The Master (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bynomeansfond) wrote2014-03-30 11:03 pm
bynomeansfond) wrote2014-03-30 11:03 pm
Entry tags:
app for ataraxion
P L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Cully
OOC Journal:culumacilinte
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nein
Email + IM: im.going.nowhere.very.slowly AT gmail DOT com, Culumacilinte on AIM
Characters Played at Ataraxion: None
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: The Master
Canon: Doctor Who
Original or Alternate Universe: Sort of both. A canonical alternate timeline. Because that is what Doctor Who is all about
Canon Point: Post-Scream of the Shalka
Number: No preference
Setting: The Doctor Who universe. More specifically, Scream of the Shalka. The Shalka!verse timeline diverges from the Doctor’s main continuity at some point during his Eighth regeneration; instead of fighting in the Time War and becoming Christopher Eccleston, he regenerates into Richard E. Grant, and is stuck working for the Time Lords.
History: Not a great deal is known about the Master’s childhood. He was loomed into the House of Oakdown, one of the Newblood houses of Gallifrey, and attended the Time Lord Academy from the age of eight until sometime in his second century. At the Academy, he became friends with a young Doctor (then known as Theta Sigma); among other things, they would sabotage each other’s experiments, and sneak out of the Capitol to play in the mountains, or go drinking with Shobogans, an underclass of Gallifreyans. He developed his strong mental powers at a young age, and would often hypnotise people as a joke. He was also part of a clique of students called the Deca, almost all of whom would go on to become renegades. He was intelligent, ambitious, reckless, and both he and Theta Sigma were deeply dissatisfied with the Time Lord status quo. It is perhaps little wonder that he fell obsessively in love with the boy, and even less wonder, between two such strong personalities, that that ended poorly.
It’s speculated that after graduating (with excellent marks, thank you very much) he went to work for the Celestial Intervention Agency as a scientist and engineer. The CIA was more or less the only career path available which allowed for interference and interaction with the larger universe, and the Master was much more inclined to work within the system to effect change than the young Doctor. His ambitions, however, were greater than his superiors were comfortable with, and his methods became increasingly morally dubious, and after a time experiment blew up a large chunk of the Capitol, a warrant was written for his arrest. Rather than submit himself to the Chancellery Guard, the Master fled in a stolen TARDIS, and was declared renegade. At some point between his graduation and his exile, he and the Doctor had a falling out; though the exact circumstances are unknown, it's generally presumed to be in relation to the Master's amorality and his ambitions to affect change by ruling, rather than simply gadding about playing universal tourist.
His activities for the next some hundreds of years are unknown, though it can be presumed that, being new to the universe outside of Gallifrey, he spent much of his time continuing his education, as well as attempting (successfully and otherwise) to overthrow planetary governments/otherwise gain power for himself. During this time, he managed to go through almost all of his regenerations, leaving him in his penultimate body by the time the Doctor was only on his third.
When he found out that the Doctor had been exiled to Earth, he turned his attentions thenceward, bringing a succession of alien menaces to Earth in an attempt to conquer it, and to exact revenge on the Doctor for an unknown slight. To both he and the Doctor, however, his plots served the dual purpose of a sort of game; to provide entertainment for the Doctor in his exile, and for both of them a match of wits, a sparring flirtation. The Master would occasionally offer the Doctor the chance to rule the universe at his side, but was consistently rebuffed. The Master was quite serious in his desire to kill the Doctor, it was mostly by way of a justly deserved punishment. The Doctor would regenerate, after all.
He did not, however, manage to kill the Doctor, and was eventually killed himself, regenerating out of his last healthy body into a twisted corpse sustained only by his force of will to survive. On the verge of death, he was found on the planet Tersurus by Goth, a power hungry Time Lord chancellor. Using Goth, he made his way back to Gallifrey, and engineered the assassination of the Time Lord president, all the while plotting to use the power of the Eye of Harmony to revitalize himself and acquire a new set of regenerations, as well as to attain mastery of the whole universe. Now mad and twisted beyond any gentlemanly rivalry, he brought the Doctor to Gallifrey to serve as a scapegoat for the assassination, wishing for him to die ‘in ignominious shame and disgrace’. The Doctor defeated him, but the Master managed to escape from Gallifrey.
Eventually, still in his corpse of a body, he ended up on the planet of Traken, a place of such goodness that any evil thing which came there was calcified into a ‘Melkur’, an immobile statue. The Master’s TARDIS took the form of such a Melkur, and was tended by a young woman named Kassia, whom he shaped and influenced as she grew up. The goodness of the Traken Union was made possible by its Source, an immensely powerful source of bioelectric energy controlled by the Keeper of Traken. The Master plotted a long game to become Keeper and seize the power of the source, thus rejuvenating himself and gaining power over the whole Union. Again, the Doctor foiled his plans, but the Master was able to take over the body of a Trakenite scientist named Tremas—he was young and strong and alive again.
Having possession of a newly vigorous body that wasn’t in constant agony may have unhinged him slightly with the sheer glee of it. With a new penchant for mad laughter and theatricality, he (in quick succession) accidentally destroyed a third of the universe, killed the Doctor’s fourth incarnation, pushing him off a satellite dish to fall to his death, and kidnapped his young companion Adric. With the aid of Adric’s mathematical genius, he built a city of recursions to attempt to trap the newly-regenerated and confused Doctor, but the Doctor and his companions (including Nyssa, the daughter of Tremas, whose body he was wearing) escaped.
Their interactions in this set of regenerations were rather more strained than those with the Doctor’s third body. The Master was quite as prepared as ever to play his little games, but the Doctor was much less willing to participate. As x_los rather wonderfully put it, ‘The Master in this somewhat-madder-than-last-time incarnation veers from besotted (unable to countenance the idea of the Doctor's death—‘a cosmos without the Doctor scarcely bears thinking about’) to homicidal. With an option on crazed stalker.’ Throughout, the Master was confident that despite how he might goad, the Doctor would be either unwilling or unable to kill him and ultimately put a stop to him. On the planet Sarn, it turned out that he was wrong. Feeling the weight of all the deaths the Master had been responsible for, the Doctor finally allowed him (apparently) to burn to death.
The restorative power of Sarn’s numismaton gas, however, ensured that he remained alive, later to run into the Doctor’s sixth incarnation, and their old schoolmate, an amoral scientist called the Rani. This particular incident is seen by many as being rather telling of their school days, as, despite the high stakes, the three spent the entire misadventure bickering and mocking each other, with the Master occasionally expressing admiration for the intellects of the other two. Attempting to hijack the results of the Rani’s scientific experiments for his own gain, he ended up without his TARDIS for some time. When he recovered it, he materialised within the Matrix—the digital repository of all Time Lord knowledge—and discovered that the Sixth Doctor was being held on trial, with the Valeyard as the prosecution. The Valeyard was a potential future incarnation of the Doctor, an amalgamation of all the darker, ruthless aspects of the Doctor’s nature, who was plotting to steal the Doctor’s remaining regenerations for himself.
The Master considered the Valeyard a rival, and took advantage of his position within the Matrix to produce evidence that the footage of the Doctor the Valeyard was using to condemn him had been tampered with, thinking it better to rescue the Doctor than to let the Valeyard—a foe whom he surely could never beat—win. In retribution, the Valeyard trapped him in the Matrix, but the Master eventually escaped.
Later, he ended up stranded on the nameless Cheetah Planet, a geologically volatile planet with a symbiotic relationship with its inhabitants. The planet acted as a virus, turning anyone who stayed on it too long into a Cheetah Person themself; making them more apt to give into repressed impulses and violence. Because of this symbiosis, the violence of the Cheetah People was tearing the planet itself apart. Whilst there, he established himself as ruler of the Cheetah People, planning to use their world-hopping talents to conquer planets. Still in his Trakenite body, the Master was less able to resist the planet’s influence than he imagined he might have been, and he contrived to bring the Doctor, now in his seventh body, to the planet, hoping for a rescue (or to destroy the Doctor once and for all; with his mind altered by the planet, he was much more violent and impulsive than usual, and much less able to focus on a particular plan).
Both the Doctor and Ace ended up briefly infected by the Cheetah virus during this incident, and the Master was left on the Cheetah planet. Extra-textually, this is where we enter the Wilderness Years of Doctor Who, so there are a number of conflicting accounts of how the Master got off the Cheetah Planet, and what happened to him in the following years. What is clear is that eventually he ended up on trial by the Daleks—ostensibly for his war crimes, possibly because of his past betrayals of the Daleks.
After being executed by the Daleks, the Master contrived to preserve his consciousness in the body of a deathworm morphant, and plotted to steal the Doctor’s remaining regenerations so that he could finally have a Time Lord body again. In the final struggle with the Doctor, the Master fell in the Eye of Harmony in the heart of the Doctor’s TARDIS, and was trapped there.
There he remained, his scattered mind slowly reconstituting itself over hundreds of years, until he was able to use his psychic link with the TARDIS (his mind was, after all, literally part of her) to reach out to the Doctor. The Doctor had recently regenerated after the loss of a companion, and it was perhaps thanks to his loneliness and volatility that the Master was able to persuade the Doctor to build him a body. With guidance from the Master, together they constructed an android body for him, which, while it was unable to leave the TARDIS, was otherwise uninhibited. He and the Doctor came to an uneasy accord; they fought, to be certain, and the Master made the occasional attempt on the Doctor’s life, but they also entered into a sexual relationship (whilst not precisely canonical, this is Word of God), and for the first time in over a thousand years, began to do something like rekindle their old friendship.
During this time, the TARDIS was under the control of the Time Lords, who used it to send the Doctor on missions to places where they couldn’t be seen to interfere, but still wanted stuff done. On one of these trips, the Doctor acquired a companion, a rather bolshy, intelligent young woman named Alison Cheney. She was still travelling with them when the Master arrived on the Tranquility.
A Note on the Drums: The Master does not hear them. The reasons for this are somewhat strange and paradoxical, but are as follows: Rassilon decided to implant the drums in the Master’s head during the Time War, when the Master contemporaneous to him was in his (other) Derek Jacobi incarnation. Therefore, that Master (and the incarnation that followed) retroactively perceived the drums as having been present in his mind his whole life, but any previous incarnations would not have had them. When he looked into the Time Vortex as a boy and heard them, it was because, in seeing in that moment all of time and space, he caught a glimpse of them as part of his own future.
Personality:
‘One must rule or serve. That is the basic law of life’
A quote from the Master from the serial 'Colony in Space,' and something which, for much of his life, neatly summed up the Master's attitude towards the way the universe works. In his mind, however, there are very few who rule. Either they simply haven't the ability or intelligence, or (as in the Time Lords), they do, but choose not to act on it. He is utterly disdainful of both those sorts of people, and traditionally has viewed himself as one of the few people in the universe who actually counts, so to speak. His ambition, accordingly, has always been to rule, to structure the universe to his design.
The Master's incredibly intelligent, a control freak with an epic superiority complex; he's also entirely amoral- huge swathes of people have been known to die during the course of his plans, and he's more than willing to torture and hurt to further his own goals. That superiority complex has, however, more often than not been his downfall-- he has a history of failing to plan for all eventualities, especially the betrayal of allies.
At the moment, however, he’s been forced to somewhat re-evaluate his place in the universe. Brought back to life in an android body that is unable to leave the Doctor’s TARDIS, he’s certainly not going to be doing any amount of world-conquering. It’s incredibly important to his own conception of himself that he not be a servant, which his current circumstances often make him feel that he is; a butler or a glorified sex toy, his only purpose to be a balm for the Doctor’s loneliness and guilt. He’s bitter, but also grateful; he resents his position, and yet he’s far too cowardly to choose death over any kind of life. He is powerless, in a very real sense, and he reacts to that in a variety of ways.
Little, petty things become incredibly important to him-- if he cannot have the kind of cosmic control he’s accustomed to, he will grab whatever’s left to him. This can take the form of anything from bitching at the Doctor about his piloting skills to bioengineering a virus with which to infect him, so the Master can have the smug satisfaction of taking care of him afterwards. The Master has always been haughty, arrogant, and vain; for the first time in his life, he’s experiencing something like self-loathing. He is not at all comfortable with this. This inclines him to be more bitter, and also more melancholic than he has been in other incarnations.
He also is occasionally gripped by something of an existential crisis; he hasn’t had a body that’s truly his own for centuries, of course, and he’s generally inclined to view his body as a tool, something separate from his Self (the incredible speed with which he went through his first set of regenerations can be credited to this attitude), but never before has it been quite as obvious as this. In his darkest moments, he occasionally thinks that he cannot even be said to own his body at all-- if it belongs to anyone, it is to the Doctor, who built it, who has the power to shut it down if he wills it.
He and the Doctor are much nastier to each other than they have been in the past. Whilst in previous televised canon, even death-threats tended to be mannered and accompanied by gentlemanly banter, the Shalka novelisation mentions that the furniture in the console room is scarred with the marks of old disputes-- rowing, smashing glasses, and throwing furniture is apparently not uncommon. No standing on dignity here. This is mostly because they are in a relationship now, however dysfunctional, and there’s little room for pretending at courtliness when they’re both in a position to intimately see the ugliness of the other.
Part and parcel with this, however, he is also occasionally much more open and vulnerable than he’d ever dared to be with the man before. As much as he plays up how aggrieved and long-suffering he is, he’s also often genuinely happy, which is something of a novelty. In canon, we see him openly worrying after the Doctor’s safety, and being positively thrilled when he returns to the TARDIS unharmed. He cares deeply about the Doctor, and has a rather possessive, ‘I’m the only one who’s allowed to hurt him’ attitude towards him.
With people other than the Doctor, however, he tends to fall back on old mannerisms, easily affecting aloof, mannered sarcasm, dry wit, and false joviality. He’s frequently dismissive of those he considers unimportant, though he can perfectly charming if he wants to be, and indeed he often is. Considering, of course, that it’s eminently possible to be charming and murderous at the same time. With the introduction of Alison into the TARDIS, however, the Master is beginning to relearn how to have-- if not a friendship-- at least a more or less genuinely cordial relationship with someone which isn’t predicated on their usefulness to him. Sometimes he actually enjoys her company, it’s very bizarre.
The Master has always had a sharp, and often rather twisted, sense of humour (this is the man who tried to take over the Earth with plastic daffodils and inflatable chairs), and he retains that in this incarnation. And if said sense of humour tends less towards the absurd and more towards the blackly cynical and dry, well, he's less absurd himself in this incarnation.
For most of his long life, the Master has been a fairly solitary person-- by choice. This is not something he’d anticipate, but, having become used to the fellowship of the Doctor and Miss Cheney, as well as the psychic link he shares with the Doctor’s TARDIS, he will initially feel incredibly adrift when he finds himself aboard the Tranquility. While he certainly won’t go seeking out friendship, he may find himself unexpectedly apt to appreciate company.
Revisions: Regarding the canonicity of the romantic/sexual relationship between the Master and the Doctor, Paul Cornell (the writer of Scream of the Shalka and its novelisation) said at the Redemption '09 convention, in regards to a question about the Doctor and the Master's relationship, 'Yeah, they were so doing it,' and 'Oh, they were at it, definitely!' He also confirmed during this panel that part of their relationship was a reawakening of their childhood friendship. See this post for further discussion. As these were remarks at a panel, this is as much of a citation as I can provide, but I feel it provides enough evidence of the author's intent in writing the Doctor/Master relationship.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: The Master is an android, and as as such, he has strength far beyond that of a human, can survive most sorts of physical trauma, and doesn’t need food or sleep. (Just because he doesn’t need them, however, doesn’t mean he won’t indulge if given the option). His body contains its own internal power source, as well as nanites which circulate through it and absorb and dispose of any contaminants-- so dirt, water, blood, etc, will have no effect on his functionality. However, his android body also means he may occasionally have malfunctions which (without the aid of the Doctor), he will have to attempt to manually fix himself. Similarly, it is theoretically possible for someone else to open him up and shut him down, or mess about with his circuitry.
As all Time Lords, he is mildly telepathic; with skin contact, he can enter into someone’s mind-- whether to communicate, or for other, more sinister purposes. He’s capable, for example, of constructing a false memory, implanting suggestions, or of blocking off part of the mind. He’s also a skilled hypnotist, though the especially strong-willed or those with psychic powers of their own may be able to resist his mental domination. Though he does retain all these powers, his telepathic abilities are certainly less strong than they were when he was in a proper Time Lord body.
Inventory:
(1) suit, black, high-collared, wool-silk blend
(1) white dress shirt with a Mandarin collar
(1) pair of black dress socks
(1) pair of dress shoes
In the pockets of his trousers:
Some spare servos
A sonic screwdriver, heavily modified
A mobile telephone that’s borrowed its blue, blocky aesthetic from the TARDIS’s exterior
A staser pistol
A tattooing gun
Appearance: The Master appears to be a man in his late forties, handsome, trim, and strong, with a neat black goatee streaked with white, hair with a pronounced widow’s peak brushed back from his face, and dramatically pointy sideburns. He has warm brown eyes, an extremely pale complexion, and a propensity for dressing in expensive, minimalist black-- lots of high collars and clean lines. Under his clothes, he has a collection of tattoos, all self-applied, none of which will show when he’s fully dressed.
For the most part, he looks entirely organic, though there are tells if one looks closely, the most obvious being that his skin has neither pores nor hairs, except where they’ve been threaded in intentionally.
For his icons, I’m using his one piece of canon, which is animated, but IRL, he’s going to look something like a cross between Derek Jacobi and Roger Delgado.
Age: Somewhere in the general vicinity of 1500-2000, though it’s difficult to say, as his canon is full of contradictions regarding his age, and especially given that several hundred years of relative time passed whilst he was stuck in the Eye of Harmony, so whether that ought to contribute to his age or not is debatable.
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
Log is taken from a meeting with his own Twelfth incarnation.
[He spreads his arms slightly as his Self takes him in. Slightly taller than the younger Master, and much paler in complexion, it's otherwise largely modelled on the same pattern. If nothing else, the Master had taken pleasure, in building this body with the Doctor, in looking like himself again. After centuries of stolen bodies, it had felt like luxury to be able to mould the body according to the mind within it. And it is, despite its inherent shortcomings, a very fine body. To look at, even to touch, one might hardly tell that it isn't organic. But there are slight tells, for those with an eye to see. His synthetic skin, grown to feel just like the real thing, has no hairs save where they've been intentionally planted, and while he's able to replicate the motion of breathing, there are no pulses at either neck or wrist.]
[As far as the question of the Doctor goes... He cocks an eyebrow, dry. He sees the out his younger Self leaves him, but it's not necessary.]
The Doctor is-- mm, delicate is not quite the right word-- jagged, this regeneration. Full of unhealed edges. I doubt whether any of his predecessors would have fished me out of the Eye, frankly, but he's so terribly needy. I don't know that he could help himself. Of course, he's still a bastard.
[Fragile the Doctor may be, but that fragility expresses itself more often than not in drinking too much and taking advantage of the fact that he can simply turn the Master off if he doesn't wish to listen to him anymore. They both have honed their cruelty on each other.]
[He huffs another one of those unnecessary breaths, ironic and self-aware.]
I daresay it's about as close to a marriage as we'll ever get.
[Will that give his younger Self hope? Or will it merely embarrass him that the Master is willing to say it like that, so baldly. He doesn't know. When the Master had been him, he'd been so convinced that any day, the Doctor would give up his ridiculous charade and accept his offers; only experience drove that out of him.]
I also retain a vestigial link to the TARDIS itself. Where I may be going, I will have neither of them.
Here’s a link to a test drive thread, for further reference
Comms Sample:
[The face of a man appears on the video feed; apparently in dignified, handsome middle age, there is something peculiarly still about it. He lifts an eyebrow. His voice, when he speaks, is a pleasantly plummy tenor.]
I've been given to understand that an introduction is customary for those of us... hm, new arrivals aboard this little ship.
[He's still not sure how he feels about this whole affair; on the one hand, he's blessedly, impossibly free of the Doctor and his TARDIS, when he'd quite reconciled himself to spending the rest of his existence lurking in her corridors like the proverbial ghost in the machine. On the other hand... he's left the Doctor in another universe and he's free of the TARDIS; he can feel the absence of her in her head, a tangible lack that sets him on edge]
I am the Master.
[No 'and you will obey me' here, just the introduction, as mild and harmless as a name like his can ever be.]
And I'm led to believe that there's a a science department somewhere aboard this vessel. Activity being preferable to simply... wandering through corridors for an infinity, I do believe I might be of some use to you. Whomever is responsible for such things may feel free to contact me.
Aaaaaand to close:
Your Name: Cully
OOC Journal:
culumacilinte Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nein
Email + IM: im.going.nowhere.very.slowly AT gmail DOT com, Culumacilinte on AIM
Characters Played at Ataraxion: None
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: The Master
Canon: Doctor Who
Original or Alternate Universe: Sort of both. A canonical alternate timeline. Because that is what Doctor Who is all about
Canon Point: Post-Scream of the Shalka
Number: No preference
Setting: The Doctor Who universe. More specifically, Scream of the Shalka. The Shalka!verse timeline diverges from the Doctor’s main continuity at some point during his Eighth regeneration; instead of fighting in the Time War and becoming Christopher Eccleston, he regenerates into Richard E. Grant, and is stuck working for the Time Lords.
History: Not a great deal is known about the Master’s childhood. He was loomed into the House of Oakdown, one of the Newblood houses of Gallifrey, and attended the Time Lord Academy from the age of eight until sometime in his second century. At the Academy, he became friends with a young Doctor (then known as Theta Sigma); among other things, they would sabotage each other’s experiments, and sneak out of the Capitol to play in the mountains, or go drinking with Shobogans, an underclass of Gallifreyans. He developed his strong mental powers at a young age, and would often hypnotise people as a joke. He was also part of a clique of students called the Deca, almost all of whom would go on to become renegades. He was intelligent, ambitious, reckless, and both he and Theta Sigma were deeply dissatisfied with the Time Lord status quo. It is perhaps little wonder that he fell obsessively in love with the boy, and even less wonder, between two such strong personalities, that that ended poorly.
It’s speculated that after graduating (with excellent marks, thank you very much) he went to work for the Celestial Intervention Agency as a scientist and engineer. The CIA was more or less the only career path available which allowed for interference and interaction with the larger universe, and the Master was much more inclined to work within the system to effect change than the young Doctor. His ambitions, however, were greater than his superiors were comfortable with, and his methods became increasingly morally dubious, and after a time experiment blew up a large chunk of the Capitol, a warrant was written for his arrest. Rather than submit himself to the Chancellery Guard, the Master fled in a stolen TARDIS, and was declared renegade. At some point between his graduation and his exile, he and the Doctor had a falling out; though the exact circumstances are unknown, it's generally presumed to be in relation to the Master's amorality and his ambitions to affect change by ruling, rather than simply gadding about playing universal tourist.
His activities for the next some hundreds of years are unknown, though it can be presumed that, being new to the universe outside of Gallifrey, he spent much of his time continuing his education, as well as attempting (successfully and otherwise) to overthrow planetary governments/otherwise gain power for himself. During this time, he managed to go through almost all of his regenerations, leaving him in his penultimate body by the time the Doctor was only on his third.
When he found out that the Doctor had been exiled to Earth, he turned his attentions thenceward, bringing a succession of alien menaces to Earth in an attempt to conquer it, and to exact revenge on the Doctor for an unknown slight. To both he and the Doctor, however, his plots served the dual purpose of a sort of game; to provide entertainment for the Doctor in his exile, and for both of them a match of wits, a sparring flirtation. The Master would occasionally offer the Doctor the chance to rule the universe at his side, but was consistently rebuffed. The Master was quite serious in his desire to kill the Doctor, it was mostly by way of a justly deserved punishment. The Doctor would regenerate, after all.
He did not, however, manage to kill the Doctor, and was eventually killed himself, regenerating out of his last healthy body into a twisted corpse sustained only by his force of will to survive. On the verge of death, he was found on the planet Tersurus by Goth, a power hungry Time Lord chancellor. Using Goth, he made his way back to Gallifrey, and engineered the assassination of the Time Lord president, all the while plotting to use the power of the Eye of Harmony to revitalize himself and acquire a new set of regenerations, as well as to attain mastery of the whole universe. Now mad and twisted beyond any gentlemanly rivalry, he brought the Doctor to Gallifrey to serve as a scapegoat for the assassination, wishing for him to die ‘in ignominious shame and disgrace’. The Doctor defeated him, but the Master managed to escape from Gallifrey.
Eventually, still in his corpse of a body, he ended up on the planet of Traken, a place of such goodness that any evil thing which came there was calcified into a ‘Melkur’, an immobile statue. The Master’s TARDIS took the form of such a Melkur, and was tended by a young woman named Kassia, whom he shaped and influenced as she grew up. The goodness of the Traken Union was made possible by its Source, an immensely powerful source of bioelectric energy controlled by the Keeper of Traken. The Master plotted a long game to become Keeper and seize the power of the source, thus rejuvenating himself and gaining power over the whole Union. Again, the Doctor foiled his plans, but the Master was able to take over the body of a Trakenite scientist named Tremas—he was young and strong and alive again.
Having possession of a newly vigorous body that wasn’t in constant agony may have unhinged him slightly with the sheer glee of it. With a new penchant for mad laughter and theatricality, he (in quick succession) accidentally destroyed a third of the universe, killed the Doctor’s fourth incarnation, pushing him off a satellite dish to fall to his death, and kidnapped his young companion Adric. With the aid of Adric’s mathematical genius, he built a city of recursions to attempt to trap the newly-regenerated and confused Doctor, but the Doctor and his companions (including Nyssa, the daughter of Tremas, whose body he was wearing) escaped.
Their interactions in this set of regenerations were rather more strained than those with the Doctor’s third body. The Master was quite as prepared as ever to play his little games, but the Doctor was much less willing to participate. As x_los rather wonderfully put it, ‘The Master in this somewhat-madder-than-last-time incarnation veers from besotted (unable to countenance the idea of the Doctor's death—‘a cosmos without the Doctor scarcely bears thinking about’) to homicidal. With an option on crazed stalker.’ Throughout, the Master was confident that despite how he might goad, the Doctor would be either unwilling or unable to kill him and ultimately put a stop to him. On the planet Sarn, it turned out that he was wrong. Feeling the weight of all the deaths the Master had been responsible for, the Doctor finally allowed him (apparently) to burn to death.
The restorative power of Sarn’s numismaton gas, however, ensured that he remained alive, later to run into the Doctor’s sixth incarnation, and their old schoolmate, an amoral scientist called the Rani. This particular incident is seen by many as being rather telling of their school days, as, despite the high stakes, the three spent the entire misadventure bickering and mocking each other, with the Master occasionally expressing admiration for the intellects of the other two. Attempting to hijack the results of the Rani’s scientific experiments for his own gain, he ended up without his TARDIS for some time. When he recovered it, he materialised within the Matrix—the digital repository of all Time Lord knowledge—and discovered that the Sixth Doctor was being held on trial, with the Valeyard as the prosecution. The Valeyard was a potential future incarnation of the Doctor, an amalgamation of all the darker, ruthless aspects of the Doctor’s nature, who was plotting to steal the Doctor’s remaining regenerations for himself.
The Master considered the Valeyard a rival, and took advantage of his position within the Matrix to produce evidence that the footage of the Doctor the Valeyard was using to condemn him had been tampered with, thinking it better to rescue the Doctor than to let the Valeyard—a foe whom he surely could never beat—win. In retribution, the Valeyard trapped him in the Matrix, but the Master eventually escaped.
Later, he ended up stranded on the nameless Cheetah Planet, a geologically volatile planet with a symbiotic relationship with its inhabitants. The planet acted as a virus, turning anyone who stayed on it too long into a Cheetah Person themself; making them more apt to give into repressed impulses and violence. Because of this symbiosis, the violence of the Cheetah People was tearing the planet itself apart. Whilst there, he established himself as ruler of the Cheetah People, planning to use their world-hopping talents to conquer planets. Still in his Trakenite body, the Master was less able to resist the planet’s influence than he imagined he might have been, and he contrived to bring the Doctor, now in his seventh body, to the planet, hoping for a rescue (or to destroy the Doctor once and for all; with his mind altered by the planet, he was much more violent and impulsive than usual, and much less able to focus on a particular plan).
Both the Doctor and Ace ended up briefly infected by the Cheetah virus during this incident, and the Master was left on the Cheetah planet. Extra-textually, this is where we enter the Wilderness Years of Doctor Who, so there are a number of conflicting accounts of how the Master got off the Cheetah Planet, and what happened to him in the following years. What is clear is that eventually he ended up on trial by the Daleks—ostensibly for his war crimes, possibly because of his past betrayals of the Daleks.
After being executed by the Daleks, the Master contrived to preserve his consciousness in the body of a deathworm morphant, and plotted to steal the Doctor’s remaining regenerations so that he could finally have a Time Lord body again. In the final struggle with the Doctor, the Master fell in the Eye of Harmony in the heart of the Doctor’s TARDIS, and was trapped there.
There he remained, his scattered mind slowly reconstituting itself over hundreds of years, until he was able to use his psychic link with the TARDIS (his mind was, after all, literally part of her) to reach out to the Doctor. The Doctor had recently regenerated after the loss of a companion, and it was perhaps thanks to his loneliness and volatility that the Master was able to persuade the Doctor to build him a body. With guidance from the Master, together they constructed an android body for him, which, while it was unable to leave the TARDIS, was otherwise uninhibited. He and the Doctor came to an uneasy accord; they fought, to be certain, and the Master made the occasional attempt on the Doctor’s life, but they also entered into a sexual relationship (whilst not precisely canonical, this is Word of God), and for the first time in over a thousand years, began to do something like rekindle their old friendship.
During this time, the TARDIS was under the control of the Time Lords, who used it to send the Doctor on missions to places where they couldn’t be seen to interfere, but still wanted stuff done. On one of these trips, the Doctor acquired a companion, a rather bolshy, intelligent young woman named Alison Cheney. She was still travelling with them when the Master arrived on the Tranquility.
A Note on the Drums: The Master does not hear them. The reasons for this are somewhat strange and paradoxical, but are as follows: Rassilon decided to implant the drums in the Master’s head during the Time War, when the Master contemporaneous to him was in his (other) Derek Jacobi incarnation. Therefore, that Master (and the incarnation that followed) retroactively perceived the drums as having been present in his mind his whole life, but any previous incarnations would not have had them. When he looked into the Time Vortex as a boy and heard them, it was because, in seeing in that moment all of time and space, he caught a glimpse of them as part of his own future.
Personality:
‘One must rule or serve. That is the basic law of life’
A quote from the Master from the serial 'Colony in Space,' and something which, for much of his life, neatly summed up the Master's attitude towards the way the universe works. In his mind, however, there are very few who rule. Either they simply haven't the ability or intelligence, or (as in the Time Lords), they do, but choose not to act on it. He is utterly disdainful of both those sorts of people, and traditionally has viewed himself as one of the few people in the universe who actually counts, so to speak. His ambition, accordingly, has always been to rule, to structure the universe to his design.
The Master's incredibly intelligent, a control freak with an epic superiority complex; he's also entirely amoral- huge swathes of people have been known to die during the course of his plans, and he's more than willing to torture and hurt to further his own goals. That superiority complex has, however, more often than not been his downfall-- he has a history of failing to plan for all eventualities, especially the betrayal of allies.
At the moment, however, he’s been forced to somewhat re-evaluate his place in the universe. Brought back to life in an android body that is unable to leave the Doctor’s TARDIS, he’s certainly not going to be doing any amount of world-conquering. It’s incredibly important to his own conception of himself that he not be a servant, which his current circumstances often make him feel that he is; a butler or a glorified sex toy, his only purpose to be a balm for the Doctor’s loneliness and guilt. He’s bitter, but also grateful; he resents his position, and yet he’s far too cowardly to choose death over any kind of life. He is powerless, in a very real sense, and he reacts to that in a variety of ways.
Little, petty things become incredibly important to him-- if he cannot have the kind of cosmic control he’s accustomed to, he will grab whatever’s left to him. This can take the form of anything from bitching at the Doctor about his piloting skills to bioengineering a virus with which to infect him, so the Master can have the smug satisfaction of taking care of him afterwards. The Master has always been haughty, arrogant, and vain; for the first time in his life, he’s experiencing something like self-loathing. He is not at all comfortable with this. This inclines him to be more bitter, and also more melancholic than he has been in other incarnations.
He also is occasionally gripped by something of an existential crisis; he hasn’t had a body that’s truly his own for centuries, of course, and he’s generally inclined to view his body as a tool, something separate from his Self (the incredible speed with which he went through his first set of regenerations can be credited to this attitude), but never before has it been quite as obvious as this. In his darkest moments, he occasionally thinks that he cannot even be said to own his body at all-- if it belongs to anyone, it is to the Doctor, who built it, who has the power to shut it down if he wills it.
He and the Doctor are much nastier to each other than they have been in the past. Whilst in previous televised canon, even death-threats tended to be mannered and accompanied by gentlemanly banter, the Shalka novelisation mentions that the furniture in the console room is scarred with the marks of old disputes-- rowing, smashing glasses, and throwing furniture is apparently not uncommon. No standing on dignity here. This is mostly because they are in a relationship now, however dysfunctional, and there’s little room for pretending at courtliness when they’re both in a position to intimately see the ugliness of the other.
Part and parcel with this, however, he is also occasionally much more open and vulnerable than he’d ever dared to be with the man before. As much as he plays up how aggrieved and long-suffering he is, he’s also often genuinely happy, which is something of a novelty. In canon, we see him openly worrying after the Doctor’s safety, and being positively thrilled when he returns to the TARDIS unharmed. He cares deeply about the Doctor, and has a rather possessive, ‘I’m the only one who’s allowed to hurt him’ attitude towards him.
With people other than the Doctor, however, he tends to fall back on old mannerisms, easily affecting aloof, mannered sarcasm, dry wit, and false joviality. He’s frequently dismissive of those he considers unimportant, though he can perfectly charming if he wants to be, and indeed he often is. Considering, of course, that it’s eminently possible to be charming and murderous at the same time. With the introduction of Alison into the TARDIS, however, the Master is beginning to relearn how to have-- if not a friendship-- at least a more or less genuinely cordial relationship with someone which isn’t predicated on their usefulness to him. Sometimes he actually enjoys her company, it’s very bizarre.
The Master has always had a sharp, and often rather twisted, sense of humour (this is the man who tried to take over the Earth with plastic daffodils and inflatable chairs), and he retains that in this incarnation. And if said sense of humour tends less towards the absurd and more towards the blackly cynical and dry, well, he's less absurd himself in this incarnation.
For most of his long life, the Master has been a fairly solitary person-- by choice. This is not something he’d anticipate, but, having become used to the fellowship of the Doctor and Miss Cheney, as well as the psychic link he shares with the Doctor’s TARDIS, he will initially feel incredibly adrift when he finds himself aboard the Tranquility. While he certainly won’t go seeking out friendship, he may find himself unexpectedly apt to appreciate company.
Revisions: Regarding the canonicity of the romantic/sexual relationship between the Master and the Doctor, Paul Cornell (the writer of Scream of the Shalka and its novelisation) said at the Redemption '09 convention, in regards to a question about the Doctor and the Master's relationship, 'Yeah, they were so doing it,' and 'Oh, they were at it, definitely!' He also confirmed during this panel that part of their relationship was a reawakening of their childhood friendship. See this post for further discussion. As these were remarks at a panel, this is as much of a citation as I can provide, but I feel it provides enough evidence of the author's intent in writing the Doctor/Master relationship.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: The Master is an android, and as as such, he has strength far beyond that of a human, can survive most sorts of physical trauma, and doesn’t need food or sleep. (Just because he doesn’t need them, however, doesn’t mean he won’t indulge if given the option). His body contains its own internal power source, as well as nanites which circulate through it and absorb and dispose of any contaminants-- so dirt, water, blood, etc, will have no effect on his functionality. However, his android body also means he may occasionally have malfunctions which (without the aid of the Doctor), he will have to attempt to manually fix himself. Similarly, it is theoretically possible for someone else to open him up and shut him down, or mess about with his circuitry.
As all Time Lords, he is mildly telepathic; with skin contact, he can enter into someone’s mind-- whether to communicate, or for other, more sinister purposes. He’s capable, for example, of constructing a false memory, implanting suggestions, or of blocking off part of the mind. He’s also a skilled hypnotist, though the especially strong-willed or those with psychic powers of their own may be able to resist his mental domination. Though he does retain all these powers, his telepathic abilities are certainly less strong than they were when he was in a proper Time Lord body.
Inventory:
(1) suit, black, high-collared, wool-silk blend
(1) white dress shirt with a Mandarin collar
(1) pair of black dress socks
(1) pair of dress shoes
In the pockets of his trousers:
Some spare servos
A sonic screwdriver, heavily modified
A mobile telephone that’s borrowed its blue, blocky aesthetic from the TARDIS’s exterior
A staser pistol
A tattooing gun
Appearance: The Master appears to be a man in his late forties, handsome, trim, and strong, with a neat black goatee streaked with white, hair with a pronounced widow’s peak brushed back from his face, and dramatically pointy sideburns. He has warm brown eyes, an extremely pale complexion, and a propensity for dressing in expensive, minimalist black-- lots of high collars and clean lines. Under his clothes, he has a collection of tattoos, all self-applied, none of which will show when he’s fully dressed.
For the most part, he looks entirely organic, though there are tells if one looks closely, the most obvious being that his skin has neither pores nor hairs, except where they’ve been threaded in intentionally.
For his icons, I’m using his one piece of canon, which is animated, but IRL, he’s going to look something like a cross between Derek Jacobi and Roger Delgado.
Age: Somewhere in the general vicinity of 1500-2000, though it’s difficult to say, as his canon is full of contradictions regarding his age, and especially given that several hundred years of relative time passed whilst he was stuck in the Eye of Harmony, so whether that ought to contribute to his age or not is debatable.
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
Log is taken from a meeting with his own Twelfth incarnation.
[He spreads his arms slightly as his Self takes him in. Slightly taller than the younger Master, and much paler in complexion, it's otherwise largely modelled on the same pattern. If nothing else, the Master had taken pleasure, in building this body with the Doctor, in looking like himself again. After centuries of stolen bodies, it had felt like luxury to be able to mould the body according to the mind within it. And it is, despite its inherent shortcomings, a very fine body. To look at, even to touch, one might hardly tell that it isn't organic. But there are slight tells, for those with an eye to see. His synthetic skin, grown to feel just like the real thing, has no hairs save where they've been intentionally planted, and while he's able to replicate the motion of breathing, there are no pulses at either neck or wrist.]
[As far as the question of the Doctor goes... He cocks an eyebrow, dry. He sees the out his younger Self leaves him, but it's not necessary.]
The Doctor is-- mm, delicate is not quite the right word-- jagged, this regeneration. Full of unhealed edges. I doubt whether any of his predecessors would have fished me out of the Eye, frankly, but he's so terribly needy. I don't know that he could help himself. Of course, he's still a bastard.
[Fragile the Doctor may be, but that fragility expresses itself more often than not in drinking too much and taking advantage of the fact that he can simply turn the Master off if he doesn't wish to listen to him anymore. They both have honed their cruelty on each other.]
[He huffs another one of those unnecessary breaths, ironic and self-aware.]
I daresay it's about as close to a marriage as we'll ever get.
[Will that give his younger Self hope? Or will it merely embarrass him that the Master is willing to say it like that, so baldly. He doesn't know. When the Master had been him, he'd been so convinced that any day, the Doctor would give up his ridiculous charade and accept his offers; only experience drove that out of him.]
I also retain a vestigial link to the TARDIS itself. Where I may be going, I will have neither of them.
Here’s a link to a test drive thread, for further reference
Comms Sample:
[The face of a man appears on the video feed; apparently in dignified, handsome middle age, there is something peculiarly still about it. He lifts an eyebrow. His voice, when he speaks, is a pleasantly plummy tenor.]
I've been given to understand that an introduction is customary for those of us... hm, new arrivals aboard this little ship.
[He's still not sure how he feels about this whole affair; on the one hand, he's blessedly, impossibly free of the Doctor and his TARDIS, when he'd quite reconciled himself to spending the rest of his existence lurking in her corridors like the proverbial ghost in the machine. On the other hand... he's left the Doctor in another universe and he's free of the TARDIS; he can feel the absence of her in her head, a tangible lack that sets him on edge]
I am the Master.
[No 'and you will obey me' here, just the introduction, as mild and harmless as a name like his can ever be.]
And I'm led to believe that there's a a science department somewhere aboard this vessel. Activity being preferable to simply... wandering through corridors for an infinity, I do believe I might be of some use to you. Whomever is responsible for such things may feel free to contact me.
Aaaaaand to close: