[repost] The Double Disappearance of Col. Sheppard, Ch. 1
-title- The Double Disappearance of Colonel Sheppard, Chapter One: John
-warnings- Gen. Silly. Fusion. Strong language. Humor relating to genitalia.
-timeframe- Takes place during second season, sort of.
-characters- John, Rodney; cameos by Zelenka and Ronon
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Neither, sadly, is Steve Senn's The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek, on which this is based, in any sense -- I couldn't find a copy of the book anywhere in town. WTF. (Also, I think I ganked the clapping outside a door as knock-equivalent from Brust's Dragaera series.)
-summary- John Sheppard wakes up in an alternate universe.
The Double Disappearance of Colonel Sheppard
Chapter One
(John)
John Sheppard woke up with the morning sun in his eyes and an uncomfortably full bladder, and stumbled off to deal with that first thing.
WHen he was splashing water on his face afterwards, he noticed that first, his toiletries had been replaced with bigger and clunkier versions (including his toothbrush), and second, the roll of toilet paper he had carefully snagged and placed on a handy shelf was missing.
He'd have suspected someone of taking it (no one he knew of really liked the Ancient sonic bidets) but he didn't think even Rodney would invade his quarters for the express purpose of stealing his toilet paper, and anyway the different toiletries suggested that he might somehow be in the wrong quarters.
John swallowed deeply, made sure nothing was poking out of his boxers, pulled his black T-shirt down over his hips, and hastily strode into the attached bedroom.
There was nobody else in what, at first, appeared to be his own bedroom. His surfboard was there. A guitar case -- although bulkier than his own, with far larger and clunkier locks -- was there. The bed was the same sort of mess that he usually left it in before making it.
The book on his night table, which had been a neat rectangular parallelohedron with a shiny red jacket when he went to bed, was now a larger and somehow rounder affair with a pebbled leather binding. A closer look revealed that it claimed to be War and Peace, by Draco Tolstoy; John opened it at the embossed-and-pierced thin wooden slat that seemed to have replaced his embossed-and-pierced Athosian-made leather bookmark, and found that despite the thicker, nubbly-edged pages, the text seemed about the same as that of the last bit he'd read. His headset, which he had left next to it, was now sized to fit a head twice as big as his.
He also now owned an excellent-quality poster of the (anthropomorphic) Stegosaurus in Black.
John very slowly checked his clothes. The jackets and shirts looked like his -- if he'd been six sizes larger and favored sleeves that let the whole side of his body "breathe." The official-issue trousers had -- shit -- tail sleeves.
He picked up the headset, held it awkwardly to his ear, and turned it on. "McKay, to my quarters, please."
"...do you have any idea what time it is? What sort of emergency..."
"It's not an emergency, but something's happened I want you to take a look at."
"I presume I'll have time to get dressed?"
"Sure. Nobody deserves the sight of your scary p.j.s anyway."
"You know not whereof you speak," Rodney huffed, and shut his radio off.
John shrugged, dropped his in his lap, and picked up War and Peace. Might as well get some reading in.
And when Rodney arrived, either they could laugh together over how McKay'd gotten him good, or Rodney would explode in an amusing fit of jealousy that someone else had thought it up first, or...
Well, no sense thinking about the "or."
Anatole had just announced that while his regiment was at the front, he had no idea where he, personally, was attached to when someone clapped outside John's door.
"Come in," John called, putting the bookmark in his book.
The door hooshed open. "So what is it -- " Rodney's familiar voice was already demanding.
The anthropomorphic feathered tyrannosaur in the doorway stopped dead. Most of the parts left visible by the modified Atlantis science uniform were covered in small overlapping scales that changed shades of green as the light hit them, but the underside of the thin short arms and the crown of the head sprouted sparse, brown-green feathers. There appeared to be chopsticks in the right hand. The (very large) mouth gaped open, a strangled shout issuing from behind lots and lots of big long curved teeth. From beneath green-scaled overhanging brows, Rodney's blue eyes blazed.
"McKay. It's me." John rolled his eyes, one hand going to his neck and tugging his dogtags out from under its shirt.
"Oh, and I'm supposed to believe that?" the Tyrannosaurus Rodneysnarked on autopilot, stalking into the room, door closing almost on the tail as the right "hand" and its sticks reached out towards John's dogtags' chain. The plastic chopstick-things turned out to be mounted on plastic rings on the two clawed not-fingers of his not-hand, and he leaned forward as he stepped closer, using the chopsticks to delicately take the dogtags and lift them in front of one eye as his tail went out behind him for balance.
"Gah," John said, overriding the instinct demanding he protect his carotid as he turned his head sideways (unfortunately, not quite in time). "Your mouth smells like something died in there."
"I thought your whatever was probably more important than brushing and flossing at once," the vocal tones at least were blessedly familiar, "and I've told you before, three-day meat is a delicacy, it's not my fault if your taste buds have evolved right past the ability to appreciate it. Or haven't gotten there at all; how in the world did you manage to turn yourself into an Ancient?"
"I'm not an Ancient." Well, not technically. Or maybe yes technically, but not really. But the point was that Rodney at least had never yet treated him like one.
"Bipedal pongid ape with nose projecting beyond jaw, very sparse hair beyond the crest, evident intelligence, tool use, and speech. Ancient. Now, what did you touch and where were you yesterday -- wait. How do I know you're not an Ancient pretending to be the Colonel?!"
The chopsticks pulled harder. John grabbed the chain and managed to yank his tags free, uncomfortably aware that he was nose-to-nose with something that could eat his face in one bite.
"How do I know you're not a bird pretending to be Rodney McKay?"
"Bird?!" The tyr-- Rodney huffed back, tail thumping to the floor to support him. "Really, do I go around calling you an ape? Or, well, more to the point, human?"
"Biologically speaking, I'm both," John pointed out reasonably. "I've always been both. I was both yesterday. You were both yesterday. Johnny Cash was both yesterday. Tolstoy was both and dead yesterday, and also his name was Leo. I figure either everything else has changed and I'm immune or I've switched universes, like that episode where Spock had a beard."
Rodney blinked. "What's a beard?"
John rolled his eyes. "Where the Enterprise was like original-series Klingons and advanced by removing the one in place above -- hey, does that mean the mirrorverse Klingons acted like the original series Federation?"
"Ohhh," Rodney said. "The one where the men wore barbarous costumes with knives and the women were topless. That was a great episode."
"Topless? You got topless? And it was, though obviously not as great as yours."
"Oh, yeah, the Star Trek characters lost their tops every so often. There was this one episode where Sulu was running around shirtless and waving a sword... anyway! If you're here, where's Colonel Sheppard? The one I know?"
"... in my universe?"
"Oh, great. We'd better start looking into this." He clicked his radio on. "Radek?"
"Can I get dressed first?" John said plaintively as Zelenka said over the radio, "Of course something would arise just when I was about to go to bed."
"Yes, yes, of course," Rodney said absently, waving his unbedizened hand at John, and then hastily said "Not you! I need you to check the power logs for last night, with particular reference to the Colonel's room."
"Is something the matter?"
"Yes. No. Not precisely -- meet me at the infirmary after you've checked things out, I'll explain there." His head swung towards John, who was holding one of the cloth -- things -- with attached strings that he'd found in his underpants drawer and turning it this way and that. "For the love of everything, Sheppard, haven't you seen underwear before? Six-year-olds are capable of tying it on, it shouldn't be too hard for you to manage..."
"Perhaps you should remember when to turn off your headset, yes?" Zelenka suggested sweetly, apparently turning his own off as Rodney spluttered.
After a last pitful glance at the alien (dinosaur) underwear, John gave up and took his boxers off, turning them inside out and shaking them before putting them back on and noticing that Rodney was staring at his crotch.
"What?" he demanded. Sure, if Rodney was any indication, anthropomorphic dinosaurs were just plain bigger than humans, but honestly...!
"Is there a reason they're out like that?" Rodney asked. "I mean, you've been up for a while, and they're all flaccid -- should you be seeing Carson? I mean, more than you're already going to see him to see if there are trace particles in your system from the crossover or whatever? I know my cat's were hanging out flaccid a lot, but that's because cats don't HAVE a genital pouch, a stupid design flaw in an otherwise very intelligent creature -- "
"...what's a genital pouch?" John managed weakly.
Rodney's mouth dropped open again. (This time John managed to avoid the initial gust of rotting-carcass-breath.) "It's... you know, where you keep them when you aren't using them..."
"What, inside my boxers?"
"...seriously? Not inside your body?"
"Uh, no." John decided he'd rather stick to his own black T-shirt than be lost in other-John's. "Nowhere for them to go." Although with this conversation, they were trying.
"...wow. That's... amazingly retarded. Is it just Ancients, or all apes?"
"I told you, I'm not an Ancient -- and all mammals, as far as I know."
"Whatever for? And Alteran, if you'd rather."
"Keeps them cool. And I'm not Alteran. The Alterans built Atlantis. We came here last year to see what was left of it." John unearthed a stretch belt and turned back to the pants drawer.
"So did we. And it still seems like a crummy design, having them right out in the open like that. Wouldn't it hurt if something bumped into them, or are they less sensitive than sauric genitalia, or...?"
"We. Learn. To. Keep. Them. From. Getting. Struck."
"Oh, very well, if you say so. You've got your foot through the tail sleeve."
John made an irritated noise, pulled his left foot back out, and put it in the left leg of the oversized trousers this time.
"So what on earth do you call yourselves?"
"Uh, human?" The stretch belt was designed so that one could put the tongue through anywhere, even at the narrow circumference of John's waist; even so, the trousers were both too wide (horizontally) and too tight (cutting him in half much?) He finally pulled the belt free, stepped out of the pants, and put them on again backwards. Much better (depressingly enough).
"So, uh, another species of human survived in your 'verse? All we know of are the Ancients and those H-cans on M1M-316... the palaeontologists keep wanting to go back there and see, ridiculously enough, you'd think they'd realize that large hairy pongids with very long strides are bad news no matter how many more teeth you have."
"Those were humans here?" John balled up the tail sleeve and tucked most of it down his right leg, for balance. "They were giant versions of, well, you in my world. Only sort of off-cream-colored with blue stripes."
Rodney preened. John threw a jacket on the bed and headed into the bathroom.
"And I don't know what you mean by 'survived'; humans evolved a million years ago from the same ape-thing that also evolved into chimpanzees." The oversize zipper of other-John's giant dock kit stuck in exactly the same place and jiggled loose in almost the same way (although needing considerably more force) as his own.
"Oh. Huh. Wait, were the Ancients saurs then, in your 'verse?"
"No, they looked human enough," John said absently, rummaging through an assortment of tweezers that ran from "miniature" to "needlenose pliers" before finding a straight razor at the bottom of the kit. "Nobody's quite sure where they came from, Anthro and Linguistics and Biology have rematches over the subject all the time." None of the bottles or cans appeared to be shaving cream, though. Sigh. Oh well, it wasn't as if he'd never used soap before.
"But the Ancients were a species of human, they ran tissue analyses on the one who was frozen in Antarctica, do you have any idea what the odds are against the same species evolving twi-- WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!"
"Fucking hell, McKay! Didn't anyone ever tell you not to startle a man with a razor at his throat? Jeez."
"No, because normal people don't put razors to their throats. It's not a strigil, Colonel."
"Doesn't anyone shave anything here? If not their beards, dogs or sheep or something?" He tilted his head and began drawing the razor down it, fingers adjusting to the slightly awkward handle after one or two passes.
"What -- oh." Other-Rodney stared at the process with intense fascination. "Anthro and Linguistics were disturbing my lunch with all sorts of theories over why some of the recorded images of Ancients had furred jaws and some didn't; in your world, it's cosmetic?"
"Most men can grow beards," John grunted, stopping to whip hairs off the blade. "A few men can't and a few women can, but it's usually thought of as something wrong with them." He finished up, patted his face dry, and looked at the doorway full of tyrannosaur. "If you don't mind?"
"No, no, of course not, just -- texture?"
"Fine." John spread his arms and tilted his chin up.
Rodney ducked his head and ran the upper skin of one nostril along John's jaw. The latter jumped.
"The hell?"
"You said I could touch!"
"Not with your face!"
"I didn't see you bending to thumbs' reach!"
"I'm sorry," John said earnestly, because, really, he could sort of see other-Rodney's point, and patted him on the nose.
"Wha-- oh, very funny, Colonel. Can we get going now?" Rodney moved to the outer door, sublimely unconcerned with the fact that he had been the one blocking the way.
"Let me get my jacket and my shoes on -- "
"The shoes won't fit."
Considering that the socks looked like bizarre hybrids of socks and fingerless driving gloves, John expected he was right. He shrugged the jacket on -- loose or not, it at least told people who he was supposed to be -- and followed Rodney out the door, into a dimmer-than-it-should-be corridor and into the path of a very large (for an anthropomorphic) dinosaur.
The newcomer was brown, built on a similar but wider-hipped body plan to Rodney's, with apparent four-fingered hands, two rows of spikes running along the nose from the eye sockets to the snout, a bony dome ringed with little stubby horns atop the head, and a mane of feathers running down the back and sides of the neck from the horns. The feathers were waxed into parallel rows, and the whatever-saurus was dressed in leather.
As they stopped dead, the hall lights over them brightened to normal levels and spread a little down the corridor in both directions. The hum of Ancient technology, which had died down over the months he'd lived in Atlantis, sang again at heightened pitch.
"Where's Sheppard?" the brown dinosaur rumbled in Ronon's voice.
"Apparently, he's fallen into the parallel universe where we're all Ancients."
"Human," John rolled his eyes.
"We've got this one instead," Rodney went on, "so I'm taking him to get checked up -- we need a baseline in case he gets sick or something before we get ours back, and anyway everyone will need to know."
"Sorry to miss our run," John apologized.
Ronon eyed him suspiciously. "Wasn't your plan."
"Yeah, but I hope the other me's apologizing to my world's Ronon on my behalf."
"I'll get the others," Ronon announced and took off down the corridor.
"Huh," said John, heading to the infirmary, lights coming up around him along the way. "What kind of 'saur is he?"
"Pachycephalosaur. We met him -- holy crap, the city loves you. Are you sure you're not an Ancient?"
"Positive -- wait, if the Ancients looked like me, do any of you even have the ATA gene?"
"Of course we do! Our Sheppard has the strongest version! Carson invented a retrovirus... "
"All that's true in my world too, but where'd it come from? We kind of figured they'd interbred."
"We thought they'd been experimenting on protosaurians, but nobody ever came up with a really good reason why they'd give a few species of precivilized dromaeosaurids admin access to their technology. Huh."
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
-warnings- Gen. Silly. Fusion. Strong language. Humor relating to genitalia.
-timeframe- Takes place during second season, sort of.
-characters- John, Rodney; cameos by Zelenka and Ronon
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Neither, sadly, is Steve Senn's The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek, on which this is based, in any sense -- I couldn't find a copy of the book anywhere in town. WTF. (Also, I think I ganked the clapping outside a door as knock-equivalent from Brust's Dragaera series.)
-summary- John Sheppard wakes up in an alternate universe.
The Double Disappearance of Colonel Sheppard
Chapter One
(John)
John Sheppard woke up with the morning sun in his eyes and an uncomfortably full bladder, and stumbled off to deal with that first thing.
WHen he was splashing water on his face afterwards, he noticed that first, his toiletries had been replaced with bigger and clunkier versions (including his toothbrush), and second, the roll of toilet paper he had carefully snagged and placed on a handy shelf was missing.
He'd have suspected someone of taking it (no one he knew of really liked the Ancient sonic bidets) but he didn't think even Rodney would invade his quarters for the express purpose of stealing his toilet paper, and anyway the different toiletries suggested that he might somehow be in the wrong quarters.
John swallowed deeply, made sure nothing was poking out of his boxers, pulled his black T-shirt down over his hips, and hastily strode into the attached bedroom.
There was nobody else in what, at first, appeared to be his own bedroom. His surfboard was there. A guitar case -- although bulkier than his own, with far larger and clunkier locks -- was there. The bed was the same sort of mess that he usually left it in before making it.
The book on his night table, which had been a neat rectangular parallelohedron with a shiny red jacket when he went to bed, was now a larger and somehow rounder affair with a pebbled leather binding. A closer look revealed that it claimed to be War and Peace, by Draco Tolstoy; John opened it at the embossed-and-pierced thin wooden slat that seemed to have replaced his embossed-and-pierced Athosian-made leather bookmark, and found that despite the thicker, nubbly-edged pages, the text seemed about the same as that of the last bit he'd read. His headset, which he had left next to it, was now sized to fit a head twice as big as his.
He also now owned an excellent-quality poster of the (anthropomorphic) Stegosaurus in Black.
John very slowly checked his clothes. The jackets and shirts looked like his -- if he'd been six sizes larger and favored sleeves that let the whole side of his body "breathe." The official-issue trousers had -- shit -- tail sleeves.
He picked up the headset, held it awkwardly to his ear, and turned it on. "McKay, to my quarters, please."
"...do you have any idea what time it is? What sort of emergency..."
"It's not an emergency, but something's happened I want you to take a look at."
"I presume I'll have time to get dressed?"
"Sure. Nobody deserves the sight of your scary p.j.s anyway."
"You know not whereof you speak," Rodney huffed, and shut his radio off.
John shrugged, dropped his in his lap, and picked up War and Peace. Might as well get some reading in.
And when Rodney arrived, either they could laugh together over how McKay'd gotten him good, or Rodney would explode in an amusing fit of jealousy that someone else had thought it up first, or...
Well, no sense thinking about the "or."
Anatole had just announced that while his regiment was at the front, he had no idea where he, personally, was attached to when someone clapped outside John's door.
"Come in," John called, putting the bookmark in his book.
The door hooshed open. "So what is it -- " Rodney's familiar voice was already demanding.
The anthropomorphic feathered tyrannosaur in the doorway stopped dead. Most of the parts left visible by the modified Atlantis science uniform were covered in small overlapping scales that changed shades of green as the light hit them, but the underside of the thin short arms and the crown of the head sprouted sparse, brown-green feathers. There appeared to be chopsticks in the right hand. The (very large) mouth gaped open, a strangled shout issuing from behind lots and lots of big long curved teeth. From beneath green-scaled overhanging brows, Rodney's blue eyes blazed.
"McKay. It's me." John rolled his eyes, one hand going to his neck and tugging his dogtags out from under its shirt.
"Oh, and I'm supposed to believe that?" the Tyrannosaurus Rodneysnarked on autopilot, stalking into the room, door closing almost on the tail as the right "hand" and its sticks reached out towards John's dogtags' chain. The plastic chopstick-things turned out to be mounted on plastic rings on the two clawed not-fingers of his not-hand, and he leaned forward as he stepped closer, using the chopsticks to delicately take the dogtags and lift them in front of one eye as his tail went out behind him for balance.
"Gah," John said, overriding the instinct demanding he protect his carotid as he turned his head sideways (unfortunately, not quite in time). "Your mouth smells like something died in there."
"I thought your whatever was probably more important than brushing and flossing at once," the vocal tones at least were blessedly familiar, "and I've told you before, three-day meat is a delicacy, it's not my fault if your taste buds have evolved right past the ability to appreciate it. Or haven't gotten there at all; how in the world did you manage to turn yourself into an Ancient?"
"I'm not an Ancient." Well, not technically. Or maybe yes technically, but not really. But the point was that Rodney at least had never yet treated him like one.
"Bipedal pongid ape with nose projecting beyond jaw, very sparse hair beyond the crest, evident intelligence, tool use, and speech. Ancient. Now, what did you touch and where were you yesterday -- wait. How do I know you're not an Ancient pretending to be the Colonel?!"
The chopsticks pulled harder. John grabbed the chain and managed to yank his tags free, uncomfortably aware that he was nose-to-nose with something that could eat his face in one bite.
"How do I know you're not a bird pretending to be Rodney McKay?"
"Bird?!" The tyr-- Rodney huffed back, tail thumping to the floor to support him. "Really, do I go around calling you an ape? Or, well, more to the point, human?"
"Biologically speaking, I'm both," John pointed out reasonably. "I've always been both. I was both yesterday. You were both yesterday. Johnny Cash was both yesterday. Tolstoy was both and dead yesterday, and also his name was Leo. I figure either everything else has changed and I'm immune or I've switched universes, like that episode where Spock had a beard."
Rodney blinked. "What's a beard?"
John rolled his eyes. "Where the Enterprise was like original-series Klingons and advanced by removing the one in place above -- hey, does that mean the mirrorverse Klingons acted like the original series Federation?"
"Ohhh," Rodney said. "The one where the men wore barbarous costumes with knives and the women were topless. That was a great episode."
"Topless? You got topless? And it was, though obviously not as great as yours."
"Oh, yeah, the Star Trek characters lost their tops every so often. There was this one episode where Sulu was running around shirtless and waving a sword... anyway! If you're here, where's Colonel Sheppard? The one I know?"
"... in my universe?"
"Oh, great. We'd better start looking into this." He clicked his radio on. "Radek?"
"Can I get dressed first?" John said plaintively as Zelenka said over the radio, "Of course something would arise just when I was about to go to bed."
"Yes, yes, of course," Rodney said absently, waving his unbedizened hand at John, and then hastily said "Not you! I need you to check the power logs for last night, with particular reference to the Colonel's room."
"Is something the matter?"
"Yes. No. Not precisely -- meet me at the infirmary after you've checked things out, I'll explain there." His head swung towards John, who was holding one of the cloth -- things -- with attached strings that he'd found in his underpants drawer and turning it this way and that. "For the love of everything, Sheppard, haven't you seen underwear before? Six-year-olds are capable of tying it on, it shouldn't be too hard for you to manage..."
"Perhaps you should remember when to turn off your headset, yes?" Zelenka suggested sweetly, apparently turning his own off as Rodney spluttered.
After a last pitful glance at the alien (dinosaur) underwear, John gave up and took his boxers off, turning them inside out and shaking them before putting them back on and noticing that Rodney was staring at his crotch.
"What?" he demanded. Sure, if Rodney was any indication, anthropomorphic dinosaurs were just plain bigger than humans, but honestly...!
"Is there a reason they're out like that?" Rodney asked. "I mean, you've been up for a while, and they're all flaccid -- should you be seeing Carson? I mean, more than you're already going to see him to see if there are trace particles in your system from the crossover or whatever? I know my cat's were hanging out flaccid a lot, but that's because cats don't HAVE a genital pouch, a stupid design flaw in an otherwise very intelligent creature -- "
"...what's a genital pouch?" John managed weakly.
Rodney's mouth dropped open again. (This time John managed to avoid the initial gust of rotting-carcass-breath.) "It's... you know, where you keep them when you aren't using them..."
"What, inside my boxers?"
"...seriously? Not inside your body?"
"Uh, no." John decided he'd rather stick to his own black T-shirt than be lost in other-John's. "Nowhere for them to go." Although with this conversation, they were trying.
"...wow. That's... amazingly retarded. Is it just Ancients, or all apes?"
"I told you, I'm not an Ancient -- and all mammals, as far as I know."
"Whatever for? And Alteran, if you'd rather."
"Keeps them cool. And I'm not Alteran. The Alterans built Atlantis. We came here last year to see what was left of it." John unearthed a stretch belt and turned back to the pants drawer.
"So did we. And it still seems like a crummy design, having them right out in the open like that. Wouldn't it hurt if something bumped into them, or are they less sensitive than sauric genitalia, or...?"
"We. Learn. To. Keep. Them. From. Getting. Struck."
"Oh, very well, if you say so. You've got your foot through the tail sleeve."
John made an irritated noise, pulled his left foot back out, and put it in the left leg of the oversized trousers this time.
"So what on earth do you call yourselves?"
"Uh, human?" The stretch belt was designed so that one could put the tongue through anywhere, even at the narrow circumference of John's waist; even so, the trousers were both too wide (horizontally) and too tight (cutting him in half much?) He finally pulled the belt free, stepped out of the pants, and put them on again backwards. Much better (depressingly enough).
"So, uh, another species of human survived in your 'verse? All we know of are the Ancients and those H-cans on M1M-316... the palaeontologists keep wanting to go back there and see, ridiculously enough, you'd think they'd realize that large hairy pongids with very long strides are bad news no matter how many more teeth you have."
"Those were humans here?" John balled up the tail sleeve and tucked most of it down his right leg, for balance. "They were giant versions of, well, you in my world. Only sort of off-cream-colored with blue stripes."
Rodney preened. John threw a jacket on the bed and headed into the bathroom.
"And I don't know what you mean by 'survived'; humans evolved a million years ago from the same ape-thing that also evolved into chimpanzees." The oversize zipper of other-John's giant dock kit stuck in exactly the same place and jiggled loose in almost the same way (although needing considerably more force) as his own.
"Oh. Huh. Wait, were the Ancients saurs then, in your 'verse?"
"No, they looked human enough," John said absently, rummaging through an assortment of tweezers that ran from "miniature" to "needlenose pliers" before finding a straight razor at the bottom of the kit. "Nobody's quite sure where they came from, Anthro and Linguistics and Biology have rematches over the subject all the time." None of the bottles or cans appeared to be shaving cream, though. Sigh. Oh well, it wasn't as if he'd never used soap before.
"But the Ancients were a species of human, they ran tissue analyses on the one who was frozen in Antarctica, do you have any idea what the odds are against the same species evolving twi-- WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!"
"Fucking hell, McKay! Didn't anyone ever tell you not to startle a man with a razor at his throat? Jeez."
"No, because normal people don't put razors to their throats. It's not a strigil, Colonel."
"Doesn't anyone shave anything here? If not their beards, dogs or sheep or something?" He tilted his head and began drawing the razor down it, fingers adjusting to the slightly awkward handle after one or two passes.
"What -- oh." Other-Rodney stared at the process with intense fascination. "Anthro and Linguistics were disturbing my lunch with all sorts of theories over why some of the recorded images of Ancients had furred jaws and some didn't; in your world, it's cosmetic?"
"Most men can grow beards," John grunted, stopping to whip hairs off the blade. "A few men can't and a few women can, but it's usually thought of as something wrong with them." He finished up, patted his face dry, and looked at the doorway full of tyrannosaur. "If you don't mind?"
"No, no, of course not, just -- texture?"
"Fine." John spread his arms and tilted his chin up.
Rodney ducked his head and ran the upper skin of one nostril along John's jaw. The latter jumped.
"The hell?"
"You said I could touch!"
"Not with your face!"
"I didn't see you bending to thumbs' reach!"
"I'm sorry," John said earnestly, because, really, he could sort of see other-Rodney's point, and patted him on the nose.
"Wha-- oh, very funny, Colonel. Can we get going now?" Rodney moved to the outer door, sublimely unconcerned with the fact that he had been the one blocking the way.
"Let me get my jacket and my shoes on -- "
"The shoes won't fit."
Considering that the socks looked like bizarre hybrids of socks and fingerless driving gloves, John expected he was right. He shrugged the jacket on -- loose or not, it at least told people who he was supposed to be -- and followed Rodney out the door, into a dimmer-than-it-should-be corridor and into the path of a very large (for an anthropomorphic) dinosaur.
The newcomer was brown, built on a similar but wider-hipped body plan to Rodney's, with apparent four-fingered hands, two rows of spikes running along the nose from the eye sockets to the snout, a bony dome ringed with little stubby horns atop the head, and a mane of feathers running down the back and sides of the neck from the horns. The feathers were waxed into parallel rows, and the whatever-saurus was dressed in leather.
As they stopped dead, the hall lights over them brightened to normal levels and spread a little down the corridor in both directions. The hum of Ancient technology, which had died down over the months he'd lived in Atlantis, sang again at heightened pitch.
"Where's Sheppard?" the brown dinosaur rumbled in Ronon's voice.
"Apparently, he's fallen into the parallel universe where we're all Ancients."
"Human," John rolled his eyes.
"We've got this one instead," Rodney went on, "so I'm taking him to get checked up -- we need a baseline in case he gets sick or something before we get ours back, and anyway everyone will need to know."
"Sorry to miss our run," John apologized.
Ronon eyed him suspiciously. "Wasn't your plan."
"Yeah, but I hope the other me's apologizing to my world's Ronon on my behalf."
"I'll get the others," Ronon announced and took off down the corridor.
"Huh," said John, heading to the infirmary, lights coming up around him along the way. "What kind of 'saur is he?"
"Pachycephalosaur. We met him -- holy crap, the city loves you. Are you sure you're not an Ancient?"
"Positive -- wait, if the Ancients looked like me, do any of you even have the ATA gene?"
"Of course we do! Our Sheppard has the strongest version! Carson invented a retrovirus... "
"All that's true in my world too, but where'd it come from? We kind of figured they'd interbred."
"We thought they'd been experimenting on protosaurians, but nobody ever came up with a really good reason why they'd give a few species of precivilized dromaeosaurids admin access to their technology. Huh."
Chapter 2
Chapter 3