Dog Hop (audio story)

 was the seventy-fifth story in the Torchwood - Monthly Range by Big Finish Productions. It was written by Lauren Mooney and Stewart Pringle.

Publisher's summary
Andy Davidson has stumbled across the last proper pub on Cardiff Bay. Sticky carpets, cut-glass mirrors, eccentric regulars and absolutely no food. He gets chatting to the bar manager Nia, who has a strange tale to tell. A tale about bizarre experiments on the local dog population, about booze-hounds transplanted into real hounds.

And the weirdest thing is, Andy might be starting to believe her.

Plot
Andy is injured by a collapsing fence whilst chasing a shoplifter and is tended to by Nia, the acting bar manager of the Red Lion. He returns with money to pay for the repairs after apologising to Sandra, who owns the Rejuven8 Yoga and Health Spa next door, and enjoys a normal night of drinking with Dick, Ken and Mary. Afterwards, Nia confides in him that she believes that Col, the landlord, has switched bodies with Rollo, a dog, and he looks into her predecessor, Tony, who has disappeared. The police have no record of him being reported missing.

Dick fails to appear at the pub as usual and a dog visits instead, which Nia and the regulars believe has swapped bodies with him. Mary and Ken steal a number of dogs from the park as they believe them to be Tony and other missing people and Andy has Col taken to the hospital when he starts barking. Nia informs Andy that all of the missing people had been to Rejuven8, which she speculates is experimenting with mind transference with the aim of making people immortal, and that she has kidnapped Sandra after a botched break-in.

Andy tells Nia that she has made up this conspiracy because she is a bored and lonely writer of speculative fiction, which she realises is the truth. Sandra decides not to press charges so long as her clinic is not bothered by noise from the Red Lion and Andy parts ways with Nia, but the bodies of the missing people start to wash up with scorch marks on their temples and Andy wonders if Nia was right. He is unable to get in contact with her for some time and learns that the Red Lion has been sold to Sandra to expand Rejuven8.

When Andy visits the pub in the hopes of seeing Nia, he finds her wearing a different style of clothes than usual, using a different accent and forgetting the names of her regulars. She tells him that she is going to work at Rejuven8 and he becomes suspicious, starting to believe that Nia's mind has been put in the body of Fifi, a small dog which barks at him.

Cast

 * Andy Davidson - Tom Price
 * Nia - Zadeiah Campbell-Davies
 * Ken - Gareth Armstrong
 * Dick - Howard Ward
 * Mary - Lissa Berry
 * Sandra - Leah Marks

Worldbuilding

 * Col is the landlord of the Red Lion.
 * Sandra Baines runs Rejuven8.
 * Andy asks for a flat white.
 * Margaret was Dick's wife.
 * Mary drinks Irish cream and cognac.
 * Tony McKinnon is an alcoholic.
 * Nia mentions Jodie Foster.
 * The toilets at the Red Lion have air slicers.
 * Rebecca works in missing persons.
 * Nia went to university.
 * David Lannock is a twenty-year-old student who went missing on 23 October.
 * Nia writes speculative fiction.
 * Linda Eaves is a beautician.
 * Mike takes Sandra to the hospital.
 * Mary's sister lives in Rhyl.

Continuity

 * Andy mentions that he has a friend who is a specialist in strange phenomena. (TV: Everything Changes, etc.)