Ex Machina (Redux), by Sophonisba [crossing challenge]

[saphanibaal]

-title- Ex Machina (Redux)
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Gen. AU. Crossover, oh my yes. Variations in orthography to denote variations in understanding or meaning.
-timeframe- After "Sanctuary."
-spoilers- Well... more or less through "Progeny."
-characters- Teyla, Miko, an Ancient ^_^ and... others.
-disclaimer- Not mine. Completely and utterly not mine. Full disclaimer at end, so as to avoid spoilers.
-notes- This follows directly on the heels of the first part of Ex Machina. Part of my pet asymptotic-to-canon AU; there's also a slight reference to a bit of a fic I wrote called "Second String" (which would probably be much clearer if I'd gotten around to revising that last).
-word count- 10041
-summary- The further wanderings of Teyla and the helpful and enthusiastic Ancient (and knight-guardsman of Canada) that she met in the halls of Atlantis, and who they met upon them.



Ex Machina
(Redux)

( first part lives here)

"Are you certain, messire Glaucus," Teyla asked a little later, "of all the places you wish to go?"

"Oh, yes, a picture was made for me by -- " and here Glaucus looked as crafty as a very honest and earnest man might -- "one who had Reason to Know." He snapped his fingers, and a small model (made of light) of the city appeared in midair at Teyla's eye level, turning slowly. Within it, several bright sparks of light winked purple, while others glowed a steady greenish-white.

"Hm," Glaucus said thoughtfully, tapping at a white glow far out along the Southeast Pier. "I haven't done anything about that one yet: this is Suspicious, and Bears Investigating." The model vanished. "Are you with me, good Teyla?"

"Certainly," Teyla said, "although perhaps I should put this down first, so as to have my arms free."

"Ah," Glaucus said wisely, leading her into a transporter. "Self-Defense! Often of use, should matters go... Badly."

The transporter took them to the corridor onto which Teyla's chamber gave. Most of the nearby rooms had stood empty since the Athosians took up residence on the Atlantean continent (which, Teyla had heard, had been named "Athosia" in their honor, although everyone in the city seemed to speak of it as "the mainland"); nor were there any sounds from the occupied end of the corridor to suggest that any of her few remaining neighbors had returned to their chambers at this time.

Teyla set the cheese and crystals down just within her door and collected her bantoi, emerging to find Glaucus just going into the chamber where Doctor Singh and Corporal Kaur (whose House, according to their own alien customs, had one surname for the male members and another for the female; several of the Tellurians referred to the pair of them as "the Singhs" when together) made their home.

"May I ask what you are doing?"

(Later, she and others would marvel that she had not thought, then or before, to collect her comrades or the city's security forces in addition to her bantos rods, but all she would be able to say would be that the moments since she had met Glaucus had passed as if in a waking dream.)

"As long as I had made up my mind to come hither," Glaucus explained, neatening a stack of papers on a small table just inside the door, "it seemed to me that I should bring several publications which the corporal would otherwise miss out on, and, although she and her husband carefully made arrangements for others to pay their taxes this year, a report of how they are doing so, and recordings of our championships in the games of hockey and of curling." The stack square-cornered to his satisfaction, he rejoined her in the corridor, closing the door behind him.

"Doctor McKay has mentioned the game of hockey, which he esteems for his homeland's sake despite his greater love for foot-ball; what is 'curling'?"

Asking such a question of the Ancient proved to be much like asking Rodney McKay to explain one of his specialties: if Teyla remained uncertain of the subject after hearing the answer, she was certainly uncertain of very much more about the subject than she had been before.

"Well," Glaucus said thoughtfully, "it is certainly fixed. And very well done, too; if not for information received, I would not have known that that had been there."

"Perhaps," Teyla offered, "we should look around."

"Exactly," Glaucus said. "Clues! There are skin cells from at least two humans on the wall here, and sets of footprints leading... that way."

Teyla could not see any footprints whatsoever, but she obediently glided in the direction indicated, moving as swiftly and silently as she might, until they caught a glimpse of somebody's leg going up a flight of stairs.

Following the stairs and the corridor at their head, Teyla and Glaucus came upon three people gathered at the control unit of a door: a thin sharp-featured dark-skinned woman shrouded in a magnificent flame-colored cape, hair plaited with golden beads into many small braids and gathered into a coronet, whose likeness Teyla was sure she had seen somewhere -- perhaps among one of her trading-partners, or on one of the entertainment recordings brought from the Mother-earth; a girl not (quite) yet a woman with the same sort of wide face and eyelid shape as Doctor Kusanagi and her compatriots, whose hair was both bright pink and tightly gathered above each temple into a pointed shape like an animal's ear before let spring loose into matching sheaves, truncated below pink-clad shoulders; and, most surprisingly, one of the two green-clothed men who came and went and pressed buttons at Doctor Weir's bidding -- the Canadian one known as "Chuck" - here wearing a black leather jacket over undress trousers much like the pair of Doctor McKay's that Aiden had referred to as "cargo pants."

"Speak of a lupos!" Glaucus said, pleased. "I don't known what you're doing here, but Madam President, this is Teyla Emmagan, who is helping me to disarm various measures carelessly left running within the city; and Teyla, this is my friend Romanadvoratrelundar, the president, which is a chosen leader, of her people the time-masters, having taken on -- is this the third or the fourth shape I've known you in?"

"It is the third one I've worn since I graduated, if that's what you mean," the dark-skinned woman said, straightening to greet them. (Teyla had the vague impression that there ought to be less hair on top of her head, and certainly no braids long enough to cascade from the coronet down behind one ear and into the high white collar she wore beneath her cape.) "The last time I met you I was on my second one, and we first met soon after I started traveling with the doctor from my perspective."

"And from mine, on my third visit to your n-space," Glaucus agreed. "I saw him just the other day on this n-space's Terra, from a little after the last time his adventures in your multiverse were recorded in this n-space -- speaking of which, isn't this one a little out of your usual Stomping Grounds?"

"In the usual way of things, certainly: but -- oh, pardon my rudeness; let me introduce my companions, whom I and mine have been retrieving from temporal discontinuities. The small lady is Usagi, and this is -- "

"Chuck," Teyla said, her voice sounding oddly in her own ears. It was him -- surely it was? And yet something about him was somehow off, like a Wraith trick -- but not Wraith, she sensed nothing from him, no matter how she tried --

"What?" Chuck said, sounding even more startled than Teyla felt. "Dar, Teyla shouldn't know me, not if I succeeded -- "

"The one mistress Teyla knows is your nephew," Glaucus explained. "Well, half-nephew."

"Oh, on the -- "

"Canadian side, of course."

"Then the profile -- "

"Comes from a father who bears as much resemblance to your father's begetter's father as your father did to his adoptive-father-and-uncle, who is in the city as we speak."

(Later, when she related this, the Chuck she knew would say "But my name isn't actually Chuck."

"Maybe his wasn't either," Major Sheppard would offer, "and they called him that for the same reasons we call you."

"Or maybe his really was," Doctor McKay would say. "Things like that happen in parallel worlds. Once I met a woman from a parallel world who said that in her homeworld, she and I and I think it turned out to be Zelenka were mad scientists for fun and profit, which was odd because I hadn't met him yet and I didn't put it together until I was rereading the transcript last month.")

Even without that last complication, Teyla did not hesitate to say "I am very confused."

"It is simple," Usagi told her. "Shar, whom you call 'Chuck,' went back in time to keep himself from being born. But now that he has done THAT, there is another in his place. If your Chuck were really Shar, Shar would be him, only with two sets of memories; but he isn't, probably because he did stop himself from being born, which because of the way he was traveling would have made him go out like a candle -- "

"Like in Back to the Future," Chuck -- Shar? -- said.

"-- and since time-lords are as allergic to temporal paradoxes as the bright/morrow-people are to killing, what with it making them sick to think too hard about it actually happening and their brains bursting in their heads if they try to do it themselves -- "

The lady president -- Romadotrevor Dar? -- fixed Usagi with a speaking look, one that suggested that the girl was speaking of matters best not revealed to chance-met strangers.

She didn't appear to notice. " -- and since we were in the middle of the everything anyway, we could tell where he was being squeezed out and picked him up. You understand?"

Teyla did not.

"I for one am still amazed that your housecart managed," Glaucus said. "So many of your older ones are so resistant to the concept of temporal paradox that, if they cannot quell one, when caught within it they implode, taking the planet and most of the solar system with them. Even the devices your compatriots several dimensions *that* way have made to help them fight their great time war have wrought so much havoc on that n-space that it has become nigh-impossible to travel in or out thereof."

"Oh, *that's* how that works," Chuck -- Shar -- said. "I've been wondering ever since they picked me up."

"You could have asked," the time-mistress told him.

"At any rate," Usagi finished triumphantly, "your Chuck isn't Shar, but he looks *like* him because he's a relative or a reincarnation or something."

"I wouldn't know about that last," his other rescuer said mildly.

"I wouldn't be allowed to say anything I might or might not know about possible or -- "

"That's quite enough periphrasis, Glaucus," the time-mistress cut him off. "You'll confuse my companions."

"I thought it was 'have confused,'" Usagi whispered.

Teyla didn't particularly think any of them were being especially clear; she could understand that not-Chuck was Chuck's near kinsman, but his apparent familiarity with her was confusing to think about and the references they made to how he had come here -- well, she was carefully storing the conversation in her head so that someone would be able to translate the explanation Doctor McKay would give of it for her.

(The eventual translation needed a season's worth of entertainment-watching to put into context, and when it had done she wanted at least a month of that time back.)

"That aside," Glaucus continued without skipping a beat, "it was Oma Desala who told me that, the universe needing a Char or Chuck or Charles as the case might be at Stargate Command, it would take it on itself to supply one."

"Who is the lady Desala?" Teyla asked at the same time as not-Chuck's "You know Oma?"

"Desala Iss," Glaucus explained, "is my cousin's wife's brother's college roommate's uncle's massage therapist's niece's ex-fiancee's great-grandfather's teacher's son's research partner's second cousin once removed's husband's mother's boyfriend's sister's secretary's daughter."

Teyla nodded thoughtfully.

"And that makes you..." Shar-not-Chuck said, smiling as if at some secret joke.

"You call us 'Ancients,'" Glaucus said seriously.

"Shar," Usagi hissed. "He's not joking."

"Are you, then, also Ancestors, o shining among ladies?" Teyla asked her and the lady president with careful courtesy. Neither of them had quite the same feeling of stretched reality as she had from Glaucus (and, in retrospect, that she had had to a lesser extent from Chaya Sar), but that might be because Glaucus still remained partly on a higher plane after the manner of the Ancestors.

"Not at all -- and 'Dar' will do to address me," the lady said kindly, spreading her hands through the arm-slits of her cape in greeting. Beneath it, she appeared to be wearing something high-collared and shimmering white that clung to some of her skin and exposed more of it. "My people don't even exist in your reality save in tales mildly popular on a few worlds; we call ourselves 'Time Lords' -- "

"Your pardon, Madam President, but I think 'time-masters' better catches the sense of it."

"Huh," not-quite-Chuck said. "Our ship translates for us, so we usually don't have this problem; as a native Ring-speech-speaker, I think both translations are close enough. They're rather more different from humans than the Ancients are, if prone to similar self-images, and even in their home universes most of them don't get out much."

"Very few," Madam President Dar agreed. "None of us would be here if a friend and mentor of mine, one of those few who do so travel, had not happened in his wanderings to absorb a tremendous energy blow with his housecart/ship; the energy involved popped it right out of our home n-space and set it with him and his companions oscillating back and forth across and between many strange realities even as they traveled back and forth relative to their starting points, and would doubtless have had them doing so for much longer if they had not happened across me and mine where we had been trapped and offered me a lift out of there."

"I must admit," Glaucus said, "that I wouldn't have thought that it would take that much energy to pull even another such housecart out of e-space; how did you set up the transfer, and what media -- "

"Oh, it wasn't that," Dar said quickly, "but since he and Irene -- I don't know whether you've met Irene?"

"When she and the doctor came to visit... Certain Persons," Glaucus said with careful emphasis, "who may or may not have made their home in a certain territory that may or may not now be or have been in the jurisdiction of the body to which I have joined myself, for what might or might not be the purpose of the composition of a work of art that may or may not have been subsequently performed in this n-space or in the n-space containing the planet Tellus on which the brilliant and charming lady who may or may not rejoice in the professional sobriquet of 'Carina' has the honor to call her home -- "

"GLAUCUS," everyone said, some with more certainty than others.

"And also," the Ancestor said quickly, "I have been to see her parallel from the space whence the enjoinment came, who is very much the same woman, several times; her Cenerentola and Orfeo were particularly noteworthy, and of course her acclaimed Alfredo."

"Alfredo?" not-quite-Chuck blurted.

"Since the doctor and Irene..." Usagi began with heavy emphasis.

"Since they rescued me," Dar explained, "it seemed only right that, the next time they paused in my home space, I should bleed off at least half of the energy they were burdened with, and go back and forth between relative dimensions myself." She smiled suddenly. "Besides, it gets me out of my office and away from the paperwork, and the next time we're in my home space I can always go back to right after I left and avoid causing problems for my people."

"And in between that, we're the ones bouncing around the multiverse like a superball on speed," Usagi said, "and stopping whenever the housecart/ship/Tardis is in enought of a steady state to rescue humans like us or visit interesting new places or fix things that need fixing, such as now."

Teyla had an unpleasant image of a Wraith hive for a moment before realizing that anyone, human or not, who voluntarily chose to fix 'things' belonging to strangers solely because they needed fixing could not live in anything as repulsive as that, even if it fulfilled much the same functions. (Although she still thought that 'Latecomer' was not the best-omened of names for a dwelling that carried one from place to place, even had its inhabitants no particular time of arrival in mind, and it certainly seemed that at least sometimes Dar did. She much preferred the names the Atlanteans had given the puddlejumpers, such as Lucy and Emily and Fred.)

"It sounds most convenient," she said instead, "to be able to leave and go elsewhere and have adventures and yet return to find your problems ready and waiting for you to do what you can."

"I have always found it so," Dar agreed, "although often I can't help wishing that at least some of them might have solved themselves in the scant moments I was gone. At least dangers left unlabeled and poorly-designed mechanisms left ready to set themselves running are easy to set right."

"As we, as I have said, are doing," Glaucus proclaimed.

"I held a panel aside once," Teyla clarified.

"Is that... ah... allowed?" Chuck himself often wore such an expression when feeling that Doctor Weir or Doctor McKay or both were enroute on an unwise course of action; on this man, however, it might denote something else.

"Firstly, it is something that can be done on THIS plane, as can clearly be proven, since you yourselves are doing it; secondly, I may explain to the others that I detected your presence and came to see what you were doing, and perhaps they will not ask for further explanation; and thirdly, once it was made known to me that Canadian lives were at stake -- well!"

"I take it you are fond of Canadia," Usagi said.

"Is it not 'Canada'?" Teyla wondered.

"It is," the time-lady, the Ancestor, and the man who was and was not Chuck of Canada all said at once.

"I'm sorry, I can't keep all those ancient countries straight!"

"Messire Glaucus," Teyla explained, "took on solid shape in the land of Canada seventeen annu ago, and has become its citizen and one of its knight protectors."

"I had noticed the uniform," Chuck/Shar said dryly.

"Since this is no longer the city of my ancestors but rather a new nation-state under Doctor Elizabeth Weir, I felt it behooved me..."

At this point the two men and the lady president went off into a long discussion of, apparently, those changes they had made and those they were yet to make, leaving Teyla and the girl to stare at each other.

"You are not one of those Ancient people, too, are you?" Usagi asked, looking up with pink-red eyes through mercifully darker eyelashes.

"No, I am not," Teyla said gravely, and began to explain how she had come to be living in the City of the Ancestors -- the Silver City of Doctor Weir, as the Ancestor had named it and she supposed she should now call it.

Aside from the occasional remark notable enough to catch the attention of the others ---

"As well as uniforms themselves, color-coding can be really useful in emergencies, though, even if it is fairly mindless," the pink-haired girl pointed out. "Most often it's element-based, so the variations take a little getting used to, but enough places are on the Ellenary Grid that we chose outfits that get a fairly consistent reception -- that and Madam Dar's not only implying light patient red and yellow and wearing leader's white under it, the white is the uniform of a Three-W-A trouble consultant, so although that era doesn't have a standard color theory she can put aside the cape and be trusted."

"Would those consultants... " Teyla began, unsure whether criticism were called for or wise.

"I am still licensed as a semi-independent one," Dar said mildly over one shoulder, throwing her flame-colored cape back and removing a long tool from a thigh holster-like pouch. "The Worlds Welfare Work Association sanctioned and abrogated the doctor and, I believe, Sarah Jane early on, and so I was one of several later companions to be grandfathered in -- and, when I have visited that era since the time of my legalization, now and again their central computer has even brought matters to my attention as the person best suited for the job; at least I settle them on time and somewhere within the vicinity of the suggested budget."

"Unlike the doctor and Mistress Smith -- I think their performance is the reason the Three-W-A still keeps the Lovely Angel and its consultants on the payroll," Usagi whispered.

Teyla nodded politely, suspecting that it might be as well that none of those people, whomever they might be, had come to Atlantis. "And what is it that your clothing says?"

"Pink jean jacket, white leotard, collar off a sailor suit, pink leg warmers, and pink high-tops?" notChuck/Shar commented. "The eighties called, they want their fashions back."

"Sha~ar!"

Usagi whipped out something rather like a pistol and fired at him before Teyla could intervene; a starburst of pink light coruscated on his upper arm before beginning to fade.

"Some throw nerf bricks," Shar/Chuck said. "We fire crystalight rays."

Usagi dodged his return fire, and it splashed harmlessly on Teyla's hip. She prodded the green glow curiously with a finger, but the fabric of her skirt remained unchanged.

"Color aside," Usagi shrugged as her traveling companion went back to helping the lady Dar with repairs, "this is a good outfit to run very fast in, and with Madam Dar we do that a lot. I think it's catching."

"So do I," Dar said wryly. "I barely did any before I was assigned to the doctor."

"If so, I, too, have caught it from my conjoined," Teyla said. "We are all safe from each other."

-or-

"A machine for making exploding tumors?" Usagi demanded. "What in the world would anyone want exploding tumors for?"

"Well, it was one of Old Kumby's, and... "

"Whatever happened to him?" Shar/Chuck interrupted. "From everything you've said, well...!"

"Rabban -- " Glaucus made a very odd gesture, taking it in turns to raise a second finger until he was making what her teammates puzzlingly referred to as a "v sign," despite the fact that it looked more like an m if anything -- "dragged him out of contemplation in order to pull him into the Great Unpleasantness -- now, that was interference with the embodied, if you like -- and he was destroyed by their multiplanar weapon."

"Destroyed?"

"We are, after all, familiar with the motion -- well, not motion precisely, but the word will do -- taken by an Ascending soul; when a mortal dies, however, while the spirit tends to bolster our planes, unless it also provides the last necessary impetus for the formerly-embodied to Ascend to our level as sometimes happens, the soul's action is rather orthagonal to that motion -- "

"Orthagonal?" Teyla wondered.

"Sideways," Dar translated helpfully, not bothering to look up from her work.

"And, when struck by the weapon in question, there are traces that what was once one of us had, ah, gone in a likewise, as the president put it, sideways fashion, although the workings of the weapon were such that too-close observation tended to pull one in after the target -- "

"So what does happen to people when they die?" notChuck/Shar
asked.

"Well, that is, given the work of the two hundred eighty-sixth Myrddhin, although of course Melia Torvis had several very cogent observations, and while we know what happens to the participants of the Esperance Project they were not precisely mortal in the same way that you are, so their 'death' is more the alteration from their first to second state of being, although several of them have since chosen to go back out into bodies not designed to fulfill such a translation, and thus passed in the end in the same way that those of us who chose to Descend into full embodiment rather than the mere taking shape that I myself -- "

"You don't know." Usagi's gaze had the peculiarly direct and earnest quality that she swould most likely lose once her breasts had finished budding and her hips widened.

"Well, I mean, that is to say, as it so happens... no." Glaucus shot a half-apologetic look at Teyla and added, "I have not yet died, you see."

-or-

"Wait, General O'Neill let him come?"

"I gathered that it was the desire of his heart," Teyla said, "and surely no one has a greater interest in his safety nor is more to be trusted to guard his back than his wife."

"He got married again? When?"

"I was unaware that he was married before."

"Indeed, this is his first and only wife, unless you count his comrades as he does not, the most glorious woman of two worlds -- saving your presence, Teyla Emmagan -- "

"I make no claim to glory for myself."

"I would, for Mama -- "

"Forgive me, Miss Usagi. Saving Teyla Emmagan and, in other worlds than these, the new queen's serenity and of course the princess of helium, who at last has queens shining among women fit for comparison."

Shar/Chuck ignored Glaucus and Usagi. "But how'd that happen?"

"We'll go and see when we're done here, Char." Dar patted the side of the device she had recently reattached, smiling when it remained in place.

-- the conversations ran in parallel until everybody got up and trooped off to the next area to be defanged.

"The Ancestors certainly made very many dangerous things," Teyla said, waiting with an armload of crystals for the president and the technician to hand her yet another one.

"They were in the middle of a war," President Dar said from atop Glaucus' shoulders, her head and arms buried in the slant graduating from wall to ceiling. She had taken her boots as well as her cape off for ease in her working position, and would most likely have won the physics and engineering wizards' informal contest as to who had looked best when performing repairs. (Such contests always took place after the fact, as during the event all thus involved and many who simply happened to be in the vicinity tended to have much more important matters on their minds.)

"People do strange and terrible things when they are fighting," Usagi agreed, sitting on the upper edge of the panel that had been removed to allow the time-mistress access. She had cushioned it with the lady's folded cape, but it still seemed rather a precarious seat. "My mama..."

"It was more," the time lady suggested, "that they never thought anyone else would come to explore the city once they'd left. Hand me the... " She made a twisting, fiddling motion with her right hand.

"It was more," Shar/Chuck argued, "that the Ancients had no concept of cleaning up after themselves, what with being the pinnacle of their notion of creation and all."

Glaucus stood rigidly at attention, but a slight stiffening of his hands suggested that he was not immune to his fellow-Canadian's condemnation of his race.

"There are enough ways to get killed in this galaxy alone already," President Dar half-changed the subject. "I really don't see that you need to go adding to them." She handed a discolored crystal down to Shar/Chuck, who handed it on to Teyla.

"I gather you weren't involved in making these before you Ascended, either," Shar/Chuck offered in half-apology.

"Well, no, I was not."

"Messire Glaucus," Teyla said politely, unsure whether she were championing the Ancestor (who could not truly have need of mortal defense?) or gently correcting one of her own people (who was, after all, not truly one of hers) "is not even from the age of the City of the Ancestors at all, but was born to the Ancestors of Thartessus." She bent to set down her current handful of crystals. "...where is Thartessus?"

"Well, at the time it was at the mouth of the River Aurva, not too far north of where the Middle Sea gives on the Atlantic Ocean, and the suburbs are still there, if covered with silt and other muck -- but to be perfectly accurate, while my grandparents were indeed from Thartessus, and my family moved back there when I was still quite young, only eighteen annu, I was actually born at Velester."

"Velester?"

"In the Cloud-topped Hills, on a spot where the Rasenna later built a town of their own when my Velestern neighbors' descendants were pushed south between the Safini and Latini; the Rasenna called it 'Velesther,' and I believe the locals call it 'Volaterrae' these days -- "

"'Velletri', surely?" Madam President Dar said. "I know 'Volaterrae' was the Roman name for Felathri, in the north of the Rasenna lands."

"Ah. Entirely my fault, and thank you for bringing it to my attention; no matter how much trouble I have keeping these modern names straight, this sort of confusion is *not* appropriate to my current vocation. And whereas *Velletri* still stands on the ashes of Velester -- or, rather, on the rich soil into which its ashes long since decomposed -- later generations of Thartessians, alarmed by the cultural cross-contamination going on with the Carpites, whose language and original culture unlike those of the Safini and Latini was utterly alien -- "

"The Doctors Isabel Hernandes had more than a few things to say about that, in my Atlantis," Shar/Chuck put in.

"Here, too," Teyla said, hopeful that the conversation was returning to the outskirts of the vicinity of the familiar. "They have said very many things about the language of the Ancestors and Ring-speech and their resemblance to... Italic?"

"Which is where all these places are," Shar/Chuck said helpfully. "Well, except for Thartessus, which seems to have been about three-quarters as far as the mainland is from here."

"I am afraid that, should there in fact be a reason for this odd and peculiarly unhelpful similarity, I would be quite unable to say anything that would or would not elucidate -- "

Dar shifted from one foot to another, tapping Glaucus' chin with the side of her slack foot.

" -- and, nevertheless, I would have said Thartessus to have been 'a little less than thirteen-sixteenths' -- "

"'Alarmed by the Carpites,'" Usagi interrupted, throwing her hands up in impatience and accidentally kicking one of Dar's boots over onto Glaucus' hat.

"Oh. Well, they flew the city away a few millennia ago and set it down on the east coast of Africa, near the degenerate remnants of the research colony Melchior had planted back on the Mother-earth before the Wraith destroyed their stargate, so as to take over said remnants."

Everyone who was not currently half-buried inside a wall looked at him.

"Well, someone had to! You would not believe what depths of degradation and obsequity and later barbarism the Melchioranites had sunk to. Or possibly you would, but it does the nature of the world no credit."

"And," Shar/Chuck murmured, "all of these places are on Earth, except for Melchior."

"What's Melchior?"

"It used to be a part of the Atlantic Imperium." Whatever rearrangements Madam President Dar had been making let her voice echo more oddly than before. "They used to have a galaxy-spanning gate back in the day, much like the one in your central tower."

"After it was gone and the planet fell to the Wraith," her pedestal added, "they put a new gate up in orbit and pressed Melchior into use as a staging base. Mistress Teyla has been there, once of her own free will and twice as much by compulsion."

"Melchior," Teyla repeated. It seemed an innocuous enough name for a world where Toran had died as he had most feared, where Major Sheppard had taken his deathwound (and let Doctors McKay and Beckett argue as they liked, she knew what a stilled heart meant, as for that matter did the Major himself), where she too had nearly perished.

"And what do you mean by degenerate remnants, anyway?" Shar/Chuck wondered. "I assume it's not just that they intermarried with humans?"

"No, of course not, plenty of people do that," Glaucus said, shocked. "Or, well, did -- it's a little harder when one is unsubstantial. You yourself and the small lady here are both descendants of such hybrids, ones who probably never even dreamed of serving those such as -- Rabban was bad enough, but at least he was ours; unlike that... personage so euphemistically referred to as 'Ra-Kudu' or 'Rîgh' and the spawn thereof, or, worse, nameless horrors from the lower reflections, and that's not even going into the sort of biological end-products the colony's genetic engineering had descended to; much more drastic and less forgivable than in the case of mistress Teyla's ancestors."

Teyla stared at him. "Than in what?"

"Oh, it is nothing bad," Glaucus said hastily. "Merely one more variation in what is already a great mosaic; why, among ourselves, none of whom have any inheritance from the Lost Colony, several of us have far greater idiosyncracies. Take the president's inability to tolerate asynchronous bifurcation exposure, for example, or so light a thing as the color of the small lady's hair."

"Be sure to remember that," Shar/Chuck said kindly. "He isn't worried, so why should you be?"

"I was not, until you raised the subject."

"I *am* sorry. Really, I shouldn't even have brought it up. I could instead, for example, have pointed out that a certain lady of my acquaintance, most gracious and most deserving of respect, is herself a human descended from hybrids of my people and hers -- oh!" He was so visibly struck with his idea that he swayed a little, and Madam President Dar put out a hand against the wall to steady herself as she withdrew.

"What is it?" she asked.

"You, my friend, are still a woman," Glaucus began.

"Well, yes; it's actually more rare for it to change than not, and usually associated with traumatic premature regeneration."

"So it wasn't that surprising after eight of those," Usagi offered.

"Seven," Madam Dar corrected, handing a tool down.

"Wait, she's the eighth?" Shar/Chuck said. "I thought she was the ninth, q.v. Ives."

"If we are speaking of the doctor," Glaucus said, "the female shape in which I last met her or him is the eighth he has worn since first I met him and gentle Susan of the many surnames, when his first oscillatory period was winding down. But since neither of them are here, mistress Teyla and Miss Usagi, themselves female and whom I believe to have always been so, are. Perhaps you can give me some advice."

"Advice on what, messire?" Teyla asked politely.

"She," Glaucus breathed the word with reverential love, "knowing my feelings, chose to wed Another; a doughty man and true, an officer and a gentleman, wise in counsel and rich in watchman's experience, whom I greatly respected and with whom my superiors had often worked, who was sadly too soon taken from her."

"By Wraith? Or was this among the worlds of the Milk-way?"

"By coronary thrombosis, and it was. And while I of course assured her that I would always stand her friend, to come to her at once if ever she called on me, and have several times brought her company of gifts I thought would please her, I do not know whether, it having been two annu and one hundred seven days, it is too soon to start courting her again."

"Hardly," Teyla reassured him.

"Only you, Glaucus." Dar dropped her gaze to her brown feet and gave the crown of his head a fond look. "Panel?"

"Unless they'd been married for a very long time?" Usagi demurred, straining to lift the panel until Shar/Chuck took it from her and handed it up to the president.

"Not long at all, even in the lives of humans," Glaucus said. "But the heart is loyal -- "

"And still you could have begun your courting an anns ago," Teyla said, "with no difference as to whether she will in the end accept or no."

"I could?"

Everyone nodded, up to and including Madam President Dar, leaping down from his shoulders for the occasion.

Usagi handed Glaucus his hat before holding one of the president's boots open for her older companion.

"Have you any suggestions for how best to court Her?" Glaucus settled the hat back on his head.

"It helps if you do something to prove your worth as a family member," Teyla offered. "I do not know her situation, but perhaps you could hunt some food animal for her, or make her something which will be of daily use, or fix something which she needs, or be there when danger threatens." As she had seen Major Sheppard's and Lieutenant Aiden Ford's worth, when they came into a Wraith hive after their people and hers. As she had seen Doctor McKay's, when he had busied himself with the upkeep of the maker-of-fresh-water, and when he had complained that no one else had thought to do it all the time he was fixing the drains on her corridor, and when he had been the first to notice Wex's difficulty breathing and leapt to his side when the boy was struck with the shellfish-sickness.

"Kicking an army of invading ninja out of the garden is always good," Usagi put in, "but you can never count on enemy ninja to be there when you want them and I don't know whether the place where she lives has a garden."

"And if you hire them for the occasion," Shar/Chuck added, "word always gets out somehow and it'll more likely than not make her mad at you."

"Make her a meal," Madam President Dar offered.

"I already did."

"Well, you can do it again, surely?" Teyla said.

"Make it dinner," the other woman agreed. "Dinner is always more impressive than lunch."

The sunbeams through the windows were growing longer and Teyla's stomach emptier as they finally took the transporter to a room deep within the city, both Glaucus and Shar attempting to explain the Ancestors' method of putting out city fires to her in order to prevent mishaps.

In the center of the room was an elaborate silver chair with arms and a high back, carved with odd and peculiarly shapeless reliefs, positioned such that it utterly dominated the room.

Once Teyla could give her attention to the rest of said room, it proved to contain a mirror tall and wide enough to easily reflect any three of them; a knee-high casketlike object, near the mirror's base, fashioned of a dull dark grey metal, with an antenna sticking out of one end and bearing atop the other a sculpture suggesting, in a blocky angular way, the head of some long-muzzled animal; and Doctor Kusanagi, chasing a rapidly moving small light grey animal around the room and petitioning it in two languages to return her headset.

The animal leapt in front of Usagi and dropped it at her feet.

"Thank you, Diana," the girl said, bemused, and picked it up. (She pronounced it, reasonably, "Dee-ah-na," rather than the mishmash Private Hawkins made of her own name.) The animal leapt on Usagi's arm as she straightened and rose, and clambered up it to sit on the girl's head, between the conelike buns of hair.

"Masaka," Doctor Kusanagi said, and somehow Teyla understood it as an expression of dazed incredulity. "Ma...sa...ka...!"

"Miss Diana instructed me not to intervene, Mistress." The casket rolled towards them "head"-first, heightening its likeness to a small animal, as a flat voice with unnatural overtones spoke; after a moment, Teyla realized that it was coming from the animal-shaped baby MALP. "I hope that that was not incorrect?"

"Just fine, K-9," Madam President Dar said.

Doctor Kusanagi darted her gaze from one to the other of them, wild-eyed.

Glaucus, on the other hand, beamed at her. "Wonderful! I have only to set up the higher security protocols, and now I can key them to you so that you may give John Sheppard and some other likewise trustworthy person aether access!" He pronounced Major Sheppard's name with a round, long o.

"Um," Doctor Kusanagi said. "Those ladies I recognize -- " although she did not sound sure of Usagi, or possibly of Diana-the-animal -- "and either he is our fellow -- "

"Actually, no," Shar said.

" -- and so then, as that appears to be Kei-nine, his mistress and this gentleman here would perhaps be the ones who appeared in the movie...?"

"I'm not sure what film you're speaking of," Madam President Dar answered her, "but certainly I am Romanadvoratrelundar, and these are my companions K-9, Usagi, Diana, and Char."

"And so you are made known to me, and Teyla I know well, but you
are, goodman knight-guardsman...?"

"He is an Ancestor," Teyla explained, "once called Glaucus, born to the Ancestors long after they returned to the Mother-earth, who has come hither to close away dangerous devices of *his* Ancestors that we might not accidentally set them off, and he is very sorry that he did not arrive earlier."

"We are glad for your help," Doctor Kusanagi said politely, automatically.

Glaucus beamed at her again.

"This is Doctor Miko Kusanagi, a wizard of my second people," Teyla dutifully made known to Madam President Dar and her companions. "And I, too, am curious about this movie..." In all the tales of those blessed enough to walk with the Ancestors and other deities and receive their personal intervention, none had mentioned that one so favored would feel as if an onlooker to one of Major Sheppard and Doctor McKay's half-comprehensible arguments (perhaps over manners of ball games she had never heard of, or the realative merits of various pieces of the epic cycle that appeared to center on ships not yet built that would sail between stars joined in a 'Federation of Planets,' which appeared to be so endemic to Tellurian culture that comparisons were routinely made to its characters and situations without thought for a need for explanations).

"There was a movie, a play made for recording, when I was in higher learning," Doctor Kusanagi said, "about the adventures of the very famous fabled doctor: at its beginning and end he met with this lady, in this shape she has now turned into, only I think there had been some issue about the ownership of names, as he addressed Madam President as 'Dar' rather than by the name her previous actors had used -- "

"The Bruckters were scary," someone who proved to be the animal Diana put in, licking a forepaw. "We get chased often enough by people who dislike something that we have done that we don't need to add cases of mistaken identity on top of it, not when it can be avoided by something as simple as a name-change."

"Says the cat who's the only one of us never to have done so," Usagi remarked.

Indeed, now that Diana was sitting still, she bore a clear resemblance to Doctor McKay's picture; nobody else looked startled, so Teyla decided to ask her comrade later why in his praise of cats he had not mentioned that they could use human speech.

"Mine has not been. Either."

"I'm sorry, K-9."

"Although as you're all called K-9, it's a little different," Madam President Dar commented.

"So," Shar said at the same time. "Maybe you should have gone with 'Fred' back then."

"The doctor said much the same thing, in the movie," Doctor Kusanagi said, "in that first scene."

"And it was annoying then, too."

"I am sorry --!"

"No, no, it's hardly your fault."

"And so you offered to drain away some of the energy that had been affecting his ship in between the old series and the movie, as befitted someone who had been rescued in that time; and at the very end of the movie, you appeared again, accompanied by a young man who might have been played by our assistant to Dr. Weir made up to look older, but I have not yet asked him. The makers hoped that the movie would do well enough that it would pay for them to make following adventures to be split into parts and sent to people's homes, but it did not: many people found it too weird, or they were angry that the doctor regenerated into a woman, or they did not think that Grace Jones was a fit person to play the madam president, and there was some disagreement over the character of Irene, and some over that of Doctor Holloway, and an argument over the name of Shar, because some people thought that he was supposed to be the very famous Shar from an entirely different show."

"Did people not like the other Shar?" Usagi asked.

"No, they did -- " Doctor Kusanagi was blushing and seemed unable to look her in the face -- "and so his owners thought that the movie was trying to steal his fame, although the movie-makers pointed out that even that Shar was named for the singer Sharl Aznable -- "

"Aznavour," Glaucus, the current Shar, and Madam President Dar all corrected her.

"Aah, forgive me. -- who is a real person, and so cannot be owned; but all the arguing was unpleasant to those people who might otherwise have paid for such recorded shows."

"But you cannot own any people," Teyla pointed out reasonably.

"If they are only in a story," Doctor Kusanagi tried to explain, "then they belong to the owner of that story."

"But you cannot own a story once it is told."

Shar laughed. "Rather a lot of people on this expedition would agree with you."

"But... "

"The fact of the matter appears to be," Madam President Dar confided in Teyla, "most of the people of the Mother-earth are very mildly insane. I think it must be something in the water."

"Madam Dar!" Usagi protested.

"What? You are."

Glaucus, meanwhile, had taken his hat off; he now held it in his lap as he seated himself in the silver chair. The latter glowed blue in its flat places and leaned back to accommodate him.

"In the world where I'm from," Shar explained, "I wasn't in the movie at all, and they never made more because it stank, and it was made for TV in the first place, and the doctor regenerated into that guy who played the saner nervous actor in that cult film about the two out-of-work actors -- I only just now found out that she's instead of him, not after him -- and was supposed to be part-human."

"It did not stink," Glaucus objected. "It did not do well because not enough people knew about it properly beforehand."

"But the doctor is not part-human," Usagi said at the same time. "Pu is part-human, or at least part Moon-Kingdom-person... "

"No, that is also human," Glaucus said.

"But he was the one who appeared as the master, at the very beginning." Doctor Kusanagi ignored the others, wide brow wrinkling. "Of the movie, not in his first appearance -- but if the master should play the doctor, I am not surprised that it would be a bit... ah... "

"But I have seen the actor in question," Diana said, "when my father and his friend were watching the cult film, and he did not particularly look like the master."

"He was wearing a great deal of makeup in the movie, and something that made his cheekbones look different... "

"Ah, that would explain it."

Doctor Kusanagi still looked worried, and Teyla hastily turned to Usagi and said "Were you also there at that time?"

"Well, not at the beginning, obviously, and apparently Madam Dar met with the doctor and heard her report of the master's destruction while I was still asleep," Usagi grumbled, "after coming back from the Lovely Angels' party. We saved a planet."

"It just goes to show," Shar said, "you're not old enough to party hearty like that."

"Excuse me? Just because I've been doing some more growing up now I'm accompanying Madam Dar -- how old do you think I am?"

For some reason, this replaced Doctor Kusanagi's worry with amusement.

"How did you come to be traveling with Madam President Dar?" Perhaps Usagi and Shar might squabble much as Doctor McKay and Major Sheppard did -- or, only slightly more accurately, as did Wex and his sister Lumy -- but that did not mean that the sound of it would bring a fond smile to Teyla's face.

Usagi's irritation collapsed into sadness. "I went into the past to change things, only when I came back I could remember both, and it was wrong. And then Mama gave me -- well, it's a very important thing, and she sent me back to the past to learn how to use it -- "

"The silver crystal," Doctor Kusanagi murmured, nodding
thoughtfully.

"and then Diana, who is this cat -- "

"Hello, all," Diana said, deigning to take proper notice of them for a brief moment before settling back into elegant nonchalance.

"-- but after we had returned, Mama had changed and become different, and she told me that she had sealed a very evil thing in herself to purify it. So she had me send her to even farther back in the past so she could concentrate on that and not on everything else she takes care of; only I did it wrong and took Papa and Diana and me back with her, and then I couldn't get us back, maybe because Pu wasn't anchoring us then, and Mama got very angry and her eyes were gold and Papa told me to run, and Diana and I did, and I don't know what happened but Mama was coming after us, only she was more wrong than anything, and I held Diana and just wanted very badly to be somewhere that wasn't there, and then we were with Pu, but with a Pu I hadn't really met yet, so she didn't really know me.

"But she could tell I wasn't in my time, and she looked and said that time had changed so much that there wasn't any way for it to get to my home when it kept on going unless we changed all of it back, and maybe not even then, and I changed things because people died! And when I came back the first time, even if I'd changed too much somehow, and it was all wrong, at least they weren't dead. At least they hadn't died scared and thinking we'd make it all better, even if they'd never existed at all."

"And so the lady Usagi calls 'Pu' contacted us, where she had had her schooling," Madam President Dar explained, looking up from the notes she had been setting down on a writing-sheet she had produced while Teyla was paying attention to her companions; "and since I had recently become president, I was the one who came to meet Usagi and Diana and offer them places with me."

"Ah, so that is how it was," Doctor Kusanagi said. "I had wondered, in the..." her voice trailed off as she flushed.

"Have we met?" Diana wondered.

"Chotto chigau n desu ga.." Doctor Kusanagi began, continuing an explanation in a strange foreign tongue that almost, almost seemed to be somehow comprehensible.

Usagi lifted her head, startled, and then dropped her gaze to the wizard's arm. A smile broke across the girl's face and she answered, in words that Teyla both understood (at least, as well as any conversation consisting almost entirely of unfamiliar names and terms could be understood) and knew to be the same language that Doctor Kusanagi had spoken. Diana ventured a comment, and the conversation blurred back into quick high-pitched chatter as Teyla ceased to pay attention to it.

"What is it that you are writing?" Teyla asked Dar, turning instead back to the madam president.

"Sets of Asurac coordinates." She held the sheet out for a moment, showing a list of Ring addresses. "All of these worlds are notoriously inhospitable, in ways neither you nor I can do much about; and since very few of them have anything that would be of use to you here, I would recommend that you avoid them."

"Is Asuras on there?" Shar said, suddenly.

"This one, third from the top."

"You really don't want to go there," he told Teyla. "It'll only get a lot of good people killed... and speaking of which, while the Athosians may need to leave for safety when under attack -- "

"As they did when the great storm came upon us?"

"Precisely. Except for things like that, they should stay on the same world as Atlantis. There are Stargates in the galaxy that aren't being used, and so we -- I mean you -- I mean the Atlanteans could sort of borrow one and set it and a control center with an iris and everything up over by where you are, so you wouldn't be absolutely dependent on getting into the city whenever it was convenient, but if your people go off and live somewhere else we can't stay in contact and. Well. It could very easily go bad."

"I will take your advice to heart," Teyla said formally. She relaxed into curiosity. "Are there other such Rings with... irises?"

"The information for their manufacture was in the city database the last time I was here," Dar said. "I'll just write down the path to it."

Doctor Kusanagi's head jerked up as Glaucus, still in the great chair, said without looking "I'm reasonably confident that it's in the directory of the same name one up and inside 'pale'; but the path you have written down also contains many files that may well be of great use."

"Nevertheless, I'll put them both down."

"Have you any other such advice for us?" Doctor Kusanagi asked Shar.

"I'm... not sure," he answered. "You're already... you're not my Miko and this isn't my Teyla, and you and the others might not be close enough to mine to make the same choices. We've already turned off or warned for the things that are physically here, and Dar's handling offworld warnings, and so otherwise... I could say, for instance, that if Dr. Beckett tries to develop a way of reversing what in the Wraith makes them Wraith, you should be very, very hesitant to implement it, but if the idea's never yet crossed his mind I don't want to be the one who puts it there."

"I do not quite understand," Teyla said. "Of reversing what?"

"I shall explain it to you later," Doctor Kusanagi offered, "but such a notion, as Doctor McKay puts it, 'just has "bad idea" written all over it.'"

"Closer to 'insanely stupid idea that would only be dreamed up by someone so inherently naive they think good intentions will carry them through,' but you understand my point." Shar smiled wryly, and for a moment Teyla was sure that he looked like... someone, the resemblance vanished too quickly for her to ascertain whom.

"So," Dar agreed, and handed her sheet to Teyla. "We should be on our way."

"You will not stay and meet with the others, then?" Doctor Kusanagi asked.

"I suspect that all that will lead to will be wasteful questions and suspicions," Madam President Dar told her. "Not that your leaders may not have plenty of those already -- "

"But we don't really need to be here for them," Usagi interrupted.

"I should have liked to see more of the City," Diana said.

"We'll go visit it when it's flourishing," Dar reassured her. "One always has a better idea of what a place can be then anyway, and people have more time to be friendly when they aren't on the frontier itself."

"And... " Shar said. His gaze fell on Doctor Kusanagi, and for a moment there was so much grief and wistful longing in it that Teyla wanted to break the moment with sound. "It's been hard enough seeing Teyla and talking to her, and I didn't actually know the Teyla from my world as well. I'd just as soon be going now, when I can pretend that you're still the friends I knew."

Teyla checked her first impulse, and then thought better of that check; she walked to Shar and offered her people's brace of greeting and farewell, and after a moment he returned it, with the slight stiffness that betokened lack of practice rather than the greater one that signaled discomfort.

"We've only met one of the rest of you before," Usagi began.

"No, we/you haven't," Dar and Glaucus said at once.

"The young man whom you met would have been... ah, a close associate and kinsman, very nearly an alter ego of if not a true gestalt with the one who is here now," Glaucus expanded. "If, that is, he had existed in this world."

"But he doesn't," Dar went on, "because of Char's actions."

"Of my actions?" Shar blinked at her. "But I was only there for the time that matches up with this one now."

"And yet with distemporal mechanisms, effects in the future can cause it to change the past; there's a reason my own people have been so chary of that power falling into any hands but ours."

"Ah, so that is," Doctor Kusanagi said thoughtfully, nodding.

Teyla resolved to ask her about it when their guests had left.

"Then I expect it would be twice as weird to meet the other one now as I thought it would," Usagi finished, "and since Shar would like it even less... no matter how fun it is to meet people who are enthusiasts for your actions in a tale, if you remembered them as being your friends it probably wouldn't be fun any more."

Diana leapt down from her position and slunk about Doctor Kusanagi's ankles, brushing her sides against them. "It's been nice meeting you."

"It really has," Usagi echoed her companion, smiling and handing the headset back to its owner with the grace of a great lady. She bowed to Doctor Kusanagi and to Teyla, a smooth gesture in which she never lowered her eyes.

Doctor Kusanagi returned it, more deeply, and then repeated it for Madam President Dar. "I have been honored to meet all of you."

"Keep safe," Shar said, a little awkwardly, as Diana nodded to Teyla and ran to jump onto K-9's back.

"Good luck in your travels, all of you," Glaucus said, the chair returning to its original position. "We must meet up again when we can do it properly; perhaps you will come to this space's Canada in the future, or..."

"Actually," Dar said, "we're planning to visit the island of Tortuga three spaces over that way, a few times in the eighteenth century of their common era. You're welcome to join us."

"Thank you! I will, the next time that my duties give me leave!"

The madam president smiled, drawing her flame-colored cape more closely about herself. "We'll look forward to seeing you, then. Mistress Teyla, Leader Kusanagi, it has been a pleasure to meet you as well. Come along, entourage."

K-9 and its living burden rolled forward up to the large mirror and into it, not even pausing as it disappeared through what could not truly be glass.

Madam President Dar followed, Usagi on her heels. Shar paused for a moment, waved a little awkwardly, and then stepped into the mirror himself.

It disappeared with an odd humming noise.

"Mah," Doctor Kusanagi said eventually, looking at the place where it had been.

Teyla met her eyes and nodded.

"Here, mistress Miko," Glaucus said politely, rising to his feet and turning his hat around in his hands. "If you would take your seat here... "

-disclaimers-

Teyla, Miko, this iteration of the city of Atlantis, "Chuck," and any other SGA characters mentioned in passing belong to MGM, et cetera.
"Glaucus," the lady in whose behalf he wants advice, and a few other people he mentions in passing belong to Alliance Atlantis. (His language choices were a little different when he was talking to them.)
Romanadvoratrelundar, her ship/housecart, K-9, the doctor everyone keeps mentioning, and several people mentioned in connection with one or more of them all belong, of course, to the BBC.
(Although the "most recent iteration" of the Doctor that they're talking about was very directly inspired by the works of Adrian Ives.)
The small lady Usagi and her cat Diana, as well as her parents, Pu, Diana's father, and his friend belong to Takeuchi Naoko and, in this incarnation, to Toei Animation and TeleV Asahi. (I'm not sure who first came up with the concept of Sailorpluto as part-Time-Lord, but I don't know that I'd have thought of it on my own.)
The woman should be in the public domain by now, but Irene/Carina was of course thought up (possibly separately) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The "very famous Shar" -- or, usually, Char -- belongs to Sunrise Studios. (The singer Char Aznavour belongs, presumably, to himself.)
Thartessus/Tartessos was a thriving Bronze Age city near the mouth of the Guadalquivir, well before the Classical Greek period; some authorities say it was part of the original inspiration for Atlantis, and others think they're wishful-thinking at best.
Velletri/Velitrae is an old town in the Alban Hills, not too far south of Rome.
The Bructeri were a German tribe that eventually joined with others to become the Franks. Sometimes they were on good terms with the Romans, and sometimes... not.
If there's something I've forgotten to mention, I don't mean to unjustifiably claim it.