The Discontinuity Guide
The Missing Adventures

Managra

September 1995

(Features the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith between Planet of Evil and Pyramids of Mars.

Author: Stephen Marley

Editor: Rebecca Levene

Roots: There are references to Shakespeare's Henry VIII, Richard II, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and Romeo and Juliet. There are references to Charon the Ferryman, Michaelangelo's The Last Judgement, the Bible, Milton, Brillo pads, Hildegard von Bingen, Roger Corman's film adaptation of The Pit and the Pendulum, Room 101, Frankenstein, Childe Haroldes Pilgrimage, Don Juan, the Brothers Grimm, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, the Richard Lester Three Musketeer films, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (translators worn in the ear), the Malleus Maleficarum, the Zohar, Countess Dracula, John Dee, Kelley, Sir Galahad, Malory's Morte d'Arthur, Wordsworth, Sartre, Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, Agincourt, and Gorgons.

Dialogue Disasters: 'Cat lick your heart' makes for an irritating vampiric catch phrase.

Dialogue Triumphs: Byron on Sarah: 'Running near-naked through the Vatican. A shameless Diana of the chase. An honest slut. I approve.'

'What you lack in wit you compensate for in superficiality.'

Sarah indignantly tells Byron, 'I won't be anyone's plaything at any price', to which the poet casually replies, 'I would money for old rope.'

'Go back home to your graves and nobody will get hurt.'

'Never overlook the obvious but people do, with tiresome regularity.'

Technobabble: Plenty, including pseudo-sentient themoplasmic soma-seekers which home in on target DNA. Mary Shelley's sword is a monomolecular pe.

Continuity: The Mimic was an entity that copied what it saw and repeated what it heard. It had no mind of its own. It wandered aimlessly onto Gallifrey, where it absorbed the planet's secrets. Rassilon expelled the Mimic into the Vortex, where it drifted until drawn to Castle Bathory. The Mimic was drawn to Earth in Castle Bathory when Elizabeth Bathory made a pact with a far more terrible being [one of the Great Old Ones? see All-Consuming Fire, Millennial Rites], where the Managra creature (an anagram of Anagram), a faint reflection of the Mimic, shadowed Pearson back to England. It sought in Pearson, who in turn had sought immortality from Countess Bathory, a thinking host. The Doctor describes Managra as a by-product of the Mimic, but still powerful enough to warp the Earth to the last syllable of recorded time. Francis Pearson was a playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare. He wrote thirty works, including Three Gentlemen of Venice on a Killing Spree, Edward II's Horrible End, Vampires: the Froth and the Frenzy, The Adventures of Macbeth's Head, The Blood, The Horror and the Countess, Third Ghastly Tale of the Black Forest, The Man Who Sold His Ears to the Devil, and Thirteenth Night, all of which were lost in a blaze in 1610. He wrote The Adventures of Macbeth's Head in 1603. He wrote The Blood Countess of Transylvania in 1612, two years after the blaze, inspired by the events that he witnessed at Castle Bathory. He burnt down the Globe theatre out of jealousy for Shakespeare on 29th June 1613 and disappeared, transported to Europa in the thirty-first century by Managra. He became united with Managra, becoming the composite entity Persona (an anagram of Pearson) and adopted the name Doctor Sperano (another anagram of Pearson) and became the Dramaturge, producing and directing his lost plays for the Theatre of Transmogrification. Persona intends to transmogrify the population of Europa into shapes that it can play with.

A cult on Gallifrey celebrated a ritual called Thirteenth Night once a year and practiced a form of theatre called Mimesis, which allows the user to rewrite reality. Mimesis was developed on Gallifrey. Because of the nature of Managra, mimetic art states that anyone that looks upon Managra becomes what he or she sees.

Denizens of Europa include several versions of Tomas de Torquemada, three versions of Byron (Mad, Bad and Dangerous Byrons), Cardinals Borgia and Richelieu (one Richelieu killed off all the others so that he is unique), two versions of Casanova, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Alistair Crowley, Johann Faust, Paracelsus, Cagliostro, various Cyrano de Bergeracs, Marquis de Sades, Goethes, Mozarts, Beethovens, Tchaikovskys, Metternichs, Leonardo da Vincis, Emily Brontes, and the Four Musketeers. Most of these are Reprises, clones based on the DNA of the originals and programmed with facsimile memory lattices. The databank from which these memory lattices are created is called the Chronopticon. One Byron (Dangerous Byron) was cloned from the real Byrons hair, another from his toenail. Mad Byron is a vampire; Bad Byron rarely leaves the Villa Diodati and is obsessed with sadism. Reprises of fictional characters are based on actors who have played them on film; in the case of the Four Muskateers, these are Michael York, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, and Richard Chamberlain. Other fictional Reprises include Lawrence Olivier's Heathcliffe and the entire cast of Poldark. Victor Frankenstein has been Reprised from a man of that name who once lived on the Rhine and encoded with a composite Frankenstein personality drawn from the novel and several films. The Torquemadas are cloned from a lock of hair from the original, although it accidentally got burned in a thurible meaning that no more Torquemadas can be made. The majority of Europa's population however is natural-born, with the Reprises forming only a minority. The Catholic Church Apostolic and the Holy Inquisition rule Europa from the Vatican. The Vatican has a Heretic Alarm, which involves plasmic extrusions in the forms of gargoyles shrieking the word HERETIC! very loudly. Torquemada immerses the Doctor and Sarah in blood, which the Doctor describes as semi-liquefied haemogel, possibly Aldeberan in origin. Parts of the Vatican are semi-organic.

The Undead are persecuted throughout Europa, except in Transylvania, even though many of them live happily on Black Pudding. Vampirism is compulsory for inhabitants of Transylvania. The Ipsissimus order of vampires are the fiends of the Nosferatu breed and are all descended from Lord Jake and Lady Madelaine, who arrived from space (see Goth Opera). Jake and Madelaine were destroyed by Jonquil the Intrepid in the twenty-fourth century. Ipsissimus Vampires have detachable shadows and cannot be destroyed with stakes if moonlight casts a shadow on them at the time; they continue to exist as shadows that are as deadly as the original vampire. Nachzehrers and Neuntters are differeny groups of vampire; the latter are plague-bearers. Tree ghosts are arboreal psychic parasites, described by the Doctor as Necrodryads.

The Doctor is intending to take Sarah to Shalonar when he mistakenly arrives in Europa. He has never visited Europa before, but knows of it by reputation. He can see through cloaking-fields. He carries a needle and thimble and a flute. In addition to his jelly babies, he also carries liquorice allsorts. When asked if the Master is an enemy, he describes him as an adversary, adding that the Master is his own worst enemy. The Doctor survives being stabbed in the middle of his chest by the Reprise of Mary Shelley. He still has nightmares about the events that took place in Castle Bathory (see Unrecorded Adventures). He knows how to use Mimesis and has inured himself to its effects.

Sarah visited the Sistine Chapel on a tour in 1971. She wears a black bikini here, having been promised a trip to a Shalonarian beach, and is later forced to don a black cassock and white cotta. She speaks some Latin. She had childhood friends named Billy and Julie. Her parents died in a car-crash when she was a child, after which she went to live with her Aunt Lavinia in Morton Harewood (K9 and Company). She viewed the Third Doctor as a sort of vague father figure, but considers the Fourth to be more of a mad uncle. She fancies Michael York. She knows of the Master, despite not having met him (see The Five Doctors). Captured by the Dramaturge, she is dressed in an orange gown bordered with white lace and briefly convinced that her name is Shara.

Breaking into the TARDIS, the Pope's men find both the primary and secondary console rooms (see The Masque of Mandragora).

Links: The Overcities are mentioned (Original Sin). There is a reference to E-Space (Full Circle, State of Decay, Warriors Gate). The Doctor mentions the Meddling Monk (The Time Meddler, The Daleks' Master Plan) and Cybermen.

Location: London, 29th June 1613; and Europa, 3278.

Future History: Jung the Obscure was a twenty-third century theorist who published his theories in the Eiger Apocrypha.

Colonists from the Overcities, signaling the inception of the Europan era, remodeled Vatican City in the 31st century. They were dubbed the Concocters, and the founding of Europa The Great Concoction. One of the Concocters was Persona. The Concocters created three Switzias, four Rhines, six Danubes, and dozens of Black Forests. They also raised new Alps, and created several Lake Comos, Lake Genevas, Lough Neaghs and Seines. There is a second Mediterranean, which exists partially in the Dimensions Extraordinary. The new Vatican is ten to twenty times bigger than the original and hovers in the air like an Overcity. Europa is reconstructed on the site of the original Europe and is inhabited by ghosts, vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and other grotesques spawned from old European folklore. Psychotronic engineering created the various supernatural denizens of Europa. The psionic, psychotronic, chronoptic and trans-dimensional technology used came from Gallifrey, via Managra and originally from the Mimic. Europa is divided into Dominions, which roughly map to the original European countries. Each Dominion is designed according to a specific time zone and to maintain integrity technological inventions are considered taboo and anachronism is illegal. Pope Lucien is supposedly murdered in 3278, a period that the Doctor refers to as the High Dogmatic period, but substituted himself for a clone in readiness for this. It is forbidden for a Reprise to become Pope by the Nicodemus principle of the Seventeenth Gospel, drawn up c3218; the wily Richelieu manages to overturn this rule, becoming the next Pope. There is an official Anti-Church, ruled by an official Anti-Christ. Mechanical horses are the major export of Britannia Edwardiana. Polyglots are micro-translators worn in the ear. The Vatican bans all Elizabethan and Jacobean English drama, including the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Jonson and Webster.

Unrecorded Adventures: The Doctor was present at the trial of Elizabeth Bathory in the Castle Bathory, possibly during a time when he dropped Sarah off on Skye for a couple of days. He spent some time at the castle and seemingly played a role in the terrible events that took place there, where he encountered and defeated the being summoned by Elizabeth Bathory. He became aware of the simultaneous presence of the Mimic and witnessed the departure of its reflection, Managra, in pursuit of Pearson. He witnessed the destruction of the Globe theatre and saw Pearson fleeing the scene, having shadowed him from Castle Bathory for months.

The Doctor is an old friend of the original Lord Byron; they once sat in the Parthenon and the Doctor gave him a critique of a poem that he hadn't yet written. The Doctor, trying to jog Byron's memory, mentions a little episode with the five oranges and the purple handkerchief and the misplaced nostrum. They also once chatted in the Villa Diodati. The Doctor has also met the original Tomas de Torquemada twice, once in Toledo, and seven years later in Avila, where Torquemada died. During the latter meeting, a personification of death was involved. The Doctor performed in Macbeth with Shakespeare when it opened at the Globe Theatre, playing the part of the Doctor (see The Empire of Glass). He claims that he once met a man who wore a hat inside his head. He has met the original Percy Shelley.

The Bottom Line: Combing European folklore, theatre, and a host of characters both historical and fictional, Managra is completely bonkers. Marley manages to juggle both horror and farce with equal skill, making Managra not only one of the most literate Missing Adventures (and a splendid novel in its own right) but also one of the wittiest. Magnificent.

Discontinuity Guide by Paul Clarke