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caladria:Harry Maybourne and Vala Mal Doran: "Well, I wouldn't have done it like that."
If you had asked Harry Maybourne only a few days earlier, he would have told you his life was perfect. Four wives, a kingdom of devoted servants who respect his opinion and leadership, no enemies lurking in the shadows, and absolutely no subterfuge of any kind marring his existence.
His life was…peaceful. Ideal for his retirement. Or so he thought.
It was only when the dark-haired siren with secretive eyes and a saucy gait appeared on his planet with an insane proposition that he realized just how bored he really was.
He couldn’t trust her. All he could be sure of was that she would get him into some serious trouble, set him running for his life again, and scraping out any way to stay one step ahead.
He had zero chance of saying no to her.
“What makes you think I’ll be of any use for your little heist?” he asked.
“The objects of interest are on your planet.”
“Here?” Harry asked, wondering how he could have missed anything of value.
“No, silly,” she said with pert jut of her chin. “On Earth.”
Harry’s smile slipped from genuine amusement to chilling as he regarded her a little closer. Now he could see it, just beyond the flashy cleavage and seductive lips, the steel-infused edge to someone well versed in the game.
He stepped closer to her, forcing her to look up to keep eye contact. Looking supremely unconcerned at the posturing, she didn’t surrender even an inch.
“How exactly do you know about me?” he asked.
“Do you really care?” she countered, leaning forward just enough to press against him.
At the moment, no, he really didn’t.
“Just think of them,” she said, “sitting on top of an Ancient hoard of treasures beyond imagining and never even knowing it.”
Harry grinned, imagining waltzing back to Earth someday with a vital piece of technology, the hoops he could make Jack jump through. There could be an angle here; there was always an angle.
“What do you say, darling?” she purred, her fingers trailing up and down his arm.
Harry said the only thing he could. “Sounds like fun.”
Leaning even closer, her lips just below the edge of his jaw, she said, “Glad to hear it.”
The next thing Harry knew, she had slapped something against his arm and set off at a quick pace into the next meadow.
With a curse, Harry strode off after her to find the junkiest tel’tac he’s ever seen waiting for them. Climbing inside after the woman, he lifted the golden bracelet now encircling his wrist.
“What the hell is this?” he demanded.
She held up a matching one on her own arm. “An insurance policy,” she said with a smirk. “No turning back now.”
Spinning on her heel she flopped down into the driver’s seat, kicking at a panel when the engine refused to do her bidding, and hefted them rather gracelessly off the surface of the planet.
He reached out to steady himself on the gaudy golden walls and tried to figure out how his life had managed to spin so wildly out of control in only a matter of moments.
“We’ll be on Earth in just three days,” Vala said, slamming them into hyperspace and propping her feet up on the dash.
He should be pissed. Or at least morose over the loss of his perfect, polygamous life. But as he took the other seat and looked out into the blur of hyperspace, he felt the long forgotten pulse of adrenaline, the thrill of pulling off the impossible. There was money to be made.
He couldn’t wait.
Plus, he still had to figure out how double-cross his delectable new partner, bracelet or no. Frankly, he was pretty excited to see how it would all turn out.
It’d be nice to see Earth again.
For
zorb:
Sam and Vala: She shouldn't have been so surprised at what she found in the drawer.
Sam’s lab could be a frightfully dull place to hang around. Either because of her intense concentration or the eight plus years of experience she had ignoring the antics of Jack O’Neill, Sam was terribly difficult to annoy. It took very little to get Daniel grinding his teeth, and Cam was the easiest mark there was. With a great deal of effort and ingenuity, Vala could even occasionally get Teal’c’s left eye twitching just like so as he tried to pretend he was ‘meditating.’
Sam was a different animal all together. But Vala liked a good challenge.
Vala stretched her arms across the lab table, shoving the useless tangle of items to either side, sighing dramatically as she did so. After a minute or two of this, she glanced up to find Sam still typing away at her laptop at the other end of the room.
Nothing. That act would have guaranteed at least a waspish ‘Vala!’ from Daniel.
But maybe Sam’s insensitivity could be used to her advantage. Vala looked speculatively at the many drawers and cupboard lining the walls of the lab.
Very early on Vala had deduced that Sam was already in the habit of keeping anything truly valuable or fragile tucked away, leaving out only an odd assortment of inert alien artifacts and tangled yo-yos. It was a fairly ingenious ploy at distracting any ordinary would be misfits, but Vala was far from ordinary. She went straight for the drawers and cabinets. Many of them were locked, but knowing what kind of stuff Sam might lock up, she decided leave lock picking for a future worse case scenario.
She slid open the first drawer and pawed carelessly through the contents. Very boring for the most part. Old cracked crystals carefully organized by size and color. She really needed to get Sam out for some fun one of these days. She knew the perfect place, too, if they could get their hands on a tel’tac for a few days.
Shoving the drawer closed with a swishy click, she moved on to the next drawer. This one was filled with a bizarre assortment of objects, including one she was fairly certain was a hand sanitizer and another that looked suspiciously like the Goa’uld equivalent of a Roomba. Weird, but not all that interesting.
Vala was about to close the drawer and move on when some of the contents shifted, making another item near the back visible. Slapping a hand over her mouth, Vala couldn’t quite muffle her ear-splitting squeal.
Finally having reached the proper end of the noise spectrum to actually engage Sam’s attention, Vala pulled the shok’ram out of the drawer, waving it in the air at her.
“You have been holding out on me, Samantha Carter, you naughty girl!”
Sam blinked a couple of times, looking at Vala as if just realizing she had company. Then her eyes latched onto the item Vala was still brandishing.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Too late to play coy now!” Vala crowed.
She could see the moment Sam’s brain finally identified the object, an almost visible click into place, but rather than looking embarrassed or even remotely scandalized, she just frowned. “That’s one of the artifacts I could never figure out.”
Vala paused, looking up at Sam to gauge if she was being genuine. “You really don’t know what this is?” she asked, lowering the shok’ram to the table and poking at the controls
“No. Do you?”
“Of course I do!” Vala said, flabbergasted that this technology had somehow never made it to Earth. It explained a lot though, really. “It’s a shok’ram.”
When the word didn’t seem to register with Sam, Vala sighed loudly. “Honestly, sometimes I’m shocked you Tau’ri ever learned to walk upright!”
Sam’s eyebrow popped up at the slur and Vala smiled gamely. Definitely time to distract Sam with technology, she thought to herself. “All the Goa’uld have shok’ram, solitary, selfish beasts that they are. Apparently even a Goa’uld needs physical gratification.”
Sam’s pique seemed to instantly evaporate, her face now staining faintly pink. Clearing her throat in what was clearly an attempt to act professionally, she said, “Are you telling me that thing…is a Goa’uld vibrator?”
Vala laughed at her appalled look. “Goodness, no. It’s nothing like your pathetic Earth toys,” she said dismissively. “All you have to do is touch it, and the device taps straight into the pleasure quarters of the brain, without any of that tiresome…manual labor.”
Sam’s eyes had grown the widest she’d ever seen them. “Are you serious?”
“Would I joke about something like this?” Vala asked.
“Good point,” Sam conceded, avidly watching Vala poke and prod at the still inert object.
“Ah ha!” Vala said after a while. “The power source is kaput, no wonder you could never get it to work.”
She popped out the used cell, letting it clatter carelessly to the floor as she reached back in the drawer for the hand sanitizer and pulled it apart. It was the hand held sonic shower unit with fused controls that finally provided a compatible, working power cell. She slammed it home into the shok’ram, lights blinking to life on the surface.
“Is it…working?” Sam asked, looking morbidly fascinated and embarrassed all at the same time. Oh, yes, Vala really needed to take Sam to Risa for a few days if this was making her blush.
“Only one way to find out,” Vala said, picking up the shok’ram and heading for the door. “We’re going to need a test subject.”
“Where are you going?” Sam asked, alarm making her voice a bit shrill as she slammed her laptop closed and pushed out of her chair.
“I’m going to give it to Daniel,” Vala announced, as if it were the most obvious conclusion.
“You’re what?” Sam asked, stepping in front of the door and cutting off her exit.
Vala sighed, propping one hand on her hip and foisting the shok’ram up in the air with the other. “I have never known anyone in more desperate need of a good-.”
“Vala!” Sam interrupted, waving her hands in front of her face as if trying to rid herself of an unpleasant mental image. “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you just run around base with that thing!”
Vala briefly considered trying to take Sam down, but frankly, she wasn’t wearing the right outfight. “Fine,” she said with a sigh, deeply disappointed, but not quite surprised, that Sam was proving to be no fun at all.
Sam did look a little guilty as she took it, holding it carefully between finger and thumb as if scared to accidentally set it off. “Is there anything else in that drawer I should know about?” she asked.
Vala shook her head. “Mostly it looks like you raided the bath house of a Goa’uld or something.”
“Ok,” Sam said, retreating slowly back into her lab as if she were handling a bomb. But also preoccupied enough to not have noticed or cared how easily Vala had given it up.
Exiting the lab, Vala reached a hand down into her pocket, lifting out a small metal disc. She tossed it gently in the air a couple of times as she walked down the hallway.
Maybe she hadn’t gotten to play with the shok’ram, but the personal invisibility device she’d found sitting right next to it in Sam’s drawer of fun should provide more than enough entertainment to make up for it.
Honestly, though, she would tell Sam about the device someday. If the whole planet was at stake or something. More than likely.
Grinning, Vala slapped the device on her arm and set off for the men’s locker room.
caladria:Harry Maybourne and Vala Mal Doran: "Well, I wouldn't have done it like that."
If you had asked Harry Maybourne only a few days earlier, he would have told you his life was perfect. Four wives, a kingdom of devoted servants who respect his opinion and leadership, no enemies lurking in the shadows, and absolutely no subterfuge of any kind marring his existence.
His life was…peaceful. Ideal for his retirement. Or so he thought.
It was only when the dark-haired siren with secretive eyes and a saucy gait appeared on his planet with an insane proposition that he realized just how bored he really was.
He couldn’t trust her. All he could be sure of was that she would get him into some serious trouble, set him running for his life again, and scraping out any way to stay one step ahead.
He had zero chance of saying no to her.
“What makes you think I’ll be of any use for your little heist?” he asked.
“The objects of interest are on your planet.”
“Here?” Harry asked, wondering how he could have missed anything of value.
“No, silly,” she said with pert jut of her chin. “On Earth.”
Harry’s smile slipped from genuine amusement to chilling as he regarded her a little closer. Now he could see it, just beyond the flashy cleavage and seductive lips, the steel-infused edge to someone well versed in the game.
He stepped closer to her, forcing her to look up to keep eye contact. Looking supremely unconcerned at the posturing, she didn’t surrender even an inch.
“How exactly do you know about me?” he asked.
“Do you really care?” she countered, leaning forward just enough to press against him.
At the moment, no, he really didn’t.
“Just think of them,” she said, “sitting on top of an Ancient hoard of treasures beyond imagining and never even knowing it.”
Harry grinned, imagining waltzing back to Earth someday with a vital piece of technology, the hoops he could make Jack jump through. There could be an angle here; there was always an angle.
“What do you say, darling?” she purred, her fingers trailing up and down his arm.
Harry said the only thing he could. “Sounds like fun.”
Leaning even closer, her lips just below the edge of his jaw, she said, “Glad to hear it.”
The next thing Harry knew, she had slapped something against his arm and set off at a quick pace into the next meadow.
With a curse, Harry strode off after her to find the junkiest tel’tac he’s ever seen waiting for them. Climbing inside after the woman, he lifted the golden bracelet now encircling his wrist.
“What the hell is this?” he demanded.
She held up a matching one on her own arm. “An insurance policy,” she said with a smirk. “No turning back now.”
Spinning on her heel she flopped down into the driver’s seat, kicking at a panel when the engine refused to do her bidding, and hefted them rather gracelessly off the surface of the planet.
He reached out to steady himself on the gaudy golden walls and tried to figure out how his life had managed to spin so wildly out of control in only a matter of moments.
“We’ll be on Earth in just three days,” Vala said, slamming them into hyperspace and propping her feet up on the dash.
He should be pissed. Or at least morose over the loss of his perfect, polygamous life. But as he took the other seat and looked out into the blur of hyperspace, he felt the long forgotten pulse of adrenaline, the thrill of pulling off the impossible. There was money to be made.
He couldn’t wait.
Plus, he still had to figure out how double-cross his delectable new partner, bracelet or no. Frankly, he was pretty excited to see how it would all turn out.
It’d be nice to see Earth again.
For
zorb:
Sam and Vala: She shouldn't have been so surprised at what she found in the drawer.
Sam’s lab could be a frightfully dull place to hang around. Either because of her intense concentration or the eight plus years of experience she had ignoring the antics of Jack O’Neill, Sam was terribly difficult to annoy. It took very little to get Daniel grinding his teeth, and Cam was the easiest mark there was. With a great deal of effort and ingenuity, Vala could even occasionally get Teal’c’s left eye twitching just like so as he tried to pretend he was ‘meditating.’
Sam was a different animal all together. But Vala liked a good challenge.
Vala stretched her arms across the lab table, shoving the useless tangle of items to either side, sighing dramatically as she did so. After a minute or two of this, she glanced up to find Sam still typing away at her laptop at the other end of the room.
Nothing. That act would have guaranteed at least a waspish ‘Vala!’ from Daniel.
But maybe Sam’s insensitivity could be used to her advantage. Vala looked speculatively at the many drawers and cupboard lining the walls of the lab.
Very early on Vala had deduced that Sam was already in the habit of keeping anything truly valuable or fragile tucked away, leaving out only an odd assortment of inert alien artifacts and tangled yo-yos. It was a fairly ingenious ploy at distracting any ordinary would be misfits, but Vala was far from ordinary. She went straight for the drawers and cabinets. Many of them were locked, but knowing what kind of stuff Sam might lock up, she decided leave lock picking for a future worse case scenario.
She slid open the first drawer and pawed carelessly through the contents. Very boring for the most part. Old cracked crystals carefully organized by size and color. She really needed to get Sam out for some fun one of these days. She knew the perfect place, too, if they could get their hands on a tel’tac for a few days.
Shoving the drawer closed with a swishy click, she moved on to the next drawer. This one was filled with a bizarre assortment of objects, including one she was fairly certain was a hand sanitizer and another that looked suspiciously like the Goa’uld equivalent of a Roomba. Weird, but not all that interesting.
Vala was about to close the drawer and move on when some of the contents shifted, making another item near the back visible. Slapping a hand over her mouth, Vala couldn’t quite muffle her ear-splitting squeal.
Finally having reached the proper end of the noise spectrum to actually engage Sam’s attention, Vala pulled the shok’ram out of the drawer, waving it in the air at her.
“You have been holding out on me, Samantha Carter, you naughty girl!”
Sam blinked a couple of times, looking at Vala as if just realizing she had company. Then her eyes latched onto the item Vala was still brandishing.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Too late to play coy now!” Vala crowed.
She could see the moment Sam’s brain finally identified the object, an almost visible click into place, but rather than looking embarrassed or even remotely scandalized, she just frowned. “That’s one of the artifacts I could never figure out.”
Vala paused, looking up at Sam to gauge if she was being genuine. “You really don’t know what this is?” she asked, lowering the shok’ram to the table and poking at the controls
“No. Do you?”
“Of course I do!” Vala said, flabbergasted that this technology had somehow never made it to Earth. It explained a lot though, really. “It’s a shok’ram.”
When the word didn’t seem to register with Sam, Vala sighed loudly. “Honestly, sometimes I’m shocked you Tau’ri ever learned to walk upright!”
Sam’s eyebrow popped up at the slur and Vala smiled gamely. Definitely time to distract Sam with technology, she thought to herself. “All the Goa’uld have shok’ram, solitary, selfish beasts that they are. Apparently even a Goa’uld needs physical gratification.”
Sam’s pique seemed to instantly evaporate, her face now staining faintly pink. Clearing her throat in what was clearly an attempt to act professionally, she said, “Are you telling me that thing…is a Goa’uld vibrator?”
Vala laughed at her appalled look. “Goodness, no. It’s nothing like your pathetic Earth toys,” she said dismissively. “All you have to do is touch it, and the device taps straight into the pleasure quarters of the brain, without any of that tiresome…manual labor.”
Sam’s eyes had grown the widest she’d ever seen them. “Are you serious?”
“Would I joke about something like this?” Vala asked.
“Good point,” Sam conceded, avidly watching Vala poke and prod at the still inert object.
“Ah ha!” Vala said after a while. “The power source is kaput, no wonder you could never get it to work.”
She popped out the used cell, letting it clatter carelessly to the floor as she reached back in the drawer for the hand sanitizer and pulled it apart. It was the hand held sonic shower unit with fused controls that finally provided a compatible, working power cell. She slammed it home into the shok’ram, lights blinking to life on the surface.
“Is it…working?” Sam asked, looking morbidly fascinated and embarrassed all at the same time. Oh, yes, Vala really needed to take Sam to Risa for a few days if this was making her blush.
“Only one way to find out,” Vala said, picking up the shok’ram and heading for the door. “We’re going to need a test subject.”
“Where are you going?” Sam asked, alarm making her voice a bit shrill as she slammed her laptop closed and pushed out of her chair.
“I’m going to give it to Daniel,” Vala announced, as if it were the most obvious conclusion.
“You’re what?” Sam asked, stepping in front of the door and cutting off her exit.
Vala sighed, propping one hand on her hip and foisting the shok’ram up in the air with the other. “I have never known anyone in more desperate need of a good-.”
“Vala!” Sam interrupted, waving her hands in front of her face as if trying to rid herself of an unpleasant mental image. “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you just run around base with that thing!”
Vala briefly considered trying to take Sam down, but frankly, she wasn’t wearing the right outfight. “Fine,” she said with a sigh, deeply disappointed, but not quite surprised, that Sam was proving to be no fun at all.
Sam did look a little guilty as she took it, holding it carefully between finger and thumb as if scared to accidentally set it off. “Is there anything else in that drawer I should know about?” she asked.
Vala shook her head. “Mostly it looks like you raided the bath house of a Goa’uld or something.”
“Ok,” Sam said, retreating slowly back into her lab as if she were handling a bomb. But also preoccupied enough to not have noticed or cared how easily Vala had given it up.
Exiting the lab, Vala reached a hand down into her pocket, lifting out a small metal disc. She tossed it gently in the air a couple of times as she walked down the hallway.
Maybe she hadn’t gotten to play with the shok’ram, but the personal invisibility device she’d found sitting right next to it in Sam’s drawer of fun should provide more than enough entertainment to make up for it.
Honestly, though, she would tell Sam about the device someday. If the whole planet was at stake or something. More than likely.
Grinning, Vala slapped the device on her arm and set off for the men’s locker room.