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
The Mandarin, having wanted to play a game with the Entity for a while, arrives in the non-world where the Entity resides,

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

 * 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 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 thought is was rather his prison.
 * The Mandarin tells the Entity that he is in his non-world for a better reason than to admire the decor.

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 comic War-Game previously depicted the Sixth Doctor and Frobisher playing four-dimensional chess.