AN: Part seven of the A Twist In The Tale verse - a story verse that I was sure was complete until Owen sprung this on me.
Ianto heard the scream and the crash from the kitchenette and rushed back to the main part of the hub, his gun out ready to help with whatever problem had cropped up.
Gwen was stood on the couch, a smashed mug on the floor by her desk, with her gun pointed towards the floor.
"What's wrong? What happened?" Ianto asked, looking around to find out what had startled Gwen.
"There's a snake!" Gwen called out, shifting her gun at the sign of movement under her desk.
Realising what was going on Ianto moved towards her desk, reaching down and collecting the snake before turning to reassure Gwen.
"It's okay. It's only Owen -" He began, stopping at the glare and the hiss that came from the snake, "Owen's latest experiment." Ianto continued, understanding that the grumpy man didn't want Gwen to know that he had managed to turn himself into a snake. "He must have gotten out of the hothouse, I'll just take him back up and lock him in. Why don't you go get yourself some lunch?"
Ianto watched as Gwen nodded, grabbing her bag and rushing through the door up to the tourist office. Once she had left he raised the snake to eye level. "I thought you had stopped playing with that device Owen?"
Furious hissing came from the snake and Ianto sighed, he couldn't understand Owen's tirade so he shouldn't even try. He placed the snake down and watched in amazement a few minutes later when it turned back into Owen without the use of the device. Owen looked both disgruntled and disorientated, reaching out and stabilising himself against Ianto.
"The machine is still in the archives." Owen bit out, looking at Ianto, almost daring him to disagree. "I wasn't intending to go through that again; I didn't exactly enjoy being a snake you know."
"So how did you?" Ianto prompted the other man, hoping that he would give him some sort of answer.
"I don't know," Owen groused, "One minute I'm walking across the hub thinking about what it was like to be a snake, and the next thing I know I'm a snake again and then having to take cover under Gwen's desk when she came barrelling into the hub."
"You just turned into a snake again like that, was turning back the same?" Ianto asked, trying to get the facts in the hope of making some sense of the situation. "You thought of being a snake and you were a snake, you thought of being human and you were human, correct?"
Owen just nodded as he walked towards the door, intending to get back to his desk so he could grab a scanner and check himself out for any complications.
"Don't think about being a snake then." Ianto told him, "Not yet at least, focus on being human and we'll see if we can see anything with the scanner, see if anything has changed about your biology. We will probably have to try a few controlled experiments, get some readings of you in both forms, maybe get Toshiko and Jack in on it as well. Tosh can help with the science of everything and Jack can distract Gwen."
Owen just groaned as he walked down to his desk, he had really gotten Ianto interested in this one. He could foresee a lot of changing into a snake in his future, hopefully he could control it; it would be dangerous if a stray thought turned him into a snake while he was in the field or driving, never mind what would happen if his mind drifted during sex. He handed the scanner to Ianto to take some readings, wondering at the same time how he had managed to become his own lab rat, or lab snake as the case was.