this_time_i_win

Character Information
Name: The Master
Nickname/aliases: Koschei, Harold Saxon, Mister Master
Canon (e.g. Harry Potter/Firefly/Star Trek): Doctor Who
Canon Type (e.g. book, movie, television show, play)?: Television show
Character's LJ: this_time_i_win

Brief history of your character:

Born (or possibly loomed) on Gallifrey in the House of Oakden, the Master - then called Koschei - grew up alongside the Gallifreyan who would later become the Time Lord known as the Doctor. Koschei's family was a respectable, wealthy one, and despite what he felt was an extremely stifling social environment, Koschei was probably quite spoiled by the standards of many Gallifreyans, let alone members of other species. Unfortunately, at the age of eight the seed of insanity was sown in his mind when he underwent the standard ceremony for those young Gallifreyans taken to be trained as Time Lords. The children were required to gaze into the Untempered Schism, a hole in the fabric of reality that allows one to gaze directly into the Time Vortex. This experience was already an innately painful, frightening one for many Gallifreyan children, but in Koschei's case it was much worse than that. Far into the future, Rassilon, the founder of Time Lord society, used the Untempered Schism to retroactively infect young Koschei's mind with a psychic signal the Time Lords would later be able to use as a lifeline to escape the time-lock that had been imposed on them in order to prevent the Last Great Time War from ending the rest of the universe.

This signal manifested itself in his mind as the sound of drums, which would aggravate his violent, arrogant, and megalomanic tendencies for centuries to come. For a very long time, these traits manifested themselves as a desire not only to achieve immortality for himself, but also to impose order on the universe, often regardless of the cost to others. In this sense, many of the Master's actions were not necessarily evil, despite him frequently exhibiting what would be highly unethical or amoral behavior and attitude in the eyes of others, particularly the Doctor. Over the centuries, he burned through his regenerations to the point where he was forced to spend much of his time plotting to steal bodies or regenerations in order to prolong himself, but it is unclear whether he used up his own regenerations especially quickly as compared to the Doctor (who himself regenerates more frequently and often under greater distress than is probably normal for a more civilized Time Lord), or if the relative nature of their personal timelines has meant that the Master is significantly older than the Doctor despite the two of them having originated from roughly the same point in time.

If the Master was relatively sane, if amoral, for the majority of his life, it was the Last Great Time War and his subsequent regeneration that put an end to that. The Master was absent for the first parts of the War due to being dead at the time (though he had been killed on several prior occasions and had never been stopped by it before then). He was, however, resurrected by the then-desperate Time Lords during the War in order that he might be used as a weapon against the Daleks. Whether or not the Master commanded any successful campaigns against the enemies of the Time Lords is unclear, though he seems to have been willing enough to take up arms in the name of Gallifrey, if only because of the promise of a new set of regenerations. It has been revealed, though, that he was present at the fall of the Cruciform to the Dalek Emperor. The size of the conflict and the specter of defeat was so frightening that the Master fled rather than stand and fight. He used his TARDIS to disappear into the far future, nearly to the end of the universe, and there he used the chameleon arch to transform himself into a human named Yana, wiping his own mind and body of all traces of his true identity.

Yana believed himself to be an orphan, but how much of his history was real and how much was invented by the chameleon arch is uncertain. The Master lived in that form for at least seventeen years, as that is the length of time for which he is known to have been accompanied by a Malmooth assistant named Chantho. Yana inherited the Master's intellect and the drums, though not his time sense (he was an extremely unpunctual human) or his drive for dominance and mastery over others.

A chance visit to the end of the universe by the Doctor, Martha Jones, and Jack Harkness inadvertently triggered Yana's suppressed memories and caused him to open the antique fob watch in which his Time Lord essence had been stored during his tenure as a human. Resurrected as the Master, he proceeded to kill faithful Chantho, only to be fatally wounded by her in return. He escaped to the Doctor's TARDIS, locking himself inside moments before his regeneration. He deliberately regenerated into a much younger body than before, notably in reaction to the Doctor's contemporary appearance, and used the TARDIS to escape.

Due to the Doctor's meddling, the Master was unable to use the other Time Lord's TARDIS to travel anywhere (or anywhen) far from its last two destinations: Earth in the mid-2000s and the planet Malcassairo near the end of the universe. He arrived in England around the year 2006, and proceeded to fabricate an identity for himself, becoming a man named Harold Saxon and thus evading the notice of the Doctor's past self relative to his time line, who visted the Earth frequently during this time but was unaware of the Master's presence. He soon designed and unveiled the Archangel Network, a series of fifteen satellites in stationary orbit around the Earth, which became Earth's primary communications network in early 2007. Unknown to the humans who helped implement it, the Archangel Network was not merely the revolution in communication technology it appeared to be. The Master used the satellites to broadcast a signal over the Earth, coded in the same Time Lord heartsbeat rhythm of four in which he'd heard the drums for most of his life. The suggestion the network planted was initially simple: trust Harold Saxon. The life story he crafted for himself was simple - sloppy, even, in places - but Archangel soon did its work, and the humans of Earth took everything he told them about himself at face value.



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