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Sometimes, very rarely, Mary got a bit lonely stuck on this stupid mudball of a planet. She missed home terribly, and she missed not having to use her mouth to communicate with others. Of course, she’d rather be alone than stuck with her guard, so she figured she’d just have to make the best of it while she waited for the governments to change again so that she could try to fix her ship and get back. Then, a few years after she had been exiled to Earth, she learned that the city where the human Mary had lived was right on top of a space-time rift. At first, she had hoped that the energy from it would be a way of powering her transporter so that she could get home. It wasn’t. She carried the transporter back to the crash site and buried it near that soldier’s body so that she’d be sure to remember where it was, no matter how long she was stuck here.
The first time she realised what the Rift actually did was sometime in the 1830s, when she was walking home from a party. How she despised these rich human fools, how easy they were to trick, to succumb, how easily she could make them part from their treasures and their lives. Mistress , she mused, how apt. I am the mistress of that man. I control him utterly . Normally, she wasn’t quite so disgusted with the humans, or at least she could focus on other things instead, but that man’s mouth flapped so much when he talked, and it was the same day as she had landed all those years ago. Suddenly, someone ran into her quite forcefully.
Get off me! she yelled, furious. Her dress was probably ruined now, and the cleaning standards of this planet were as appalling as everything else about it.
Sorry, sorry, I don’t know what happened - there was this light and then something just… grabbed me! the someone babbled, scrambling off her.
As he stood up, Mary realised two things in quick succession: one, that her and then man who’d knocked her over had been conversing telepathically, and two, that his skin had a distinctly mint-green tint to it. She glanced around swiftly, then grabbed him and tugged him into an alleyway.
Ow! What do you think you’re - where am I? he complained.
My name is Mary, she told him. This is Sol 3 - Earth. How did you get here?
I… I don’t know. There was a light, and a horrible sort of sucking feeling. I don’t know how to describe it properly… it was like being pulled through a reed made of really cold light. It hurt quite a lot, actually, he explained, rubbing his arms.
Can you talk out loud? Mary asked. They can’t use telepathy on this planet.
“Y-yes,” he said. “We live near the sea, but we learned to speak physically to trade with the people who lived in the nearby villages on land.”
Mary nodded. “In that case, you should probably try to get a job fishing or something like that. Something familiar.”
But I want - “I want to go home,” he said.
I’m sorry, Mary said. You can’t.
Since then, there had been several other aliens who had come through the Rift and been trapped on Earth. Mary didn’t personally witness many of them, and she tried to avoid everyone who came through. She hated being reminded that she was still stuck here, while the government that had exiled her had almost certainly been overthrown by now. Fortunately, she had been able to adapt to and survive on Earth pretty well compared to a lot of the others - several of the aliens who had been brought by the Rift weren’t compatible with the atmosphere, or were too different from the humans to be able to hide among them (although the inhabitants of Cardiff seemed fairly calm about most of the aliens they encountered - she assumed it must be that they were used to seeing them). The first man she’d seen come through the Rift - he had started calling himself Dafydd, and worked as a fisherman - was still alive. She saw him from time to time, and spoke to him even more rarely.
Then, in late 1869, the Rift split wide open, and Cardiff went absolutely mad.
What a Christmas gift, she reflected sourly to herself, a bunch of people ripped from their home planets and dropped on this one. I wonder how many of them will die here? How many will go mad from being trapped?
It was a bad ending to the year, and it continued through the rest of the winter. Mary was tired of all of these people showing up and reminding her again of how helpless she was, that she was stuck.
You would think that at least one of these people would have the knowledge and skills to fix my transporter, she groused when the Rift had quieted back down. I would even let whoever fixed it come to my planet with me, instead of using them as a snack, so that they could get home from there.
But no one who could help her, or anyone else, ever came through.
And then the world ended ten years later. It was as if the Rift had died. No one ever came through now, and Mary slowly began to realise that she truly was going to be trapped on this planet for the rest of her life. She was forced to visit some of the others, to see if any of them had seen anyone new come through. None of them had. Dafydd, by now an old man, told her that he thought it was a result of what had happened in 1869, when the Rift had pulled through so many.
Now, he told her, looking wistfully up at the stars, it seems to have stitched itself all the way closed again. Maybe all of us - before ‘69 - was it slowly opening, and now it’s finished going in the other direction.
Maybe, Mary said, with a twinge of sorrow.
She hadn’t realised before how lonely it was to be the only alien on the planet, but the idea of being alone for the rest of her life was terrifying.
One night, as she was walking home along the riverside, she heard a crashing noise in the underbrush. She turned to see what it was, and watched in astonishment as an alien wearing a suit ran past her, turning to shoot at something or someone chasing after him. Mary gaped. The first new alien she had seen in over a decade, and he was a gun-toting fish in a suit.
Why, she thought bitterly to herself, can’t it ever be an attractive woman who falls through the Rift?
Then another man, this one human, came through the bushes. He had a pistol in his hand too. Mary followed him as he chased the alien. Even if they did have guns, it wasn’t as though they could hurt her with them; and this was both the new alien she’d seen in years, and the first time she’d ever seen a human trying to catch one. Suddenly she had a very bad feeling. The longer the chase continued, the more worried she felt. At the end, the human shot the alien in the shoulder and handcuffed him, then dragged him away.
A woman with vivid purple eyes and faintly lavender-tinted skin joined Mary in the alleyway and watched the man dragging the alien away. Mary turned towards the woman, mouth open.
“Verana,” she said, forestalling the question. “That was a blowfish. They’re pretty bad, but I can’t help but pity him anyway. Even they deserve better than to be tortured and murdered.”
Mary stared at her, shocked. “What?”
“Oh,” Verana said. “You… didn’t know? How could you not know? Every time they find an alien in Cardiff, they hunt them down and take them. I’ve heard the stories - everyone has. They experiment on us and torture us, imprison us, and kill us. We’ve all had to go into hiding.”
“Who?” Mary whispered. “Who are they?”
“Torchwood.”