Love Rat (audio story)
Love Rat was the fifth audio episode of Aliens Among Us and the first story in the second box set. It was the first story showing Orr as a regular Torchwood Three member.
Publisher's summary
Captain Jack Harkness is dead, and that's the simplest thing that's happened to him in the last few days. Even the manner of his death is surprisingly complex, especially when it turns out that he hasn't come back alone.
While Torchwood try and cope with a new mayor and a terrorist cell, they also have to deal with what, at first, looks to be a plague, and then turns out to be something far, far worse.
Plot
Jack and Duncan go to a hotel room and begin having rough sex, although Jack asks if they should not get to know each other better first. Duncan hurts Jack and Jack tries unsuccessfully to get free, being raped and having his neck snapped as something snarls. He comes back to life in an emergency mortuary with no memory of what happened and is told by Tyler, who is making himself indispensable to Ro-Jedda, of what happened. Jack feels abnormally hot and seduces Tyler, having sex on the mortuary slab.
Mr Colchester arrives at the Hub with poison and traps for the vermin nibbling through the power lines. Ng receives a phone call from Andy and leaves with Orr and the two join him and Jack at the mortuary. Andy takes the three of them to view four corpses with no identifiable cause of death and is repeatedly hit on by Jack. Orr convulses on the floor, changing repeatedly from male to female and unable to settle on a form. Jack and Ng take them back to the Hub screaming and Mr Colchester manages to calm them down by telling the others to leave, allowing them to focus solely on his desires and settle in Colin's form.
Duncan wanders the streets and worries as a police car goes by. He calls his wife, Maddy, telling her that he is safe but that she must keep away from him for her and Stephen's safety as he had killed a man. Tyler returns to his flat and finds that Ro-Jedda has managed to get in. She warns him that she will destroy Torchwood if he did not get closer to them and get them to bring down Red Doors, who proved resistant to her being mayor. In the medical bay, Ng and Jack share doughnuts and have sex, much to Gwen's disgust.
Ng calls Rhys and apologises for not returning home the previous night, promising to be home that night at six with a takeaway. She meets with Andy with Dawn Shale's phone and uses her corpse to get access to it. Orr tells Mr Colchester and Jack that their seizure had been because of a bombardment of violent, sexual desire and that they had detected something alive within the corpses. At the mortuary, Ng and Andy use Shale's eye to get into her phone and are attacked by the reanimated body of Harry Fletcher, which Ng shoots at before it escapes. Jack arrives and joins them in chasing after it, finding it dead again, and tells Andy to move it and the other dead bodies to the Hub in case of further reanimation.
In the Hub, Mr Colchester has caught one of the vermin and Orr identifies it as a vent scrit which had presumably arrived through the Rift with the Sorvix. Their genitalia shifts due to the scrit. Ng and Jack find on Shale's phone that she had been in contact with Duncan, whom Jack recognised as the man that killed him, remembering the night in a haze and Fletcher's screeches as the same noise Duncan had made. Ng sends Duncan a message to draw him out. They take the bodies to the Hub and Mr Colchester and Orr show them the scrit and tell them of its heightened sexual appetite and the parasite that they found within it. They conclude that the parasites have spread to humans through infected faeces and, in private, Ng confronts Jack about infecting her and tells him to call Tyler.
Ng and Jack meet Tyler, who goes to Ro-Jedda to ask for a cure, although he knew that there would be a price. Shale's phone receives a response from Duncan and Ng and Jack go to a motel to meet him. He brandishes a knife before Ng manages to calm him down. Tyler convinces Ro-Jedda to give him a cure, telling her that it would put Jack in her debt, wipe out the parasites and keep the rest of the UK from noticing the Sorvix occupation. Having been cured, he takes the curative worms to the Hub where Ng, Jack and Duncan swallow them before Ng gives Duncan retcon and takes him home. Tyler calls off his sexual relationship with Jack as well as his involvement with Torchwood, telling him to do something about Red Doors to keep Ro-Jedda off his back.
Ng returns home and finds an upset Rhys. He cries and tells her that he thinks that their relationship has falling apart since even before Mary's death, bringing up how they had not had sex in weeks and that she had not seemed herself for some time. With Anwen at a sleepover, Ng considers killing Rhys but instead has sex with him after he tells her that he would do anything at all to fix their relationship. Gwen tries to tell Rhys that it is not her and begs Ng to stop.
Cast
- Captain Jack Harkness - John Barrowman
- Ng - Alexandria Riley
- Mr Colchester - Paul Clayton
- Orr - Sam Béart
- Tyler Steele - Jonny Green
- Rhys Williams - Kai Owen
- Sgt. Andy Davidson - Tom Price
- Gwen Cooper - Eve Myles
- Ro-Jedda - Rachel Atkins
- Duncan - Ewan Bailey
- Maddy - Kerry Joy Stewart
Worldbuilding
- Jack is raped by Duncan in a chain hotel outside of Cardiff, just south of Junction 32.
- Two of the bodies in the temporary mortuary without the obvious cause of death belong to Dawn Shale and Harry Fletcher.
- Jack Harkness' body is found in a chain hotel south of Junction 32, near a site of a terrorist attack.
- Mr Colchester brings camembert for lunch.
- It is an urban myth that Ketamine is mostly used on horses.
- Duncan and Maddy have a son named Stephen.
- Ng mentions Top of the Pops.
- Vent scrits are more successful at invasions than Sorvix, Sontarans and even Daleks.
- A CT scan of the vent script's cerebellum shows an overactive limbic lobe.
- Toxoplasmosis has been known to pass from rats to cats.
- Ng mentions Jeremy Kyle.
- Tyler Steele notes that Sorvix are not Benedictine monks.
- Ng mentions Norman Bates.
- Tyler persuades Ro-Jedda to save humans in Cardiff, noting that otherwise UNIT will show up.
- Duncan takes retcon.
- Mr Colchester compares the corpses reanimated by the parasite to The Walking Dead.
- Gwen Cooper had a friend Janice whose brother had a pet rat called Fang.
- Ng mentions GCSE.
Notes
to be added
Continuity
- Ro-Jedda owns 3Sol, the company responsible for many tasks in the city. (AUDIO: Changes Everything, Superiority Complex)
- In return for the cure, Tyler Steele asks Jack Harkness to look into the anti-Sorvix terrorists in Cardiff. (AUDIO: The Empty Hand)
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