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One version of Doctor Know, like many, was actually called Doctor Know-It-All but often referred to as simply Doctor Know. A powerful and knowledgeable “sorcerer supreme”, he had a number of titles including Grand Mayoral Authority of Knowheresville. He spent some time in Oz, becoming known as the “Veritable Virtuoso of Macrology”; (PROSE: Good Crieff - The Tribulations of the Scottish Division) due to a persistent clerical errors, many Ozian documents rendered his name as Professor Nowitall. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over-There) He also once claimed without further context that “the Beanie Babies wiki call[ed him] God” when rattling off a list of his titles. (PROSE: Good Crieff - The Tribulations of the Scottish Division)
Description
Physical appearance
This version of the Doctor was a dark-skinned man with curly hair, wearing an oversized scarf, a purple overcoat with a stick of broccoli hanging out of one of the breast pockets, trousers which “seemed to belong to a pair of pajamas”. He also wore a pair of large glasses. (PROSE: Open Sourcing) Jenny Over-There later thought of Doctor Know as wearing outfits having something in common with Doctor Omega's and Professor Helvetius's. (PROSE: A Series of Queer Events)
Personality
Doctor Know was a whimsical and eccentric individual, prone to rattling off boastful titles and to shirking his duties. (PROSE: Good Crieff - The Tribulations of the Scottish Division)
Powers & abilities
Doctor Know was an enormously knowledgeable and powerful sorcerer. Though ostensibly a human, did not age, and claimed to be equal in supernatural abilities to a Guardian of Time or a Great Higher-Up. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over- There: Tetra-None Hepta-Oct and Doctor Know-It-All Talk it Out)
Biography
Early activities
Despite his various abilities, Doctor Know claimed to be a human, (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over- There: Tetra-None Hepta-Oct and Doctor Know-It-All Talk it Out) although by the time of his involvement with the M.F.S. Scottish Division he claimed to have “lived a thousand lives and journeyed to a thousand wolds”, (PROSE: Open Source (2024 reedit)) and to have lived for “centuries”. (PROSE: Good Crieff: The Tribulations of the Scottish Division (2024 reedit))
Prior to joining the Scottish Division, Doctor Know accrued the title of Grand Mayoral Authority of Knowheresville. He also served as “co-writer of the Necronomicon, editor of Necronomics for Dummies”, and “writer of the video essay ‘The King in Yellow is a Bad Play and Here's Why’”. (PROSE: Good Crieff - The Tribulations of the Scottish Division)
Around the beginning of the 20th century, he was headhunted by the Great Higher-Ups, but declined to join their numbers, not wanting it to interfere with his other responsibilities. He would nevertheless later apply to join the Guardians of Time, though his email went without reply. By this time, he was already teaching at the Royal College of Oz as “Professor Nowitall”, living under Monarch Pastoria, in what was then known as the Central City. He grew bored, however, of this fairly stagnant era of Oz's history, and began looking for replacements. Northern Cardinal Gayelette eventually helped him to realise that no living Ozian who would be up to his standards would be likely to want the position, prompting him to create a successor out of whole cloth — or, as the case may be, having dismissed the option of a living scarecrow or a Frankenstein-style construct, out of a clutch of wogglebug eggs that happened to catch his line of sight in a corner of his rather derelict laboratory. Experimenting ruthlessly upon them for decades, he eventually managed to create “Professor Wogglebug”, a sapient, talkative, human-sized wogglebug.
On the day when he finally unveiled the now-adult and fully-educated “Professor H. M. Wogglebug, T. E.”, Doctor Know coyly “told his students that the lecture would be taught by a substitute for the day”. Visible annoyance made way to stark horror as the students caught sight of their new Professor, but “as the lecture started, and the auditorium started to calm down, their reactions quickly switched from grossed out to engrossed. The Doctor had never felt so proud of someone other than himself until that moment…”. He would go on to officially consider Professor Wogglebug his son, often interceding with the monarch of Oz to get him out of trouble. He also home schooled him, passing on his typical verbosity to the creature. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over- There: Tetra-None Hepta-Oct and Doctor Know-It-All Talk it Out) Ozma would later dub him the “Veritable Virtuoso of Macrology”. (PROSE: Good Crieff - The Tribulations of the Scottish Division)
Joining the M.F.S.
A version of Doctor Know-It-All was one of the applicants to join the Multidimensional Finders Service when the Man in Grey conducted job interviews. As the Great Higher-Ups had demanded characters free of copyright, he was initially reluctant to accept him due to his resemblance to “the time-traveller guy”. However, he blackmailed the Man in Grey with photographs of the Man in Black, another being who was surprisingly similar to the Man in Grey, a connection the Man in Grey was apparently keen to keep secret from the Higher-Ups. Doctor Know ended up as one of the finalists, being sent to Scotland to set up the new branch of the M.F.S. alongside Talbot Molossus, the Hydrant and 0000-8888888. (PROSE: Open Sourcing)
Soon after, he attended the Pride party organised by Jenny Over-There and Dynamite Thor in Professor Helvetius's Convenient Pride Decorations Shop; after Jenny contacted him, he was very insistent that Jenny also invite Ozma, to whom Jenny later spotted him talking about apparently unpleasant matters in an alcove out of the way of the heart of the party. (PROSE: A Series of Queer Events (2024 reedit))
In the Scottish Division
After the M.F.S. Scottish Division got settled in its new headquarters in Crieff, Doctor Know installed his eldritch computer in the building. Problematically, no one but him knew how to use it and he was often absent from the office, preferring to spend his time at the coffee shop down the road to the irritation of team leader Talbot Molossus. On one occasion, after Talbot and Tetra tried and failed to use the computer themselves, the Hydrant managed to drag a reluctant Doctor back to the office, where he successfully used his computer to find the current caller's keys, but then immediately made to leave again to go have a sandwich. (PROSE: Good Crieff - The Tribulations of the Scottish Division)
Doctor Know and Tetra gradually developed a rapport. When Dynamite Thor called the Scottish Division asking for the location of “crimes” that he could fight, they worked together to intuit that directing him towards actual petty criminals would not go well for anyone involved, and fooled him into thinking that there were no longer any crimes being committed anywhere on Earth. Later that day, Tetra struck up a conversation with him, for no other reason than that she had foreseen that she would do so. The conversation was interrupted by a phone call from Professor Wogglebug, which simultaneously saw Tetra learning about Doctor Know's relation to the Professor, and the Doctor learning about the Professor's relationship to Doctor Know's own boss, the Man in Grey. Considerably disturbed by these news, Doctor Know made an excuse to quickly hang up, and walked out of the office to process this information. He had left his computer unlocked, allowing an impish Tetra to try the video game he'd been playing on it when she walked up to him. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over- There: Tetra-None Hepta-Oct and Doctor Know-It-All Talk it Out)
Behind the scenes
Although primarily a version of the open-source character Doctor Know, Callum Phillpott's Doctor Know-It-All is also conflated with the preexisting public-domain Oz character of Professor Nowitall, responsible for the enlargement of the Woggle-Bug, as implied in Good Crieff - The Tribulations of the Scottish Division when he mentions being familiar with Ozma, and elaborated upon in Annals of the Jen.
External links
| Incarnations of Doctor Know |
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| 925th Universe |
| Incarnations of Professor Nowitall |
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| 925th Universe |