The Time Vortex, scientifically speaking, is a dimensional plane where time and space intersect at an angle determined by non-Euclidean geometry. For those who aren’t scientists studying time and space, it’s a means of going into either the past or the future of any point in space and time. The Time Lords, an ancient race that had long vanished in a war for the sake of creation, had long mastered travel through the Vortex and created mighty machines, all under the banner of Time and Relative Dimension in Space, TARDIS! Sadly, there’s only one TARDIS freely travelling the Vortex, and it looks like a London Police Box from the 1960’s. …Inside, however, was another marvel of the Time Lords, the ability to engineer dimensions! Inside the Police Box was a room the size of a large apartment and as tall as a small ballroom! It was pale blue with the walls decorated with roundels inside hexagonal designs. It had two levels, with the lower level dedicated to maintenance of the central hexagonal console with a cylinder in the center moving up and down. Right now, the owner of this particular TARDIS, a woman with long, wavy brown hair, was conducting maintenance. “Come on baby, you drive me crazy!” she sang. “Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!” Interesting choice of words as the console’s lower level sparked in her face and filled her vision with smoke. The woman used her hat to wave it away as she coughed her lungs out. Once she recovered, she glared at the console on the upper level. “What is the matter with you?!” she snapped at her TARDIS. “I checked the flux comparative adjustor, redid the wiring for the vortex loop, I even turned you off and on again, yet the vector tracker dial is STILL loose! Do I need to have Amy hammer the console?!”
“What’s this about my hammer and the console, Doctor?” asked a voice. The woman, the Time Lord known as the Doctor, turned to see her companions standing in the doorway leading to a hall. One was a tall African American man in a turtleneck and jeans known as Dr. William Davies, the other, the one who spoke, was a 3-foot-tall anthropomorphic pink hedgehog woman in a black dress named Amy Rose.
“Oh, the vector tracker dial’s been loose for the past week,” replied the Doctor. “That’s why we keep encountering bumps in the time track.”
“And you think her hammer can fix it?” asked William.
“I’ve tried every other bloody thing,” remarked the Doctor as she returned to the upper level and practically stared a hole at a panel with blue controls, one of them being a dial of some sort. “I swear, if I don’t find the fault,” she snarled as she grabbed the dial, “I’ll-!” The dial popped off too easily, causing the Doctor to stumble. When she recovered, she blinked. “…That’s not supposed to happen,” she said. She looked at the backside of the dial and saw that the thing that was supposed to hold it to the control it was supposed to operate was nothing more than a lump of plastic. “…Ah,” she said. She heard William and Amy laughing hard. William was holding the railing to steady himself while Amy simply surrendered to collapsing on the floor in an undignified heap of giggles. “Stop laughing! It’s not funny!” protested the Doctor.
“It’s funny where I’m standing!” laughed William.
“Oh man! Tails went through the exact same scenario with his microwave!” cackled Amy.
“The Doctor, ladies and gentlemen!” William wheezed out through his laughing. “The best technical expert in all of time and space! Bamboozled by wear and tear!”
“Oh, shut up, you!” hissed the Doctor as she opened a drawer under the console panel. She pulled out a new dial and set it into the circular slot, then tested it. “There we go.” She glared at the Time Rotor, as she usually does when talking to the TARDIS. “You couldn’t just say that, huh dear? Couldn’t print that out in the fault locator, hm?” The TARDIS beeped as if laughing. “Yes, very funny, dear,” grumbled the Doctor. Her annoyance was cut short as a button on a panel of red controls flashed and beeped.
“What’s wrong now?” asked Amy when she picked herself up.
“That’s not a TARDIS fault,” replied the Doctor. “That’s the external perimeter alarm, giving us plenty of warning. Amazing, though. We’re in the Vortex.” The Doctor fired up the scanner and blinked in amazement at the object onscreen. It was a ship that looked like a bow with an arrow loaded and pulled back, ready to fire. “…A bowship,” said the Doctor. “But that’s impossible.”
“Doctor?” asked William.
“Bowships were used by the early Gallifreyans to defeat the Great Vampires in the Dark Times,” explained the Doctor. “They’re not time-travel capable, though.”
“So what’s an ancient Gallifreyan ship doing here?” asked Amy.
“…I have a theory,” remarked the Doctor. “Hang on a second.” She fiddled with the controls, then a microphone popped up. “Unidentified craft, this is the Doctor,” she said. “I must ask how you got that ship into the Time Vortex as such a craft is NOT capable of going through it.”
“Doctor!” hissed a harsh woman’s voice. An austere woman in Victorian clothing appeared on the screen. “Am I to forever be plagued by you?!” hissed the woman. “After you lost MY planet?! MY people?! …Still, you’re lucky I need you alive!”
“…Rassilon’s beard!” breathed the Doctor.
“Not this time, Doctor!” replied the woman.
“Doctor, who is that woman?” asked William.
“Still travelling with the insects, Doctor?” asked the woman. “No wonder you were exiled to Earth as their 1970’s began!”
“…Do you need any assistance, Lady President?” asked the Doctor.
“…Much as I hate to admit it, Usurper, yes,” sighed the woman. “And drop the mockery of a title! I was the President Eternal until you stole Gallifrey from me by exiling me!”
“Doctor, what does-?” quizzed Amy.
“William, Amy, get out of sight,” directed the Doctor. “She’s not someone that should be in the same room as you.”
“…Doctor, you’ve never told us to hide, not even from the Daleks,” reminded Amy.
“Don’t argue with me, just-!”
“Doctor, we’re staying put and getting answers,” insisted William.
“…Bring your bowship alongside,” the Doctor said to the woman. “And don’t touch anything when you come aboard.”
“I’ll see you shortly, Doctor,” replied the woman. She ended the call and the Doctor fiddled with the controls.
Outside in the Time Vortex, the TARDIS and bowship lined their doors up so they were facing one another. Some form of energy bridge then extended from the TARDIS and latched onto the bowship’s airlock. The woman stepped onto the energy bridge with all the arrogance of a high-class lady.
The Doctor held the door open for the woman. The instant she crossed the TARDIS’ threshold, the woman pressed a button on an alien key fob and the bowship vanished. “It’s out of the Time Vortex, Doctor,” explained the woman.
“Why would you need my help?” asked the Doctor. “You designed the bowship, according to accepted history. You invented time travel for us. …And you managed to make my abilities clinical with Tecteun’s help.”
“…How do you know about Tecteun?” asked the woman.
“Let’s just say that the Master unlocked what you hid away, you, Omega, and Tecteun. Was she the Other?”
“…Then you know your origins, Timeless Child,” hissed the woman.
“Not fully, but enough, Rassilon.”
“So that’s her name?” asked Amy. “Rassilon?”
“Yes,” replied the Doctor. “And she’s tied to the origins of that Timeless Child Miss Tarae and I mentioned when we first met.”
“Is that what the Master calls themself these days?” asked Rassilon.
“During Gallifrey’s early history,” continued the Doctor, “long after the original Shobogans overthrew the Pythians, a Shobogan woman named Tecteun discovered a child that had the ability to completely rewrite their body’s cellular structure and genetic code to stave off death. Tecteun experimented and shared the secrets of regeneration with Rassilon and Omega. Thanks to that, Rassilon and Omega could build a power source by collapsing a star and imprisoning the resulting singularity in a crystal called the Eye of Harmony. That energy also gave them the means to create vessels that could travel in time. Through those discoveries, Rassilon, Omega, and Tecteun (with history calling her the Other) founded the society of Time Lords on Gallifrey. Those three and the Timeless Child had infinite regenerations, but the rest of the Time Lords were limited to twelve, giving them a total of thirteen incarnations. They then rewrote the Timeless Child after she…got too big for those ridiculous robes and put her somewhere else on Gallifrey. …However, the Child would go on to enter the Academy of Gallifrey and become a Time Lord himself. After being disgusted with the stagnation of Gallifrey, he and his granddaughter stole a time machine, with such vehicles now called a TARDIS, with a knackered navigation system and broken chameleon circuit, landing in a scrap yard at 76 Totter’s Lane, Shoreditch, London, 1963, and taking the shape of a police box.”
“…You don’t mean-?!” gasped William.
“You’re…that same Timeless Child from Early Gallifrey?!” finished Amy.
“Quite the…lore dump, I believe humans of the 2020’s would say,” chuckled Rassilon. “I’d like to explain why I kept the Doctor’s origins a secret from even herself, but I’m rather pressed for time. Doctor, the Black Guardian has ensnared me in their trap and I need your help in gathering the six segments of the Key to Time.”