All That Glitters (Are Not ZPMs) by Sholio (Men and Machines Challenge)
Title: All That Glitters (are not ZPMs)
Author: friendshipper (Sholio)
Rating: PG, gen, no spoilers
Word Count: 2800
Summary: John wasn't sure whether to shoot it before it escaped and tried to destroy the city, or covet it for his very own.
Notes: For the pay it forward LJ meme, blade_girl asked for a story in which "The expedition finds out that a room they are using for one purpose was actually designed for another. It has to be a room that we have seen in canon being put to a specific, identifiable use." I also wanted to write something for this challenge. Combining the two, I ended up with ... this.
John was wading his way, without a whole lot of interest, through the lives and loves of 19th-century Russian aristocracy, and wishing he'd brought the Cliff Notes of War & Peace with him rather than the actual book, when his door chimed.
Thank God, he thought, and got up to answer it. At this time of night, there were only a handful of people it was likely to be, and his first guess turned out to be right.
"Hi," Rodney said cheerfully, bouncing on tiptoe.
Okay, not a good sign. "Hi," John returned, with caution, leaning on the doorframe. "What's up?"
Rodney held up a tablet computer and waved it cheerfully. "I was reading the Ancient database in bed just now --"
"That's what you do on your off time?"
"Well ... yes," Rodney said, looking slightly confused, as if the idea of anything else had not occurred to him, "but anyway, I found an interesting section of the database that we hadn't deciphered before."
"And you just had to get up and come tell me?"
"Yep!" Rodney said, bouncing again.
"The radio just would not do."
"Nope."
Of Rodney's many, varied and mostly unpleasant moods, "quivering spaniel on the scent of discovery" was honestly one of John's favorites. Not that he would ever tell Rodney that, of course. "Okay, so, spill it."
Rodney slapped the tablet happily. "It's the Alteran tax assessors' records for the city of Atlantis!"
He beamed at John, who blinked. Maybe this was a dream, in which case Rodney would be turning into a Wraith wearing clown makeup any minute now. "Ancients had taxes?" he said, finally.
"Yeah, who would have guessed? Well, not exactly taxes as we think of it; more like an institutionalized way of levying support for --"
"And you felt like coming by my quarters at midnight to tell me about it."
"What? Well, no, obviously we already knew about this; it's just that we hadn't ever found the records for --"
"So ... wait a minute." John scowled at him. "You found the Ancient equivalent of a 1040 booklet, which you already knew existed and you've been trying to find -- for some reason -- and that's what you came to tell me about." He reached for the door controls. "Good night."
"No! Wait! I admit it sounds a bit odd, but, wait, Colonel -- you do know why I've been looking for this, don't you?"
John sighed, hand resting on the control to close the door. "Because you smoked too much of that purple weed back on M4S-291?"
"Firstly, it was M4Q-291 -- the other was the ice planet with the donkeys, remember? -- and secondly, no! If this is complete, Colonel, it's a listing of every person, place and object in Atlantis, and its value."
John lowered his hand from the door controls, starting to catch on. "Wait a minute..."
Rodney nodded so vigorously that John had a moment's fatigue-induced vision of his head flying right off his shoulders and sailing across the corridor. "If anywhere in this city has a spare ZPM or a lab for manufacturing them, this should tell us."
John slouched into the lab the following morning to find every scientist in Atlantis -- at least it seemed that way -- spread out on lab stools and floor, poring over laptop computers and printouts.
"I hate the Ancients," Rodney said as John dragged him off for breakfast. "Ooh, waffles."
"So what else is new?" John wasn't much of a breakfast person; he got a cup of coffee, a bagel and a couple of the sectioned, pinkish-orange fruits that always made Rodney flinch even though Carson swore up and down that they didn't contain citrus.
"Personally, if a society can conquer space, time and death, I wouldn't think alphabetic order should pose that much of a challenge," Rodney said as he loaded up his tray. "Obviously, this is one of those rare occasions that I am actually wrong, but only because I expected sense from the civilization that, oh, built the Stargates. Could you not eat that around me?"
"I have it on good medical authority that it won't hurt you," John said, peeling his pseudo-grapefruit and enjoying the way that Rodney nearly dropped his tray in an attempt to avoid being squirted. Teyla and Ronon were already at a table by the big window; Ronon had a stack of waffles nearly as high as his head, while Teyla had a single waffle smothered in so much whipped cream and berries that it was a wonder she could find the waffle in there.
"You don't know that," Rodney snapped, clunking his tray down next to Ronon's. "It's possible to have an allergic reaction psychosomatically, you know, through the power of suggestion. The human brain is a marvelous and amazing thing, and it stands to reason that psychosomatic effects would be stronger in me because I'm smarter than the rest of you. Pass me the syrup, Conan. What was I talking about?"
John ran the conversation back in his head. "Ancients, alphabetic order or lack thereof. Can I try a bite of that, Teyla?"
She obligingly stabbed a small square of waffle for him, while Rodney rerouted back onto his primary conversational track. "Right, idiots, the lot of them. Highly advanced civilization, my ass. Look at this!" He held up his tablet computer over the waffles to show John, apparently oblivious to the risk of syrup-related disaster -- as well as to the fact that it was mostly in Ancient, and meant absolutely nothing to John. "They inventoried the contents of the bathroom cabinets one at a time and categorized them by color! You wouldn't believe how long it took us to figure that one out."
"I'm not sure why you bothered," John said, mooching another bite of Teyla's waffle.
"Well, clearly we wouldn't have, if we realized that we were looking at Ancient records for toothpaste, except we didn't because it was stored right under the contents of Lab 12! Does that make any sense at all?"
"Not to me." But no less sense than any of the rest of it. John gave Teyla a pathetic, starving look in the hopes that more waffle would migrate his way, but she was too busy eyeballing Rodney across the table.
"I would very much appreciate it if you would not insult the Ancestors in my hearing, Rodney."
"It's not insulting if I'm simply stating a fact, and the fact in this case is that the entire society could have benefited from a course in remedial bookkeeping --"
Teyla's shoulders were becoming ominously tense. "Rodney," John said with his mouth half-full of Teyla's waffle, "what's the first rule of team breakfast, movie nights and other social events?"
Rodney heaved a sigh and rolled his eyes, and recited quickly, "Do not ridicule your teammates' religious convictions, cultural beliefs, or choice of movie, but --"
"Great. Eat your waffles. They're good today."
Rodney made a disgruntled sound, but the lure of the waffles proved to be too much for him. He typed with one hand while eating with the other, jockeying with Ronon for elbow room.
"Thank you, John." Teyla looked down at her mostly empty plate. "Would you care for a waffle of your own?" she added, pointedly.
"No thanks, I'm full."
Rodney let out a sudden startled noise, staring at his screen. He tapped his radio. "Oh, hey! Elizabeth! Do you have a minute? I need to see you in your quarters." Brief pause; a blush spread like sunset across his nose and cheeks. "Um, that came out wrong. It's your quarters I need to see. I mean, with you there, ideally -- I wouldn't just break into your -- Yes, yes, I'll be right there. Stop grinning, Colonel." He stood up quickly, then stared down wistfully at his waffles, jabbed a fork into one of them and tried to stuff the whole thing in his mouth.
A few seconds later, Ronon had his first opportunity to practice the Heimlich maneuver. No one was especially thrilled, least of all John when the remains of Rodney's waffle landed on his tray and killed what appetite he'd had left.
The senior staff briefing was at 11:00. John had spent the morning working on overdue mission reports; he brought his laptop to the briefing with him, where he found himself the only one who'd actually showed up on time, so he took the opportunity to start hacking away on the mission report for that planet with all the flying squirrels. Rodney had been allergic to them, and they'd kept trying to build nests in Ronon's hair; it hadn't been one of his favorite missions.
Rodney and Elizabeth showed up ten minutes late, Elizabeth saying, "Sorry, sorry," and Rodney in the middle of full-on rant mode.
"-- why we can't move the bed, it's clearly the furniture getting in the way and I don't know how many times I have to ask --"
"Not one more time, please," Elizabeth said flatly, and, sitting down, folded her hands in front of her and smiled. "Good morning, John. Anything new before we get down to the business of drawing up next week's gate mission roster?"
"Um ..." John looked back and forth between them. "What's going on?"
"Nothing important," Elizabeth said brightly, at the same time that Rodney said, "Elizabeth's quarters are a ZPM factory."
Elizabeth clonked her forehead on the desk in front of her. "Rodney, I read the database entry that you showed me, all right? Several times. It simply says that the room I'm using for my quarters formerly contained manufacturing equipment."
"Equipment for manufacturing vital energy supplies," Rodney retorted. "What else could that be but ZPMs?"
"Rodney, the words estarchus verasim also have a dozen other meanings, and the Alteran grammar is very different from any Earth language. What you're translating as 'energy' can also mean gardening, human metabolism or sunlight. We may be talking about a machine for making fertilizer."
"Or espresso," John said cheerfully. They both glared at him.
After stick practice with Teyla and a quick lunch, John moseyed by Elizabeth's quarters to see how Rodney was coming along at wearing her down.
Pretty well, apparently. Elizabeth's bed had been moved to one side of the room, with a giant pile of priceless cultural artifacts teetering in the middle of it. Rodney was crawling around on the floor, scanner in one hand and ballpoint pen in the other, using the pen to tap on the floor. Elizabeth, looking frazzled and annoyed, was struggling to take down a ceremonial mask nearly as large as she was.
"I see that conscientious objection isn't working anymore," John said dryly, hurrying to help her. "What's he doing?"
Elizabeth pressed her lips together as they hauled the mask over to the bed. "He's convinced the manufacturing equipment that he wants is hidden in the floor or the walls."
"Only place it could be!" Rodney called, his nose six inches from the floor.
John strolled over to crouch down next to him. "Or it could have been moved somewhere else."
Rodney slid a quick hand over the polished surface of the floor. "Nowhere to anchor it. If they'd had anything large and free-standing in here, you'd see some kind of grapples or fasteners, like in the jumper bay. With the city floating on the ocean, everything large has some kind of auxiliary anchoring system, just in case the city's primary stabilizers fail; the Ancients may not have been the universe's greatest forward thinkers, but the thought did occur to them that no one wants to be forced into premature Ascension when they're crushed by a sliding crate of scrap iron."
"Ouch."
"Mmm," Rodney agreed. "On the other hand, a pretty common space-saving technique was to have equipment folded into the walls; it unfolds if it's activated. We've found that in several labs."
"How do you activate it?"
"The usual way -- physical contact and mental command." Rodney stood to sweep the scanner across the walls.
"You mean, just touch the floor and think 'on'," John said, touching the floor.
All hell promptly broke loose.
"You got lucky," Rodney snapped, once they'd managed to escape from Elizabeth's quarters and rescue Elizabeth. Her bed had been pierced by what looked like a gigantic skewer, and the room was now packed with incomprehensibly arcane (to John) machinery.
"Lucky in what way?" John demanded, dabbing at a cut on his forehead.
"My quarters," Elizabeth said blankly.
"You just happened to be touching the right part of the floor. I'd been over it a dozen times."
"Yeah, whatever." John peered back through Elizabeth's doorway. The room was literally packed with smooth, oiled blades and spigots and tubes and gears and canisters and pipes; it looked like Rube Goldberg had tried to design a Transformer and then stuffed it into a closet. John wasn't sure whether to shoot it before it escaped and tried to destroy the city, or covet it for his very own.
"My quarters," Elizabeth said again, and she turned a gimlet glare on Rodney.
"Well," John said, looking at his watch, "look at the time, I was supposed to be conducting training exercises with the Marines ten minutes ago," and he beat a hasty retreat.
"Coward!" Rodney spat after him.
He actually did end up too busy to go back and check on the progress of the alleged ZPM machine. Organizing training exercises for the new batch of grunts off the Daedalus, and settling a dispute between two guys who'd somehow both been assigned the same quarters, and trying to figure out where the missing shipment of ammo had gotten off to, and swapping around the gate rosters to accommodate Dr. Kubelvag's sprained ankle (which he'd forgotten about) and Dr. Vogel's hay fever (also forgotten), and trying to get Private Byers past her fear of the gate ... it was a long, if typical, day.
He finally managed to drag himself into the mess for dinner, after the place was mostly deserted, only to see Rodney sitting off by himself at a table in the corner, with dejection oozing out of every pore.
"Hey," John said, sliding into the seat across from him.
Rodney gave him a little wave.
"Everything all right?"
"Oh, fine, fine..." Rodney made a circuitous gesture that ended with his hand back on the coffee cup, "and Elizabeth has her quarters back, finally figured out how to get the damn machine to pack itself back up again ... she's not very happy about the bed, though, and for the record, no matter what she tells you, only one clay pot was crushed and it was pretty ugly to start with."
"Did you figure out what the machine does?"
"Um." Rodney stared at his coffee. "Yes. Sort of. Turns out Elizabeth's translation was somewhat closer than mine."
"It makes fertilizer?"
"It makes toilet paper," Rodney said into his coffee cup.
"Oh." John pondered that for a moment, looking for a positive spin. "You know, that would have really come in handy the first year."
Rodney snorted a small laugh. "True. Not so much now, though."
"Hmm," John said, noncommittally, and attacked his meatloaf.
Slumping a bit more, Rodney added, "On top of all that, it's starting to look like the word that I took, understandably enough, to be tax, actually means something more along the lines of personal care items."
John mulled that one over while he ate another few bites. "In other words, that entire 'lost' section of the database that you found --"
"... is almost entirely devoted to Ancient grooming supplies," Rodney groaned. "Which I would have known immediately if they had any sort of sane indexing system, by the way."
"Hey, I gotta hit the bathroom; back in a minute."
"Yeah, whatever." Rodney waved a limp hand.
As soon as John stepped out into the hall, he tapped his radio and said quietly, "Ronon? Teyla? What are you guys up to?"
Ronon's voice came back almost immediately, breathing hard. "Sparring. Why?"
John cast a sideward glance over his shoulder at Rodney's dejected figure. "Tonight is now officially a 'cheer up Rodney' night."
"I shall bring entertainment," Teyla said promptly. "I believe Doctor Cole just acquired the series of 'Futurama' on her computer, and she owes me a favor."
"Great! Ronon, you get the ice cream."
"On it."
"I'll make popcorn; see you at the lounge in ten." He seriously had the best team in this or any other galaxy. Sticking his hands in his pockets, John wandered back into the mess to round up his depressed idiot genius. Eating in the lounge sounded like a good idea tonight. He wondered if the mess had any of those chocolate cookies left.
~fin~
Credit where credit is due: "John's idiot genius" as a nickname for Rodney is naye's turn of phrase.
Author: friendshipper (Sholio)
Rating: PG, gen, no spoilers
Word Count: 2800
Summary: John wasn't sure whether to shoot it before it escaped and tried to destroy the city, or covet it for his very own.
Notes: For the pay it forward LJ meme, blade_girl asked for a story in which "The expedition finds out that a room they are using for one purpose was actually designed for another. It has to be a room that we have seen in canon being put to a specific, identifiable use." I also wanted to write something for this challenge. Combining the two, I ended up with ... this.
John was wading his way, without a whole lot of interest, through the lives and loves of 19th-century Russian aristocracy, and wishing he'd brought the Cliff Notes of War & Peace with him rather than the actual book, when his door chimed.
Thank God, he thought, and got up to answer it. At this time of night, there were only a handful of people it was likely to be, and his first guess turned out to be right.
"Hi," Rodney said cheerfully, bouncing on tiptoe.
Okay, not a good sign. "Hi," John returned, with caution, leaning on the doorframe. "What's up?"
Rodney held up a tablet computer and waved it cheerfully. "I was reading the Ancient database in bed just now --"
"That's what you do on your off time?"
"Well ... yes," Rodney said, looking slightly confused, as if the idea of anything else had not occurred to him, "but anyway, I found an interesting section of the database that we hadn't deciphered before."
"And you just had to get up and come tell me?"
"Yep!" Rodney said, bouncing again.
"The radio just would not do."
"Nope."
Of Rodney's many, varied and mostly unpleasant moods, "quivering spaniel on the scent of discovery" was honestly one of John's favorites. Not that he would ever tell Rodney that, of course. "Okay, so, spill it."
Rodney slapped the tablet happily. "It's the Alteran tax assessors' records for the city of Atlantis!"
He beamed at John, who blinked. Maybe this was a dream, in which case Rodney would be turning into a Wraith wearing clown makeup any minute now. "Ancients had taxes?" he said, finally.
"Yeah, who would have guessed? Well, not exactly taxes as we think of it; more like an institutionalized way of levying support for --"
"And you felt like coming by my quarters at midnight to tell me about it."
"What? Well, no, obviously we already knew about this; it's just that we hadn't ever found the records for --"
"So ... wait a minute." John scowled at him. "You found the Ancient equivalent of a 1040 booklet, which you already knew existed and you've been trying to find -- for some reason -- and that's what you came to tell me about." He reached for the door controls. "Good night."
"No! Wait! I admit it sounds a bit odd, but, wait, Colonel -- you do know why I've been looking for this, don't you?"
John sighed, hand resting on the control to close the door. "Because you smoked too much of that purple weed back on M4S-291?"
"Firstly, it was M4Q-291 -- the other was the ice planet with the donkeys, remember? -- and secondly, no! If this is complete, Colonel, it's a listing of every person, place and object in Atlantis, and its value."
John lowered his hand from the door controls, starting to catch on. "Wait a minute..."
Rodney nodded so vigorously that John had a moment's fatigue-induced vision of his head flying right off his shoulders and sailing across the corridor. "If anywhere in this city has a spare ZPM or a lab for manufacturing them, this should tell us."
John slouched into the lab the following morning to find every scientist in Atlantis -- at least it seemed that way -- spread out on lab stools and floor, poring over laptop computers and printouts.
"I hate the Ancients," Rodney said as John dragged him off for breakfast. "Ooh, waffles."
"So what else is new?" John wasn't much of a breakfast person; he got a cup of coffee, a bagel and a couple of the sectioned, pinkish-orange fruits that always made Rodney flinch even though Carson swore up and down that they didn't contain citrus.
"Personally, if a society can conquer space, time and death, I wouldn't think alphabetic order should pose that much of a challenge," Rodney said as he loaded up his tray. "Obviously, this is one of those rare occasions that I am actually wrong, but only because I expected sense from the civilization that, oh, built the Stargates. Could you not eat that around me?"
"I have it on good medical authority that it won't hurt you," John said, peeling his pseudo-grapefruit and enjoying the way that Rodney nearly dropped his tray in an attempt to avoid being squirted. Teyla and Ronon were already at a table by the big window; Ronon had a stack of waffles nearly as high as his head, while Teyla had a single waffle smothered in so much whipped cream and berries that it was a wonder she could find the waffle in there.
"You don't know that," Rodney snapped, clunking his tray down next to Ronon's. "It's possible to have an allergic reaction psychosomatically, you know, through the power of suggestion. The human brain is a marvelous and amazing thing, and it stands to reason that psychosomatic effects would be stronger in me because I'm smarter than the rest of you. Pass me the syrup, Conan. What was I talking about?"
John ran the conversation back in his head. "Ancients, alphabetic order or lack thereof. Can I try a bite of that, Teyla?"
She obligingly stabbed a small square of waffle for him, while Rodney rerouted back onto his primary conversational track. "Right, idiots, the lot of them. Highly advanced civilization, my ass. Look at this!" He held up his tablet computer over the waffles to show John, apparently oblivious to the risk of syrup-related disaster -- as well as to the fact that it was mostly in Ancient, and meant absolutely nothing to John. "They inventoried the contents of the bathroom cabinets one at a time and categorized them by color! You wouldn't believe how long it took us to figure that one out."
"I'm not sure why you bothered," John said, mooching another bite of Teyla's waffle.
"Well, clearly we wouldn't have, if we realized that we were looking at Ancient records for toothpaste, except we didn't because it was stored right under the contents of Lab 12! Does that make any sense at all?"
"Not to me." But no less sense than any of the rest of it. John gave Teyla a pathetic, starving look in the hopes that more waffle would migrate his way, but she was too busy eyeballing Rodney across the table.
"I would very much appreciate it if you would not insult the Ancestors in my hearing, Rodney."
"It's not insulting if I'm simply stating a fact, and the fact in this case is that the entire society could have benefited from a course in remedial bookkeeping --"
Teyla's shoulders were becoming ominously tense. "Rodney," John said with his mouth half-full of Teyla's waffle, "what's the first rule of team breakfast, movie nights and other social events?"
Rodney heaved a sigh and rolled his eyes, and recited quickly, "Do not ridicule your teammates' religious convictions, cultural beliefs, or choice of movie, but --"
"Great. Eat your waffles. They're good today."
Rodney made a disgruntled sound, but the lure of the waffles proved to be too much for him. He typed with one hand while eating with the other, jockeying with Ronon for elbow room.
"Thank you, John." Teyla looked down at her mostly empty plate. "Would you care for a waffle of your own?" she added, pointedly.
"No thanks, I'm full."
Rodney let out a sudden startled noise, staring at his screen. He tapped his radio. "Oh, hey! Elizabeth! Do you have a minute? I need to see you in your quarters." Brief pause; a blush spread like sunset across his nose and cheeks. "Um, that came out wrong. It's your quarters I need to see. I mean, with you there, ideally -- I wouldn't just break into your -- Yes, yes, I'll be right there. Stop grinning, Colonel." He stood up quickly, then stared down wistfully at his waffles, jabbed a fork into one of them and tried to stuff the whole thing in his mouth.
A few seconds later, Ronon had his first opportunity to practice the Heimlich maneuver. No one was especially thrilled, least of all John when the remains of Rodney's waffle landed on his tray and killed what appetite he'd had left.
The senior staff briefing was at 11:00. John had spent the morning working on overdue mission reports; he brought his laptop to the briefing with him, where he found himself the only one who'd actually showed up on time, so he took the opportunity to start hacking away on the mission report for that planet with all the flying squirrels. Rodney had been allergic to them, and they'd kept trying to build nests in Ronon's hair; it hadn't been one of his favorite missions.
Rodney and Elizabeth showed up ten minutes late, Elizabeth saying, "Sorry, sorry," and Rodney in the middle of full-on rant mode.
"-- why we can't move the bed, it's clearly the furniture getting in the way and I don't know how many times I have to ask --"
"Not one more time, please," Elizabeth said flatly, and, sitting down, folded her hands in front of her and smiled. "Good morning, John. Anything new before we get down to the business of drawing up next week's gate mission roster?"
"Um ..." John looked back and forth between them. "What's going on?"
"Nothing important," Elizabeth said brightly, at the same time that Rodney said, "Elizabeth's quarters are a ZPM factory."
Elizabeth clonked her forehead on the desk in front of her. "Rodney, I read the database entry that you showed me, all right? Several times. It simply says that the room I'm using for my quarters formerly contained manufacturing equipment."
"Equipment for manufacturing vital energy supplies," Rodney retorted. "What else could that be but ZPMs?"
"Rodney, the words estarchus verasim also have a dozen other meanings, and the Alteran grammar is very different from any Earth language. What you're translating as 'energy' can also mean gardening, human metabolism or sunlight. We may be talking about a machine for making fertilizer."
"Or espresso," John said cheerfully. They both glared at him.
After stick practice with Teyla and a quick lunch, John moseyed by Elizabeth's quarters to see how Rodney was coming along at wearing her down.
Pretty well, apparently. Elizabeth's bed had been moved to one side of the room, with a giant pile of priceless cultural artifacts teetering in the middle of it. Rodney was crawling around on the floor, scanner in one hand and ballpoint pen in the other, using the pen to tap on the floor. Elizabeth, looking frazzled and annoyed, was struggling to take down a ceremonial mask nearly as large as she was.
"I see that conscientious objection isn't working anymore," John said dryly, hurrying to help her. "What's he doing?"
Elizabeth pressed her lips together as they hauled the mask over to the bed. "He's convinced the manufacturing equipment that he wants is hidden in the floor or the walls."
"Only place it could be!" Rodney called, his nose six inches from the floor.
John strolled over to crouch down next to him. "Or it could have been moved somewhere else."
Rodney slid a quick hand over the polished surface of the floor. "Nowhere to anchor it. If they'd had anything large and free-standing in here, you'd see some kind of grapples or fasteners, like in the jumper bay. With the city floating on the ocean, everything large has some kind of auxiliary anchoring system, just in case the city's primary stabilizers fail; the Ancients may not have been the universe's greatest forward thinkers, but the thought did occur to them that no one wants to be forced into premature Ascension when they're crushed by a sliding crate of scrap iron."
"Ouch."
"Mmm," Rodney agreed. "On the other hand, a pretty common space-saving technique was to have equipment folded into the walls; it unfolds if it's activated. We've found that in several labs."
"How do you activate it?"
"The usual way -- physical contact and mental command." Rodney stood to sweep the scanner across the walls.
"You mean, just touch the floor and think 'on'," John said, touching the floor.
All hell promptly broke loose.
"You got lucky," Rodney snapped, once they'd managed to escape from Elizabeth's quarters and rescue Elizabeth. Her bed had been pierced by what looked like a gigantic skewer, and the room was now packed with incomprehensibly arcane (to John) machinery.
"Lucky in what way?" John demanded, dabbing at a cut on his forehead.
"My quarters," Elizabeth said blankly.
"You just happened to be touching the right part of the floor. I'd been over it a dozen times."
"Yeah, whatever." John peered back through Elizabeth's doorway. The room was literally packed with smooth, oiled blades and spigots and tubes and gears and canisters and pipes; it looked like Rube Goldberg had tried to design a Transformer and then stuffed it into a closet. John wasn't sure whether to shoot it before it escaped and tried to destroy the city, or covet it for his very own.
"My quarters," Elizabeth said again, and she turned a gimlet glare on Rodney.
"Well," John said, looking at his watch, "look at the time, I was supposed to be conducting training exercises with the Marines ten minutes ago," and he beat a hasty retreat.
"Coward!" Rodney spat after him.
He actually did end up too busy to go back and check on the progress of the alleged ZPM machine. Organizing training exercises for the new batch of grunts off the Daedalus, and settling a dispute between two guys who'd somehow both been assigned the same quarters, and trying to figure out where the missing shipment of ammo had gotten off to, and swapping around the gate rosters to accommodate Dr. Kubelvag's sprained ankle (which he'd forgotten about) and Dr. Vogel's hay fever (also forgotten), and trying to get Private Byers past her fear of the gate ... it was a long, if typical, day.
He finally managed to drag himself into the mess for dinner, after the place was mostly deserted, only to see Rodney sitting off by himself at a table in the corner, with dejection oozing out of every pore.
"Hey," John said, sliding into the seat across from him.
Rodney gave him a little wave.
"Everything all right?"
"Oh, fine, fine..." Rodney made a circuitous gesture that ended with his hand back on the coffee cup, "and Elizabeth has her quarters back, finally figured out how to get the damn machine to pack itself back up again ... she's not very happy about the bed, though, and for the record, no matter what she tells you, only one clay pot was crushed and it was pretty ugly to start with."
"Did you figure out what the machine does?"
"Um." Rodney stared at his coffee. "Yes. Sort of. Turns out Elizabeth's translation was somewhat closer than mine."
"It makes fertilizer?"
"It makes toilet paper," Rodney said into his coffee cup.
"Oh." John pondered that for a moment, looking for a positive spin. "You know, that would have really come in handy the first year."
Rodney snorted a small laugh. "True. Not so much now, though."
"Hmm," John said, noncommittally, and attacked his meatloaf.
Slumping a bit more, Rodney added, "On top of all that, it's starting to look like the word that I took, understandably enough, to be tax, actually means something more along the lines of personal care items."
John mulled that one over while he ate another few bites. "In other words, that entire 'lost' section of the database that you found --"
"... is almost entirely devoted to Ancient grooming supplies," Rodney groaned. "Which I would have known immediately if they had any sort of sane indexing system, by the way."
"Hey, I gotta hit the bathroom; back in a minute."
"Yeah, whatever." Rodney waved a limp hand.
As soon as John stepped out into the hall, he tapped his radio and said quietly, "Ronon? Teyla? What are you guys up to?"
Ronon's voice came back almost immediately, breathing hard. "Sparring. Why?"
John cast a sideward glance over his shoulder at Rodney's dejected figure. "Tonight is now officially a 'cheer up Rodney' night."
"I shall bring entertainment," Teyla said promptly. "I believe Doctor Cole just acquired the series of 'Futurama' on her computer, and she owes me a favor."
"Great! Ronon, you get the ice cream."
"On it."
"I'll make popcorn; see you at the lounge in ten." He seriously had the best team in this or any other galaxy. Sticking his hands in his pockets, John wandered back into the mess to round up his depressed idiot genius. Eating in the lounge sounded like a good idea tonight. He wondered if the mess had any of those chocolate cookies left.
~fin~
Credit where credit is due: "John's idiot genius" as a nickname for Rodney is naye's turn of phrase.