milliways_bar | (no subject)

"That's right," he says, pleased as ever when someone knows Wales exists. "And it's lovely.

"I've never been to New Jersey, I'm afraid. I'd never been out of Europe until recently."

"You're not missing much," Liz says dryly over the rim of her coffee cup. "Not when it comes to Jersey. I spend a lot of time out of state."

Doing things like hunting the Gwrach y Rhibyn in the Welsh countryside. She's remembering it more clearly now.

"I'll cross it off my list of potential holiday spots, then.

"What were you doing in Wales, if I may ask?"

"I was on assignment."

Sometimes in Milliways, she'll leave it at that. Outside of Milliways, of course, she'll always leave it at that. But there isn't exactly a need for secrecy in the bar, where most people recognize that ghosts and monsters and the supernatural exist, at least in some worlds, and where Liz's big red boyfriend with horns and a tail runs around openly, as happy as a clam.

Some days, though, Liz doesn't feel like explaining, and she lets it go until she has to detail what exactly it is that she does. You have to gauge your audience, and sometimes, you think they just won't be able to handle it.

Today, she spent four and a half hours pretending to be a run-of-the-mill FBI agent while talking (cajoling, persuading, and ultimately veiled-threatening) a South Dakota county sheriff into allowing her people to perform an unsupervised autopsy. Liz is not a people person, but unfortunately, being the most regular-human-looking member of the three person team, she wound up with the short end of the arguing stick. Today is not one of those days where she wants to hide anything. Ianto, she decides, can handle it.

"There were reports of the Gwrach y Rhibyn starting to take a whole lot of victims," Liz says, matter-of-fact. "We got sent to stop her."

Edited 2010-02-22 06:42 (UTC)

"The Gwrach y Rhibyn," Ianto repeats and starts to smile. "My dad used to tell me stories about her."

Finding out she's real--at least in some reality--does not perturb him.

"Did you catch her?"

Liz is inwardly a little impressed that Ianto managed to understand what the hell she said. She isn't giving herself quite enough credit; while she'll never be a master of the Welsh language and Gwrach y Rhibyn wasn't pronounced particularly well, Liz spent the better part of four days hearing that name incessantly. She doesn't mangle it as badly as she thinks she does.

Ianto and his calm acceptance, meanwhile, rise several notches in her estimation.

She bobs her head. "It took a few days, but we found her." She gives a small, lopsided smile. "She won't be ambushing people at crossroads again anytime soon."

Ianto's Welsh isn't native-speaker good, but he's gotten used to people ~~mangling~~ experimenting with it. "That's good work, there.

"Your job must be a lot like mine. Defender of the Earth."

[ooc: Bedtime for me. Slowtime?]

Edited 2010-02-22 07:01 (UTC)

"For today," she draws the lapel of her suit jacket aside, just enough to flash the gold shield on her belt, "I'm FBI." She drops the fabric and it swings back into place. "But as soon as I don't have to deal with the general public any more, I'm a field agent with the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, which doesn't technically exist."

It is all very bureaucratic.

The look she turns on him is a little bemused, but mostly interested (and a little pleased; Liz loves meeting people who don't so much as blink at what she does). " 'Defender of the Earth'? Is that the official title?"

Edited 2010-02-22 07:04 (UTC)

"Oh, no. Defender of the Earth is just the simplest way to explain it. The official name is the Torchwood Institute, which tells you absolutely nothing, I know.

"And my official title is Administration and General Support, which also tells you absolutely nothing." Not about the coffee, not about the research, and certainly not about knowing where the bodies are buried.

Or, more likely, cyrogenically frozen.

Which tells you absolutely nothing, and also tells you absolutely nothing, he said. It sounds a little familiar. Liz half-smiles. "So," she says, her chin resting in her hand, "then tell me something."

"All right," says Ianto, imitating her pose, "there's a rift in time and space that begins in Cardiff Bay and meanders through the Welsh countryside for we-don't-know-how-many-kilometers, and sometimes, every few days, every few weeks, it opens and objects, creatures, beings sometimes, come through. Our job is to collect the objects, capture the creatures and occasionally protect the beings who come through--or project Earth from them, as necessary."

He sits back. "Is that something enough for you?"

"That's something, all right," Liz says, her bemused smile curving higher, brushing against the fingers pressed to her cheek. "If you take out the space and time rifts and the Welsh countryside, it sounds pretty familiar."

Edited 2010-02-22 21:10 (UTC)

"You don't deal with the outer space aspect of the supernatural much, I take it," says Ianto. "My world gets invaded surprisingly often for a backwater planetoid orbiting an unremarkable yellow star. Usually at Christmas."

Her smile flashes. "Aliens are one of the few things that we haven't had to rack up experience with," she admits. (Unless you count the Ogdru Jahad -- but they aren't aliens, Liz thinks; not really.) "My world runs more along the lines of folk tales and the traditionally spooky. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, fairies, demons." Her mouth quirks. "You know; Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff movies."

"I know the films well.

"You know, I've read true accounts or seen with my own eyes all of those but vampires--but I wouldn't write them off as non-existent. The universe is too strange not to have them, to be honest."

"They're not much like the movies," Liz adds.

"But that's a pretty sensible motto. If it's weird, it probably exists somewhere."

"Otherwise, how would we have come up with it?" Ianto says reasonably.

"Oh, I don't know," she says, a little dryly. "People can be pretty creative. You might be surprised by how many of our assignments wind up being caused by humans somehow."

"Very few of ours do," Ianto says, a bit enviously. He pulls down his collar to show a small, narrow scar on his neck. "Cannibals."

Ianto was almost eaten by cannibals. Your argument is invalid.

Liz's eyebrows go up, then down. "The totally human kind?" she asks. "In Wales?"

That is a new one.

"In Wales. One of the reasons why I'm never going camping again."

"Nothing good ever happens when people go camping," she says, wry.

"Cannibals are a new one for me, though."

"Avoid at all costs," is Ianto's astute advice. "Or go in with considerable more firepower than we did."

Of course, the trip was meant to be an exercise in team-building...oh, good intentions.

Ianto can't possibly understand why Liz laughs at his second sentence, but he will momentarily. She lifts her head out of her hand and keeps her hand up, her elbow still on the bar.

Red-orange-gold flames (blue close to the skin) coil around her forearm with a low whump, racing up and around her arm, turning the rubber bands on her wrist to ash (but leaving her jacket sleeve unscathed), until they dissipate into nothingness -- sinking back into her skin -- from above her fingers. It all happens in a flash and then the heat has gone and her hand shines from within, finger bones backlit like an x-ray.

Within a split second, her skin looks entirely ordinary again, no longer covered in fire or translucent with eerie light. Liz's eyes fade from red-orange back to their normal brown. It gets easier, less nervewracking, to reveal that to someone every time she does it.

"Firepower's not exactly an issue." She brushes ash from her wrist.

Ianto watches this in silent amazement.

"Blimey," he says, awed. "That's brilliant.

"Is it a mutation? Do you come from a race of fire-handler people? Does everybody on your world have powers like that?"