[Myst] Application
PLAYER
Name: Lis
Personal Journal: skipthedemon
Age: 29
Contact:
Email: skipthedemon @ gmail.com
AIM: Lisb1121
Plurk: skipthedemon
Other Characters Played: None
Link to last AC: N/A
CHARACTER
Name: Professor Yana (aka the Master....and the Master's endless aliases) The application is dual in nature, to explain both Yana and the Master, and how Yana is connected to the Master.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Age:
Apparent Age: 60s
Actual Age: Indeterminate. His real memories as a human go back decades, but his youth is very hazy.
The Master's age is also indeterminate. Using his parallels with the Doctor as a reference point, roughly 1000.
OU or AU?: OU
Timeline: Mid point of “Utopia” just after the Doctor has helped Yana finish his rocket system.
Wiki link: Professor Yana at Doctor Who wiki and the Master at Wikipedia
The Master's canon has the problem inherent in long running franchises. It is vast, in many media forms, and sometimes contradictory. That's ok - that time can be rewritten is also part of canon. I am generally drawing just from the TV episodes that have been produced by the BBC. I may borrow here and there from extended universe sources, in a very mix and match way, for flavor. My goal is a coherent character, not completism.
HISTORY & PERSONALITY:
''A man is the sum of his memories, you know, and a Time Lord even more so.” - The Doctor
I. Professor: late 14th century CE., from the Latin, “person who professes to be an expert in some art or science, teacher of highest rank," agent noun from 'profitieri' "lay claim to, declare openly". As a title prefixed to a name, it dates from 1706.
Yana : (Note: The following section is entirely canon take from the episode “Utopia.”)
Yana's earliest memory is being found as a child on the planet known as the Silver Devestation. He has no idea who is parents are, and he is unfortunate (or fortunate depending on how one looks at it) to live near the end of his universe's capability of substantiating life. Trillions of years after the Big Bang, entropy has taken its toll. Every main sequence star humanity can see has burned out. Only technology and ingenuity has kept anyone alive. But there is one possible shining beacon of hope; for many years, a powerful signal has been sending out 'Come to Utopia'. Some people have been following that signal, on the chance a new way to survive has been found.
Yana is one of those people who believes that this so called Utopia worth a look, and that living in hope is better than not. He's spent most of his life bouncing from refugee ship to ship, trying to get closer to that signal. For as long as he can remember, he's had a knack for mechanics and engineering. In a time when every resource must be conserved and put to use, his skill has been infinitely valuable, and (probably) paid his passage as he traveled.
About 17 years ago, he ended up on Malcassario, once the home of an insectoid species called the Malmooth. Malcassario has a still functioning atmospheric shell, keeping air and warmth trapped around the planet. A fairly large group of human refugees had gathered there. Outside of the encampment roam the Future Kind; a somewhat human looking species that hunts in packs and find humans good eating. They are called the Future Kind because humanity fears they were once human, but have lost touch with most rationality, or that humans with become like them. Also resident on the planet is at least one remaining Malmooth, Chantho.
Yana gave himself the title “Professor” to take on the air of authority, and convinced the human community to help collect resources to build a large long range ship to carry them to Utopia. Rumor spread out that someone had found a way to get to Utopia, and more people came. Chantho worked beside him for years, and came to adore him, but Yana took no outward notice. Their project nearly stalled completely near the very end. The engine system that Yana had creatively put together worked on paper, but he had difficulty getting the built engines to harmonize in way that would allow the ship to reach escape velocity. He hid these difficulties from the rest of the community, not wanting to dash their hopes. He thought he might yet resolve the problem before people despaired or revolted just from waiting.
His hopes when answered when a strange man calling himself the Doctor, and his two friends, Martha Jones and Jack Harkness, arrived at the compound. Yana took the title 'doctor' to mean the Doctor was a man of science, and literally ran to meet the man, grabbed his hand , and ran him back to the rocket controls to have a look. The Doctor was more than happy to help, but instantly admitted he'd never seen a system like the one Yana had built. The Doctor also claimed to have never heard of Utopia, and not to be human at all, but a Time Lord, although he did not elaborate on what meant. After a little study of the system, the Doctor intuited that one subsystem wasn't working, and literally fixed it in seconds of seeing the problem.
Yana was more than a little astonished, but mollified at the Doctor's praise that he had done brilliantly with “food and string and staples” to work with, and remarked that in another era Yana's genius would have been revered, and he certainly had the Doctor's admiration for it. The Doctor also noted that the final ignition sequence had to be done from the ground. Yana admitted he hadn't seen a way around it, and had intended to stay behind so that the ship would lift off. He mused he was “getting a little too old for Utopia. Time I had some sleep.”
Yana was in the middle of a flurry of the ship's final preparations, with the help of the Doctor and his friends, when the corridor he was taking back to his lab turned into something else entirely.....
II. Master: In Old English mægester "one having control or authority," from the Latin magister "chief, head, director, teacher" a contrastive adj. from magis (adv.) "more," itself a comparative of magnus "great." In academic senses it is attested from late 14th century CE., originally a degree conveying authority to teach in the universities.
What Yana does not realize is that so much of his life is hazy because it never actually happened. He was not born human. He was made human, by a Chameleon Arch, a device that rewrote his natural biology and memories - although even some of his forms preceding becoming human are questionable to call 'natural' as well. The being that strapped himself into the Chameleon Arch called himself the Master, a Time Lord biologically as well as in his training and self-conception.
Some thousand years of subjective experience earlier, a child who would become the Master was born on the planet Gallifrey, in the Citadel, to House Oakdown. The first eight years of his life were largely unremarkable by Gallifreyian standards. Childhood on Gallifrey was mostly study and endless lectures on the duty to House, to all fellow Time Lords, and to the Web of Time. He was very bright, and maybe the elders of House Oakdown tolerated less than perfection even more than some other Houses, but that was not something the child had any reason to question. At the age of eight he was sent to the Academy, as all children that age generally were.
Initiation into the Academy included a tradition of taking the children to the Untempered Schism, a gap in Time and Space, from which one could catch a glimpse of Eternity. Some children were considered inspired by it, a natural step to becoming a full fledged Time Lord capable of guarding the Web of Time. Some children ran away. And some went mad.
(The following couple of paragraphs is slight extrapolation from several parts of canon. i.e. trying make sense of a massive retconning that a writer thought was dramatically cool, and it was, but *maybe* needed an beta for. *cough*) The child who would become the Master was doomed to madness, although it took a long, long while to blossom into full form. When he looked into the Schism he saw not just the vastness of Time and Space, but was also subjected to a signal reaching back in time, specifically for him. This signal came from a terrified and desperate High Council of the Time Lords, in Gallifrey's future, near the end of a war that the Time Lords were losing. The signal was ordered sent by Rassilon, possibly the oldest and most powerful Time Lord who ever lived, and with it came some of the will of Rassilon to win the war, never die, and conquer all. The intention was to use the Master's mind as one of the anchor points with which to move Gallifrey beyond the reach of the war, because there was prophecy that the Master would be one of the few to survive the war. This created a self fulfilling predestination paradox: the child who would become the Master would survive because of his insane drives, which were in part due to the way the future High Council tampered with his mind as a child.
The child and all his contemporaries were, of course, unaware of this paradox. All he knew was he'd looked into the Schism, that it had been terrifying and awesome in the true sense of the word, and he'd come away with the sense he was destined to do great things and also the faint sound of drumming in his mind, although the sound mostly slipped into the background of thought.
At the Academy he took to going by 'Koschei' and made friends with some of the most creative of his peers. His friends weren't always the top of their class in marks, and they all got in trouble a lot, but they were far more interesting than the sort who mindlessly accepted all the 'facts' that their professors taught them. The strangest of Koschei's friends went by Theta Sigma. Theta was a terrible student, but he was still brilliant and compelling like no one else Koschei knew. They both dreamed of leaving the safety of Gallifrey and going out in the universe to do great things.
When they were 90, still really kids by the standards of long lived Time Lords, Theta, ah, borrowed a ship (called the TARDIS) and closed the a time rift at the Medusa Cascade - an astounding feat for someone his age. Theta took the title 'the Doctor', and was known as that henceforth.
(And now we're back entirely on canon.) Koschei took the title the Master. He and the Doctor has a massive falling out, in least in part over philosophical differences. The Doctor wanted to see the universe. The Master thought they were destined to rule it, and started using more and more extreme measures to get power. They both departed Gallifrey and officially became renegades who lived outside normal Time Lord society.
By the time they were several centuries old, their enmity was a well known fact to many people on Gallifrey. When the Doctor's third incarnation (see regeneration under 'powers' below) was exiled to Earth for a time, a fellow Time Lord went to far as to warn the Doctor that the Master was coming to Earth to be a deadly nuisance.
The Doctor and the Master battled wits numerous times while the Doctor was trapped on Earth. The Master's schemes included following several Earth legends to artifacts of power (he loves Summoning Shit with elaborate pageantry) and helping other alien races invade the planet so he could take over once the planet was in shambles. Each plan, however, inevitably revealed his deep ambivalence towards the Doctor. Some of them seemed contrived to gain the Doctor's attention, or to at least trap him. In one breath the Master would pronounce his intention to destroy the Doctor, and in the next lament that he would miss such a fine mind and sometimes rescue him from.....everything else. On more than one occasion when his plans went so badly that his life was in danger, he and the Doctor worked together to arrest the consequences. They tended to easily fall into rhythm, noticeable even to the people around them, complete with moments of awkward surprise when one of them reminded the other that they were enemies. Closest to the Master's real desire was to convince the Doctor to rule beside him, something he offered to the Doctor on more than one occasion. The Doctor, however, was always the sort to run away from long term power, echoing how he had run from the Schism as a child.
The Master eventually (off screen) ran through all 13 incarnations that were considered part of the natural life cycle of a Time Lord. He clung to the painful miserable wreck that was his last body through sheer will, citing that his hate kept him alive. He came up with a plan to extend his life by taking over the Doctor's body and living out the Doctor's remaining regenerations. This plan involved subverting a well pool of psychic energy used by the people of the planet Traken to keep themselves in peace and harmony. The Master's plan succeeded in part. He managed to gain control of the energy and thus threw Traken into chaos. However, the Doctor, with the help of Tremas, a respected Traken scientist and statesman, escaped the Master's plan. The Master's took over Tremas's body instead. That the Doctor had made fast friends with Tremas, falling into that working camaraderie that the Doctor had one had with the Master, may or may not be motivation for the Master's second choice in host.
In this non-native body, the Master's emotional stability continued to spiral down. After he succeeded in pitching the Doctor off of a radio tower, forcing the Doctor to regenerate, much of the semi-friendly feel under their rivarly evaporated. Eventually, the Master was captured by the Daleks, a race bent on exterminating every sentient species aside from their own, a race that was also gathering time travel technology. They killed the Master in a way that should have been final. Essentially, it was, because his stolen body did not have the ability to regenerate.
Full on war across time and space broke out between the Time Lords and the Daleks. The Time Lords had on whole been peaceful for eons, secure in the power on Gallifrey and only stepping in to interfere to protect their control of Time and the keeping the fabric of Time and Space stable. For all their technology and history, the Time Lords were not well prepared for a massive Time War. The High Council chose to resurrect the Master back into a fully Time Lord body, because they thought they could use his ruthlessness and penchant for violence. He did fight on the side of Time Lords for a time. He was present when one of the Time Lords' most powerful weapons, the Cruciform, was captured by the Daleks. At that point he decided the war could not be won, and deserted. He ran away to very close to the heat death of the universe, which he hoped would be beyond the Daleks' ability to follow him.
Then he hid himself using a piece of Time Lord technology called a Chameleon Arch. The Arch rewrote his biology to human, took away his conscious memories and replaced them with ones of a human life. All of his Time Lord memories and part of his consciousness was placed in an object that looks like a pocket watch. When the human Yana 'awoke' he had the pocket watch and believed that he'd had it all his life. While its existence was there in the back of his mind, the pocket watch was equipped with a perception filter to divert his attention from being curious about it. Presumably, the Master hadn't realized how effective that filter would be when he formed this plan. To be fair, perception filters hadn't worked on him before.
Mode of Entrance: Portal
Suitability: On the surface, Yana fits the benevolent, absent minded, and highly eccentric professor stereotype completely. He has a particular love for mathematics, engineering, and physics. He'll feel a lot of wonder and excitement at being part of a world that isn't on the brink of death. He is well versed in experimenting with the limits of technology with the materials that are available.
Beneath that, without touching the entity of the Master per se, he is a strong, forceful personality resistant to despair. He couldn't have convinced so many people to give him resources to build a long range ship, for a sky with no stars, otherwise. He has a strong practical and ruthless streak, as evidenced by his quick decision to leave a man to die rather than risk the guards and guns at the compound gate.
FOR OUs ONLY
ITEMS: His clothing, an Edwardian style outfit with waistcoat and cravat, in black and white. His fake pocketwatch.
ABILITIES/POWERS:
Professor Yana : Yana has very occasional flashes of 'out of character' temper and cynicism. He will also recall facts he is not sure where he read or heard, and have muscle memory for tasks he doesn't consciously recall being familiar with. He may start to relate a story and stop because it doesn't fit into memories. If anyone points this out to him, he will be very confused.
In short, all the memories and learned abilities of the Master are still sort of there but deeply buried and covered over with constructed memories of a human childhood and what Yana has directly experienced in the decades he has existed. More often than not, however, when confronted with something the Master would know but Yana hasn't directly experienced, Yana draws a blank, or will have that 'just on the tip of your tongue' feeling when you can't quite remember. He, and most people all his life, have chalked it up to him being very absent minded.
The Master:
In pocket watch form: The Master's consciousness is trapped within the pocket watch, somewhat aware of what is going on around him, because he is still connected to his body. If someone else were open the pocketwatch, he might be able to telepathically communicate with them (as seen in a story when the Doctor pulled the same trick to hide). Given that he's the Master, he might try to force himself into said person's mind to take them over, and it's uncertain what would happened to them or to Yana. Also uncertain is what would happen if the pocketwatch were simply destroyed.
If Yana were to open the watch, connection between the body and mind is made in full. Yana would regain all of his memories as the Master, and his biology would revert to one of a full fledged Time Lord. In canon, this was a permanent thing, and presumably reverting him to 'just' Yana would require the entire Chameleon Arch apparatus.
If the the Master were to return in full glory, his abilities as a Time Lord from canon:
I. Time
Time Lords have a special relationship with Time, at least in their native dimension. They can sense anomalies in the fabric of Time, such as time loops, and have some measure of immunity from the effects of an anomaly.
II. Psychic Ability
Time Lords also display some degree of psychic ability. The Master, to varying skill in different bodies, has a form of projective telepathy. Once in contact with a mind, it is possible for him to peruse and manipulate memories and to compel the weak willed to do his bidding. However, it is not full blown telepathy per se. Telepathic contact requires at least firm eye contact and usually requires physical contact. (Think Vulcan telepathy. He might feel huge psychic events, very powerful thoughts and emotions aimed at him, or intuit a few things about someone's personality, but generally can't 'hear' individual thoughts without direct contact.)
III. Resilience
Aside from that, Time Lords have excellent reflexes and seemingly more strength than the average human but not, say, superhero strength, just deceptively strong for slight builds and sometimes older looking bodies. They tolerate a wider band of temperatures than humans without feeling uncomfortable, but can definitely freeze or burn. Time Lords can hold their breath for long periods of time, by using their respiratory bypass system, but they can also clearly drown. In fact, drowning and suffocation is a death that they cannot regenerate out of, unless quickly resuscitated, because oxygen is necessary for the new cell growth.
Time Lords are generally resilient. Their two hearts mean that if one stops for a short period of time, they can remain alive until managing to restart it. They can also slow their hearts to feign death or drop into a healing state. They can sustain huge electrical shocks and large amounts of X-ray radiation, although other kinds of radiation will kill them and trigger regeneration. (We have seen radiation poisoning be the cause of regeneration twice in canon.) To a certain extent he can manipulate his physiology, such as gathering and ingesting the ingredients to get his body to make a antidote for poisoning.
IV. Regeneration
Lastly, Time Lords have the ability to regenerate. In most circumstances when they are on the brink of death, they renew every single cell in their body. This changes their entire physical form, and parts of their personality. Some Time Lords can control this ability well, forming the results as they like before the process is complete. For others, it is a fairly random process, influenced by the circumstances of the death. A second mortal wound after regeneration has been triggered, but before the physical form has changed (aka the glowy part), stops regeneration stone cold. The Time Lord dies completely. In canon, just beyond the point Yana is from, the Master regenerated shortly after having his full memories returned, so he clearly retained this ability, although it is uncertain how many more times he would be able to do it.
Suggested Power Reductions:
The main question is whether Yana would ever be able to fully revert to the Master.
If he does, the Master may be disoriented by not being in his home universe and unable to get a feel for Time. Obviously, his psychic ability would effectively be limited even more by me being polite and not godmodding. His general physical abilities wouldn't be noticeably more than a fit or talented human. I'd prefer to keep the get out of jail free card of regeneration, just because it's fun, and since regeneration can be influenced by choice or circumstance, the Master could, potentially, go a very different path from post-Utopia canon. But I'd be fine with any ruling. Note that Yana cannot regenerate. He is an aging human, who will continue to age and can die in ordinary human fashion. Presumably the Master would be trapped in the pocket watch forever or, without the anchor of his body, lose his hold on the cohesiveness of his mind. Maybe. In the extended universe beyond TV episodes, he's made several body hops.
Most of a Time Lord's power is his intellect, and considerable life experience, and lastly, the technology that 1920s Earth does not have.
WRITING SAMPLES
First Person:
[Phone Call//All]
Ah. So, this is a communications device. Good. Good. …..what do you call it here?
[Yana clears his throat.]
It has a been a very strange day. Maybe everything since I woke up today hasn't been real. This creaky old head of mine finally lost touch with it all, hmmm? On the chance that's not the case, would someone be so kind as to tell me where I am?
Third Person:
Yana has been rushing back to lab, more tools in hand, and then he stopped to close his eyes during a wave of dizziness and something else he felt, something almost familiar. When he opened his eyes, he got a rush of vertigo again, and his head hurt, and it was bright. Bright everywhere. And so much open space.
He staggered up some stairs, and leaned against the banister, trying to get his bearings. Absently, he noted he must have dropped his tools. Foolish! He couldn't lose or break them; he didn't have anything to spare. He looked around on the ground past the steps he'd just come up. His tools weren't there, but there was grass. Healthy, green grass. He hadn't seen than in a many a year.
He glanced up towards the bright light. This. This was a not a vivarium under a dome. He'd heard of such things. That was blue up there, and the light. That had to be from a star. A sun, he corrected himself. From the vantage point of a planet warmed by a star, it would be called a sun.
He'd seen pictures from records, of course. Even in his wildest fantasies of what might be found at Utopia, he had not really thought he'd ever see such a thing. That strange Doctor fellow had said he might have a way out for them even after the rocket took off, but....
Yana didn't think was it.
A door opened behind him, so he turned to look. A person. A human looking person, even. That was something of a relief. At the very least, he wasn't completely alone.
“I'm sorry,” he stammered. “I'm very sorry to bother you. I think I'm very lost. What is this place?”
Additional Notes:
Somehow I managed to not cram in that Professor Yana also hears the sound of drums that has run through the Master's mind most of his life. dun-dun-dun-DUN. Roughly the rhythm of a Time Lord's double heart beat. Or a marching rhythm. (Look, the metaphor is not subtle, ok?) Fanon is often that the closer the Master got in his life to the Time War that the worse the influence of the signal/drums/influence of Rassilon became. The Master certainly got more and more mentally and emotionally unstable throughout canon.
Yana appears to simply get bad headaches, and general worry that there's something wrong with his mind. Either being human or the majority of the Master's consciousness being stored elsewhere seems to shield him. I like to think being not even in the same dimension as the origin of the problem might shield slightly more. That could also be interesting if the Master comes out to play. It would possibly make him even more dangerous, but in a fun way, in the long term. A return to his earlier appearances as a colder, more calculating man, one less erratic and less influenced by his emotional impulses. Also, frankly, more controllable in a game setting.
Name: Lis
Personal Journal: skipthedemon
Age: 29
Contact:
Email: skipthedemon @ gmail.com
AIM: Lisb1121
Plurk: skipthedemon
Other Characters Played: None
Link to last AC: N/A
CHARACTER
Name: Professor Yana (aka the Master....and the Master's endless aliases) The application is dual in nature, to explain both Yana and the Master, and how Yana is connected to the Master.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Age:
Apparent Age: 60s
Actual Age: Indeterminate. His real memories as a human go back decades, but his youth is very hazy.
The Master's age is also indeterminate. Using his parallels with the Doctor as a reference point, roughly 1000.
OU or AU?: OU
Timeline: Mid point of “Utopia” just after the Doctor has helped Yana finish his rocket system.
Wiki link: Professor Yana at Doctor Who wiki and the Master at Wikipedia
The Master's canon has the problem inherent in long running franchises. It is vast, in many media forms, and sometimes contradictory. That's ok - that time can be rewritten is also part of canon. I am generally drawing just from the TV episodes that have been produced by the BBC. I may borrow here and there from extended universe sources, in a very mix and match way, for flavor. My goal is a coherent character, not completism.
HISTORY & PERSONALITY:
''A man is the sum of his memories, you know, and a Time Lord even more so.” - The Doctor
I. Professor: late 14th century CE., from the Latin, “person who professes to be an expert in some art or science, teacher of highest rank," agent noun from 'profitieri' "lay claim to, declare openly". As a title prefixed to a name, it dates from 1706.
Yana : (Note: The following section is entirely canon take from the episode “Utopia.”)
Yana's earliest memory is being found as a child on the planet known as the Silver Devestation. He has no idea who is parents are, and he is unfortunate (or fortunate depending on how one looks at it) to live near the end of his universe's capability of substantiating life. Trillions of years after the Big Bang, entropy has taken its toll. Every main sequence star humanity can see has burned out. Only technology and ingenuity has kept anyone alive. But there is one possible shining beacon of hope; for many years, a powerful signal has been sending out 'Come to Utopia'. Some people have been following that signal, on the chance a new way to survive has been found.
Yana is one of those people who believes that this so called Utopia worth a look, and that living in hope is better than not. He's spent most of his life bouncing from refugee ship to ship, trying to get closer to that signal. For as long as he can remember, he's had a knack for mechanics and engineering. In a time when every resource must be conserved and put to use, his skill has been infinitely valuable, and (probably) paid his passage as he traveled.
About 17 years ago, he ended up on Malcassario, once the home of an insectoid species called the Malmooth. Malcassario has a still functioning atmospheric shell, keeping air and warmth trapped around the planet. A fairly large group of human refugees had gathered there. Outside of the encampment roam the Future Kind; a somewhat human looking species that hunts in packs and find humans good eating. They are called the Future Kind because humanity fears they were once human, but have lost touch with most rationality, or that humans with become like them. Also resident on the planet is at least one remaining Malmooth, Chantho.
Yana gave himself the title “Professor” to take on the air of authority, and convinced the human community to help collect resources to build a large long range ship to carry them to Utopia. Rumor spread out that someone had found a way to get to Utopia, and more people came. Chantho worked beside him for years, and came to adore him, but Yana took no outward notice. Their project nearly stalled completely near the very end. The engine system that Yana had creatively put together worked on paper, but he had difficulty getting the built engines to harmonize in way that would allow the ship to reach escape velocity. He hid these difficulties from the rest of the community, not wanting to dash their hopes. He thought he might yet resolve the problem before people despaired or revolted just from waiting.
His hopes when answered when a strange man calling himself the Doctor, and his two friends, Martha Jones and Jack Harkness, arrived at the compound. Yana took the title 'doctor' to mean the Doctor was a man of science, and literally ran to meet the man, grabbed his hand , and ran him back to the rocket controls to have a look. The Doctor was more than happy to help, but instantly admitted he'd never seen a system like the one Yana had built. The Doctor also claimed to have never heard of Utopia, and not to be human at all, but a Time Lord, although he did not elaborate on what meant. After a little study of the system, the Doctor intuited that one subsystem wasn't working, and literally fixed it in seconds of seeing the problem.
Yana was more than a little astonished, but mollified at the Doctor's praise that he had done brilliantly with “food and string and staples” to work with, and remarked that in another era Yana's genius would have been revered, and he certainly had the Doctor's admiration for it. The Doctor also noted that the final ignition sequence had to be done from the ground. Yana admitted he hadn't seen a way around it, and had intended to stay behind so that the ship would lift off. He mused he was “getting a little too old for Utopia. Time I had some sleep.”
Yana was in the middle of a flurry of the ship's final preparations, with the help of the Doctor and his friends, when the corridor he was taking back to his lab turned into something else entirely.....
II. Master: In Old English mægester "one having control or authority," from the Latin magister "chief, head, director, teacher" a contrastive adj. from magis (adv.) "more," itself a comparative of magnus "great." In academic senses it is attested from late 14th century CE., originally a degree conveying authority to teach in the universities.
What Yana does not realize is that so much of his life is hazy because it never actually happened. He was not born human. He was made human, by a Chameleon Arch, a device that rewrote his natural biology and memories - although even some of his forms preceding becoming human are questionable to call 'natural' as well. The being that strapped himself into the Chameleon Arch called himself the Master, a Time Lord biologically as well as in his training and self-conception.
Some thousand years of subjective experience earlier, a child who would become the Master was born on the planet Gallifrey, in the Citadel, to House Oakdown. The first eight years of his life were largely unremarkable by Gallifreyian standards. Childhood on Gallifrey was mostly study and endless lectures on the duty to House, to all fellow Time Lords, and to the Web of Time. He was very bright, and maybe the elders of House Oakdown tolerated less than perfection even more than some other Houses, but that was not something the child had any reason to question. At the age of eight he was sent to the Academy, as all children that age generally were.
Initiation into the Academy included a tradition of taking the children to the Untempered Schism, a gap in Time and Space, from which one could catch a glimpse of Eternity. Some children were considered inspired by it, a natural step to becoming a full fledged Time Lord capable of guarding the Web of Time. Some children ran away. And some went mad.
(The following couple of paragraphs is slight extrapolation from several parts of canon. i.e. trying make sense of a massive retconning that a writer thought was dramatically cool, and it was, but *maybe* needed an beta for. *cough*) The child who would become the Master was doomed to madness, although it took a long, long while to blossom into full form. When he looked into the Schism he saw not just the vastness of Time and Space, but was also subjected to a signal reaching back in time, specifically for him. This signal came from a terrified and desperate High Council of the Time Lords, in Gallifrey's future, near the end of a war that the Time Lords were losing. The signal was ordered sent by Rassilon, possibly the oldest and most powerful Time Lord who ever lived, and with it came some of the will of Rassilon to win the war, never die, and conquer all. The intention was to use the Master's mind as one of the anchor points with which to move Gallifrey beyond the reach of the war, because there was prophecy that the Master would be one of the few to survive the war. This created a self fulfilling predestination paradox: the child who would become the Master would survive because of his insane drives, which were in part due to the way the future High Council tampered with his mind as a child.
The child and all his contemporaries were, of course, unaware of this paradox. All he knew was he'd looked into the Schism, that it had been terrifying and awesome in the true sense of the word, and he'd come away with the sense he was destined to do great things and also the faint sound of drumming in his mind, although the sound mostly slipped into the background of thought.
At the Academy he took to going by 'Koschei' and made friends with some of the most creative of his peers. His friends weren't always the top of their class in marks, and they all got in trouble a lot, but they were far more interesting than the sort who mindlessly accepted all the 'facts' that their professors taught them. The strangest of Koschei's friends went by Theta Sigma. Theta was a terrible student, but he was still brilliant and compelling like no one else Koschei knew. They both dreamed of leaving the safety of Gallifrey and going out in the universe to do great things.
When they were 90, still really kids by the standards of long lived Time Lords, Theta, ah, borrowed a ship (called the TARDIS) and closed the a time rift at the Medusa Cascade - an astounding feat for someone his age. Theta took the title 'the Doctor', and was known as that henceforth.
(And now we're back entirely on canon.) Koschei took the title the Master. He and the Doctor has a massive falling out, in least in part over philosophical differences. The Doctor wanted to see the universe. The Master thought they were destined to rule it, and started using more and more extreme measures to get power. They both departed Gallifrey and officially became renegades who lived outside normal Time Lord society.
By the time they were several centuries old, their enmity was a well known fact to many people on Gallifrey. When the Doctor's third incarnation (see regeneration under 'powers' below) was exiled to Earth for a time, a fellow Time Lord went to far as to warn the Doctor that the Master was coming to Earth to be a deadly nuisance.
The Doctor and the Master battled wits numerous times while the Doctor was trapped on Earth. The Master's schemes included following several Earth legends to artifacts of power (he loves Summoning Shit with elaborate pageantry) and helping other alien races invade the planet so he could take over once the planet was in shambles. Each plan, however, inevitably revealed his deep ambivalence towards the Doctor. Some of them seemed contrived to gain the Doctor's attention, or to at least trap him. In one breath the Master would pronounce his intention to destroy the Doctor, and in the next lament that he would miss such a fine mind and sometimes rescue him from.....everything else. On more than one occasion when his plans went so badly that his life was in danger, he and the Doctor worked together to arrest the consequences. They tended to easily fall into rhythm, noticeable even to the people around them, complete with moments of awkward surprise when one of them reminded the other that they were enemies. Closest to the Master's real desire was to convince the Doctor to rule beside him, something he offered to the Doctor on more than one occasion. The Doctor, however, was always the sort to run away from long term power, echoing how he had run from the Schism as a child.
The Master eventually (off screen) ran through all 13 incarnations that were considered part of the natural life cycle of a Time Lord. He clung to the painful miserable wreck that was his last body through sheer will, citing that his hate kept him alive. He came up with a plan to extend his life by taking over the Doctor's body and living out the Doctor's remaining regenerations. This plan involved subverting a well pool of psychic energy used by the people of the planet Traken to keep themselves in peace and harmony. The Master's plan succeeded in part. He managed to gain control of the energy and thus threw Traken into chaos. However, the Doctor, with the help of Tremas, a respected Traken scientist and statesman, escaped the Master's plan. The Master's took over Tremas's body instead. That the Doctor had made fast friends with Tremas, falling into that working camaraderie that the Doctor had one had with the Master, may or may not be motivation for the Master's second choice in host.
In this non-native body, the Master's emotional stability continued to spiral down. After he succeeded in pitching the Doctor off of a radio tower, forcing the Doctor to regenerate, much of the semi-friendly feel under their rivarly evaporated. Eventually, the Master was captured by the Daleks, a race bent on exterminating every sentient species aside from their own, a race that was also gathering time travel technology. They killed the Master in a way that should have been final. Essentially, it was, because his stolen body did not have the ability to regenerate.
Full on war across time and space broke out between the Time Lords and the Daleks. The Time Lords had on whole been peaceful for eons, secure in the power on Gallifrey and only stepping in to interfere to protect their control of Time and the keeping the fabric of Time and Space stable. For all their technology and history, the Time Lords were not well prepared for a massive Time War. The High Council chose to resurrect the Master back into a fully Time Lord body, because they thought they could use his ruthlessness and penchant for violence. He did fight on the side of Time Lords for a time. He was present when one of the Time Lords' most powerful weapons, the Cruciform, was captured by the Daleks. At that point he decided the war could not be won, and deserted. He ran away to very close to the heat death of the universe, which he hoped would be beyond the Daleks' ability to follow him.
Then he hid himself using a piece of Time Lord technology called a Chameleon Arch. The Arch rewrote his biology to human, took away his conscious memories and replaced them with ones of a human life. All of his Time Lord memories and part of his consciousness was placed in an object that looks like a pocket watch. When the human Yana 'awoke' he had the pocket watch and believed that he'd had it all his life. While its existence was there in the back of his mind, the pocket watch was equipped with a perception filter to divert his attention from being curious about it. Presumably, the Master hadn't realized how effective that filter would be when he formed this plan. To be fair, perception filters hadn't worked on him before.
Mode of Entrance: Portal
Suitability: On the surface, Yana fits the benevolent, absent minded, and highly eccentric professor stereotype completely. He has a particular love for mathematics, engineering, and physics. He'll feel a lot of wonder and excitement at being part of a world that isn't on the brink of death. He is well versed in experimenting with the limits of technology with the materials that are available.
Beneath that, without touching the entity of the Master per se, he is a strong, forceful personality resistant to despair. He couldn't have convinced so many people to give him resources to build a long range ship, for a sky with no stars, otherwise. He has a strong practical and ruthless streak, as evidenced by his quick decision to leave a man to die rather than risk the guards and guns at the compound gate.
FOR OUs ONLY
ITEMS: His clothing, an Edwardian style outfit with waistcoat and cravat, in black and white. His fake pocketwatch.
ABILITIES/POWERS:
Professor Yana : Yana has very occasional flashes of 'out of character' temper and cynicism. He will also recall facts he is not sure where he read or heard, and have muscle memory for tasks he doesn't consciously recall being familiar with. He may start to relate a story and stop because it doesn't fit into memories. If anyone points this out to him, he will be very confused.
In short, all the memories and learned abilities of the Master are still sort of there but deeply buried and covered over with constructed memories of a human childhood and what Yana has directly experienced in the decades he has existed. More often than not, however, when confronted with something the Master would know but Yana hasn't directly experienced, Yana draws a blank, or will have that 'just on the tip of your tongue' feeling when you can't quite remember. He, and most people all his life, have chalked it up to him being very absent minded.
The Master:
In pocket watch form: The Master's consciousness is trapped within the pocket watch, somewhat aware of what is going on around him, because he is still connected to his body. If someone else were open the pocketwatch, he might be able to telepathically communicate with them (as seen in a story when the Doctor pulled the same trick to hide). Given that he's the Master, he might try to force himself into said person's mind to take them over, and it's uncertain what would happened to them or to Yana. Also uncertain is what would happen if the pocketwatch were simply destroyed.
If Yana were to open the watch, connection between the body and mind is made in full. Yana would regain all of his memories as the Master, and his biology would revert to one of a full fledged Time Lord. In canon, this was a permanent thing, and presumably reverting him to 'just' Yana would require the entire Chameleon Arch apparatus.
If the the Master were to return in full glory, his abilities as a Time Lord from canon:
I. Time
Time Lords have a special relationship with Time, at least in their native dimension. They can sense anomalies in the fabric of Time, such as time loops, and have some measure of immunity from the effects of an anomaly.
II. Psychic Ability
Time Lords also display some degree of psychic ability. The Master, to varying skill in different bodies, has a form of projective telepathy. Once in contact with a mind, it is possible for him to peruse and manipulate memories and to compel the weak willed to do his bidding. However, it is not full blown telepathy per se. Telepathic contact requires at least firm eye contact and usually requires physical contact. (Think Vulcan telepathy. He might feel huge psychic events, very powerful thoughts and emotions aimed at him, or intuit a few things about someone's personality, but generally can't 'hear' individual thoughts without direct contact.)
III. Resilience
Aside from that, Time Lords have excellent reflexes and seemingly more strength than the average human but not, say, superhero strength, just deceptively strong for slight builds and sometimes older looking bodies. They tolerate a wider band of temperatures than humans without feeling uncomfortable, but can definitely freeze or burn. Time Lords can hold their breath for long periods of time, by using their respiratory bypass system, but they can also clearly drown. In fact, drowning and suffocation is a death that they cannot regenerate out of, unless quickly resuscitated, because oxygen is necessary for the new cell growth.
Time Lords are generally resilient. Their two hearts mean that if one stops for a short period of time, they can remain alive until managing to restart it. They can also slow their hearts to feign death or drop into a healing state. They can sustain huge electrical shocks and large amounts of X-ray radiation, although other kinds of radiation will kill them and trigger regeneration. (We have seen radiation poisoning be the cause of regeneration twice in canon.) To a certain extent he can manipulate his physiology, such as gathering and ingesting the ingredients to get his body to make a antidote for poisoning.
IV. Regeneration
Lastly, Time Lords have the ability to regenerate. In most circumstances when they are on the brink of death, they renew every single cell in their body. This changes their entire physical form, and parts of their personality. Some Time Lords can control this ability well, forming the results as they like before the process is complete. For others, it is a fairly random process, influenced by the circumstances of the death. A second mortal wound after regeneration has been triggered, but before the physical form has changed (aka the glowy part), stops regeneration stone cold. The Time Lord dies completely. In canon, just beyond the point Yana is from, the Master regenerated shortly after having his full memories returned, so he clearly retained this ability, although it is uncertain how many more times he would be able to do it.
Suggested Power Reductions:
The main question is whether Yana would ever be able to fully revert to the Master.
If he does, the Master may be disoriented by not being in his home universe and unable to get a feel for Time. Obviously, his psychic ability would effectively be limited even more by me being polite and not godmodding. His general physical abilities wouldn't be noticeably more than a fit or talented human. I'd prefer to keep the get out of jail free card of regeneration, just because it's fun, and since regeneration can be influenced by choice or circumstance, the Master could, potentially, go a very different path from post-Utopia canon. But I'd be fine with any ruling. Note that Yana cannot regenerate. He is an aging human, who will continue to age and can die in ordinary human fashion. Presumably the Master would be trapped in the pocket watch forever or, without the anchor of his body, lose his hold on the cohesiveness of his mind. Maybe. In the extended universe beyond TV episodes, he's made several body hops.
Most of a Time Lord's power is his intellect, and considerable life experience, and lastly, the technology that 1920s Earth does not have.
WRITING SAMPLES
First Person:
[Phone Call//All]
Ah. So, this is a communications device. Good. Good. …..what do you call it here?
[Yana clears his throat.]
It has a been a very strange day. Maybe everything since I woke up today hasn't been real. This creaky old head of mine finally lost touch with it all, hmmm? On the chance that's not the case, would someone be so kind as to tell me where I am?
Third Person:
Yana has been rushing back to lab, more tools in hand, and then he stopped to close his eyes during a wave of dizziness and something else he felt, something almost familiar. When he opened his eyes, he got a rush of vertigo again, and his head hurt, and it was bright. Bright everywhere. And so much open space.
He staggered up some stairs, and leaned against the banister, trying to get his bearings. Absently, he noted he must have dropped his tools. Foolish! He couldn't lose or break them; he didn't have anything to spare. He looked around on the ground past the steps he'd just come up. His tools weren't there, but there was grass. Healthy, green grass. He hadn't seen than in a many a year.
He glanced up towards the bright light. This. This was a not a vivarium under a dome. He'd heard of such things. That was blue up there, and the light. That had to be from a star. A sun, he corrected himself. From the vantage point of a planet warmed by a star, it would be called a sun.
He'd seen pictures from records, of course. Even in his wildest fantasies of what might be found at Utopia, he had not really thought he'd ever see such a thing. That strange Doctor fellow had said he might have a way out for them even after the rocket took off, but....
Yana didn't think was it.
A door opened behind him, so he turned to look. A person. A human looking person, even. That was something of a relief. At the very least, he wasn't completely alone.
“I'm sorry,” he stammered. “I'm very sorry to bother you. I think I'm very lost. What is this place?”
Additional Notes:
Somehow I managed to not cram in that Professor Yana also hears the sound of drums that has run through the Master's mind most of his life. dun-dun-dun-DUN. Roughly the rhythm of a Time Lord's double heart beat. Or a marching rhythm. (Look, the metaphor is not subtle, ok?) Fanon is often that the closer the Master got in his life to the Time War that the worse the influence of the signal/drums/influence of Rassilon became. The Master certainly got more and more mentally and emotionally unstable throughout canon.
Yana appears to simply get bad headaches, and general worry that there's something wrong with his mind. Either being human or the majority of the Master's consciousness being stored elsewhere seems to shield him. I like to think being not even in the same dimension as the origin of the problem might shield slightly more. That could also be interesting if the Master comes out to play. It would possibly make him even more dangerous, but in a fun way, in the long term. A return to his earlier appearances as a colder, more calculating man, one less erratic and less influenced by his emotional impulses. Also, frankly, more controllable in a game setting.