#looooooms

We’ve since seen that “Time Tots” most definitely recieve nursery rhymes and such at young ages, and the Tenth Doctor has even mentioned things about “playing in a nursery.” 

Paul Cornell’s Goth Opera takes this further, showing that Time Tots really are treated as humans would treat toddlers... 

“And that is the story of how Rassilon slayed the Great Vampire, and let us all sleep safely in our beds at night." Romana closed the book with the Great Seal of Rassilon on the cover and smiled at the children that were sitting around her chair in a rapt circle. "Which is what all of you Time Toddlers should be doing now." 

Nurses led the little Gallifreyans away, oblivious to their protests. Some of them stopped to thank Romana or ask questions about Rassilon, and she replied to them all. 

.... as does Ian Potter’s (excellent) “Apocrypha Bidpedium, with several excerpts coming from a children’s book titled Tales of the Matrix– True Stories from TARDIS Logs, Retold for Time Tots by Loom Auntie Flavia. 

And y’know, yeah, all cute and sweet and silly, “Time Tots! Time Toddlers!” It’s cute! 

Until you remember Lungbarrow... 

“They are all born from the Family Loom as full-grown adults. They are like children at first and have to learn like children. Andred calls that time brain-buffing. He says the things they live with in the House are deliberately big, so that they feel as if they have been small.”

.... and Faction Paradox’s Of the City of the Saved... 

“A childe is not a child. Youth is relative, as is biology. It’s doubtful any true childe of the Houses has been a child, except in appearance.”

... meaning that whenever you read/hear a sweet little Time Tot nursery rhyme, it’s either being read to a) a full grown adult with a baby brain, or b) some sort of Damian-from-The-Omen-esque nightmare genius child. 

He was trying to juggle another magnetic card into the console. 

Families? thought Ace. She suddenly remembered a sliver of a borrowed dream when she had glimpsed what she thought was his family. Cousins and more cousins in a distant mountainous country. No mothers or fathers — just cousins. But in the TARDIS library, there was a birthday card, old and yellowing, and on it in willowy writing was Happy Birthday Grandfather. 

- Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible, Marc Platt

Tell me more: You are a Time Lord? How old are you? 

Inside my mind. Probing my memories. Searching for secrets from cradle to grave. 

I have no cradle, I have no grave. I was born at Otherstide through the Loom of the House of Lungbarrow in Southern Gallifrey. 

Waiting to be born. Strung out, spread really thin. Unable to think, unable to assemble my thoughts. I couldn’t wait to get out. They were there. All forty-five of my cousins. Satthralope smacked me so hard I could barely walk and – 

You are Loom-born? 

Yes, I think so. 

[...] 

This accounts contradict each other. 

Memories often do. 

‘If you would be so kind as to come with me?’ 

‘Who are you?’ He was so old, but there weren’t any old people any more. He walked through the cloister with the aid of a stick, a knobbled stick with strange writing on it. There was a dark shape drifting behind him in the shadows. Outside the Capitol was burning. 

‘I couldn’t possibly tell you that, oh no.’ 

‘You wear my husband’s ring.’ He held it up to the candlelight, examined it, then clutched it to his chest. 

‘Yes. So I do.’ 

‘Please stop them – they are trying to find my daughter-in-law, they are going to kill her child.’ 

He placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘Your granddaughter was born ten minutes ago, I was there at the birth. She is safe, quite safe.’ 

‘A girl? Where is she?’ 

‘She will be taken away from here, away from this madness. I will take her far from this world of vampires and valeyards. First, however, we must get you to safety.’ 

‘Me?’ 

He took her hand. ‘Come, my dear.’ 

This memory is faint. 

It was a long time ago. I’m not even sure it’s one of mine. 

The truth. 

A lot of what happened before my second regeneration is hazy. Great chunks of my life are missing. It was all so very long ago. 

- Cold Fusion, Lance Parkin 

Who was to say that it was any different anywhere else? The past didn’t exist, only the memory of the past. Perhaps the past was necessitated by the present, and not vice versa. It was only the first night, but a number of centuries had already preceded it. If time was an illusion, then what did that make a Time Lord? No… the past existed, it was real, he’d been there, his own past and other people’s. 

He looked down at the woman sleeping far below him. She had been part of him for generations before his birth. She’d taught his father and his father and his father. She’d helped to raise him, she’d been his tutor, his friend, his first love, his wife, the mother of his children, she had been everything to him in the past. She had always been there, she wasn’t just a whim, a fictional construct. 

But how would he know if she was? There was a rumble of thunder far away, over the sea. Either she had always been there, or the past was changing, renewing itself. If he woke up tomorrow and she had never been there, would he still remember her? He looked down at her again, suddenly full of the thought that he should be with her for every moment that he possibly could be just in case she vanished, never to be seen or mentioned again. 

He scowled, although there was no one to see it. This was nonsense, sophistry, The Doctor knew exactly who he was, who he’d always been. He was a Time Lord, from the Noble House of Lungbarrow on the planet Gallifrey. He had been born of the Loom, son of the greatest explorer of his age and a human woman, Annalise… no… his mother’s name had been Penelope. He knew his father’s name, at least: his father’s name wasn’t Ulysses, and he was a professor at Berkeley. 

His own name escaped him for the moment, but he knew that he had one. Lightning flashed overhead, unbidden, marking out the silhouette of the fortress like a signal flare.

- The Infinity Doctors, Lance Parkin 

All the way to the graveyard the Doctor refused to answer Sam's questions. He found that he was starting to relish the thought of seeing Iris again. He couldn't even remember what the last encounter had been. Unhappy, at any rate. He seemed to recall their parting under a cloud. He wished his memory wasn't so poor. Sometimes when he tried to reach back into previous lives it was like recalling something told to him, a dream, or a book he once read. It made him feel very young. Dwarfed by the magnitude of his life. Sometimes it wasn't worth the mental effort, trying to drag his waking thoughts to a point before Skaro, London, San Francisco, Lungbarrow... Just let the past come to you when it will, he thought. That's the best way. Because, in the end, it always will.

- The Scarlet Empress, Paul Magrs

‘But it happened,’ said the Doctor. ‘You didn’t just implant a memory. You changed my biodata. You changed my past!’ 

‘Are you sure?’ 

‘It’s impossible,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s impossible for my people. Our past is unreachable. What’s written can’t be unwritten.’ 

‘Who said your history can’t change?’ 

Another boy answered, ‘Someone from his history.’ 

And another: ‘Maybe it’s the second-biggest lie in Time Lord history.’ 

‘Maybe it changes all the time.’ 

Someone giggled. ‘Let’s play pin the tale on the donkey.’ 

‘Maybe you didn’t use to have a father.’ 

‘Maybe you’re living in the middle of a time war. Maybe there’s an Enemy out there –’ 

The Doctor shouted, ‘I’m not listening!’ 

‘– who’s rewriting you when you’re not looking!’ 

‘Maybe you weren’t always half human.’ 

‘But now you’ve become always half human.’ 

‘Maybe you weren’t always a Time Lord.’ 

‘But now you’ve always been a Time Lord.’ 

‘Maybe you originally came from some planet in the forty-ninth century. Fleeing from the Enemy who’d overrun your home –’ 

‘I said I’m not listening! Laa laa laa laa laa –’ 

‘– and you’ve just been written and rewritten and overwritten, ever since.’ 

‘Pin the tale!’ 

‘How d’you know it’s not true?’ 

‘How could you know it’s not true?’ 

The voices crowded in. 

‘How would you know, huh?’ 

‘How would you know?’ 

‘How would ‘How would you ‘How ‘How would you know? you know? you know? know?’ 

‘Why would I care?’ shouted the Doctor.

- Unnatural History, Kate Orman and Jon Blum

While Faction Paradox existed, there was no reason for him to do anything. Everything was negotiable. The child from their ranks had told him as much. His birthright, his culture, the things he’d defined himself against, were all variables now. He remembered his father, but he also remembered the loom, being twice born. He didn’t know which he remembered from life, and which from dreams.

He was sure they’d done something to him, his past, an alteration to who he was, to the very weave of his biodata. But he didn’t know what, or how he could even start to put things right again.