milliways_bar | (no subject)

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As usual, Ianto is sitting at the bar with a cup of coffee and his diary.

If one were to peek over his shoulder, one would see the words, "Today is my birthday" written at the top of today's page.

But one wouldn't do that, would one? It's terribly bad manners.

[tags of smallness: Maj. Evan Lorne, Billy Kaplan.]

[ooc: ~~Work-relate slowtime in effect.~~]

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"Certainly, thank you," he says, taking one.

"I don't know what the Invisible Hand is. Superpowered or otherwise."

"I . . ." He rolls his eyes at himself. "I work for the Torchwood Institute. We protect Earth from alien threats."

Jen is impressed. Protecting Earth from would be marauders is a heroic undertaking, to be sure.

"Adam Smith's invisible hand from The Wealth of Nations. Sorry, probably not the best metaphor to use before 10:00 AM, when all sane people should be busy consuming caffeine and raging impotently at Fox News. I haven't heard of the Torchwood Institute, but that doesn't mean anything, since you might be a covert agency. Do you ever go off planet, or is your scope really confined to just Earth? I ask because there's an organization called S.W.O.R.D. that I occasionally come across with a similar mandate, although they operate almost exclusively off planet."

"So . . . the invisible hand is about economics?" Ianto says, baffled.

He shrugs, expression wry. "Technically we're a special ops unit, but I think we're the worst kept secret in British history.

"I've never been off-planet. Technically we haven't had first contact yet, and certainly mainstream science isn't ready for exploration, let alone defending against attacks."

"I've never heard of S.W.O.R.D. We have a sister organization, UNIT, but they're not explorers, either."

Meanwhile, Jen is sipping her coffee, and finds it to be a mild Sumatran blend, which goes nicely with the food she's ordered. Leave it to Bar to coordinate a meal for her palate.

"People who form organizations like this are very fond of acronyms, aren't they? I'm not surprised you haven't come across S.W.O.R.D. - they're the sister organization to S.H.I.E.L.D., which would be roughly analogous to your Torchwood, except that S.H.I.E.L.D. is everywhere, very explicitly tied to the United Nations, and prone to pulling rank on countries indiscriminately. S.W.O.R.D. and S.H.I.E.L.D. have a propensity for stealthy observation before making contact. Except when it comes to me - then they either want to employ me or put me in a containment unit. That last isn't easy, and it tends to make me angry.

Where does the name Torchwood come from? It sounds like an upscale night club."

"The estate where the institute was founded is named Torchwood. We have--we had four locations until recently, when one was destroyed and another was lost. Er. In the misplaced kind of way.

"The original Torchwood is in Scotland."

"You misplaced a front office? You have my sympathies. Was it time displaced, sucked into an antimatter portal, or abruptly put into another dimension?"

Jen's tone conveys that this sort of thing happens all the time.

"I'm afraid I don't know," Ianto says apologetically. "They just stopped reporting in one day."

"That's awful. I'm very sorry to hear that."

She is sorry. Losing professional associates is hard, especially in an environment where the fervor of and importance of shared mission brings people, no matter how disparate, close together.

Occasionally when agency franchises disappear, they wind up on a pristine beach somewhere in the Kree empire, sipping sangira until Tefral the Surveyor comes along and promptly brings boots them back to Earth.

"So, you work for a not-so-covert Torchwood. Has your Earth verified the existence of alien intelligences, or is this another SETI project?"

Jen's met lots and lots of aliens, some benevolently inclined towards Earth, some indifferent, some hostile, and some a combination of any of the above.

"We know there's intelligent life out there. Most of it, really, is benign: when beings come to Earth they just want a quiet place to settle for a while, or they're explorers getting to know the neighbors.

"Sometimes their intentions aren't so pure. That's where we come in."

"Earth as a quiet place to come and enjoy a leisurely bottle of wine. That's...interesting, and very unusual."

Jen is having a very hard time right now keeping a straight face, because the prospect of anyone thinking of her Earth as a vacation portal is absurdly and hysterically funny. Most aliens arrive, survey, and promptly twist what passes for their faces into profound dismay. Sometimes they even run screaming back to their ships on the way out.

"And how did you find Milliways? Does your organization make use of Milliways, or are you one of the lucky ones that gets singled out for a door?"

"It's a great place to raise a family," Ianto says with a shrug.

"I found a door. So have most of my co-workers. Mine is usually through our archives."

"I first found a door at an upscale Turkish restaurant in New York. Go figure. Serendipity or evil cosmic plan? You be the judge. The doors tend to follow me, although inconcistently. I once found one in the shower on a giant aircraft."

"Sometimes," Ianto says, "I come here when I open the door to a coffee shop.

"Today I was on my way home from work and stopped to get some chips, and what do you know, here I came."

"One of these days I'm going to do a survey of as many bar patrons as I can find, and ask them about their doors - where and when they find them, how long the doors last, etc. - to see if there's any discernible pattern. It would be a completely altruistic and heuristic endeavor for all the people that have told me that their doors alarm and/or frighten them. Patterns are reassuring things, if they're comprehensible"

She eyes him speculatively.

"For someone that's never been off planet, you don't seem surprised at all to meet giant green women."

Ianto shrugs. "I've never been offworld, that's true, but I've seen more species than mere humans."

"Oh, I didn't mean to imply that you're not a seasoned and worldly gentleman," she replies, cheerfully and hopefully reassuring.

"I'm human, by the way. A human with an interesting relationship with gamma radiation, but a human nonetheless."

"You . . . live on it?" Ianto guesses.

"No. I was given a transfusion of blood that was heavily mutated by gamma radiation. That transfusion activated a rare gene - a gene that I possess, along with a select few others - which in turn caused me to gain some strength, stamina, healing ability, muscle mass, and to turn green when I feel in the mood. You could drop the Empire State Building on me and I'd walk away whistling."

This might be the understatement of the last millennium. Or two.

Edited 2008-08-20 01:01 (UTC)

"Blimey," Ianto says. "I'd say sorry but the benefits don't seem that bad."

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