Interplanetary Travel 101: This Is Not Kansas

[savedthatjaffa]

She checked the seals on her Hazmat suit a few more times and then made sure the hoses were working properly, which they were. Lam was fairly confident the suit was sound -- she did this every time -- and stepped up to the shimmering ripple of the gate, her hands full of equipment to deal with just about anything save major surgery. SG-12 was still

Comments

[sgmitchell]

He wasn't in a daze. Last week? That had been a daze. But it had been a bit...mechanical, since Morgan left. Actually left this time, not just stepped out. It wasn't as bad as he'd expected it to be, and maybe the week alone had helped, in both a twisted and a straightforward way.

However, his...thoughtful wanderings of the beach were interrupted by a familiar voice. He hadn't heard it in...what was...longer than he wanted to count, but it was nevertheless familiar. And judging by her equipment, outfit, and unimpressed expression? He highly doubted she was just a clone.

Cam grinned suddenly, jogging up to close the distance between their two positions, and waved. "Doctor...you're here to tell me Odyssey's in orbit, right?"

[savedthatjaffa]

"What?" She stared at Mitchell like he'd grown another head and frowned. "I wish. I could use the lift, apparently. Not only is there no Gate behind me, but if I don't get these antibiotics somewhere cool, they're likely to go bad. Not for a good eight hours thanks to the packaging, but still."

Lam studied him for a moment.

"...Landry said you and SG-1 were due home," she said flatly. "There a reason you're on a tropical beach in the middle of nowhere?" Lam squinted up at the sky and then glanced around. Definitely not normal. "And," she waggled the radio, "this is useless."

[sgmitchell]

Yeah, he'd sure like if that meant the Odyssey was on its way, but he knew well enough that it wasn't. Well, it could have been, but he doubted the General would send his daughter through without briefing her on it. Occasionally tense silences in hallways or no.

Still, this was definitely Lam, now, a part of the team.

"Are you up for coffee, Doctor? We can get those antibiotics somewhere cool, but the explanation's gonna take a bit."

[savedthatjaffa]

"You know I'm always up for coffee," she said with a slight smile. "I can't sleep before I step through that gate. It's all anticipation of having my molecules scrambled and then reassembled, I guess."

Lam shrugged lightly and started grabbing her gear. She maintained if she could carry it all through the gate, she could carry it in to find coffee.

"As long as I get these antibiotics safe, you could pretty much drag me anywhere. Hopefully, I can find some spare clothes somewhere, seeing as Tomlin still has my backpack. That's the last time I'm letting anyone take my personal bag through before me. Explain as we walk, that way it'll take half the time when we get to the coffee."

[shot_my_shoes]

"That's a little warm for a tropical island." There weren't many people who would dress like that, even if that was all the clothes box gave them, so Harry wondered if she was a new arrival. That he hadn't seen her around before told him nothing because he hadn't really been concentrating on who was around. He smiled at her anyway because it never hurt to be friendly.

[savedthatjaffa]

"All I've got at the moment," Lam said, squinting at the man and folding her arms. Not for the first time, she cursed Tomlin and the bag situation. There were good khakis and a black shirt in there, at least.

[shot_my_shoes]

"I know the feeling." He didn't go barefoot by choice, after all. He held out his hand to her. "Harry. I'm yet to decide how much the island hates me."

[savedthatjaffa]

"Doctor Carolyn Lam," she said and took the offered hand a bit dubiously. "The fact that you're here is probably enough of a clue. This place is definitely weird."

Probably weirder than Stargate Command, wormholes, and aliens.

[theunascended]

Daniel was working on Jack's furniture. He was, like he usually was when he was working on carpentry at New Atlantis, shirtless. He looked up when he saw someone come in and stopped sharply when he saw a very familiar face. "Dr. Lam? Carolyn?" He put the hammer and nails down and moved in her direction.

"That is you, right? People have a tendency...not to always be who they look like."

[savedthatjaffa]

"Last I checked, I was," Lam said, pausing mid-stride to eye none other than Daniel Jackson. Mitchell did say they weren't the only familiar faces and she'd taken that to mean there were more SG-1 people around. In fact, he might have actually mentioned Jackson at some point. She'd been too grateful for the coffee and things had started to blur just a bit.

Jackson seemed to be fine, but that was just the clinical side of her brain working overtime. Force of habit, she thought wryly. Dressed in jeans and a black tee, she'd managed to ditch the reddish orange Hazmat suit for something a bit less of an eye sore. She rocked back on her heels a bit and frowned slightly.

"Ran into Mitchell when I arrived," she said matter-of-factly. (Arrived, appeared, materialized, got plucked from the stream--) It's still not exactly the best thing in the world, but...here I stand. "We had coffee, he explained the situation. I suppose I'm still processing." She eyed the furniture. "Hobby?"

[theunascended]

"Payment for a friend. He's making Vala something for her birthday. I'm not too good with jewelry. And I'm on the building crew. It gives me something to keep me occupied. I've...I've been here quite a while." Four months and he'd have been here two years. It was a little boggling to think about, so he usually tried not to.

"It's good to see you. Even if you might not exactly be thrilled about being here."

He wasn't entirely sure what Mitchell had said about the island, yet, so he'd take his cues from her.

[savedthatjaffa]

"Ah," she said, frowning so very lightly it was mostly in her eyes. "Well," Lam rubbed at her eyes a bit. "It's better now that I managed a few hours of sleep in that...crash room. I can't imagine that anyone is pleased about being yanked from their own Universes and getting stuck here."

She looked determined.

"We'll just have to figure out a way off so we can get back to what we're supposed to be doing." Lam said it like Mitchell had, with that same 'don't you say a damn thing against it' tone of voice. She'd already met up with someone who tried to convince her to throw in her chips and she wasn't going to do that.

[purplensparkly]

Trance was carrying Rommie's head home. She wasn't entirely sure what else to do with it, so she had it in the crook of her arm. It was completely dead and she wasn't sure how she was going to reactivate her or even if she wanted to. After all, it wasn't much of a life if you were just a head.

But when she turned the corner and saw that face, the same face as the head she had in her hand, she shrieked again, jumping back.

One might almost say she was getting to be human, shouting like that so much.

[savedthatjaffa]

Lam frowned.

And then stared, blinking at her own head.

"...what the hell?" Okay. It wasn't every day some purple woman (purple?) shrieked at you. For that matter, it wasn't every day a purple woman had her hands full of your head. Lam took a step back and put a hand to her head. Still there.

"This might sound weird," she said carefully, "but...why do you have my head?" Technically speaking, it wasn't her head, but a copy of her head, which wasn't necessarily her head at all. Lam folded her arms and tried to wipe the shocked expression off her face.

[purplensparkly]

"Rommie? Rommie, no, no, no, no, no. You shouldn't be here. You're supposed to be back on the Andromeda with...well, with yourselves and Dylan and Harper and Beka and Tyr. And me. I was supposed to fix things. I was supposed to make them right."

Trance was wondering why her other self hadn't fixed things. Why things seemed worse than she'd warned herself about.

"At least tell me you know how you got here. If it's a tesseract, we can probably find a way to get you back. Even if it doesn't quite work that way here." Trance would make it work if that's what it took to get Rommie back where she was supposed to be.

[savedthatjaffa]

"I'm not who you think I am," Lam said, frowning a little deeper. "I'm not Rommie. I'm Doctor Carolyn Lam." Sorry. "And you still have a head that looks exactly like mine. I have to admit, that's pretty creepy." 'Pretty creepy' was the understatement of the decade. Maybe of the last, oh, six billion years.