Results are in...
for Stargate_LAS (Challenge 3) and originalfic_las (Challenge 1), so I can post my fic now. I got a mixed reaction of 1 best and 1 worst vote on the Stargate fic, and 1 worst vote on the originalfic fic. (Haven't received my feedback yet to know why.) Not sure how I will keep up with it during NaNo, because it took me HOURS to read/vote/feed.
Name: MajorSamFan
Show/Movie: SG-1, Season 7
Story Title: Let There Be Cake
Character/Relationships: Daniel Jackson, Teal’c, Jack O’Neill and Samantha Carter, with mention of other canon base personnel
Rating: G
Warnings: No warnings. Set some time between “Grace” and “Heroes, Part 1”
Daniel Jackson ducked into a lab, and Teal’c pulled the door shut just as Samantha Carter rounded the corner at the end of the hall. The former First Prime of Apophis tilted his head in acknowledgement of his teammate.
“Hey, Teal’c. Still on for weight training at 1600?”
“Indeed.”
“Great. I’m so glad to be released back to full duty after the Prometheus. I just have to drop this report off to Colonel O’Neill,” Sam explained, brandishing a folder marked “Top Secret”. “And then I’ll get changed. I’ll meet you in the gym.”
“I will be there.”
Sam started to smile, but it morphed into more of a questioning expression as her gaze shifted back and forth between him and the lab door with narrowing eyes and a slight upward tug on one side of her mouth. Her lips parted as if to ask what Teal’c wanted with Jay Felger, thinking better of it, Sam stopped short. Finishing the grin and then shaking her head, Sam turned with military precision and continued down the corridor.
Teal’c waited until she turned the next corner before silently following her and glancing around the edge. He just caught a glimpse of the folder swishing behind her as she made the next bend. Teal’c straightened and walked back to the lab door, which he opened and entered. Unfortunately, Jay Felger was there.
“Wow! I wish I didn’t have to monitor this experiment so closely, or I’d join you,” the nerd gushed.
Teal’c did not say aloud, “You are not invited,” but his posture said as much. Oblivious as usual, Felger took no note of it and started reminiscing to Daniel about his past encounters with SG-1. Teal’c interrupted without compunction.
“Daniel Jackson, O’Neill said he would keep Major Carter occupied for fifteen minutes. We must not delay.”
“Uh, yeah, we better go. Thanks for letting me hide in here, Folgers.”
“Felger,” the scientist corrected. Daniel Jackson had returned, descended to the human plain of existence, only months ago, and everyone forgave his occasionally memory issues. However, he recalled Jay only from what Jack had told him and thus, as Folgers. Daniel, ever the coffee addict, remembered that distinctly.
“Ah, yes, well…thanks,” Daniel mumbled, picking up the pink box he had set on Jay’s lab table. He exited through the door Teal’c held open, looking both ways down the hall in case Sam might have returned unexpectedly. Given her natural curiosity, that posed an actual risk, but Daniel found the passage clear and stepped out.
Teal’c closed the lab door while Daniel waited, and then the Jaffa led the way to the commissary. They found Sergeants Harriman and Siler hanging the last of the pink streamers and Janet Fraiser adding plates to the napkins and plastic forks already laid out. Daniel set the box in the big open spot reserved for it.
“Lemme see!” Janet tossed open the box lid. “Oh, wow! That’s great. She’s going to love it!”
Daniel lifted out a bakery-decorated sheet cake made to look like a scientific calculator using fondant to represent all the numbers and symbols. They had wanted a laptop, but the local baker had just shaken his head and said, “I’m not the Cake Boss, for crying out loud!” After seeing what he *had* accomplished, given they had ordered only 48 hours ahead, Teal’c had complimented his “great proficiency”, and Daniel had suggested maybe next time, with more notice, he could do a laptop. The baker had showed them the door, mumbling something about crazy men in fedoras. Then they had only to get the cake to Cheyenne Mountain without incident and to the commissary without Sam seeing it.
Leaving Janet to finalize setting up the cake, Daniel turned to find Teal’c greeting some of the other SG teams as they arrived. He didn’t remember his teammate being so sociable, but there Teal’c stood, nodding at each person who came in.
“Okay, everyone, quiet down,” Daniel announced. “Jack’s gonna bring Sam any minute. Find a spot. I’m going to turn out the lights, and when they walk in, everyone yell, ‘Surprise!’ Okay? Good.”
Airmen and Marines alike shuffled about and finally settled around the perimeter. Most everyone clumped in their teams, with some intermingling. Colonel Dixon of SG-13 and his red-headed archaeologist - Balinsky, Daniel remembered - talked with Colonel Reynolds. Dixon’s team was due to gate out to P3X-666 in a few days, Daniel knew. Unlike Jack, he refused to attach any significance to the designation “666”, and he hoped they would find some clue to the Lost City there.
Daniel flipped the light switch, leaving them with only the glow from the kitchen area. He barely had moved back by Teal’c, when they heard Jack O’Neill proclaim out in the hall, “I hope they have cake. Really hankering for a big ol’ piece…”
“Not pie, Sir?” Sam asked, as the door opened. “What the…? Why are the lights off?” Sam reached over and felt for the switch and, finding it, flicked it back on.
“Surprise!” everyone shouted, and Samantha Carter’s cheeks colored as she took in the assembled company. She had stopped in the doorway, and the Colonel peeked over her shoulder.
“Uh, Carter? Think we could actually go in?”
“Sorry, Sir,” she mumbled reflexively, stepping further into the room. Janet walked over, grabbed her arm and guided her to the cake. “Oh, guys, that’s just…”
Teal’c and Daniel sidled up on Sam’s left, and O’Neill followed, his hands shoved in his BDU pockets and a grin plastered on his face.
“I told you there was talk of cake,” Jack reminded her with his patented smirk.
“I can’t believe you all pulled it off as a surprise.”
“Well, you know, Carter, I love it when a plan comes together.”
Name: MajorSamFan
Story Title: Can You Spare Some Change?
Rating: PG
Warnings: brief mention of drug lab
I hate shopping. I hate everything about shopping, for myself or for others - trying on clothes, walking around football-field-sized stores, standing in long check-out lines, spending money I don’t really have. Target or Wal-Mart get my meager business, the same places other people with no money to spare shop. Or panhandle. Though less prevalent here than in the City, we have plenty of “will work for food signs” and people begging for change.
Having just spent way more than I had planned on gifts, I stepped out into the cool dusk breeze. Always alert in parking lots, especially as the sun disappears, I spotted her immediately, walking away with the slumped shoulders of rejection from another potential victim. I carefully avoided meeting her gaze, fumbling for the car keys. She approached anyway.
“Can you spare some change?” I didn’t acknowledge the rail-thin woman dressed in dirty, faded jeans, cowboy boots, and a western-styled shirt; I hoped she would go away. She didn’t. “I just need gas money to get back to…” It didn’t matter to me what fake destination she planned to give.
“Sorry!” I interrupted, finally having unlocked my car. I slipped into the seat and closed the door. Safe. Or so I thought.
I had left the windows cracked open, and I heard a small voice ask, “Can we go now? I’m tired. And hungry. And it’s starting to get cold.” A girl, maybe five years old, wearing a spaghetti-strap tank, shorts and thongs and clutching a ragged quilt that definitely had seen better days, stepped into the glare of my headlights from behind a “welfare wagon”.
Now *my* shoulders slumped. A child. Even here in sunny California, the temperature had dropped from the upper 70s down to the 60s - too chilly for that outfit.
My hand rested on the key, ready to turn it. My mind warred. Times were tough all over with the economic downturn. My paycheck barely stretched, often *didn’t* stretch enough; I had overdue bills myself. Still…a child.
I twisted the key, and the CD player turned on. Steven Curtis Chapman picked up where he’d left off when I had parked,
“And I saw the face of Jesus down on 16th Avenue. He was sleeping in an old car, while his mom went looking for food. And I heard the voice of Jesus, gently whisper to my soul, ‘Didn’t you say you wanted to know me. Well, here I am, and it’s getting cold.’
“So what now? What will you do, now that you found me? What now? What will you do with this treasure you found? I know I may not look like what you expected, but if you remember, this is right where I said I would be. You found me. What now?”
By the time he finished, tears streamed down my cheeks. I sniffed and turned off the engine. Grabbing my purse and purchases, I walked slowly over to the woman. The little girl lay on the back seat of the station wagon, curled up in a light “indoor” child’s sleeping bag. They lived in the car, I surmised.
“Excuse me,” I whispered, barely able to talk.
The woman’s hard eyes softened as she noted the tears on my face, but she still stood with her hip cocked to one side and arms crossed, her earlier “pity-me performance posture” replaced with distrust.
“Can I change my mind?”
“I don’t know. Can you?”
“Look, I’ve been ‘taken’ by panhandlers before.” Her face flushed, her eyes narrowed, and she started to turn away. My words cut deep, I realized too late, and I thought how I’d feel if I had to beg change to survive. “I really am sorry, and, if you’ll let me, I’d like to help. Let’s go inside and get your daughter…”
“Granddaughter.”
“Your granddaughter - and you - something to eat. We can talk about what’s going on. Maybe I *can* help - or find someone who can.”
She hesitated but agreed when the little girl sat up. I returned my merchandise while they waited. The clerk frowned at us, but since I had paid in cash she refunded it. I used the money to feed Marsha and little Madison.
In between bites, Marsha explained that her husband had died and she had injured her back, both in a fiery explosion that destroyed their home. Unbeknownst to them, their daughter and son-in-law had cooked drugs in the basement apartment of the house they shared, and the family - minus granddad - had narrowly escaped a batch gone wrong. Maddie’s parents currently enjoyed the county’s hospitality, awaiting trial, but because the house had been used for illegal activities, the insurance company had denied coverage, putting Marsha and Maddie out on the street after Marsha’s state disability ran out.
They had no other family, no connections in the area and no place to go. In fact, if children’s services weren’t so buried in workload, they probably would have taken Maddie from her and placed her in foster care already.
With what remained of my cash, I bought Maddie some clothes to supplement the few they had received from her classmates. A call to my pastor netted a police motel room voucher and gas and grocery money from the benevolence fund. By the time Marsha tucked Maddie into bed at the motel, our church “phone tree” had found a place for them to stay after the motel, both money and clothing donations and a light-duty, part-time job opportunity for Marsha.
As I left them, Marsha whispered, “Thanks.” I looked back to respond, but I saw her head bowed and realized she wasn’t speaking to me. I pulled the door shut to her saying, “Thank you for changing her mind.”
I repeated the same as I sat in my car and listened to that song one more time. I’ve changed my mind about shopping, too; it’s not *that* bad after all.
Name: MajorSamFan
Show/Movie: SG-1, Season 7
Story Title: Let There Be Cake
Character/Relationships: Daniel Jackson, Teal’c, Jack O’Neill and Samantha Carter, with mention of other canon base personnel
Rating: G
Warnings: No warnings. Set some time between “Grace” and “Heroes, Part 1”
Daniel Jackson ducked into a lab, and Teal’c pulled the door shut just as Samantha Carter rounded the corner at the end of the hall. The former First Prime of Apophis tilted his head in acknowledgement of his teammate.
“Hey, Teal’c. Still on for weight training at 1600?”
“Indeed.”
“Great. I’m so glad to be released back to full duty after the Prometheus. I just have to drop this report off to Colonel O’Neill,” Sam explained, brandishing a folder marked “Top Secret”. “And then I’ll get changed. I’ll meet you in the gym.”
“I will be there.”
Sam started to smile, but it morphed into more of a questioning expression as her gaze shifted back and forth between him and the lab door with narrowing eyes and a slight upward tug on one side of her mouth. Her lips parted as if to ask what Teal’c wanted with Jay Felger, thinking better of it, Sam stopped short. Finishing the grin and then shaking her head, Sam turned with military precision and continued down the corridor.
Teal’c waited until she turned the next corner before silently following her and glancing around the edge. He just caught a glimpse of the folder swishing behind her as she made the next bend. Teal’c straightened and walked back to the lab door, which he opened and entered. Unfortunately, Jay Felger was there.
“Wow! I wish I didn’t have to monitor this experiment so closely, or I’d join you,” the nerd gushed.
Teal’c did not say aloud, “You are not invited,” but his posture said as much. Oblivious as usual, Felger took no note of it and started reminiscing to Daniel about his past encounters with SG-1. Teal’c interrupted without compunction.
“Daniel Jackson, O’Neill said he would keep Major Carter occupied for fifteen minutes. We must not delay.”
“Uh, yeah, we better go. Thanks for letting me hide in here, Folgers.”
“Felger,” the scientist corrected. Daniel Jackson had returned, descended to the human plain of existence, only months ago, and everyone forgave his occasionally memory issues. However, he recalled Jay only from what Jack had told him and thus, as Folgers. Daniel, ever the coffee addict, remembered that distinctly.
“Ah, yes, well…thanks,” Daniel mumbled, picking up the pink box he had set on Jay’s lab table. He exited through the door Teal’c held open, looking both ways down the hall in case Sam might have returned unexpectedly. Given her natural curiosity, that posed an actual risk, but Daniel found the passage clear and stepped out.
Teal’c closed the lab door while Daniel waited, and then the Jaffa led the way to the commissary. They found Sergeants Harriman and Siler hanging the last of the pink streamers and Janet Fraiser adding plates to the napkins and plastic forks already laid out. Daniel set the box in the big open spot reserved for it.
“Lemme see!” Janet tossed open the box lid. “Oh, wow! That’s great. She’s going to love it!”
Daniel lifted out a bakery-decorated sheet cake made to look like a scientific calculator using fondant to represent all the numbers and symbols. They had wanted a laptop, but the local baker had just shaken his head and said, “I’m not the Cake Boss, for crying out loud!” After seeing what he *had* accomplished, given they had ordered only 48 hours ahead, Teal’c had complimented his “great proficiency”, and Daniel had suggested maybe next time, with more notice, he could do a laptop. The baker had showed them the door, mumbling something about crazy men in fedoras. Then they had only to get the cake to Cheyenne Mountain without incident and to the commissary without Sam seeing it.
Leaving Janet to finalize setting up the cake, Daniel turned to find Teal’c greeting some of the other SG teams as they arrived. He didn’t remember his teammate being so sociable, but there Teal’c stood, nodding at each person who came in.
“Okay, everyone, quiet down,” Daniel announced. “Jack’s gonna bring Sam any minute. Find a spot. I’m going to turn out the lights, and when they walk in, everyone yell, ‘Surprise!’ Okay? Good.”
Airmen and Marines alike shuffled about and finally settled around the perimeter. Most everyone clumped in their teams, with some intermingling. Colonel Dixon of SG-13 and his red-headed archaeologist - Balinsky, Daniel remembered - talked with Colonel Reynolds. Dixon’s team was due to gate out to P3X-666 in a few days, Daniel knew. Unlike Jack, he refused to attach any significance to the designation “666”, and he hoped they would find some clue to the Lost City there.
Daniel flipped the light switch, leaving them with only the glow from the kitchen area. He barely had moved back by Teal’c, when they heard Jack O’Neill proclaim out in the hall, “I hope they have cake. Really hankering for a big ol’ piece…”
“Not pie, Sir?” Sam asked, as the door opened. “What the…? Why are the lights off?” Sam reached over and felt for the switch and, finding it, flicked it back on.
“Surprise!” everyone shouted, and Samantha Carter’s cheeks colored as she took in the assembled company. She had stopped in the doorway, and the Colonel peeked over her shoulder.
“Uh, Carter? Think we could actually go in?”
“Sorry, Sir,” she mumbled reflexively, stepping further into the room. Janet walked over, grabbed her arm and guided her to the cake. “Oh, guys, that’s just…”
Teal’c and Daniel sidled up on Sam’s left, and O’Neill followed, his hands shoved in his BDU pockets and a grin plastered on his face.
“I told you there was talk of cake,” Jack reminded her with his patented smirk.
“I can’t believe you all pulled it off as a surprise.”
“Well, you know, Carter, I love it when a plan comes together.”
Name: MajorSamFan
Story Title: Can You Spare Some Change?
Rating: PG
Warnings: brief mention of drug lab
I hate shopping. I hate everything about shopping, for myself or for others - trying on clothes, walking around football-field-sized stores, standing in long check-out lines, spending money I don’t really have. Target or Wal-Mart get my meager business, the same places other people with no money to spare shop. Or panhandle. Though less prevalent here than in the City, we have plenty of “will work for food signs” and people begging for change.
Having just spent way more than I had planned on gifts, I stepped out into the cool dusk breeze. Always alert in parking lots, especially as the sun disappears, I spotted her immediately, walking away with the slumped shoulders of rejection from another potential victim. I carefully avoided meeting her gaze, fumbling for the car keys. She approached anyway.
“Can you spare some change?” I didn’t acknowledge the rail-thin woman dressed in dirty, faded jeans, cowboy boots, and a western-styled shirt; I hoped she would go away. She didn’t. “I just need gas money to get back to…” It didn’t matter to me what fake destination she planned to give.
“Sorry!” I interrupted, finally having unlocked my car. I slipped into the seat and closed the door. Safe. Or so I thought.
I had left the windows cracked open, and I heard a small voice ask, “Can we go now? I’m tired. And hungry. And it’s starting to get cold.” A girl, maybe five years old, wearing a spaghetti-strap tank, shorts and thongs and clutching a ragged quilt that definitely had seen better days, stepped into the glare of my headlights from behind a “welfare wagon”.
Now *my* shoulders slumped. A child. Even here in sunny California, the temperature had dropped from the upper 70s down to the 60s - too chilly for that outfit.
My hand rested on the key, ready to turn it. My mind warred. Times were tough all over with the economic downturn. My paycheck barely stretched, often *didn’t* stretch enough; I had overdue bills myself. Still…a child.
I twisted the key, and the CD player turned on. Steven Curtis Chapman picked up where he’d left off when I had parked,
“And I saw the face of Jesus down on 16th Avenue. He was sleeping in an old car, while his mom went looking for food. And I heard the voice of Jesus, gently whisper to my soul, ‘Didn’t you say you wanted to know me. Well, here I am, and it’s getting cold.’
“So what now? What will you do, now that you found me? What now? What will you do with this treasure you found? I know I may not look like what you expected, but if you remember, this is right where I said I would be. You found me. What now?”
By the time he finished, tears streamed down my cheeks. I sniffed and turned off the engine. Grabbing my purse and purchases, I walked slowly over to the woman. The little girl lay on the back seat of the station wagon, curled up in a light “indoor” child’s sleeping bag. They lived in the car, I surmised.
“Excuse me,” I whispered, barely able to talk.
The woman’s hard eyes softened as she noted the tears on my face, but she still stood with her hip cocked to one side and arms crossed, her earlier “pity-me performance posture” replaced with distrust.
“Can I change my mind?”
“I don’t know. Can you?”
“Look, I’ve been ‘taken’ by panhandlers before.” Her face flushed, her eyes narrowed, and she started to turn away. My words cut deep, I realized too late, and I thought how I’d feel if I had to beg change to survive. “I really am sorry, and, if you’ll let me, I’d like to help. Let’s go inside and get your daughter…”
“Granddaughter.”
“Your granddaughter - and you - something to eat. We can talk about what’s going on. Maybe I *can* help - or find someone who can.”
She hesitated but agreed when the little girl sat up. I returned my merchandise while they waited. The clerk frowned at us, but since I had paid in cash she refunded it. I used the money to feed Marsha and little Madison.
In between bites, Marsha explained that her husband had died and she had injured her back, both in a fiery explosion that destroyed their home. Unbeknownst to them, their daughter and son-in-law had cooked drugs in the basement apartment of the house they shared, and the family - minus granddad - had narrowly escaped a batch gone wrong. Maddie’s parents currently enjoyed the county’s hospitality, awaiting trial, but because the house had been used for illegal activities, the insurance company had denied coverage, putting Marsha and Maddie out on the street after Marsha’s state disability ran out.
They had no other family, no connections in the area and no place to go. In fact, if children’s services weren’t so buried in workload, they probably would have taken Maddie from her and placed her in foster care already.
With what remained of my cash, I bought Maddie some clothes to supplement the few they had received from her classmates. A call to my pastor netted a police motel room voucher and gas and grocery money from the benevolence fund. By the time Marsha tucked Maddie into bed at the motel, our church “phone tree” had found a place for them to stay after the motel, both money and clothing donations and a light-duty, part-time job opportunity for Marsha.
As I left them, Marsha whispered, “Thanks.” I looked back to respond, but I saw her head bowed and realized she wasn’t speaking to me. I pulled the door shut to her saying, “Thank you for changing her mind.”
I repeated the same as I sat in my car and listened to that song one more time. I’ve changed my mind about shopping, too; it’s not *that* bad after all.