| Date: 10 December 2007
Characters: Toshiko Sato, Donna Noble Location: office building, outside Link to IJ: thread #1297 |
 Toshiko was still in a state of shock. Jack had died, Jack had almost really died, he'd laid on that slab cold and white and motionless for days. And then he hadn't. Died. They'd hugged and she'd been able to reassure herself that he was real. That he was really alive.
And just when she thought things were settling down, he disappeared. The temporary calm and happiness that they'd all just started to accept disappeared with him. Toshiko was at her station, CCTV links on every screen she could see, but there was no Jack. She rubbed at her eyes and stood to get more coffee. As she opened the door to the front room, there was a glow. Tosh blinked, raised her arm to try to block the light. The Rift? Who had opened it again!? When she could see again, everything was different. "Hello?" she called. |
 "Hello? Hello? Walk through a glowin' light, end up in god knows where and all she says is 'Hello'." Donna waved her arms exaggeratedly from the other end of the office conference room. |
| "Hello?" Tosh said again, blinking at the sudden diatribe. "I take it you weren't here before either then?" |
| "Oh, no, I always say 'god knows where' when I know precisely where I am, don't you?" she bellowed. |
| "Actually, more often than you think," Tosh said with a sigh. She began to investigate the room. "Can you tell me what happened? Exactly?" |
| "How the bloody hell should I know? Do you know? Is this." She suddenly looked suspicious. "Martian." |
| "It all looks fairly terrestrial to me," Tosh said, finishing her circuit of the room. Dammit, why'd she have to leave without her ... She held up a hand and tapped her earbud.
"Gwen? Ianto? Owen? Is anyone receiving this?" |
| "Who the bloody hell are you talking to?" |
| "No one, it seems," Toshiko said, sighing as she took off the earbud and examined it. It seemed to be in working order, but no signal.
"Right, shall we go find out where we are then?" |
| Donna shooed Toshiko to go first. |
| She did, pausing just outside the doorway to take stock. Regular hallway going in both directions.
"I don't suppose you have a pen or anything?" |
| "In the purse I'm not carrying." she grumbled. |
| Tosh looked around, then leaned against the wall and pulled off her shoe. She used the high heel to scratch an X on the wall next to the door. |
| "That's vandalism, that is." She sounded admiring rather than scolding. She also pulled a lipstick out of her pocket and handed it to Tosh. |
| "Well, I didn't have any breadcrumbs handy," Tosh said, finally smiling a little as she put her shoe back on and accepted the lipstick.
"Left or right?" |
| "Right," Donna said immediately before offering, "I'm Donna." |
| "Toshiko," she replied as she started down the hallway. "Has anything like this ever happened to you before?" |
| "...Well, I didn't come up with aliens out of the clear blue sky!" |
| "Actually, you said Martian," Toshiko corrected out of habit. The hall ended in a T and Tosh used Donna's lipstick to draw an arrow in the direction they'd come, low down on the wall.
"So you've encountered that glowing light before? Been transported someplace else?" Her first journey through the rift had been much more subtle, and, her second much more hurried and deliberate. She couldn't find any commonalities yet. |
| "Yeah, though it was more gold. And that wasn't how I ended up where we were." |
| "So how did you?" |
| "Walked through a door," she admitted, "At the shop." |
| "I walked through a door this time too," Toshiko said. The corridor had several closed doors. "Shall we?" |
| "Pick a door, any door?" |
| "One's just as good as the other when you don't know what's behind any of them," Tosh said. |
| Donna opened the second one on the left. It was a regular office. |
| "Doesn't look familiar to me," she said as she glanced around the room. |
| "Me neither. It just looks like some office. On a Sunday." |
| Tosh opened the next door; it was the same. |
| "We got transported to a bloody office." |
| "Not very exciting, is it?" Tosh said. She stepped back out into the corridor, looked in both directions and seemed to make a decision. "Come on," she said |
| "Where are we going?" Donna frowned. |
| "We are looking for stairs," Tosh said. "Which are usually at the ends of corridors." |
| "Not an elevator?" Donna bitched, even as she headed for the end of the hall. |
| "Do you want to chance getting stuck?" |
| "...Point. No guarentees about the fire code here, eh?" |
| "Exactly," Tosh said, nodding. |
| Donna opened the heavy door at the end of the hall, showing the fire stairs, "You first." |
| "Right." Tosh stepped out on to the small landing and looked down. "Looks about three floors," she said to Donna as she she started down. |
| 'I've seen this movie," she muttered, "We're going to get to the ground and there's going to be zombies, isn't there?" |
| "Better than cannibals," Tosh responded, repressing a shudder. |
| "..What the difference?" |
| "Zombies are dead; cannibals are real, living human beings." |
| "Zombies were real people." |
| "Past tense. Were," Tosh said as she rounded the landing for the second floor. |
| "Okay, that sounds like personal experience and can it please not be?" |
| "I wish," Toshiko said, her tone grim. |
| "Don't tell me," Donna demanded, "Never tell me." |
| "It's not high on the top of my list of things to talk about," Toshiko assured her. |
| Donna just looked grossed out and couldn't resist asking, "You didn't eat any, did you?" |
| "No," Tosh said. "I ... never mind." Another landing and down towards the first floor. |
| "Oh God," Donna wrinkled her nose, following after "What do you do?" |
| "I didn't do anything!" Tosh exclaimed, exasperated. "I. We. We were on the menu! We didn't do anything but get out alive!" |
| "...I meant for work! I changed the subject!" |
| "Oh. Sorry. And I can't really say. It's classified." |
| "...Government?" |
| "Not exactly." |
| "What exactly then? I'm in the middle of this now." |
| "We're outside the government," Tosh said as she opened the heavy fire door at the landing. |
| "Mafia?" |
| "Oh god no," Toshiko said, laughing. "Ever hear of Torchwood?" |
| "Yeah," she nodded, "Blokes messing with huron particles and outer space." |
| "Well, the Cardiff branch doesn't mess with huron particles," she assured her. |
| "Who cares what Cardiff does?" |
| "You'd be surprised," Tosh murmured. |
| "I'd have to be." |
| "Better that way, trust me." |
| "Surprised?" |
| "There's all sorts of things I could tell you about, but none of them would help the situation and there's no sense in making you worry unnecessarily." |
| "I have a good imagination, girly. not telling me is just going to have my use it." |
| "Tell you what," Tosh said, marking a wall and turning right as they reached another T. "We get out of this building, figure out where we are and I'll tell you some stories." |
| "And in the meantime I'll be going nutters," Donna said, opening the doors they passed. |
| Tosh gave her a look.
"Where are you from, anyway?" |
| "London," she said a bit proudly. |
| "Ah. I left London several years ago," she said with a small smile. |
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