Maxie Masters
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, 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
Maxiassa's parents were both fairly old, and did not intend to have any children, although 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 3, 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 She was fairly withdrawn and solitary at school, though she claimed not to mind.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)
As a young adult, she worked as a tour guide alongside her friend Tiassia. (PROSE: She Came From Another World!) 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) 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 (PROSE: She Came From Another World!) amidst chaotic, violent events, which would plague her in the form of uncontrollable flashbacks for some time afterwards. (AUDIO: Maxie)
Arrival on Earth
Maxiassa's spaceship landed in England. Giles, the director of the Preternatural Research Bureau, 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.
Two months later, Giles had arranged a meeting with Sir Andrew Williams and Maxiassa, now going by the name of Maxine Masters, 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. (PROSE: She Came From Another World) 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)
Eventually, she moved into a room at P.R.O.B.E. HQ (PROSE: Out of the Box) and began cataloguing alien artefacts in her office. (PROSE: The Door We Forgot) 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) She liked playing video games like Super Mario Brothers 3. (PROSE: The Door We Forgot)
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)
As P.R.O.B.E. technician
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After Archie MacTavish died, Maxie and Tasha took it in turns to buy Giles breakfast because they were worried about him. (WC: Manchester)
On 14 February 2019 Maxie was able to create a concoction to counteract the effect that Stacey Facade had on Giles. (WC: 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)
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)
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)
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) 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)
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' sensitivity to time anomalies, however, she got a headache from the temporal manipulation to which she had fallen victim. (HOMEVID: Daylight Savings)
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.
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)
Appearance
Maxie originally appeared humanoid, but with purple hair, eyes, and blood. Her skin was completely white. (PROSE: She Came From Another World, AUDIO: Maxie) However, after her arrival on Earth, she started dyeing her hair brown and using sunglasses to cover up her inhuman eyes. (AUDIO: Maxie) This disguise was refined over time, with Maxie taking to wearing contact lenses to make her eyes brown, and wearing a layer of makeup to adopt a less noticeable human skin tone. (PROSE: She Came From Another World) She usually wore a long coat. (PROSE: Out of the Box)
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)
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