, extended to the fringes of the planet’s atmosphere and held the Prydonian Academy far up its slopes. Acolytes there endlessly recanted protocols and procedures. In high towers, special pupils learned dark arts.
 [284]

The Academy was basically a self-contained city annexed to the Gallifreyan Capitol. It took up twenty-eight square miles of Gallifrey’s surface.
 [285]

The Doctor was a contemporary of the Master, Runcible, Drax and the Rani.
 [286]
He was “fifty years before” the Monk.
 [287]
The War Chief and the Doctor recognised each other.
 [288]
The Doctor knew Hedin and Damon.
 [289]
He knew the Time Lord who warned him about the Master.
 [290]

The Doctor was at the Academy with Vansell.
 [291]
He attended the Rani’s raucous 94th birthday party.
 [292]
The Doctor attended University with the Rani, and his speciality was thermodynamics.
 [293]
He got an education at the “University of Gallifrey”.
 [294]
The Doctor said his field was “mainly” the science of macro-cosmology.
 [295]

Anzor, the son of a High Council member, bullied the Doctor into doing his homework at the Prydonian Academy. He also tormented him with a pain-inducing Galvanizer stick. One of the Doctor’s friends, Cheevah, stood up to Anzor - who sealed Cheevah in a block of crystal, and dropped him from the Academy belltower.
 [296]

He attended “the Academy” with the Master.
 [297]
The Doctor attended a Tech Course with the Class of ‘92, which included Drax, before he gained his Doctorate.
 [298]
The Doctor was taught quantum mechanics at infant school. He and his friends once put a teacher in a time loop. He kept a pet flubble under his bed during his first year at the Academy, and was nearly caught when she went into heat and started a mating song.
 [299]
He took his Gallifrey Lifesaver’s Certificate.
 [300]

The Doctor studied at Prydon Academy (where Borusa taught him).
 [301]
Lord Cardinal Lenadi led the Prydonian Chapter during the Doctor’s time on Gallifrey.
 [302]
Cardinal Borusa wrote a history called
Rassilon the God
.
 [303]
The Doctor was taught by Azmael.
 [304]
The Doctor’s old academy teacher told him, “Ignore history at your peril”.
 [305]
He used to build time jammers to disrupt others’ experiments.
 [306]
When the Doctor was young, he kept enough odds and ends in his pockets to build a holo-field scrambler in five minutes flat - and often did.
 [307]
He used to build space-time portals for fun.
 [308]

Ruath and the Doctor staged pranks together - they introduced cats into the Gallifreyan ecosystem, altered gravity to make a Panopticon graduation take place in mid-air and electrified Borusa’s perigosto stick.
 [309]
Cats were very popular on Gallifrey, to such an extent that every President had a presidential cat... until an incident with giant mice.
 [310]

A Cardinal Sendok taught them at the Academy.
 [311]
The Doctor skipped his Academy class on transdimensional locus attraction dynamics to learn the yo-yo and juggling.
 [312]
The Time Lord Dimension Ethics Committee banned all exploration of the higher dimensions. Nevertheless, fascinated by the legends of the Great Old Ones at the Academy, the Doctor and Master travelled back in time to search for Valdemar. They found nothing but warnings.
 [313]

Daring neonates at the Academy played a dangerous game called Eighth Man Bound. This entailed deliberately putting an “Initiate” into a state of flux between life or death, enabling them to witness and experience their future regenerations. The term was coined after a student of the Arcalian Chapter who discovered the natures of his first seven bodies, but couldn’t observe the eighth. A student of the Prydonian Chapter was rumoured to have tied this record.
 [314]

The Doctor used to play truant so he could down pints of Best Shobogan beer at the Golden Grockle in Low Town. He seethed with anger at the High Council.
 [315]
The Doctor at this time was called “Theta Sigma”, his nickname.
 [316]
The Master got a higher grade at Cosmic Science than the Doctor. The Doctor claims he was a late developer.
 [317]
Cardinal Sendok taught the Doctor and the Master cosmic science.
 [318]

Divided Loyalties

The Doctor was part of the Deca, a group of ten brilliant students who were activists in favour of more Time Lord intervention. The Deca members were: the Doctor, Koschei (the Master), Mortimus (the Monk), Magnus (the War Chief), Drax, Ushas (the Rani), Vansell (actually a Celestial Intervention Agency spy), Rallon, Millennia and Jelpax.

They were taught by Borusa, Franilla, Sendok and Zass.

It was as part of the Deca that the Doctor learned about the Celestial Toymaker. The Doctor, Rallon and Millennia located the Toymaker and were caught up in his games. Rallon and Millennia were apparently killed, and the Doctor was expelled from the Academy on his return to Gallifrey, and ordered to spend five hundred years in Records and Traffic Control. He studied for his doctorate in his spare time.

The President at this time was Drall, the Castellan was Rannex. Type 35 TARDISes were in operation; the Doctor used a Type 18 to visit the Toymaker.

Only Jelpax completed his time at the Academy in the conventional manner, the others either went to special projects or vanished. Jelpax went on to work with Borusa.

Time Lords had to pass a test to fly a TARDIS; the Doctor failed his.
 [319]
The Doctor wasn’t much for studying at school.
 [320]
He deliberately failed his exams so that people would underestimate him, and to avoid office duty.
 [321]
The Doctor eventually scraped through the Academy with 51% on the second attempt
.
 [322]
His poor results were a grave disappointment to his parents.
 [323]

Iris Wildthyme

The adventurer in time and space known as Iris Wildthyme claimed to have grown up in a House in southern Gallifrey. It was ruled by Aunts including Baba, her favourite. Iris’ mother ran away with an offworlder. Iris found an abandoned TARDIS in the wilderness and adopted it.
 [324]

Iris also claimed to come from one of the New Towns under the Gallifreyan Capitol. She found her TARDIS abandoned in the mountains as a wasted experiment, helping it to learn, feed and evolve. In turn, the bus gave Iris advice. She’s been travelling longer than the Doctor.

The Doctor said Iris wasn’t a proper Time Lady and that the Time Lords were unsure of her identity.
 [325]
Iris referred to the Doctor’s people as “a snobby, over-privileged bunch”.
 [326]
Iris was unique in the whole of creation, and had no duplicates in parallel realities.
 [327]

Iris said the Obverse was her home, and that she was “not who she said she was, and more besides!”
 [328]
On another occasion, Iris claimed to hail from the Clockworks - a place of logic and reason, inhabited by beings who tinkered with time and were “the grease in the cogs of the multiverse”. She was just a kid from the slums, and rebelled by stealing her time-travelling bus.
 [329]

The Doctor on Gallifrey

The Doctor says he was a pioneer among his people.
 [330]
He claimed to have built his Ship. Susan coined the acronym TARDIS.
 [331]
The Doctor excelled himself when he built the TARDIS force field.
 [332]
He and the Master referred to each other as “Lords”.
 [333]

Before leaving Gallifrey, the Doctor was used on a diplomatic mission at least once, when he visited the inauguration of Station Chimera in the Third Zone.
 [334]
Following a campaign by the Doctor, the Time Lords banned MiniScopes.
 [335]