Games (short story)

Games was thirty-fourth Brief Encounters short story published in DWM 192 on 1 October 1992 by Marvel Comics UK and written by Warwick Gray. The story featured the Mandarin, aka the Toymaker, playing four dimensional chess with the Entity, aka Fenric.

Summary
The Mandarin and the Entity play four dimensional chess, and, as the Mandarin realises he is about to lose, strategically plays into a stalemate to prevent the Entity from taking over his body.

Plot
Having wanted to challenge the Entity to a game for a while, the Mandarin arrives in his dimensions and, after agreeing to the stakes, the Entity chooses their contest: four dimensional chess. Shifting into a shadowy version of the Mandarin's appearance, the duo begin their match;

Characters

 * The Mandarin
 * The Entity

The Mandarin

 * Some concepts the Mandarin doesn't understand or know of; these include evil and what a stalemate is.
 * The Entity refers to the Mandarin as a "Magician".
 * The Entity states that while the Mandarin is "beyond death", he is not beyond his reach.

The Entity

 * The Mandarin believes the Entity to be a "curious creature".
 * The Entity is a shapeless, formless black cloud, personifying pure evil. The cloud "throb[s] with a terrible passion".
 * While in the Arabian plains, the Entity went by the name "Aboo-Fenran".

The Entity's domain

 * The grey void where the Entity resides is described as a non-world — "an unimaginative little world — a dimension of shadows and half-lives" — by the Mandarin. While the Entity asserts that it is his domain, the Mandarin contrarily claims that it is his prison.
 * The Mandarin tells the Entity that he is in his non-world for a better reason than to admire the decor.

The Mandarin-the Entity chess match

 * The duo agree on the stakes; if the Mandarin is the victor, the Entity will become his toy, but if the Entity is instead the victor, the Mandarin's body will become the Entity's so he may be free.

Continuity

 * This story is a sequel to the novelisation The Curse of Fenric, as it shows Fenric within the Shadow Dimensions having been trapped their by the Seventh Doctor.
 * This story describes the Shadow Dimensions as a non-world, a piece of terminology later adopted by the Faction Paradox novels The Book of the War and Of the City of the Saved..., which describes the concept as an area of reality linked to the Spiral Politic but without a physical location.
 * The Mandarin states that he was previously known as Toymaker; the Mandarin was known as the Toymaker since his debut in The Celestial Toymaker, with The Nightmare Fair establishing his change of name, however other sources since have reverted back to "the Toymaker".
 * The comic War-Game previously depicted the Sixth Doctor and Frobisher playing four-dimensional chess.