ddd_news | APPLICATIONS -- 2010; 001

APPLICATIONS -- 2010; 001

THIS APPLICATIONS POST IS CLOSED. Please direct your attention to the new one here!

Each year, the team defrosted Tommy, a World War I-era soldier kept in cryogenic storage; the Torchwood members who came across him in 1918 knew he would eventually be needed to fix a time shift. They sealed instructions in a box that was keyed to open at the right time. Since joining Torchwood, Tosh placed herself in charge of Tommy, eventually growing attached to him over time. She's the one who took him on his yearly "day out" - and, before they discover that the time shift was about to occur, she slept with him. Shortly afterwards, the box opened, and Jack called Tosh to tell her to return to the Hub. He gave her her instructions, then warned her of something else - Tommy was executed for cowardice after he returned to his own timeline. Tosh was hesitant to make him return after that revelation, but she did so anyway, instructing the past Torchwood agents in what needed to be done. However, Tommy forgot about what happened in the future, so Tosh had to be psychically projected into the past to persuade him to stitch the time shift shut. Afterwards, Tosh was devastated, knowing that she'd sentenced him to death, and knowing that she had no other choice.

Sometime later, Gwen returned from a holiday with Rhys, only to discover that the rest of the team had changed to include a sixth member, Adam. He fit in so perfectly that it seemed as if he'd always been there. (The fact that he's an entity that alters others' memories in order to manipulate them may have something to do with this - he has to exist within memories in order to survive.) In fact, he established himself as Tosh's fiance, making Owen the nerdy one with the hopeless crush on Tosh. Luckily, Ianto's diary helped to reveal the true past to Jack - along with Torchwood's security footage - and Adam was captured. Jack convinced everybody to take retcon pills in order to forget Adam; they needed to find a memory that defined them and made them think of who they were. Tosh chose maths - how they're reliable and everything always works out properly. She mentioned moving into her first flat and wanting to have a flat-warming party, only to realise that she didn't have anybody she wanted to invite. All she wanted is for someone to see that she's special - taking the pill obviously make her forget the one person who did. Needless to say, they all took the pills and forgot Adam, then found a few things left behind in the Hub later. Tosh had a bouquet of flowers (sent by Owen when he was in love with her), which rather mystified her - Owen, of course, disregarded it entirely.

When terminally ill patients in Cardiff started receiving miracle cures, Martha Jones turned up to help the team investigate a facility known only as the Pharm. Owen tried to flirt with her, but she was clearly uninterested - in fact, she was engaged. Tosh commented on Martha and Owen, but Owen assured her it was going nowhere - they eventually agreed to go on a date. The team fitted Martha with contact lenses that transmitted a video feed back to the Hub. However, Martha was infected with the alien larvae, and her blood cells, mutated from traveling through time and space, allowed her to incubate the larva long past the time the previous "patients" did. Owen, Jack, and the rest of the team came to her rescue; Owen used a singularity scalpel to remove the mayfly from her stomach. Professor Copley, the man running the Pharm, threatened to shoot them as they tried to leave. While Owen tried to talk him down, Copley shot him in the chest.

Later, Martha prepared to perform Owen's autopsy, but Jack wasn't there; he was searching for the other resurrection gauntlet. He returned with the gauntlet and revived Owen - supposedly for two minutes - and the team said their final goodbyes, Tosh confessing her love for him. Owen didn't return to the dead, though, and no tests could distinguish anything. Their research eventually turned up a similar case of resurrection, when death came and took the souls of thirteen people. This time, it happened at a hospital; Owen sealed himself in with the entity of Death - briefly kissing Tosh first - and faced it down, defeating it.

After it was finally agreed upon that Owen was definitely human, he rejoined the team - but was relegated to making coffee. Depressed after cutting his finger and not feeling it, he went back to his flat to clear out his possessions. Tosh arrived to help him - just to talk, really - and he blew up at her, breaking a finger to show her that he was broken - and then left, going down to the wharf to attempt to commit suicide. It didn't work - but then it turned out that Owen was the only one who could infiltrate the mansion of a reclusive millionaire, due to his lack of body heat. He talked to the old man, helping him to face his fear of death, and retrieved the alien artefact he'd come for. Later, he showed it to a woman preparing to commit suicide on a roof - telling her the events of the episode - and revealed that it was a beacon sent back to Earth in response to its transmissions to extraterrestrials.

Gwen's wedding occurred shortly after that - and, of course, they couldn't have any sort of event without aliens. Gwen became the host for an alien's baby - appearing rather pregnant - and the mother, a shape-changer, infiltrated the wedding, killing some of the guests before holding Gwen's mother hostage. Gwen shot the mother and Rhys managed to remove the egg using the singularity scalpel - and then Jack retconned everybody at the wedding.

After continuing their work - first facing a series of "ghosts" from old films of a circus, then investigating negative spikes of rift activity - the team was lured to an old building with signs of alien life. The building exploded, trapping everybody but Gwen inside - Tosh's arm was broken in the process. Once freed, they discovered a holographic message from John Hart. The team split up to investigate; Jack was captured by John again, then taken back in time by his brother Gray and buried alive. Meanwhile, Gwen, Tosh, Owen, and Rhys tried to resolve the chaos coming from the bombs Gray had planted throughout the city - John returned to the Hub, telling them that the nearby nuclear power station was about to go into meltdown, but that there were Weevils keeping them from it. Owen decided to go on his own, since he had a strange undead affinity for Weevils, and Tosh was to keep in contact with him in order to tell him how to disable it. Ianto, Gwen, and John were trapped in the cells by Gray, who then shot Tosh. After Gray left, Tosh managed to regain contact with Owen, carefully talking him through the process - he would be caught in the venting of the reactor, essentially burning him alive (sort of). They kept talking to the very end, Tosh attempting to calm Owen's rage at his ultimate death, without revealing her own fate.

Personality: An only child, Tosh spent most of her early life extremely close to her parents (and, while she was in Japan, her grandparents). Her high intelligence meant that she was ostracised in school - and she didn't really care to rectify that, preferring to spend time on her own, absorbed in books. Her grandparents were codebreakers for the British military in World War II, and they taught her the tricks of encoding and decoding while she lived in Japan. She went on to learn more about it on her own; it's still an avid hobby of hers to this day. She was especially interested in math and science, and her parents encouraged her to follow these interests, though her mother secretly wished that her daughter would be a little more feminine, or at least have a few friends.

Even though she spoke fluent and unaccented English when she returned to the UK at the age of twelve, the other schoolchildren still made fun of her for being quiet, intelligent, and polite. This drove her to continue to excel at academics, rather than drawing closer to other people. She graduated early, and continued to stay apart from others at university, because she was younger than most and lacked similar interests.

As an adult, Tosh still lacks proper interpersonal relationships. She's only been on a handful of dates, and is incapable of keeping a significant other for long. Her most successful relationship to date was with Mary. She's had a crush on Owen practically ever since he started working at Torchwood, but doesn't want to approach him for fear of inevitable rejection. She's jealous of his sexual relationship with Gwen, particularly when she overhears the two of them mocking her while they flirt when she's in possession of the pendant that grants her telepathy. Since Torchwood requires its members to distance themselves from family, Tosh can't even contact her parents, and she doesn't have any friends outside of work.

Basically, Tosh is brilliant and heartbreakingly lonely, slightly incapable of maintaining any sort of social relationship and, in fact, secretly a bit afraid of social situations. She still feels incredibly guilty for the situation that led to her mother being kidnapped and her subsequent incarceration in UNIT's solitary confinement. The confinement itself drove her a little mad - eating away at her from the inside, forcing her to focus on her guilt, the shame she'd brought to her family, the thought of spending the rest of her life trapped in a cell. The thought of what she narrowly escaped still haunts her.

Other: Personality and most of the original history written for

realityshifted
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First Person (entry type): I've never quite been able to figure out what it is that draws me to Owen time and time again. It's a bit like a theorem that refuses to work out properly - you can apply the right laws to it, but in the end, none of it makes any sense. (Which really means it's not like a mathematical theorem at all, actually, but it's a useful metaphor.) He's attractive enough, true - perhaps not in the style that popular culture deems attractive, but that cocky self-confidence is more than enough to pull any girl who crosses his path.

I know it's a common cliche that women often choose the men that are worst for them, but I always imagined I had enough sense to keep from falling into that trap. He's not bad for me, precisely, not in the abusive sense of the word, he just…doesn't like me. I know that, have known it for years, and yet I've always persisted in my futile quest, through all the mockery and rejection and shagging all our female coworkers. Maybe I'm a masochist, or maybe there's something more.

That's what I thought when I first saw him, anyway - Jack brought him into the Hub, and for just a moment, he looked broken, absolutely devastated and lost, and all I wanted to do was help him pick up the pieces, because in that one moment, I saw myself mirrored in him. I've not seen that side of him again in all the time we've worked together; he's built up a facade of arrogance and callousness and cruelty to keep anybody from getting close to him. But I know I didn't imagine it; he keeps drawing closer and closer to that breaking point again. I think maybe I'm the only one who sees it - certainly he doesn't realise it - but when that day comes, he'll need someone to be there. I shouldn't spend my life waiting for him - but I don't want to leave him to his fate, either.

Third Person: The weather in Cardiff was rubbish. Granted, this was the case quite a lot of the time - some of the team members thought that the weather was influenced by the Rift, but Tosh had compiled the statistics any number of times in order to prove that wasn't the case. (Owen had muttered something about her having no sense of humor.) Really big spikes of activity actually were connected to thunderstorms, as the energy given off by the Rift excited the ions in the air - or, as Jack said, it was to give the whole thing a sense of drama.

But simply drippy weather was perfectly normal. This didn't make Tosh any happier about the water running down the back of her neck. She frowned at the detector in her hand - it was meant to be waterproof, but there was a chance some moisture had managed to foul up the sensors. The readings were precisely what they were supposed to be when there was Rift activity present - but the only other creature in the alley was a cat.

"Ianto," Tosh said into her communicator, "are you positive you've got the right coordinates?" It wasn't like Ianto to play jokes on her; the rest of the team might (or Gwen and Owen would), but Ianto was - well, not quite a friend, maybe, but the closest thing she had to one.

"You're right on top of it," Ianto confirmed.

Tosh eyed the cat warily. Jack had told her stories about carnivorous rabbits, but she'd figured at the time he'd just been taking the piss. It looked like a perfectly ordinary cat, albeit one that was just as unhappy about being soaked as she was. She shrugged philosophically and decided this was the sort of thing that was best used for getting back at one's coworkers for that trick with the aluminium foil they'd played last week.

"I think you'd better send backup," she said, contriving to sound as innocent as possible. "With a few tins of tuna fish. Or maybe a cheeseburger."

Edited 2011-02-07 20:42 (UTC)

We're sorry, but this application has been rejected. While it was well-written and accurate, we feel that the other application submitted had a slightly better grasp on character voice. Please feel free to apply for another character!

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APPLICATIONS -- 2010; 001

Re: Toshiko Sato / Torchwood / 4 of ?

Re: Toshiko Sato / Torchwood / 5 of ?

Re: Toshiko Sato / Torchwood / 6 of ?

Re: Toshiko Sato / Torchwood / 7 of 7

Rejected