TW-DW Fic: It’s Tinsel Time! - Part 2
Title: It’s Tinsel Time! - Part 2
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Jack, Ianto, Owen, Gwen.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: None.
Summary: Torchwood has a tinsel problem, and it’s getting a bit out of hand…
Word Count: 2568
Written For: m_findlow’s prompt ‘Jack attempts to bring Christmas cheer to the hub. It turns out that tinsel and alien tech don't mix,’ at torchwood_fest 2016.
Beta: My lovely friend milady_dragon. Thanks so much!
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
Part 1
The evening off was exactly what Jack and Ianto needed, excellent food eaten in agreeable company, followed by some innovative, mutually satisfying bedroom fun, and a good night’s sleep. They were both in high spirits when they got up the following morning, but their good moods only lasted until they entered the Hub.
There was tinsel everywhere, twined around every railing or piece of furniture, and if it had looked bushy the night before, now it was nothing short of luxuriant.
“What the Hell?” Ianto stared at the scene in disbelief. Even as he looked on, a shiny pink tinsel strand slithered across the floor in front of him, climbed up a railing, and began to browse on a cluster of yellow baubles that Ianto would swear hadn’t been there yesterday. Wherever he looked, there were more strands of coloured tinsel wandering around, nibbling on baubles and on certain other kinds of tinsel, which seemed to be growing like fruiting vines. “Tinsel trees and living tinsel creatures? Where exactly did you buy your decorations, Jack?” Ianto turned to his lover, a deeply suspicious expression on his face.
“From the stores in the St David’s shopping centre, I swear!” Jack replied, eyes wide and sincere. “They were perfectly ordinary decorations when I got them, not even remotely alien, honest! I didn’t do this, I can’t have! All I wanted was for the Hub to look pretty and festive, and now…” He waved his hands helplessly at the bizarre tinsel jungle before them.
Jack looked so distraught that Ianto couldn’t help but sympathise. He patted the other man’s arm consolingly. “It’s okay, I believe you, but something weird is going on, and we need to get to the bottom of it before the Hub gets completely overrun with tinsel-life.”
Above their heads, the tinsel fluttered and rustled in the gentle breeze from the ventilation system, blowing small, glittering strands to the ground. Some of them, coming to rest in crevices, immediately put out roots and started to grow, like germinating tinsel seeds. Drawing a deep, calming breath, Ianto strode forward, wending his way between the tinsel vines in search of a computer.
He had to tear away some of the ‘foliage’ to get at a keyboard and screen before he could set scans running, and he briefly wished Tosh was there in the Hub instead of thousands of miles away in Japan. Torchwood’s tech expert had far more experience in using the various systems designed to monitor conditions within the Hub than he did, since she’d been the one to create most of them. She could probably compile and analyse the relevant data in less than half the time it would take him. Dismissing his wishful thinking, he concentrated on learning as much as he could about the strange new ecosystem that had taken root in the Hub overnight.
Ianto was concentrating so hard on the information he was gathering, trying to make some sort of sense out of it, that he didn’t even notice the cog door alarms going off. The first he knew of Owen’s arrival was a loud and horrified voice shouting, “Bloody Hell! And I thought it was bad yesterday!”
“Owen, good, glad to see you’re on time for once. We have a bit of a situation here.” Jack had managed to pull himself together a little. He was damned if a bit of living tinsel was going to get the better of him; he was still the boss.
“What the fuck happened?” Owen jumped back with a stifled shriek as a tinsel creature slithered across his foot on its way to forage among the new growth that had sprouted since Jack and Ianto had arrived.
“We’re not sure yet, so I suggest you start taking samples for analysis, and see if you can come up with an explanation for why my Christmas decorations have mutated into new life-forms. This shouldn’t be happening!” The last comment came out just short of a wail.
“No kidding. This place gets weirder by the minute! Right, where’s my desk?” Without waiting for an answer, Owen plunged into the glittery jungle. “Never mind, I’ll find it myself.”
The situation hadn’t improved by the time Gwen arrived half an hour later. If anything, it was worse, possibly because turning the lights on was encouraging a growth spurt. “Mornin’ boys! What’s all this then?” She stared curiously at the transformed Hub.
“For reasons best known to themselves, Jack’s decorations have apparently taken on a life of their own,” Ianto informed her. “We’re trying to figure out what caused it and hopefully find a way of reversing it before Cardiff gets turned into tinsel town.”
“Could be worse, at least the natives seem friendly,” Owen commented, emerging from the jungle with a gold tinsel-snake coiled around one arm. “Far as I can tell, they’re not carnivorous; they only eat the tinsel trees and the bauble-berries. And those are Ianto’s names for them, nothing to do with me,” he added hastily at seeing the amused expression on Gwen’s face.
“So what are the creatures called?” Gwen asked, grinning at Ianto. “They’re sort of cute, in a twinkly way.” She stroked the one wrapped around Owen’s arm, and it rustled softly, rubbing against her hand.
“I’ve just been calling them Twinkles,” Ianto admitted sheepishly, trying to fend off a blue one that seemed to be attempting to mate with his bright pink tie.
Gwen nodded. “Twinkles. Yep, definitely suits them.”
“What I want to know is how to turn them back into my decorations,” Jack said, unhooking the red Twinkle that was determinedly trying to climb his leg, and draping it over the nearest tinsel-swathed railing. “All I did was try to save Ianto a job because he’d been working so hard, and instead I’ve somehow managed to add to everyone’s workload.”
“No one’s blaming you, Jack. This is Torchwood; weirdness just happens,” Ianto assured his lover with a smile. “Admittedly, there’s usually a bit of alien tech we can point to and say, ‘there’s the culprit’, but that’s not always the case. Better get back to work I suppose; this isn’t going to fix itself.” He started to walk away.
Jack nodded, then suddenly looked up. “Wait, Ianto, back up a minute; what did you just say?”
“Better get back to work?”
“No, before that, something about alien tech?”
“Right, because in most cases that’s what causes weird things like this to happen…”
Jack snapped his fingers. “The device!”
“What device?” Ianto frowned at Jack in confusion.
“I forget all about it until just now. When I was putting my decorations in the SUV’s boot, there was already something in there, a containment box…”
Owen facepalmed. “Right! The thing I picked up on that retrieval day before yesterday. I left it in the car while I nipped to the loo, I was goin’ to fetch it afterwards, but then Teaboy said lunch was ready, and I forgot.”
“So this mysterious device might be bringing your decorations to life?” Gwen asked.
Jack shrugged awkwardly. “I don’t know. Maybe?”
“Seems a reasonable assumption,” Ianto agreed. “If it was in the boot with the decorations… Where is it now?”
“I put it on Tosh’s workstation when I came back from shopping and, um, there’s something else…” Jack looked guiltily at Ianto.
“Spit it out, Jack; what did you do?”
“Nothing! At least, not on purpose… I saw the containment unit, and I wasn’t sure if anything was in it, so I opened it, and… when I was examining the device, I might have accidentally dropped it in one of my bags of decorations.”
“Of course you did.” Ianto rolled his eyes.
“Sorry.” Jack drooped. “I guess this is my fault after all.”
“Well, not entirely. It wouldn’t have happened if Owen hadn’t left the thing in the SUV in the first place.”
“Hey! Don’t go blaming me!”
Turning to the medic, Ianto raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”
“I only left it there, I’m not responsible for anything anyone did with it afterwards.”
“That’s a bit of a weak defence, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, well, it’s the only one I’ve got.” Owen scowled at Ianto, arms folded, as if daring him to make an issue of it.
“Can we just wait to decide who’s to blame until we get the situation under control?” Jack asked plaintively. “It’s growing so fast, if we don’t come up with a solution soon, we could wind up trapped down here with no way out! Death by tinsel!”
“You’re right, we need to stay on subject,” Ianto agreed. “Okay, the scans I did earlier were showing strange energy readings; at the time I assumed they were from the tinsel, but maybe they’re coming from your mysterious device…”
“It’s not my device,” Jack insisted.
“Whatever. You said you put it on Tosh’s desk?”
“Yes. I thought you could maybe take a look at it when you found time.”
“I think now would be a good time, don’t you? That is, if I can find Tosh’s desk. The area around the workstations is where the tinsel is thickest. Wish me luck!” Tossing his jacket to Jack and rolling up his shirtsleeves, Ianto plunged into the tinsel jungle.
“Good luck!” Jack called, then he glanced at Gwen. “Maybe I should go with him, for back-up.”
“I’m sure he’ll be fine; he knows the Hub like the back of his hand.”
“Under normal circumstances, sure,” Jack agreed, “but even by Torchwood standards, this isn’t exactly normal.” They waited tensely for several minutes, and just as Jack was about to hand Ianto’s jacket to Gwen and go in search of his lover, the man in question re-emerged, clutching the containment unit in both hands. He was covered in bits of tinsel and had a purple Twinkle coiled around his head, covering one eye like a bizarre pirate’s eye-patch.
“Got it!” he gasped, lugging the box over and plonking it down at Jack’s feet before unwrapping the Twinkle that was obscuring his vision.
“Great! Now what?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Was it switched on when you found it?” They could dimly see small lights flickering inside the containment unit.
“Not that I could tell. The lights only started flashing after I dropped it in with the decorations.” Seeing the long-suffering expression on Ianto’s face, Jack hurriedly added, “It was slippery, alright? I lost my grip!”
“I noticed that when I found it,” Owen agreed. “It was like the surface of it was oily, but as far as I could see, nothing transferred onto my gloves. I checked.”
“Must just be one of the properties of whatever it’s made from.” Ianto snapped open the containment unit and looked at the device. “Right, let’s see what some scans will tell us.” He’d grabbed a few things from Tosh’s desk drawers before returning to the others, and now he unhooked the strap of one of her more sensitive and versatile scanners from around his neck, turning it on and running it over the device. “Huh. According to this, the whole surface except for the buttons and the lights is covered in minute pores, smaller than the human eye can see, and you were right about the oil. It’s leaking out of the pores. From what I can make out, it’s organic but harmless to living organisms. Aside from that, I can’t make head or tail out of these readings.”
“Give that to me.” Owen held out his hand for the scanner and Ianto passed it to him. Everyone remained silent while Owen studied the various read-outs. “I need a medical scanner,” he decided after several minutes, handing Jack the one Ianto had used, since he’d been trying to read it over Owen’s shoulder. Skirting the thickest areas of jungle, the medic made his way down to the medical bay for some of his own equipment, returning a few minutes later. “Alright, I have a possible theory about this thing so let’s see if I’m right.” He took his time over the scans, gathering every bit of data possible, then sat on the bottom step of the stairs leading up to Jack’s office and started scrawling notes on a pad.
While Owen was busy, Ianto went back to his own tests, trying to determine how the device was powered and whether or not it had such a thing as an off switch. Not that he was at all sure that turning it off would do any good now that the damage had already been done. It would be something akin to closing the stable door after the horse had bolted.
There was little that Gwen and Jack could do without getting in the way, so while Gwen played with the Twinkles, who seemed friendly and curious but not terribly bright, Jack mooched about mourning his pretty decorations. Fate didn’t seem to want him to have anything nice, at least not for long. He snapped out of his moping when Owen announced that he thought he had the device sussed.
“You know how to fix all this?” Jack waved at the sparkly indoor jungle.
“Not yet, but I think I know what this device does.”
“Which is?”
“It accelerates evolution on barren worlds, working with whatever’s to hand. It’s a combination of the oil, a complex mix of amino acids, enzymes, and other things I’ve never seen before, and a type of radiation I’m unfamiliar with which seems to fuel the process. When you dropped that thing,” he gestured to the piece of alien tech in the containment box, “in with your decorations, they got smeared with the oil which started to change them into life forms. You handled both the tinsel that had come in contact with the oil, and the stuff that hadn’t, spreading it to everything you touched. The warmth and light in the Hub probably helped things along.”
“But if I infected everything I touched, why haven’t the Hub furnishings come to life as well? Why is it only the decorations?”
“You said by the time you untangled the device from the decorations, there were lights flashing on it?” Ianto asked.
“Yes.”
“Then that was probably when the process was initialised and it was only keyed to the kinds of things it was in contact with when first it came on, in this case your decorations.”
Owen nodded. “Makes a weird sort of sense.”
“Can we stop it?” Jack pleaded.
“I don’t think so.” Owen sounded oddly apologetic, which was unusual for him. “I think now it’s started we just have to let evolution have its way.”
Jack slumped disconsolately onto the steps, head in his hands. “It’ll take over the whole Hub!”
“We might be able to kill it, extreme cold would probably do the trick,” Owen suggested.
“You can’t wipe out a whole new kind of life!” Gwen protested, horrified at the very idea. “It would be genocide!”
“I have to admit I’m with Gwen on this,” Ianto said quietly. “The Twinkles and the tinsel trees aren’t to blame; they’re innocent victims.”
“So what do we do now? If we’re not careful and it gets out of the Hub, tinsel life could take over the entire world!” Owen actually sounded worried.
“I think we need some expert help,” Jack said with a sigh. Pulling out his phone, he placed a call to his oldest friend…
Part 3
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Jack, Ianto, Owen, Gwen.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: None.
Summary: Torchwood has a tinsel problem, and it’s getting a bit out of hand…
Word Count: 2568
Written For: m_findlow’s prompt ‘Jack attempts to bring Christmas cheer to the hub. It turns out that tinsel and alien tech don't mix,’ at torchwood_fest 2016.
Beta: My lovely friend milady_dragon. Thanks so much!
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
Part 1
The evening off was exactly what Jack and Ianto needed, excellent food eaten in agreeable company, followed by some innovative, mutually satisfying bedroom fun, and a good night’s sleep. They were both in high spirits when they got up the following morning, but their good moods only lasted until they entered the Hub.
There was tinsel everywhere, twined around every railing or piece of furniture, and if it had looked bushy the night before, now it was nothing short of luxuriant.
“What the Hell?” Ianto stared at the scene in disbelief. Even as he looked on, a shiny pink tinsel strand slithered across the floor in front of him, climbed up a railing, and began to browse on a cluster of yellow baubles that Ianto would swear hadn’t been there yesterday. Wherever he looked, there were more strands of coloured tinsel wandering around, nibbling on baubles and on certain other kinds of tinsel, which seemed to be growing like fruiting vines. “Tinsel trees and living tinsel creatures? Where exactly did you buy your decorations, Jack?” Ianto turned to his lover, a deeply suspicious expression on his face.
“From the stores in the St David’s shopping centre, I swear!” Jack replied, eyes wide and sincere. “They were perfectly ordinary decorations when I got them, not even remotely alien, honest! I didn’t do this, I can’t have! All I wanted was for the Hub to look pretty and festive, and now…” He waved his hands helplessly at the bizarre tinsel jungle before them.
Jack looked so distraught that Ianto couldn’t help but sympathise. He patted the other man’s arm consolingly. “It’s okay, I believe you, but something weird is going on, and we need to get to the bottom of it before the Hub gets completely overrun with tinsel-life.”
Above their heads, the tinsel fluttered and rustled in the gentle breeze from the ventilation system, blowing small, glittering strands to the ground. Some of them, coming to rest in crevices, immediately put out roots and started to grow, like germinating tinsel seeds. Drawing a deep, calming breath, Ianto strode forward, wending his way between the tinsel vines in search of a computer.
He had to tear away some of the ‘foliage’ to get at a keyboard and screen before he could set scans running, and he briefly wished Tosh was there in the Hub instead of thousands of miles away in Japan. Torchwood’s tech expert had far more experience in using the various systems designed to monitor conditions within the Hub than he did, since she’d been the one to create most of them. She could probably compile and analyse the relevant data in less than half the time it would take him. Dismissing his wishful thinking, he concentrated on learning as much as he could about the strange new ecosystem that had taken root in the Hub overnight.
Ianto was concentrating so hard on the information he was gathering, trying to make some sort of sense out of it, that he didn’t even notice the cog door alarms going off. The first he knew of Owen’s arrival was a loud and horrified voice shouting, “Bloody Hell! And I thought it was bad yesterday!”
“Owen, good, glad to see you’re on time for once. We have a bit of a situation here.” Jack had managed to pull himself together a little. He was damned if a bit of living tinsel was going to get the better of him; he was still the boss.
“What the fuck happened?” Owen jumped back with a stifled shriek as a tinsel creature slithered across his foot on its way to forage among the new growth that had sprouted since Jack and Ianto had arrived.
“We’re not sure yet, so I suggest you start taking samples for analysis, and see if you can come up with an explanation for why my Christmas decorations have mutated into new life-forms. This shouldn’t be happening!” The last comment came out just short of a wail.
“No kidding. This place gets weirder by the minute! Right, where’s my desk?” Without waiting for an answer, Owen plunged into the glittery jungle. “Never mind, I’ll find it myself.”
The situation hadn’t improved by the time Gwen arrived half an hour later. If anything, it was worse, possibly because turning the lights on was encouraging a growth spurt. “Mornin’ boys! What’s all this then?” She stared curiously at the transformed Hub.
“For reasons best known to themselves, Jack’s decorations have apparently taken on a life of their own,” Ianto informed her. “We’re trying to figure out what caused it and hopefully find a way of reversing it before Cardiff gets turned into tinsel town.”
“Could be worse, at least the natives seem friendly,” Owen commented, emerging from the jungle with a gold tinsel-snake coiled around one arm. “Far as I can tell, they’re not carnivorous; they only eat the tinsel trees and the bauble-berries. And those are Ianto’s names for them, nothing to do with me,” he added hastily at seeing the amused expression on Gwen’s face.
“So what are the creatures called?” Gwen asked, grinning at Ianto. “They’re sort of cute, in a twinkly way.” She stroked the one wrapped around Owen’s arm, and it rustled softly, rubbing against her hand.
“I’ve just been calling them Twinkles,” Ianto admitted sheepishly, trying to fend off a blue one that seemed to be attempting to mate with his bright pink tie.
Gwen nodded. “Twinkles. Yep, definitely suits them.”
“What I want to know is how to turn them back into my decorations,” Jack said, unhooking the red Twinkle that was determinedly trying to climb his leg, and draping it over the nearest tinsel-swathed railing. “All I did was try to save Ianto a job because he’d been working so hard, and instead I’ve somehow managed to add to everyone’s workload.”
“No one’s blaming you, Jack. This is Torchwood; weirdness just happens,” Ianto assured his lover with a smile. “Admittedly, there’s usually a bit of alien tech we can point to and say, ‘there’s the culprit’, but that’s not always the case. Better get back to work I suppose; this isn’t going to fix itself.” He started to walk away.
Jack nodded, then suddenly looked up. “Wait, Ianto, back up a minute; what did you just say?”
“Better get back to work?”
“No, before that, something about alien tech?”
“Right, because in most cases that’s what causes weird things like this to happen…”
Jack snapped his fingers. “The device!”
“What device?” Ianto frowned at Jack in confusion.
“I forget all about it until just now. When I was putting my decorations in the SUV’s boot, there was already something in there, a containment box…”
Owen facepalmed. “Right! The thing I picked up on that retrieval day before yesterday. I left it in the car while I nipped to the loo, I was goin’ to fetch it afterwards, but then Teaboy said lunch was ready, and I forgot.”
“So this mysterious device might be bringing your decorations to life?” Gwen asked.
Jack shrugged awkwardly. “I don’t know. Maybe?”
“Seems a reasonable assumption,” Ianto agreed. “If it was in the boot with the decorations… Where is it now?”
“I put it on Tosh’s workstation when I came back from shopping and, um, there’s something else…” Jack looked guiltily at Ianto.
“Spit it out, Jack; what did you do?”
“Nothing! At least, not on purpose… I saw the containment unit, and I wasn’t sure if anything was in it, so I opened it, and… when I was examining the device, I might have accidentally dropped it in one of my bags of decorations.”
“Of course you did.” Ianto rolled his eyes.
“Sorry.” Jack drooped. “I guess this is my fault after all.”
“Well, not entirely. It wouldn’t have happened if Owen hadn’t left the thing in the SUV in the first place.”
“Hey! Don’t go blaming me!”
Turning to the medic, Ianto raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”
“I only left it there, I’m not responsible for anything anyone did with it afterwards.”
“That’s a bit of a weak defence, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, well, it’s the only one I’ve got.” Owen scowled at Ianto, arms folded, as if daring him to make an issue of it.
“Can we just wait to decide who’s to blame until we get the situation under control?” Jack asked plaintively. “It’s growing so fast, if we don’t come up with a solution soon, we could wind up trapped down here with no way out! Death by tinsel!”
“You’re right, we need to stay on subject,” Ianto agreed. “Okay, the scans I did earlier were showing strange energy readings; at the time I assumed they were from the tinsel, but maybe they’re coming from your mysterious device…”
“It’s not my device,” Jack insisted.
“Whatever. You said you put it on Tosh’s desk?”
“Yes. I thought you could maybe take a look at it when you found time.”
“I think now would be a good time, don’t you? That is, if I can find Tosh’s desk. The area around the workstations is where the tinsel is thickest. Wish me luck!” Tossing his jacket to Jack and rolling up his shirtsleeves, Ianto plunged into the tinsel jungle.
“Good luck!” Jack called, then he glanced at Gwen. “Maybe I should go with him, for back-up.”
“I’m sure he’ll be fine; he knows the Hub like the back of his hand.”
“Under normal circumstances, sure,” Jack agreed, “but even by Torchwood standards, this isn’t exactly normal.” They waited tensely for several minutes, and just as Jack was about to hand Ianto’s jacket to Gwen and go in search of his lover, the man in question re-emerged, clutching the containment unit in both hands. He was covered in bits of tinsel and had a purple Twinkle coiled around his head, covering one eye like a bizarre pirate’s eye-patch.
“Got it!” he gasped, lugging the box over and plonking it down at Jack’s feet before unwrapping the Twinkle that was obscuring his vision.
“Great! Now what?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Was it switched on when you found it?” They could dimly see small lights flickering inside the containment unit.
“Not that I could tell. The lights only started flashing after I dropped it in with the decorations.” Seeing the long-suffering expression on Ianto’s face, Jack hurriedly added, “It was slippery, alright? I lost my grip!”
“I noticed that when I found it,” Owen agreed. “It was like the surface of it was oily, but as far as I could see, nothing transferred onto my gloves. I checked.”
“Must just be one of the properties of whatever it’s made from.” Ianto snapped open the containment unit and looked at the device. “Right, let’s see what some scans will tell us.” He’d grabbed a few things from Tosh’s desk drawers before returning to the others, and now he unhooked the strap of one of her more sensitive and versatile scanners from around his neck, turning it on and running it over the device. “Huh. According to this, the whole surface except for the buttons and the lights is covered in minute pores, smaller than the human eye can see, and you were right about the oil. It’s leaking out of the pores. From what I can make out, it’s organic but harmless to living organisms. Aside from that, I can’t make head or tail out of these readings.”
“Give that to me.” Owen held out his hand for the scanner and Ianto passed it to him. Everyone remained silent while Owen studied the various read-outs. “I need a medical scanner,” he decided after several minutes, handing Jack the one Ianto had used, since he’d been trying to read it over Owen’s shoulder. Skirting the thickest areas of jungle, the medic made his way down to the medical bay for some of his own equipment, returning a few minutes later. “Alright, I have a possible theory about this thing so let’s see if I’m right.” He took his time over the scans, gathering every bit of data possible, then sat on the bottom step of the stairs leading up to Jack’s office and started scrawling notes on a pad.
While Owen was busy, Ianto went back to his own tests, trying to determine how the device was powered and whether or not it had such a thing as an off switch. Not that he was at all sure that turning it off would do any good now that the damage had already been done. It would be something akin to closing the stable door after the horse had bolted.
There was little that Gwen and Jack could do without getting in the way, so while Gwen played with the Twinkles, who seemed friendly and curious but not terribly bright, Jack mooched about mourning his pretty decorations. Fate didn’t seem to want him to have anything nice, at least not for long. He snapped out of his moping when Owen announced that he thought he had the device sussed.
“You know how to fix all this?” Jack waved at the sparkly indoor jungle.
“Not yet, but I think I know what this device does.”
“Which is?”
“It accelerates evolution on barren worlds, working with whatever’s to hand. It’s a combination of the oil, a complex mix of amino acids, enzymes, and other things I’ve never seen before, and a type of radiation I’m unfamiliar with which seems to fuel the process. When you dropped that thing,” he gestured to the piece of alien tech in the containment box, “in with your decorations, they got smeared with the oil which started to change them into life forms. You handled both the tinsel that had come in contact with the oil, and the stuff that hadn’t, spreading it to everything you touched. The warmth and light in the Hub probably helped things along.”
“But if I infected everything I touched, why haven’t the Hub furnishings come to life as well? Why is it only the decorations?”
“You said by the time you untangled the device from the decorations, there were lights flashing on it?” Ianto asked.
“Yes.”
“Then that was probably when the process was initialised and it was only keyed to the kinds of things it was in contact with when first it came on, in this case your decorations.”
Owen nodded. “Makes a weird sort of sense.”
“Can we stop it?” Jack pleaded.
“I don’t think so.” Owen sounded oddly apologetic, which was unusual for him. “I think now it’s started we just have to let evolution have its way.”
Jack slumped disconsolately onto the steps, head in his hands. “It’ll take over the whole Hub!”
“We might be able to kill it, extreme cold would probably do the trick,” Owen suggested.
“You can’t wipe out a whole new kind of life!” Gwen protested, horrified at the very idea. “It would be genocide!”
“I have to admit I’m with Gwen on this,” Ianto said quietly. “The Twinkles and the tinsel trees aren’t to blame; they’re innocent victims.”
“So what do we do now? If we’re not careful and it gets out of the Hub, tinsel life could take over the entire world!” Owen actually sounded worried.
“I think we need some expert help,” Jack said with a sigh. Pulling out his phone, he placed a call to his oldest friend…
Part 3