Episode 11: The Eye of
Madness
The
Master is back! Coming from yet another
alternate timeline, trapped in our continuum by the Dissonance, the Doctor’s
nemesis is now intent on becoming the sole Master of Time… which, of course,
implies the destruction of all other Time Lords! Following the shutdown of Gallifrey’s and
Avalon’s Eyes of Harmony, Lady Penelope and the Corsair must track the
power-mad arch-villain through the vortex… The chase is on – but Time is
running out!
Episode 12: Scar(ed)y Cats
Following
her brush with the Master and his Cybermen allies, still awaiting news from
Avalon, Lady Penelope lands her TARDIS in Ulthar, the out-of-time city of her
friends the Greflings. She soon learns that something
dark and very nasty is threatening the very existence of the adorable
Quantum Cats… a menace known as the Kitlings!
A tale of secret origins and feline paradoxes, featuring yet another
ancient, half-mad Time Lord renegade!
Episode 12 gave me the
opportunity to indulge into some retcon fun about the Catkind (e.g. Brannigan,
the Sisters of Plenitude etc.) and one of my earliest creations for the
campaign, the Greflings, also known as the Quantum Cats.
The Greflings
The Greflings are friendly
(if insatiably curious) creatures who look exactly like Sphynx cats (you know,
the hairless ones) – fully intelligent cats with the power to wander at will
through space and time, slipping and sneaking through dimensional interstices;
they also have the power to track virtually anyone or anything through the
vortex and are irresistibly attracted by paradoxes and other temporal anomalies
(as well as by TARDISes, who see them as pesky pests and simply DON’T want them
aboard).
The Greflings have been around in Lady Penelope’s Odyssey from the first season (they initially appeared in Episode 4, The City of Chimeras, set in 1920s Paris). I introduced their home of Ulthar during Season Eight (how time flies) and finally had the opportunity to reveal their origin story in Season Thirteenth. Here are their quick & dirty stats:
Attributes: Awareness 4, Coordination 4, Ingenuity 4, Presence 2, Resolve 2, Strength 1
Skills: Athletics 2, Convince 2, Knowledge 2, Subterfuge 4
Good Traits: Keen Senses, Vortex (“the Whisk”), Lucky (side-effect of the Whisk), Run for Your Life, Sense of Direction (on a cosmic level), Feel the Turn of the Universe, Networked (Minor), Face in the Crowd (actually a form of mild psychic/sensory cloaking, making them “unnoticeable” as long as they keep quiet - except by people with Feel the Turn of the Universe, Alien Senses and other perception-enhancing abilities)
Bad Traits: Tiny (Major), Insatiable Curiosity, Cowardly (but adorable)
Their leader, the Grand Grefling, has a Presence and a Resolve of 4, as well as the Psychic and Telepathy traits.
A Convoluted Origin
For quite some time now,
I’ve had the idea that these adorable creatures were somehow descended from the
ferocious, wicked Kitlings – the teleporting, scavenging black cats from Survival.
In “Scar(ed)y Cats”, I was finally able to do this idea justice (in case you
were wondering, the Greflings are the scaredy cats, while the Kitlings are, of
course, the scary ones). So what happened to the Cheetah People and the
Kitlings after the end of Survival?
As hinted in the last
images of the episodes, the Cheetah People “found a new home” – but nothing is
said about the fate of the Kitlings, with which the horse-riding, hunting
felines clearly had a deep symbiotic bond… I decided that the two species were
somehow separated from each other – because every existing Kitling had been
captured by some mysterious force (more on this below).
For the first time in their
history, the Cheetah People were alone; cut off from the symbiotic influence of
the Kitlings, they quickly changed, as the “Cheetah virus” in their blood adapted
itself and its effects to their new, more peaceful surroundings; over a few millennia,
they gradually lost their more feral instincts (killing for fun, hunting
humanoid preys etc.) while still retaining their other feline traits, evolving
into (you’ve guessed it) the Catkind from the 10th Doctor era! I even allowed myself a small improvisational
luxury by suggesting that the commitment of the Catkind in the order of the
Sisters of Plenitude could be a way of atoning for the savage past of their
ancestors, of showing humans and other sentient species that Cat persons were
nice, trustworthy and altruistic, the best healers (as opposed to the best
hunters) in the universe.
But what happened to the
Kitlings, you ask? Right after the
events of Survival, they were captured en masse by a crazy Time Lord (using their
own teleportation powers to lure them into a trap) who wanted to experiment on
them – to “improve” them, in all senses of the word, i.e. to refine their unique
abilities, boost their intelligence and suppress their feral instincts... Why
he wanted to do this remains a mystery – perhaps the mad renegade was simply
experimenting for the sake of scientific curiosity or perhaps he wanted to
create the ultimate feline pet for style-conscious time travelers. Who knows?
Anyway, after many genetic,
psychical and quantic manipulations (involving, among other things, a deliberate
sequence of partially-controlled Blinovitch Effects), he finally managed to
transform the last Kitlings into the first Greflings. And their transition from
black cats to hairless ones coincided, of course, with the complete suppression
of their feral, nasty side.
But the first Greflings,
blessed with their dimension-walking powers (they call it “Whisking”), quickly wandered
away from the abode of their Creator, who probably forgot about them (he was
absent-minded like that) before eventually annihilating himself after a
catastrophically failed experiment into time paradoxes… When the Quantum Cats
returned to what they perceived as their home (a strange, somewhat
sinister-looking mansion house located Somewhere Out of Time), they found that
their maker had left them forever. They named the place “Ulthar” and went on their
curiosity-driven expeditions through time and space, meeting Time Lords and
other Highly Interesting Things along the way.
Sources
The basis for the concept of the Greflings was simply the phrase "Quantum Cats" - I hadn't seen Survival back then! When I discovered the Kitlings, well... it was too beautiful a coincidence to ignore!
The name “Ulthar” is of
course taken from the City of Cats in Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories. As for
the mad Time Lord who became the Greflings’ mythical Creator, I had first toyed
with the idea of using the Seventh Doctor himself but for various reasons I
finally settle for my own version and reinterpretation of a more obscure
character – Astrolabus, from the Sixth Doctor graphic novel Voyager.
