On Gallifrey in the House of Lungbarrow one of the Cousins decided to be an explorer. The Cousin ended up traveling to Earth 1883. He married a woman named Penelope Gate. He decided to change his name to Ulysses after an Earth adventurer. During their travels had a son and named him Irving Braxiatel. They returned to Gallifrey to raise him. When they got back they found out that womb babies were illegal, so they lived in a house in the mountains. When Braxiatel turned eight they entered him into the Time Academy as a non Gallifreyan and adopted son not to attract attention to him being a womb baby. Several years later Ulysses brought Penelope to meet his family at Lungbarrow. Penelope not knowing what the machine was touched it. The machine was the genetic loom. After touching it she became pregnant. After the baby was born Ulysses and Penelope decided it was safest for the baby to be put in the loom. One of his Cousins died and if everyone thought the child was loom born no one would think twice.

 

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It was loom day every came to watch. Mean while one of the Cousins, Innocet, was looking out one of the windows in the House. She saw the old crumbling well in the orchard and a stranger was leaning over the well. It was a woman trailing her long hair into the water. The sunlight was dappling all green and brown over her robes, so that you couldn't really tell if she was there at all. Innocet ran down to the orchard to find her, but when she reached the well, there was no one there. Only fruit bobbing on the water and a scent of roses. Innocet imagined it was an omen for the good of the House. Unaware it was an Eternal. It was the same Eternal who gave the Other his robe millions of years earlier. She came to celebrate the return of the Other.

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The Kithriarch of the House was Quences and the Housekeeper was Satthralope. Each House consisted of a quota 45 Cousins. Most of the Cousins called him "Wormhole," but Innocet called him "Snail," because of what she considered a slight physical defect, a small convex protuberance on his abdomen shaped like the curling shell of a snail. It was only his navel or belly button, left over from his umbilical. But, she didn’t know this, because no one on Gallifrey has one. Do to the fact that everyone was loomed and not born. After he was loomed his parents took aside and told him the truth, he was born then loomed.

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Life at House of Lungbarrow was busy.  A single flute was playing somewhere. His cousins, born from the family Loom. Yet even they laughed occasionally, lured from the dust-webbed halls of the brooding House on lush berrying trips in the summer woodlands. And no dinner for those that old Housekeeper Satthralope found out, the arch tyrant with her clay pipe, and twenty-way mirrors. Then there were the Drudges, the House servants, wood people, connected to the House along with the furniture. It was lonely no one paid attention to him.

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The fruity scent of karmine pudding, the clink of cutlery, the rattle of adults in conversation. The young eyes rounding a corner, looking up at a dining-room table taller than he was. The boy was in the Great Hall of the family House.

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His father is there, at the table, with his friends. One of them is Mr. Saldaamir, an alien with blue skin, the last survivor of the Time Wars in the ancient past. They’re talking about grown-up things – they’re always talking about wars, and great projects, and big things that have to be taken care of. He’ll be leaving again soon.

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The boy just got back from up on the mountain, and caught a cobblemouse, its wings just begun to sprout. The boy has to show it off to them, right this instant. The young boy has no concept of time, just of right now.

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The grown-ups ignoring him being too busy about important matters.

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They’re not listening to me. They’re being. So I let the cobblemouse go!

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It runs right down the table – this live animal suddenly charging right through the middle of all their plans and points and resolutions. Mr. Saldaamir looks like he’s about to spontaneously combust!

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It was the blackest day of his life. Behind the house sat under a tree was an old man a hermit, a monk. He sat under this tree half his life time learnt the secret to life. The new loomed Cousin went to ask him to help him. The boy saw world around him as bleak and cold, few bare rocks with weeds sprouted from them, pathetic patches of sludgy snow and , and just gray, gray, gray. The path to the summit was icy. The tree was twisted and ancient. The old man was brittle as a dead leaf in the autumn.

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The old man said nothing, not one word. He just sat their silently and expressionless as the young boy poured out his troubles to him. He was too unhappy just for tears. When he had finished the monk lifted a skeleton little hand and pointed at a one of troughs little weeds a flower that resembled a Daisy.

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The boy stared at for awhile and suddenly he saw it through the old man’s eyes. The flower was glowing with life. Like a simply cut jewel and the colors deep beyond imagination. He laughed at the fact that this flower was the secret of life.

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Later he got up and ran down the mountain. He found the rocks weren’t gray at all, but that they were red, brown, purple, and gold. Thoughs little pathetic patches of snow were actually shining white in the sun light. The suns baking wash of Elysian sunshine that warmed him through to the bones. There was a gentle, slow, dreaming sound. This was now the best day of his life.

 

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The boy loved to go outside. He met a new friend Koschei, later known as the Master. They would run around on estates of Koschei’s father's (Kithriarch sometimes called father) land pastures of red grass, stretching far across the slopes of Mount Perdition. They would run across the fields all days, calling up at the sky. The fields were tall, still grass on mountain before haytime; a golden-winged beatitude flew hovered lazily from one nodding pool of nectar to the next. The scent of hot dried Gallifreyan earth under their feet. On warm Gallifreyan nights the boy would lay by his father on the grass. There was some times a meter storms dancing with lights purple, green, and brilliant yellow. He found one Cousin that he became close to, Innocet.

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His mother would read nursery stories to him both Gallifreyan and Earthling human. His mother had long red hair that hung wild to her waist and she had a cut-glass voice she world wear strange Earthling clothes an ankle-length skirt and prim white blouse. Once she at the side of his bed sat and read from a Gallifreyan storybook about a tale about an adventurous youth who had gone back into his own past, to before his mummy and daddy were born.

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He knew, as everyone knew, that this was strictly forbidden. Travelling into the past was allowed, but not into your own past. That part of your story had already been written, and there was no room for any new characters or incidents. But the adventurous youth didn’t listen to his elders and his betters, and without any obvious motivation he used an ordinary knife to murder his own grandfather. The consequences were obvious, even to a small child: if his father had never been born, the adventurous youth would never be born. . . so couldn’t go back and murder his grandfather. If his grandfather wasn’t murdered, he was free to have a son. . . and the adventurous youth would be born, and would commit the murder. It went around and around.​

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Although this was the first time the boy had heard it, this was a very old legend. A fairy tale that had been written to frighten young Gallifreyans, to warn them of the dangers that their great powers could bring them.

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“So what happened to the adventurous youth?”

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“Well, no one knew, not even the wise men of the High Council, not even the finest minds stored in the Matrix, not even great Rassilon himself. But there were stories that out there, wherever that was, there existed a shadowy half-man, simultaneously alive and dead, murderer and victim. No one knew what he looked like, except that he had only one arm – and no one could agree which one he had lost, or how it had happened. His name was Grandfather Paradox, and if you were naughty he would find you and use you and destroy you, as part of his labyrinthine schemes against the Time Lords.”

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The boy had taken the story very, very seriously. For months, perhaps even years, afterwards he had worried that Grandfather Paradox was under his bed, or lurking beneath the table in the refectory, or making the noises he could hear outside at night. Gradually, the fear had faded.

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The Boy loved to play chess. He never lost. Until one day his father was busy as usual, one of his father’s friends, Savar played a game against him. Savar beat him and he wanted to cry.

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When the boy was loomed, Quences consultation with the Bench of Matricians, about how the boy will turn out and his occupation. The Bench of Matricians informed Quences that they predict the boy, will be the most important influential Time Lord since Rassilon on Gallifrey's future and the universe. Quences brought the boy to the Time Academy and asked that the boy be able to enter the special courses. The House of Lungbarrow had only produced servants and petty clerks and Quences was bound determined to the see the boy through to his destiny with hopes that he at least becomes a Lord Cardinal. So he built a robot tutor, Badger to help him with his studies. His Cousin Glospin was jealous of him for all of Quences attention, in fact most his Cousin disliked him for it.

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The boy was only eight in Time Lord Years when he entered the Time Lord Academy. First he had to choose his name. All Gallifreyan children entered the Academy at the age of eight to the exact day of their Loom Day; this was also their Name Day. The boy chose “The Doctor” for his name even though he already had a name. He chose ‘The Doctor” because it means healer, wise man, and knower of many things, but he didn’t tell his Cousins what name he chose.

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Then the Doctor when to the initiation ceremony where Gallifreyan children are made to look into the Untempered Schism, a gap in space and time where they could view the time vortex. After looking into it his friend Koschei went mad, when he looked he ran away. At the Time Lord Academy Gallifreyan children were separated by political Chapters and the religious Order, but when the Doctor entered the High Council had already dissolved the religious Order; however, some people still practiced this, like the monk in behind his home and students could still learn about it in classes. The Doctor became a member of the Prydonian Chapter. He was put into a clique of ten young Time Lords with the collective name of the Deca. His teacher was Borusa and some of his cliques were Koschei and the Rani. Everyone at the Academy called the Doctor Theta Sigma his nick name.

 

***

 

The first time he had left Gallifrey, it had been for a short hop across the Constellation, to his parents’ summer house. He’d stared up into the dark night’s sky, seen all the moving points of light.​

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“Not stars,” his mother had told him. “Ships. Those ships don’t travel on the sea, those are ships that travel in space and time.”

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He had wanted to ask where they were going, and who was in them, but he hadn’t. When he got back, he’d asked his tutors and looked in books and the video archive, but the answer remained elusive. He’d read about the stars and the planets, and all the people that lived out in the universe, and all about their histories and their sciences. He thought up a lot of questions, and not all the answers were in the books that had been written so far or on the Public Record Video. To find the answers, he would have to go looking for them. He’d have to leave Gallifrey, get out there, out into the universe. Who knew where the future lay? Who wanted to know? The Doctor smiled.

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