torchwoodteaboy | [RL WITH SULU]

Ianto quirked an eyebrow. He'd figured that Sulu would say something like that--he looked the type--but he was also of the opinion that anyone who said that they didn't like the taste of coffee just hadn't had a properly brewed cup yet. He'd humor Sulu and put in a shot of sweet syrup, but definitely not make it as sweet as Sulu himself would probably normally make it.

Grabbing Owen's old mug from the rack, he set the coffee to brew, filling the mug up before adding a single shot of syrup. "No milk to further contaminate it?" he asked, smirking but otherwise handing over the bevarage Jack and the others often referred to as being "sweet nectar of the gods".

"I've gotten used to not having any creamer or anything," Sulu grinned, "The stuff we use on board isn't really... well. Good. For anything." Sulu accepted the mug with a brief "thanks" before deciding that it would probably be better to try it now than to wait. After all, he wasn't really a coffee fan and dragging out the inevitable lukewarm reaction wouldn't make it any better. Besides, hot was better than cold, right?

He took a tentative sip, then frowned and took another. "It's good." He sounded kind of confused. "Like, honestly really good."

Ianto, who'd been watching Sulu for a reaction, all but burst out laughing at the one he gave. "Don't look so surprised," he said, with a big grin. "There is a reason that they have to refer to me as coffee king if I've cut them off, it's not like you can find this kind of stuff just anywhere." He petted the machine. "I've modified this baby enough so that it's guaranteed to make the most perfect cup of coffee you've ever had every time it works. That is, if you know how to work it right." He took down his own mug and poured himself a mugful as well, taking a sip to make sure that, yes, indeed, it was as wonderful as ever. "I take it you're more of a tea kind of guy, then?"

Sulu nodded. "Yeah, pretty much. Coffee's usually too bitter for me, but this is pretty much amazing." He was definitely drinking the coffee like someone who wasn't adverse to the taste, that was for sure. "Was it just luck that you figured out how to use it? Or did you find a manual in a language only you can read?" He grinned.

Ianto smiles, pleased with himself for impressing someone who's pretty impressive himself. "Well, something like that. It's more like I had the patience to figure it out and then fix where it needed fixing. Plus, do a little of my own modifications, and voila, a gorgeous masterpiece of wonderful smell and taste."

Sulu lifted his mug briefly in appreciation. "You definitely know what you're doing. I sort of thought you were exaggerating a little when you said you made great coffee, but I've been proven wrong." Actually, he was pretty tempted now to offer Ianto space on the Enterprise in exchange for what could possibly be peace-treaty coffee.

"I'd offer to teach you how, but I don't really know myself, I just kind of worked it out. Plus, it wouldn't be that much of a success if I went around teaching everyone else to do it as well." He nursed his cup of coffee, all but crawling into the warm, dark liquid. "Once we're done with this, we can move onto the lower levels. It's just... a bit dusty down there, so it's better to finish first."

"I wouldn't want you to ruin your monopoly on coffee, don't worry." Sulu had enough restraint to refrain from gulping down the coffee he had left, but only just. The stuff was pretty damned delicious. "Is there anything I should know before we head down there, though? Other than 'don't touch anything,' obviously."

"Well," Ianto said, pausing to drink down the last of his cup. "I think we're going to go see Janet and the cells first, because they're on the way down to the archives. My advice would be try not to make a target of yourself for them, and don't stick your fingers through the air holes. They're liable to be eaten off. Other than that..." He shrugged. "You can touch things in the archive, just don't touch anything that I say you can't touch, and we should be fine. Sound good?"

"Sounds fine. I've built up an aversion towards putting my hands in the way of anything that might take them, anyway." He took the last few sips left in his mug, smiling easily. "And I'm used to following orders. So, I think we'll be okay." Probably!

"Yes, you would need your hands, what with being a pilot and all." Ianto smiled at Sulu, taking his empty mug from him and rinsing both mugs out before leaving them to sit in the sink. "Alright, it's this way," he said, leading the way across the opposite side of the Hub from the door, and around the corner to start down another flight of stairs.

"And as for following orders, well, that makes two of us," Ianto said as he walked. "I mean, I'm used to following them more than I'm used to issuing them out, but I think I can manage telling you when not to do something that might end up going bad." He smirked and gave Sulu a little wink.

"I'll make it easier for you and keep my hands in my pockets," Sulu said with a smirk, going so far as to actually shove his hands back in his pockets. "Now, what kind of doom are you leading me towards first, exactly?"

"You're going to meet Janet, the Weevil," Ianto said, as the went down the stairs and rounded the corner of a tunnel. "And probably...well, we don't have a name for it yet, but there's a Hoix a few cells down that would probably be pretty interesting to you as well. As for what a Weevil exactly is, well. You'll see when we get there, but basically, Weevils are big, mildly telepathic pitbull-like humanoids that can digest anything they run into. They generally live in the sewers and keep to themselves, but Janet here likes to attack people, so we keep her locked up. As for Hoix, well, they're kind of uglier versions of weevils, only their only goal in life it seems is to eat anything. Metal, plastic, you, you name it. I had to remove anything in the cell that might've gotten eaten off."

Sulu frowned in thought. Part of him wanted to ask about the capacity for reason, or the population count in the sewers, or any number of questions xenobiology classes had taught him to ask, but he kept them to himself for the time-being. "Any particular reason she likes to go after people? ...And how telepathic are we talking?"

Ianto shrugged. "We're not quite sure. She doesn't seem to have any other differences from other Weevils. Just every once and a while one goes rogue like this, and we have to make sure to take them off the streets. We try to house them here when we can, but most of the time they get a taste for flesh, they're too hard to bring in and we have to put them down. Janet's special, though. She's, well, cooperative. She'll just eat your face off if you get too close."

He led Sulu down another hallway to another staircase. "As for the telepathy, well. They can sense when another Weevil close by is suffering. They've got some sense of emotion from us as well. And, well. It's a bit of a long story, but for the end of things, Owen was sort of the walking dead, and they could recognize that. I think they even revered him. Got to his head, though, called himself 'King of the Weevils'." He stopped outside the door at the bottom of the stairs.

"This is it. You ready?" he asked.

"Sounds more cooperative than some people I've met," Sulu grinned. "And is there something about Torchwood that just makes people want to be monarchs?"

When they reached the door and Ianto asked him that forever worrying, bad-connotations-included question, Sulu just shrugged amicably. "I'm probably not, but that's never stopped me before."

Ianto chuckled. "I don't know. I guess when you spend enough time around Captain Jack Harkness, Himself, a bit of that ego starts to rub off on you as well."

Ianto pulled open the door to the cells and motioned Sulu in after him. The two entered a short, dark, slightly ill-kept hallway. Ianto led them to the first cell on the left, where, from inside the cells, Janet the Weevil crouched and stared out at them.

"Sulu," Ianto said, "meet Janet, our resident giant carnivorous pest. Well, second giant carnivorous pest."

Well. It wasn't unusual to find alien species that looked so different, but Sulu was pretty sure he'd never seen anything like Janet before. The angular arch to the eye sockets was kind of familiar, though...

"Hello, Janet," he said idly, not thinking twice about giving a greeting to a carnivorous, face-eating alien. (When you go to a university where vaguely-humanoid aliens are your professors, it becomes a default reaction to any extraterrestrial life.) "Just so you know, Ianto, I am really resisting leaning in and poking, right now."

"Good," Ianto says, "because she's liable to try and bite your fingers off." As if to prove his point, Janet seems to sniff the air, growling and bearing her teeth. Ianto stands back. He's never seen anyone's reaction to an alien before--it's always Jack showing people around, this whole experience is still pretty new to him. Pretty neat, though, if he said so himself.

"There are tons of them," Ianto explained, "living in the sewers and abandoned buildings and the likes. There are some theories about where they came from and what they are, but...they're a bit hard to believe, really..."

"Yeah, definitely noticing the biting off part." Sulu tilted his head to the side, like that would help him see the Weevil in a new light, the growling registering low on his "bad signs that you should pay attention to" scale.

"So, what's the leading theory? And... what do you do with her? Just leave her here?" Obviously, there wasn't much to do with something that wanted to eat your face, but he felt obliged to ask.

"Well..." Ianto trailed off, feeling a bit silly for even mentioning them. "Some people like to think that they're, well...us. Well, I mean, not us us, but. Humans, somewhere down the line, when we've started reverse evolving. When we're boiled down to our basic emotions, and all we have is rage." Ianto shook himself. "But--... Obviously that theory's a little far-fetched. Like I said, we really have no idea. They just seem to appear out of nowhere all the time, and every single one of them is wearing those leather jump suits," he said, pointing to the jumpsuit Janet was sporting.

"As for what we do with her, well. We keep her fed and housed, but there's really not much more we can do with her. Let her out, she'll eat people. I mean, we could kill her, but," Ianto paused, remembering his days at Torchwood One, "Torchwood doesn't do things like that anymore, not since Jack took over Torchwood operations."

Sulu hummed thoughtfully. "It's not the most insane I've ever heard, really. Probably not right, but still. The jumpsuit thing is kind of weird, though." He glanced briefly at Ianto, "Jack's a good man for putting a stop to that kind of idiocy." Sulu, after all, was kind of a firm believer in alien rights. "There's no way to actually educate them, I guess, right? Or at least get Janet to not go around eating people."

Ianto's eyes lower to the ground. "We really haven't tried trying to educate them. I know it's not the best excuse, but we don't really have the time or the manpower to even attempt it. Not with only the three of us."

Ianto was sorry that he seemed to always turn the conversation in such sour directions. It was hard seeing the brighter side of things when so much of your life was in shadows, he supposed. "We do what we can, but further studies won't really be possible for a while yet."

Sulu shook his head. "It's an understandable issue. Honestly, even with the size of the Enterprise's crew, we wouldn't be able to do something like that properly, either. It's something that would required a dedicated taskforce."

It was kind of a shame, though; this sort of situation wouldn't work in his universe, at all, but here it was the only real option. And, as terrible as it was to think, at least Janet didn't know well enough that she was getting the short end of the stick. He offered Ianto a smile. "From what I know of 21st century entertainment, you probably would be worse off if you let her learn from television programming, so waiting to see if you can get someone that would actually be able to help is probably your best bet."

Ianto smiled slightly back at Sulu, appreciating his attempt to lighten the mood and the fact that he hadn't called Ianto out on being a downer. Ianto generally did feel bad for the creatures down in the cells, but there wasn't a lot that Torcwood could do for them. "Perhaps you're right." He pushed himself off from the wall where he'd been leaning, trying to shake himself of the mood.

"So, that's Janet. She's pretty intelligent, actually, for the things we have down here. Want to meet a Hoix? They'll give you a pretty good opinion of Weevils, comparatively."

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