B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (147 page)

A spaceship came through the Rift and released a “telesensual field” - part of a nonviolent first contact protocol designed to solicit information. The Cardiff public became overly eager to say hello and to divulge their personal details, and the city descended into chaos as people ignored their responsibilities. Torchwood shut down the field by broadcasting gibberish through Jack’s cell phone.

2008 (Friday) - TW: In the Shadows

Captain Jack’s crew stopped Patrick Jefferson’s serial-killing spree, and confiscated his huon-particle-laced matchbox. Unable to formally bring Jefferson to justice, Torchwood planted spare bodies in his cellar and alerted the authorities.

2008 - TW: “Rift War”

The Sanctified once had a powerful empire, but were now farmers of dinosaurs. One of their number, Vox, manipulated his people into thinking that Torchwood would attack by weaponising the Rift, prompting a pre-emptive strike. Torchwood repelled the Sanctified’s shock troops - the bestial Harrowkind - who materialised in Cardiff to neutralise the Hub.

Soon after, Captain Jack’s crew dealt with a Rift bubble that developed in Cardiff Castle, and cared for an enormous Zansi baby during the six weeks it took the child to mature. Torchwood also rounded up a pack of Sanctified-owned dinosaurs in Millennium Stadium, and sent them back through the Rift. They also investigated a stone circle that focused Rift energy every eighty years, and briefly swapped Ianto and Tosh with Gerald Carter and Harriet Derbyshire in 1918.

2008 - TW: “Shrouded”

John Hart and Rhys arrived from the future to warn Ianto that a time-traveller named Beatrice, a.k.a. Mairwyn, would try to seduce him - and that his surrendering to her advances could potentially change history. Mairwyn showed Ianto a future in which he, Owen and Tosh died, and the Hub was destroyed. She proposed that they steal the Shroud - a device from Torchwood One assigned to Ianto’s care - and escape together, but Ianto killed Mairwyn, gave a precognitive device in her possession to the future-Hart and Retconned his knowledge of events to come.

2008 - TW: Adam
 [1214]

An entity that was adrift in the Rift surfaced in Cardiff, and manifested by engraining itself into the minds of Jack’s Torchwood agents. They believed the interloper was a fellow Torchwood agent, Adam Smith, and retroactively thought they had all worked together for three years. Jack uncovered the deception and eradicated Adam by removing everyone’s memories of the past two days. Jack himself had to go a step further, and permanently lost the last good memory he had of his father.

2008 - TW: “Rift War”
 [1215]

The Harrowkind renewed their assault on Torchwood, and sped through a Cardiff retail centre. The last Omnicron trapped the Harrowkind within its tesseract as data files, but was then destroyed by Vox. Soon afterwards, Vox focused enough Rift energy through the Hub’s Rift Manipulator to endow himself with fantastical abilities. Torchwood curtailed the energy feeding Vox, leaving him at the mercy of some golems - antibodies generated by the Rift to deal with such threats.

2008 (August) - The Twilight Streets
 [1216]

Abaddon’s death had tipped the balance of power toward the Dark and its allies. Bilis Manger aided Torchwood in trapping the Dark in a containment box, and in releasing the Light into the Rift to keep Abaddon’s nemesis, Pwccm, forever imprisoned. Manger departed to intern Abaddon’s ashes outside Britain. During this conflict, earthquakes and fires destroyed the Tretarri housing district.

2008 - TW: Reset / TW: Dead Man Walking
 [1217]

Martha Jones was now working for UNIT, and helped Torchwood uncover a conspiracy regarding the Pharm: a partnership between the government and a consortium of pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Aaron Copley sought a means of resetting the human body back to its “factory settings” - a development that could potentially cure all human ailment - using “the mayfly”, an alien insect species. Copley’s experiments were killing his test subjects, so Torchwood shut down the operation. An enraged Copley killed Owen Harper, and was then shot dead by Jack.

Jack retrieved the second Resurrection Gauntlet from St. Mary’s Church, and used it to revive Owen for a few moments - or so he thought. Unexpectedly, Owen remained active as an animated cadaver even after the Gauntlet’s destruction. As with events in 1479, Owen’s return to life enabled a personification of Death to stalk Cardiff. Death attempted to murder thirteen people - the number required to secure its foothold on Earth - but had only killed twelve when Owen grappled with Death and banished it.

2008 - TW: A Day in the Death
 [1218]

Henry John Parker died, and Owen acquired from him an extra-terrestrial device - a reply sent by unknown parties to the NASA space messages of the 70s. Martha returned to UNIT.

The planet Ytraxor was freezing as its sun grew dim, and approaching glaciers forced the Ytraxorians to fight for what land remained. Ytraxorian scientists developed a Reality Gun that could displace objects in space and time - useless as a means of escape, but an effective weapon. The Ytraxorians destroyed themselves, but one of them, and his Reality Gun, were hurled through space and materialised in a deep-fat fryer in Cardiff. Captain Jack, Gwen and Ianto confiscated the dead alien’s Reality Gun.
 [1219]

2008 (last week of August) - SJA: Invasion of the Bane
 [1220]

Thirteen-year-old Maria Jackson moved to a new house in Ealing, West London, with her father Alan. That night, she saw her neighbour, Sarah Jane Smith, talking to an alien. Sarah aided this lost being - a Star Poet from Arcateen 5 - in returning home, and Maria teamed up with her to uncover the secret behind the popular new addictive drink Bubble Shock. It was a creation of the cephalopod-like Bane - Bubble Shock was laced with a secretion of the Bane Mother, and could take control of anyone who drank it. Two percent of the population carried innate resistance to Bubble Shock, and so the Bane had created an Archetype: a teenage human boy made from the data scans of the ten thousand people who had visited the Bubble Shock factory. The Bane intended that the Archetype would enable them to refine Bubble Shock and eliminate the 2% deviation.

The Bane assumed mental control of the Bubble Shock drinkers - legions of people took to the streets with bottles of Bubble Shock, intoning “Drink it, drink it...” Sarah, Maria and the Archetype thwarted the Bane overseer, Mrs Wormwood, and destroyed the main Bubble Shock factory. Bubble Shock was withdrawn, and a government cover story claimed that chemicals released from the Bubble Shock plant had caused a mass hysteria.

Sarah named the Archetype “Luke Smith” and adopted him as her son. The two of them resided at 13 Bannerman Road.

(=) In the history where Sarah Jane died instead of Andrea Yates, the Trickster prevented the Bane from visiting Earth.
 [1221]

2008 - “A Perfect World”
 [1222]

While travelling in the TARDIS solo, Thomas Brewster stopped in London, 2008, and met a young woman named Connie Winter. She wished for a more perfect world - and as Brewster hadn’t materialised the TARDIS properly, a quantum fissure formed that enabled two existential maintenance workers, “Phil” and “Trev”, to hear their conversation.

(=) After Brewster departed in the Ship, Phil and Trev manipulated Connie’s timeline to avert her biggest mistakes, and curtailed a large number of political scandals and disasters. The fifth Doctor and Nyssa - having reunited with Brewster - learned how his actions had altered history. Phil and Trev were persuaded to undo their alterations.

Brewster left the TARDIS to start a relationship with the original Connie. The Doctor gave Brewster ownership of his house on Baker Street, which hadn’t been occupied in one hundred forty-one years, thinking that the proceeds from its sale would keep him afloat for a time.

2008 (a Monday and Tuesday in September) - SJA: Revenge of the Slitheen
 [1223]

Maria and Luke started at their new school, Park Vale, and made a new friend, Clyde Langer. With Sarah Jane’s help, they discovered that a group of Slitheen had murdered some of the fatter teachers and the school headmaster, and that their friend Jeffery was a Slitheen child. The Slitheen planned to harvest all energy from Earth and its sun with the equipment housed in the Coldfire Technology Blocks, then sell the energy to fund the retaking of their homeworld, Raxacoricofallapatorius, with a battlefleet. The Slitheen activated their equipment, and the sun temporarily turned a cold blue. Discovering the aliens’ vulnerability to vinegar, Sarah Jane and her friends fought their way to the machine at Park Vale and destroyed it, ending the scheme.

UNIT cleaned up the Slitheen operation, and Sarah had Mr. Smith release a cover story that the sun’s outage resulted from a temporary reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles.

(=) The Trickster stopped the Slitheen from going to Earth.
 [1224]

2008 - SJA: Eye of the Gorgon
 [1225]

Sarah Jane and her friends investigated Lavender Lawns, a nursing home where apparitions have been reported. One of the residents, Bea Nelson-Stanley, gave Luke the prized talisman that could link the world of the ancient Gorgon with Earth. The nuns protecting the remaining Gorgon (who was in the body of an Abbess) acquired the talisman, and opened a portal so the other Gorgon could dominate humanity. The Abbess-Gorgon tried to take Sarah Jane as its new host, but Maria disrupted the transfer, turning the Abbess to stone. The portal was deactivated.

Sarah Jane’s current aliases included Bunty Mansfield, Victoria Williams and Felicity Barnes. The Viszern Royal Fleet, composed of six hundred ships, passed through Earth’s solar system and created a magnificent stellar light show.

Sarah Jane defeated the Patriarchs of the Tin Vagabond
.
 [1226]

(=) The Trickster stopped the Gorgon from invading Earth, and “turned away” the Patriarchs.
 [1227]

2008 (a Tuesday) - SJA: Warriors of Kudlak
 [1228]

Twenty-four children had vanished at various Combat 3000 locations, which offered realistic laser tag. Sarah Jane and her friends learned that the disappearances all coincided with freak storms. At the London Combat 3000 site, they saw Kudlak - a member of the insectoid Uvodni race who was trying to recruit warriors to fight his enemies, the Malakh. Kudlak’s battle computer, Mistress, had deliberately withheld a message that the war had ended ten years before, because she had no purpose except war. Kudlak destroyed Mistress and released his prisoners.

(=) The Trickster thwarted Kudlak.
 [1229]

2008 (a Friday and Saturday) - TW: Something Borrowed
 [1230]

A Nostravite - a shapeshifting species in which the male carries fertilised eggs in his mouth - bit Gwen, who became pregnant with Nostravite offspring during her wedding to Rhys Williams. Torchwood killed the Nostravite mother and removed her young from Gwen, then dosed all of the wedding guests with Level 6 Retcon in their champagne.

2008 (September) - TW: Skypoint
 [1231]

The master criminal Besnik Lucca built SkyPoint - an apartment high-rise in Cardiff - as his personal fortress. A thought-entity from beyond the grave had hitched a ride with a SkyPoint resident, a young girl named Alison Lloyd, when she was resuscitated after being clinically dead. The thought-creature stayed corporeal by consuming some of the SkyPoint residents, but Owen injected the creature with a syringe of his dead blood, killing it. Torchwood gave the authorities enough evidence to put Lucca away for fifty years.

2008 - TW: From Out of the Rain
 [1232]

The Electro Cinema in Cardiff reopened as a museum, and an examination of old film stocks in its basement released the Night Travellers contained within. Two Night Travellers stole life essences from half a dozen people, then released the remainder of their contingent from the film. Jack prevented the Travellers from taking more victims by recording their images onto a film reel and exposing it to sunlight, seemingly eradicating them. It was possible that the Travellers had survived on a film reel at a flea market
.

2008 (October) - “Hotel Historia”
 [1233]

The super-criminal Majenta Pryce and her assistant Fanson founded the Hotel Historia - a chain that became the toast of the Seven Galaxies, offering guests the opportunity to time travel to different points in history. The chain fell into decline as patrons shied away from time travel in the aftermath of the Last Great Time War, but Majenta and Fanson operated one of the remaining Hotel Historias on Earth. Patrons could experience wildlife in the Jurassic, converse with great wits in Elizabethan England, etc. Meals served at the Historia included vintage Vesuvian vino and woolly mammoth steaks.