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At first, they were practically human. They had but a single heart and their minds were all linked. This was the Old Time, a time of glory, of golden luminescent buildings spread across a hundred worlds. An empire forged in the gaps between lines of prophecies. Heroes set out on great quests, certain of success. And every time they returned to Gallifrey, the Pythia took her pound of flesh from every expedition. Often demanding the greatest treasure, which was freely given as she was the one that made success so certain. Her foretellings determined Gallifrey’s course, always towards a shining future.
It was to be a future full of magic, but there were those who preferred the cold rationality of science. When the last Pythia’s prophecies dried up, support grew for Rassilon’s cause. In the end, she had one final glimpse of the future and learned that she would be the last. In her despair, she cast herself into the abyss and the empire fell with her. As she died, she cursed Gallifrey so that children would become the stuff of myth and legend. And if not for a gift, their race would have gone the same way.
The gift was from the other powers that an advisor served. To Gallifrey, it was presented as some new innovation from Rassilon’s workshops. It was not the first gift from those powers passed off as Gallifreyan ingenuity, and it would not be the last. Every one of the ruling Houses received a genetic loom to perpetuate their bloodlines. If natural reproduction would be denied to them, they would do it unnaturally.
The only discernable difference between the loom-born and those naturally born was in the lack of a navel. At least, that was the only difference in life. In death, their corpse would melt: skin and flesh receding to reveal the bone beneath. After a few moments, the flesh would flow back in a new form, sometimes even a new pigmentation. It was thoroughly biological, almost a reminder of their true nature. The Gallifreyans called it reincarnation.
Under the aegis of Rassilon, Gallifrey thrived. The loom-born supplanted the nobles as a new breed of elite. Time travel flourished; it had been a reality before but now became commonplace. Time-sensitive pioneers went out to explore and returned with tales of impossible sights and abominations. Stories of an all too likely future with no place for them. They told of domed cities, that almost parodied their own, with opalescent spires occupied by monsters. The present, however, was a time of experimentation, of reckless gambles leading to great innovations.
One of those was the theft of TARDISes. There were those who had travelled to a glimmering city of glass, only to return with rumours of a new breed of timeship made by unnatural powers. The Archons of this nameless city were a threat that needed to be defused. And so the Other went alone, as a representative of both Gallifrey and something else.
As he later told it, they rebuffed his efforts to negotiate, leaving burglary as the only option to undermine the Archons. He walked among abominations and Great Old Ones, passing unremarked as he wound his way to the birthing cradles to liberate a seed, the first of this new breed. It was named a TARDIS after a child’s innocent suggestion.
Unlike timeships, TARDISes didn't need time-sensitives as pilots. Instead they needed a star for fuel. Once-obsolete starships were used to journey out into the black void, searching this endless abyss for the Eye of Harmony. When Rassilon returned, he sealed it within Gallifrey as a power source for TARDISes. It would also serve as the anchor of another gamble and innovation, perhaps the most reckless of them all.
The Coming of the New Time. To future generations, it would be known as the Anchoring of the Thread. It established a framework for history, to ensure that those cataclysmic futures foretold by voyagers would never occur. It was the day where the Houses of Gallifrey became Great, where the Gallifreyans granted themselves the mantle of Time Lords. However, all did not go to plan, this rewriting of reality made the universe vulnerable to external incursion, allowing the Yssgaroth to tear their way into the universe, carving a caldera into the skin of the planet. The New Time had arrived, and it brought new nightmares with it.
There was a war and the newly ascended Time Lords won, the Yssgaroth were rendered nigh-extinct. Some melted back into their shadows to avoid death, others were captured and allowed to live for further use. After the war, the Time Lords began to catalogue the side-effects of this New Time. The most obvious change was to their already strained mental links, now broken. Thus the looms were altered. After experiments performed on prisoners of war and deserters, new biodata was inserted into the template and the Time Lords gained an extra heart. It acted as a link to their Homeworld, to their history. Keeping voyagers stable, now that the days of constant mental communion were over.
The second heart was the first and last innovation of the New Time. Gallifrey was almost in a form that would be recognisable today. Rassilon had always held the Other at a distance, perennially aware of his higher allegiance. Thus as the Capitol burned, the Other was banished, but there are no records of his departure from either a TARDIS cradle or spaceport. Instead, there are rumours that he fell into a loom vat. With the last vestige of moral guidelines gone, Rassilon was free to purge the womb-born, leaving the planet as the inheritance of those who came from the looms.
After the upheaval of the purge, Gallifrey comfortably settled into stagnation, every day being the same as the next. Time Lords being loomed for specific roles and never even trying to explore beyond their niche. Before, their destinies had been written for them; now their destinies were lived for them. And so it would have continued until the heat death of the universe, were it not for the circumstances of the Other’s death.
The Other had chosen to thrown himself into not just any loom vat but the Prime Distributor, where the Time Lord template is set. His genetic material irrevocably altered that template. These alterations began to manifest, generation by generation. At first, it was purely internal, with skeletons too large to fit within the skin and their blood taking on a different hue. Then it began to seep outwards. Some possessed shadows that were a few milliseconds out-of-sync, a symptom that would later be developed as a specialty of House Paradox. Others had irises that faintly glowed in the dark, darkness being a rare state on a world with two suns. The most useful of these alterations was every loom-born being loomed as a time-sensitive. Every loom-born now able to see their true selves.
The process of reincarnation itself changed to mask the diverging biology. It became less visceral, more abstract. The body of a Time Lord would simply glow instead of liquefying to reveal the distorted masquerade of a skeleton beneath the skin. This refined process received the more befitting name of regeneration.
One day, a loom-jumper was loomed anew, fraudulently gaining a new set of regenerations; his first words were not words at all but screams. He was driven insane by his new flesh, so different from what he used to be. At the time, the President blustered it away as a new security measure but in reality it was nothing less than the complete eradication of the Gallifreyan species.
The looms had been a gift, but was their purpose truly to continue the line of Gallifrey? Could perhaps their purpose have been to dilute it, allow other biodata to slither past the genetic locks and supplant the Gallifreyans at the source. A purpose hastened by the mass donation of biodata that came from the Other's death.
The Broken Generation were of course the most affected by the Other's biodata, the most noticeably irregular. Not only were they a generation entirely made up of renegades, they were renegades who took pride in their nature, barely even attempting to suppress their peculiarities. The most public example of this lack of control being an assassination attempt on the Braxiatel Collection's director. Witness reports uniformly suggested that the victim didn't bleed or even seem to have organs within him. Instead, there was an infinite starfield blazing out from the bullet holes. Most of those witnesses now reside in various psychiatric facilities, their continued care being paid for by the Collection.
Instances such as that are rare, mainly due to Gallifrey's isolation. But by and large, the Time Lords of Gallifrey continued to keep up their humanoid forms for the sake of tradition, if nothing else. It took an Enemy of a similar nature and decades of War for them to let go of that antiquated notion. Once it was over and the Peace began, they tore down the grey barracks that had become a fixture of the Homeworld. The Homeworld became Gallifrey once more, the planet now glimmering with opalescent spires and domed cities. A world occupied by Time Lords who were unused to hiding their nature.