Character Information: History

[crisis_inverted]

Koschei: The Master's youth and school years

Becoming the Master: Politics, or some animals are more equal than others

Exile: Leaving home to conquer the universe

The Time War: Resurrected to fight

The Silver Devastation: Running from the end of the world

Life as Gosse Yana: Forgetting himself in order to survive

The Last of the Time Lords: Catching up on current events

The Year that Never Was: Making up for lost time

Til Death Do: Resurrection and killing Lucy

Metacrisis: The consequences of a murder



Koschei: The Master's youth and school years

The Master was once an alien, born on the planet Gallifrey, home to the functionally-immortal, telepathic, human-looking species known as both Gallifreyans and Time Lords. The Time Lords were an ancient race, powerful and (in their own opinion) wise, self-appointed guardians of Time, able to manipulate the fabric of time and space, but determined not to interfere in the business of the universe unless crisis demanded it. The Master came from an old family, one that had once been wealthy and powerful but that, at the time of his birth, scraped along on memories of its past greatness. The family raised him on stories of his illustrious ancestors; but he suspected that these stories were lies—balm for a family too apathetic to reclaim any real power.

At the age of eight, he was shown the Untempered Schism (a window into the raw stuff of time and space), a Gallifreyan coming-of-age custom, and placed in Gallifrey's most prestigious school, the Academy. He spent decades of his life there, receiving the extensive education appropriate for a member of the upper class. The classes and professors themselves were, at first, fascinating, but the more he learned and the older he grew, the more he became convinced that Gallifrey was exactly like his dust-and-memory-filled family home, only on a much greater scale. Everything was form and function, with no risk, no innovation, no room for new thoughts and uncomfortable questions. Classes began to bore him. He turned in work done well but quickly, leaving him time for his own study and science and engineering experiments.

He made one real friend at the Academy, another loner with an inquisitive mind, a boy from a family with all the power the Master's family pretended to. They became a team, known by their school nicknames: Theta and Koschei. Theta saw possibilities that Koschei didn't, and vice-versa. Theta could convince where Koschei could manipulate. They shared their studies and their ways of seeing the world; they focused the universe into each other, filtered through their two different-similar minds, and learned.

Becoming the Master: Politics, or some animals are more equal than others

When they graduated, Koschei chose a title, as per Gallifreyan custom, going into politics as the Master. Theta, now calling himself the Doctor, married and, over the next few years, had two children—but this didn't prevent him from continuing his involvement with the Master (their connection had evolved years ago into a physical relationship as well as a mental/emotional one), nor from becoming just as involved in politics as the Master. There was change to be realized in Gallifrey, and they were the men to do it—the very best, in the Master's opinion, that the planet had to offer.

In pursuit of his political goals, the Master manipulated, seduced, betrayed, and deceived—and, finally, he began to kill. The first few deaths were a revelation—killing opposing political figures with undetectable poisons and slow wasting diseases, arranging freak accidents for them to meet on the streets or in their homes. It was so easy. He orchestrated the deaths of more and more enemies, both political and personal.

Meanwhile, he gathered radicals to him, careful to hide his identity as he worked. He hid many of his plans from the Doctor, reasoning that this was better for them both. The Doctor could continue his own work, by socially acceptable paths, without having to worry about revealing the Master's secrets or reacting wrongly to news of another tragic death. The Master began to knit together greater plans, plans to rework not just Gallifreyan social order but the order of the universe itself.

Finally, he laid his plans out before the Doctor, expecting enthusiasm and help and ideas. Instead, he was met with horror and rejection. The Doctor said no; they didn't have the right to kill nor to remake the lives of others.. They fought, and the changes they'd affected in the system, the support they'd gathered, each in his own way, fell apart as the friction between them increased. Eventually, the Doctor decided he didn't want to have anything to do with the Master, and he ran—not just from politics, but from Gallifrey entirely.

The Master went ahead with his plans, but without the Doctor (and the protection of the Doctor's powerful family), he lost control. One by one, the dissidents he and the Doctor had inspired were arrested and exiled, in a massive political purge. The Master was put on trial and exiled, as well—but not as one of the leaders of the movement. No, clearly, the Doctor must have been the man responsible for its rise to power—after all, he had run, which proved his guilt, didn't it? His family's influence and resources would have made such machinations easy to cover up. The Master was viewed as just another cog in the Doctor's machine, and his trial was cursory, taking up just enough time to satisfy propriety before finding him guilty and exiling him from Gallifrey.

Exile: Leaving home to conquer the universe

Exiled into the greater universe, in a stolen TARDIS (a Gallifreyan time-machine-and-spaceship) the Master traveled, and learned. Without the Doctor, the learning was not quite the same, but he grew used to it. He took proteges and lackeys, who died when they failed him or when he grew bored with them. He discovered the pleasures of impersonation, of convincing the cultures he encountered that he was a part of them, a friend, an ally, a native son, and taking them over, shaping them, from inside, like a thinking cancer, a single-minded, sentient virus. He found religion and superstition and became a god, again and again, on planet after planet. With his advanced scientific knowledge, his Gallifreyan psychic abilities, and his charisma, he was the divine outsider and the lauded insider. He was the Master, and the name became everything he was.

Years later, the Doctor joined him in official exile, when Gallifrey caught up with him and slapped his wrists for interfering in the affairs of the universe (his family's influence protected him from any more severe punishment). The Master made contact with the Doctor again, hoping that, now that the Doctor had also been rejected by Gallifrey, he might come around to the Master's way of thinking.

But the Doctor had found friends to replace the Master—an entire planet's worth of friends. Spending his exile on the planet Earth, the Doctor had become science adviser to UNIT, a UK military security organization, and taken it upon himself to serve as the planet's defender—and the Master, who had no use for Earth or its backwards people, became one of the threats the Doctor lived to combat.

Eventually, after several attempts to convince the Doctor to take over the universe (or at least, the Earth) with him, the Master gave up on renewing their partnership, and turned his attention back to the greater universe. He died many times, in his adventures—a Gallifreyan can heal his body from fatal injury thirteen times, and the Master used up all of his chances but one within centuries. Determined not to die permanently, he returned to Gallifrey to use the Eye of Harmony, the secret doomsday device that anchored Gallifreyan technology and power, to grant himself more lives; though he was prevented by the Doctor, he refused to die. On the planet Traken, in a second attempt to prolong his life, the Master attempted to steal the Doctor's body. Prevented again, the Master stole the body of a lesser lifeform in order to survive, taking the body of the Trakenite Tremas.

Stripped of his old goals and dreams, the Master survived, popping in on the Doctor now and again to plague him, to remind him of their history, to endanger his friends and complicate his life. They came to mean less to each other, to be habits more than friends, reminders more than present truths.

They met for the final time for decades on the Cheetah Planet, a living planet that infected those who lived on (or visited it) with a feral, werewolf-like violence and a direct, almost metaphysical connection to the planet. Due to his adopted, non-Gallifreyan body, the Master did not have his natural immunity to infections like this, and fell prey to it. When the Doctor visited the planet, the Master tried to kill him—the Doctor escaped, but the Master died when the planet's destructive spirit tore it apart. He had no ability to revive from what should have been his final death.

He was dead for decades, as the Doctor continued his adventures across time and space.

The Time War: Resurrected to fight

While the Master was dead, Gallifrey began its first war in thousands of years—a war against the Daleks, a bioengineered, half-mechanical race that existed to destroy all life except Dalek life. The war escalated, becoming the Time War, a conflict that stretched across the entire universe, drawing in thousands of species and warping the fabric of time and space itself.

As the War drew on, Gallifrey grew desperate. The minds of all Time Lords (even exiles like the Master who died off planet) were, by custom, stored in a massive computer system called the Matrix—almost any dead Gallifreyan, stretching back for centuries could be brought back to life, though such resurrection was extremely rare. Now, with the Daleks winning, the Gallifreyan government gave permission to resurrect any Gallifreyan who might be able to serve in the fight—even the renegades and exiles.

The more recent the death, the less trouble the reconstruction and the more complete the resulting Gallifreyan. The Master had died not so very long ago, so he was one of the first to be revived—a trickier process than it was for many of the criminals, as the Master had died in a non-Time-Lord body, his consciousness intertwined with that of an entire planet, but nothing too difficult for the scientists and engineers of Gallifrey. When the Master came to, in his new body—a Gallifreyan body, young and strong, suited to the War—he had a great deal of reorienting to do in a very short time. He was given the briefest explanations, shown horrific footage and telepathic impressions from the War, issued standard-issue quarters and possessions, and asked his name, in a terse debriefing. No one remembered him. No one knew who the Master was. On his exile, his name, like that of the other rebels he and the Doctor had once led, had been struck from the record. To a few highly-placed officials, his identity might once have been known—but they had been wiped out in the War. Now, no one cared who he was. He would work alone, with little support. They would use him where they thought proper Gallifreyan citizens, stable citizens, with ethical codes and strong upbringings, would fail, or object. He would be a secret operative, one of many, the ghosts of Gallifrey.

He went along with this plan, eager to be moving again, to be active and alive, in a proper body, with a full new set of lives ahead of him.

He did as Gallifrey wanted him to—he destroyed Daleks and resources (and peoples) the Daleks might use against Gallifrey. He used twists and pockets of time to hide his own recreational asides, thefts and dominations, massacres and moments of luxury and pleasure. The ghost handlers began to recognize his name: the Master, one of their best and maddest operatives.

Again and again, he heard rumors that the Doctor was also fighting in War, and tried to cross paths with him. He was never able to.

The Silver Devastation: Running from the end of the world

However, as the War drew to a climax, even the Doctor fell from his concerns. On the last of his missions, the Master watched as the Daleks beat him and several other ghosts (all working independently but for the same ends) in a rush for control of the Cruciform, an ancient planet-sized artifact capable of drawing anything or -one from the past or future into the present and forcing it to exist across all of time. The Master ran, hard and fast, in his TARDIS, as the Daleks called a supernova into existence behind him, realized it across all time, so one section of space burned eternally, from the birth of the universe to its death, from before the star that it once had been existed to long after all the light in reality should have faded away.

The Master ran far enough (forward in time, to the very last days of the universe), and escaped. None of the other ghosts on the mission, or their handlers, survived.

Neither did his TARDIS.

Like a swimmer pulled down by the suction of a sinking ship, the TARDIS's substance was torn apart by the Cruciform's twisting of time and space. It held together long enough to get the Master away, and long enough for the Master to use the last of its power on himself—to activate and use the Chameleon Arch, an in-built device that could convert a Time Lord, reversibly, into another species. The device came with sacrifices: His full memory and personality would be stored in a token—in his case, a fobwatch—while a new, generated personality, unaware of its Gallifreyan origins, "ran" his transformed body. Like a screensaver, the body would not return to its Gallifreyan state until it was "jogged" by the opening of the fobwatch and the touch of his full persona and memory—at which point, he would be restored to his Gallifreyan state and his full mind.

The Master knew that the Daleks had known the ghosts were coming, and would make certain that none of them had escaped. With the Cruciform, they could erase him from time forever, so that he had never existed and never could exist again. To live as a human for a time, a member of a nothing race that had little place in the War, was a far lesser evil than to not exist at all. His human persona would open the fobwatch in time, and he would remember himself and return to the universe—after the War had been won, by either side.

Life as Gosse Yana: Forgetting himself in order to survive

So the Master began his life as Gosse Yana. This life began young, by human standards—the Master forced his body to die and heal itself to the physiological age of 15 or 16, prior to using the Arch, in order to allow himself as long a life as a human as might be necessary, for the War to pass him by. Gosse was found adrift in a dead ship (the remains of his TARDIS) by refugees from the cold at the end of the universe, heat-miners sapping energy from the Silver Devastation, the supernova that somehow continued to burn, even when all the other stars in the universe had gone out.

Taken in by the refugees, always eager to find a new survivor, Gosse finished growing up with them. He was, everyone thought—himself included—a strange young man, with no memories prior to his discovery and rescue, his only belongings an archaic fobwatch and the poorly-fitting clothes he'd been found in. Polite but distant, prone to moments of abstraction and to headaches brought on by a sound only he could hear, the sound of distant drums, he did what he could for the refugees. Though they would gladly have accepted him as family, he returned only careful courtesy for their honest warmth. Despite his chilliness, he was valued, as a brilliant engineer and problem-solver. So much knowledge had been lost, as the universe had entered its final days and civilizations had fallen and scattered—but Gosse knew things. He could fix anything that needed fixing, improve and repair the refugee ship, suggest locations for heat-hunting and methods for heat-conservation—even tell fascinating stories, now and then, if he was caught in a reflective mood.

Eventually, his refugees met other refugees met other refugees, his family-that-wasn't growing larger—until, when he was in his (apparent) forties, they met a group that told them about the dream of Utopia, a refuge somewhere in space where, they claimed, scientists had worked out a way to survive the heat-death of the universe. People were beginning to lose hope; the Silver Devastation, the mainstay of refugee survival in this region of space, had gone out, in the blink of an eye, several years ago (and Gosse had been troubled by his reaction to this—exhilaration, as though he had been waiting for that moment his entire life—the moment, though he didn't know it at the time, when the Time War ended, when the Daleks lost control of the Cruciform). The news of Utopia raised spirits, and Gosse latched onto it. For the next decade, he traveled with the ragtag group of almost-scientists and engineers who had brought the rumor of Utopia, helping them develop plans and find more refugees. They found and raided abandoned facilities, tracing Utopia, until finally, they located the data and developed the systems needed to pick up a signal they believed originated from Utopia.

Unfortunately, by that point, the refugee fleet was running on its last resources. It had to land, or risk using up the last of its fuel in space, drifting forever as its occupants died slowly, alone in the dark.

They chose to set down on Malcassairo, the closest still-habitable planet to the signal they could reach with their remaining resources. Landing amid the remnants of the insectoid Malmuth civilization (including a still-functioning heat shield, one of their reasons for choosing the planet), they found it occupied only by humanoid savages, quickly dubbed the Futurekind, and one remaining Malmuth woman, Chantho, who had been holding out on her own, in an abandoned bunker, for several years.

Immediate survival took precedence, with the refugees breaking down their ships for parts and raw materials, reinforcing the bunker against the Futurekind and raiding the remnants of the Malmuth cities for further materials. During these first few years, the Futurekind broke into the bunker, once, killing all of the scientists except Yana and Chantho (Yana hid, dragging Chantho, with whom he had developed a mentor-assistant relationship, along with him). Left alone, they continued the project that had begun as a group effort—the building and outfitting of a final great ship, cobbled together from the remnants of their previous fleet and scavenged Malmuth technology, to take the last of humanity to Utopia.

For ten years, they worked, until the project was almost done. Yana had long ago grown tired. When the time came, he would let the rest of humanity go and stay behind, with Chantho. He would let things end.

The Last of the Time Lords: Catching up on current events

And then a TARDIS appeared on Malcassairo—the Doctor's TARDIS, manned by the Doctor and two of his many human friends, Jack Harkness and Martha Jones. Without his Gallifreyan memories, the Master, as Yana, gladly accepted their help in completing and launching the ship that would take humanity to Utopia. However, their visit jarred his human persona into discomfort and unease, finally triggering him to open the fobwatch which carried his Gallifreyan essence. He became the Master again and stole the Doctor's TARDIS to escape the end of the universe, leaving the Doctor, Jack, and Martha behind. But, of course, the Doctor couldn't help himself from interfering. He locked the TARDIS' controls, limiting the Master to travel between only two points in time: 2007 and the end of the universe.

Arriving on Earth, the UK, 2007, the Master found himself in a universe without Gallifrey. The War had ended—he remembered the blinking-out of the Silver Devastation, the sign that the Daleks' hold on the Cruciform had been broken and that Gallifrey must have won. But the planet no longer existed, and he could no find no trace of his species. There were no Gallifreyans, no Time Lords, left—except himself, and the Doctor.

So he did what he always did. He laid a trap for the Doctor, trusting him to play the game they had played for centuries.

The British political system was incredibly easy to manipulate—especially in the new appearance he had assumed on becoming Gallifreyan again, young and handsome. He climbed quickly: infiltrating the UK's Ministry of Defense and then campaigning for election as Prime Minister. As he climbed, he designed and oversaw the implementation of the Archangel Network, a satellite system which nominally served to carry cellular phone signals but which actually subtly hypnotically influenced the minds of humanity in his favor, guaranteeing his election as PM. He also spent part of his time back at the end of the universe, locating the last of humanity, those survivors who had arrived safely at Utopia. He discovered that even Utopia was dying, and that humanity had cannibalized and altered itself, transforming itself into what the Master named the Toclafane, little more than hive-minded, half-witted brains encased in floating metal spheres. He promised them their own planet, back in the past, if they would serve him. They agreed, and, back in 2007, he reengineered the Doctor's TARDIS into a Paradox Machine, a device that would allow the Toclafane to come back to the past and kill their ancestors, present-day humanity, without wiping themselves out of existence.

During these eighteen months of preparation, the Master also discovered there were a few props a human politician needed. One of these was a spouse.

Easily enough done. A political contact of his, a man he did a few easy favors in return for even greater favors, had a daughter—cultivated, controlled, trapped. He saw in her the restless violence of an imprisoned thing, a snake in a cage, fed candies and cakes and never looked at twice, its poison turning in upon itself. He courted her and offered her freedom, cultivated and encouraged the violence he saw in her, and then he told her the truth—who he was and what he was going to do, what she could do if she stood with him. She proposed marriage in that moment, and he accepted—he'd had the engagement ring ready. They were married with enormous pomp and circumstance within two weeks.

The Year that Never Was: Making up for lost time

Right on time, immediately following the Master's rise to the Premiership, the Doctor appeared, and fell into the traps the Master had set for him and his friends, Jack and Martha. The Master captured the Doctor easily (as he did Jack—Martha managed to escape), just in time for the Doctor to witness one of the greatest triumphs in the Master's very long life—the activation of the Paradox Machine and the descent of the Toclafane, the reengineered human race, down to the Earth, to decimate their ancestors.

As controller of the Toclafane and of the still-operating Archangel Network (which continued to work its influence on the human race, subtly reinforcing its fear and awe of him, their Lord and Master), the Master assumed control of the Earth. He crushed major resistance within days, and instituted a reign of terror, destroying humanity's monuments, defiling its churches, killing and humiliating its leaders, burning its libraries, mocking its institutions, and shattering its taboos. Nothing was safe from him and nothing was sacred, except the worship of his own person. He enslaved the entire species and set it to raping Earth's resources to build the fleet that would carry humanity's murderous future, the Toclafane, out to make war on the universe. Gallifrey was gone, but the Master still lived, and there would be a Time Lord Empire now, as there should have been, long ago.

The Master kept the Doctor close by, torturing him for his entertainment. He forced the Doctor to accompany him on whirlwind tours of destruction, asking him to choose who lived and who died, searching out old human friends of the Doctor's and reducing them to animals before he finally put them out of their misery.

The Master fully expected the Doctor to break, eventually—to give in and join the Master or to let his defenses crumble away, becoming open, mentally and physically. Instead, the Doctor retreated into himself. Within months, it became almost impossible for the Master to provoke a response from the Doctor. The Master tried to get in to the Doctor's mind, to find some proof that the Master was making some impact—but he couldn't. Some of the Doctor's mind he could see, but not all of it. The Doctor was still keeping secrets. He was still betraying the Master with his insistence on remaining opaque and apart, the same betrayal that had begun back on Gallifrey, when they were young.

A year into his rule, the Master captured Martha Jones, and brought her back to his stronghold, the air warship Valiant, to be executed. However, things went awry when the Doctor revealed the secret he had been keeping from the Master for a year—the combined hopes of the human race, its faith in the Doctor's ability to save it, as spread and encouraged by Martha and fed back through the Archangel Network, psychically empowered the Doctor and allowed him to distract the Master long enough for Jack, kept prisoner on the Valiant, to destroy the Paradox Machine, reversing time and restoring Earth to its state prior to the Machine's activation. The year of the Master's rule had never happened, and only the people in Valiant's control room at the time of the Machine's deactivation remembered it: the Master; Jack; Lucy, the Master's human wife; Martha; and the Doctor.

The Doctor announced his intention to "keep" the Master—as a patient more than a prisoner, someone to help and reform. Before anyone could leave the Valiant's control room, however, Lucy shot the Master—another betrayal, and not one the Master had anticipated. He had cared for her, in his way, shown her things no human could ever hope to see, if they weren't standing by the side of the Master. She had been his, and he had come to take her for granted, which was the closest, under most circumstances, he came to trusting anyone.

In that moment, faced with two betrayals, the Master chose to defy the Doctor's expectations. Instead of healing from the gunshot wound, he allowed himself to die, while the Doctor begged him to live.

Til Death Do: Resurrection and killing Lucy

The Master thought he was dying for good—or, at least, that he would not be resurrected again for quite some time. However, he'd set up a ring he always wore to store his essence in case he died a death he couldn't heal from, just as a fobwatch had stored his persona once before—and he'd shown Lucy what to do with the ring if he died such a death. Her killing him was unpremeditated—a genuine attempt to free herself from a relationship that had become neglectful and abusive—but her fear of the Master and his disapproval extended even past his death. To make up for her error, she took the ring to the secret room on the Valiant he had shown her and revived him, the essence in the ring invigorating one of several "blank" cloned bodies he'd stored there. The reembodiment process disoriented the Master; and, before his head had time to clear, he killed Lucy for her betrayal.

Naked, still dripping with the fluid from the clone-storage tube, he struck her with the full power of a Time Lord body roiling with regenerative energy, a hazy golden energy given off by Gallifreyans healing their bodies from fatal wounds (or, in this case, adjusting to reembodiment). Lucy fell against another tube, containing an unused clone blank, both her skull and the tube's glass cracking at the impact. Before she had time to recover, the Master broke a length of narrow metal pipe from the tangle of wires and tubing surrounding the clone tanks, and drove it up under her ribcage, entirely through her body, piercing through the glass into the clone tube behind her—the very tip of it lodging, bloodlessly, in the abdomen of the clone.

Through the haze of the energy haloing him, the Master watched her die, and took satisfaction in it—until, in a few minutes, the confusion and rush of reembodiment had faded, and he felt disgust (and even the slightest twinge of regret) at the rashness of his actions. He dressed and outfitted himself with the emergency supplies he had stored in the room, and left. He had no desire to deal with the body.

Metacrisis: The consequences of a murder

Preoccupied with stabilizing his own condition and emotions, the Master hadn't noticed the way the energy he had been radiating in abundance had traveled up the pipe, as though it were a conducting wire, through Lucy's body, and into the clone tube behind her. Curling along the metal, some of it swirled out into the fluid filling the tube, and some of it flowed into the shallow, unbleeding wound in the clone's chest. The energy, filtering into the clone through Lucy's body as she died, touched off a reaction. Minutes after the Master left the room, another Master woke up in it.

He knew everything that the Master knew—up until the Master's body had stabilized and he had turned away from Lucy's body. In his memories, he had killed her; he had driven the pipe through her—and, just barely, into his own body, just at the base of his sternum.

But he also remembered her—fuzzily, distantly, mostly in scraps of emotion. In those memories, he had died, painfully, angry-frightened-relieved-surprised-hurt, moments before. In those memories, he had loved, feared, hated, and rebelled against the Master.

He had no problem identifying what he was—a metacrisis. Humans had just enough in common with Gallifreyans that if a human touched a sample of Gallifreyan tissue charged with regenerative energy, the contact would touch off a reaction—the energy, undirected by a consciousness, would try to "heal" the tissue sample and the human being, both. The result would be two full beings, both "healed" into a midway state between Gallifreyan and human—the tissue sample spontaneously generating into a full part-Gallifreyan, part-human, and the human being made over into a part-Gallifreyan. He, the metacrisis, was the tissue sample—the cloned Time Lord body charged by the Master's regenerative energy. Lucy had been the human, touching him through the pipe piercing them both—but she had been too far gone, too close to death and too injured, for the metacrisis process to heal.

As he climbed out of the tube and found himself clothes from his/the Master's emergency stores, he took stock of his new hybrid life. One heart. Something that felt like the barest echo of a time sense and of psychic abilities. Above-human but below-Time-Lord healing abilities—the shallow wound in his chest not bleeding but not healing with any visible speed. Partial recall of Lucy Saxon nee Cole's memories and full access to the Master's. Blond hair instead of brunette. A newfound taste for lighter colors, discovered as he dressed, choosing a white jacket to go over an ensemble entirely free of the Master's favorite color, black.


He stole some of the Master's extra supplies—including a handful of false identification papers (made out to Ashlar Doxon, an anagram of Harold Saxon) and a supply of cash, and ran from the UK, not stopping to examine his motivations. He went to Japan. He had burned that once—the Master had, during the Year that had never been—and now it was back again. He moved between the main cities of Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo, keeping luxurious apartments in each, stealing until he could support the lifestyle he expected for himself using his own cleverness. He found that he was good with words—a field that had always been the Doctor's—and established himself as an able translator and an expert on foreign relations and mediation. He freelanced, translating for big business, the sciences, criminal politics and the black market, secret-service agencies—even for wealthy tourists—making a a name for himself. In the underworld, where he preferred to work, he became the Ashura, the Demon, a title developed from chronic mispronunciation of his assumed first name. (Sometimes, out of his earshot, the title lengthened to the Dokushin Ashura, the Bachelor Demon, playing further on mispronunciation.) He enjoyed the familiarity of bearing a title, and his rising notoriety, but he kept himself always in check, away from involving himself in aboveboard politics or any other field with high media exposure. He couldn't let his face show up in the press—because if it did, he was certain the Master would come for Ashler Doxon.