Welcome to Cardiff. Home of culture and good times. And oh yeah, a huge rift in the sky that pops out aliens every now and then! If you’re [un]lucky enough to know about Torchwood, you’ll know that the 21st century is where it all changes… And you gotta be ready.

In recent years, our small blue and green planet has met more aliens than ever before, and most of them weren’t here for tea and biscuits. Not that the ‘general public’ know, of course: When aliens smashed a ship through Big Ben, they didn’t blink. Cybermen and Daleks fought to take over and people were easily convinced it was a hallucination. An assumed deceased 900 year old Time Lord enslaved the world for a year, and only a broken paradox managed to bring things back to normal, only a select few any the wiser.

All down to Torchwood, and sometimes The Doctor.

Who is The Doctor? Doctor Who. Sir Doctor of TARDIS. John Smith. The Oncoming Storm. The Lonely God. His nemesis once remarked to the Doctor that they both chose their names, and that it was sanctimonious of the Doctor to identify himself as "the man who makes people better". Nigh unknown to the human race, the now last of the Time Lords has been protecting this world and others, in this time and others, under monikers for a large part of his 945-soon-to-be-946 years.

What is Torchwood? In short, along with the more universal and well-known UNIT, Earth’s unofficial official line of defence against the dangers threatening mankind, and a repository for the ‘safe keeping’ of alien artefacts that have made their way there. With it’s HQ recently destroyed and rebuilt under the oblivious eyes of the world in none other than Cardiff, and branches in Glasgow and London ready to assemble and deploy whenever the hub needs them, why fear the paranormal? Torchwood is unapparantly led in its defences by the knowledgeable and enigmatic Captain Jack Harkness, who knows that everything they discover is invaluable for mankind to survive what he believes is coming, even if he’s not quite sure mankind should know or what is coming...

But people are starting to notice the subtle yet peculiar things that are happening, surely it can't be that long until someone finds and exposes Torchwood too? For the time being they have managed to go unnoticed and even expand but surely it's only a matter of time before people start connecting those little dots. Every time something weird happens, the team set the police off on a wild goose chase that cannot be questioned and take over the circus, and they’ve never been good at quiet entrances.

The year is 2008, and things really are starting to change – Rapidly. Cardiff’s branch of Torchwood is the only one that has made any contact with the outside of underground world since New Year’s Eve 2007, and the worst is beginning to be feared. Convoys set out to investigate the whodunit have vanished, along with an increasing population of unsuspecting residents in the surrounding areas. And in Cardiff itself, unexpected objects are starting to fall through the rift, littering the streets, sometimes dangerous objects that should by all rights still be in their rightful places in Glasgow and London, with objects reported missing by rural communities across the United Kingdom. Not only that, ordinary every day people have started collecting the stuff that falls through the rift – Well some of them are ordinary, some of them are actually collectors of this alien junk. Needless to say, staying anonymous is getting harder each day.

The press already thinks it's on to something and has started turning up on the scene of everything weird thing that happens before Torchwood even have a chance to get in the car! Torchwood is also battling to be on the case, making it their mission not only to stop these collectors but to restore all the items to their rightful places, as well as finding out why (if there is any reason) the items are being hoarded. After all, it’s all they can do. The only lead they have is a suggestion made by an employee working in Glasgow on Halloween 2007, the proposal that Cardiff’s rift isn’t the only one.

Are new rifts coming and, if so, does it mean that the global warming nightmare has finally come true or are the new tears in the space time continuum on purpose, an effect of yet another alien race taking an interest in ours?