Maxie Masters

Maxie Masters
Main aliases:	Maxiassa, Maxine Masters
Species:	Gendar
Job:	Tour guide, technician
Affiliated with:	P.R.O.B.E.
Place of origin:	Gendar
Mothers:	Her mothers, her mother
Father:	Her fathers
Sibling:	Her siblings
First mentioned in:	Shadows of Doubt [+]Loading...["Shadows of Doubt (webcast)"]
First appearance:	The Door We Forgot [+]Loading...["The Door We Forgot (short story)"]
Appearances:	see list

Maxine Masters, born Maxiassa, better-known as Maxie Masters, and sometimes thought of as "Maxiassa Masters" by humans who knew her true identity, was a Gendar. Forced to leave her planet after the death of her friend, she took refuge on Earth. Confiding in Giles, the director of P.R.O.B.E., she ended up becoming P.R.O.B.E.'s technician, residing in a room at P.R.O.B.E. HQ and putting her knowledge of advanced alien technology to use as the team's tech support.

Biography

On Gendar

According to one account, Maxiassa had both mothers, fathers, and siblings. She also had multiple friends. (PROSE: She Came From Another World! ^[+]Loading...["She Came From Another World! (short story)"]) According to another account, Maxiassa only had one set of parents, who were both fairly old, and did not intend to have any children. However, they took it well when Maxiassa was born after all. She was an only child, and they doted on her, but were careful not to spoil her. Maxie's mother taught her to "always do her best" when she was three, a lesson she took to heart throughout her life. She was fairly withdrawn and solitary at school, though she claimed not to mind. (AUDIO: Maxie ^[+]Loading...["Maxie (audio story)"])

Maxie grew up hearing tales about the Denaxian death ships and their assassins as a bedtime story. (PROSE: How To Appear Human In Several Uneasy Lessons ^[+]Loading...["How To Appear Human In Several Uneasy Lessons (short story)"])

As a young adult, she worked as a tour guide alongside her friend Tiassia, a job she assumed would be fun. She also never went to university. (PROSE: She Came From Another World! ^[+]Loading...["She Came From Another World! (short story)"]) She gave tours of various extraordinary landmarks of Gendar to alien tourists, for example giving guided tours of Auteur's Babbling Bibliothèque to electromagnetic barnacles.

Although it was not her profession or area of expertise, she sometimes tinkered with electronics as a hobby even then. (PROSE: Out of the Box ^[+]Loading...["Out of the Box (short story)"]) One day, after Maxie and Tiassia accidentally stumbled into a meeting they weren't supposed to, Tiassia was killed and Maxiassa had to quickly flee Gendar, as the individuals in the meeting sought to kill her too; she was only able to grab a duffle bag with a small amount of her belongings, including a computer. (PROSE: She Came From Another World! ^[+]Loading...["She Came From Another World! (short story)","She Came From Another World!"]) According to one account, Maxiassa's fleeing from Gendar had been amidst chaotic, violent events, which would plague her in the form of uncontrollable flashbacks for some time afterwards. (AUDIO: Maxie ^[+]Loading...["Maxie (audio story)"])

Arrival on Earth

Maxiassa's spaceship landed in England. Giles, the director of the P.R.O.B.E., happened to be on holiday in the area, and went to investigate. When she climbed out of her spaceship, Maxiassa and Giles were attacked by Mar'tuth, and she and Giles defeated the humanoid being with mirrors in a nearby branch of Homestyle.

Maxie began disguising herself as a human using hair dye and a pair of sunglasses. (PROSE: The Door We Forgot ^[+]Loading...["The Door We Forgot (short story)"])

Two months later, Giles had arranged a meeting with Sir Andrew Williams and Maxiassa, now going by the name of Maxine Masters and wearing make-up to appear more human, and the three of them agreed that Maxine could gain asylum on Earth on the proviso she worked for P.R.O.B.E. as a technician. She was later met by Giles in her apartment, and Giles got her to repair a trio-disregulator; happy with her natural ability to fix it, he gave Maxine his old job as technician. (PROSE: She Came From Another World ^[+]Loading...["She Came From Another World! (short story)","She Came From Another World"]) According to another account, she spent the following night in a safe house outside central London, which she suspected Giles had previously offered to other alien refugees. She perfected a "human disguise", dyeing her purple hair a less remarkable brown and picking up a pair of sunglasses to disguise her inhuman eye colour. Giles picked her up in the morning to drive her to P.R.O.B.E. HQ, where he showed her her new office.

However, he was called away to go on a mission with the rest of the team, without having finished explaining everything to Maxie. Feeling superfluous and unwanted, Maxie began digging into the computer's archives to see if she could make herself useful. After reading through a lot of past case files, she discovered the records of the case currently in progress, a case of aliens who had hacked into the Secret Services' systems with malware and were blackmailing them. She effortlessly bypassed the malicious software and programmed new protections for the systems, phoning Giles even as he was meeting the aliens to tell her what she had achieved. Realising that he felt as though he'd been patronising her, Giles invited her to an expensive restaurant in London to make her feel more respected as a coworker. In turn, she assured him that she realised not every case would be so easy. (AUDIO: Maxie ^[+]Loading...["Maxie (audio story)"])

Eventually, she moved into a room at P.R.O.B.E. HQ (PROSE: Out of the Box ^[+]Loading...["Out of the Box (short story)"]) and began cataloguing alien artefacts in her office. (PROSE: The Door We Forgot ^[+]Loading...["The Door We Forgot (short story)"]) Shortly after arriving on Earth, Maxie spent some time browsing the human Internet. Giles also took it upon himself to introduce her to various Earth media, including the movie Aladdin and another movie which ended with the Wicked Witch of the West melting. (PROSE: Out of the Box ^[+]Loading...["Out of the Box (short story)"]) She liked playing video games like Super Mario Brothers 3. (PROSE: The Door We Forgot ^[+]Loading...["The Door We Forgot (short story)"])

After initial friction with Agamya Akhtar, Giles also explained human religions to Maxie, who was left rather confused by humans' worship of various contradictory deities whose existence was not a physically-proven fact, in contrast to Gendar's "gods", the Sun Builders, whose existence was a historical certainty whether one wanted to worship them or not. However, she slowly came around to better understanding human spirituality. (PROSE: Out of the Box ^[+]Loading...["Out of the Box (short story)"])

As P.R.O.B.E. technician

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On 23 April 2018, after Giles was alerted to the existence of a Facebook group where London area residents had uploaded videos and reports of several real supernatural events alongside the usual hoaxes, including several cases P.R.O.B.E. itself had worked on. When he noticed credible reports of a poltergeist haunting in Peckham which had not previously been on P.R.O.B.E.'s radar, Giles called on Maxie to find the address of the user who had made the report. After he and Archie MacTavish got back from dealing with the "Peckham Poltergeist", Giles had Maxie delete all footage of P.R.O.B.E. from the Facebook page, but also decided that they should keep an eye on it in case other useful reports surfaced on it. (WC: Peckham Poltergeist ^[+]Loading...["Peckham Poltergeist (webcast)"])

After Archie died, Maxie and Tasha took it in turns to buy Giles breakfast because they were worried about him. (WC: Manchester ^[+]Loading...["Manchester (webcast)"])

On 14 February 2019 Maxie was able to create a concoction to counteract the effect that Stacey Facade had on Giles, then disable Stacey's cloaking device. (WC: Stacey Facade ^[+]Loading...["Stacey Facade (webcast)","Stacey Facade"]) A few months later, Giles asked discreetly for Maxie's help finding out information on the daughter of Sandra and Harry King. Maxie dutifully told him about the basics of the girl's identity, but made it clear that she had readily guessed that Sandra was Giles's estrange sister and Harriet was therefore his niece. The two also discovered that Harriet's boyfriend Jonathan coincidentally had ties to Beltane, an organisation that P.R.O.B.E. had been investigating. (AUDIO: Broken Bonds ^[+]Loading...["Broken Bonds (audio story)"])

On 9 May 2019, the P.R.O.B.E. team investigated reports of a ghost at the London Palladium, which turned out to have been temporal visions transmitted by an Artari Time Projector. As Maxie deactivated and packed up the device, she caught a glimpse of one of the Shadow People; she was initially frightened, and this was her first time encountering the beings, she had not been there a month prior on a mission when the others had seen a large crowd of them at St Thomas's Chapel. However, by the time they returned to the office, Maxie had developed a theory that the Shadow People were essentially harmless "stalkers" peeking through from another dimension. (WC: Shadow People ^[+]Loading...["Shadow People (webcast)"])

In June 2019, after the Jovian Diplomacy Service sent P.R.O.B.E. a mysterious package which turned out to contain a shapeshifting object which turned from a silver dagger into mere water and then an energy weapon, Maxie analysed it with her wrist scanner, instantly realising that its readings were "off the charts", meaning the device was extremely powerful. Further research identified it as the mythical weapon Varunastra. Knowing what she was dealing with allowed Maxie to construct a bulky containment unit meant to stabilise its shapeshifting, although Giles was unsure that the stabilising effect would be entirely reliable. (WC: Varunastra ^[+]Loading...["Varunastra (webcast)"])

Shortly after Az joined the team, the full P.R.O.B.E. team defeated Morch'aliach with the help of Origin Zero and of the time-travelling Ganeida. (PROSE: A Honeycomb of Souls ^[+]Loading...["A Honeycomb of Souls (short story)"])

In November 2019, Maxie spotted one of the items on the high-security "Dr Smith shelf" giving off a flash of green light. After she spoke about it with Giles, he explained that the device was Box, the portable supercomputer of the old director, which had been damaged a few years prior. He allowed her to take Box off the shelf and try to repair her. After she stayed up all night working on the matter, he brought her a cup of cocoa. After she spilled the cocoa on Box, reversing much of her progress, she spent a few days doing field work with Giles and the rest of the team, but soon sank back into the work, which consumed most of her attention.

Agamya Akhtar, with whom Maxie had been having trouble getting along, spoke to her and Giles about her fear that the Box A.I. was malevolent and should not be awakened; although she continued her work, Maxie was rattled by these concerns and ended up procrastinating, working slowly and avoiding any real breakthroughs to delay the possible catastrophe. Eventually, Giles forced her to come along on a mission to Bildbriain Dairies to get her out of H.Q. and help her clear her head. She took Box along, and, after the team found themselves captured by the Greth, Box, now able to communicate through text messages on her screen, convinced Agamya to vouch for her and let Maxie take the risk of fully "freeing" Box, if she thought the possibility of Box saving them was worth the risk. Maxie agreed, bluffing the Greth by playing on her Gendar heritage and getting it to let her connect Box to the internet — though not before ensuring the rest of the team would not overhear her confessing to her nonhuman parentage, which she was still unwilling to share. After Box indeed saved the day, Maxie and Agamya had a talk, agreeing they were friends from now on. (PROSE: Out of the Box ^[+]Loading...["Out of the Box (short story)"])

On 23 November 2020, a cursed DVD, which Giles had bought through eBay under the misapprehension that it was a copy of the rare Doctor X episode Doctor X and the Caverns of Andostar, fried all of P.R.O.B.E. HQ's electronics. It took Maxie two days to repair them completely. In the interim, working from an Internet café, Giles and the others believed they had traced the location of the DVD's seller, and travelled there while leaving Maxie to her work. In their absence, HQ was raided by the seller, who had deliberately sent the team on a wild goose chase; he locked Maxie in her own office and turned the place inside-out until he found his prize, a Nolvox control node. Maxie was released when the others returned from Bedfordshire on 25 November, but was unable to give them any details on her attacker. (WC: Doctor X ^[+]Loading...["Doctor X (webcast)"])

On 9 January 2021, when Liz Haggard unofficially asked for Giles's help in using P.R.O.B.E.'s resources to track down her kidnapped granddaughter Elizabeth Holub, Maxie used her technical know-how to bypass the normal paperwork and procedures for P.R.O.B.E. to access the Ministry of Defence's surveillance feeds. However, she stayed behind when Giles and Liz subsequently drove to Elizabeth's location, Sherwood Forest. (HOMEVID: Sherwood Sorceress ^[+]Loading...["Sherwood Sorceress (home video)"])

On 3 March 2021, Giles had Maxie look over the footage anonymously sent to them as proof that Lauren Anderson was innocent of the slaughter of her colleagues and patients years prior. She found no evidence of the videos being doctored, and she and Giles met up with the source, Lor, who turned out to be none other than Lauren Anderson, who'd been living on the run since being framed. Maxie helped Lor and Giles defeat the love wraith Stacey Facade, who had been feeding off of Lauren, once and for all. (HOMEVID: Lauren Anderson ^[+]Loading...["Lauren Anderson (home video)"]) Soon after, in the days leading up to 10 March, Maxie helped Giles dispose of a murderous interdimensional "Living Fiction" entity inhabiting a film reel, with the two of them trying various method before landing on the idea of simply exposing the film reel to direct sunlight — a weakness both of vintage film reels and of the classic movie vampires that the entity was emulating. (HOMEVID: Living Fiction ^[+]Loading...["Living Fiction (home video)"])

Maxie kept a time detector in her office. With it, she was able to detect Faction Paradox activity in London on 28 March. However, after P.R.O.B.E. came close to cracking the Faction's scheme, the Faction went back in time and stole the time detector from Maxie, preventing her from ever having found out about their presence. Due to her species's sensitivity to time anomalies, however, she got a headache from the temporal manipulation to which she had fallen victim. (HOMEVID: Daylight Savings ^[+]Loading...["Daylight Savings (home video)"])

By 4 April, the whole team was aware of Maxie's nature as a non-human. That day, she was abruptly taken ill; it would later be discovered that this was due to an allergic reaction to pollen of some of the plants recovered by P.R.O.B.E. from Ogden Farm. Fearing the worst, and having no other way of curing her which he was sure would work on her Gendar biology, Giles took the drastic step of injecting Maxie with a dose of Cyberon. Although this did stop the fit and fever, the drug proved far more potent on a Gendar than a human with this single injection being enough for the Cyberon intelligence to completely take over Maxie's body.

The Cyberon drug transfers itself from Maxie to the Cyberon pilot. (HOMEVID: The Only Cure ^[+]Loading...["The Only Cure (home video)","The Only Cure"])

Under the Cyberon's control, "Maxie" slipped out of her teammates' grasp and stole Giles's car to make her escape — this, even though the "real" Maxie didn't know how to drive. The Cyberon directed her to a sewer entrance near Clapham Junction and, from there, to the location of a crashed Cyberon pod which she began to repair. Meanwhile, the rest of the team tracked her down using CCTV footage and followed her to the cavern housing the spacecraft. The Cyberon fluid voluntarily released Maxie so that it could instead transfer itself to the hollow husk of the craft's original Cyberon pilot. Though nearly falling unconscious from the strain of possession and her earlier illness, Maxie was able to advise Giles on how to trigger the Cyberon craft's self-destruct, and the entire team made their escape while the pod and its pilot were destroyed.

After returning to HQ, Maxie was given a check-up by Lauren Anderson, who confirmed she had no Cyberon left in her system and finally identified the original source of her illness. (HOMEVID: The Only Cure ^[+]Loading...["The Only Cure (home video)"])

After the P.R.O.B.E. team investigated Felix Mather starting on 8 May, and discovered that he had become a recluse due to a mysterious aura of "wrongness" which had clung to him ever since his history was rewritten on a grand scale, Maxie pledged to try and engineer a cure for his peculiar temporal condition. Giles was, however, pessimistic about her prospects of succeeding without precise knowledge of the ritual Faction Paradox had used on Mather. (HOMEVID: Ex-President ^[+]Loading...["Ex-President (home video)"])

Appearance

When she first came to Earth, Maxiassa had vivid purple hair that was tied in a ponytail; purple irises; pure white skin, which was whiter than Caucasian; and she had odd bone structure. She had purple blood, and her veins were visible. To blend in better on Earth, she wore brown contacts that covered her irises, dyed brown hair, and a layer of make-up over her visible skin. (PROSE: She Came From Another World! ^[+]Loading...["She Came From Another World! (short story)"]) According to another account, she wore sunglasses to cover up her inhuman eyes. (AUDIO: Maxie ^[+]Loading...["Maxie (audio story)"])

Because Gendar, although humanoid in appearance, had a somewhat different body language from humans', Maxie had some trouble learning how to smile in a way that humans found acceptable; her best attempts, even four years after coming to Earth, were "irregular", "all teeth and no expression". (AUDIO: Broken Bonds ^[+]Loading...["Broken Bonds (audio story)"])

Clothing and attire

Maxie Masters's scanner, which she wore on her left wrist. (WC: Varunastra ^[+]Loading...["Varunastra (webcast)"])

On her final day on Gendar, she wore a grey poncho over a white blouse and pants, with sturdy boots, heavy-duty goggles, and a big satchel. When she went to Sir Andrew Williams two months later, to appear more human, she wore a long skirt and had a purse, as otherwise she would've had no pockets. (PROSE: She Came From Another World! ^[+]Loading...["She Came From Another World! (short story)"])

She usually wore a long coat. (PROSE: Out of the Box ^[+]Loading...["Out of the Box (short story)"])

She wore a scanner on her left wrist. (WC: Varunastra ^[+]Loading...["Varunastra (webcast)"])

Behind the scenes

The Gendar Conspiracy ^[+]Loading...["The Gendar Conspiracy (short story)"], released a year before Maxie's debut in She Came From Another World! ^[+]Loading...["She Came From Another World! (short story)","She Came From Another World!"], featured a brief appearance by a nameless Gendar tour guide. Although the link has never been made explicit, this character may be interpreted as a younger version of Maxie.