Tabby Cats And Time Lords (short story)
Tabby Cats And Time Lords was a short story printed in The Player's Manual of FASA's The Doctor Who Role Playing Game. It was not itself a role-playing story to any degree, instead serving as an example of a typical DWU adventure that might inspire players of the Game. The story featured Anthony Ainley's Master while starring an original companion/Time Lord pair as protagonists: cat burglar Tabby C. Fellowes and the Celestial Intervention Agency field agent Alistanathcalebiviteth, or simply "Stan".
Publisher's summary
The story that follows deals with two typical characters that might be found in The DOCTOR WHO Role Playing Game. One of these characters is a Gallifreyan Time Lord, and the other is a human companion. The story illustrates various parts of the character creation rules, as well as other rules from this game. Players are urged to begin reading the story, and when a shaded section in italic type occurs, to turn to the next chapter (and following chapters) to create their own characters or to see how their characters could be involved in game actions. After each section of the character creation rules in the next chapter, there is an instruction to return to this story for an introduction to the next step. After players have created one character, it will not be necessary for them to read this story again… unless they happen to encounter one of the characters while on an adventure!
Plot
Cat burglar T. C. "Tabby" Fellowes's heist targeting a mysterious mask being exhibited in a museum goes awry when she bumps into a strange man stepping out of an antique phone booth. The man carelessly activates the alarms, and Tabby reluctantly helps him "escape", not listening to his protests about wanting to just go back to his "TARDIS". The man claims to be an alien time-traveller, and gives his name as the cumbersome "Alistanathcalebiviteth", which Tabby decides to shorten to Stan.
With Stan bluffing his way past a security guard, the two make their way out of the building, and back to Tabby's apartment. Stan first finds its austere, cheap furniture disappointing before she reveals that this floor is a decoy to avoid being conspicuous as a thief, and shows him her "Playroom", a secret room full of high-tech equipment and trophies of her and her late father's heists. As he comes up in the conversation, Tabby explains that her father was recently killed while in prison. He wasn't imprisoned for his actual activities as a burglar, but on "trumped-up drug charges" brought against him by Kevin Chaney, the mysterious owner of the mask, in revenge after Fellowes tried to steal it. Meanwhile, Stan explains that the mask is an alien artefact which leeches the mental energy of the people around it, which the Time Lords thought they had destroyed a long time ago.
They return to the museum, armed with Stan's ultrasonic electron diverter, which can deactivate all electrical devices within a certain radius. There, they are confronted with "Kevin Chaney", whom Stan recognises as an infamous criminal of Gallifrey: the Master, wielding not only a Tissue Compression Eliminator but also an ultrasonic induction gun which heats metal up at a distance but is harmless to living tissue. Tabby manages to startle him with a thrown dagger, and the two rescuers struggle against the villain, with Tabby managing to use the ultrasonic induction gun on the mask while the Master is wearing it, forcing him to take it off and thus surrender his main edge in the fight. Injured, he is forced to flee back into his TARDIS (disguised as an iron maiden), though not before grazing both Tabby and Stan with a misfired T.C.E. blast.
Stan, mask in hand, staggers back to his TARDIS, followed by Tabby, who is startled by the ship's dimensional transcendentalism as it finally sinks in that everything Stan told her about his background was true. He finally collapses, mortally wounded, but, before a startled Tabby, regenerates into a much younger man. Though annoyed that he lost his first body so young, Stan instantly jumps back to business, saying goodbye to Tabby as he plans to return to Gallifrey to hand the mask over to his superiors.
Three weeks later from his perspective, but mere moments from Tabby's, his TARDIS rematerialises in the same place and Stan steps out to explain that following his success in this mission, his superiors have assigned him as a permanent field operative. His first task is to recover another artefact from another evil maniac, in "a piddling little place in the Greater Magellanic Cloud". He uses the fact that her burglary skills might be useful as an excuse to invite an overjoyed Tabby aboard as a permanent companion.
Characters
Worldbuilding
- Tabby is the daughter of "Black Cat" Fellowes, who was already a burglar and taught her everything she knows. He was stabbed to death during a prison yard brawl after being set up by Kevin Chaney.
- Stan swears "by Rassilon" and "in the name of Time".
- When Tabby derisively asks Stan if is a Martian, he haughtily answers "Do I look like an Ice Warrior to you?".
- Tabby derisively refers to herself as Glinda the Good Witch, of Oz. Stan misunderstand this as "Gulindavagoodavish".
- Stan belongs to the Arcalian College.
- Stan was present when Cheops, a pharaoh who controlled "the whole Nile Valley", built the pyramid. He tried to convince him to treat the workers better, but he wouldn't listen, up until revolts occurred.
- After Stan tells Tabby that he's slightly under 400 years old, she refers to him as an "outer-space Methuselah".
- Tabby is 20 years old.
- Stan dismissively states that television was "the ruination of every civilisation that ever invented it".
- Stan's TARDIS takes the form of a phone booth. The Master's, having a working chameleon circuit, takes the form of an iron maiden to be inconspicuous among the museum artefacts.
Continuity
- The Master is infamous on Gallifrey as a criminal. (TV: The Five Doctors)
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