Not Quite Expected

OneWhoSitsWithTheTurtles

Story: Torchwood based. Not based around any specific episode or season.

Rating: T for Teen, though it might be upped later.

Relationships: Slight Jack/Gwen, slight Tosh/Owen, later Jack might be paired with someone else, I'm not entirely sure as to how it'll end up. Though this'll have romance, it won't be the priority, and I can't guarantee this'll end with the same relationships it starts with. If you don't like it then feel free to leave at any time.

Disclaimer: I do not own the Torchwood characters or ideas, etc, and I do not plan on ever making money out of this. It's all for good fun. The only character I really own is one of the main characters who has been wandering my mind asking (more like screaming) to be put down in a story for ages now.

Summary: Everything's normal in Torchwood (or as normal as Torchwood can be) when the team picks up a possible threat. What they first think is nothing more than a common alien turns into something they weren't quite expecting.

Hope you enjoy, this is my first Torchwood fan fiction. I can't promise I'll update all the time as I'm busy with my final year of high school and busy with university stuff, but I'll do my best to get it done. Also I'll try to keep the OOC down to as little as possible, we'll see how it goes. Feel free to review; they are honestly the highlights of my day.

Chapter 1

"Would you shut off that damn beeping?" Owen glowered at Tosh from across the tops of the computer screens with his hands clamped over his ears. The alarm had been going off for nearly six hours now, on and off, and if it wasn't shut off soon he was sure he would murder someone.

"You'd think that after six hours of telling me to do that I would have if I could! So just sit down and shut up while I try to get to the manual shut off," Tosh shot back as her fingers flashed over the keyboards.

"You mean we've been listening to that beeping for hours and only now you're trying to get to the manual shut off?" Owen stormed over to the computers. He may not have been a computer genius but if worse came to worse he knew where the frying pan was. That would shut the damn computer up.

"I already tried the manual shut off, and the backup. Now I'm trying to access the primary coding for the backup manual shut off and…" she was distracted for a moment as she got through another layer of the coding. Looking up again, she noticed Owen returning with a frying pan in both hands, raised over his head, "drop the frying pan right now!"

"Not a chance, Tosh! Now step back and let the master do his work," he took a few steps towards the computers but was tackled to the floor from the side. The frying pan skidded away out of reach and Owen turned over to see who had so rudely interrupted his genius plans.

Ianto was already back on his feet and straightening his tie by the time Owen focused on him, and was off to make more coffee by the time Owen was on his feet again. He threw a glance towards where the frying pan had landed but was disappointed to see it snatched up again. Taking slow and deliberate steps towards Tosh in an attempt to intimidate her, he reached out towards the frying pan as she took hesitant steps back against the computer desk.

Owen wrapped his hand around the handle of the pan above where Tosh's hand was and pressed himself against her into the desk. Her eyes closed, as he knew they would, and while distracted he pulled the frying pan from her grasp. He danced out of reach and waved the pan around mockingly.

With Ianto nowhere to be seen and Tosh temporarily unfocused, Owen raised the frying pan over his head, about to bring it down when he heard the cog door clatter open. With a classic deer-caught-in-the-headlights expression, he froze and watched Jack hold the cog door open and close it once more once Gwen was inside. Jack met his eyes from across the room and quirked an eyebrow before sauntering over and removing the frying pan from his grasp.

Gwen returned a few minutes later with earplugs that had been conveniently missing during the hours Jack and Gwen had been gone. She handed a pair to Tosh and Owen, though it was unnecessary as the insistent beeping turned off ten minutes later. Everyone removed their earplugs with a sigh of relief and Ianto returned with coffee.

"So what was that about?" Jack inclined his head in the direction of the frying pan that was now resting on the floor.

"The damn alarm wouldn't shut off and Tosh and Ianto were being useless about turning it off. I was about to do it myself but I was stopped by force," he slumped back into a chair and sent a glare at each Torchwood team member in turn.

"It wasn't our fault! Something was altered in the alarm system so it wouldn't shut off unless what originally set it off disappeared. Unfortunately, the source decided to stay for a while," Tosh defended herself, trying to hide her hurt over Owen's accusations.

"Tosh and Ianto get on that; we don't want to have to listen to that alarm for hours on end every time something comes through the Rift. Once the alarm is fixed we'll try to figure out what set it off in the first place," Jack said while fiddling with his coffee mug.

"No luck then?" Ianto asked from his seat on the edge of the couch.

"None. Gwen and I went to each place with Rift activity that was setting off the alarm but there was nothing around when we got there and no traces that anything had been there at all," the Captain looked at each member of his small team, eyes lingering on Gwen last.

Blushing slight, Gwen tried to ignore Jack's eyes and continued, "We'll have to check the scanner and pinpoint the exact locations and how long the source was there. The places we checked out were rather unusual for aliens to be active in: a shopping mall, a park, an ice cream parlor, and two bars."

"Owen you check on Janet to see if she's acting differently, see if she might be sensing any new weevils about. Everyone else try to get that alarm fixed, the locations mapped and get the source possibilities narrowed down," Jack called out as he made his way back towards his office.

He looked out of one of the windows down into the Hub for a few moments, watching Owen move towards the lower cells and the others huddle around the computers in order to attempt to make some progress. Smiling into his coffee mug, Jack turned back towards his desk. He pulled on his ear in an attempt to stop the ringing from the alarm that had been echoed through his comm. as he and Gwen traveled the city in hopes of finding the source of the alarms.

Whatever it had been was going to be trouble if it didn't slip back through the Rift on its own. Grimacing at the thought, he set his coffee down on the desk and moved to the vaults. After a short time of fiddling through a multitude of locks he sat down with a small binder-sized screen in his hands. He swept the random items littering his desk aside and set the alien artifact down carefully before turning it on.

A low hum, one that was much more pleasant to hear in the background than the beeping of the alarm filled the office. Biting his lip in concentration, he pressed a few buttons until an aerial view of Cardiff was displayed on the screen. Next he placed his comm. on the top right corner of the screen. A few moments passed until a blue-ish light twisted its way through the map of Cardiff; the Rift. When they had found this alien technology it had originally been very useful for tracking things that had recently passed through the Rift. But after too much use in a short time Tosh had become unable to part from it. Deeming it dangerous despite its usefulness, Jack had locked it away.

Now he looked down at the map of Cardiff and the pale blue light that twisted through it. What he noticed after that were the streaks of the same blue mist spread around the city. The screen usually showed a trail of the object or alien that had gone through the Rift, Jack assumed incase the aliens of this technology lost something by accident while traveling, but the smudges on the screen weren't showing a trail at all.

It was as if whatever came through the Rift kept passing back through the Rift and ending up in different places for short amounts of time before moving to a different place. This could become a big problem as it would weaken the Rift if it was overused, making it easier for more things to fall through, but it would also make it damn challenging to catch whatever this thing was.

He transferred the image on the screen to his Vortex Manipulator temporarily before turning off the screen and returning it to its home in the vaults; he didn't want it running any longer than it needed to be. After taking a few minutes break to sip his coffee thoughtfully, he returned back downstairs to find the other four squished around the main computer yelling instructions to each other, effectively drowning each other, and any useful suggestions, out.

Jack sat back on the couch and watched in amusement since none of them had noticed his return. Just when the yelling and bickering was growing tiresome and he got up to swat them all on the back of the head, Tosh gave a yell of triumph and navigated through the new screen that was presently displayed. He heard Owen and Ianto muttering back and forth about who had been the one to come up with the working idea but noticed Gwen pushing away her chair.

He smiled up at her when she turned and moved over on the couch for her to join him, which she obviously did. They sat in compatible silence watching the others until the computers had been fully restored and then chatted quietly while Tosh uploaded all the information that was now accessible and the other two males left the computer to go about their business.

After such a hectic morning things were winding down nicely, which hadn't happened in quite a while with all the Rift activity they had been picking up. In late afternoon, Jack called everyone to the meeting room from their respective corners of the Hub. Tosh plugged in her laptop while the others huddled around the table. Finally there was a chime indicating a successful connection and Tosh began explaining her findings.

"The only thing that could have scrambled the computers was whatever came through the Rift today, though we still don't know what that is or how it did so. I've put up some additional firewalls and believe there won't be any more problems with the alarm," she began.

"Was anything corrupted or tampered with when the computers were infected?" Jack asked after giving a quick glance to the laptop in front of him.

"Not that I can find which is really odd. I mean, why hack into the computers if you don't want to destroy anything? The only thing it did was alert us of the source more…insistently, which couldn't have helped whatever the thing was in the end." Everyone nodded their heads and Owen snickered something under his breath. "Anyways, I have locks on the exact locations that they showed up and how long they were there, but it's either a lot of them coming through at different times or one keeps disappearing and reappearing. Either way, it trips the alarm and keeps it on for the entire time it's traceable."

Tosh clicked the mouse a few times and a map with red dots filled the screen on the wall. "Now, from 7:54am to 8:03am the alien or aliens were at the Little Almond Bar on Cheshire Street. I'm assuming since the bar was closed at this time it just moved around and left. Next time it set off the alarm was at 8:25am and stayed around until 10:17am in the Lakeshore Park."

As she read out the times and places, black writing filled the screen with the same information next to the red dots in order. "After that the alarms were quiet until 11:42am and only stayed on until 12:02pm, when the thing was at Mr. Macer's Ice Cream Parlor on the corner of Mayflower and Maple."

"Ah, I remember that hour of silence," Owen chimed in while Tosh was taking a breath. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, a look of peace crossing his face as if he were remembering a long past holiday at the beach.

"Yes…well it returned soon after and was at the Dragon's Keep, a local bar in the south part of town that's meant for people taking off lunch from work. More like a restaurant bar than a club bar so it was open when it went. It stayed there from 12:13pm to 1:32pm, reappeared at the Medire Shopping Mall at 1:47pm and disappeared until now at 2:21pm," Tosh concluded, the final bit of information added to the screen.

"So are there any connections between times or locations?" Ianto asked from his seat, squinting at the map in an attempt at finding a pattern. Gwen was doing likewise, pulling out and dusting off her old police knowledge.

"None that I or the computer can weed out," Tosh shook her head, "and that's all the information we have."

"Not quite," Jack said as he stood up and moved towards the laptop. After connecting his Vortex Manipulator he pulled up the second map on the screen.

"Jack! You used that alien screen, didn't you?" Gwen asked accusingly from across the table.

"Not to worry, Gwen, I didn't use it for long. I was careful," he met everyone's eye to confirm this before turning back the screen. "Now, as we remember from before this line going through Cardiff is the Rift. The other smudges are the same places that the computers picked up but it shows that it didn't travel around a lot. This could mean that it might be able to use the Rift to travel around," he explained to the team.

There was silence for a few moments as everyone grasped the concept. Gwen was the first one to speak, "Well that can't be good."

"You think?" Owen shot at her.

"So what are we going to do, Jack?" Tosh fidgeted with her shirt while watching the Captain for orders.

"Our best bet is to wait for the thing to reappear and then go after it before it disappears again. First thing we need to do once we find it is to capture it and block off its link to the Rift before it rips a new hole in it, which is the last thing we need. So, everyone grab your sleeping bags and get ready for a campout, we could be here a while," Jack stood up with his hands on the desk.

Before he could say anything else, Ianto finally looked away from the screen, "Where was the sixth place the thing turned up again?"

"There were only five places it showed up; the bars, the ice cream parlor, the park and the shopping mall," Gwen listed off the places she and Jack had visited that day as the new locations continued to spring up.

"Well there's a sixth smudge on the map now only it's making a line," he said matter-of-factly and pointed at the screen behind everyone. They turned as one to see what Ianto was talking about. There, near the bottom corner of the map was a brighter blue smudge, the brightness indicating newer connection with the Rift than the other smudges that had begun to fade throughout the day. Also, instead of there being a small circle of area similar to the others, it was turning into a line, showing a direct trace of the pathway the thing was taking. Jack also noted that the blue colour faded quickly as the thing moved, meaning that its connection to the Rift was waning and was apparently unable to travel through it anymore.

"Okay everyone, saddle up. We need to get to that thing before it gets to anyone else and before it figures out how to reconnect with the Rift and disappears on us. We can hope that the connection is permanently going since it didn't set off the alarm, which only goes off when things related to the Rift shows up, but that's calling for a lot more luck than we usually have. I want everyone's best work; we need to be fast and efficient!" Jack yelled as the others nodded and headed for the door to grab their equipment.

So what did you think? Was it okay for my first Torchwood fanfiction? Review please, it doesn't take long and it makes me all happy and more likely to write more :-P Chapter 2 might be up later today or tomorrow. Hopefully.