A/N: Hey guys. What's up? I'm back (God, it's been a long time), this time with something that I am fairly certain has never been seen before. It is the love child of several of my favorite shows, The Office, Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Chuck, none of which I own. My working title for this was "The DOCTOR WHO CHUCKed TORCHWOOD onto THE OFFICE". In the end I decided on something better. I don't know what else to say, so without further ado, I proudly present…
Aliens of Scranton
Scranton, Pennsylvania, United States
Jim Halpert was bored. Extremely bored. He was leaning back in his desk chair, counting ceiling tiles, trying his best to tune out the ravings of the man sitting next to him. Dwight Schrute was talking about…something. Jim was pretty sure it was something about why Dwight was a superior human being to Jim in every sense, but he wasn't positive. It was four forty-five on a Thursday, and he just wanted to go home.
"Are you even listening to me?" Dwight was indignant at Jim's blatant lack of interest in his words.
For his part, Jim didn't even look at the man next to him when he responded, "Absolutely not." He heard Dwight snort in disgust and return to his strange hunt and smash method of typing on his keyboard. Seriously, Jim thought, it's like he's trying to break every individual key. Unable to stand being near Dwight anymore, Jim stood up and walked to the reception desk to his right.
He leaned over the desk and spoke in a hushed tone to the woman sitting behind it. "What are you doing tonight after work?"
Pam Beesly looked up at him with a teasing smile, "I was planning on going home and watching TV with my boyfriend for a couple hours. Maybe order a pizza."
Jim smiled, "Oh. That does sound fun. But, how would you like to help me bring Dwight down a peg instead?"
"I would love to. What did you have in mind?"
Jim gave a small shrug, "I have an idea. I just need to run out and get some stuff for it."
At five o'clock, Jim left the office amongst the crowd of Dunder-Mifflinites desperate to get to their evenings of relaxation. Pam stayed behind, saying that she needed to finish some faxes. Dwight left fifteen minutes later, making Pam the only one left in the office. Twenty minutes after Dwight's departure, Jim strolled back into the office carrying two bags in his hand. Pam stood up from her desk and walked over to him as he reached his desk. "So," she said, "what did you get?"
Jim opened the bags with an excited grin on his face. "Well first," he pulled a package out of the first bag, "one inflatable clear plastic dome, with an electric pump." He pulled a manila envelope out of the bag, "A couple warning signs I made up at Kinko's. Some green silly putty," his grin became a smile when he saw the curious puzzlement on Pam's face. "And the grand finale, two biohazard suits from that costume shop down the street." He saw comprehension dawn on Pam's face as she started to laugh.
"You're going to turn Dwight's desk into a biohazard site! That's great. Oh! Why don't I type up a letter from the head of the EPA telling him what happened?"
Jim's smile got even wider, "I knew there was a reason I loved you." He leaned in and kissed her as she started laughing again. As she went back to her desk, Jim tore open the bag around the plastic dome and started to set it up. It took about fifteen minutes for the dome to completely inflate, but once it was done, it was perfect. It was just big enough to surround the desk and let someone sit and work in the chair. He then opened the envelope and removed the warning signs from it. They were printed on adhesive paper, so he removed the backing and started placing them at various points on the outside of the dome. He then proceeded to open the first door on the dome's "airlock", then the second, and started spreading the silly putty at random points on Dwight's desk.
When he walked out of the dome, Pam was looking in admiring his handiwork. She handed him a piece of paper as she said, "Very nice."
"Thanks." He started reading the letter and was immediately impressed. It was a wordy, borderline insincere apology for the inconvenience posed to Dwight. There was no reason given for the containment, stating that it was a matter of national security. It was convincingly governmental, there were even large, meaningless buzz words scattered throughout. The letter gave no contact information and said that he would be called when it was safe to remove the dome. Pam had even included a watermark of the EPA's symbol. "This is brilliant Pam." He extracted an envelope from his desk drawer and carefully folded the letter into thirds and slid it into the envelope, which he sealed. When he had taped it to the outside of the door, he turned and offered his arm, "Well Ms. Beesly, shall we call it a day?"
She smiled as she took the proffered arm, "Absolutely Mr. Halpert." The couple walked out of the office, laughing at the way Dwight would react tomorrow when he saw his desk.
Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
It was a strangely quiet night for the city of Cardiff. If you had asked any of the general populace, of course, they would have said it was a perfectly ordinary night; but to the few enlightened minds of the Torchwood 3 team, this was a rare night off. Jack Harkness, the leader of said team, was sitting alone in the Hub, Torchwood's subterranean base of operations. It was filled with dozens of computers and other technology, not all strictly human in origin. The purpose of it all was to monitor alien activity on Earth in order to protect the human race from extraterrestrial hostility.
Jack wasn't working per se, but he was staring absently at the screens, halfway lost in thought. Suddenly, there was a rapid succession of beeps emanating from one of the computers. Jack strolled up and walked over to the machine and examined the situation. The beeps signified rift activity. This wasn't unusual in and of itself: Cardiff was right under the path of a rift in space-time, which was the reason for most of the strange activity in the city. What was unusual was that this activity wasn't coming from the Cardiff rift, but one over the United States; one that didn't exist a day, hell, even an hour, earlier.
As Jack was struggling to comprehend this new turn of events, the computer started emitting a low-pitched, sustained tone. This one didn't represent rift activity, but temporal activity. Something had just time-travelled onto the planet, somewhere in the vicinity of Los Angeles, California, in the United States. Just one of these would have warranted an investigation, but both occurring within minutes of each other called for immediate action. Reaching for his phone, Jack made a quick phone call, "Gwen, it's Jack. Call Owen and Tosh. We have a situation." He hung up the phone and stared at the screen; hoping whatever was going on wasn't as serious as his gut was telling him it would be.
Burbank, California, United States
Chuck Bartowski was driving a Volkswagen emblazoned with the words "Buy More" and "Nerd Herd". It was something that came with his job, his day job at least. Chuck was the lead Nerd Herder, also known as tech support, at the Burbank branch of Buy More, one of the largest tech store chains in the country. He had just completed a service call and was on his way back to the store to finish out his work day. That was the plan at least, until his iPhone started ringing, and Chuck saw that the caller was Sarah Walker, his girlfriend.
Well, girlfriend wasn't quite the correct term. Handler was really more appropriate. See, Chuck's other job was much more exciting than a Nerd Herder. By night, and sometimes when he should be at the Buy More, he was a spy. Not by choice, but a spy nonetheless. About a year ago, Chuck's old college roommate, who happened to be a rogue CIA agent, had emailed Chuck the contents of a computer holding the sum of the US government's intelligence secrets. Now Chuck was assigned two handlers, one, Sarah, was from the CIA and was posing as his girlfriend; the other, Major John Casey, was from the NSA and was posing as Chuck's neighbor and coworker.
This secret part of Chuck's life, one that he was coming to embrace, and even enjoy, was driven by the fact that the computer stored in his head would be triggered by visual stimuli in what he had termed "flashes". Such was the life of the US government's Intersect computer system.
He answered the phone, "Hey Sarah, what's up."
"Chuck, we need you to get to the Castle immediately." The Castle was the secret base of operations located beneath Orange Orange, the yogurt shop across the street from the Buy More, which served as Sarah's cover job.
"What's up, do we have a mission?"
Chuck noticed a moment of hesitation before Sarah responded, "We aren't sure, but there's something strange going on, and we need you here to see if you flash on anything."
Before he could respond, a…something emerged from the park that he was driving past. It was roughly man sized, and shaped vaguely like a pepper shaker. It had what looked like a plunger in place of one arm, and something that resembled an egg whisk in place of the other. Near the top of the thing was some kind of eye stalk, emanating a blue light from the end. It was shouting in a high pitched, slightly computerized voice, "Exterminate!" It then proceeded to fire a series of lasers in random directions from its whisk-arm.
His facial expression went slack as the Intersect computer fired into overdrive. He was flashing. In front of his eyes, Chuck saw a rapid sequence of images: The seal of UNIT (the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce), the seal of something called the Torchwood Institute, a strange blue phone booth, and an individual- make that ten individuals- no, the same man, but with ten different faces, known as the Doctor. Finally, he saw the same creature that had triggered the flash, and he understood what was going on.
"Sarah, do you want to see if I flashed on something that looks like a big pepper shaker?"
Sarah's surprise was clearly evident in her voice, "Yeah, we did. How did you know?"
"Because I just saw one, and I flashed on it. It's called a Dalek, and it means serious trouble. You need to run a search on all communication channels. Watch for the phrases 'the Doctor', 'TARDIS', 'blue box', and 'Torchwood'. They're the only ones who can help us right now."
"Chuck, what's going on?"
"Sarah, I promise I'll explain everything when I get to the Castle. Just believe me when I say that this is serious, and that you need to get searching for those phrases."
