Fic: Night Travelers
Night Travelers
cast: Andy Davidson -
invisible_lift, Jack Harkness -
xtricks, Owen Harper -
pocketmouse, Ianto Jones -
tea
BETA:
51stcenturyfox
(Prologue), (Part 1: In the Field), (Part 2: Stumbling Into the Past), (Part 3: On Ice), (Part 4: Commandeered by Torchwood)
"Okay," Jack called out, giving Tosh a squeeze on the shoulder as he straightened up from a quick one-on-one with her. "Field trip time, kids."
"Ianto, get the SUV ready, we're out to-" he glanced over at Tosh, brows raised. "Middle-of-nowhere-Wales. In the rain, which is why Gwen and her germs are staying behind to hold the fort with Tosh."
Jack smiled. "It's just us boys."
And a heck of a lot of equipment.
"Middle-of-nowhere as in actual middle-of-nowhere, or middle-of-nowhere because you can't pronounce it middle-of-nowhere?" Andy asked, looking up from his monitor. In fairness, his command of Welsh language and pronunciation wasn't perfect -- Gwen sometimes corrected him on unfamiliar place names -- but it was better than Jack's. "And wait," he asked, perplexed. "What about Tosh? Doesn't she get to come too?"
Owen came up from around the corner in the medical bay, lingering at the edge of the steps. "You realise I'm bringing the extra medical kits," he said, referring to the backpack-sized field kits and the extra-large trauma kit, which took up about a quarter of the SUV's boot and had to be kept in one of those massive tupperware containers. "There aren't any mysterious disappearances, are there, because I can tell you right now I'll sit that one out, thank you."
"Are we talking the countryside, Jack?" Ianto asked. "And how long is this going to take? We won't need overnight equipment, will we?" He hoped not. He hadn't been back to the countryside since the cannibals, and he wasn't sure he could take a night of listening to the sounds of nature and trying not to jump out of his skin at every suspicious noise.
Jack held up his hands. "No. No camping. Promise. Hotels or villages or whatever, at worst." He gave Andy a helpless glance. "Ystrad - Yanstragy - you know I speak twenty-seven different languages," he grouse. He held up a slip of paper.
"We're going near Y-s-t-r-a-d-g-y-n-l-a-i-s. No missing persons, no additional persons, no weevils, cannibals, aliens, tribbles, spaceships or in-laws, just some energy readings."
"Which is why," he continued cheerfully, "Tosh is staying here with the main equipment while we take remote monitors and shovels and bury them in unsuspecting sheepfolds while explaining to Welsh-only-speaking -- and thus you accompany us, Ianto -- suspicious natives that we're only checking the ground water, no trouble at all, thank you very much."
"I think my Welsh can handle it," Ianto said, shutting off the computer and standing up, straightening out his jacket.
Owen raised an eyebrow. "Nice friendly villagers, yeah." He made a sarcastic fist-pump.
"And," Jack winked at Owen. "You can take as much equipment as you like but if the car gets too crowded someone gets to sit on my lap."
Andy balked. "Cannibals?! In Ystradgynlais?! No way. They're all caves and waterfalls and mountains and Eisteddfodau out there."
Checking the ground water? "Natives?" Andy wondered idly if Jack realized that Gwen was from around there. Well, Swansea technically, but close enough. "And bagsie the back seat. No way I'm sitting in Jack's lap.”
"I suppose that means I'm driving, sir," Ianto said blandly. "I'll brew some coffee for the road, shall I?"
"Nope," Jack said lightly, "the Brecons." But Jack wasn't excited by the idea of caves either. Slips and faults in the ground, especially with water, could effect the readings they were getting. "Coffee, please, yes, Ianto. Maps, Tosh?" he asked hopefully and smiled when, as always, she had them ready.
"And, seriously, we have to take a bunch of monitors out so don't get too eager for extra gear." Jack went on. "We all know the Rift isn't behaving the way it... well, usually does. And there's what looks like Rift energy out there. If it's spreading ..." He shrugged. They couldn't stop it, they couldn't control it but they had to at least try and be aware of it. "Yggdrasil - whatever - is too far to patrol but maybe the data there will help us here. It's low-key so probably the worst effects are rains of frogs and the usual."
"I'm not staying in any place that doesn't already have tourists in it," Owen said. He ignored Jack's warning about equipment. If the equipment was that big of a deal, Jack would split them up between the SUV and the lorry again if he had to. Just so long as they weren't going out in tents again, Owen would deal with it. "I hate the countryside well enough without having to worry about being attacked by villagers again."
Andy resisted correcting Jack's utter failure of pronunciation. It wasn't that Ystradgynlais was particularly difficult to say, but one thing Andy had learned since joining Torchwood was to pick his battles. If that meant being one of two fluent (or at least passable) Welsh-speakers, he could excuse Jack's failure to make Cymraeg number 28 on his list of spoken languages. Instead, he began the task of finishing up and saving his work and logging out of his workstation. "Any other equipment that needs getting together? Armory, that sort of thing?" Owen would be prepping first aid, Ianto the SUV. He might as well make himself useful while trying to swallow the idea of cannibals out in the Brecon Beacons.
"Arm yourself well, Andy," Owen said, turning to back down into the medical bay. "The Welsh countryside is a horrible place, and they take no prisoners."
Andy rolled his eyes. "I've been camping before, Owen. I was in scouts." He added 'anti-Welsh prat' to his ever-growing list of things that irritated him about Owen, then turned back to Jack.
"Yeah," Jack said to Andy. "We get to lift heavy things."
"Camping has nothing to do with it!" Owen called up. "I'm just saying. Jack has the luck of the damned, whatever we run into out there, we're going to need serious weaponry. Why do you think I'm packing the portable surgery kit!" Hmm. Perhaps it was time to try out the singularity scalpel again. It was practically working now...
"Hey," Jack objected. "It's not the countryside! I mean we nearly get killed no matter where we are!"
It took about twenty minutes and a good sense of puzzles (or experience smuggling things) to pack the SUV full of everything while leaving room for all the passengers. No one wanted to sit on Jack's lap. He slammed the passenger side door and twisted around to look at Andy and Owen. "Now, no killing each other back there or I'll make Ianto turn this thing back around," he said with a smirk as Ianto buckled in and started the engine.
Ianto leaned over Andy's lap and tucked two portable mugs of coffee in the cupholders in the back seats, before shutting the door and sliding into the front. The other two went between him and Jack, and the thermos of extra coffee -- black, since they couldn't agree on it any other way -- got tucked behind his seat so it wouldn't roll around.
"It's hot," he cautioned. "So don't spill it on anything precious."
Jack cupped a hand over his crotch as he picked up his mug. "I'll be careful of the equipment."
He did up his buckle and listened to Jack chastise the two in the back -- as if he weren't the biggest child of all of them -- and started the engine.
"Ystradgynlais or bust," he intoned, and drove out of the carpark, only the faintest shimmer of worry keeping him from being entirely relaxed.
Andy snorted at the prospect of he and Owen going back and forth at one another like kid brothers in the back seat of the SUV. The sad thing was, he could sort of imagine it. Therefore, he did the only sane thing and brought his PDA out of his pocket. He'd loaded a few old case reports -- including the one about the Brecon Beacons cannibals -- and busied himself reading as Jack drove.
Ystradglynais was less than an hour's drive, after all. What could happen in thirty or forty minutes?
Owen shrugged his shoulders down and leaned against the window. He couldn't exactly sleep on the trip, that would probably get him laughed at more than anything else, but he could make a good approximation of it, staring out the window. The world passing by was grey and chilly, same sky all the way across the horizon. It all quickly blurred together.
Like two cats in a too-small room, Andy and Owen decided the most dignified response to each other's presence was to pretend the other didn't exist. Jack alternated between watching the shifting signals (and Tosh's interpretation of them) as they travelled -- and making up bawdy and outrageous stories about the people in other cars they passed.
"You see," he said cheerfully as he eyed the neighboring car with the blue-haired little old ladies. "This is how I keep in touch with the general public, I try and put myself in their place. Every blue-haired woman I've had sex with has been wonderfully inventive -- it must be a traditional style handed down from mother to daughter."
"Wait, what?" Andy asked, looking up. He'd clearly missed something, or Jack really had just mentioned blue-haired women as a class who passed sexual techniques in the manner of a traditional handicraft. Like weaving or...or woodworking. Woodworking? Oh, Jesus. I'm going to need to brain bleach after this trip.
"I dated a girl with blue hair once. Well, started out blue. Went through a few colors after that."
"Well, then you know what I mean. Blue hair, guaranteed good time." Jack stretched as much as he could in the seat. "Not that I've ever had truly bad sex. Except for that Anithropic orgy ... they really needed to clarify the 'free food afterwards' part of the invitation because I hadn't really planned on being on the menu in quite that way." Jack paused. "Still, the sex wasn't bad."
He was sorely tempted to start asking Ianto 'if they were there yet' but since he didn't really want to get strangled by any of his team today, Jack managed to restrain himself. The signs, though, suggested they were nearly there and they'd left more urban areas behind for very pretty, lushly green, landscape that he eyed suspiciously. He'd never tell Owen but Jack couldn't entirely deny that pretty countryside had lost some of its appeal since the Brecons.
"Here's where we want to end up," Jack unfolded the map onto his lap and pointed out a brief arc of scattered markings where Tosh had pinpointed the suspicious activity. "I think it's at least partly hiking trails."
TBC
This is a sort of early holiday gift for those who follow the role-playing game I admin. It's a transcription of one of the better (possibly best) of the adventures the team has been on. It's been cleaned up as much as possible to make reading easier however, it is not entirely like a standard novel/story; for one thing the POV changes frequently because of the nature of play by post gaming. However, I think the shifts are clear and more-or-less logical and the story is well worth the slightly odd style.
The entire story runs about fourteen chapters and I'll be posting a couple of chapters every few days.