Special Unit 3 - Part 3 of 9
Aug. 10th, 2009 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wiseheartTitle: SPECIAL UNIT 3
Author: Soledad
Fandom: Torchwood/Special Unit 2 x-over, with a guest appearance of the Tenth Doctor.
Category: Heavy-duty Gwen bashing and a great deal of silliness.
Rating: G, suitable for all, with the exception of die-hard Gwackers.
Genre: Crackfic, with gender bending, body swap, whatever – the whole nine miles.
Series: none
Timeframe: indefinite. Perhaps “Sleepers”, from Series 2 for Torchwood, but not necessarily.
Summary: Once again, Gwen fumbles around with something she was told not to touch. The consequences are…unusual.
Disclaimer: the usual: don’t own, don’t sue! Everything belongs to RTD and BBC - and UPN, respectively.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
PART THREE: SO, WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO US?
Author’s notes:
Our heroes finally learn the ugly truth – and they are not happy. Also, you can finaly meet the new, "improved" Gwen... who isn't happy, either.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
While Tosh took a thoroughly confused Andy under her wings, promising him to explain everything later, Ianto made coffee – fortunately, the coffee machine remained unchanged, together with the rest of the Hub – and Jack went to look for Gwen and Owen. About five minutes later he came back, carrying a beautiful, long-haired blonde on his arm.
“I haven’t found any sign of Gwen, whatever she might look like at the moment,” he explained, “But found this pretty creature in the morgue, at Owen’s computer, in the company of a lost game. So, I guess this must be Owen. Who’d have thought he could become such a hot girl?”
Ianto sat, crossing his endless legs in a manner that would have tempted a saint and glared at their boss. “Try to make a pass on him, and he’ll break your nose,” he warned. “And so will I, for that matter.”
“I never took you for the jealous type,” Jack said, grinning.
Ianto shrugged, bringing his newly-acquired breasts into the game. “I’m a girl now, Jack. I’m entitled to be a bit more… emotional.”
“We should all be a bit more professional about this,” Tosh said. “Try to wake up Owen, guys; I’ll call up the CCTV footage of the last couple of hours.”
Waking up Owen was the easy part. Keeping him from fainting again and stopping his endless rants proved a lot harder.
“Well, at least we can be sure about one thing,” Jack commented. “Whatever’s happened to us, it’s only changed the appearance, not the personality. As we can all see, nothing has changed in Owen’s sunny disposition.”
“Up yours, Harkness,” Owen scowled, the familiar sour expression looking so strangely out of place on his current lovely, female face. “Can we hope that Tosh will finally move her lazy arse and find that footage, so that we can figure out this disaster and how to reverse it?”
“Mind your filthy mouth, Owen,” Tosh warned, without looking at him. “I’m twice your size now, and despite my looks, I’ll have no problem with hitting a girl if I have to.”
“We can have a chick fight to make time pass more quickly,” Ianto suggested with a bright smile. He, too, was half a head taller than Owen in this incarnation and found the thought of slapping the doctor silly a very appealing one. If there was one thing he had little tolerance for it was rudeness.
Poor Andy, still trying to come to terms with his different shape and looks, was staring at them in open-mouthed shock. How could they joke about… about this thing?
Tosh spun around with her chair and gave Ianto and Owen a disapproving look.
“Stop the hair-pulling, girls,” she said with a newborn confidence that surprised even her; perhaps no longer being the shortest person in the team did help. “It’s TV-time.”
“Cool,” Jack rubbed his hands expectantly; then his face fell, realising he still couldn’t feel a thing with the prosthetic one. Still, he tried to save face. “Ianto, do we have popcorn?”
Ianto raised a superior eyebrow. “I find I have too much class in my current shape to play the teagirl to an elderly man, Captain my Captain,” he replied haughtily. “Besides, I don’t reckon the programme’s gonna be very… entertaining.”
“Okay,” Tosh said, ignoring them with practiced ease,” here we go. Let’s start with your office, Jack.”
The screen came alive, and they could se Jack talking to someone on the phone – presumably to Archie McAlister in Glasgow, as this had been his only phone call in that afternoon. After hanging up, he drank coffee and began to deal with the reports piling up on his desk. Some minutes later, however, he started convulsing with no visible reason, the outlines of his entire body becoming blurred and changing shape. In the end, the image cleared again, and the same large, middle-aged black man was sitting at the desk they had been introduced to a few minutes ago,
“That explains the how,” Ianto commented after a long moment of stunned silence, “But not the why.”
“Perhaps the rest of the records will help,” Jack suggested. “Show us the morgue, Tosh.”
But the footage from the morgue showed a scene almost similar to the first one. Owen was playing computer games – and winning, big time! – until the metamorphosis hit and he became the lovely blonde woman who was now sitting in their midst, with that unbecoming scowl on his/her gentle face. It was really a shame to ruin a face like that with such a sour look.
“Okay, what’s next?” Jack asked.
“The Archives don’t have CCTV surveillance,” Ianto replied, “So my suggestion would be either Tosh or the tourist office.”
“Ummm, guys,” Andy said, speaking for the first time. “I don’t know how to break this to you, but it ain’t a tourist office anymore.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jack snorted. “What else could it be?”
“My impression was that of a dry cleaner service,” Andy replied slowly.
Jack and Ianto exchanged baffled looks. This was the first indication that other than the persons inside the Hub might have changed.
“Show us the shop, Tosh,” Jack said grimly.
Tosh switched to live feed, and they all could see it without a doubt: that which once had been Torchwood’s cover shop was now a small dry cleaner’s, with the proper machines, cloth presses, hangers and all that stuff. There were even freshly cleaned coats and clothes hanging in the back, where the kitchenette used to be.
“It’s a good thing I know so much about stain removal, ironing and the proper pressing of suits,” Ianto commented dryly. “Should we be unable to reverse the changes, I can still run the cover shop. My Dad would be so proud!”
“With those legs?” Jack grinned. “It would be a criminal waste. Okay, Tosh, show us how the changes took place.”
“Coming up,” Tosh switched back to recorded footage, and they could all see Andy, in his full height, wearing his uniform, enter the tourist office. He thumped on the counter to get someone’s – anyone’s – attention and called Gwen’s name repeatedly.
When the metamorphosis hit, the whole shop was filled with thick, white fog, so that they couldn’t really see anything. After the fog had dissipated, the shop had already morphed into the dry cleaner’s, and Andy was having his current size and – admittedly very good – looks.
“Shit!” Jack summarized succinctly. “That was a big fat nothing. This time, we don’t even know how it happened.”
“No, but we can assume it was the same process as by us all,” Tosh replied. “I can show you the footage from my workstation, but…”
“… it wouldn’t give us any more details,” Jack finished. “Show us anyway, just to be sure. We can’t ignore the smallest thing that might be different.”
But Tosh’ metamorphosis hadn’t been any different from that of Jack or Owen, and based on that fact they could be reasonably sure that Ianto, too, had changed in a similar fashion.
“Why the heck don’t we have surveillance down in the Archives anyway?” Owen asked. Ianto gave him an eyeroll.
“Cos all the top secret alien stuff is stored in there perhaps?” he retorted. “It wouldn’t be exactly secret if there were video footage of it, would it?”
“Aren’t we forgetting something?” Andy asked. “Where’s Gwen? What happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” Tosh admitted. “She hasn’t shown up anywhere on the footage.”
“Has anyone seen her shortly before we all passed out?” Jack asked.
“I have,” Ianto said. “When I started packing those artefacts in the storage room away, she was, well, playing with them, as usual.”
“Is she fucking insane?” Jack exploded. “I have explicitly told her not to touch those things. That they were not safe.”
Ianto looked at him in mild exasperation. “And how often did she listen when you told her not to do something? Get real, Jack!”
“Good point,” Jack admitted. “Well, let’s find her. Perhaps she can tell us what she’s done.”
“I’d suggest starting with the storage room,” Ianto rose from his seat with the grace of a ballet-dancer. He seemed to get a grip on the working of his new body – and the effects of it – in a surprisingly short time. Jack found that incredibly sexy.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
They entered the room and looked around for Gwen… or anyone who could be Gwen, considering the circumstances. All they could see at first were the alien artefacts, though, glowing or spinning or flashing on the table.
“Is everything as it’s supposed to be?” Jack asked. He hadn’t had the time to take a closer look at this particular set of stuff yet, which was the reason why everyone but Tosh had been told to stay away from it.
“I’m not sure,” Ianto answered thoughtfully. “Something is… different, but I can’t tell you what it is, not off the top of my head. I’ll need to compare the artefacts with the archive photos in the database. Tosh has made digital…”
He couldn’t finish, however, because a whiny, petulant – although unmistakably male – voice interrupted him.
“Took Jack long enough to send someone to help me. It’s so like him to fool around with some blonde bimbo while a member of his team is in danger. How the hell are you two anyway?”
Looking for the source of that shrill voice, they finally spotted a four-foot-short, squarely built, bearded… creature with collar-length, yellow hair on his unproportionally large head and very short arms. They exchanged baffled looks. None of them had ever seen a creature like this, and that, after all those years with Torchwood, was a lot to say.
On the other hand, the… troll had a wide gap between his large front teeth, and his eyes, while watery blue, were unnaturally wide with overacted emotion. In fact, they seemed in danger to roll off his skull. He was also pouting, which looked fairly ridiculous on that drab face.
“Well, Gwen,” Jack said after a long moment of silence, “it seems you’ve overdone yourself this time.”
“What do you mean?” the strangely-shaped creature now housing Gwen’s consciousness protested. “I didn’t do anything!”
“You were poking around alien tech you’d been told to leave alone,” Ianto corrected. The little troll gave him a baleful look.
“You’re boring, girl! In fact, you sound just like Ianto.”
“Why, thank you,” Ianto replied. “I take that as a compliment. You seem to be right, Jack,” he added, turning to his boss. “The gender-swap apparently doesn’t change the personality.”
Gwen-troll stared at them, her mouth hanging open. “Gender-swap? What are you talking about?”
“You really are a little slow, aren’t you?” Ianto was almost indecently amused by the sight of her desperate – and utterly futile – efforts to understand things. “I am Ianto, and this is Jack. Owen is now a girl, and poor Tosh is an ugly bloke. Oh, and your ex-partner, Andy, is hotter than my Granny Olwyn’s chilli sauce.”
“You’re insane!” Gwen snapped. “There isn’t such thing as a gender swap.
“Isn’t there?” Ianto said with a smug smile that would have looked even better on his true face, but was a thing of beauty nonetheless. “Then why are you a four-feet-tall, bearded little troll now? One that could easily pass under the table?”
Gwen-troll looked from them to the tabletop that was in her eye level now… and passed out unceremoniously.
“What is this whole fainting business again?” Jack groused. “I’m too old and too heavy to carry my unconscious team members around the Hub all day! Can’t you give me a hand with her? She looks small, but believe me, she weighs a ton in this form.”
“Sorry, can’t do,” Ianto replied airily. “I’m still learning how to walk on these high heels, you see. It’s all a question of balance…”
“You were barefoot when I had to carry Owen, and you didn’t help me with him, either,” Jack complained.
Ianto gave him The Eyebrow™. “You insisted on carrying him, so that you could feel him up while he couldn’t punch you in the nose, remember? So stop complaining,” he returned. “There’s no use to deny it. I’ve seen you. So shut up and take Gwen to the others while I get the photos from the database to check out this stuff here… sir,” he added with exaggerated emphasis.
Despite the unexpectedly heavy weight of the Gwen-troll threatening to throw his back, Jack couldn’t suppress a lewd grin. Ianto in dominant mode, regardless of male or female, was sheer irresistibly sexy. It was a real shame that they didn’t have time for that sort of entertainment right now.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Tosh cheered up considerably when she saw Jack dumping the Gwen-troll onto the sofa… and that not too gently. She might be an ugly male geek now, but at least she was still human. What kind of species Gwen had turned into was a complete mystery for her, though. She told so.
“Jack, you’ve travelled through space and time with the Doctor for… I don’t know for how long,” she said. “Have you ever seen an alien like this?
Jack shook his head. “Nope. And I have seen my fair share of them.”
“But I think I have,” Owen said, narrowing his now oh-so-pretty eyes. “I just can’t remember where.”
“On archive photos perhaps?” Tosh suggested,
Owen shook his head, his long, honey-blonde hair flying. “No, I’m fairly sure it had nothing to do with Torchwood. Somewhere else…”
“Where?” Jack pressed. Owen just shrugged.
“I dunno, perhaps in some computer game…” he snapped with his well-manicured, slender fingers. “Of course! She looks like the gnomes in that new Baldur’s Gate computer game. Not clothing-wise, obviously, but the size, the proportions, the features…”
Jack looked at him doubtfully. “Yeah, right. You should examine her thoroughly, though. Take some samples and stuff. We need to know what she is now, genetically.”
Owen gave him a crooked grin. “That might not be easy. These new Baldur’s Gate gnomes have an extremely tough skin and a very dense muscle tissue. My needles would likely break should I try to give her an injection. And I warn you: gnomes are much stronger than they look.”
“...in your game,” Jack said wryly. Owen shrugged again.
“Well, she is unexpectedly heavy, isn’t she?”
“Yeah, but…” Jack was still not buying it.
“That comes from the high muscle density,” Owen explained. “Muscle is always much heavier than simple fat. That’s why it’s so hard to get rid of when one tries to lose weight.”
“Man!” Andy looked at him in naked adoration. “You do know your stuff, don’t you? Smart, as well as pretty. I like that.”
Owen rolled those pretty eyes, annoyed. “Andy, stop hitting at me! I told you, I’m not gay!”
“So?” Andy didn’t seem to see the problem. “Neither am I.”
“Then why are you hitting at me?” Owen asked, exasperated.
“Well, you’re a hot chick now,” Andy said if that would explain everything.
“That doesn’t change a thing!” Owen declared forcefully.
Andy gave him a positively sultry look. “It does, in my book.”
“Arrgh!” Owen threw his hands in the air in frustration. “Someone save me from this hormonally overloaded teenager here!”
“It’s different, being the prey for a change, isn’t it?” Ianto asked quietly, startling them; they hadn’t heard him enter. The fact that he was wearing his spare socks instead of the suicidal boots might have been an explanation.
“Have you found anything?” Jack gestured at the folder in Ianto’s hand.
Ianto nodded. “Possibly. Care to see it, sir?”
“I’d care to see a great many things you have to show,” Jack leered.
Owen rolled his eyes again. He seemed to do that a lot lately. “Do we really have to listen to this? Get a room, you two!”
“Not necessary,” Ianto declared tartly. “I have my standards, and in this current shape – or rather the lack thereof – Jack doesn’t happen to meet them.”
“Hey!” Jack protested. “There’s nothing wrong with my shape!”
Ianto gave him a pitying look. “Jack. Get a grip. There’s no way I’d get intimate with you as long as you aren’t… well, yourself again. Besides, can you imagine what our babies would look like, should you manage to knock me up while we are in these bodies?”
Tosh grinned, and so did Andy – they seemed to have developed an easy understanding in that short time already. Some sort of male bonding perhaps. Owen, however, put his fingers in his ears and groaned.
“So not listening to this!”
Ianto grinned at Jack. “Sir, I believe we should relocate to the storage room… for the peace of Owen’s mind. He seems to be fragile enough at the moment as it is.”
A thrown pillow hit him squarely in the back. “I’ll give you fragile, teaboy!”
Ianto shook his head in mock sadness. “Always with the name-calling. Are you never gonna grow up, sweetheart?”
“Owen!” Jack interrupted the rapidly escalating banter, “Try to examine Gwen anyway. There ought to be a few tests you can run, cos I’m not buying the gnome thing. We’re not in a fantasy game. Tosh, try to figure out more about the game Owen mentioned. Perhaps there is a connection after all, unlikely as it seems. I’m gonna see what Ianto has found.”
“And what should I do?” Andy asked. He hated waiting and being useless.
Jack grinned at him. “Keep hitting at Owen. Perhaps, if you’re persistent enough, he will see the light, after all. I know I would.”
“Yeah, what a surprise,” Owen muttered but went for his med kit obediently. “Have you ever managed to keep it in your pants, Harkness?”
“No,” Jack replied honestly. “What would be the fun in that?”
Owen looked at the ceiling. “Right. Forget I even asked. Just… just find out what happened and how we undo it. Please.”
Part 04: We Are Learning Who We Are
Author: Soledad
Fandom: Torchwood/Special Unit 2 x-over, with a guest appearance of the Tenth Doctor.
Category: Heavy-duty Gwen bashing and a great deal of silliness.
Rating: G, suitable for all, with the exception of die-hard Gwackers.
Genre: Crackfic, with gender bending, body swap, whatever – the whole nine miles.
Series: none
Timeframe: indefinite. Perhaps “Sleepers”, from Series 2 for Torchwood, but not necessarily.
Summary: Once again, Gwen fumbles around with something she was told not to touch. The consequences are…unusual.
Disclaimer: the usual: don’t own, don’t sue! Everything belongs to RTD and BBC - and UPN, respectively.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
PART THREE: SO, WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO US?
Author’s notes:
Our heroes finally learn the ugly truth – and they are not happy. Also, you can finaly meet the new, "improved" Gwen... who isn't happy, either.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
While Tosh took a thoroughly confused Andy under her wings, promising him to explain everything later, Ianto made coffee – fortunately, the coffee machine remained unchanged, together with the rest of the Hub – and Jack went to look for Gwen and Owen. About five minutes later he came back, carrying a beautiful, long-haired blonde on his arm.
“I haven’t found any sign of Gwen, whatever she might look like at the moment,” he explained, “But found this pretty creature in the morgue, at Owen’s computer, in the company of a lost game. So, I guess this must be Owen. Who’d have thought he could become such a hot girl?”
Ianto sat, crossing his endless legs in a manner that would have tempted a saint and glared at their boss. “Try to make a pass on him, and he’ll break your nose,” he warned. “And so will I, for that matter.”
“I never took you for the jealous type,” Jack said, grinning.
Ianto shrugged, bringing his newly-acquired breasts into the game. “I’m a girl now, Jack. I’m entitled to be a bit more… emotional.”
“We should all be a bit more professional about this,” Tosh said. “Try to wake up Owen, guys; I’ll call up the CCTV footage of the last couple of hours.”
Waking up Owen was the easy part. Keeping him from fainting again and stopping his endless rants proved a lot harder.
“Well, at least we can be sure about one thing,” Jack commented. “Whatever’s happened to us, it’s only changed the appearance, not the personality. As we can all see, nothing has changed in Owen’s sunny disposition.”
“Up yours, Harkness,” Owen scowled, the familiar sour expression looking so strangely out of place on his current lovely, female face. “Can we hope that Tosh will finally move her lazy arse and find that footage, so that we can figure out this disaster and how to reverse it?”
“Mind your filthy mouth, Owen,” Tosh warned, without looking at him. “I’m twice your size now, and despite my looks, I’ll have no problem with hitting a girl if I have to.”
“We can have a chick fight to make time pass more quickly,” Ianto suggested with a bright smile. He, too, was half a head taller than Owen in this incarnation and found the thought of slapping the doctor silly a very appealing one. If there was one thing he had little tolerance for it was rudeness.
Poor Andy, still trying to come to terms with his different shape and looks, was staring at them in open-mouthed shock. How could they joke about… about this thing?
Tosh spun around with her chair and gave Ianto and Owen a disapproving look.
“Stop the hair-pulling, girls,” she said with a newborn confidence that surprised even her; perhaps no longer being the shortest person in the team did help. “It’s TV-time.”
“Cool,” Jack rubbed his hands expectantly; then his face fell, realising he still couldn’t feel a thing with the prosthetic one. Still, he tried to save face. “Ianto, do we have popcorn?”
Ianto raised a superior eyebrow. “I find I have too much class in my current shape to play the teagirl to an elderly man, Captain my Captain,” he replied haughtily. “Besides, I don’t reckon the programme’s gonna be very… entertaining.”
“Okay,” Tosh said, ignoring them with practiced ease,” here we go. Let’s start with your office, Jack.”
The screen came alive, and they could se Jack talking to someone on the phone – presumably to Archie McAlister in Glasgow, as this had been his only phone call in that afternoon. After hanging up, he drank coffee and began to deal with the reports piling up on his desk. Some minutes later, however, he started convulsing with no visible reason, the outlines of his entire body becoming blurred and changing shape. In the end, the image cleared again, and the same large, middle-aged black man was sitting at the desk they had been introduced to a few minutes ago,
“That explains the how,” Ianto commented after a long moment of stunned silence, “But not the why.”
“Perhaps the rest of the records will help,” Jack suggested. “Show us the morgue, Tosh.”
But the footage from the morgue showed a scene almost similar to the first one. Owen was playing computer games – and winning, big time! – until the metamorphosis hit and he became the lovely blonde woman who was now sitting in their midst, with that unbecoming scowl on his/her gentle face. It was really a shame to ruin a face like that with such a sour look.
“Okay, what’s next?” Jack asked.
“The Archives don’t have CCTV surveillance,” Ianto replied, “So my suggestion would be either Tosh or the tourist office.”
“Ummm, guys,” Andy said, speaking for the first time. “I don’t know how to break this to you, but it ain’t a tourist office anymore.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jack snorted. “What else could it be?”
“My impression was that of a dry cleaner service,” Andy replied slowly.
Jack and Ianto exchanged baffled looks. This was the first indication that other than the persons inside the Hub might have changed.
“Show us the shop, Tosh,” Jack said grimly.
Tosh switched to live feed, and they all could see it without a doubt: that which once had been Torchwood’s cover shop was now a small dry cleaner’s, with the proper machines, cloth presses, hangers and all that stuff. There were even freshly cleaned coats and clothes hanging in the back, where the kitchenette used to be.
“It’s a good thing I know so much about stain removal, ironing and the proper pressing of suits,” Ianto commented dryly. “Should we be unable to reverse the changes, I can still run the cover shop. My Dad would be so proud!”
“With those legs?” Jack grinned. “It would be a criminal waste. Okay, Tosh, show us how the changes took place.”
“Coming up,” Tosh switched back to recorded footage, and they could all see Andy, in his full height, wearing his uniform, enter the tourist office. He thumped on the counter to get someone’s – anyone’s – attention and called Gwen’s name repeatedly.
When the metamorphosis hit, the whole shop was filled with thick, white fog, so that they couldn’t really see anything. After the fog had dissipated, the shop had already morphed into the dry cleaner’s, and Andy was having his current size and – admittedly very good – looks.
“Shit!” Jack summarized succinctly. “That was a big fat nothing. This time, we don’t even know how it happened.”
“No, but we can assume it was the same process as by us all,” Tosh replied. “I can show you the footage from my workstation, but…”
“… it wouldn’t give us any more details,” Jack finished. “Show us anyway, just to be sure. We can’t ignore the smallest thing that might be different.”
But Tosh’ metamorphosis hadn’t been any different from that of Jack or Owen, and based on that fact they could be reasonably sure that Ianto, too, had changed in a similar fashion.
“Why the heck don’t we have surveillance down in the Archives anyway?” Owen asked. Ianto gave him an eyeroll.
“Cos all the top secret alien stuff is stored in there perhaps?” he retorted. “It wouldn’t be exactly secret if there were video footage of it, would it?”
“Aren’t we forgetting something?” Andy asked. “Where’s Gwen? What happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” Tosh admitted. “She hasn’t shown up anywhere on the footage.”
“Has anyone seen her shortly before we all passed out?” Jack asked.
“I have,” Ianto said. “When I started packing those artefacts in the storage room away, she was, well, playing with them, as usual.”
“Is she fucking insane?” Jack exploded. “I have explicitly told her not to touch those things. That they were not safe.”
Ianto looked at him in mild exasperation. “And how often did she listen when you told her not to do something? Get real, Jack!”
“Good point,” Jack admitted. “Well, let’s find her. Perhaps she can tell us what she’s done.”
“I’d suggest starting with the storage room,” Ianto rose from his seat with the grace of a ballet-dancer. He seemed to get a grip on the working of his new body – and the effects of it – in a surprisingly short time. Jack found that incredibly sexy.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
They entered the room and looked around for Gwen… or anyone who could be Gwen, considering the circumstances. All they could see at first were the alien artefacts, though, glowing or spinning or flashing on the table.
“Is everything as it’s supposed to be?” Jack asked. He hadn’t had the time to take a closer look at this particular set of stuff yet, which was the reason why everyone but Tosh had been told to stay away from it.
“I’m not sure,” Ianto answered thoughtfully. “Something is… different, but I can’t tell you what it is, not off the top of my head. I’ll need to compare the artefacts with the archive photos in the database. Tosh has made digital…”
He couldn’t finish, however, because a whiny, petulant – although unmistakably male – voice interrupted him.
“Took Jack long enough to send someone to help me. It’s so like him to fool around with some blonde bimbo while a member of his team is in danger. How the hell are you two anyway?”
Looking for the source of that shrill voice, they finally spotted a four-foot-short, squarely built, bearded… creature with collar-length, yellow hair on his unproportionally large head and very short arms. They exchanged baffled looks. None of them had ever seen a creature like this, and that, after all those years with Torchwood, was a lot to say.
On the other hand, the… troll had a wide gap between his large front teeth, and his eyes, while watery blue, were unnaturally wide with overacted emotion. In fact, they seemed in danger to roll off his skull. He was also pouting, which looked fairly ridiculous on that drab face.
“Well, Gwen,” Jack said after a long moment of silence, “it seems you’ve overdone yourself this time.”
“What do you mean?” the strangely-shaped creature now housing Gwen’s consciousness protested. “I didn’t do anything!”
“You were poking around alien tech you’d been told to leave alone,” Ianto corrected. The little troll gave him a baleful look.
“You’re boring, girl! In fact, you sound just like Ianto.”
“Why, thank you,” Ianto replied. “I take that as a compliment. You seem to be right, Jack,” he added, turning to his boss. “The gender-swap apparently doesn’t change the personality.”
Gwen-troll stared at them, her mouth hanging open. “Gender-swap? What are you talking about?”
“You really are a little slow, aren’t you?” Ianto was almost indecently amused by the sight of her desperate – and utterly futile – efforts to understand things. “I am Ianto, and this is Jack. Owen is now a girl, and poor Tosh is an ugly bloke. Oh, and your ex-partner, Andy, is hotter than my Granny Olwyn’s chilli sauce.”
“You’re insane!” Gwen snapped. “There isn’t such thing as a gender swap.
“Isn’t there?” Ianto said with a smug smile that would have looked even better on his true face, but was a thing of beauty nonetheless. “Then why are you a four-feet-tall, bearded little troll now? One that could easily pass under the table?”
Gwen-troll looked from them to the tabletop that was in her eye level now… and passed out unceremoniously.
“What is this whole fainting business again?” Jack groused. “I’m too old and too heavy to carry my unconscious team members around the Hub all day! Can’t you give me a hand with her? She looks small, but believe me, she weighs a ton in this form.”
“Sorry, can’t do,” Ianto replied airily. “I’m still learning how to walk on these high heels, you see. It’s all a question of balance…”
“You were barefoot when I had to carry Owen, and you didn’t help me with him, either,” Jack complained.
Ianto gave him The Eyebrow™. “You insisted on carrying him, so that you could feel him up while he couldn’t punch you in the nose, remember? So stop complaining,” he returned. “There’s no use to deny it. I’ve seen you. So shut up and take Gwen to the others while I get the photos from the database to check out this stuff here… sir,” he added with exaggerated emphasis.
Despite the unexpectedly heavy weight of the Gwen-troll threatening to throw his back, Jack couldn’t suppress a lewd grin. Ianto in dominant mode, regardless of male or female, was sheer irresistibly sexy. It was a real shame that they didn’t have time for that sort of entertainment right now.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Tosh cheered up considerably when she saw Jack dumping the Gwen-troll onto the sofa… and that not too gently. She might be an ugly male geek now, but at least she was still human. What kind of species Gwen had turned into was a complete mystery for her, though. She told so.
“Jack, you’ve travelled through space and time with the Doctor for… I don’t know for how long,” she said. “Have you ever seen an alien like this?
Jack shook his head. “Nope. And I have seen my fair share of them.”
“But I think I have,” Owen said, narrowing his now oh-so-pretty eyes. “I just can’t remember where.”
“On archive photos perhaps?” Tosh suggested,
Owen shook his head, his long, honey-blonde hair flying. “No, I’m fairly sure it had nothing to do with Torchwood. Somewhere else…”
“Where?” Jack pressed. Owen just shrugged.
“I dunno, perhaps in some computer game…” he snapped with his well-manicured, slender fingers. “Of course! She looks like the gnomes in that new Baldur’s Gate computer game. Not clothing-wise, obviously, but the size, the proportions, the features…”
Jack looked at him doubtfully. “Yeah, right. You should examine her thoroughly, though. Take some samples and stuff. We need to know what she is now, genetically.”
Owen gave him a crooked grin. “That might not be easy. These new Baldur’s Gate gnomes have an extremely tough skin and a very dense muscle tissue. My needles would likely break should I try to give her an injection. And I warn you: gnomes are much stronger than they look.”
“...in your game,” Jack said wryly. Owen shrugged again.
“Well, she is unexpectedly heavy, isn’t she?”
“Yeah, but…” Jack was still not buying it.
“That comes from the high muscle density,” Owen explained. “Muscle is always much heavier than simple fat. That’s why it’s so hard to get rid of when one tries to lose weight.”
“Man!” Andy looked at him in naked adoration. “You do know your stuff, don’t you? Smart, as well as pretty. I like that.”
Owen rolled those pretty eyes, annoyed. “Andy, stop hitting at me! I told you, I’m not gay!”
“So?” Andy didn’t seem to see the problem. “Neither am I.”
“Then why are you hitting at me?” Owen asked, exasperated.
“Well, you’re a hot chick now,” Andy said if that would explain everything.
“That doesn’t change a thing!” Owen declared forcefully.
Andy gave him a positively sultry look. “It does, in my book.”
“Arrgh!” Owen threw his hands in the air in frustration. “Someone save me from this hormonally overloaded teenager here!”
“It’s different, being the prey for a change, isn’t it?” Ianto asked quietly, startling them; they hadn’t heard him enter. The fact that he was wearing his spare socks instead of the suicidal boots might have been an explanation.
“Have you found anything?” Jack gestured at the folder in Ianto’s hand.
Ianto nodded. “Possibly. Care to see it, sir?”
“I’d care to see a great many things you have to show,” Jack leered.
Owen rolled his eyes again. He seemed to do that a lot lately. “Do we really have to listen to this? Get a room, you two!”
“Not necessary,” Ianto declared tartly. “I have my standards, and in this current shape – or rather the lack thereof – Jack doesn’t happen to meet them.”
“Hey!” Jack protested. “There’s nothing wrong with my shape!”
Ianto gave him a pitying look. “Jack. Get a grip. There’s no way I’d get intimate with you as long as you aren’t… well, yourself again. Besides, can you imagine what our babies would look like, should you manage to knock me up while we are in these bodies?”
Tosh grinned, and so did Andy – they seemed to have developed an easy understanding in that short time already. Some sort of male bonding perhaps. Owen, however, put his fingers in his ears and groaned.
“So not listening to this!”
Ianto grinned at Jack. “Sir, I believe we should relocate to the storage room… for the peace of Owen’s mind. He seems to be fragile enough at the moment as it is.”
A thrown pillow hit him squarely in the back. “I’ll give you fragile, teaboy!”
Ianto shook his head in mock sadness. “Always with the name-calling. Are you never gonna grow up, sweetheart?”
“Owen!” Jack interrupted the rapidly escalating banter, “Try to examine Gwen anyway. There ought to be a few tests you can run, cos I’m not buying the gnome thing. We’re not in a fantasy game. Tosh, try to figure out more about the game Owen mentioned. Perhaps there is a connection after all, unlikely as it seems. I’m gonna see what Ianto has found.”
“And what should I do?” Andy asked. He hated waiting and being useless.
Jack grinned at him. “Keep hitting at Owen. Perhaps, if you’re persistent enough, he will see the light, after all. I know I would.”
“Yeah, what a surprise,” Owen muttered but went for his med kit obediently. “Have you ever managed to keep it in your pants, Harkness?”
“No,” Jack replied honestly. “What would be the fun in that?”
Owen looked at the ceiling. “Right. Forget I even asked. Just… just find out what happened and how we undo it. Please.”
Part 04: We Are Learning Who We Are
