Uninvited Hosts

Cousin Rynde is an unsavoury fellow. He used to be in catering (that rings bells), but now he’s more of a spiv into any sort of dodgy deal. He’s always ready to sell you, under the counter, no questions asked, half a pound of tafelshrew and mushroom sausages that he’s knocked off from the Drudges’ kitchen. Don’t touch them, they’re well past their Best Before date.

Drat, another of the legion of games from Innocet’s compendium, is a card game, probably the Gallifreyan equivalent of the German game Skat.

Wouldn’t I much rather write an Earth-bound story? Well, it certainly hands me a lot of minute detail on a plate. I know, and the readers know the references, rules and social structures for Earth. But I do love filling in the detail of alien societies. That’s where the colour comes from and I can spend far too long getting myself into the right world for a story. I have to be inside it before I can write it. Even then, it still has to be recognisable for the reader. Real alien life could well be so alien that we wouldn’t recognise it as life at all. On tv, we rarely see more than half a dozen woggly creatures to represent an entire race. So most tv alien societies can only be variations on an Earthly theme.

Are the living Houses a complete anathema to everything we’ve ever seen of Gallifreyan culture? I don’t think so. They are a throwback to the beginning of the Intuitive Revelation, which marked the end of the dark days of the Old Time. Like the Looms they house, they were conceived to protect a species threatened with extinction: the Gallifreyans themselves. TARDISes are very much alive; so is the old and battered Hand of Omega, itself a relic from another age. If you looked at the ancient culture of Japan, before it adopted and outdid the invasive culture of the West, you might think it very unearthly indeed. The past is there to be respected, but there’s no point in writing at all if you don’t come up with something new.

The body-bepple is a 30th century extension of tattooing or body piercing, allowing the fashion-conscious to remake their bodies into interesting (and exotic) forms. When Chris first appeared in Andy Lane’s Original Sin, he was aptly beppled into the shape of a giant teddy bear.