Rift activity has been relatively low in the last week or so, and there is nothing that the monitor has predicted to occur for at least another couple of days. Quite frankly we are all getting a little bored. Yesterday we finished off the last of the 'proper' work, the others caught up on a backlog of paperwork whilst I finished cataloguing our remaining unidentifiable artefacts. Today has been somewhat less productive, we've resorted to playing hangman, I hope we get an interesting case soon.
Thankfully Tosh hasn't tried to drag us along to anymore pub quizzes, although she did mention in passing that we should try going to a karaoke night, but I think she was joking this time.
She has however managed to convince us that we need to socialise more, so tonight we ordered pizzas to the hub and had nice evening in. Tosh was absolutely right, as usual, as tonight helped everyone to just relax – we've all been so stressed and uptight since… he left us.
After eating, Owen whipped out a deck of cards and insisted that we had to have a game before we all went home, his suggestion seemed harmless enough. It was the first time I'd played poker (the 21st century version at least) for many years and, if I had ever been any good at it in the first place, I had clearly lost all knack for it. I'm so glad we were not playing for real money, Owen's smugness at victory was enough to unsettle anyone's stomach without the thought of losing several hundred pounds to him.
What was originally just the one game turned in to hours of fun in which the quality and maturity of our antics decreased rather rapidly: we went from poker to snap to bullshit to Uno, then gave up on card games entirely and started playing twister. It was almost midnight by then and none of us had realised how quickly time had been passing; until Gwen whilst in a most compromising, knotted position on the mat looked at her watch and without warning jerked out of place causing us all to collapse in a heap.
"Shit!" she cried "I told Rhys I'd be back by 10 so that we could watch a DVD together tonight, he's going to bloody kill me! This is the third time I've stood him up this week!" she continued in frenzy.
"I'm sure he'll understand, just make sure you tell him that you were busy with paperwork and not playing party games" Tosh said, trying to calm her down a little.
"I don't think he will understand, he's been so snappy with me lately, he's fed up with me working such long and erratic hours. He says I never put any time in for 'us' anymore. I can see that I'm upsetting him, but I just can't give up working here!" evidently Tosh's words hadn't helped as much as they should have done…
"Gwen, Rhys loves you and you love him. All you can do is go home and promise that you will make it up to him, people can forgive the one they love of many faults" I said, attempting to help.
I felt like the biggest hypocrite in the world offering relationship advice when the man I loved, who was in no way shape or form attached to me, had run off and left. Never the less she appeared to calm down slightly and shortly left the hub.
With just the three of us there, and none of us feeling particularly ready to leave yet, we decided to have a game of hide and seek around the hub, to enhance our status as 'big kids' if nothing else. Overall it was a highly enjoyable few hours, if there's still not much on at work in the next couple of days we may have to repeat this.
I've said before that I think I jinx things by writing them down in here, and I still stand by it. Just as I have been writing about boredom at work and potential plans for the next few workless nights, Gwen goes missing.
It's all rather peculiar; she has literally just vanished without warning, she didn't turn up this morning at her usual time of 7.30, and by 11.00 we had started to get worried. Owen said
"Perhaps she's done a Jack?"
But it's been nowhere near enough time yet for me to be able to laugh at something like that, so instead I simply offered a
"Or perhaps Rhys really did get angry with her yesterday and has done away with her?" altering the subject.
Tosh said I shouldn't joke about such things, and she's right I shouldn't, but I needed a diversion in the conversation and besides Rhys looks like such a 'puppy dog' form his photos and, form the way that Gwen describes him, I doubt he could hurt a fly. It has got me thinking though, I hope nothing serious has happened to Gwen, it's so unlike her not to even call in to say that she wouldn't be in today, if it had been Owen we mightn't have batted an eyelid but Gwen…
And it's not as if we can just call up Rhys and ask if she's taken a day off ill to … make it up to him… if you see what I mean, as he doesn't know anything about us. We could go over to their flat to check up on everything, but it could all become highly awkward a) if she was there and had to pretend not to know us and b) if she wasn't there and we started questioning him about her he may think something strange was going on. This is going to be a tricky one.
It's almost 4.00 pm now and still no sign of Gwen. We've been checking through CCTV footage to try and track her journey home from work yesterday and so far have found a lot to give us cause for concern.
When she was just outside the tourist information centre there was a strange yellowy white light that appeared to be following her, right round to the corner by the road where there is a blind spot. After this point we couldn't pick Gwen back up on the footage anywhere, something must have happened to her at that point. We couldn't find the strange pattern of light anywhere after that either, it must be connected somehow, but what on earth was it?
At last, Gwen is back safe and sound. Well safe, if not sound at least. Whatever that strange light had been, it had somehow taken Gwen temporarily back to the past, to the court of Queen Elizabeth the First.
She said it was the strangest thing, she was just getting to the corner of the road (our blind spot) when she noticed this strange glowing light, all of a sudden it seemed to surround her completely, blocking out the rest of her vision. When she could see again, she was no longer in 21st Century Cardiff, but 16th Century England, at one of the Queen's most famous masques. Stranger still, was the fact that she was no longer dressed in the leather jacket and jeans that she had been earlier, but in an elegant gown in keeping with the period.
Not knowing what to do, Gwen simply tried to blend in until she could figure out 'what the bloody hell' had gone on. Several hours later, just as the entertainment for this evening was coming to a close, she saw a Steward empty a phial of green liquid into her Majesty's wine glass. Gwen knew at once that something was wrong, and as the Queen was about to take her first sip, she swiped it from her hands preventing her from doing so. From the look in the Steward's eyes when she did so, it confirmed her earlier thoughts that it must have been poison in the glass.
Just as she had come to this realisation, the same yellowy white light appeared again, impairing her vision once more, and bringing her back to Cardiff in the present day on the corner of the road, all normality returned.
"If it wasn't for the fact that I have several angry voice mails from Rhys saying was ever so cross with me for 'stopping out all night without so much as a text' then I might have thought I had dreamt it all" Gwen finished.
She seemed in a complete daze by it all. We were all just as confused as she was; why had she been taken by this strange presence? Was it to save the Queen's life? Was this light really some strange creature from another world, or was it simply being used by another creature? It's on days like these when I feel that Torchwood has many more questions than answers.
Tosh and Owen disappeared this evening as well, but only for half an hour or so.
They were returning from a meeting with UNIT when all of a sudden they were surrounded by this same peculiar light in the side street were the SUV was parked. They said it was almost exactly as Gwen had described. The light sort of engulfed their surroundings and transported them to another time, but not to the 16th Century this time, to the 20th. The 1960s to be precise – they had found themselves in the middle of one of the Beatle's early gigs.
I am incredibly jealous, I am a very big fan of the Beatles; if I ever get hold of a time machine seeing them perform live would certainly be on my list of things to do.
Anyway, I digress… There was a problem with the equipment as the electrics overheated causing the stage to catch fire. Immediately everyone was ushered outside to the fire assembly point, but when outside Tosh and Owen realised that John Lennon was still inside. So they went back in for him, they couldn't let him die now, before his time.
Imagine how many songs would never have been written? How much joy the world would have never heard? Risking their own lives they dodged the flames and brought him out, unconscious but unharmed, and called for an ambulance. After this the yellow, glowing light appeared once more, pulling them back to the present. The mystery surrounding this presence is growing ever more intriguing, it appears to be acting as some strange sort of universal guardian angel.
We've been putting out brains to work all of this evening trying to figure out what on earth it could be, but no one has recorded anything of this nature down on the system before. And I've tried going through some of the old paper records which have yet to be transferred to the computers and there's nothing there either, we're just going to have to wait and see if it appears again.
As luck would have it, I had my own encounter with this strange light like existence. I was on my way to work this morning, bright and early as ever when I noticed the glowing presence moving across the bay.
I knew roughly what was coming next and was slightly excited, I was the only one who hadn't had this peculiar time-travelling-lifesaving experience yet and I did feel a little left out… It moved towards me and I felt bright white light suddenly wash over me, blocking out the current scene, and then I was in London. War time London, in the middle of an air raid.
I panicked, I had no idea what to do, everywhere I looked there were people running, sirens blaring out across the streets and the distant, horrific sound of bombs dropping.
And then I saw him. In the middle of all the chaos, just standing there, helping people in to shelters. He looked exactly the same, the same perfectly styled hair, the same confident stance, the same grin, the same charismatic air, the same coat…. Yet somehow he looked younger, only slightly, he just didn't have the same look of wisdom in his eyes. I wanted to run over to him, to kiss him, to cry into his shoulders; but he wasn't my Jack, not yet. I didn't really understand how he could be there, I wasn't one hundred per cent sure that it even was him, but the things he'd accidentally mentioned about the forties before suggested that it was more than a hallucination of mine.
Then I noticed the shadow creeping out from the alley, gun in hand, red armband of horror adorned with a black spider of death on his sleeve. A Nazi soldier.
Jack had his back turned, hurriedly ushering civilians into the air raid shelter, not thinking about himself. The Nazi was pointing his gun directly at him; he was badly injured, but had identified Jack as the enemy and seemed determined to gain one last 'victory' before he was withdrawn from the army. He took off the safety and edged closer.
"Look out Sir!" I said, without thinking and pushed him out of the way onto the cobbled street.
The gun fired at nothing. The Nazi retreated in to the shadows again, but not before the Captain had seen him, had realised what he'd been saved from.
"Thanks, maybe some time I can buy you a drink" He said to me with a grin.
He never changes. But no sooner than he had said that, I was surrounded by that familiar brightness again and found myself back by the bay in Cardiff. It all felt so surreal.
I got back, chinese in hand, to find that the team had been following me. They'd figured that this strange light would come after me next and so had left the hub shortly after me to try and trap the being.
They'd managed to get it into the portable cell and brought it back to base with them. At first all they could detect was a lot of bright light, and a lot of what sounded like white noise, but filtered this noise through her language programme and managed to translate it in to sentences.
It was more than just a peculiar, glowing light; it was a living creature from a far off galaxy. It was similar in build up to a star, in the sense that it was like a burning ball of gas, but it had a consciousness.
They were able to communicate with it properly; it was the last of its kind: the Salvatores Temporis – saviours of time. They were once a large race, but most of them died out during the great time war. They were the protectors of time.
Apparently there are many creatures out there, most of them part of the Trickster's Brigade, who want to disrupt our time, remove important people from our history and change the fate of our future. The Salvatores Temporis work to set this right, to keep time on the right path.
As the last one left, it's needed more and more help to correct the changes that creatures are trying to impose on time, which is why it has been taking us back in time to prevent people from dying. It recognised what Torchwood does, how we work to protect others and how we have come in to contact with other life forms before and knew that we would know what to do when we were transported in time.
They set it free after that, to bring me back and to carry on protecting our history and our future. It's so rewarding to come across a being so selfless and innocently kind. I wish I had got the chance to thank it.