The Double Disappearance of Colonel Sheppard, ch. 3, by Sophonisba [amnesty 2007|multiple]
-title- The Double Disappearance of Colonel Sheppard, Chapter Three
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Gen. Silly. Fusion. Strong language. Humor relating to primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Random technobabble that doesn't make too much more sense than that of the original. Follows Chapter One; it shouldn't be as necessary to read Chapter Two to understand this.
-timeframe- Takes place during second season, sort of, after "Epiphany."
-spoilers- For "Instinct" and "Conversion." Big ginormous ones.
-characters- John and ensemble, including a few surprises.
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Neither, sadly, is Steve Senn's The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek, on which this is based, in any sense. At one point, Lorne paraphrases a line from Esther Friesner's Majyk by Design (about what some people will eat).
-word count- 2912
-summary- The other dinosaur inhabitants of their Atlantis meet human Sheppard, with various digressions into biology and peculiar medical history.
The Double Disappearance of Colonel Sheppard
Chapter Three
(John)
By the time they got to the infirmary, John was mostly used to Atlantis's excitement, or possibly Atlantis had gotten used to the presence of a better match to the Alteran genome than its current inhabitants.
He walked in as casually as he would have wandered into the infirmary on his own Atlantis, and then stopped as the small long-necked military saur, all of whose visible skin was covered in flame-colored feathers, stiffened, pivoted, and pointed a Wraith stunner at him. Behind it, the bed was occupied, and someone was kneeling by its side with their head resting on their folded arms next to the dinosaur patient. John raised his hands.
"Oh, put that away, Cadman, it's Colonel Sheppard," Rodney said, nudging him on with a nose between the shoulderblades. "Well, not our Colonel, but a Colonel from a parallel universe where we're all apparently human. Except probably for her."
"Human?" Lieutenant Cadman said warily, rising to an erect tripod sort of pose. The stunner dipped but remained pointed in his general direction. John absently noted that the feathers on her neck were longer, forming a mane or ruff, and that her chest was as flat as Rodney's own. As flat as John's own, come to think of it.
"Human," Rodney repeated. "Like the Ancients -- please tell me you've seen at least one of the holograms? Only not Ancient Ancients, I think they bear the same relationship to the Alterans that saurs did to the Ancients in Final Fantasy Seven -- those ones were called Cetera or something -- which would make the lieutenant colonel Aerith, given how strongly he's got the gene."
"Aeris?" John blinked. "I thought I'd at least be Zack. Got the hair for it and everything."
"I hate to tell you this," Rodney told him, "but your hair looks nothing like triceratops head structure."
"Who are Zack and Ay-er-what?" the kneeling girl asked, rising and turning around.
John was a grown man, trained and experienced, and did not scream, although he might have squawked a bit when hastily going for his gun.
Ellia, on the other hand, did scream, ducking behind the feathery lieutenant and holding her arms out as if to prevent someone from getting close to the bed and its sleeping dinosaur occupant.
Cadman fired her stunner, which went somewhere over John's shoulder as Rodney suddenly knocked him forward and nearly got a toe shot off for his pains.
"It's all right, it's all right, she's a tame Wraith!" Rodney bellowed, leaning forward and spreading his own arms (as best John could see from his position on the floor, prone under one of Rodney's feet. He could feel the clawpoints on his back, and hoped to all that was holy that Rodney wouldn't forget and put weight on that leg). "Put that AWAY, Cadman, have you forgotten the way Stackhouse and the others reacted to her already?" He wobbled backwards, lowering his tail to the floor to aid in balance. "Seriously, Ellia was raised human, we feed her those sheepy goat things from Amara."
"And it?" Ellia asked, half-hysterical. "I couldn't touch its mind at all -- "
"Hey, I'm cured," John grumbled. Mostly, anyway. Then he cursed himself for bringing the subject up at all.
"Cured?" Rodney, Cadman, and Ellia demanded with varying levels of curiosity and suspicion.
"You shan't have him," the last-named commanded before he could reply, still in her protective stance.
"Wait, is that your dad?" John was blanking on the man's name; Zeda-- Zada-- something.
Rodney tentatively lifted his foot.
"So," John said, carefully sitting up, open hands spread well to each side. "In this universe obviously, uh, Ellia didn't inject herself with an untried substance and start mutating and go insane and kill her foster-father and bite me, thus giving me a retrovirus that turned me blue and scaly."
"I wouldn't," Ellia protested. "I don't even eat people now I can reach animals with enough presence to them."
"Where'd this alleged substance come from, and how'd you get cured?" Cadman wondered.
"You'd probably look good in blue scales," Rodney said thoughtfully, "although you can really work that feather thing, too."
"Carson," John ignored the other two. "I think he made another retrovirus with my own DNA -- although I was sort of out of it by then, and afterwards I just wanted it all to be over."
"So you're not a Wraith," Ellia said, slit pupils dilating to ovals.
"No, he's a Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard from a parallel universe where, if I gather correctly, you're still a Wraith but all the rest of us are human like him, weren't you listening?" Rodney snapped.
John carefully turned his hands out, holding his unmarked palms up.
"What's a hyuuman?"
"What," Carson Beckett demanded, "is all this noise in my infirmary?" A black-and-gray feathered dinosaur in medical yellow and tan, waving hands that were obviously vestigial wings, complete with feather feathers on the outside edge and on top of his head rather than the hairlike peacocky things on the rest of his visible body, burst in through the other infirmary door.
Well. That explained the sleeves. Although at that size -- John rather thought it would suck worse to have wings and not be able to fly than to have neither, and decided to forgive his counterpart for apparently having missed out on the wonderful world of arthropoid ferality.
"And did I hear you say," the geneticist went on, "this is Colonel Sheppard on the floor -- what's he doing down there?"
"Misunderstanding," John said briefly.
"I brought him," Rodney explained, "so we could get a medical baseline in case something goes wrong before we can send him back."
"Not to mention," Cadman added, "that we'd then have a complete human genetic scale. Dr. Jahnke would love that, even if you've found other things more worth your time."
"Uh, mine isn't quite typical." John guessed that Carson was torn between pouncing on him for Tests and glaring at Cadman.
"He's got an Ancient grandpa or something," Rodney said helpfully. "The city's technology reacts to him like anything."
"What does Elizabeth say about this?" Carson wondered.
"I didn't want to disturb her," Rodney said. "We were going to call her after Sheppard's checkup -- "
"Rodney."
"Oops?" John said.
"I'll call her," Cadman sighed.
*
An extremely embarrassing and intrusive checkup later (and Carson had shown far too much interest in his navel, even once John had stammered that the warts were the last remnant of the bug retrovirus and ought to be going away Real Soon Now), they came out to find the infirmary's main room completely full of:
- Rodney, of course;
- Cadman;
- Ellia;
- An ancient-looking stegosaurus sitting up in bed, almost certainly Ellia's adoptive father -- Zaddik, that was his name, John was almost sure of it;
- Ronon;
- A stocky military dinosaur with spineless feathers in a sort of camouflage khaki pattern and a long neck, wearing an American flag patch and Atlantis' version of major's insignia, so probably Lorne;
- A triceratops with eyes that didn't quite seem to be the same color, apparently another American lieutenant;
- Several American sergeants, all unarmored herbivores;
- Three carnivorous scientists -- one brightly colored scaled one with little horns over the eyes and a bigger one on the nose, a duller-colored one with only the eyebrow horns but with a monocle suspended on stiff wire from each of them, and a smaller version of, apparently, Carson's sort of dinosaur covered in iridescent black feathers with a pair of goggles strapped onto its head -- the first two wearing their own set of chopstick rings on their three-clawed hands, and none of whom had turned enough for John to see their flag patches;
- Two carnivorous or omnivorous scaled biologists chattering in German about "das Mesozoikum," almost certainly the palaeontologists Jahnke and Meier;
- and two dinosaurs in command red, the duck-billed one herself scaled in red (shading from near-black maroon along her spine to fine blonde mail over her flat breast, visible through the unzipped neck of her shirt); the other the same sort of dinosaur as Cadman with richer, more earth-toned feathers, her uniform jacket sitting oddly over her leather leggings.
He'd faced worse.
Besides -- John automatically held his hands slightly out, and Teyla came forward to let him take her (wider, more sloping) shoulders in his hands and to press her (feathered) brow to his, bending her head farther than humanly possible and tucking her beak into her breast. She smelled a little musky, a little of warm feathers, a little like the Teyla he knew but without something he couldn't name.
"John," she said, and he answered "Yeah."
"Forgive me," Elizabeth began, "but -- confirmation that he is in fact a Colonel Sheppard?"
"He acts like him," Rodney pointed out, "and hasn't missed a beat yet, plus his secret password's the same."
"He has most of the Colonel's scars," Carson added, "suggesting parallel experience, as might be expected."
"Although why," Zelenka, the green-striped tawny dinosaur with the monocles, sniffed, "is not certain -- Stargate Command has records of much more extensive situational differences from worlds whose inhabitants were much more physically similar, down to quantum level." He opened a large, clunky, rounder-cornered laptop with oversized sturdy keys and displayed a graph. "There was a significant discharge of energy in Colonel Sheppard's quarters at three-fifty-two this morning, mostly in the very low end of the electromagnetic spectrum."
"Good thing I've been backing up, then," John said, leaning against a handy piece of large unidentifiable equipment. "I hope he did."
"And there was evidence of tachyon condensation in his room," Rodney added, ignoring him. "Unfortunately too much time had passed to determine whether the tachyonic field had originally been in the area of the bed or not."
"The bed," Elizabeth said blankly.
"I woke up here," John explained.
"And we still do not know why," Radek said. "While the energy was obviously released there, we cannot yet tell from where it came. Not from the city's own power, we know."
"We're inventorying all the known alternate power supplies in the city," Rodney finished, "but the question of transmission remains."
Elizabeth nodded. "The health of our guest?"
"You realize, all jokes aside, that I've worked more with birds and chelonians than with mammals," Carson began. "As best I can tell, however, with the aid of the Ancient diagnostic apparatus, Colonel Sheppard appears to be a reasonably healthy demi-Ancient, with at least one significant sequence of non-Ancient pongid DNA. His blood pressure is a little higher than the recommended Ancient range, and he's lower than he should be in levels of trace minerals that tend to occur in green leafy vegetables -- if you can eat those?"
"Provided the leaves are flimsy enough and they aren't also poisonous, sure," John shrugged. "The Ancient dietary requirements were almost identical to ours -- I think the main difference Dr. Beckett found was that they were far less likely to become addicted to anything. Also, if I'm remembering right, they didn't need as much fruit in their diet and occasionally needed rather more calcium and protein when they were healing, because they healed faster or something."
The palaeontologists leaned forward with parted mouths, intrigued, letting him see that the one with feathers grading into scales probably was an omnivore if the different kinds of teeth were any indication.
Carson nodded. "And, of course, he has some leftover Wraith/iratus tissue inclusions from what was apparently a far wider effect, but I see no reason why that shouldn't eventually be replaced with normal healthy flesh like the rest."
"WHAT?" roared most of the dinosaurs in the room at once.
"I know I mentioned what he told us about the cross-dimensional Ellia, ma'am," Cadman grumbled.
"Wait, wait, iratus? Are you sure?" said Rodney. "Because in our world, we found iratus bugs on the planet where the first hive was, and discovered them when one chomped down on you -- uh, our you -- and wouldn't let go -- "
"And my team had to kill me to get it off," John went on, "while the jumper was stuck in the Gate -- "
"-- because the drive pod wouldn't!" Rodney finished triumphantly. He and John beamed at each other, it taking the latter several moments before he realized that the former was doing so far more toothily than was quite, well, comfortable for a bystander.
"Indeed, there are great similarities between our two worlds," Teyla observed.
"But I gather that your world's Ellia infected you with iratus DNA?" Elizabeth brought them back to the topic, puzzled.
Ellia flinched.
Ronon laid a hand near the butt of his weapon, glaring at her.
Cadman and two of the sergeants unobtrusively placed themselves between the two of them.
"See, Carson found out that Wraith DNA was part iratus and part human or something," John tried to explain -- it wasn't as if it had made that much sense to him the first time. Or the last time. "So he was trying to invent a retrovirus to change the iratus DNA into human and make a Wraith human."
"You can DO that?" Ellia's pale face was completely, utterly stunned, and then the blood flushed livid in her cheeks, staining the secondary breathing slits within.
"Well, not yet, we can't," John said dryly. "Did you miss the bit I said about going nuts and eating your dad?"
"I don't want THAT! It is just," the -- girl, he kept finding it hard not to think of her as a girl -- tried to explain, "that I don't want to kill any people ever again, and the yowes are so bland and they go so quickly and are not ever much nourishment for those here once I am done with them -- "
"We could slice them up and sell them in L.A. as the ultimate diet food," Lorne (John'd guessed correctly) said dryly. "And I know people who'd buy them, carnivore or not."
Most of his subordinates nodded.
"And I do not know how long you will be willing to pay for beasts large enough for me to eat," Ellia ignored the byplay, "and Sheppard says that because of the way I eat I mustn't kill anyone that way, not even if they're enemies."
"Well, you're always allowed to defend yourself if you really have to," Lorne said, "but honestly, if you have a gun, just shoot them; it's simpler all round, and it's not as if it's civilized to eat dead hostiles."
"Maybe if they're other Wraith," Rodney said. "I mean, I wouldn't want to eat one, they have those poison sacs in their arms and they taste terrible, but they might not to her."
"Rodney!" Elizabeth glared down her horsey nose. "We do not kill sentient beings for food, whatever their practice!"
"Don't see why not," Ronon grumbled, and louder, "Taste terrible?"
"During the siege of the city," Rodney told him, "my gun failed me -- "
"I heard you ejected the clip by accident," John and Carson said in unison, and then whirled round to look at each other.
"I. was. unable. to. use. it," even Rodney's irritation was more majectic in this shape, "and was forced to defend myself with tooth and claw."
"He acquitted himself well," Teyla agreed. "The tyrannosaur is fearsome indeed, and I wonder that the Ancestors settled none of them here."
"But what was this about a retrovirus?" Carson said.
"It was something you were trying to make," John said, shifting back and forth, forcing himself to recall details he'd been trying hard to forget, "and you came and joined us because you thought, uh, we'd found the beginnings of one..."
Ellia stared at her feet. Zaddik found something very interesting about the ceiling, spiked tail twitching back and forth out of his sheets.
"... and I think Ellia thought you were done when you weren't, so she borrowed some but it worked backwards, maybe because queens are built on a different design than other Wraith -- are all of the others guys, or is it like bees, or don't you know? We weren't sure. Anyway, when I, uh, was infected, I skipped right past whatever Wraith are and started turning into a bug-man or something, and I really don't remember much about that but it's all fixed now, although apparently it involved a mission to Iratus Bug World and Walker and Stevens got killed there, so you'd probably really rather you didn't do that."
"Stupid idea anyway." Ronon thumped his tail on the floor. "Change their shape and you still won't change their hearts."
"Yes, but we can talk to predators," Elizabeth pointed out. "All modern societies are based on that, Atlantis itself is proof -- "
"Sateda, I have heard, was a world of fruit-eaters," Teyla said, "as the Genii are all trachodonts."
"And Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard has agreed to let us use some of his genes for a new version of our gene therapy," Carson got out his final point, "one that might give us more control over Ancient technology."
"Our Beckett didn't need help to work the medscanners," John shrugged. It wasn't as if he could have stopped this one from playing Ras Thavas with the samples he was taking in any case.
"Maybe human genes just take grafts better, though," Ford said.
John snapped his head around so quickly that his neck made known its displeasure. "FORD?!"
"Yes, sir?" said the brown triceratops.
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Gen. Silly. Fusion. Strong language. Humor relating to primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Random technobabble that doesn't make too much more sense than that of the original. Follows Chapter One; it shouldn't be as necessary to read Chapter Two to understand this.
-timeframe- Takes place during second season, sort of, after "Epiphany."
-spoilers- For "Instinct" and "Conversion." Big ginormous ones.
-characters- John and ensemble, including a few surprises.
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Neither, sadly, is Steve Senn's The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek, on which this is based, in any sense. At one point, Lorne paraphrases a line from Esther Friesner's Majyk by Design (about what some people will eat).
-word count- 2912
-summary- The other dinosaur inhabitants of their Atlantis meet human Sheppard, with various digressions into biology and peculiar medical history.
The Double Disappearance of Colonel Sheppard
Chapter Three
(John)
By the time they got to the infirmary, John was mostly used to Atlantis's excitement, or possibly Atlantis had gotten used to the presence of a better match to the Alteran genome than its current inhabitants.
He walked in as casually as he would have wandered into the infirmary on his own Atlantis, and then stopped as the small long-necked military saur, all of whose visible skin was covered in flame-colored feathers, stiffened, pivoted, and pointed a Wraith stunner at him. Behind it, the bed was occupied, and someone was kneeling by its side with their head resting on their folded arms next to the dinosaur patient. John raised his hands.
"Oh, put that away, Cadman, it's Colonel Sheppard," Rodney said, nudging him on with a nose between the shoulderblades. "Well, not our Colonel, but a Colonel from a parallel universe where we're all apparently human. Except probably for her."
"Human?" Lieutenant Cadman said warily, rising to an erect tripod sort of pose. The stunner dipped but remained pointed in his general direction. John absently noted that the feathers on her neck were longer, forming a mane or ruff, and that her chest was as flat as Rodney's own. As flat as John's own, come to think of it.
"Human," Rodney repeated. "Like the Ancients -- please tell me you've seen at least one of the holograms? Only not Ancient Ancients, I think they bear the same relationship to the Alterans that saurs did to the Ancients in Final Fantasy Seven -- those ones were called Cetera or something -- which would make the lieutenant colonel Aerith, given how strongly he's got the gene."
"Aeris?" John blinked. "I thought I'd at least be Zack. Got the hair for it and everything."
"I hate to tell you this," Rodney told him, "but your hair looks nothing like triceratops head structure."
"Who are Zack and Ay-er-what?" the kneeling girl asked, rising and turning around.
John was a grown man, trained and experienced, and did not scream, although he might have squawked a bit when hastily going for his gun.
Ellia, on the other hand, did scream, ducking behind the feathery lieutenant and holding her arms out as if to prevent someone from getting close to the bed and its sleeping dinosaur occupant.
Cadman fired her stunner, which went somewhere over John's shoulder as Rodney suddenly knocked him forward and nearly got a toe shot off for his pains.
"It's all right, it's all right, she's a tame Wraith!" Rodney bellowed, leaning forward and spreading his own arms (as best John could see from his position on the floor, prone under one of Rodney's feet. He could feel the clawpoints on his back, and hoped to all that was holy that Rodney wouldn't forget and put weight on that leg). "Put that AWAY, Cadman, have you forgotten the way Stackhouse and the others reacted to her already?" He wobbled backwards, lowering his tail to the floor to aid in balance. "Seriously, Ellia was raised human, we feed her those sheepy goat things from Amara."
"And it?" Ellia asked, half-hysterical. "I couldn't touch its mind at all -- "
"Hey, I'm cured," John grumbled. Mostly, anyway. Then he cursed himself for bringing the subject up at all.
"Cured?" Rodney, Cadman, and Ellia demanded with varying levels of curiosity and suspicion.
"You shan't have him," the last-named commanded before he could reply, still in her protective stance.
"Wait, is that your dad?" John was blanking on the man's name; Zeda-- Zada-- something.
Rodney tentatively lifted his foot.
"So," John said, carefully sitting up, open hands spread well to each side. "In this universe obviously, uh, Ellia didn't inject herself with an untried substance and start mutating and go insane and kill her foster-father and bite me, thus giving me a retrovirus that turned me blue and scaly."
"I wouldn't," Ellia protested. "I don't even eat people now I can reach animals with enough presence to them."
"Where'd this alleged substance come from, and how'd you get cured?" Cadman wondered.
"You'd probably look good in blue scales," Rodney said thoughtfully, "although you can really work that feather thing, too."
"Carson," John ignored the other two. "I think he made another retrovirus with my own DNA -- although I was sort of out of it by then, and afterwards I just wanted it all to be over."
"So you're not a Wraith," Ellia said, slit pupils dilating to ovals.
"No, he's a Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard from a parallel universe where, if I gather correctly, you're still a Wraith but all the rest of us are human like him, weren't you listening?" Rodney snapped.
John carefully turned his hands out, holding his unmarked palms up.
"What's a hyuuman?"
"What," Carson Beckett demanded, "is all this noise in my infirmary?" A black-and-gray feathered dinosaur in medical yellow and tan, waving hands that were obviously vestigial wings, complete with feather feathers on the outside edge and on top of his head rather than the hairlike peacocky things on the rest of his visible body, burst in through the other infirmary door.
Well. That explained the sleeves. Although at that size -- John rather thought it would suck worse to have wings and not be able to fly than to have neither, and decided to forgive his counterpart for apparently having missed out on the wonderful world of arthropoid ferality.
"And did I hear you say," the geneticist went on, "this is Colonel Sheppard on the floor -- what's he doing down there?"
"Misunderstanding," John said briefly.
"I brought him," Rodney explained, "so we could get a medical baseline in case something goes wrong before we can send him back."
"Not to mention," Cadman added, "that we'd then have a complete human genetic scale. Dr. Jahnke would love that, even if you've found other things more worth your time."
"Uh, mine isn't quite typical." John guessed that Carson was torn between pouncing on him for Tests and glaring at Cadman.
"He's got an Ancient grandpa or something," Rodney said helpfully. "The city's technology reacts to him like anything."
"What does Elizabeth say about this?" Carson wondered.
"I didn't want to disturb her," Rodney said. "We were going to call her after Sheppard's checkup -- "
"Rodney."
"Oops?" John said.
"I'll call her," Cadman sighed.
*
An extremely embarrassing and intrusive checkup later (and Carson had shown far too much interest in his navel, even once John had stammered that the warts were the last remnant of the bug retrovirus and ought to be going away Real Soon Now), they came out to find the infirmary's main room completely full of:
- Rodney, of course;
- Cadman;
- Ellia;
- An ancient-looking stegosaurus sitting up in bed, almost certainly Ellia's adoptive father -- Zaddik, that was his name, John was almost sure of it;
- Ronon;
- A stocky military dinosaur with spineless feathers in a sort of camouflage khaki pattern and a long neck, wearing an American flag patch and Atlantis' version of major's insignia, so probably Lorne;
- A triceratops with eyes that didn't quite seem to be the same color, apparently another American lieutenant;
- Several American sergeants, all unarmored herbivores;
- Three carnivorous scientists -- one brightly colored scaled one with little horns over the eyes and a bigger one on the nose, a duller-colored one with only the eyebrow horns but with a monocle suspended on stiff wire from each of them, and a smaller version of, apparently, Carson's sort of dinosaur covered in iridescent black feathers with a pair of goggles strapped onto its head -- the first two wearing their own set of chopstick rings on their three-clawed hands, and none of whom had turned enough for John to see their flag patches;
- Two carnivorous or omnivorous scaled biologists chattering in German about "das Mesozoikum," almost certainly the palaeontologists Jahnke and Meier;
- and two dinosaurs in command red, the duck-billed one herself scaled in red (shading from near-black maroon along her spine to fine blonde mail over her flat breast, visible through the unzipped neck of her shirt); the other the same sort of dinosaur as Cadman with richer, more earth-toned feathers, her uniform jacket sitting oddly over her leather leggings.
He'd faced worse.
Besides -- John automatically held his hands slightly out, and Teyla came forward to let him take her (wider, more sloping) shoulders in his hands and to press her (feathered) brow to his, bending her head farther than humanly possible and tucking her beak into her breast. She smelled a little musky, a little of warm feathers, a little like the Teyla he knew but without something he couldn't name.
"John," she said, and he answered "Yeah."
"Forgive me," Elizabeth began, "but -- confirmation that he is in fact a Colonel Sheppard?"
"He acts like him," Rodney pointed out, "and hasn't missed a beat yet, plus his secret password's the same."
"He has most of the Colonel's scars," Carson added, "suggesting parallel experience, as might be expected."
"Although why," Zelenka, the green-striped tawny dinosaur with the monocles, sniffed, "is not certain -- Stargate Command has records of much more extensive situational differences from worlds whose inhabitants were much more physically similar, down to quantum level." He opened a large, clunky, rounder-cornered laptop with oversized sturdy keys and displayed a graph. "There was a significant discharge of energy in Colonel Sheppard's quarters at three-fifty-two this morning, mostly in the very low end of the electromagnetic spectrum."
"Good thing I've been backing up, then," John said, leaning against a handy piece of large unidentifiable equipment. "I hope he did."
"And there was evidence of tachyon condensation in his room," Rodney added, ignoring him. "Unfortunately too much time had passed to determine whether the tachyonic field had originally been in the area of the bed or not."
"The bed," Elizabeth said blankly.
"I woke up here," John explained.
"And we still do not know why," Radek said. "While the energy was obviously released there, we cannot yet tell from where it came. Not from the city's own power, we know."
"We're inventorying all the known alternate power supplies in the city," Rodney finished, "but the question of transmission remains."
Elizabeth nodded. "The health of our guest?"
"You realize, all jokes aside, that I've worked more with birds and chelonians than with mammals," Carson began. "As best I can tell, however, with the aid of the Ancient diagnostic apparatus, Colonel Sheppard appears to be a reasonably healthy demi-Ancient, with at least one significant sequence of non-Ancient pongid DNA. His blood pressure is a little higher than the recommended Ancient range, and he's lower than he should be in levels of trace minerals that tend to occur in green leafy vegetables -- if you can eat those?"
"Provided the leaves are flimsy enough and they aren't also poisonous, sure," John shrugged. "The Ancient dietary requirements were almost identical to ours -- I think the main difference Dr. Beckett found was that they were far less likely to become addicted to anything. Also, if I'm remembering right, they didn't need as much fruit in their diet and occasionally needed rather more calcium and protein when they were healing, because they healed faster or something."
The palaeontologists leaned forward with parted mouths, intrigued, letting him see that the one with feathers grading into scales probably was an omnivore if the different kinds of teeth were any indication.
Carson nodded. "And, of course, he has some leftover Wraith/iratus tissue inclusions from what was apparently a far wider effect, but I see no reason why that shouldn't eventually be replaced with normal healthy flesh like the rest."
"WHAT?" roared most of the dinosaurs in the room at once.
"I know I mentioned what he told us about the cross-dimensional Ellia, ma'am," Cadman grumbled.
"Wait, wait, iratus? Are you sure?" said Rodney. "Because in our world, we found iratus bugs on the planet where the first hive was, and discovered them when one chomped down on you -- uh, our you -- and wouldn't let go -- "
"And my team had to kill me to get it off," John went on, "while the jumper was stuck in the Gate -- "
"-- because the drive pod wouldn't!" Rodney finished triumphantly. He and John beamed at each other, it taking the latter several moments before he realized that the former was doing so far more toothily than was quite, well, comfortable for a bystander.
"Indeed, there are great similarities between our two worlds," Teyla observed.
"But I gather that your world's Ellia infected you with iratus DNA?" Elizabeth brought them back to the topic, puzzled.
Ellia flinched.
Ronon laid a hand near the butt of his weapon, glaring at her.
Cadman and two of the sergeants unobtrusively placed themselves between the two of them.
"See, Carson found out that Wraith DNA was part iratus and part human or something," John tried to explain -- it wasn't as if it had made that much sense to him the first time. Or the last time. "So he was trying to invent a retrovirus to change the iratus DNA into human and make a Wraith human."
"You can DO that?" Ellia's pale face was completely, utterly stunned, and then the blood flushed livid in her cheeks, staining the secondary breathing slits within.
"Well, not yet, we can't," John said dryly. "Did you miss the bit I said about going nuts and eating your dad?"
"I don't want THAT! It is just," the -- girl, he kept finding it hard not to think of her as a girl -- tried to explain, "that I don't want to kill any people ever again, and the yowes are so bland and they go so quickly and are not ever much nourishment for those here once I am done with them -- "
"We could slice them up and sell them in L.A. as the ultimate diet food," Lorne (John'd guessed correctly) said dryly. "And I know people who'd buy them, carnivore or not."
Most of his subordinates nodded.
"And I do not know how long you will be willing to pay for beasts large enough for me to eat," Ellia ignored the byplay, "and Sheppard says that because of the way I eat I mustn't kill anyone that way, not even if they're enemies."
"Well, you're always allowed to defend yourself if you really have to," Lorne said, "but honestly, if you have a gun, just shoot them; it's simpler all round, and it's not as if it's civilized to eat dead hostiles."
"Maybe if they're other Wraith," Rodney said. "I mean, I wouldn't want to eat one, they have those poison sacs in their arms and they taste terrible, but they might not to her."
"Rodney!" Elizabeth glared down her horsey nose. "We do not kill sentient beings for food, whatever their practice!"
"Don't see why not," Ronon grumbled, and louder, "Taste terrible?"
"During the siege of the city," Rodney told him, "my gun failed me -- "
"I heard you ejected the clip by accident," John and Carson said in unison, and then whirled round to look at each other.
"I. was. unable. to. use. it," even Rodney's irritation was more majectic in this shape, "and was forced to defend myself with tooth and claw."
"He acquitted himself well," Teyla agreed. "The tyrannosaur is fearsome indeed, and I wonder that the Ancestors settled none of them here."
"But what was this about a retrovirus?" Carson said.
"It was something you were trying to make," John said, shifting back and forth, forcing himself to recall details he'd been trying hard to forget, "and you came and joined us because you thought, uh, we'd found the beginnings of one..."
Ellia stared at her feet. Zaddik found something very interesting about the ceiling, spiked tail twitching back and forth out of his sheets.
"... and I think Ellia thought you were done when you weren't, so she borrowed some but it worked backwards, maybe because queens are built on a different design than other Wraith -- are all of the others guys, or is it like bees, or don't you know? We weren't sure. Anyway, when I, uh, was infected, I skipped right past whatever Wraith are and started turning into a bug-man or something, and I really don't remember much about that but it's all fixed now, although apparently it involved a mission to Iratus Bug World and Walker and Stevens got killed there, so you'd probably really rather you didn't do that."
"Stupid idea anyway." Ronon thumped his tail on the floor. "Change their shape and you still won't change their hearts."
"Yes, but we can talk to predators," Elizabeth pointed out. "All modern societies are based on that, Atlantis itself is proof -- "
"Sateda, I have heard, was a world of fruit-eaters," Teyla said, "as the Genii are all trachodonts."
"And Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard has agreed to let us use some of his genes for a new version of our gene therapy," Carson got out his final point, "one that might give us more control over Ancient technology."
"Our Beckett didn't need help to work the medscanners," John shrugged. It wasn't as if he could have stopped this one from playing Ras Thavas with the samples he was taking in any case.
"Maybe human genes just take grafts better, though," Ford said.
John snapped his head around so quickly that his neck made known its displeasure. "FORD?!"
"Yes, sir?" said the brown triceratops.