RASSILON

The history of Rassilon is very contradictory, but is generally laid out in The Book of the Old Times.  The Old Time is what the Time Lords call the pre-Time Lord days on Gallifrey, when the gallifreyans relied on simple technology such as transmats, and is now many thousands of years in the past.  The Time Lords have, ironically, lost much knowledge of their own past.  They spend much time investigating the lifelines of other worlds, and have neglected their own.

Rassilon did not invent the power of time travel.  Before he came to power, the Gallifreyans already possessed some ability to manipulate time.    This was a period of unrest in the history of the planet, and this power was not put to a good use.  The Time Scoop had probably been invented with a noble intention in mind--taking objects from out of the past and bringing them to the present.  It would have been an excellent tool for archaeological study, for example, but was put to a  twisted use: the Games.

The Gallifreyans would use the Time Scoop to snatch people and aliens from their own past or another worlds and then place them within the Death Zone.  This bleak, unfriendly area of Gallifrey is ringed in with mountains, but to make it impossible for the "contestants" to escape, the extra security of a force field was added.  The Players in the Game were then forced to fight each other to the death for the pleasure of the jaded Gallifreyans who watched the events on their Public Access Channels.  Only two races were never "invited" to compete in the Games--the Daleks and the Cybermen, both of whom were too deadly (and boring, since they killed without pleasure) to be allow to play.

When Rassilon came to power, he forbade the Games, sealed off the Death Zone, and locked away the controls of the Time Scoop.  Their location was recorded only in the forbidden Black Scrolls of Rassilon.  It was then made a capital offense either to read the Scrolls or to use the Time Scoop and Death Zone.

Even at this point in his life, Rassilon was planning far ahead.  Any other being would have destroyed both  the Scoop and all knowledge of it.  He, however, foresaw a great need for the forbidden knowledge.

Rassilon, according to The Book of the Old Time, was originally an engineer and an architect.  He worked with Omega to create the power of the Eye of Harmony.  Rassilon entered a black hole, engineered by Omega, with a fleet of ships, stabilizing the core of the black hole, and returned it to Gallifrey in power restrainers.  The Sash of Rassilon was a technological shield that enabled Rassilon to withstand the tremendous energy bursts and vast forces about the core, and he harnessed the power into the Eye of Harmony.  All of the Time Lords' power now comes from the "tamed" black hole.  It is maintained beneath the Panopticon, and can only be accessed using the Great Key.

Rassilon is also credited with creating the Transduction Barriers that surround Gallifrey, keeping it secure from alien attack.  In fact, he may not have created these force fields, but simply commissioned them.  Still, since his specialty was in force field manipulation, it remains probable that they were, indeed, one of his own inventions.

Rassilon planned in the long term for his race.  Though the Lord President is given the Sash of Rassilon and the Rod of Rassilon, the President has never been given the Great Key.  Rassilon deliberately passed knowledge of the Key to the Chancellors instead of the President.  Without the Key, no President could thus become an absolute ruler of the Time Lords and create a dictatorship.

Rassilon also created the ultimate weapon for the Time Lords, but one that he deemed too dangerous to use--the Demat Gun.  Knowledge of its existence is kept within the Matrix, but the Great Key of Rassilon is needed to construct and power the Gun.  Though the President may know of the device, he cannot operate it without the key--which no President before the Doctor has ever held.

Apparently, the Demat Gun works like a simple disintegrator, but is far more complex than that.  It need not be focused on a visible target, but can be hooked in to any time controls and used as a weapon to destroy anyone or anything in the reaches of time and space.  Knowing the dangers of such a weapon falling into the wrong hands, Rassilon had the knowledge of how to build it carefully hidden.  It has in fact been built and operated only once to anyone's knowledge--by the Doctor during the Sontaran's invasion of Gallifrey.

Rassilon's final fate is not accurately known.  Though he is considered by most to be a figure of great good, there are dark rumours to the contrary.  How exactly he came into power is not known, but it was almost certainly not without bloodshed.  Though his reforms changed forever the society of Gallifrey, and he created almost single-handed the civilization, laws, and ethics of the Time Lords, he had his darker side.  Stories circulated that he was a cruel despot, killing all of his foes and subjugating the Gallifreyans to his will.  Naturally, few such stories ever made it into any kind of official history.  The Book of the Old Time, written by an unknown Time Lord, naturally records this period from Rassilon's point of view--and any winner in a bloody struggle inevitably paints himself in the best light.

Whether Rassilon was a saint or a devil is hard to judge.  He was, in all probability, a person with many aspects.  However, his final moments have never been played out.  A portion of his mind and knowledge resides in the Matrix--probably severely edited, since much of the truth about him has been lost.  Certainly he never intended the future President of the Time Lords to have access to everything that he himself knew.  The Demat Gun and Time Scoop were both hidden by him, and the knowledge about them virtually erased.

One of the stories about him reports that in the end the Time Lords rebelled against him on account of his cruelty, and then locked him in the Black Tower in the heart of the Death Zone.  There he was reported to live on in eternal sleep.  The Tower was certainly known as the Tomb of Rassilon, and its image was familiar to generations of Time Lords--an imposing building with a horned summit and three entrances.  It is so well known that a children's nursery rhyme was made up about it.  However, very few people have ever visited it, and of those who have, far fewer have ever returned.

Rassilon's ever-devious mind laid a trap, however. Though Time Lords are very long-lived, they are not truly immortal.  Rassilon left a trail claiming that he had discovered the secret of true immortality, and that it might be gained by anyone who would venture into the Death Zone and switch off the force field guarding it.  Despite the apparent foolishness of the tale, Rassilon knew full well it would lure the greedy and unscrupulous into the Zone.

Over the Millennia, four Time Lords have made it through the Death Zone to the Tomb.  The names of the first three are lost in the mists of time, but the fourth was Borusa.  He claimed his prize after forcing the various incarnations of the Doctor to do the hard and dangerous part of the work for him--penetrating the Death Zone.  But the prize of immortality had a price--Borusa followed the others into the immortality of living stone.  His reward was to suffer endless regret for his actions.

Rassilon had laid a trap to remove potential dictators from the Rime Lord race.  His mind controls the Dark Tower, though whether he is still alive somehow, or whether this Tower is host to some complex mechanical mind such as the Matrix is uncertain.  When the Doctors had arrived there, they were confronted by a reasoning facsimile of Rassilon.  It was clearly a projection of some kind, but of what type is uncertain.  Perhaps Rassilon does rest in his Tomb in unending sleep, and this was a form of mental projection, such as the waves of fear his mind sent through the Doctor's companions.  Or perhaps it is merely some mechanical projection programmed long before,  and lasting almost eternally.

How Rassilon could accomplish the feats of turning a living being into stone is unclear.  However, it must be recalled that his specialty was in the construction of force fields, so perhaps he has merely discovered a method for preserving living beings in a stasis that resembles stone.  Rassilon also had the ability to move persons and objects through time from this Tomb, though it is probable that he may have been tapping into the Eye of Harmony to do so.  Clearly, the full extent of Rassilon's abilities have not yet been revealed.

 During the time of Rassilon, the Universe was invaded by an army of Giant Vampires.  These creatures was so powerful that a single one of them could drain the life from an entire planet.
The Time Lords fought back against the monsters, and after a terrible and bloody war, they destroyed all but the King Vampire, which vanished.  The only method of killing the vampires proved to be to destroy their hearts.  To achieve this, the Time Lords built Bowships, which launched gigantic steel bolts to pierce the vampires.  They believed that all were destroyed, but just in case the one missing vampire turned up, all Type 40 Time Vehicles were mandated to carry "The Record of Rassilon", which told of the war, and insisted that any surviving vampire must be dealt with immediately. 

The missing King Vampire had escaped the slaughter accidentally, falling through a CVE (Charged Vacuum Emboitment) into E-Space, a small Universe independent of our own.  The Doctor and Romana encountered this creature and its minions.  They managed to destroy it before it could recover from its wounds and return to our Universe to begin its bloody wars over again.

So devastating had the war with the vampires proved that the Time Lords became avowed pacifists thereafter.

Rassilon