Two Score, Minus Two or: A Stargate Tail

Chapters

Prologue: The Grand Exhibition
Chapter 1: Three Times, it's a Pandemic
Chapter 2: A Stargate Tail
Chapter 3: The Curse of Kaggen
Chapter 4: Kaggen Won't Play Ball
Chapter 5: Message in a Bottle
Chapter 6: Shadowfax Made it Look Easy
Chapter 7: The Rainbow Connection
Chapter 8: Antacids and Nightmares
Chapter 9: Even Rocky Had a Montage

Prologue: The Grand Exhibition

Author's Note

Welcome to A Stargåte Tail! Today is July 27, 2017, the 20th anniversary of the pilot episode of Stargate SG-1. Sound off if that makes you feel old! :trollestia:

Prologue: The Grand Exhibition

PHK-519 – Many Years Ago
Princess Celestia and Starswirl the Bearded – feeling almost naked without his signature hat – walked together across a field. Behind them, an industrial city crawled with life. Before them, a dark, dense forest of Populus trees waited for them as they approached.

"The people of Telepylos were certainly friendly, weren't they, Princess?" Starswirl asked.

"Indeed!" Celestia agreed. "It was an absolute delight to take part in their faire, teaching them about magic and friendship... I was even able to trade one of my pink diamonds for a nullstone padlock as a souvenir!" Celestia lifted a piece of rope in her magic, with a padlock attached to it. Her telekinetic aura didn't touch the metal.

"Yes, it's rather surprising the amount of nullstone available on this world," Starswirl nodded. "I suspect they don't find it quite so remarkable, though, since we were introducing magic to them for the first time. A nullstone padlock would provide excellent anti-unicorn security, though."

With a glance at Starswirl's hatless head, Celestia asked, "Will you be alright, leaving Hatty behind with them?"

"Hatty the Second," Starswirl corrected her. "I'm sure I'll be fine. I left Hatty with my best preservation spell. The Telepylosians will surely be able to learn much more about magic with the foundation we gave them and an enchanted object to study." His eyes drifted upwards to consider where the brim of his hat had once been. "As for myself," he mused, "I've found that good hats come to those who need them. I'm sure I'll find Hatty the Third before too long. Did I ever tell you the story about how I found Hatty the Second? I was floating in a bathtub miles out to sea..."

Celestia tuned out her mentor as he started rambling. As much as she enjoyed his company and his tutelage, as much as his magic mirror did to distract her from losing Luna, sometimes he was a bit much.

Eventually, the pair reached the looming forest, and then came upon a great stone ring standing on its edge, with a pedestal sharing its design sitting nearby.

"Ah! We're back to the anchor ring!" Starswirl said, interrupting his fanciful story about a whale, a monk, and his hat.

"Who do you suppose built the anchor rings?" Celestia asked. "The Telepylosians had no idea what we were talking about when we mentioned it, and we've seen them in a few other worlds we've traveled to.

"I don't know," Starswirl admitted. "My hypothesis is that there is, or was at some point in history, a group of interdimensional travelers with access to tremendous amounts of magicite." Starswirl cast his spell to summon their return home, and within seconds the ring filled with a flat mirrored surface. "It's a bit of a pain that the presence of an anchor ring forces my mirror to connect to only a single spot in the entire dimension, but on the other hoof they make summoning the return mirror foal's play."

"Perhaps one day we'll get to meet the descendants of the anchor ring builders," Celestia wondered aloud as she stepped into the mirror, disappearing.

Starswirl chuckled to himself, "Maybe you'll get to meet them, miss alicorn princess, but I'm an old pony, and I won't be around too much longer." He followed Celestia through the mirror, and a few seconds later the ring was empty once again.

PHK-519 – Present Day
In a dense forest of aspen-like trees, a twenty-two-foot-wide stone ring stood upright, overgrown. Clearly artificial, but just as clearly untouched for decades or centuries. The edge of the ring was decorated with a myriad of glyphs which conveyed no apparent meaning of their own.

Then, the ring began to rotate in place, under its own power.

The ring stopped, and one of the chevrons on the outside began to glow reddish-orange in the darkness of the thick forest canopy. This process repeated six more times, with seven different chevrons coming to life, before the empty space within the ring suddenly filled with what was apparently frothy blue water.

The turbulence shot forwards, horizontal to the ground in defiance of gravity, annihilating the tree trunks and undergrowth in its path. The surge subsided back to its origin, and the stone ring held a rippling blue surface, constantly moving. The trees that were now missing large portions of their trunks promptly fell over.

Seconds after the last tree fell, an object began to emerge from the vertical puddle: a machine, approximately four feet high, resting on a set of six wheels. The device was loaded out with a manipulator arm and a camera, and overall gave the impression of a miniature tank.

The probe trundled forward over the forest debris, its camera turning side to side and sending the images back to the humans controlling it from Stargate Command.

Two Score, Minus Two

A Stargåte Tail

Stargate Command Embarkation Room
Several people stood at the bottom of the ramp leading up to the Stargate, waiting for the green light to follow after the Mobile Analytic Laboratory Probe, or MALP. The five members of the interstellar exploration team were dressed in olive uniforms with black tactical vests. On each of their left shoulders, a Velcro patch identified them as members of Stargate Command, while their right shoulders each had a patch indicating that they were part of SG-1, the flagship team of the SGC.

Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Mitchell was the team's commanding officer. His short, brown hair was just visible under an olive cap as he waited patiently with his FN P90 SMG at rest to begin the routine reconnaissance mission. As a veteran fighter pilot and a member of a team that regularly got itself into close-quarters combat, Cam was able to keep himself lean and fit without much additional effort.

Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter was the second in command of the unorthodox team. Sam, in addition to her military accolades, was an astrophysicist and an engineer; she was one of the lead scientists on the Stargate program which had been running in secret under Cheyenne Mountain for the past ten years. Air Force training and field experience kept her trim, just like Mitchell. Carter also displayed the military patience Mitchell was exerting, although she allowed her short blonde hair to breathe without headwear.

Doctor Daniel Jackson was an archaeologist and a linguist, and he was often responsible for acting as translator. Daniel wore an olive green boonie hat and was outfitted similarly to Mitchell and Carter, although he was generally more accurate with his M9 pistol than the P90 SMGs when called to action. He was generally far more sedentary than either Mitchell or Carter, much preferring research in a library over physical exertion outside.

Like Daniel, Teal'c was not a member of the United States military. He was also not, strictly speaking, human. While apparently a large man of African descent, he was actually a member of an alien race called Jaffa, a genetically engineered offshoot of humanity. With over one hundred years of experience and training as a Jaffa warrior, Teal'c was much bulkier than any of his companions. Teal'c did not carry a P90, preferring instead to use the Goa'uld-made Ma'tok staff weapon. On his forehead, a brand of gold cut into his skin was a reminder of his former enslavement to a false god.

The last member of the team was Vala Mal Doran. Like Teal'c, Vala had not been born on Earth, but she was human. The Milky Way Galaxy was full of planets populated by humans stolen from Earth millennia ago, and Vala was a descendant of one such group. Vala had been a thief and con artist, wiry by necessity, until eventually finding something of a home with the SGC and SG-1. Vala kept her raven-black hair long, and she wore the same fatigues as the rest of the group, though only because it was required.

"MALP shows no activity," Chief Master Sergeant Walter Harriman could be heard over the Embarkation Room's speakers. Harriman was in the control room overlooking SG-1 and the active Stargate.

Major General Henry "Hank" Landry stood next to Sergeant Harriman, and leaned forward to speak into the microphone, "SG-1, you're go for recon on PHK-519. We'll be expecting your call back in six hours."

Colonel Mitchell gave the general a casual salute and stepped forward, crying to his team, "Let's move out!"

PHK-519 – Exterior, Day
SG-1 stepped out of the Stargate's wormhole with a small sucking sound and quickly spread out, alert for danger. While the sensors on the MALP hadn't detected anything, that didn't mean nothing was there.

Daniel took interest in the Stargate itself. "Nobody has been here in years," he said. "If this planet is inhabited, their culture has probably forgotten that the 'gate even exists, much less where it is or what it's used for."

"Forest was too thick to send out a UAV," Mitchell said as he stepped over a tree that had been felled by the unstable vortex in front of the opening wormhole, "but data from the MALP says there's a weak energy signature about four klicks to the northeast. There's somebody here."

With that, SG-1 began making their way through the underbrush towards the signal, hoping that the mission would turn up results more interesting than trees. This hope despite previous experience that 'interesting' often meant 'run for your life.'

PHK-519 Settlement – Exterior, Day
Almost immediately upon reaching the edge of the forest, SG-1 had been able to tell where their destination lay: an entire industrial city was within easy walking distance of the forest edge. If anything could account for the energy signal the MALP had detected, it would be there.

"Judging from the building construction, I'd say these people are at the beginning of an Industrial Revolution," Jackson said as the group walked down a wide cobblestone street overgrown with weeds. "Expect technology similar to that of the late 1700s."

"Should we expect any people?" Vala asked sarcastically, waving one hand around and indicating the distinct lack of any life in the large city beyond plants and vermin, and the crumbling nature of the surrounding buildings.

"Well, something's giving off this signal," Carter was following a handheld device that had picked up the same signal the MALP had detected. "I doubt any Industrial Revolution types would have something that could keep going for very long without supervision."

As the group followed Carter's directions towards the source of the signal, the street narrowed slightly, and empty carriages began appearing on the side of the road. They were obviously designed to be horse-drawn, but the leather harnesses had rotted to nearly nothing. "The population of this city has been gone for some time, ColonelCarter," Teal'c said stoically. "It is possible the energy source you are tracking is not native to this planet." Teal'c gripped his staff weapon tightly, and Mitchell adjusted his grip on his rifle, just in case.

Eventually, Carter led the group to a large building near the center of town, with a vast square surrounding it. Booths, stands, signs, and more were arrayed all over the square, all abandoned with many knocked over or collapsed.

It seemed that a few stalls had held food items at one point, long rotted away and devoured by insects, but most of the displays seemed to be showing off devices and objects d'art of all sorts.

Here was a sign with faded and torn photos of an exceedingly large diamond, though no diamond could be seen nearby. Over there was some kind of harvester machine. A table of rusted revolvers, fallen from their display stands. A collection of padlocked boxes with what must have once been diagrams of the locks' internal mechanisms.

"It's the World's Fair," Daniel realized. "Or something similar to it, anyway." He gestured at the building in the center of the square, completely covered in glass and said, "This place has a lot in common with the Crystal Palace, too, where the first international exhibition of technology was held on Earth!" Of course, after years with zero maintenance, the glass building was missing many of its panels, and the ones that remained were covered in grime.

"Yeah, but everyone seems to have abandoned the entire thing. The inventors didn't even take their inventions home with them," Sam said as she walked past a large, curling poster apparently extolling the virtues of a device that looked like a phonograph in a script that only Daniel would have been able to read, if any of them could. The device itself, and a supply of tinfoil-wrapped cylinders in a box, sat on display next to the poster, worn by years outside in the weather. "Come on, the signal is coming from inside."

"But, what about these?" Daniel whimpered slightly, pointing to the phonograph device. "We should listen to what they might have recorded on them!"

"Keep it moving, Jackson," Mitchell said, pushing Daniel in the back gently. "The general will send a science team here when we get back, and they'll be all over everything these people left behind."

PHK-519 – "Crystal Palace"
Inside the Crystal Palace analogue, the remains of more exhibits also stood abandoned. These displays were generally larger, and had held up better over the years when compared to the ones outside, likely due to the protection offered by the building itself, even if that protection had weakened with each broken pane of glass.

Colonel Carter navigated around the displays, not as interested in the convergent technological evolution of the planet as Daniel was, following the signal being picked up by her handheld. She led the group to the dead center of the structure, where the largest and most extravagant display still stood, mostly intact.

The centerpiece for the exhibit was an unbroken glass case, containing a simple-looking pointed hat. It was a deep blue, with a lighter blue trim. Golden stars and cyan crescents were scattered over the body of the hat, and brass bells were sewn to the brim and the tip. The hat was almost child-sized, and seemed entirely out of place in an exhibition of modern technology.

"The signal seems to be coming from the hat itself," Sam said. "Some kind of unidentified radiation."

"Radiation?" Mitchell asked, a hint of worry in his voice. "Is it safe?"

"Don't worry, it doesn't appear to be ionizing radiation. It should be safe to handle."

"Don't give me that," Mitchell countered. "I've read the mission reports. You told Jack that the Crystal Skull was safe, too! And look at what it did to Daniel!"

"Well, everything turned out alright in the end, didn't it?"

Mitchell pointed at Carter accusingly and said, "I hereby reserve the right to say 'I told you so' if we end up running into miniature giant space hamsters because of this thing."

"Noted," Sam said dryly.

Daniel began inspecting the signs around the hat's display, trying to decipher why a piece of headwear held such a prominent position. "The language seems to be derivative of ancient Greek," he mumbled, mostly to himself. Cam and Sam worked to remove the hat from the display case, Teal'c scanned around the open room, staff at the ready, and Vala looked on with a bored expression while Daniel began to read aloud: "See! Greatest artifact from other world, donated at Great Exhibition by Stromvilsoú. Here Great Exhibition we show you the new invention, Stromvilsoú and Ouárnias proven plus to our sciences, there is too..." Daniel trailed off.

"There is what, Daniel?" Vala asked.

"Well," he hesitated, "I can't be certain, as the language has certainly drifted from its roots. But this word," he pointed near the end of the text displayed on a large poster, "could mean 'fascination', although that doesn't make sense in context. Another possible translation would be 'witchcraft,' but I think it would be odd for a progressive people like these to buy in to claims of magic."

"The Goa'uld frequently pass off their technology as magic, DanielJackson," said Teal'c.

"True," Daniel conceded, "but the Goa'uld are generally doing that to civilizations stuck in an earlier phase of technological development. They tend to be more gullible or superstitious. The scientists on this world should've been more critical of claims of the supernatural."

"Should we be using gloves for this?" asked Mitchell from the hat's display case, now opened.

Carter shook her head, "It should be fine."

Daniel snapped out of his contemplation at their conversation. "No! Yes! Yes! Put gloves on!" he cried. "Even if the hat isn't harmful to you, you could easily be harmful to it!"

Sam shared a look with her commanding officer and shrugged, digging into her pack for some gloves to use when handling the hat.

"Is it wise to bring this back to Stargate Command?" Teal'c asked.

"I mean, it's not like we've ever had problems caused by bringing an alien artifact back for study," Vala said sarcastically.

Teal'c looked at her and cocked one eyebrow before turning back to Carter and Mitchell. "Indeed."

Stargate Command
Shortly after returning to the SGC with the alien artifact, passing the standard medical exam for everyone arriving from off-world with a clean bill of health, and completing their debriefing with General Landry, SG-1 was cleared for some leave. A science team would be sent to PHK-519, and the hat was placed in secure storage until Carter had time to study it in depth, pulling rank to have the first opportunity to properly inspect the artifact.

Most of the members of SG-1 had plans outside Cheyenne Mountain for their few days off. Most, but not all. Which was why, when Mitchell turned around a corner and saw Vala waiting for him, he immediately turned around and began walking in the opposite direction.

This, of course, did nothing to daunt Vala. "Ooh! Another mission successfully completed," she said far-too-cheerily as she caught up with Mitchell.

"Yeah, it was," Mitchell replied evasively.

"Goodness knows, we've all earned a nice break from routine!"

Mitchell turned suddenly and hastened his pace, trying to get away from Vala. Vala followed suit. "The answer's 'no,'" Mitchell grumbled.

"You don't know what I'm gonna ask you."

"Oh, yes I do."

"Alrighty then. I have a better idea of what you're facing than you might think. I've done research." Vala stepped in front of Mitchell, forcing him to stop in his tracks.

Mitchell pinched his nose, "Oh god..."

"Traditionally," Vala began, "these events entail the bringing together of large groups of people, all with a common bond in the past, but nothing really in common in the present. Everybody evaluates each other's lot in life, generally by virtue of a combination of material worth and the attractiveness of one's date, spouse, life-partner..." Vala gestured to herself. "Let me go as your date?"

Before Vala even finished speaking, Mitchell had already begun trying to speak over her, "No! No! No!"

"Please! It'll be fun, I promise!"

Mitchell sighed, "It is a high school reunion, not some swank party. Besides you will be bored out of your mind!"

Vala stomped her foot emphatically, the gesture greatly assisted by the heavy regulation combat boots she was wearing. "Don't you dare talk to me about boredom! Everybody else here has a life. Sam, off at a conference. Daniel, in a museum somewhere, doing research. Teal'c off-world—"

"With the Jaffa," Mitchell interjected.

"With the Jaffa, yes. Me? I have absolutely nothing to do."

"Vala."

"Mmm?"

"It. Is. In. Kansas."

"Don't make me beg you!" Vala begged.

Conference Reception Area
Doctor Bill Lee, one of the SGC's normally Earth-bound scientists, stood with Carter off to the side of the wine reception at the "Tomorrow's Technology Today" conference. Lee had replaced his normal white lab coat with a black business suit, and Carter had similarly replaced her normal SGC fatigues.

Chatting softly, Lee said, "Doesn't it bother you, to come to these—" Lee interrupted himself to accept a glass from a passing server. "To come to these conferences to present new technology and actually adding flaws?" More quietly, he added, "I mean pretending we know less than we really do?"

Carter grimaced at her balding peer, "Well, you know the drill. We have to act like there's a process of development."

"Oh sure, easy for you!" He exclaimed, trying to keep his voice down. "You're presenting Chimera. It's practically a fully functioning Asgard hologram system."

The Asgard, who would be familiar to UFOlogists as 'greys,' were allies of Humanity and had shared a number of technological advancements, including an advanced hologram projection system. Two years ago, the Air Force had demonstrated a 'prototype' for the system in order to discredit an industrialist who had revealed an Asgard specimen cloned from a DNA sample, thus keeping the truth secret. "I get stuck with a plasma cannon that supposedly shorts out at the drop of a hat," Doctor Lee complained.

Behind him, Lee noticed two women giggling, apparently talking about him. The women waved at Lee, smiling. Carter appeared less than impressed. "On the plus side," Lee chuckled, "these events have a dynamite singles scene. It's a huge window of opportunity. I think I'll mingle. You should, too."

Carter's jaw dropped slightly, as Lee grabbed another glass of wine from another passing server and approached the two women.

Museum Research Library
A number of artifacts from several ancient cultures littered the research area, along with a multitude of old tomes of various sizes. Daniel Jackson sat at a table with a number of books lying open, a laptop, and a yellow pad of paper slowly filling with notes.

He stood and wandered over to a nearby bookshelf, pulling a large hardback volume with no label off the shelf. An attractive young Asian woman peered at him through the gap between the books. "Doing some research?" she asked.

Without looking up from the book in his hand, Daniel replied, "Yes." After a beat, he noticed he wasn't actually alone, hearing voices, and talking to himself, and looked up to see his companion. "Hi," he said lamely. The woman smiled back at him. "I'm looking for any Aramaic translations of pre-Judeo Pagan hymns, hopefully in lithograph form. Am I in the right section?"

The woman smirked on the other side of the shelf and crossed her arms. The shiny black leather coat she was wearing was certainly not part of the normal attire for museum employees. "You don't work here, do you?" Daniel realized.

The woman shook her head and smiled, "It's okay. Maybe if we looked together?"

The side of Daniel's mouth twitched, attempting to smile. "No, it's okay," he said. "I'll ask at the enquiry desk. They probably have it locked up in the rare items archive."

The woman made a small noise acknowledging his idea, and he began to walk away. Haltingly, he said, "Uh... thank you."

Jaffa Planet – Exterior, Day
Teal'c approached the Dial Home Device attached to the planet's Stargate in conversation with another Jaffa warrior, Cha'ra. Both were clad in the tan robes common in the Free Jaffa Nation, and using Ma'Tok staff weapons as walking sticks.

"I can only hope you'll reconsider and accept the seat the Council's offering you," Cha'ra said.

"You have been speaking to Bra'tac," Teal'c chuckled ruefully.

"He only asked that I voice the opinion of any clear-minded Jaffa," Cha'ra shrugged. "The reformation of our government cannot occur without the help—"

Teal'c held up a hand to silence his companion, glancing around the clearing, tense. "Down!" he cried, as energy blasts erupted from the tree line, aimed at the pair of them.

The two Jaffa took cover behind the DHD, confident that it would be able to protect them from any anti-personnel weapons. The enemy fire died away after a few moments, which Teal'c and Cha'ra took advantage of to mount a counterattack with their own staff weapons.

No response to their attack came, and eventually the pair stopped firing.

"Are you injured?" Teal'c asked.

"No. But you are," Cha'ra said after inspecting Teal'c, finding a charred wound on the older Jaffa's side. Teal'c lifted one eyebrow, but said nothing.

Jaffa Planet Tent Settlement – Interior
Teal'c sat on a stool stripped down to his trousers, while another Jaffa tended to his wound. Cha'ra entered the tent and Teal'c attempted to stand, but his attendant forced him back to sitting.

"The men guarding the gate have detected no activity. It is possible whoever attacked us left by cloaked cargo ship," Cha'ra reported.

"Or perhaps they are still here waiting for the opportunity to finish the job." Teal'c considered for a moment before continuing, "Put out word that I indeed survived the attack, but that I am gravely injured." Teal'c gave Cha'ra a predatory grin, which Cha'ra returned before walking back outside of the tent, ready to spread disinformation.

Stargate Command Briefing Room
"So, over the past week: Doctor Jackson was assaulted by an alien bounty hunter at a museum, who was killed in the street by a passing bus; Colonel Carter was assaulted by an alien bounty hunter-sniper at the technology conference, who was vaporized by Doctor Lee's X-699 plasma cannon; Teal'c was assaulted by an alien bounty hunter masquerading as a Jaffa, who was taken out personally by Teal'c with the help of other Jaffa; and the entirety of Colonel Mitchell's high school reunion was held hostage by an alien bounty hunter attempting to capture Mitchell and Vala, who was subsequently captured by the rest of SG-1... and then released?" General Landry looked up from the file in front of him at SG-1 sitting around the conference table. "Care to explain, Mitchell?"

"Sir, the bounty on our heads was placed by the Lucian Alliance because we've been making Netan look weak. As you know from when I was undercover on Netan's ship, his seconds are beginning to doubt his leadership of the Alliance," Mitchell explained. Landry nodded and motioned for the Lieutenant Colonel to continue. "This latest failure only makes Netan look even worse than before, and letting Ventrell free ensures that everybody knows it. Netan's seconds are going to be sending bounty hunters after Netan soon enough."

General Landry looked askance at Mitchell, uncertain about the man's conclusions, but SG-1 had always been an unorthodox team, even before Landry took command of the SGC. Their record spoke to their ability, saving the planet on practically an annual basis, and earned them a certain amount of leeway.

Mitchell fidgeted a bit in his seat. "Sir, if there's nothing else, I would appreciate being able to hit the showers. Kansas is unforgiving, if you get my drift." Vala nodded in agreement.

Landry flipped the file folder closed and nodded, waving SG-1 off from debrief of their overly-eventful vacation time.

Stargate Command Locker Room, Men's Showers
Mitchell turned on the water and stripped out of the dress clothes he had been wearing to the reunion dance, tossing them far aside. As he began scrubbing down, he heard singing from the other side of the wall separating the men's and women's showers. Although it was difficult to make out the words, Vala's voice was easy to place. Mitchell rolled his eyes, but said nothing. Despite her useful skills, Vala was not only not a member of the United States Air Force like Carter and himself, she was actually born on another planet. Almost everything she learned about culture norms on Earth came from the television in her quarters, as she rarely had the opportunity to leave the base at all outside official missions. 'Singing in the shower' had apparently infected her from God only knew what television show.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mitchell noticed something unexpected. Glancing down, there was a trio of blue diamonds on his ass. Both sides, actually. He scrubbed at the image, but it wouldn't come off.

"VALA!" Mitchell screamed. The singing from the women's showers stopped, and he heard a muffled response, but not her exact words. "WHAT DID YOU DO?!"

Chapter 1: Three Times, it's a Pandemic

Stargate Command Infirmary
Mitchell sat uncomfortably on one of the infirmary beds dressed in a hospital gown as Doctor Carolyn Lam née Landry, M.D. examined the diamonds that had mysteriously appeared on his buttocks.

Vala stood nearby, not-so-subtly trying to take a peek at the goods underneath Mitchell's gown. He glared back at her, clutching the gown to make sure she didn't get her own peek at the diamonds underneath, and more importantly the anatomy they were attached to.

"It's just a tattoo, Doc. Vala must have done it while I was asleep," Mitchell complained, trying to get away from the medical prodding.

"I did no such thing!" Vala objected. "If I had the opportunity to put a tattoo on your butt, I would have done much more than just tattoo you, and I would have made sure you knew about it. While it was happening," she clarified.

In Mitchell's opinion, Vala's defense did not inspire much confidence.

Doctor Lam rolled her eyes, both at her uncooperative patient and his lascivious onlooker. "I told you, Cam, it's not a tattoo. First of all, if you'd gotten a tattoo since your last examination, your skin would still be red and irritated."

"She could've used some Goa'uld device to make the tattoo without the irritation!"

"I assure you," said Vala, "if the Goa'uld had such a device, my skin would look much different than it does now."

"Second," Lam continued forcefully, "all tattoos ultimately result in pigment getting trapped within fibroblasts just below the dermis-epidermis boundary. Over the course of decades, the pigment migrates deeper into the dermis." She stood up and motioned for Mitchell to cover himself once again, to Vala's consternation. "The skin sample I took earlier has pigmentation from the surface of the epidermis all the way down, and as best as I can tell, it continues all the way to your muscle tissue. Hell, maybe even deeper than that. Your bloodwork is still being analyzed, but this is not a tattoo."

Vala folded her arms and smirked. "See? I told you this wasn't my fault."

Mitchell glared at her and said, "I'm still blaming you."

Just then, Teal'c walked into the infirmary. Tilting his head, he greeted Doctor Lam, who asked, "Is there something I can do for you, Teal'c? Have you run out of Tretonin?"

Tretonin was the drug used by many of the Free Jaffa to replace the juvenile Goa'uld symbiote they normally carried in a pouch in their bellies. The symbiote was just one more way the Goa'uld had subjugated the Jaffa, replacing their immune system. Tretonin replaced the need for the symbiote with a new dependence, but it was a dependence on a drug that could be synthesized fairly simply, and one which the SGC was happy to give to the Free Jaffa without compensation. The mere existence of the Free Jaffa Nation was compensation enough.

Teal'c smiled and shook his head, "No, DoctorLam, my supply of Tretonin should last me for several weeks yet. I have come to speak with you on another matter, if you are free?"

"Sure, I'm done with Mitchell here, at least until his bloodwork comes back. Colonel, you're off-duty until I figure out what's going on, but you don't need to stay here." Cameron nodded, grabbed his clothes, and tried to escape Vala's interest.

Fortunately, Teal'c's situation had captured her attention, and Mitchell got out of the infirmary clean. "What's up, Muscles?" she asked.

"Vala?" Doctor Lam stared at Vala pointedly, and tried to get the onlooker to leave without making it an order.

Teal'c lifted one hand to assuage the doctor. "It is okay, DoctorLam, I do not mind if she stays. I was performing Kelno'reem in my quarters when a peculiar floating sensation woke me. This was strange enough, as I do not normally experience such things while meditating. Stranger still, I felt an itching sensation after I awoke. When I removed my trousers to investigate the source of my irritation, I discovered an image of three pink butterflies imprinted on my skin, similar to my mark of Apophis prior to becoming First Prime."

Concerned, Doctor Lam said, "Show me." Teal'c calmly pulled one side of his pants down far enough to reveal the mark on his buttocks. "Hmm... this is suspiciously similar to what happened to Mitchell. I'm going to need a blood sample and a biopsy from the affected region before—"

Doctor Lam was interrupted by Daniel knocking on the doorframe to the infirmary entrance. "Bad time?" he asked, glancing to Teal'c and his half-removed pants.

Lam glanced at Teal'c and then back at Daniel. "Let me guess," she said, "you've got three colorful tattoo-like images on each buttock?"

Daniel nodded, "Red apples."

Carolyn sighed and said, "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, it's a pandemic."

Vala looked thoughtful for a moment and said, "I'm pretty sure the quote goes, 'three times, it's enemy action.'"

"Yeah, well, as Chief Medical Officer, I'm not taking any chances," Lam said, as she crossed the room towards the big, red button on the wall near the door. "I'm calling it 'alien communicable disease' until I've got further information." With that, she punched the button, setting off the base alarm. All over the SGC, spinning red lights turned on, and a blaring klaxon began to sound.

"But the important thing is," said Vala, "it's not my fault."

Stargate Command General's Office
General Landry was not having a good day. The SGC's established procedures failed to catch a new contagion before it could spread, and to Landry it always seemed like his command was sitting under the Sword of Damocles; one false step, one escaped alien threat, and the International Oversight Advisory would have his head, not to mention the potential fate of all of his subordinates in the Stargate program.

"Give me the breakdown, Carolyn," said General Landry. His eyes kept glancing at the red telephone on his desk which only dialed one number. The base alarm lights were still flashing, but Landry had ordered the klaxon turned off, so that Doctor Lam and her team could hear themselves think while they worked on the problem.

"Around five percent of base personnel have been infected, including all members of SG-1 except for Vala Mal Doran." Doctor Lam held up a clipboard with her findings to read over her statistics. "So far, the only symptom has been the appearance of tattoo-like pigmentation, in the same location on all subjects. Many have a trio of identical or near-identical images, but that is not universally the case. Lieutenant Colonel Carter, for example, has a cloud with a rainbow-pattern lightning bolt.

"Bloodwork for many of the infected is still being processed, but I've already gotten back the results for my first few patients, and there's nothing in the bloodstream that our tests could find, no apparent cause to the changes. No viruses, no foreign bacteria, no nanites, nothing. Our samples don't even have exotic particles from the radiation emitted by the artifact. At least, nothing we could turn up. I've ordered full DNA workups, but that's going to take longer.

"We don't have enough isolation rooms for everyone displaying symptoms, so I've confined most of them to their quarters on base. Of course, nobody's leaving the base with the lockdown." Doctor Lam chewed on her lip and said, "Our best guess as to the source is the radiation being emitted by the artifact SG-1 brought back from PHK-519, and to that end Colonel Carter has requested that her isolation be moved to one of the labs, so that she can investigate it herself. That's pending your orders," she said, pointing to one of the papers on his desk. "That said, we've got more personnel showing symptoms than can be explained by direct exposure to radiation from the artifact, since the radiation is not escaping the artifact's containment."

"You don't think this could be another Prior plague, do you? Something planted on PHK-519 for us to find?" the general asked.

The Priors were the preachers of Origin, a religion devoted to worshipping the Ori, a group of beings that had ascended to a higher plane of existence. The Ori were the ones who had initially driven the Ancients, the group who had built the Stargates, to the Milky Way galaxy. Freedom of religion was all fine and dandy from General Landry's point of view, but the Priors tended to do things like raze towns if there was a single holdout against conversion, or burn heretics alive. And they had superhuman powers such as telekinesis, granted to them by the Ori directly, there was that too.

Doctor Lam crossed her arms and huffed, "It seems unlikely. There's no way the Priors could know exactly which planets we would send teams to, so it seems like a crapshoot of a plan. And according to SG-1's mission report, the artifact had apparently been on PHK-519 for longer than the Priors have been in this galaxy. If this radiation is the source, it's not a 'present' from our friendly neighborhood Priors.

"That said, this thing seems far more insidious than the PRIOR2 virus. At least with that plague we could use a Goa'uld healing device to temporarily relieve symptoms. I had Vala attempt to use the healing device on Mitchell, and if anything the image gained focus."

General Landry nodded and asked, "What procedures have you taken for protecting your team?"

"BSL-3 with hazmat suits while working directly with patients, and one of the tech guys has already come up with a radiation badge for the stuff the artifact was putting out. It might prove ultimately unnecessary, but I'm keeping them at BSL-3 just to be safe."

General Landry stood and walked around his desk before grasping the doctor's shoulders. "And how are you holding up, honey?" he asked softly.

Doctor Lam pulled herself out of his grip and growled, "Dad, how many times do I have to tell you to keep it professional?"

The general cleared his throat and said, "Sorry, doctor. What are the odds that this disease will spread beyond the base?"

"'Will?' General, if this is contagious and SG-1 represents our index case, I'm absolutely certain that it already has."

The Pentagon, Homeworld Command General's Office
Major General Jonathan "Jack" O'Neill (two L's) leaned back in his chair handling a stress ball. He, too, was not having a good day. On the computer monitor in front of him, Hank was video-conferencing with him over a secured satellite feed.

"Your daughter's right, Hank," Jack said, "this thing has already breached the SGC. We're doing our best to keep on top of things, but I doubt even the CIA's best information warfare guys can keep this bottled for very long."

Hank quirked an eyebrow on the screen. "CIA is involved?" he asked.

"Oh yeah," Jack nodded, squeezing his stress ball. "Hank, we've already got intel on at least one case for every continent. Dollars to donuts there are a bunch that we don't even know about. For all I know it's already spread to every country on the planet. On the other hand, our information suggests that the worldwide population of infected is much lower than what you've got in Cheyenne Mountain." Jack paused. "Haven't heard anything about Madagascar, though."

"How in the world could it have spread this fast? We haven't even had the artifact on Earth for two weeks!"

Jack shrugged. "Probably airborne. Or magic. And you know how I feel about clichés," O'Neill smirked.

"'Any sufficiently advanced technology...' Jack. It seems this isn't an Ori plot, but the artifact came from somewhere other than PHK-519. I've already sent a team there with orders to figure out anything they can about the alien visitors that brought the hat, and Carter has begun her own investigation into the radiation it's still emitting."

Major Paul Davis appeared in the window of General O'Neill's office door, and Jack waved him in while General Landry continued relaying status updates from the SGC, which had been quarantined once the existence of the contamination was made apparent. Davis walked up to O'Neill's desk briskly and passed the general a thick file folder. "An updated list of confirmed cases, and a compilation of our analysis so far," Davis whispered. The Pentagon liaison hesitated for a moment before adding, "Check page three, sir. About a quarter of the way down the page."

Jack nodded to the major, dismissing him, and flipped the file open, scanning down the third page as recommended. "Hank," Jack interrupted the other general. "Could you please tell Sam that Cassandra is now on our list of confirmed cases?" Cassandra had been a young girl discovered on another planet, the only survivor of a bacterial plague engineered by one of the Goa'uld System Lords. Janet Frasier, SGC's Chief Medical Officer at the time, ended up adopting the girl, and Carter had become her legal guardian after Janet's death four years ago. Of course, she was hardly a young girl any more; the fabricated birth certificate that the SGC had created for her put her at 23 years old today.

There was a brief silence on the line. "Sure thing, Jack."

Stargate Command Isolation Room 2
Doctor Lam had assigned the patients that had been the first to display symptoms to isolation rooms, with the remaining patients confined to quarters, with the exception of Carter, who was confined to her lab. As some of the first reported and the highest-profile cases on base, SG-1 was given the dubious privilege of being some of the few staying in isolation. Mitchell, Daniel, and Teal'c occupied Isolation Rooms 1, 2, and 3, respectively.

"Daniel, I'm bored!" Vala, of course, was neither confined to quarters nor stuck in an isolation room. As such, she had decided to pester one of her teammates using the intercom in the observation booth over the room.

"I feel oh so sorry for you, Vala," Daniel snarked without looking up from his book. "Not being infected by a potentially deadly, alien, unknown form of radiation. Woe is you!"

"But that's just it! You've got this exciting adventure!" Vala flailed her arms to emphasize her point. "I'm stuck out here, unable to help fix the problem, and unable to leave the base."

"Don't you normally watch television?" he asked.

Vala slumped into one of the chairs in the observation booth. "It's Tuesday. There's nothing good on Tuesday evenings."

Daniel grinned and said, "Well why don't you put all that... creative story-telling of yours to good use? Try writing something! I'm sure that will keep you busy for a few minutes, at least."

Vala spared him a withering glare. "Ha-ha, very funny. I'll have you know that I have an excellent attention span."

"Alternatively," said Daniel, glancing at his watch, "you could go to sleep. It's 2237 and if there's one thing I've learned over the years, no matter the malady, sleep generally helps." He placed a bookmark in the leather-bound volume he had been reading from, and placed the book on a tray table to the side of his bed. "See you in the morning, Vala."

"But Daniel...!" Vala whined.

"Goodnight, Vala!" Daniel shouted, as he hit a switch, turning out all of the lights in the room with the exception of the emergency illumination.

Stargate Command, Colonel Carter's Lab
"May first, 2007, 2200 hours. Examination log for artifact PHK-519-alpha," Carter spoke into a handheld voice recorder. The hat that SG-1 brought back from PHK-519 was inside a hazardous materials glove box rated for handling radioactive materials in Carter's lab, although she did not use any of the safety precautions being employed by Doctor Lam's team, as she was already displaying symptoms of the infection. Whatever it was. A number of sensors were attached to the glove box, feeding information into Carter's laptop on the table nearby. A plastic cage with a lab mouse shared the glove box with the hat, and several similar cages with other mice sat on tables around the room.

"The artifact is emitting an unknown form of non-ionizing radiation. When unshielded, the radiation was detectable as an EM signal from a range of several kilometers, but standard radiation shielding appears to be effective at halting the emissions. The artifact appears to be crafted of normal felt, thread, et cetera. Common, everyday materials. Unfortunately, destructive testing methods have not yet been authorized.

"Several mouse test subjects have been subjected to the radiation for varying periods of time, to no apparent effect so far." Sam sighed quietly before continuing, "Blood samples from each subject and control have been taken prior to exposure, during exposure, and immediately following removal from proximity to the artifact."

Carter turned the recorder off and sat with her chin in her hands, staring at the mouse inside the glove box. "What's going to happen to you, hmm?" she asked the mouse, neither expecting nor receiving any response. It had been nearly a week after SG-1's brief exposure to the hat before any visible symptoms appeared; hopefully the mice would produce something sooner, or there would be something detectable in the bloodwork before visible symptoms started popping up.

Then Carter could work on trying to figure out how the infection had spread to individuals that hadn't been directly exposed to the hat. None of the members of SG-1 or her test subjects had begun emitting the strange radiation; that was certain.

Stifling a yawn, Carter stood and stretched. "We'll see how you do with several hours' exposure more than your buddies," she said to the mouse. "Maybe time to the appearance of symptoms is related to exposure time." With that, she closed her laptop, putting it to sleep, and crawled over to the bed she'd set up in the corner of the lab. Sleeping near radioactive alien artifacts wasn't so bad, when you got to do rewarding work.

"Let's save the world, one more time," Sam mumbled to herself as she flicked off the lights.

Chapter 2: A Stargate Tail

Stargate Command Isolation Room 1
"Good morning, Cam," said Doctor Lam as she strode into the isolation room with Mitchell. The doctor was wearing a hazmat suit, as per the protocols she had instituted. Mitchell was in the middle of shaving over a wash basin that had been brought in for the purpose, since the isolation room didn't have an actual bathroom and the infected were not being permitted to wander the halls of the SGC.

"I've got good news and bad news," the doctor said. "The good news is, I've got a full analysis of your bloodwork completed, all the way down to analyzing your DNA."

"And what's is the bad news?" Mitchell asked, flinching as he nicked his chin with the razor.

Lam sighed and said, "The bad news is that the DNA samples I took from you and your teammates yesterday don't match what we've got on file for any of you. The difference isn't very big, but it's concerning considering the circumstances." She whipped out a syringe and grinned. "I'm going to be taking another set of samples today, to see how things are progressing. Even though we haven't found direct evidence of the infection, changes to your DNA suggest that whatever this is, it's at least behaving similarly to a retrovirus."

"So, what's the treatment, doc?" Mitchell asked after drying his face and letting Doctor Lam draw his blood. "And I thought this was a radiation thing, not a virus?"

"Ionizing radiation would break up your DNA and kill your cells. With the exception of the changes you're experiencing, you're all perfectly healthy. Also," she smiled comfortingly, "acute radiation syndrome is only caused by ionizing radiation, which isn't what we're dealing with, according to Sam.

"Anyway, Doctor Sheffield is making the rounds, starting everyone on a combination anti-retroviral therapy she's cooked up." Doctor Lam carefully placed the blood sample into a carrying case. "We're hoping this disease functions closely enough to HIV that similar approaches will produce similar results."

"HIV? You fill me with confidence, doc," Mitchell said.

Doctor Lam shrugged, "If Sheffield's treatment can keep you guys at butt tattoos and prevent you from advancing to whatever comes next, I'll take it." With that, Doctor Lam stepped back out of the isolation room, off to get more samples from other infected base personnel and begin the process of testing the new samples.

Mitchell absently scratched the skin under his pants where he knew the diamonds were located. He glumly slumped in front of a desk and began to catch up on the most vile part of his job, which he could at least still do while in isolation: catching up on paperwork.

Stargate Command Isolation Room 2
"I have lunch~♫!" sang Vala as she pushed a cart of food trays into the room. Most of the cart had been emptied, and Vala stomped awkwardly around in the hazmat suit, but she managed to remain cheery all the same.

Daniel put down his book and frowned at his watch. "Vala," he said, "it's nearly 1500 hours. Why are you only delivering lunch now? And why are you delivering lunch in the first place?"

Vala picked up a tray of food and tried to skip over to Daniel's bed, although it came out more like a stumbling shuffle in her positive-pressure suit. She set the tray – covered, so none of the food found the floor during her approach – on Daniel's lap and sat beside him.

"Well," she began, "General Landry saw that I was bored and restless, so he decided to give me something to do, lest I come up with something to do on my own." Daniel nodded at the general's wisdom as he opened his lunch and began to dig in. "There are a surprisingly large number of people infected with this thing, you know? Also, I may have stopped on the way to have a chat with Major Hadden."

"You mean 'flirt,'" Daniel said, without looking up from his meal.

"And Major Dixon," Vala continued, as though she hadn't heard Daniel's comment. "And Staff Sergeant Davis..."

"Hold on," said Daniel. "Major Dixon is married. And Sergeant Davis is a woman."

Vala stared at the archaeologist blankly. "I fail to see how that's relevant. Anyway, it all adds up to a late lunch for you." She pat Daniel on the back affectionately and hopped off the bed. "Now, I've still got a few more people to play delivery girl for, so if you'll excuse me..."

Vala began pulling her food cart back out of the room, and paused. "Hey, Daniel, do you want me to grab your dye from your quarters for you?"

"What are you talking about, Vala?"

"Well, it's just that your roots are showing. I mean, I didn't even know you dyed your hair, so I must say you do a pretty good job of it, but being stuck in here without your beauty products is taking its toll. Personally, I think if you're going to dye your hair, you should try something more adventurous than brown, but whatever floats your boat." Vala gestured vaguely at her own head and said, "I mean, if I want to dye my hair, I have to bleach it first, and that does all kinds of damage. If I had blonde hair like you, I'd go Sam's route. But I'm pretty sure that's against Air Force regulations, so she should probably clean herself up before someone who's less forgiving than General Landry sees her." Before actually getting a response to her question, Vala passed out of the isolation room and shut the door. Jackson stared at the door for a moment, uncertain how to respond, and now unable to do so.

Slowly, Daniel stood and walked over to the mirror set against the wall for his improvised washroom. Daniel indeed had blonde roots showing in his brown hair; blonde roots that had not been there this morning when either Doctor Lam or Doctor Sheffield had been present, and had never been present at any point in Daniel's life. While that was concerning, the thought he gave voice to was, "What did Sam do to her hair...?"

Stargate Command, Colonel Carter's Lab
After Vala had delivered lunch and complimented Carter on her hair, she had halted her experimentation on the PHK-519 artifact in confusion. Upon inspection, she was able to pull a lock of hair down in front of her eyes – hair which yesterday had been too short to do that with, even if she still had to go cross-eyed to see her hair without a mirror – and discovered the changes. Unlike Daniel and his blonde roots, the tips of her hairs had changed colors, ranging from red, orange, and yellow across her bangs; once she got to a mirror she discovered green, blue, and purple on the back of her head.

"What," she said to the empty room. It wasn't a question.

Stargate Command Isolation Room 2
Daniel reached towards the telephone on the wall which served as an intercom system for the base. New symptoms meant Doctor Lam needed to be notified immediately. As he informed the doctor about his discovery, he peered at his reflection closer.

"Is that all, Daniel? Just changing hair color, no other new symptoms?"

"Hold on..." he said. Something felt off about his reflection, beyond just the color of his hair. After a moment, he dropped the phone handset in surprise.

"Daniel? Hello?" Doctor Lam called after the handset hit the concrete floor with a clatter. Fortunately, the standard equipment in the SGC was built to withstand mundane abuse. It was only the more esoteric technology – human or extra-terrestrial – that was fragile, or more exotic forms of abuse like staff weapon blasts or Zat gun discharges that would really damage things.

"Yes, Doctor Lam," Daniel said as he scrambled to pick up the phone again, "I'm still here. Of course I'm still here, I'm in isolation."

"Was there something else, Daniel?"

"Yes, ah... just a sanity check, doctor: what color are my eyes?"

"Blue, according to your file. Why?"

"Well... today they're green." Daniel peered into the mirror again, and mumbled as he set the handset in its cradle, "They weren't green yesterday..."

Stargate Command Infirmary
"This doesn't make any sense!" Doctor Lam practically screamed in frustration.

The infirmary had been partially converted into a bio lab to help Lam and her team work on the infection problem. Monitors had also been set up to keep track of the infected: one was currently displaying Major Waterhouse's quarters, and another was displaying Isolation Room 2 with Doctor Jackson. Vala had been given the task of watching the monitors, but at that moment she seemed more interested in some kind of papercraft project she'd begun to entertain herself.

"What's the problem?" General Landry asked, making Doctor Lam jump slightly in shock. "Sorry, I didn't knock."

"It's okay, general," the doctor said. "I was just looking at some samples of Colonel Carter's hair."

"I understand our patients' hair is dyeing itself?" the general prompted.

Doctor Lam shook her head. "Not quite, just like the marks that first appeared aren't quite tattoos. I was particularly interested in Carter's symptoms due in part to the wild array of colors her hair is changing into, but she's not the only one getting a multicolor dye job. However, she is the only one on base whose hair color transformation began at the tips, rather than the roots." She picked up a sealed petri dish with a clipping of green hair. "This sample was half-green, half-blonde an hour ago when I clipped it from her," she began, "and this sample was completely blonde," she said as she held up a second sealed dish with more green hairs. "Their overall rate of hair growth seems to have increased as well; it's already hard to tell that I cut any of Sam's hair, and she'll probably want to start wearing a ponytail by tomorrow if this keeps up. But check this out."

Doctor Lam tapped a few buttons on the keyboard in front of Vala, switching the video feed from Isolation Room 2 to a magnified image of a sample of Samantha's blonde hair, currently sitting under a microscope in the infirmary. Vala looked up from her project to see what the doctor was sharing.

"What am I looking at?" The general asked.

"Just wait a moment." Indeed, a few seconds later, one end of the blonde hairs on the screen began to turn green. The color slowly crept along the fibers, slowly enough that the dividing line between green and blonde didn't appear to be moving, moment-to-moment, but quickly enough that the change was obviously occurring. "It's about a tenth of an inch per minute," Lam said, "but I can't fathom how it's happening.

"If this were simply a retrovirus, I could make some sense of the hair color changing at the roots. There is no biological reason I can think of that would make strands of hair spontaneously change color; the hair shaft isn't even biochemically active!" She waved angrily at the computer monitor in front of them. "And yet, it's happening."

"There's something else," Vala spoke up. When she had the attention of the doctor and the general, she poked at the keyboard a few times, and Isolation Room 3 replaced the microscope. A few more keypresses, and Vala manipulated the camera to zoom in on Teal'c's head. "Muscles' hair is losing its kinkiness." Indeed, the short, tightly kinky hair the group was familiar seeing on Teal'c's head had loosened up, and now more closely resembled curly hair. Vala didn't even snicker at her own double-entendre.

"You mean you've actually been paying attention to the feed?" Doctor Lam asked, surprised.

"Of course I have!"

Lam turned to General Landry and shrugged. "I honestly can't explain this, and until we can find out exactly what's causing the changes, I'm not sure I can even begin to formulate a treatment. Doctor Sheffield says she's confident her treatments are having an effect, but from where I'm sitting if there is any effect, it's not nearly enough."

Landry checked his watch. "We're expecting a report from SG-2 and SG-11 in about an hour. They've been combing over everything they could on PHK-519 to figure out where the artifact came from, and anything the locals there might have known about it."

"Could we try using some of the equipment on Atlantis?" Vala asked. Atlantis was a city-ship built by the Ancients, and even after three years, the Atlantis expedition had not fully uncovered all of the city's secrets. "Even if it isn't practical to send everyone infected to the Pegasus galaxy to use the Ancient technology on them, it might be a step towards a cure..."

General Landry shook his head. "We've been out of contact with Doctor Weir and her team ever since the Apollo went to help them with their Replicator problem. Doctor Lee at the Midway station just relayed word from Colonel Ellis that Atlantis launched from Lantea, but never arrived at M12-578. We have no idea what's happened to them."

Movement from the other monitor caught the general's eye. Major Waterhouse had begun an exercise routine in his quarters, starting with a small treadmill he had requested, since he wouldn't have access to the rec room while confined to quarters. The general's shift in attention drew Doctor Lam's eyes as well, followed by Vala's.

"I know that in the past I've said that I want to keep my subordinates on their toes..." Landry began.

"... but that doesn't mean one of your covert ops guys should be running digitigrade," Lam finished.

On a hunch, Vala flipped the two monitors through several other rooms with infected personnel. While many were resting, several were walking around their rooms for one reason or another. To a man, every single one of them had begun walking on their toes, and none even seemed cognizant of the fact. Not even the ones wearing the SGC's standard-issue combat boots, hardly ideal for a digitigrade stance, seemed to notice their own change in behavior.

Stargate Command General's Office
General Landry leaned forward towards his computer monitor, hands clasped. Once again, a video call with General O'Neill served as the SGC's contact with the outside world during the crisis.

"President Hayes has ordered a halt on the information suppression campaign. The government is publicly admitting that this disease exists. The good news is that the number of cases is low enough that we don't expect the major news outlets to do much with the story."

"I'm not surprised, Jack," General Landry said, resigned. "There are too many cases to actually hide, and the symptoms are too bizarre to explain away."

"Yeah, especially the ears."

"You should have seen Daniel's face when he found out he could rotate them," Landry chuckled, trying to bring levity to a dark situation, and for a moment, Jack joined in.

General Landry stopped, and O'Neill went quiet as well. An uncomfortable silence hung in the room. "Airman Bosworth is dead," he said solemnly.

"What happened?" Jack asked. "If this is the next stage of the infection..."

Landry waved off Jack's concern. "No, no. Bosworth took his own life. All of our patients remain healthy, despite the drastic physical changes. It seems Bosworth believed that they were all being transformed into something other than human, and he wanted to make sure he died as his original species."

"Autopsy?" Jack asked.

"Carolyn started a little while ago. Let me patch you into the feed from the operating room."

Stargate Command Surgical Theater
On the cold metal table in the center of the room, the naked form of Airman Bosworth had been turned to give Doctor Lam easier access to the mark on his buttocks.

Bosworth's hair had turned a brilliant sapphire-blue with both a lighter and darker blue streak running through it. Like the rest of the infected, he had also gained a number of new hair follicles – which had quickly grown full-length hairs – down his neck and on part of his back. The image that had appeared on his skin was a navy blue shield, emblazoned with a pink star and with three steel blue stars above it.

Doctor Lam was performing the autopsy alone, and continued to wear her hazmat suit. While the odds of the infection spreading from the deceased and radioactively-inert corpse were low in her estimation, she was continuing to play on the safe side, just in case. The suit did hamper her ability to perform intricate tasks, but that was much less of an issue for an autopsy than for surgery on a living patient.

"Taking a deep tissue sample from the infection site," she narrated as she cut deeply into the man's gluteal muscles. Soon, she had a cross-section of the man's flesh at the site of the shield image, including skin with each color pigmentation.

"The pigmentation symptom remains bright and constant through the skin, fat, and muscle," she announced for the record as she placed the chunk of meat on a tray. Blue and pink were just as visible in the cross-section as they were on the surface of the skin.

Doctor Lam shone a penlight into the hole she had carved, examining the hip bone, which was just barely visible. "The pigmentation is also visible on the bone surface, although the image appears distorted when compared to the surface of the skin." The doctor picked up a bone drill with a hollow bit to take a sample of the pigmented bone.

"The pigmentation appears to halt at the spongy bone tissue," Lam finally said after examining her sample under a microscope. "The pigmentation travels all the way through the osteons, but is not present in the core."

As Doctor Lam placed the bone sample on a tray, movement caught her eye from the examination table. "Something is moving within the body," she said, out of habit. The skin at the base of the spine rippled slightly, and the doctor moved forward slowly, cautiously, as though trying to avoid provoking a spooked animal.

"A bulge is growing at the coccyx," Lam continued to describe her observations out loud. She picked up a scalpel and said, "I am going to make an incision in order to attempt to determine the cause."

Doctor Lam began to reach for the bulge, and then jumped back when the corpse's tail bone suddenly grew several more vertebrae, and skin to match. "What...?" was all Lam could stammer before the skin of the man's new short tail erupted in a waterfall of blue hairs to match the ones on his head.

After a few moments of no further activity, Lam stammered out, "Uh... amputating the subject's... uh. Amputating the subject's tail for closer inspection..."

Stargate Command General's Office
General Landry could do nothing but stare, dumbfounded, at the live footage of the most unusual autopsy in the history of the world. General O'Neill, still on the line, couldn't do much better.

Eventually, Jack asked, "Did I just watch a dead man grow a tail?"

Landry cut the feed to the autopsy just as Doctor Lam started to haltingly resume her work. "I'll admit that it's strange, but is it really any stranger than some of the other stuff you've seen in this job?"

To his credit, Jack did stop to think about the events and adventures of the past decade before answering. "Yes," he said, "yes, it's a lot stranger."

Chapter 3: The Curse of Kaggen

Stargate Command, Isolation Room 2
Daniel looked up with surprise and just a little confusion when the base intercom in his room buzzed. He marked his place in his book, setting it aside as he crossed the room to pick up the intercom's handset.

"Not sure who you were trying to get a hold of," Daniel said, "but this is isolation."

"Danny, it's me!"

"Oh, Mitchell! Um... why are you calling me on the base comms?" Daniel asked.

"I've got nothing to do," Mitchell replied.

"I'm no more your personal entertainment than I am Vala's."

"No!" Mitchell cried. "I finished my backlog of paperwork nearly an hour ago. I was thinking we could play a game."

"A game?" Daniel asked. "Is that really the best use of the base's intercom system?"

"It's not like there's anything else going on," Mitchell argued.

Daniel pinched his nose. With a sigh, he said, "Okay, a game. Can we at least do this on the computer instead of over the intercom?"

Mitchell assented, and the pair hopped online to play. After a few rounds of Battleship, they even managed to get Teal'c in on the action, moving to digital poker.

After wasting away a surprising amount of time, and losing more chips than either Daniel or Cameron cared to admit to Teal'c, the group was interrupted by a klaxon sounding through the base.

Stargate Command Control Room
"Unscheduled offworld activation!" Sergeant Harriman cried as lights started flashing on his console and an alarm began blaring. While inbound travelers outside of predefined schedules were common enough, there was no way to know ahead of time who was coming, so unscheduled dial-ins were always a high-alert affair. In the embarkation room below Harriman, marines took up defensive positions with assault rifles, riot shields, and a pair of M2 Browning machine guns permanently affixed to the floor on each side of the ramp leading from the gate.

General Landry responded to the situation as expected, shouting, "Close the iris!" as he dashed down the spiral staircase from the floor above, where the briefing room and his office were located. Harriman slapped his hand onto a palm scanner, and twenty overlapping blades of trinium-titanium alloy slid together, covering the gate less than three micrometers in front of where the event horizon would form.

Landry walked up behind Harriman and leaned forward to better see into the embarkation room. After the incoming dialing sequence had completed and the wormhole had formed behind the iris, he asked, "What have we got, Walter?"

"Receiving a signal, sir," Harriman said. After a moment, the computer popped up with its analysis of the inbound message. The sergeant turned in his chair to look up at the general and said, "It's Bra'tac's IDC, sir. Should I open the iris?" Bra'tac was the First Prime of Apophis before Teal'c was promoted to the role, and he was pivotal in teaching Teal'c most of the things Teal'c now knew, including the truth about the Goa'uld as false gods. Bra'tac was a high-ranking member of the Free Jaffa Nation, and a close friend of many in the SGC.

Landry shook his head and moved his head closer to the microphone built into Harriman's station. "Master Bra'tac, are you receiving?"

"I am here. Is this General Landry?"

"This is. I'm afraid I can't let you through, Master Bra'tac. The SGC is under a self-imposed quarantine. Nobody comes in, nobody goes out."

There was a short pause over the radio. "Would this quarantine be because your people have been... transforming?"

Landry glanced at Sergeant Harriman, slightly dumbfounded. "How would you know about that?" he asked Bra'tac.

"This curse has struck many Free Jaffa, as well. If you allow me passage, I believe I have information you will find useful."

Harriman looked to the general, waiting for orders. Landry weighed his options, considering the information he'd received from his medical staff and the information Jack had relayed to him from the Pentagon, as well as the continuously deteriorating state of the infected personnel. With a nod, he grabbed a nearby handset for the base's intercom and said, "Hazmat team report to the gate room." Switching to an intercom that would only broadcast his voice to the gate room, he added, "Defense team stand down and pull back."

When everyone was finally in place, the general finally ordered Harriman to open the iris and called back to Bra'tac, "Okay, Master Bra'tac, you're clear to come through the gate."

The man that stepped through the gate was not what Landry was expecting from a visit by the aging Jaffa, though. While Bra'tac still wore his traditional Jaffa warrior armor and carried a staff weapon in one hand, much of his appearance had changed. His greying beard was completely gone, and where he normally wore a metal skullcap, he had a shock of unruly purple hair. His silvery cape did a decent job of hiding it, but every few steps a swish of a purple tail could be seen. His ears had elongated significantly and migrated further towards the top of his head, likely why he made no effort to continue wearing the skullcap Landry was used to seeing. His auricular muscles had also changed, as his ears twitched and rotated to catch every small sound around him. His normal brown eyes had become a brilliant purple color, and as he walked down the ramp from the Stargate he seemed to be taking special pains to keep his heels on the ground.

"You didn't tell me you were one of the Jaffa infected, Master Bra'tac," Landry chided the elderly warrior over the embarkation room speakers.

Bra'tac looked up to the control room window, his ears perked, and grinned, "You did not ask!"

"Escort our guest to Isolation Room 3," the general instructed the medical team at the entrance to the embarkation room. "I'm sorry, Master Bra'tac, but we can't have you wandering the base like this. Teal'c is in Isolation Room 3 as well, I'm sure he'll be happy to see you."

Stargate Command, Isolation Room 3
As the general predicted, Teal'c was pleased to see his mentor and surrogate father. However, he was less than enthused by the changes that had come over Bra'tac's body.

"I do not think pink is your color, Teal'c," Bra'tac said as he gestured at Teal'c's now long and flowing hair, and his tail that dragged on the ground.

"Nor is purple yours, master," Teal'c gave Bra'tac a half-grin. "How is this possible?" he asked. "We believed that the source of this transformation was an artifact we discovered on PHK-519."

"Yes, please," General Landry said as he stepped into the observation booth over the isolation room, "you said that you had pertinent information about this particular affliction?" Vala stepped into the observation booth behind the general, and she was followed by Doctor Lam. They all sat down and waited for Bra'tac to explain what he knew.

"The System Lords did not wish for the Jaffa to learn of their history, but a dedicated warrior can learn much that is meant to be hidden," Bra'tac began. "Chief among these secrets is how the Goa'uld were pulled from the waters of their home world."

"Hold on," Landry interrupted, "I thought the Goa'uld evolved from being aquatic predators to being amphibious parasites of the Unas?" The Unas, or 'first ones,' were the first race that the Goa'uld subjugated, as the two species originated on the same planet.

Bra'tac nodded. "Atok took an Unas as his host, and he was succeeded by his son Apep, who created the beginnings of the Goa'uld Empire," he said. "Eventually, Apep was devoured by Anubis, who was then overthrown by the rest of the System Lords. From there, Ra took power as the Supreme System Lord, and you are familiar with the rest of the story, I think." Bra'tac grinned at the implication, as Jack O'Neill had personally sent an armed nuclear device through a ring transport to Ra's ship during Jack's very first mission through the gate.

"But Atok did not take his host under his own power," Bra'tac said. "Do you not think it strange, that a predator would become a parasite? There was another, who the Goa'uld named 'Kaggen,' that was responsible for changing Atok and by extension, creating the Goa'uld as we know them today."

"That's great and all, giving us a name to curse for the atrocities of the Goa'uld," said Vala, "but what does this have to do with the transformations?"

Bra'tac grabbed his staff with both hands and leaned on it, looking up to Vala in the observation booth. "This is the curse of Kaggen:

With Two Score! Minus Two!
Ringed around a lake so blue!
Your memories removed, your body confused!
For your insolence you will pay,
Cast to worlds far, far away!
The snakes will rule over air and land,
Until the stars reveal my plan!
Forgetting everything and living lost,
You're all fools, and I won't be stopped –
Not at any cost!"

The general, doctor, and Vala all stared at Bra'tac blankly as he finished reciting the "curse." Teal'c, on the other hand, had closed his eyes when his master began to chant, and each word sent a shivering thrill down his spine. "I have heard these words before," Teal'c said shakily when Bra'tac was done.

The older warrior nodded to Teal'c, and looked back up to the observation booth. "You see?!" he cried. "The curse is real! Teal'c has not had the opportunities to learn of Kaggen that I have, and yet he too knows of this curse."

Landry turned to Doctor Lam and quietly asked, "Carolyn? What do you think?"

"It seems pretty far-fetched, sir," she replied. "And yet... if this Kaggen has the technology to spontaneously re-engineer a species, he's probably capable of a lot more. It's conceivable that Kaggen interfered with humanity's genome tens of thousands of years ago as well, and we've now flipped some trigger in our DNA that's causing these changes; there's certainly a lot we don't really understand about ourselves. The people that are affected simply haven't had Kaggen's influence bred out of them." Lam coughed, "This is all purely speculative, of course, sir. On the other hand, if this is a result of some alien mucking about with human DNA rather than an actual reaction with any pathogen or radiation source, it would go a long way to explaining why both Jaffa and humans are affected, but Sam's mice are not."

"Okay, so we might have the reason why this is all happening," Vala huffed. To Bra'tac, she asked, "What can we do about it?"

The Jaffa warrior gave Vala a predatory grin. "I know the address for the planet where Kaggen makes his home," he said. "With your assistance, I can mount an attack on his base, and we can force him to remove the curse from us!"

"Do you know anything about the layout of his base?" Landry asked.

"No."

"Do you know what security measures he has placed around the Stargate?"

"No."

"Do you know what forces he may have at his disposal?"

"No."

"Do you know what personal defenses Kaggen may have to protect himself?"

"No."

"Do you have a plan for what you're going to do or say to get this apparently extremely technologically-advanced individual to do what you want?"

"I... no," Bra'tac admitted.

Doctor Lam groaned. "This is suicide!"

"I would gladly die for my cause, doctor!" Bra'tac shouted, ears folding against his head. "I die free! What would you die for?"

Vala rolled her eyes and said, "I'd rather not die at all, to be honest."

"Is there anything you do know about the planet you believe Kaggen is on, Master Bra'tac?" the general asked. "I would love to be able to give my people a target that can solve this problem, but without more information I simply cannot risk a mission like this."

"I know that if we do not go to this planet and we allow this curse to continue, those of us afflicted by Kaggen will never be ourselves again." Bra'tac sat down in a chair with a defeated look on his face, knowing what General Landry's response would be. Without his beard and with the addition of a full head of hair, the old Jaffa looked much younger; in Vala's estimation, he almost looked cute, in a "that's adorable!" kind of way, not her normal usage of the word.

General Landry stood up and straightened his uniform. "I'm sorry, Master Bra'tac, but I simply can't let my people go into a situation like this so completely blind. You are going to have to stay here until Doctor Lam's team decides conclusively that your condition is not a danger to others. If and when that happens, our quarantine will be lifted and you will be permitted to return through the Stargate. I'll have a guest room prepared for you, and send an escort to take you there later." The general tossed an apologetic look to the man in the Isolation Room that went unnoticed before walking out of the observation booth, followed quickly by Doctor Lam. Vala stayed for a short while longer, not leaving until Teal'c began to give quiet comfort to his mentor; Vala was many things, and oblivious might often be among them, but even she was capable of recognizing a private moment.

Author's Note

Sorry for the short chapter this week, folks! Next week's chapter is much longer!

Chapter 4: Kaggen Won't Play Ball

Stargate Command Isolation Room 2
Just after he had gone to sleep for the night, Daniel awoke to the distinctive sound of Zat'nik'tel fire outside the Isolation Room doors. He was up in an instant, on guard for danger; his enlarged orange-furred ears swiveled independently, and he marveled once again at the drastic increase to his auditory acuity both in their ability to detect sounds and the direction the sounds were coming from. With no weapon to defend himself with, he was forced to dive around the side of his bookshelf, out of the direct line of fire from the room's entrance. Most of the lights were also off, leaving the room in semi-darkness, giving him even just the slightest extra edge against whoever was attacking.

Of course, with no base alarm blaring in his ears, it was likely that the attackers had killed or disabled a large portion of the base personnel. Considering he had been woken by the sound of a zat gun discharging, Daniel was leaning towards "disabled," as Zat'nik'tels were essentially stun guns unless you got hit repeatedly within a short time frame.

"But who's attacking?" Daniel whispered to himself as his mind tried to plan his next move, his new tail twitching in agitation. Mitchell had taken it upon himself to modify the uniforms of all of the afflicted base personnel to accommodate the alien limbs, telling a story about learning to sew from his grandmother who had insisted that "ev'ry man oughtta know how ta' darn a sock!" As for potential threats... the System Lords were pretty much gone completely, though a few Goa'uld still held handfuls of planets; the Jaffa were allies, now; that left the Lucian Alliance as an enemy that would be wielding zats, but Daniel couldn't think how they would have gained access to the base. Did it have something to do with the incoming wormhole from earlier?

Regardless of who was attacking, Daniel's first priority was to arm himself, and then find other SGC personnel that hadn't been taken out already, his team by preference although anyone would do in a pinch. And that required evading whoever was opening the door...

"Daniel?" Vala called into the room, pushing the door open. One of the guards that had been stationed outside groaned and fell over limply.

Daniel leaned out from his hiding place, his blonde mane – tied back in a ponytail – catching the light from the hallway and said, "Ah, Vala, so the base isn't under attack, then? It's just you?"

Vala pouted, holstering the zat she was holding. "Daniel, I'm hurt that you think me incapable of attacking the SGC."

"Would you prefer I tackle you to the ground and strip you of your weapon?"

"Well, when you put it like that—" Vala began walking into the room with a slight sway in her hips.

Daniel raised his arms and tried to flush the image from his mind. "Don't! Don't answer that. What are you doing, Vala?"

Instead of getting an answer from Vala, Teal'c stepped into the room, wordlessly thrusting a tactical vest and a P90 into Daniel's arms. Behind him, Bra'tac stepped into view, and Daniel's eyes bulged a bit at the old man's new appearance. "We intend to put an end to this curse, once and for all! Your general will not permit anyone to go on this mission, so we go ourselves." If there was one thing that hadn't changed about the Bra'tac from Daniel's memories of the grizzled Jaffa warrior, it was the steel in his voice when speaking of his convictions.

Daniel turned to Vala, who was busy securing the two marines that had been outside the room using some plastic handcuffs. Belatedly, he noticed something missing.

"Vala?" he asked. "Why aren't you wearing a hazmat suit?"

Finishing with the marines, Vala went through the motions of dusting herself off, before accepting a spare P90 from Teal'c. "You see, Purple'tac here showed up with a great story about the origins of the Goa'uld – you would've loved it, Daniel – and this curse that he says is the source of the transformation." Vala poked her head out of the isolation room door, looking both directions down the corridor to make sure nobody had been alerted to her isolation-breakout attempt or was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. When Vala jogged out into the hallway, Daniel followed her partially out of habit, partially out of curiosity. Bra'tac followed behind Daniel, and Teal'c silently brought up the rear, a second Zat'nik'tel at the ready for anyone coming up behind them. "When he was done, Doctor Lam said something about how this Cage fellow—"

"Kaggen," Bra'tac corrected.

"Right, this Kaggen fellow—"

This time, Daniel interrupted her, as he awkwardly donned his tactical vest, juggling his rifle while the group made their way towards the base's main elevator. "Kaggen? As in Cagn, the creator-deity of the Bushmen from southern Africa? I was actually studying their mythology just the other day. So many visiting aliens have influenced Earth mythology, primarily near the Mediterranean Sea—" he began rambling.

Vala turned to give Daniel a look. The kind of look that said "I know you know exactly how stupid it was to ask me that question." The kind of look able to cut off even the most oblivious of rambling eggheads.

When Vala turned her head away from Daniel again, she continued, "Doctor Lam said something about how it was plausible that Kaggen had screwed around with humans before Ra even showed up. I translated her doctor-speak to mean that you guys weren't contagious, and that's why I'm not wearing a hazmat suit."

"Oh," Daniel said, expecting something slightly different. "So why are you sneaking me out of my isolation in the dead of night?"

Vala swiped her ID card, or at least an ID card, to call the elevator, and Bra'tac answered his question, "I know the address were we can find Kaggen. We will capture him, and force him to end this curse!"

Taking up a defensive position on the opposite side of the elevator doors, Teal'c added, "The four of us cannot be court martialed for disobeying an order."

"Or assaulting military personnel, misappropriation of military equipment, and misuse of military facilities..." Daniel mumbled.

As the elevator doors slid open, Vala smiled. "Now you're getting it!" she said as she grabbed Daniel's arm and pulled him inside.

Stargate Command Control Room
With four quick flashes of blue lightning, the technicians in the control room all slumped over in their chairs. Bra'tac ran up to the technician sitting in front of the main dialing computer console, pushing his chair out of the way and typing a series of symbols into the computer. The computer began dialing the gate address where the group would most assuredly find Kaggen and bring him to justice, and the Stargate began to spin. Teal'c kept a wary eye and a ready zat for anyone showing up in the control room to interrupt them.

As the dialing program advanced to its final chevron encodings, the two Jaffa hurried out of the control room towards the Stargate and a few more zat discharges could be heard from the Embarkation Room.

Stargate Command Embarkation Room
"Oh, we are going to get into so much trouble for this!" Daniel complained as Vala stunned the last guard in the gate room.

The Stargate began spinning, its chevrons encoding and lighting up. Vala holstered her zat gun and stood back, waiting for the dialing sequence to complete, apparently without any care in the world. "You worry too much, Daniel," she said. "We'll only get in trouble if we run off on this unsanctioned mission and we don't bring back any goodies for the general."

Realizing that pushing the issue with Vala was a hopeless endeavor, Daniel just rolled his eyes. As the final chevron locked and the unstable vortex formed in front of the wormhole, Bra'tac and Teal'c arrived, ready for action.

"We should move now, before someone investigates our activities," Teal'c said. The four conspirators ran up the ramp to the Stargate together, stepping through the portal before anyone could prevent their escape.

PHE-405 – Exterior, Night
The heavy rainfall certainly made travel trickier. In a new experience for Daniel, his ears instinctively turned down to keep water out.

"Is it just me, or does it seem like almost every random planet we visit is a copy of British Columbia?" Daniel asked as he tried to ignore his tail dragging through the mud. When the blonde hairs had been dry, he'd been able to keep it from dragging on the floor of the SGC, but now that he was traversing unknown and uneven ground, and his tail was soaked, the end was getting completely caked. He glared with some jealousy at Teal'c, who had had the presence of mind to tie his considerably longer tail into a complex braid which resulted in the tail only reaching his knees.

The man has been completely bald for longer than I've been alive, and when he finally did grow hair before all of this it was hardly braidable. His wife doesn't even wear a braid. When did he learn how to do that?!

Daniel winced when Vala shone her flashlight in his face, and all three of his alien companions stared at him blankly. "Oh, right. Forget I said anything."

As the group resumed their trek, Vala asked, "So how much further is Kaggen's base?"

"Several hours, at least," Bra'tac replied nonchalantly, as though he were simply saying rainbows were colorful.

"We can't stay in this region for several hours!" Daniel cried. "This is obviously a floodplain, and this rain is easily enough to cause a flash flood. We need to find higher ground, and preferably shelter! Soon!"

"DanielJackson is correct!" Teal'c cried over a clap of thunder. "We should find a place to make camp, and continue searching for Kaggen tomorrow!"

Bra'tac hesitated a moment, before changing direction and leading the group away from their original destination. "There should be a hill with cave systems nearby," he said. "But it will be difficult to find in the dark!"

"I'll take 'difficult' over 'suicidal'!" Daniel practically had to scream over rolling thunder that seemed to be right on top of them. Everyone reflexively folded their sensitive ears tight against their skull, save for Vala who neither could move her ears nor needed to protect them as much.

PHE-405 – Cave System
The group did eventually find the caves Bra'tac was searching for, and took shelter from the now-torrential rain. An intangible tension lifted from their collective shoulders, as something primal told their little lizard brains that shelter from the elements also meant safety from predators.

The cave itself appeared to be an ancient lava tube, gently sloping up and away from the valley floor where the danger of a flood loomed. Unfortunately, the rainwater also meant that there was no dry wood available for constructing a fire.

Soon after arriving in the cave, Vala removed her boots, pouring out a copious amount of water. She followed up by stripping out of her uniform down to her underwear.

"Vala!" Daniel shouted, quickly turning around, his face slightly flushed.

Vala smirked as she laid out her clothes against the cave wall to dry them. "What is it, Daniel?" she asked innocently. "You don't expect me to wear wet clothes all night long and freeze to death, do you?"

"The woman has a point," Bra'tac conceded, and he began pulling off his armor. "Sleeping in wet clothing will do us no favors in our confrontation with Kaggen tomorrow."

Teal'c began to follow suit, but Daniel still did not move, resolutely turning away from the half-naked Vala. Of course, that gave her the opportunity to sneak up behind him and press herself against his back. "What's the matter, Daniel?" she whispered in his ear, which had folded back in annoyance at her antics. "Are you afraid to show a little skin...?"

As she pulled away, her playful expression turned to one of disgust. "By the way," she said, "your hair and tail are an absolute mess. You need to get cleaned up."

"And I suppose you brought a brush, did you?"

"Of course I did!"

In a flurry of activity that Daniel didn't quite manage to follow, he ended up stripped to his Egyptian pyramid-print boxers and seated on the cave floor, with Vala running a brush through his hair and tail. Teal'c and Bra'tac were already asleep, simultaneously leaving Daniel and Vala on de facto first watch and being unable to help him out of his current situation.

Despite his reservations, Daniel was relaxing under Vala's ministrations. He'd never had hair longer than his shoulders before, and the sensation of a brush pulling through his locks couldn't really compare to a comb setting short hair straight, especially when pulled by someone else. The brand new nerve endings in his tail doubled the experience, and he simply couldn't really compare it to anything he had felt thus far in his life, even including his adventures as a member of SG-1.

Stargate Command General's Office
"What do you mean 'they're gone?!'" Landry practically screamed into the phone on his desk. The regular one, not the red one.

Walter's voice remained calm, "It seems that both Teal'c and Bra'tac broke out of the base last night, incapacitating several marines and technicians. Daniel and Vala are gone, too."

The general pinched his nose in frustration. "'Never give an order that can't be obeyed,'" he sighed into the handset.

"Sir?" Sergeant Harriman asked.

"General MacArthur. I should've known that Bra'tac would've stopped at nothing to go after Kaggen, and there was no way Teal'c would do anything I say if it meant going against Bra'tac." Landry took a sip of his morning coffee, "Vala's just acting out because she's gone stir-crazy, and I'm sure Daniel has been swept up by the others."

"I'll prep a UAV," Harriman said.

"Walter, prep a UAV... dammit, how do you do that?"

"Experience, sir."

"I still can't justify sending a team, but we can at least give them some remote support. If we give them a fighting chance, maybe they'll manage to make it home and I can yell at them."

"As you say, sir."

Stargate Command Isolation Room 1
Colonel Mitchell sat up in his bed, yawned and stretched. It was day three of the outbreak, but Mitchell felt better this morning than he had in weeks. If it weren't for the indigo hair hanging in his eyes, he would've suspected a spontaneous remission of the symptoms. And the independently mobile ears. And the tail. Especially the tail.

Ready to shave and go through what would surely be another day of tedious medical testing and experimental medications, Mitchell swung his legs over the side of the bed to hop down and head to the makeshift sink against the wall. As soon as he tried to place his weight on his feet, however, he stumbled and nearly face-planted on the concrete floor.

It didn't take long to figure out what new symptom was the cause of his fall; he no longer had any feet to stand on. In their place, he now had a pair of hooves; cursory inspection suggested that they were superficially similar in construction to the hooves on the many horses he had seen growing up on his parents' Kansas farm. His knees had also reversed, which made standing back up awkward, and his legs were covered in fine white hair all the way up to his boxers.

In less time than he expected, Mitchell managed to stand back up, and figure out his newly-rearranged joints well enough to stay there, even if his stance was somewhat shaky. Carefully, he walked over to the intercom to call Doctor Lam, his hooves clopping loudly on the concrete.

"Hey, doc," he said when the other end of the line was picked up.

"Good morning, Colonel. Please tell me you didn't grow any new appendages last night. I'm still recovering from the tails."

"Well, I don't think it really counts as a 'new' appendage, since I've had feet my entire life, but it seems I've become a satyr."

"Pardon... a satyr?"

"Yeah, you know... the half-man, half-goat monsters from Greek myth?" Mitchell hmm'd into the handset, "Although my new hooves look more like a horse than a goat. And now that I think about it, my tail is pretty horse-like, too." He glanced over at the mirror and noticed a shape under his bangs and said, "On the 'new appendage' front, though, I appear to have a horn growing out of my forehead..."

Mitchell heard the doctor sigh, and he could've sworn he heard her bang her head on something hard. Possibly the wall. "I'll be down in just a moment, Cam."

It only took a few minutes for Lam to arrive in the isolation room. "I swung by the cafeteria on the way," she said, showing a bowl full of Froot Loops and a small bottle of milk, "be good and you can have breakfast early." She still wore her hazmat suit, though.

Mitchell's stomach rumbled, but the idea of the colorful fruity cereal didn't appeal like it normally would. "They wouldn't happen to have something... I don't know... denser, would they? Maybe some oatmeal?"

Lam rolled her eyes. "Beggars aren't supposed to be choosers, Cam!"

"But I'm not a beggar. Vala will be around soon and I can get some from her," Mitchell grinned impishly.

"Wait, the general didn't tell you?"

Mitchell's grin dropped instantly. "What? Vala didn't get infected, did she?"

Doctor Lam shook her head. "No," she said, "Vala broke Teal'c and Bra'tac out of containment last night, and the three of them grabbed Daniel. They escaped the base through the Stargate! You and Sam are the only members of your team on the planet, and I'm not sure anything short of a nuclear blast could get Carter away from studying the artifact you guys brought back."

"Damn it!" Mitchell cried in frustration. Almost on reflex, he kicked out with one leg, hitting the nightstand and sending it across the room where it fractured against the wall. Carolyn stared at the display in shock; the nightstand was hardly a tremendous weight, but Mitchell's kick had cleared over a dozen feet and cracked open the wooden furniture like a cheap piggy bank with a simple display of frustration. Mitchell barely seemed to notice as he continued, "Why would they go gallivanting off on their own?"

Doctor Lam noticed his odd word choice, but decided not to comment on it. "Bra'tac had some wild idea about the origin of this contagion yesterday, and Teal'c would follow him to Hell and back."

"Teal'c already helped blow up Hell," Mitchell pointed out unhelpfully. "SG-1 killed Satan and everything."

"... Right. Anyway, Vala is impulsive and going stir-crazy. While Daniel can get in trouble, he at least can't be court-martialed, so there's his reason for going. Or being taken along for the ride, knowing Vala," Carolyn shrugged. She set the rejected bowl of cereal on the table and walked up to Mitchell, staring at the small horn in the center of his forehead. "Have a seat, let me take a look."

Cameron complied, and Lam pulled what looked like a dental probe and a magnifying glass out of a supply bag, and began to examine the skin surrounding the base of the horn. "Does it hurt?" she asked as she prodded him with the probe.

Mitchell almost shook his head, before remembering exactly what part of his body was being examined. "No," he said, "I didn't even realize it was there unit I saw myself in the mirror."

"Can you feel this?" she asked, as she ran the probe along the full length of the horn, just two inches.

Mitchell flinched at the contact. "Yeah, that feels weird," he said.

"Weird how? Did it hurt?"

"No..." he trailed off. The doctor repeated the motion with the probe. "Ah!" he flinched again. "It's almost like the tickling in your nose when you need to sneeze, but can't." Mitchell reached up with his own finger and rubbed his horn, curious. "Ahh..." he winced at the alien sensation, but didn't release the bony protrusion. After just a moment of continuous contact, his body convulsed once, as though sneezing. Instead of expelling air and mucous from his nose, however, a small shower of sparks poured forth from the tip of his horn.

Doctor Lam jumped back; if anyone were to compare video, the motion was identical to her jump when presented with Airman Bosworth's new tail during his autopsy. "What the hell was that, Cam?!"

"I don't know!" he cried. The lieutenant colonel took a moment to center himself and said, "I don't know what that was, but we can worry about it later. Finish your check up so I can get some breakfast. Please."

Doctor Lam nodded, and began examining Mitchell's new hooves and backwards-bending knees. As she worked him over, she spoke with him, getting feedback on the sensations he was feeling as she poked and prodded him.

"Well, at least I have one piece of good news. Your knees are completely unchanged," she said at one point during her examination.

"Uh, I don't know if you noticed, doc, but they're bending the wrong way."

"That's not your knee, that's your heel. Don't ask me how, but your femur, tibia, and fibula have all shortened dramatically, and the structure of your foot has changed to force you into a digitigrade stance." The doctor straightened up and motioned Mitchell to stand. "Now remove your boxers, I want to see the progression of this body hair."

With his white-coated ears folded back in mild embarrassment, Mitchell did as he was instructed. He even managed to go a full ten seconds after seeing what his boxers had been covering before crying out in despair at what he had lost.

Stargate Command General's Office
Generals O'Neill and Landry were once again teleconferencing to keep the SGC apprised of events in the outside world, and keep the Pentagon apprised of the goings-on in Earth's secret first line of defense against alien attack.

"... so this 'Kaggen' may be the ultimate source of the epidemic. Now half of SG-1 have gone AWOL to try and get answers," Landry finished updating O'Neill.

"And in world news today," Jack began, trying to imitate a stereotypical news reporter, "it seems al-Qaeda has taken credit for the worldwide outbreak. I don't know if the CIA were involved in getting them to take credit or not, but they're saying stuff about punishing everyone who isn't a true believer. President Hayes is supposed to be delivering a response speech today. I don't know exactly what he intends to say, but he won't be taking retributive action against al-Qaeda for this, we've been keeping him in the loop."

"He may do something for theater. There's no way the world would let a single terrestrial organization get away with this without some kind of response. If Hayes doesn't do something, somebody else will."

"It's not like these are nice guys we're talking about, Hank."

Landry nodded. "True," he said, "but once you work in the SGC, the petty squabbles of home stop meaning as much when compared to everything that's going on out there. I don't really want to see al-Qaeda taking heat for something I know for a fact they didn't do. It's just not right."

"We're going to find a solution to this, Hank."

"'You're never beaten until you admit it.'" Landry stared into the middle distance in front of the camera.

"Patton?"

Landry nodded. "We still have the best minds in the entire world working to solve this problem, and a few minds from other worlds as well. I'm not worried."

Stargate Command Colonel Carter's Lab
Carter was less troubled by her continuing transformation than Mitchell – largely due to the lack of a new protuberance on her face and no surprise gender reassignment – and was hard at work analyzing the alien artifact. She was on her laptop, poring over the data she'd collected thus far and sipping from a cup of coffee when Dr. Greene walked in the room.

"Good morning, Colonel!" said the too-cheery redhead. "Are you ready for your first exam of the day?"

"Yeah, sure, just give me a minute?" Carter asked without looking away from the computer, taking a long pull of her coffee, but her blue ears stood at attention.

"Colonel, how many cups of coffee have you had today?"

Carter stopped what she was doing as she considered the question. "Um..."

"If you don't know the answer, then it's 'too many.' Did you even sleep last night?"

Reluctantly, Samantha put down her still-steaming coffee and swiveled around to face the doctor in the bulky hazmat suit. "That depends, what time is it?"

Dr. Greene attempted to glare at Carter intimidatingly, but it didn't really work out. She was not tall or imposing under the best of circumstances, and the plastic suit could make anyone into a caricature of themselves. All that on top of Carter's combat experience made the doctor's attempt at intimidation come out more like the adorableness of a child in a police officer costume.

Still, Carter was kind enough to give the woman some slack. "I'll get some sleep when you leave, promise."

"You'd better," the doctor groused. "I'll make sure to have sedatives with me when I come by later, and I'm not afraid to use them!"

As Greene performed her exam, she shared the scuttlebutt with Sam. Both women expressed sympathy for the patients whose genders had been forcibly flipped over night. The symptom was occurring in both men and women, with no apparent pattern. According to Greene, the gender ratio of the afflicted personnel had shifted from being heavily in favor of men, true of the base at large, to being nearly equal.

"How about your research?" Dr. Greene asked when she was done updating Carter's patient record. "Have you figured anything out yet?"

"The radiation being emitted by the artifact is definitely an intentional feature, for lack of a better word," Carter sighed. "I've found a repeating pattern, like it was designed as some kind of signal. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out what the 'message' might be, yet. Of course if this is an actual message, then odds are almost certain that it's in a language I don't know, and I'd need Daniel to translate. And he's apparently offworld."

Greene gave Carter a friendly pat on the shoulder. "You'll get there," she said. "We have faith in you. Plus," she added on her way out of the lab, "Daniel's not the only linguist here, you know. He may be your friend and teammate, but every team runs into the same problems you need Daniel for on your missions."

PHE-405 – Exterior, Day
Daniel, Teal'c, and Bra'tac had each awoken to the same surprise as Mitchell and so many other men in the SGC. Some members of the group had taken the change harder than others.

"What the hell is wrong with you, Vala?!" Daniel hissed at the sulking, healthy human as they trudged through a muddy field.

"This mission has turned into a damned taco party, that's what!" she hissed back, trying to keep her disagreement between herself and Daniel. "I used to fly solo, or I paired up with an interesting guy or two like you. Ever since joining SG-1, I've enjoyed a comfortable 3:2 ratio," Vala cut her hands through the air to emphasize her point.

"You're pissed off because there aren't enough men around for you to ogle?!"

Vala frowned, "... It sounds so shallow when you say it like that."

Several yards ahead, Teal'c and Bra'tac were having their own disagreement.

"Master Bra'tac, speak to me!"

"This is a disgrace!" Bra'tac spat. "One more crime that we must hold Kaggen accountable for."

"What does it truly matter?" Teal'c asked.

Bra'tac glared at Teal'c with a fire in her eyes, but she did not stop marching forward. "Kaggen has added insult to injury by transforming us into… into…"

"Women?" Teal'c asked, accusingly.

"A disgrace!" Bra'tac cried.

"Why would you think such a thing, master?" Teal'c asked. "Are the Hak'tyl not capable warriors, and all women? I thought that you respected Ka'lel on the High Council? Is she a disgrace to the Free Jaffa Nation?"

After an uncomfortable silence, with her ears folded down in shame, Bra'tac said, "That is different." The steel had left her voice, however.

"No," Teal'c shook her head, "it is the same. We may not send our women out to war, but they train as hard as we do to defend our homes and our children while we are away. You remain a capable warrior, master, regardless of what an ancient curse has done to your body."

Bra'tac was silent for a time. Eventually, she quietly said, "You are wise, Teal'c. Wiser than I sometimes give you credit for. Perhaps I still see in you the impetuous chal'til that you were so many years ago."

Teal'c chuckled, fond memories of days long past flashing through her mind. "And occasionally I still think of you as 'that old hashak,' as I did then. We can both be wrong occasionally."

"Indeed," Bra'tac grinned up to her pupil.

PHE-405 – Kaggen's Compound Outskirts
After several hours of walking, which became much easier for Daniel and the two Jaffa after discarding their combat boots in favor of walking on their bare hooves, Vala and her three transformed compatriots crested a soggy ridge. In the valley below, they spied a small fortress built into a cliff face.

Vala and Daniel each pulled out a pair of binoculars to try and get what limited reconnaissance they could.

"Ah see some movement in the trees, but Ah can't tell if it's just the animal life," said Daniel.

Vala stared at Daniel in mild shock at the shift in her voice which hadn't been there earlier in the morning when they had broken camp, but Daniel continued scanning the trees, oblivious. Eventually, Vala returned to scanning the valley with her binoculars, until she hissed, "There! Left of the main entrance! There's a Jaffa!" As she tried to get a better view of the Jaffa in the valley below, she said, "He's not wearing a house guard mask, though, and we're too far away to see the brand on his forehead. I can't tell who he might be serving under."

Daniel looked to Vala and asked, "What would Jaffa being doin' out here? Kaggen wouldn't be using them as guards, would he?" Daniel turned to Bra'tac to ask her what she might know, only to find that both of their Jaffa companions were displaying clear discomfort. Any attempt to hide the problem under a mask of stoicism was betrayed by the still-unfamiliar ears performing their own expressions.

Vala turned to see what had grabbed Daniel's attention. "Muscles, Bra'tac… what's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong!" Bra'tac insisted, her voice at least an octave higher than it had been that morning. "We're ready to fight whatever Kaggen can throw at us, especially if he has Jaffa enslaved to do his bidding!"

Teal'c, however, could not keep her composure as well as the elder Jaffa could. She fumbled with her tactical vest, running into some difficulty removing it, followed by her shirt, until finally she gave a sigh of relief as a pair of butter-yellow wings spread from her back of their own accord. Fortunately for Daniel's sensibilities, the gender changes had not progressed above the waistline.

"… oh," was all Vala could think to say at the display. "Well, I suppose that would be a little uncomfortable." She turned to Daniel, "What about you? Any more changes besides your accent?"

"What's wrong with mah accent?" Daniel asked, annoyed.

Vala stared at her for a moment, eyes half-lidded, before turning back to Bra'tac. "And you, Purple'tac, take off your armor."

"No!" She cried impetuously.

"You're clearly uncomfortable. Take it off!"

"Why should I?!"

"Master Bra'tac," Teal'c said, her voice calm and soothing, "if you are in as much discomfort as I was, I guarantee taking off your armor will make you feel better."

Bra'tac looked to Teal'c, who smiled comfortingly.

Bra'tac looked to Vala, who glared.

Bra'tac looked to Daniel, who nodded and rolled one hand as if to say, "get on with it."

Grumbling under her breath, Bra'tac finally began removing the armor plating under her cloak. Once that was discarded, she removed the cloak itself, and after a little bit more prodding from Vala, she finally removed her chainmail and the tunic underneath, revealing a pair of bright orange wings much like the ones on Teal'c's back, save for coloration and size – while unsettlingly large on the Jaffa's back, Bra'tac's wings were only about half the size of Teal'c's.

Vala picked up Bra'tac's chainmail in one hand and her breastplate in another, glancing from one to the other to Bra'tac's wings and back. "I don't think we can get these modified to fit you," she said, "at least not out here."

Bra'tac snorted derisively. "A true warrior doesn't need armor; it's his wits, agility, and skill that keeps him alive in battle," she said.

"Or her," Vala added with a smirk.

"Indeed," Teal'c nodded.

"Now," Daniel clapped Vala and Teal'c on the shoulders, and looked to Bra'tac, forming an impromptu huddle, "we need a plan of attack."

Just then, the team's radio crackled to life, "SG-1, this is Stargate Command, do you copy, over?" Harriman's voice was instantly recognizable.

After a tense discussion between the four co-conspirators consisting entirely of looks, Daniel replied, "We read ya, Command. We have discovered what appears to be Kaggen's compound. We have not yet met with any resistance, but we can see Jaffa on guard in the forest surrounding the front door. We don't know anything about their numbers, but there don't appear to be defensive weapons in the area."

"This Command Actual," General Landry's voice came over the radio, "a UAV is headed to your position. You'll have aerial reconnaissance within a few minutes, and we'll continue to cover the area for as long as we can. Command out." An artificial wormhole such as the one created by a Stargate cannot exist for very much longer than 38 minutes under normal conditions. That was simply a fact of wormhole physics. When the wormhole shut down automatically, the SGC's remote control over the UAV would be lost and the machine would crash, if its remote controller had not taken it down for a landing by that point.

Daniel rummaged through her pack, retrieving a small tablet device, which she soon managed to connect with one of the unmanned aerial vehicles the SGC used for safely scouting planets at longer range than the MALP could handle. The drone slowly built up a partial map of the planet as it headed towards the group. "Well, this changes things," Daniel said. "If we can get a read on their numbers and positions with infrared, we can take out the guards by surprise."

"What if the Jaffa see the UAV?" Vala asked.

"That will not be too much of a problem," Bra'tac smiled. "As every good Jaffa warrior knows, the Tau'ri send their flying machines far in advance of any people. With the Chappa'ai nearly a day away on foot, the guards seeing the drone might shoot it down, but they will not be put on high alert for many hours."

PHE-405 – Kaggen's Compound Grounds
A Jaffa warrior patrolled the forest near the entrance of the compound. He was not the only one in the general area, but none of the others were near enough to see through the forest that covered much of the valley. The warrior was not afraid; not only was he extremely skilled at his craft, but few knew of the address for this planet, and the compound was far from the Chappa'ai. If there was anything more dangerous than a wild animal, it was far more likely to be inside the fortress than outside.

A nearby rustling drew his attention, and he pointed his staff weapon in the direction of the noise. He crept closer, carefully and silently. Suddenly, a foxlike animal burst from a bush, scampering across his path. The warrior relaxed. Just another creature of the forest.

Then he was grabbed from behind, a hand covering his mouth so that he could not attempt to alert his brethren. Adrenaline flooded his system, and he fought back with all his strength. His staff weapon was quickly lost, but a few lucky blows with his elbow into the side of his unarmored attacker was enough to get free.

The warrior spun around to get a better view of his opponent, and was surprised at what he saw. The man he faced had a symbiote pouch in his gut like any adult Jaffa, but he had long, flowing pink hair on his head, and a similarly pink braided tail visible behind him. Two long, horselike ears were constantly swiveling, covered in yellow fur, and the not-Jaffa clearly had yellow-furred hooves as well. The final absurdity was the pair of yellow feathered wings folded on the man's back. The patchwork creature was like nothing he had ever seen – although there had been rumors among the troops recently – but the warrior's analysis did not last long. This thing had attacked him and disarmed him; it would not live to see another sunrise.

The warrior charged his opponent, who responded in kind. The pair grappled one another, each trying to grasp some advantage in the mêlée. The Jaffa warrior attempted to trip up the creature's equine hooves by sweeping its legs, but a swift kick from the beast struck his knee just right to shatter the joint completely.

At that moment, the Jaffa knew his chances of death had dramatically increased. The monster was a match for him in hand-to-hand combat, but now he had lost almost all of his mobility. His only hope was to drag himself to his fallen weapon and fight sins against nature with the might of his god. The warrior crawled desperately to his weapon. He reached out, his fingers curling around the haft, when with a sickening crunch his opponent completed a leap that ended with all of its weight on the warrior's wrist, which was instantly crushed.

The warrior cried out in pain. He hoped his brothers would hear his death throes and avenge him by killing this abomination against god. But he would not be there to see it. The beast reached down and tore the warrior's weapon from him unresponsive fingers. It pointed the staff at the warrior's head, and fired.

Moments later, Daniel arrived from the west, at the same time that Vala and Bra'tac arrived from the east. "I managed four silent takedowns," Vala said breathlessly, "Purple'tac says he... she took out seven on her own. How about you two?" Spotting the corpse with a charred hole where its head should be, she added, "Although I don't think any of ours were quite so... messy."

"Ah got three," Daniel replied.

"And this was my sixth, ValaMalDoran," Teal'c said, calm as a cucumber.

"Twenty-one dead or disabled," Daniel summarized. "That matches the heat signatures we got from the UAV."

"The ones I fought all bore the mark of Ba'al," Bra'tac said. Ba'al was the last remaining Goa'uld bearing the title of System Lord, but he was also one of the few Goa'uld willing to look at the big picture enough to work with the people of Earth against a common enemy.

Vala's left eye twitched at the mention of the System Lord. "Come on, girls," she said, hefting her P90, "I still owe Ba'al a few things." Of course, Ba'al also had a bit of a thing for Qetesh, the Goa'uld that had taken Vala as a host, and he seemed to have some difficulty separating Qetesh from Vala in his mind.

"Just because the Jaffa have Ba'al's mark doesn't mean they're workin' for Ba'al," Daniel argued. "We've seen Goa'uld steal each other's soldiers without re-branding 'em lotsa times."

"Yeah, yeah," Vala groused, "less talking, more walking. We just need to get inside..."

PHE-405 – Entrance to Kaggen's Compound
The group approached the door to the fortress, a literally monolithic affair. "Okay," huffed Vala, "how do we get in?"

"There must be a way in," Bra'tac reasoned. "These Jaffa were not guarding nothing."

Daniel approached the door, placing her hand on its surface and closing her eyes, as though the stone would talk to her if she just took the time to listen. After a moment, she took a step back and scraped at the ground with a hoof.

"Daniel...?" Vala tried to get her attention.

Daniel's legs sprang to action, and she gave the stone door a mighty kick. For a moment, it seemed like nothing had happened, and Daniel was resting her hoof against the stone. With a grunt, she jerked her hoof back, taking a significant portion of the surrounding stone with it.

"Well that's new," said Vala.

Teal'c approached cautiously. "DanielJackson… can you... kick down a ten meter stone door?"

"Uh… maybe?" Daniel replied sheepishly.

PHE-405 – Kaggen's Compound
Despite the guards outside, the group met relatively little resistance after passing through the front door, sufficiently demolished by Daniel's powerful kicks.

The interior walls of the compound were much more austere than Goa'uld buildings and ships. Goa'uld design had walls positively covered in symbols similar to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, embossed in gold, while this structure had much more abstract designs in various shades of brown, red, and orange which often blended with the color of the earthen walls so well that it was difficult to tell the art was even there.

The group moved slowly, those with hooves taking care to avoid making too much noise on the stone floor. Doorways had inscriptions next to them, which Daniel said were "almost like a written Khoe dialect." Unfortunately, she admitted, Khoe was not among the dozens of languages she could translate, at least not without copious reference materials, and modern Khoe had no written form in the first place.

The group instead relied on Teal'c's tracking ability; layers of dust suggested that the facility had not been maintained for many years, but recent tracks through that dust – along with the presence of Jaffa guards outside – served as evidence that Ba'al or some other Goa'uld who had stolen Ba'al's warriors had recently made his presence here.

The group cautiously made their way through a series of branching corridors, until they eventually heard a voice coming from around a corner. It had the same guttural resonance of a Goa'uld puppeting its host and putting on a show of their power, but the underlying voice was feminine and unfamiliar.

"Where is that miserable beast?" the voice growled.

"My lord," another voice began, "this complex is large, and labyrinthine. There are still many areas we have yet to search."

"I'm well aware of the scale of this fortress, Jaffa. And you would do well to recall that your predecessor... lost his position for reporting things which I already knew," the unknown Goa'uld threatened her underling.

"Of course, my lord," the Jaffa responded. "But if the beast we hunt is responsible for the transformations, why is it that you cannot simply dismiss his magic?"

"You dare to question the powers of your god?!" the Goa'uld raged.

"No, my lord! I—" the Jaffa's protest turned to a gurgling scream heard over the telltale hum of a Goa'uld Kara kesh, a multifunctional tool which many System Lords enjoyed using as a torture device. Sustained use on a subject could figuratively melt their brain, with lethal results.

After a few moments, the group of eavesdroppers heard the heavy thump of an unconscious, or dead, Jaffa hitting the floor. The Goa'uld shouted, "Jaffa, kree!"

Another Jaffa spoke up, "Yes, my lord!"

"Congratulations on your promotion," the Goa'uld growled sarcastically. "It's obvious the beast isn't here, and hasn't been here for a considerable amount of time. Collect your men from outside and start distributing explosives. If I can't have Kaggen, then he can't have his fortress."

Standing right at the corner, Vala rolled her eyes, giving Daniel barely a second to grasp her plan of attack before she executed it. "And that's our cue," she said as she turned around the corner, immediately opening fire with her P90 on one of two Jaffa warriors still standing in the hall.

Daniel rolled low behind Vala and tagged the other Jaffa warrior in the leg with her pistol, who collapsed, but the warrior was still combat-capable.

The wounded Jaffa managed to grip his staff weapon and squeeze off a couple of shots in Vala and Daniel's direction, before Bra'tac and Teal'c rounded the corner themselves, finishing him off with a pair of staff blasts to the chest.

The Goa'uld who had been commanding the Jaffa was unexpectedly fuchsia. A shock of curly pink hair, pink tail, and pink-furred hooves showed that she was affected by Kaggen's 'curse' as much as the SGC had been. Her reactions to the ambush were swift, using her Kara kesh to raise her personal defense shield against the P90s and Ma'tok staves, before ducking into the cover of a nearby doorway.

Once the immediate threat was out of view, Vala sagged against the wall, bleeding from a shoulder injury inflicted by the enemy Jaffa who was too stubborn to die properly.

While Daniel stood to her full height and helped Bra'tac cover the Goa'uld whose hair could still be seen in great contrast to the dirt-colored architecture, Teal'c grabbed Vala by her tactical vest and pulled her back around the corner. "You are injured, ValaMalDoran," she said simply.

"Yeah, I noticed, Muscles," Vala replied through gritted teeth. Although it was hardly a fatal wound, any injury from a Ma'tok staff hurt to an incredible degree. The Goa'uld were not known for deploying humane weapons.

Teal'c began dressing Vala's wound, and Daniel called out to the Goa'uld, "Come on out now! Your Jaffa are all dead, you're outnumbered."

"Was that Qetesh I saw get hit?" squeaked the Goa'uld from her cover. The artificially-added gravel was gone from her voice, the charade unnecessary with no underlings in earshot. "And, of course, Apophis's two shol'va as well. It's so nice to see that the Tau'ri are being affected by this curse, too," she gloated. "Who does that make you, then, blondie? Another member of SG-1, I suppose?"

"Ya say that like ya know us," Daniel said.

"Oh, I'm hurt. You don't recognize me? I realize I've done something with my hair since last we crossed paths, but surely you can at least make a guess," the Goa'uld snarked back.

"These slaves to a false god were all branded by Ba'al," Bra'tac growled. "Do you claim to be him?"

"First prize to the traitor," Ba'al replied.

"An' what in tarnation are ya doing here?" Daniel shot back.

"The same thing I imagine you're doing: trying to find Kaggen, to force him to restore my host to its proper shape." Ba'al paused before adding, "I'm sure O'Neill could tell you just how good I am at interrogation." SG-1's first encounter with Ba'al had been when then-Colonel Jack O'Neill infiltrated a base controlled by the System Lord, and was subsequently captured and interrogated. Ba'al's method of interrogation included repeatedly torturing his subject to death, and then resurrecting them with a Goa'uld sarcophagus. Nobody had been able to get Jack to tell them how many times Ba'al had killed him, and Daniel suspected that Jack had actually lost count.

At that moment, Ba'al was forced to duck under the butt of Teal'c's staff. After dressing Vala's wound, the Jaffa had managed to sneak around to a connecting hallway and take the Goa'uld by surprise. The personal defense shield absorbed energy discharges such as staff blasts and it halted high-speed kinetic impacts such as the bullets from a P90, but it permitted slower-moving objects to pass through freely. Slower-moving objects such as a Ma'tok staff being swung like a club.

Ba'al raised her Kara kesh to begin fighting back, but she was too slow. Teal'c grabbed the wrist wrapped in the ribbon device and wrenched it free from its owner's possession. Flushed out of cover with both Bra'tac's and Daniel's weapons pointed at her, and with her personal defense shield lost, Ba'al took the most sensible option available to her: she surrendered.

This was not the first time Ba'al had been taken into custody. Previous capture attempts had always resulted in his eventual escape, and on at least one occasion Ba'al had allowed himself to be captured as part of a long-reaching plot. Daniel was thus understandably cautious as she approached the prisoner with a pair of plasticuffs while Teal'c and Bra'tac kept their weapons trained on the pink Goa'uld.

By the time Ba'al was secured, Vala was back on her feet again. Ba'al noticed her approach and said, "Ah, Qetesh, so nice of you to join us. And as lovely as ever, I see. Managed to escape Kaggen's curse, did you?"

Vala didn't reply as she approached. She stood, staring into Ba'al's now-sapphire eyes in silence.

Then Ba'al doubled over as Vala threw all of her power into a punch with her uninjured arm, hitting the Goa'uld right in the solar plexus. Vala turned away from the groaning System Lord and began to walk back towards the entrance. "Come on, girls, let's get out of here."

PHE-405 – Exterior, Day
There was little talking as the group slogged through the still-muddy plain back to the Stargate. Eventually, however, Daniel broke the silence. "What Ah don't understand is, why you're buying into the 'curse' explanation?" she asked Ba'al. "Ah mean, Ah get tellin' your Jaffa something like that, but why keep using that language with us?"

"What, just because we can do things beyond the comprehension of ignorant brutes means that we can't acknowledge there exist things beyond even ourselves? What was it that your famous Tau'ri writer said? 'There are more things in the universe than you can dream of.'" Ba'al smirked at her ability to reference the culture of her captors.

"Oh please, even I know that's not right," Vala rolled her eyes. Ba'al's smirk morphed into an annoyed scowl.

"'And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But come;
Here, as before, never, so help you mercy,
How strange or odd soe'er I bear myself,
As I perchance hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on,
That you, at such times seeing me, never shall,
With arms encumber'd thus, or this headshake,
Or by pronouncing some doubtful phrase,
As 'Well, well, we know,' or 'We could, an if we would,'
Or 'If we list to speak,' or 'There be, an if they might,'
Or such ambiguous giving out, to note
That you know aught of me: this not to do,
So grace and mercy at your most need help you, Swear.'" Daniel affected a stereotypical Elizabethan accent, all hints of her new voice missing. As she finished her short monologue, she noticed that the other women were all staring at her with stunned interest. Those undergoing transformations had their large ears perked up, capturing every word. Daniel, on the other hand, shrank slightly from the sudden attention.

"I did not know you were a thespian, DanielJackson," Teal'c finally said.

Daniel relaxed slightly as the group continued towards the Stargate. Scratching behind one orange ear, she said, "Aw, well... that scene struck me when Ah was the laughing stock of the archaeological community. Ah mean, Ah'm still a laughing stock, but at least we know Ah was right. The pyramids were landing pads for alien space ships." Daniel sighed slightly, kicking at a rock in her path. It flew a good ten feet before getting buried in the soggy ground of a small knoll. "Hamlet and Horatio saw a ghost. Hamlet reminded Horatio that just because you don't think it can be true, doesn't mean you should ignore the evidence in front of your eyes. Ah guess Ah felt the same way about my hypotheses."

PHE-405 – Stargate
The transformations did not stop just because the victims were awake. By the time the group reached the Stargate near sundown, the fur had covered their arms and necks, beginning to spread onto their torsos, ready to meet the creeping fur coming up from their legs. Their fingers had begun to stiffen and thicken, and all four of them were walking with a noticeable hunch, as the shape of their pelvis shifted. Finally, their skulls had begun to change, with mouth and nose pushing forward.

Daniel could no longer fit her index fingers behind the trigger guard of her weapons. Her strength, however, had proven to be unmatched by any human beyond possibly the best strongmen, and she thus didn't actually feel unarmed. She didn't have the same training in close-quarters fighting that soldiers like Mitchell or Carter had, but sheer power could make up for a fair bit.

Teal'c and Bra'tac continued to hold onto their staff weapons, and were certainly able to operate the simple button controls built into the haft, but their grip was loose, and it was unlikely they would be able to effectively use them in mêlée.

Vala stepped up to the dialing console in front of the Stargate, and entered the coordinates for Earth. Once the wormhole was established, she entered her personal iris code into her GDO, the only member of the group who could still easily press the small buttons.

"Vala, I'm sure you can imagine my opinion of your actions over the past twenty-four hours," a grumpy-sounding General Landry's voice came over the radio.

"Don't worry, general! We brought you a present!" Vala replied with a fresh injection of cheer for being nearly home.

"A present? Are you saying that you four captured Ka—"

With her back turned to Ba'al, Vala didn't see the prisoner begin to move. Daniel, Teal'c, and Bra'tac, in the middle of the most physically awkward portion of their transformation thus far, could not react quickly enough to prevent her from taking her opportunistic attack.

A simple body-check in Vala's back was enough to send her flying into the event horizon and through the Stargate. As Ba'al slowly turned back to her remaining captors with pink ears flat and teeth bared, her curly hair spontaneously fell straight, emitting a curious sound reminiscent of a deflating balloon. A stunned silence settled over her opponents, and Ba'al casually pulled her hands apart as though her plasticuffs were made of paper.

"She..." Daniel stammered, "Nobody gave us the go-ahead to enter. The iris wasn't open yet!"

Ba'al put on a manic grin. The two Jaffa levelled their staff weapons at her, while Daniel began screaming into her radio, begging the technicians at the other end to open the iris, hoping against hope that she could get the message through in the few seconds it would take Vala's pattern to cross the galaxy.

Ba'al's ear twitched, and she leapt into motion. A split second later, both Ma'tok staves opened fire at the position she was. The Goa'uld rushed inside Teal'c's effective firing range. A quick strike, blocked by the staff, knocked it from Teal'c's tenuous grip.

Following a flip of her tail, Ba'al kicked straight out behind her, where Bra'tac was approaching from. The elder Jaffa attempted to block, gripping the staff in a fashion that would prevent her from being disarmed. On the plus side, she managed to keep her hold on the staff. However, Ba'al's kick was powerful enough to snap Bra'tac's staff in two, sending the winged warrior up and away. Her head collided, hard, with the top of the gate before her momentum took her through the event horizon, as well.

Teal'c let out a wordless roar and begin swinging with all her might. Ba'al ducked and weaved, she blocked and parried, and Teal'c failed to land a single effective blow.

Eventually, Teal'c overextended with a thrust, and Ba'al made sure to make her pay for it. The Goa'uld compensated for her poor grip by using both hands, grabbing Teal'c by her wrist and elbow. She spun in a semicircle, her straight pink hair fanning out, in a manner that might be called "majestic" in another context, before executing an over-the-shoulder throw. Teal'c landed just short of the wormhole, but she crossed its event horizon before she could roll to a stop.

And then there was one.

Daniel unclipped the P90 from her tactical vest, which she wasn't able to operate anyway, and tossed it to the side. With one hoof digging into the dirt she said, "Ah don't care how useful you might be in interrogation. Yer dead."

"Bring it, hayseed!" Ba'al cried. Then she paused, her stance relaxing slightly in confusion over what she'd just said.

Daniel charged during Ba'al's moment of distraction, her arms outstretched. There was no technique, little strategy. Only main force.

Ba'al met her directly, their hands grappling with limited effectiveness wherever they could find a hold on each other.

The force of Daniel's charge pushed Ba'al back a full five feet before the Goa'uld managed to slow the other woman's advance. Deep gouges in the rain-softened earth trailed from Ba'al's hooves as she resisted Daniel's push towards the gate.

Eventually, Daniel's advance halted, the steam built up from her charge expended. Both combatants strained against the other for several moments, until Ba'al's eyes widened as Daniel found purchase and began to push Ba'al further once again.

Ba'al tried to move one hoof to find something better to brace against, but it was a fatal error. Cutting Daniel's resistance in half only made her job easier, and in moments Ba'al was close enough to the wormhole that she could have reached out and touched the event horizon.

Beads of sweat rolled down Daniel's face. A vein began to pop out against her neck. Ba'al made her fight for every inch, but it was clear at this point that despite the Goa'uld's great strength in her new body, Daniel's was greater. Ba'al began to panic, when her tail began to swish of its own volition, lightly brushing against the rippling blue event horizon of the Stargate.

Ba'al gave Daniel a toothy grin. Daniel should have noticed and realized something was up, but she was too focused on forcing her opponent into the wormhole. Whether her intent was to send Ba'al back to Earth, or somehow disengage the gate while Ba'al was partway through – severing anything that had passed the event horizon – none could say. With a jerk, Ba'al suddenly twisted out of Daniel's grip, completely abandoning the contest of strength. Daniel couldn't abandon her struggle so easily, though, and with nothing resisting her push she tumbled forward into the Stargate. "Aw, bisc—" she managed to get out before the wormhole engulfed her.

Alone on Kaggen's planet, Ba'al grinned from ear to ear as her hair sprang back into its earlier set of dense curls with a boing sound just as curious as the deflating balloon that had accompanied it turning straight. She casually walked back to the Stargate's dialing console. She began pressing buttons, first shutting down the connection to Earth, and then dialing some other gate address, and stepping through when then new connection was complete.

Once Ba'al was gone, the Stargate shut down again on its own, and PHE-405 stood silent once again.

Author's Note

I wish I could draw, so I could have a picture of Vala and Daniel doing the brushie brushie. :ajsmug:

Chapter 5: Message in a Bottle

Stargate Command Control Room
"Unscheduled offworld activation!" Harriman shouted into his microphone as klaxons began going off. He slapped his hand on the iris controls and the gate was quickly sealed behind the interlocking sheets of metal.

"What have we got, Walter?" General Landry asked, as he walked up behind the Chief Master Sergeant.

"We have a signal coming in now, sir." A moment later, the computer had identified the signal as Vala's GDO code. "It's Vala!"

Sergeant Harriman looked up to the general standing next to him for orders, who sighed and nodded. The sergeant pressed his hand on the iris control again, opening up the gate for travelers.

Hank leaned over the radio equipment and called the unsanctioned expedition, "Vala, I'm sure you can imagine my opinion of your actions over the past twenty-four hours."

Vala's voice crackled over the control room speakers, "Don't worry, general! We brought you a present!"

The general's eyes widened with surprise and he glanced to Walter before responding, "A present? Are you saying that you four captured Ka—"

Before he could complete his thought, he was interrupted by shouting from the other end of the connection. A few confused and worried glances were shared between the people in the control room, before an unfamiliar female voice began shouting over the radio, begging them to open the iris, that Vala had either gone through or been thrown through the wormhole – the message was slightly unclear, as the speaker was hysterical.

Long before anyone could properly digest the message or react to it, Vala came flying through the Stargate head-first, landing painfully at the base of the ramp. General Landry gave a silent prayer of thanks that he had already ordered the iris opened, or else Vala would be a fine mist of subatomic particles right now.

"Medical team to the gate room!" Landry ordered over the base intercom. To the speakers in the gate room, he said, "Defense teams, stand by!"

Just after he finished issuing the orders, another figure flew through the top of the gate, spinning end over end, out of control. One of Bra'tac's new wings caught on the barrel of one of the floor-mounted M2s and made a wet snap as the altered trajectory left her face-planting right next to its operator.

Seeing one of the transformation victims in the gate room, General Landry quickly revised his earlier orders. He instructed the defense teams to stand back and report to quarantine, and the medical team to be wearing hazmat suits.

Teal'c came next, as the defense teams were closing the blast doors leading out of the room. Her yellow form rolled to a stop halfway down the ramp to the gate, and some of her long pink hair became tangled in the ramp's grating.

The atmosphere in the control room was tense. There was no word on what exactly was happening on the other side of the gate, and with Daniel on the other side, they couldn't simply close the iris. The team members that had returned, on top of being injured, were alone, since the general refused to risk spreading the infection any further than it already had been.

It wasn't until the hazmat-suited medical team began filing into the gate room that Daniel stumbled through the wormhole. She tripped at the threshold, performed an unintentional somersault, and ended her entrance in a sitting position, legs splayed, just in front of Teal'c prone body.

As soon as everyone had been accounted for, Harriman slammed the iris closed. A few seconds later, the wormhole disengaged.

"Well," someone said from the back of the room, "I suppose that could have gone worse."

Stargate Command Isolation Room 2
Eventually, the mess in the embarkation room had been sorted out, and Daniel and Teal'c had been returned to their respective isolation rooms. Mitchell had been transferred to her quarters, Bra'tac taking her place, since the actual isolation rooms offered better access to the medical care that she was in dire need of than any living quarters were.

As the only member of the unsanctioned team still conscious, Daniel was the one to be debriefed first. She described in detail the majority of their trip to Kaggen's world, only leaving out Vala brushing her hair the night before. Daniel tried to describe the writing they had found on the walls of Kaggen's compound, but Vala and her conspirators had been responsible for packing the gear, and had neglected to include any kind of camera to record with.

When Daniel finally revealed that Ba'al was in fact in the base looking for Kaggen, too, and described the System Lord's new appearance, the general stopped her. "You mean the Goa'uld's healing abilities doesn't make them immune to this affliction, either?"

Doctor Lam, also observing the debrief, cut in, "No, that makes sense. The symbiotes can only drastically accelerate the body's natural healing and hyper-charge the body's immune response. They can't do anything completely outside the realm of their host's biology."

"Do you suppose Ba'al's clones would be experiencing the transformations as well?" Hank asked his daughter.

Lam nodded, "If this transformation is being caused by some trigger buried deep within human DNA, any of Ba'al's clones exposed to the same trigger would experience the same transformation. And it seems so far that everyone in the galaxy has been exposed to whatever the trigger is close enough to simultaneously." After a beat, she added, "It may have even been a clone that Daniel and the others encountered on Kaggen's world."

"How could everypony in the galaxy be exposed simultaneously?" Daniel asked from the room below.

Carolyn and Hank exchanged a look. "Did you say 'everybody in the galaxy,' Daniel?" Doctor Lam asked.

Daniel nodded, "Yeah, everypony in the galaxy. Even the Dakara superweapon needed to activate all the Stargates in the Milky Way network at once in order t'get everywhere, and we needed Ba'al's help t'get that done."

Some time ago, SG-1 had enlisted Ba'al's help to use an Ancient device on the Jaffa homeworld in order to simultaneously eliminate all of the robotic Replicators overrunning humans and Goa'uld alike. Ba'al used his skill with the Stargate network to open every gate simultaneously to allow the energy wave to emanate from Dakara to every world with a Stargate and destroy the Replicators before they had a chance to adapt or escape the wave's effective range.

"I'll add a psych eval to the battery of tests my patients are getting," Doctor Lam whispered to General Landry.

Landry bade Daniel to continue her account of the events on Kaggen's planet, including capturing Ba'al and her subsequent escape at the gate.

"The way you describe Ba'al's hand-to-hand technique... it's almost as if he... she, whatever. It's almost as if she could see the attacks coming, or at least some of them. Whatever early-warning system she's using, it's hardly impenetrable, as Teal'c demonstrated when you captured her, but we may need more information about her new armament before facing her next time," the general mused, mostly to himself.

"It couldn't be something on her," Daniel said, "we searched her pretty thoroughly. Ah suppose it could be some kind of implant, though."

"Thank you, Doctor Jackson, we'll keep you apprised of the situation," Landry said as he stood to leave.

"Wait! How is Vala? And Flut—Teal’c and Bra’tac? Doctor Lam, Vala said she interpreted something you said the other day as this transformation not being contagious. Was she right?"

Carolyn nodded to General Landry, and he continued his way out of the room, while the doctor settled in to discuss the status of the others who tried to track down Kaggen.

"Teal'c was knocked out, but she's a fighter; she really just needs rest at this point. She's got some heavy bruising and a few lacerations, but she'll heal. Knowing her, I've had her sedated for now," she began. "Vala has a severe concussion, and the shoulder injury from the staff blast you described, but beyond that she just has minor scrapes and bruises. Outside of a Goa'uld healing device, the only thing left we can do for her is to wait and see. And, of course, we don't have anyone available to use a healing device on her."

"What about asking the Tok'ra for help?" Daniel asked.

"We've been trying to get in contact with them since this fiasco began, but no luck yet. You know how they can be sometimes," Lam said. "In fact, considering Ba'al is being transformed, they may be trying to deal with this thing as much as we are." If one of the Tok'ra operatives were affected, they certainly wouldn't be able to go on any new assignments; they'd stick out like a sore thumb. And the Tok'ra already had dismal manpower to begin with.

Doctor Lam sighed. "Bra'tac had it the worst," she said. "One wing has a compound fracture. They're far too small to fly with, obviously, but she'll be in extreme pain regardless. She's also got a few cracked ribs, a hairline skull fracture, and multiple other problems." Doctor Lam looked down to Daniel with sympathy, "Bra'tac is in surgery now. If she still had her symbiote, I'd give her excellent odds for survival. As it is... the surgeon and his assistants all have to be in hazmat suits, and Bra'tac is on Tretonin. This will be touch-and-go for a while, if she survives at all."

"Well, there's a silver lining on every raincloud, Ah suppose," Daniel mused.

"Oh? What's that?"

"General Landry opened the iris in time to save Vala's life. Ah'll be content with that, for now. What about Vala catching whatever we've got?" Daniel reminded the doctor.

"We've taken a number of tissue samples from her, and we'll be monitoring her status closely. If she shows no signs of transformation for long enough, I may lift some of my team's containment procedures, and General Landry might even end our isolation and quarantine."

"That'd be nice," Daniel said, as Doctor Lam excused herself to make her evening rounds.

Stargate Command, Colonel Carter's Lab
Samantha Carter was pecking away at her laptop keyboard, gripping a pencil in each gnarled hand to hit the keys. Her fingers had begun merging together, and there was no way she would be able to type; not only was the manual dexterity of her hands completely shot, but each finger would most likely hit multiple keys at a time unless she was extremely careful.

Her blue-feathered wings twitched in irritation at how slowly she was composing her email, but it was better than the utter frustration she would be suffering if she had tried to type the way she was used to, with human hands. She certainly couldn't do anything but acknowledge that her hands were not human, not any more. Based on the rest of her appearance, they'd likely be hooves by the morning. Despite assurances to the contrary, it seemed Doctor Sheffield's drug cocktail had done nothing to prevent the transformation.

Eventually, however, even as painfully slow as it was to type, Sam finally sent the message.

To: daniel.jackson@cmc.af.mil
From: samantha.carter@cmc.af.mil
Subject: Re: PHK-519-alpha message translation

A comment Dr. Lam made about your debrief gave me an idea; what if the signal to start the transformation was coming from subspace? What if the radiation-message being emitted by PHK-519-alpha is only part of the puzzle, and somehow whoever made this thing created a subspace beacon out of felt?

A subspace beacon would have a relatively limited range, but it would be able to reach all humans and human-descendants such as Jaffa nearly instantaneously. A powerful enough beacon could cover a significant fraction of the Milky Way.

Sure, it's a bit out there, but we've seen stranger things, right?

Well, maybe not. But still, since I'm at a dead-end I figured it was worth checking to see if there was a subspace signal being emitted, and I was right!

The subspace signal itself doesn't mean anything to me, although it could be encrypted. However, I tried an algorithm to convert the radiation into a polarized EM wave, and converted the subspace signal into a polarized wave perpendicular to the wave generated by the radiation... the result looks promising, almost like a radio signal.

Attached is an audio file generated by treating the combination as a radio broadcast. It's still not ideal, but any help would be appreciated.

Recover quickly, please,
Sam

PS: I hate how hard it is to type with my hands transforming like this, and I seriously doubt I'm going to have fingers much longer. Except for the fact that I'm keeping my mind, I think this is worse than P3X-797's "Touched" disease.

To: daniel.jackson@cmc.af.mil
From: samantha.carter@cmc.af.mil
Subject: Re: PHK-519-alpha message translation

What the hell are you thinking, Daniel?! I know you won't see this message until you get back from Vala's stupid joyride, but dammit, I need you here! I need your help on this one!

PS: If Dr. Lam is right about Kaggen's involvement, it would go a long way towards explaining why my mice are immune.

To: daniel.jackson@cmc.af.mil
From: samantha.carter@cmc.af.mil
Subject: PHK-519-alpha message translation

Daniel,

The radiation being emitted by PHK-519-alpha contains a repeating structure, I suspect some kind of message. Unfortunately, there's not really enough data for me to decipher it, even assuming it's not in some code. I was hoping you'd be able to help.

Relevant files attached.

PS: None of my mice have transformed at all.

Thanks,
Sam

In a surprisingly short amount of time, Sam heard a ping as her laptop received a new email, a reply from Daniel.

To: samantha.carter@cmc.af.mil
From: daniel.jackson@cmc.af.mil
Cc: cameron.balinsky@cmc.af.mil
Subject: Re: PHK-519-alpha message translation

CC Cameron Belinsky

Sorry about leaving you high and dry, Sam. Bhalla didn't really give me much choice. She's not either than a porta potty at a peanut festival sometimes. I'll see what I can do with the audio. Cameron, care to assist? Lamb says if Bhalla doesn't transform we may be out of isolation, to. PS you should try using a dictation program. It's not perfect, but I bet it's less aggravating than whatever you're doing now.

Sam had to pause while reading to decipher some of the results of Daniel's speech-to-text program. "Not either than" was especially egregious, until she paired it with the rest of the sentence. Although she was alone in her lab, Sam still covered her snout with her soon-to-be hoof to muffle the snickering.

Stargate Command Infirmary
Vala and the defense team that had been present when her merry band returned were all stuck in quarantine while the doctors processed their tissue samples to see if the infection had spread. The marines, otherwise healthy, had been sent to their quarters. Vala, on the other hand, had needed medical assistance, and so an inflatable quarantine tent had been added to the infirmary.

A heart monitor beeped steadily as Dr. Greene entered the tent in full gear to change Vala's saline IV drip. Conveniently, that was exactly the moment Vala chose to regain consciousness.

With a groan, Vala tried to sit up, but Colleen was quick to push her back down. "Ah, ah, ah!" She cautioned. "You've got a nasty concussion. You're not getting out of bed today, and if Doctor Lam has anything to say about it, you're not going through the gate again for at least a week." After a pause, she added, "Although I suppose you can't leave quarantine until we clear you, anyway."

"What... what happened?" Vala struggled to speak while Greene changed the IV bag.

"Everyone got back home alive, if that's what you're asking," she said. "Beyond that, you'll have to ask Doctor Lam. She sat in on Daniel's debrief while I was stuck doing paperwork," the doctor grimaced at the memory.

After that, Greene began asking Vala a series of questions, not about the unsanctioned mission – although elements of it did come up in Vala's answers – but rather she asked questions designed to gauge the extent of Vala's brain injury.

When she was finished with her medical interrogation, Dr. Colleen Greene stepped out of the quarantine tent and very nearly collided with Dr. Lam.

"How's our patient?" Lam asked as Dr. Greene struggled out of her hazmat suit.

"Still suffering symptoms," Greene said. "She's mostly coherent, although she did get confused a few times while I was talking to her. No headaches or dizziness, at least not for the moment, and her vision's good. I added it all to her patient notes."

"Sounds promising."

"Well, at least she's got no option other than getting rest," Greene said as she put her hazmat suit on a hanger. "At least, until we get her DNA results back."

"Don't be too certain," Lam smirked, "she already broke out of the base once. With force."

Air Force Academy Hospital
Cassandra Fraiser had been happily attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Las Vegas when the whole shitshow began. When she began having personal issues a couple years ago, Sam had juggled her career to help, taking a post at Area 51 just 3 hours of desert road from Cassandra's dorm. Instead of going through the Stargate, Sam spent her time investigating alien artifacts that the SGC brought home. Eventually, though, Cassandra managed to get her life in order, and didn't need to lean on Sam for support. Then Mitchell had brought the original SG-1 back together, and Sam was finally able to return to Cheyenne Mountain.

When the transformations began, Cassandra had initially thought that perhaps it was one last echo of the manipulations Nirrti had done to her body. Then Cassandra learned that it was affecting more people than just her, and the next obvious conclusion to her was still some kind of alien contagion. She dropped out of her classes for the remainder of the spring semester, and made her way back to Colorado Springs... only to discover that the SGC was on total lockdown. It took surprisingly few pulled strings to get herself into the USAFA Hospital's isolation wing. Of course, those same strings apparently quickly got word to the Pentagon, and she received a call from "Uncle Jack", checking up on her.

By the evening of May 3rd, Cassandra's hair had gone two-tone light purple and pink with curls, with a tail to match. Her eyes had gone from a greenish-hazel to a much deeper, pale green. She had grown a white fur coat, a stubby horn in the center of her forehead. Her feet had become hooves, and her hands were well on their way to being the same. She even had a pair of images on her butt of a musical note inside a star inside a shield.

Perhaps living up to her name, nobody at the hospital had believed her when she had suggested the end-stage of the transformation would be equine. When the doctors had finally admitted that her prediction was likely true, the ones that had remembered her had questioned her about how she had known what was going to happen.

At the time, she had claimed that she had seen it in a dream – perhaps not helping her image as a Grecian Cassandra.

It wasn't a complete lie; she had had several dreams of ponies like her. As time passed, however, Cassandra became slowly convinced that she was not dreaming fantasies constructed from a combination of imagination and terrible reality. Instead, she was dreaming of memories.

"What are we gonna do?! There's no way we can beat him!" Scootaloo cried as the group of mares, each at the dawn of adulthood, took shelter in an empty house.

"We need to get to Princess Twilight," I said. "If she doesn't know what Discord's doing yet, we need to tell her. And if she already knows, then there won't be anywhere safer than by a Princess."

"Uh, Ah hate t'burst yer bubble, Sweetie," Apple Bloom looked uncomfortable, "but Applejack took Twi to Canterlot this morning."

"Rainbow Dash is on tour with the Wonderbolts," Scootaloo frowned.

"The Boutique is only a few blocks away!" I said. "We can get Rarity! She was so excited to hang out with me during my spring break, she made sure to be in Ponyville."

The three mares poked their heads out of the house's front door, finding the streets of Ponyville deserted. "C'mon, let's go!" Scootaloo said as she burst onto the street and began galloping at her not-inconsiderable top speed.

Apple Bloom and I were quick on her tail. By the time the Carousel Boutique was in view, my heart was pounding and my breathing was labored. As much as I enjoyed my time attending Hoofschule Fur Musik und Tanz in Germaney, I certainly wasn't getting the kind of regular workout as I did as a filly, running around every day and crusading with my two best friends.

"Ack!" Scootaloo squeaked as she smacked face-first into a giant green jello salad that hadn't been there a second earlier.

Apple Bloom and I managed to slow down and stop before hitting the ambush dessert. I was glad to be done with running, but the jello was a sure sign Discord was somewhere nearby. "Where is he?" I asked, looking around frantically.

Scootaloo pulled herself out of the jello with a wet sucking noise, bits of bright green gelatin dripping from her head. "I don't know, but I'm not waiting to find out!" She said, as she began running around the giant jello in order to continue to our original destination.

With a crack, the patchwork demon appeared in front of us, blocking Scootaloo's forward progress once again. "Where do you think you're going, Chicken Little?" he asked her.

"RUN!" I screamed to my friends. Apple Bloom leapt to the left and began galloping for her life. I did the same, in the opposite direction. I spared a thought for Scootaloo, already within arm's reach of Discord, and then I heard her scream. My guts twisted. I was too weak to even watch, much less do anything to try and help her. I tried to pour on the speed, with a stitch forming in my side.

Then Scootaloo's scream was silenced. In the span of a breath, I heard Apple Bloom's scream begin.

If I could just get to Rarity, everything could be fixed. It would all be okay.

If I could just get the next thirty yards, I would be safe.

Apple Bloom's scream was cut off. I noticed my hooves were no longer hitting the dirt. I was floating in the air, and Rarity's door wasn't getting any closer.

Discord casually walked up to me, and I sagged in place. It was all over, the monster had won.

"What, giving up? How positively boring," he complained. "Tell me, what do you think of my little 'and then there were none' performance? I mean, I admit it's not over yet, there's still one little pony left..." Discord hummed to himself and said, "You know, you're not that much younger now than your sister was when we first met. She turned me to stone. What can you do?"

For a moment, I wished I was a magical prodigy like Princess Twilight had been. I wished I had been studying how to make walls of flame and telekinetic blades, instead of how to belt out arias and ballads. All I could do was flail my legs ineffectually.

Discord simply laughed at my attempts. "It's good to see a bit of fight left in you. But you must understand, the sisters of Generosity and Honesty absolutely must go."

"And Scootaloo?" I asked through clenched teeth, trying to hold my composure and not break down in tears.

Discord shrugged. "Wrong place, wrong time."

The door to the Boutique slowly opened – no squeaking, that would hardly do for Rarity – and revealed a Rarity with her eyes filled with rage.

"Let. Her. GO!"

Discord's eagle claw began to glow with a purple light. "If the screams of everypony else are anything to go by," he told me calmly, while facing Rarity who had begun charging her horn and rushing towards us, "this is going to hurt. A lot."

Discord booped me on the nose with his glowing claw. The purple aura drained into my face, and my body filled with white-hot pain. Despite my attempt to bottle it up, a pained shriek escaped my throat as Discord began to chant.

Rarity unleashed her attack, interrupting the chant. Aetherial gems cut through the air and began slashing at Discord's body repeatedly, forming an angry cloud around the beast.

I felt my body finally hit the ground as Discord moved to defend himself from my sister's assault, and then the world went dark.

There was no question in Cassandra's mind any more. "Cassandra" was a fabrication, a human that should never have existed. The same was true of all of the other humans in the grip of the transformation "plague".

Discord had stolen decades of her life, the lives of her friends, the lives of her family, and the lives of ponies across Equestria.

There was only one organization on the planet that might believe that the ponies were a race of aliens, and that they were all in need of help. The doctors at the Air Force Academy Hospital would hardly allow her out of isolation, and the SGC was on lockdown. But Earth's defenses had never met a unicorn spell before, even one with a limited set of spells at her disposal.

The USAFA Hospital had relatively few pony patients. One wing had been converted into isolation for the ponies, and the rooms were all single-occupancy. Outside of any medical emergencies, the doctors and nurses were done with Sweetie for the day, and she hardly planned to press the nurse call button while trying to escape.

A quick cast of Mythal's Muffling on the walls of her room helped to ensure that none of the humans would hear her departure until it was too late. Although the windows didn't open, Redbelly's Resonance Recognition told her the tone that would shatter them.

With a deep breath, Sweetie held a single note, pitch-perfect, for several seconds, until the window was no longer an obstacle to her escape. A little bit of telekinesis brushed the glass that had landed inside out of the way, so that she wouldn't hurt herself walking around. Some of the glass had fallen on the ground below, and there wasn't much she could do about that, unfortunately.

Sweetie had been placed in a room on the second floor, and although it may have been cliché, she had a solution that didn't involve breaking any legs: an escape rope made from bedsheets. After tying the sheets together and adding a few knots to make her descent easier, Sweetie anchored the makeshift rope to the bed, shoved it to the window, and tossed the rope outside.

Belatedly, she realized there might be a flaw in her plan: She wasn't actually certain whether there was a window on the first floor below her. She wasn't even sure whether she was above another patient room or not. She cursed herself for not doing more research before attempting her escape, but she had already committed to action.

In order to mitigate the consequences of her mistake, Sweetie hung her drawstring bag with her belongings around her neck before scooting down her escape rope as fast as she could. Maybe if she went quickly, she could avoid getting spotted. The sun had already set, and all she could hope for at this point was luck.

When she got to the end of her rope, she learned three things: one, that it wasn't quite long enough. There was still another six feet or so between her and the ground. Two, there was in fact a window below hers, and as she swung around on the end of her rope, she was in full view of the room on the other side.

The third thing she learned was that the room below her's was a nurse's station, and it was occupied.

The head nurse looked up when she saw Sweetie moving outside, and her mouth dropped into a small "O" of surprise. Sweetie gave her an awkward grin with a muzzle that hadn't quite finished its transformation and a small wave, before letting go of the rope and dropping to the ground hard on her tail.

"Ouch," Sweetie grumbled to herself, before scrambling to her hooves. The nurse would surely raise some kind of alarm soon, so she had to make use of what head start was available to her.

But how to get to the SGC? Highway 87 would be the easiest route, and it was almost a straight shot to Cheyenne Mountain, but it would also be the most open route, where she would be more likely to be discovered.

Sweetie levitated her smartphone out of her bag, as well as the pencil she had been using as a stylus. She kept her eyes out for people wandering the hospital grounds, trying to stick to shadows where she could. As she ran, she opened her Maps application and considered her options.

"Offroad will be harder, but it'll be worth it to keep a low profile," she muttered to herself.

As she passed under another window, Sweetie heard someone inside saying something about "code green" and sharing her description. The pony hunt was afoot!

While she prioritized getting off the hospital grounds, where the hospital staff and security would surely spend most of their initial search time, she brought up the contacts list on her phone, and called one particular number.

Two rings, and the call was picked up. "Cassie, do you know what time it is over here?"

"Hello to you, too, Uncle Jack!" Sweetie squeaked with a smile. As much as Discord had stolen her life in Equestria, she had managed to make a human life on Hanka, and when Nirrti had destroyed that, she rebuilt on Earth.

"I should be asleep," Jack grumped into the phone.

"Oh come on! It's only, what, ten o'clock in Virginia? You're not that old yet, are you?"

"Some days it feels like I'm older than dirt!" Jack laughed. "What's up, kiddo?"

"Oh, you know me, getting into trouble and taking advantage of nepotism in the military to get out of it," Sweetie said flippantly, and Jack laughed on the other end of the line. "You may be getting a call from USAFA soon, I figured I should talk to you before they do."

"Please, tell me you didn't mastermind a breakout from the hospital," Jack sighed.

"Okay. I did, though."

"Cassie, we still don't know if this thing is contagious or not. We need you back in isolation," Jack scolded.

"Tell you what: if you come and meet me at the SGC, I'll let you scold me all you like," Sweetie Belle said, before hanging up without waiting for a response. With a quick glance to her map to orient herself, she slipped past the boundaries of the hospital grounds, and pulled the battery from her phone, placing the parts back in her bag. Sweetie wasn't sure if General O'Neill would try to track her down before she reached Cheyenne Mountain, but it didn't seem to be worth the risk.

Sweetie took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. With a sense of hope for herself and the rest of Discord's victims, she began an easy canter south.

Author's Note

Also, yes, in fact, I did write the body of Daniel's email with a voice-to-text program.

Chapter 6: Shadowfax Made it Look Easy

Ute Valley Park, Night
After hiking through the less-populated portions of Colorado Springs for several hours, Sweetie Belle found herself in a large public park. She could clearly smell that the park's various trees were popular with the dogs in the area as she made her way onto one of the hiking trails.

Sweetie was sweating and breathing hard; perhaps assuming she could trot from the USAFA Hospital to the SGC was arrogant of her, but at least it was cold and breezy in the middle of the night. It's not like driving would be much easier, even if it might be faster. And if she got pulled over, she certainly didn't look like the picture of "Cassandra" on her driver's license any more. Besides, her rental car probably had LoJack or something similar, and General O'Neill could probably get someone to track her that way. Maybe even a kill switch. Could LoJack do that? Sweetie had no idea, and she didn't intend to find out the hard way.

She rounded a bend in the trail and saw a building ahead, with a few picnic tables in the adjacent clearing. As she drew close, she could see that the building housed a pair of restrooms and, more importantly to Sweetie after hiking for so long, a water fountain.

Sweetie summoned a burst of energy to gallop up to the water fountain. She was just barely able to reach the children's fountain without rearing up as she approached; she attempted to push the button with her telekinesis, but her magical grip slipped off like water on a duck's back. Her brow furrowed in confusion. That's never happened before, she thought. She tried to push the water fountain's button again, with the same result. Writing it off as a consequence of her transformation being not quite completed, she reached up to the button with one hoof and began drinking like she had been lost in the desert, albeit slightly awkwardly.

When she finally stepped away, she once again regretted her hastiness in leaving the hospital without thorough planning. Hydration was important for a long trek, she knew that. It was the sort of thing you simply learned from osmosis being around either doctors or the military for decades, and Sweetie – as Cassandra – had been subject to both. But she had set out without even bringing a bottle of water, and now that she had found water on her route she didn't have anything to keep the water in for the next leg of her journey.

Sweetie sat against the outer wall of the men's restroom and levitated her phone and battery out of her bag, and her makeshift stylus. There was a slight hesitation, a worry that trying to manipulate her phone would fall to the same failure that she had experienced with the water fountain, but nothing unexpected happened. After reassembling and booting up her phone, she once again opened her Maps application to orient herself and make sure she was keeping on track. Assuming General O'Neill left the Pentagon as soon as possible, he'd probably reach the SGC within maybe three hours. She probably wouldn't be able to get there on hoof for another five.

With a sigh, Sweetie pulled the battery from her phone again. Maybe Uncle Jack got delayed. Or maybe he decided to nap before coming out, she thought.

The young unicorn's ears perked up, as she heard sniffling echoing from within the women's restroom. Isn't the park closed this late?

Curious, Sweetie stood and crept towards the other side of the building. Light was pouring out from the bathroom's door, which hung ajar. As Sweetie approached, the light shut off. She nosed the door open wide enough to make her way inside, and as her hooves clopped on the tile floor the motion sensors noticed her and turned the lights back on once again.

Whether due to her hoofsteps or the return of the lighting, whoever was sniffling in the bathroom stopped. Sweetie poked her head around the corner into the bathroom proper to find a young girl sitting in the corner, her eyes puffy and red. She had blonde hair, half of it held in a single pigtail with a little pink bow while the other half hung loosely, but looked like it had recently been done up in the same way. She wore a frilly white blouse under dirty, equally frilly, pink overalls.

The girl looked up at Sweetie in wonder. "A pony?" She asked. "I didn't know there were ponies in the park." Then she noticed Sweetie's horn, and squealed, "A unicorn?!"

Sweetie winced as her ears folded back to protect her from the high-pitched noise. Perhaps it was karma for the amount of aural damage she and the rest of the Crusaders inflicted on the adults around them as fillies, but it also meant that she could only manage an uncertain half-step backwards as the human girl pushed herself up off the floor and practically threw herself around Sweetie's neck.

"I always wanted a pony, TJ is just too big, and a unicorn is just so much better!" the girl cried into Sweetie's mane, her words coming a mile a minute.

"Hey, I need to breathe!" Sweetie complained.

The girl gasped, releasing Sweetie more to look into the unicorn's face than to comply with her request for air. "You can talk?!" the girl squeaked with glee.

Sweetie chuckled to herself, getting an idea of exactly how this conversation was about to go. "Of course I can talk, all unicorns can talk."

The girl inhaled, ready to squeal again, but Sweetie cut her off with a hoof gently placed over the girl's lips. "How about we start over?" Sweetie asked. "My name is Sweetie Belle. What's yours?"

Sweetie removed her hoof, and the girl replied, "My name's Molly. Molly Williams."

With a gleam of mischievousness in her eye, Sweetie said, "I am pleased to meet you, Molly Molly Williams."

"No!" Molly stamped her foot in frustration, "It's Molly Williams, not Molly Molly Williams!"

"My apologies," Sweetie gave Molly an exaggerated bow, "I am pleased to meet you, Molly Williams Not Molly Molly Williams. If I may say so, your name is quite the mouthful."

"No, that's not right!" Molly complained. Sweetie couldn't help it anymore, and started laughing. Once Molly realized it was all just a joke, she managed to join in with Sweetie's tinkling laughter.

Once the laughter died down, Sweetie asked, "So, Molly, what's a little girl like you doing in a park like this so late at night?"

"Hey!" Molly put her chubby little fists on her hips. "I'm a big girl! I'm almost seven!"

"Oh, my apologies!"

Molly deflated a bit. "I ran away," she admitted. She rubbed at her face a bit, but she had already cried herself dry, and there was nothing to rub away.

Sweetie moved to sit next to Molly, and used her telekinesis to push against the girl's other side in a way she hoped would feel like a comforting arm. It seemed to work, as Molly leaned against Sweetie's side with a sniff. "Do you want to talk about it?" Sweetie asked gently.

"My big sister's stupid," Molly summarized. "I try to do stuff with her, and she just pushes me away to play with her friends." She rubbed one arm across her nose as she sat on the floor next to Sweetie. "I'm gonna show her what it's like without me around."

Sweetie hummed in thought, "You know, I had a similar thing happen to me when I was a filly. I was trying to do things with my big sister, but everything went wrong. We said some harsh words to each other, and I ended up trying to replace my sister with my friend's sister."

"That's a perfect idea!" Molly exclaimed. "I can just replace Megan, and then she'll really know what she's missing out on!"

"Well, I certainly thought it was a good idea at the time," Sweetie said, trying to rub Molly on the back with a hoof, "but eventually we both realized we were being stupid, and we could both hang out together and we could hang out with our separate friends. But more importantly," Sweetie turned to look Molly in the eye, "have you thought about what your parents might feel about you running away?"

Molly looked away and mumbled.

"What was that?" Sweetie asked, despite having a pretty good idea of what Molly had said.

"Mommy and Daddy would be sad," Molly said, chastised.

"And you don't want them to be sad, do you?"

"No..."

Sweetie stood up, and helped Molly to her feet. "Then maybe we should get you back home, huh?"

Sweetie led Molly back outside. The pair began walking down a path away from the rest area, when Molly hesitantly asked, "Can I... ride?"

Sweetie looked Molly up and down, trying to gauge whether that would be at all a good idea. She was about to answer in the affirmative, when Molly mistook the look as a nod. Molly placed two hands on Sweetie's back and lifted herself up, squirming into a seated position. The maneuver was executed inexpertly, but with some experience nonetheless. Molly even scooted forward once she had her seat, coming to rest just behind Sweetie's withers. She grasped the base of Sweetie's mane tightly without pulling painfully, and gripped to Sweetie's barrel with her legs.

"Okay, I'm ready!" Molly said once she had secured her position.

Sweetie started the smoothest trot she could manage. It was nothing compared to Rarity's best – Sweetie had once witnessed Rarity trot around the room while balancing four books on her head, without holding them in place with magic – but it was plenty to make a bareback rider comfortable. Glancing back at her rider, Sweetie said, "I'm surprised. Have you done a lot of riding before?"

"Uh-huh!" Molly nodded. "I ride TJ almost every day! He's too big for me to get on without help or a ladder, though." With a sudden gasp, Molly said, "You should come home with me! You can meet TJ, you two could be bestest friends! And then get married! And I could be the flower girl!"

An image formed in Sweetie's mind of a large Thoroughbred stallion with a chestnut coat looming over her. His eyes were glassy, displaying no hint of sapience. Sweetie blanched at the thought. "That's okay. I'm... not looking for a special somepony right now," she said diplomatically.

Molly seemed disappointed that she wouldn't be able to host a pony wedding, but getting to ride a unicorn through the park prevented her mood from staying low for long. A short way down the trail, lit by Sweetie's horn, Sweetie spotted a pink ribbon that matched the bow in Molly's hair.

Sweetie stopped, levitating the bow for Molly to see. "Is this yours?" She asked.

Molly gasped and nodded enthusiastically, "I lost it earlier! I never thought I was going to see it again!"

"Well, now your pigtails can match," Sweetie smiled.

Molly pouted, "I don't know how to tie a bow... Mommy does my hair for me."

"Oh, well that's okay," Sweetie said. It didn't take much effort for Sweetie to use her telekinesis to gather up the half of Molly's hair that was loose, and she neatly tied the new ribbon into a bow to match its twin.

The pair made smalltalk as Sweetie continued to follow the trail to the edge of the park, until eventually they hit the park's border and a nearby road.

Sweetie's ears twitched as she stopped and turned to her rider, "Sorry, Molly, but the pony ride is over, now."

With a frown, Molly obediently dismounted. "Are you sure—" Molly started, when a voice on the wind caught her attention, and she turned her head.

Further up the road, a car was driving slowly along the curb. Both the driver and passenger windows were open, and a couple were shouting Molly's name desperately into the night.

"Mommy! Daddy!" Molly cried, as she ran through the grass towards the approaching car.

Many tears were shed when Molly reunited with her parents. However, when Molly tried to tell them about the magical unicorn that had convinced her to come back home, she turned around to try and introduce them, only to find no trace of Sweetie Belle.

As Molly climbed into her parents' car, confused by Sweetie's disappearance, Sweetie herself observed from her concealed position in the park's bushes. "I wonder if this will turn into a local urban myth about the park?" Sweetie wondered aloud.

Stargate Command Control Room
In the wee hours of the morning, the control room had only a skeleton staff present. The Stargate had to be monitored twenty-four hours a day, every day, just in case an unscheduled incoming wormhole opened.

The inner ring of the gate began to spin. The technician manning the gate controls followed protocol by closing the iris as the "incoming wormhole" klaxon blared, but there wasn't really any energy in his motions during the tail end of the graveyard shift.

The chevrons around the gate lit up in sequence, some of the staff in the control room looking on lazily. When the seventh chevron lit up and no wormhole formed, those watching realized this was no ordinary incoming wormhole. Eight chevrons meant an intergalactic connection; was Atlantis finally back in contact?

One tech pushed another towards the door and said, "Go wake the general!"

The eighth chevron lit, but still no wormhole formed. The Stargate began to vibrate violently, threatening to damage the foundations securing it to the floor of the embarkation room, as well as the conduits used to supply power to the gate for outgoing wormholes.

"Nine chevrons?!" another tech cried, as the one sent to wake General Landry hurried her pace. "Where the hell is this thing coming from?!"

The gate did have nine chevrons on it, of course, all gates did. A huge amount of power was required to dial a seven-symbol address in the same galaxy. More power was needed for an eight-symbol address in a nearby galaxy – Ancient devices called Zero-Point Modules were generally required in order to produce enough power to make the connection. While nobody had figured out exactly what was required for a nine-symbol address, logic suggested that the power requirements would be at least an order of magnitude greater, with commensurate distance traveled.

The ninth chevron lit, and the vibrations had practically become a low-magnitude earthquake.

And the event horizon still did not form.

While the technicians in the control room were gobsmacked by the developments, the defense team had become fully alert; anything out of the ordinary absolutely demanded the highest state of awareness, and the men and women in the embarkation room were ready for anything to go wrong.

The red-orange glow of the nine lit chevrons shifted as one, each light turning a different color of the rainbow. The vibrations halted. The dialling computer system that had been cobbled together for the SGC – mostly by Samantha Carter – indicated both that the incoming connection was stable, and that the gate was trying to communicate some kind of data to the computer that the system didn't recognize.

Stranger still, there was no blue glow against the wall behind the Stargate.

"What have we got, sergeant?" General Landry said as he walked in the door. His hair was sticking up on one side, and he was still tucking in his shirt as he arrived.

"I have no idea, sir. All nine chevrons lit up for the incoming wormhole, and then they all turned different colors," the tech sitting in front of the dialling console pointed out the observation window. "I've never seen anything like it."

"Any incoming messages?" The general asked.

"No sir. No radio signals coming through, or any other communication channel we're set up to monitor. The gate is trying to tell the system something, but it's not something our system is equipped to handle."

"What about high-energy particles?" Once upon a time, the Goa'uld System Lord who fancied himself to be Satan had very nearly breached the iris by pointing a particle accelerator into the gate. The subatomic particles had enough space to reintegrate, and as a result the iris was heated to dangerous levels.

The technician shook his head, "No, there's nothing coming through the connec—" the technician interrupted himself, "Incoming travellers!"

"Keep that iris closed!" Landry ordered. There was no way to tell who was coming, and it certainly wasn't any existing ally.

Seven impacts sounded against the iris, as the Stargate attempted to reintegrate the incoming travellers, but there was not enough space between the event horizon and the iris for the particles forming their bodies to actually exist. At least they wouldn't have felt anything.

Landry sighed. "Try contacting whoever that was over the radio, maybe—" but before the general could finish giving the order, the gate shut down.

"Well," Landry said after a moment, uncertain what the best course of action would be going forward. Some unknown group with enough power to form a Stargate connection with more than just nine symbols had just lost seven people like bugs on the SGC's windshield. "I'm going back to bed. Wake me if there's any gate activity before I get back here on my own."

Cheyenne Mountain, Exterior
As dawn broke on May fourth, Sweetie Belle finally had the entrance to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in sight. Her mane was an absolute mess, her coat was closer to beige than its natural color, and she had accumulated numerous minor scrapes across her body. As it turned out, the suburbia around Colorado Springs was denser than she remembered, and there had been a couple close calls avoiding getting spotted by morning joggers and dogwalkers in the pre-dawn light.

Of course, there were concrete barricades across the road leading into the mountain, at least a dozen armed soldiers that she could see, and probably more inside the two IAV Strykers that flanked the entrance tunnel. The base's lockdown was very much still in effect.

On the other hoof, the soldiers didn't seem to be reacting to the presence of a general, so she had probably managed to beat Jack, somehow.

There was no way through the front door like this, though. The guards certainly wouldn't let her in, and there was a non-zero possibility that she could get shot; she was already trespassing. Staying unseen would be impossible without some advanced illusion spells that were certainly beyond Sweetie's ability. Those problems didn't even touch on the twenty-five ton entrance door which was surely sealed.

Fortunately, Sweetie hadn't been planning to get in the front door when she set out. The base had a few emergency shafts hidden around, which wouldn't have nearly as much security outside. She just had to find one.

Fountain, Colorado
In the small Colorado Springs suburb, a black SUV with tinted windows pulled up in front of an unassuming two-story house. It was a picture of Americana, with a well-kept front yard and a white picket fence.

Major General Jonathan O'Neill stepped out of the passenger side of the SUV wearing his uniform and a pair of aviator sunglasses. As he exited the vehicle, he donned his combination cap, and then fussed with his uniform to make sure everything was perfect.

O'Neill let himself through the fence and strode confidently to the house, ringing the bell and waiting patiently.

In moments, the door was answered by a young teenaged girl. Jack's stoic demeanor cracked immediately.

"Uncle Jack!" the girl said excitedly as she opened the door.

At the same time, O'Neill removed his sunglasses and said, "Good morning, Tessa!"

After an enthusiastic hug, Jack asked, "May I come in? I was in town and I thought I would swing by to see George."

Jack removed his cap as Tessa led him into the house and called ahead, "Grampa! It's General O'Neill!"

On the couch in the living room, a younger girl was tying a big pink bow in the mane of one of the transformation victims. Jack stumbled backwards in shock and sputtered, "Kayla! Get away from there!"

With a confused frown on her face, Kayla obeyed the order and backed away from the couch to the other side of the room. The pony on the couch had a pale yellow coat, red mane, and the image of an apple on a multicolored shield on her rump.

"Relax, Jack," the pony snorted, annoyed.

"Girls, the government believes this is some kind of disease, and we don't know how contagious it is. As nice as it might be to have a talking pony, we have to get you two to the hospital," O'Neill told Tessa and Kayla.

"Over mah dead body!" The pony shouted, standing up from the couch. "Ah kept us all in quarantine once the first symptoms showed up, but the girls have been with me from the beginning!" The pony stomped across the room and looked up to stare Jack in the eyes.

"Look, I don't—" Jack tried to say.

"D'you see any signs or symptoms on mah granddaughters?" The pony asked.

"Granddaughters? What?" Jack mentally stumbled. "George?"

Retired former Lieutenant General George Hammond was Jack's predecessor at Homeworld Command, and had been the commander of the SGC for most of its history. Now, he had become a she, and she was a little pony.

"At first, Ah figured Ah would just keep an eye on the news, read between the cover stories, and pick up the phone when the SGC had a cure," Hammond began. "At this point, though, Ah'm thinkin' this is one of the best things to happen to me in a decade."

Jack reeled, "You want this?"

"Last week Ah was old, bald, overweight, and spending time with my granddaughters meant sitting in a chair and watching them." Hammond stalked back to the couch and hopped onto it, sitting like a dog. "Today, Ah feel forty years younger. Ah'm stronger than Ah've ever been. Ah've got a full head of hair. Ah can actually do things with my granddaughters—"

"And we have a pony!" Kayla piped in.

"—even if we haven't actually left the house in the past few days," George finished her interrupted thought. "Honestly, from my perspective, in the grand scheme of things, the only way today could be better is if Mary Anne were to come back to life."

There was an awkward pause, the two young girls looking to Jack with tension writ on their faces.

"But you're not wearing any pants," Jack complained. "You've become as bad as the Asgard."

George threw her head back and guffawed.

"No, seriously," Jack said, waving his hands in George's general direction, "pants!"

"Jack, Ah'm a pony," Hammond said with a smirk, as though being a pony was enough reason to divest oneself of clothing.

With a sigh, Jack took a seat on the couch next to George-the-pony. "Girls, could you give me some time with your grandfather?" Jack asked Tessa and Kayla. The girls each offered a word of consent and scampered around the corner and up the stairs. Beyond having a pony, they were probably thrilled to be missing school over this. Jack sighed again.

"Be back in a moment," George said. She jumped off the couch and trotted into the nearby kitchen. Jack heard the refrigerator open and close, and the clinking of bottles.

When George returned, she had a pair of beer bottles hanging from her teeth. She held the two bottles over the table next to Jack's armrest, knocked them with a hoof, instantly prying the caps off and spitting them out. George grabbed one bottle with her lips and returned to her seat, taking a swig of beer as she climbed onto the couch.

Jack picked up the remaining bottle of beer, and then looked at his watch. "George, it's not even noon."

Hammond grasped her bottle with both front hooves and said, "Ah'm under self-imposed quarantine, and Ah'm sure you've had a helluva week. You're also about to tell me what you know about what's goin' on. Ah figure we could both use a drink." She drank from her bottle. "By the way, your cover stories sucked."

Jack shrugged and took a drink. "I didn't write them."

"So... what do we know?" Hammond asked.

"A lot less than I'd like," Jack admitted. Technically, Hammond was no longer cleared for any of the classified information surrounding the SGC or Homeworld Command. But old habits die hard, and Hammond had been Jack's direct superior for years. The only thing that really kept a lid on O'Neill's lips was the chance that Tessa and Kayla might overhear the conversation. Jack laid out the current situation for George, while avoiding the majority of the actual specifics of the classified details of the SGC.

"Do you think Cassie made it to the base?" Hammond asked when Jack was finished. The pair had each drained their beers, but in deference to the hour of the day she decided to forego grabbing a second round.

"She's feisty. The only question in my mind is whether she got inside, or whether she'll ambush me on the way in," Jack replied. "Which reminds me," he pulled out his phone, "I should check Vala's condition, and let them know about Tessa and Kayla."

Stargate Command General's Office
After his call with Jack, Hank called up his Chief Medical Officer to relay the news and get her perspective.

"That's incredible, General," Doctor Lam said over the intercom after getting caught up. "If what General O'Neill says about Tessa and Kayla is true, that's great news for this pandemic!"

"What about Vala? Any changes?" Landry asked.

"No detectable change to her DNA," Lam reported. "I'd prefer to get the girls tested before making a final decision, but if this thing doesn't actually spread past the initial set of cases, we could certainly let our patients out of isolation and end the quarantine." After a pause that sounded like she had stepped away to pick something up, she added, "As far as Vala's injuries go, she's going to be out of commission for a while. She'll definitely survive, but she needs time to recover."

"Sounds good. Keep me updated on her condition, and the condition of the rest of her team." The general hung up, needing to move on to the rest of a busy morning.

Landry's next step was to notify the security team at the base's entrance that apparently Cassandra Fraiser had escaped from the hospital and would be making her way to Cheyenne Mountain. He relayed the description of the girl's transformed appearance that the hospital had provided to O'Neill, and ordered that no lethal force be used against her if she were found trespassing.

Hopefully, it wouldn't even come to that.

Landry's last call for the morning was his heaviest; he took a moment to collect himself, staring at the red telephone on his desk. With gravitas unwitnessed by anyone in the otherwise empty office, General Landry picked up the red phone's handset and pressed the button to dial the President of the United States.

The line picked up after two rings. "Hank, perfect timing!" President Hayes' mood seemed in conflict with the gravity of the current crisis. "I'm in conference with the IOA representatives. Suzie! Add Hank to the conference call!"

The International Oversight Advisory was a committee formed as a compromise, granting civilian oversight of the Stargate program, plus input from allies of the United States, in exchange for continued funding. Sometimes Landry felt that the representatives of the IOA were simply too far removed from the facts on the ground, and arrogantly ordered actions that were inadvisable.

After a moment, the ambient noise on the phone line changed. "Gentlemen, ma'am," Hayes said, "please welcome General Henry Landry. Hank, I believe you've met British Representative Russel Chapman, Chinese Representative Shen Xiaoyi, French Representative Jean LaPierre, and James Coolidge, our own representative. We've also got Sergei Ivanov with us today, your friend Colonel Chekov's replacement as the Russian Representative."

"Hah!" Sergei laughed. "Do not make an elephant out of a fly, mister President. Colonel Chekov did not make friends in the Stargate program. Friendship is friendship but service is service; the colonel knew that well."

"I gather the subject of discussion is the pandemic of transformations?" Landry asked.

"Exactly so," Mr. Chapman verbally stepped in. "The evidence we have suggests that the process has finally run its course, or close enough that we can treat it as 'complete.'"

"I would prefer a more conclusive finding from my Chief Medical Officer before treating my infected personnel as safe," Landry objected.

"All due respect to your doctors, but we have access to many more resources and a wider sample size to test outside Cheyenne Mountain," Chapman replied.

"Further," the French Representative added, "records from the past few days indicate that this pandemic is not communicable in any way."

Hank nodded, despite the people on the phone being unable to see him. "Yes, I just spoke with General O'Neill earlier today, and apparently former General Hammond is one of the victims, and has been living with his granddaughters since the beginning of the outbreak. The girls are showing no symptoms on visual inspection." He added, "Also, one of my personnel was in close, unprotected contact with a number of the victims for nearly twenty-four hours, and is currently showing no symptoms we can detect."

"We are going to be ending mandatory isolation and quarantine of the transformed in IOA countries today, and recommending the same to other heads of state," Ms. Shen said. "We won't be kicking the transformed out of hospitals, but the doctors caring for them won't be forced to take so many precautions during treatment."

General Landry chuckled to himself. President Hayes asked, "What's so funny, Hank?"

"Oh, it's nothing. One of the patients at the USAFA Hospital broke out of isolation last night. I was just trying to imagine her reaction to the isolation ending right after her daring escape."

"... quite," Jean LaPierre sniffed disdainfully. "In any case, we need Stargate Command active again. General, you are hereby ordered to end your lockdown and resume normal operations."

"What about my transformed personnel?" Landry asked. "I can't just send them out into the field!"

"I'm sure our doctors will continue investigating the issue until we find a cure," James Coolidge said. "But my understanding is that other than their appearance, all of the affected people are perfectly healthy. And other than a few substituted vocabulary words, they're all of sound mind, or at least as sound as they were prior to the outbreak. Until a cure is found, I recommend you simply re-train your personnel for their new bodies."

There was a moment of silence on the conference line. The silence was broken by the president, saying, "James, aren't you the one who tried to get Teal'c ejected from the SGC because he wasn't human?"

"I like to think that my time spent with Teal'c and Ronon Dex has opened my eyes somewhat," Coolidge defended himself. "Besides, as far as I'm concerned, these transformed personnel are still American citizens, and servicemen and women, besides."

The conference continued for another half-hour, most of the time spent on administrative measures. General Landry did privately congratulate himself for managing to squeeze additional funding from the IOA for the re-training that Coolidge had suggested, as well as the development and purchase of new equipment that would fit the transformed.

Time Warner Center, New York City
A cheery redheaded woman in a red knee-length dress and a bald, black man in a blue business suit sat in bar stool chairs behind an oval glass table, with multiple large screens behind them displaying the show's logo.

"A five-year old girl from Leicester, England went missing late last night," the woman began. "Her name is Madeleine McCann, and her family was on vacation in Portugal when young Madeleine went missing. Stay tuned for the details!"

"Welcome to CNN Newsroom. From the Time Warner Center in New York, I'm Tony Harris," the male anchor said.

"And I'm Heidi Collins. It's nine am on Friday, May fourth. Good morning, Tony." Heidi greeted her co-anchor.

"Good morning, Heidi," Tony responded, "and thank God it's Friday!"

"TGIF!" Heidi cheered with a laugh.

Tony looked straight ahead into one of the set's camera's and said, "This morning's top story: new developments on yesterday's news. Earlier this week, our colleagues reported that al-Qaeda had taken credit for a vaguely-defined plague that any true believers were supposed to be immune to. Yesterday, in a prepared statement, President Hayes confirmed the existence of the pandemic that al-Qaeda referred to, but he did not give us much in the way of details concerning the outbreak."

Heidi picked up for her partner, "President Hayes' statement has been receiving a significant amount of backlash from the international community, with critics saying that it was 'soft' on the terrorist organization."

Tony continued with, "Anonymous sources inside the White House have suggested that there has been an effort to keep details about this disease and the extent of the infection out of the news. However, we are moments away from an official statement from the White House on the matter."

"We go live to the James Brady Press Briefing Room for this breaking news," Heidi said, as the broadcast cut away from the two news anchors.

James Brady Press Briefing Room
The small theater in the White House's West Wing had fewer reporters than were generally present for the daily press briefings, unsurprising considering the early hour of the day.

A man in Air Force dress uniform, sans jacket, approached the podium. His rank insignia placed him as a Lieutenant Colonel. The general murmur of reporters waiting for something to report on quieted, replaced by a different murmur of curiosity at who was standing before them. The officer placed a closed folder on the podium in front of him before addressing the crowd of reporters.

"Greetings and good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming at such an early hour," the lieutenant said. "I am Lieutenant Colonel Paul Davis, a liaison in the Pentagon, and I will be delivering a prepared statement. After the statement, I will have just a few minutes to answer questions you may have."

Davis opened his folder and began to read, "Earlier this week, the terrorist organization known as al-Qaeda claimed to be responsible for a disease that would quote, 'bring low every non-believer.' To be clear: there is not one intelligence agency in the United States with credible evidence for their claim of responsibility.

"That said, there is a worldwide outbreak for which we believe al-Qaeda attempted to take credit. Current estimates put the population of affected persons at approximately 2.7 million worldwide, with approximately 216 thousand present in the United States."

One of the reporters tried to interrupt with a question, but Davis waved her down. "Please hold your questions until the end. Thank you."

When the reporters had settled themselves again, he resumed, "Symptoms of the outbreak include severe physical deformities, discoloration of the skin and hair, shifting vocal pitch, and difficulty with some common vocabulary. While the victims of this outbreak have largely been kept in isolation for the past few days while doctors investigated the problem, we have now determined that beyond the initial infection, it is not communicable. I wish to stress: this outbreak is not contagious.

"Today, we are lifting the mandatory isolation of the affected and quarantine of anyone who has come into contact with them. Due to the deformities suffered, however, we strongly encourage any of the affected individuals to stay with whatever medical care they have been receiving so far, or to seek out care if they have not received it.

"There is currently no known cure or treatment for the symptoms of this condition, but the brightest medical minds on the planet continue to work tirelessly on behalf of everyone suffering. Our hearts and our prayers go out to all of them. Thank you." Davis flipped a page in his folder, and looked up to the audience. "I will now try to answer your questions as well as I am able in the time we have remaining."

The reporter who had attempted to interrupt earlier stood, "Cheryl Bolen, Bloomberg BNA. How is it that we haven't heard about hundreds of thousands of American citizens suffering from a horrible disease until today?"

"The first cases we are aware of displayed their first visible symptoms on Tuesday," Davis replied. "Additionally, I would like to point out that while 200 thousand people is quite a lot, it's only one in about 1,400 people. Most Americans don't even know someone who has been affected by this."

"Kenneth Walsh, US News & World Report," another reporter stood, easily the oldest man in the room. "With respect to your service, why is an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel presenting this briefing, instead of mister Gliescter the Press Secretary, or his deputy?"

Davis sighed, "I am sorry to report that the reason you have been hearing from the Deputy Press Secretary so much this week is that mister Gliescter is one of the individuals who has been hospitalized by the outbreak.

"As for my own presence," he continued, "the Air Force has been heavily involved with the situation, as several of the first recorded cases were Air Force personnel."

Time Warner Center, New York City
"That was a spokesman from the Pentagon, speaking on behalf of the White House, acknowledging the existence of the disease that terrorist group al-Qaeda took credit for earlier this week," Tony Harris summarized.

"Joining us now on the phone is former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Clinton, Doctor Jeffrey Koplan," Heidi Collins introduced the program's first guest. "Doctor Koplan, good morning!"

"Good morning, thank you for having me," Koplan's voice could be heard.

"Thank you so much for joining us," Heidi responded. "So, doctor, what's your impression of this announcement at first blush?"

"The announcement of the existence of this disease is no surprise; it was already on our radar from al-Qaeda's announcement," Koplan said. "I noted two very interesting thing about this morning's statement: the first was the news that in fact al-Qaeda had nothing to do with this disease, that they have claimed credit where none is due.

"The second thing I noted was the lack of any information on how this outbreak began. Especially considering the news that it is not communicable, how did nearly three million get infected in the first place...?"

"A good question, indeed," Tony said. "With limited information, however, we're going to have to leave it there, but rest assured that we will keep up with any new developments. Coming up after the break: a new fad is starting to emerge online, using Photoshop to bring cartoons to life! More on that next."

Stargate Command Shaft 28844
It had taken Sweetie several hours to find an access shaft that she could actually get into. They were hardly easy to find from the outside in the first place, and she didn't exactly have a map of where they were supposed to be.

Worse, when she had finally found an exit hatch for an access shaft, she'd tried to use her telekinesis to manipulate the mechanical lock from the inside... only for her magic to slip off the material, the same phenomenon she had encountered in the park with the water fountain. She was confident that her magic was fully functioning, except for the obvious evidence in front of her that it wasn't.

She had spent nearly half an hour between trying to magic open the access shaft and even trying to force it open with her best bucks, but the hatch had stubbornly refused to open to her. After catching her breath, she searched for another shaft, hoping for better luck elsewhere.

Fortunately for her, not all of the access shafts had been secured in the same way. This particular shaft had been secured with an electronic keypad, and as shameful as it might be for the Air Force, it hadn't taken her many tries to crack.

Now, though, she was somewhat regretting her decision to sneak in in this way. She was almost completely exhausted from her trek across Colorado Springs, and the metal rungs of the ladder built into the wall of the shaft were emphatically not built for ponies. Each metal bar dug painfully into the fetlocks of her front legs as she descended into the underground base.

At least she could still use her horn to produce a pale green light with which to see by. She was nearly at the limit of her stamina when she came even with the door labeled "19" in big block stencil and discovered the latest setback in her quest: the doors into the access shaft were locked from the other side.

Without much hope for positive result, she reached out with her magic to try and turn the bolts holding the door closed. As she feared, her magic failed her once more.

It was too much. So close to her goal, with all the distance she'd traveled all on her own, she felt defeat once again. With a hiccuping sniff, she finally let the tears flow; it was the first time she'd had a proper cry since her adopted mother's death.

Fatigue wouldn't let her have her moment, though. A spasm in her left foreleg made her lose some of her grip on the ladder, and her heart skipped a beat in fear. With tears still dribbling onto her cheek, she wrapped her right foreleg around the ladder rung and began hitting the door with all the strength she could summon. "Help!" she choked out. "Help!"

Stargate Command Infirmary
Doctor Carolyn Lam was returning to her infirmary after making her final round of her patients held in isolation, doing final checks on their health and releasing them personally. Of course, Bra'tac, Teal'c, and Vala were still in recovery, but most of the transformed were otherwise perfectly healthy.

In the hallway outside the infirmary, Lam stopped when she heard an unfamiliar noise.

bang

She looked around in confusion, when the sound rang out again.

bang

The doctor followed the sound until she determined that it was coming from behind the door to one of the base's access shafts. Standing on the opposite side of the door, she could hear a muffled voice calling out in addition to the banging against the metal.

Thinking about the security of the base, Lam ran down the hall to retrieve an armed guard for backup. When the pair returned to the access shaft door, the frequency of the metal getting hit had dropped, and the voice had either halted or quieted beyond her ability to hear it.

At Lam's direction, the guard raised his weapon and pointed it at the door as the doctor unscrewed the bolts holding it closed.

After a three-count, Lam opened the door and the guard tensed, only for the pair to find an unfamiliar transformation victim grasping onto the access shaft's ladder, one who was slightly but noticeably smaller than the patients she had been treating thus far. Her coat was dirty and covered in scrapes, her mane and tail were tangled with leaves and twigs, the fur under her eyes was matted with tears, and mucous was clearly running from her nose.

Doctor Lam hardly even noticed that the horn on the pony's head was surrounded in a glowing pale green aura for a moment after the door opened.

The pony looked up at Carolyn and the guard. She tried to wipe her snout with one hoof as she sniffed, and then managed to croak out a pathetic, "Help," that was somewhere between a plea and a question.

"Well don't just stand there!" Lam cried at the guard, who was looking to the Chief Medical Officer for direction, when the intruder was obviously not a threat. "Help her get inside, and get her to the infirmary!"

The guard shouldered his weapon and reached into the access shaft to collect the teary pony. She gratefully wrapped her hooves around her rescuer's neck and let herself be carried away.

"What's your name, dear?" the doctor asked gently as she followed the guard carrying the pony back to the infirmary.

"Sw-sw—" the pony stammered before turning her head to look Lam in the eyes. "I'm Cassandra," she finally said.

Author's Note

:rainbowdetermined2: : Hey Cassie, guess what? Our lockdown is over!
:unsuresweetie: :

Chapter 7: The Rainbow Connection

Stargate Command Infirmary
Doctor Lam had quickly and personally attended to Cassandra's minor injuries. While Cassie was re-hydrated with a saline drip, the scuttlebutt that she had successfully infiltrated the base despite being a transformation victim spread.

To that end, Sam had pulled herself away from her studies of the artifact to visit her charge, and Mitchell had joined her. As with the rest of the transformed base personnel, they were wearing makeshift clothing modified from their PT gear, with holes cut for Carter's wings. It wasn't glamorous, but it covered up all the naughty bits.

As Cassandra stirred from her sleep, both lieutenant colonels rose to opposite sides of her bed.

"Good morning, sweetie, but you really should have tried knocking first," Mitchell said.

Cassandra's eyes snapped open and she gasped with joy. Wrapping her bandaged forelegs around Mitchell's neck, she cried, "Rarity, you're starting to remember!" Mitchell gagged at the sudden constriction of her airway.

"Huh?" Sam waved to get Cassandra's attention, "Hey there, Cassie. Uh, that's Cameron."

"Oh, uh... right," Cassandra pouted, relaxing her death grip on Mitchell. She turned to Sam and asked, "And...?"

"Sam," she responded, as Mitchell pried herself out of Cassandra's grasp.

"What do you mean 'starting to remember'?" Carter asked.

"Well, she called me..." Cassandra stalled with a frown, re-processing Mitchell's earlier words with a fully-awake brain. "Maybe I jumped the gun, but it relates to why I came."

"Sounds like we've got perfect timing, as always," General O'Neill said, stepping into the infirmary with General Landry.

"Sir!" Carter and Cameron reflexively snapped to attention.

"Oh, leave it," O'Neill waved the pair off. He looked away from Carter; a suspicious person might think he looked guilty.

Landry laughed, "You'll get used to it eventually, Jack."

"The hell I will!" Jack glared at the other general, one corner of his mouth turned up in a smirk.

Cassandra fussed with the blanket on her bed, looking uncertain. "So, Uncle Jack... about what I said on the phone..."

Jack sighed. "I'm not pleased that you broke out of the hospital," he said, "but since the mandatory isolation was lifted, it's kind of a moot point. And it looks like you've managed to punish yourself plenty enough before I got here."

Cassandra cocked her head to one side, putting her chin in a hoof. "What took you so long to get here, anyway? You should've been able to beat me here, easy."

Jack sat on the side of Cassandra's bed and mussed with her mane before replying. Cassandra scrunched up her muzzle in annoyance as Jack said, "I went to meet with George Hammond first, since I don't get around this way very often any more. It turns out he's a pony now, too."

"And it's probably a good thing you went there, too," Landry added. "Knowing that George's granddaughters were symptom-free helped to get the isolation order lifted."

"Now, what was it you really wanted to talk to me about?" Jack asked. "Surely you invited me here for more than just to scold you?"

"Oh, right!" Cassandra squeaked. "I wanted to give you some important information about this whole transformation thing. Maybe we could go somewhere more, uh... official?" she asked, looking around the group surrounding the infirmary bed.

"Hey, doc!" Jack called to Lam in her office on the opposite side of the infirmary. "Can we take Cassie to the briefing room?"

"Yes, sir! Just bring her back in six hours or so, so I can check on her again!" Lam called back.

A pale green aura formed around Cassandra's horn, and a similar aura formed around the IV needle poking into her foreleg. The needle and the tape securing it in position lifted away from her and floated to the stand with the saline bag in defiance of gravity, before both auras disappeared and gravity reasserted itself once again.

"I can see we've got more than one thing to talk about," Landry muttered.

"By the way, General," Cassandra said, "uh... the lock on the access shaft I used is set to Charlie's birthday. You should probably fix that."

Landry gave O'Neill the stink eye. Charlie was O'Neill's son, who had accidentally killed himself with Jack's personal handgun shortly before Jack was recruited for the first mission through the Stargate. At least Jack had the presence of mind to look chastised about the security code.

Cassandra hopped out of the bed and began walking towards the door, when a cough from Mitchell caught her. Cassandra looked back and Mitchell asked, "Aren't you forgetting something?" she asked, looking pointedly at the modified PT gear that she and Sam were wearing.

Jack laughed, "Relax, Cam. Ponies are like the Asgard!" With that, he led the group out of the infirmary.

Stargate Command Briefing Room
The group had taken a detour on their way to the briefing room in order to collect Daniel from her office. Daniel had been busy working with Cameron Balinsky on the radio signal Carter had constructed, but despite Balinsky being able to use the computer keyboards as intended, speeding up their process, the pair were not making much progress with so little context.

The three healthy members of SG-1 sat on one side of the long table, which General O'Neill and Cassandra on the opposite side. Landry sat down at the head of the table after the others were seated and asked, "Now, miss Fraiser, why don't you tell us what you know?"

Cassandra inhaled, then released it slowly. "Okay, first thing's first, my actual name is Sweetie Belle," she said. "And everypony who's been transformed is an alien."

Perhaps predictably, Sweetie's announcement wasn't exactly accepted at face value.

"You'll forgive me if I want more than just your word on the subject, miss Fraiser," Landry said.

"Yes," Mitchell agreed. "I mean, I remember growing up in Kansas on my parents' farm, and I can assure you my mother remembers giving birth to me."

Sweetie scratched on ear with a hoof. "Okay, I don't know all the details, but Discord cursed a bunch of ponies. There was something in his chant about losing memories and ejecting us from Equestria, which is why we're here and why nopony remembers their previous life."

"If everypony lost their memories, how d'you remember this?" Daniel drawled, willing to at least give "Sweetie" the benefit of the doubt that she wasn't afforded in her archaeological career.

"I think my sister's responsible," Sweetie said, smiling sadly at the memory. "She attacked Discord as he was placing the curse on me, and I guess he didn't get to finish it properly. I still got born into a new body on Hanka and I still lost my memories, but as my transformation back into my original pony body progressed, my memories returned, too."

"Yer sister?" Daniel asked.

Sweetie nodded. "Her name is Rarity. She's the most generous pony I know. She's a national hero, working with her closest friends to save the country on more than one occasion, and even the whole world once or twice." Sweetie's voice brimmed with love and respect as she described her sister to the group. "She runs one of the most successful clothing lines in Equestria, yet she still finds time for her friends, and for me. And," Sweetie blushed and stared at the ceiling as though it were the most interesting thing in the base, "now she's Lieutenant Colonel Mitchell."

The others in the room all turned to stare at Mitchell, who fidgeted, slightly uncomfortable under the attention. She sent a silent prayer of thanks when the Stargate began dialling, the noise drawing the attention of the other people in the room.

General Landry glanced at his watch and said, "Sorry, we'll have to take a break here. That should be the Midway Station reporting in about the efforts to reconnect with Atlantis."

As the base commander left the briefing room, Sweetie Belle stood up and walked over to the window overlooking the Stargate. While the others may have become jaded after traveling through the gate so many times, she had only used the gate once as Cassandra, and that was years ago.

Of course, with little else to do until General Landry returned, Jack and Mitchell both joined her, while Sam and Daniel held a private conversation discussing the progress being made on studying the artifact from PHK-519.

"So, Mitchell's a clothes horse?" Jack asked.

Sweetie had to giggle. The absurd juxtaposition of the human idiom and her memories of Rarity called for nothing less. "I guess you could say that," she said. "But—"

"That's not the Midway Station," Mitchell cut her off. "The eighth cheron just locked in."

Mitchell's comment drew the attention of the other two members of SG-1 in the room, who came to join the three at the window. As they arrived, Jack said, "Nine chevrons?!" He turned to Sam as the floor began to vibrate, "Can it do that?"

"The gates have nine chevrons on them, there's no reason to believe they wouldn't all be used for something," she replied.

The nine chevrons turned different colors, and the vibrations halted. "Carter, I think you'd better get down to the control room," O'Neill said. "The technicians probably need your help."

Quicker than you could say "yes, sir," Sam disappeared down the spiral staircase to the control room in a rainbow streak.

Stargate Command Control Room
As Sam clattered down the stairs, she could hear the general below giving orders.

"Open every communication channel we've got! Break out the tin cans connected by string if you have to! Tell whoever's on the other side of that gate not to come through!"

After glancing at the error message on the Stargate's control computer monitor, Carter approached a technician away from the main control console. "Let's look at the raw data the gate is sending us. We need diagnostics on this connection," she said.

"Sir!" One technician called to Landry. "I'm detecting the same kind of radiation as what we've recorded from artifact PHK-519-alpha. It's coming through the gate!"

Carter looked away from the computer terminal she was reading from, pointing one wing at the tech that had spoken. "Record everything! And check if there's a subspace signal coming through, too!"

Stargate Command Briefing Room
Sweetie turned to Daniel, wordlessly asking for an explanation of the significance of the extra chevrons. Before Daniel could begin her explanation of how Stargate addresses worked, however, Sweetie let out a small "Oh!" as she sensed somepony casting Theory's Telecom. After living on Earth, she could compare the spell to a phone call. While she could tell that the "call" wasn't for her, sensing the spell didn't tell her who the call was for.

Fortunately, one of the easiest triple-alliteration spells Sweetie knew was Tapping Theory's Telecom, letting her "join" somepony else's call. It was generally considered rude, but with nopony else around who knew magic, Sweetie was probably the only pony who could pick up.

As soon as Sweetie completed her spell, she could feel a tremendous mental weight, indicative of a similarly massive level of magical power.

<> the pony on the other end of the spell asked.

Sweetie's ears folded back, uncomfortable insulting a powerful unicorn by interrupting what was apparently a call for a guardspony. But she was unofficially representing the United States military in a way, wasn't she? Mitchell, Daniel, and Jack were trying to get her attention, but the strength of the spell she had tapped into prevented her from splitting her concentration. <> Sweetie replied.

<>

<> Sweetie gulped, hoping the pony on the other end was at least familiar with the events she was talking about.

<>

<> Sweetie supplied.

Theory's Telecom couldn't transmit reactions like a gasp, but it did include tone, and Sweetie could guess the reaction that wasn't transmitted. <> Sweetie imagined a guardspony unicorn mare dancing around in joy. <>

Sweetie felt like her heart had stopped. She finally drew the connection between somepony casting a spell, attempting to communicate with a royal guardspony, and the still-active Stargate with rainbow-colored chevrons. <> she cried, before Cadance ended the spell. <>

Sweetie thought quickly, <>

<> The princess ended her spell, and Sweetie swayed in place, dizzy from tapping into a spell cast by an alicorn.

When Sweetie came fully back to her senses, she looked up to Jack. "I need to talk to General Landry. I just got a communication from somepony on the other side of that gate."

Jack nodded, and motioned for her to walk down the staircase, following immediately behind.

Stargate Command Control Room
General Landry thanked whatever gods might be listening that there hadn't been any incoming travellers. On the other hand, there had been no response to any attempt at communication.

The atmosphere in the control room had relaxed slightly just a moment ago, when the sensors in the gate room detected that the radiation and subspace signal coming through the Stargate had ended. As everyone took a moment to catch their collective breaths, Landry turned to see Jack and "Sweetie" coming down from the briefing room.

"Jack?" Landry prompted.

The visiting general shrugged. "She says she was just in communication with someone on the other side of the connection," he said.

The young mare took a seat on the floor near where Landry was standing, scratching at a bandage on the side of her barrel. "Princess Cadance was trying to contact a royal guard named Iron Strike," she reported.

"We had an incoming connection just like this one late last night," Landry said, his face grim. "Seven incoming travelers ran into our iris."

Sweetie nodded, sad, but understanding the general's position. "She almost sent Princess Twilight to come get me, but I told her there was a barrier on this side. I also said that you were probably trying to talk to them with a radio signal." She scraped one hoof on the ground idly before continuing, "Equestria has developed radio technology, but at least by the time I was sent away, it was only used for broadcasting, mostly musical entertainment. The princess was surprised to hear you were trying to use a radio to contact them, so they probably haven't advanced much in that arena. There are just so many other ways ponies can communicate over long distances..."

"In other words, it might take them a while to get a transceiver together?" O'Neill summarized. Sweetie nodded.

"Well congratulations, Cassandra, or Sweetie Belle, or whatever you want to be called," General Landry looked down at her, "you just got hired on as diplomatic advisor."

Sweetie looked up and gave Landry a mischievous grin. "Do I get paid?" She asked.

Landry chuckled, "Sure thing, kid, I'm sure we can fit a few hours' pay into the budget. But I need an on-the-fly briefing now, while we wait for these people to get their equipment together. Who am I dealing with?"

"Just to be clear, I don't have any information about what's been happening in Equestria since getting turned into a human," Sweetie prefaced her impromptu briefing. "However, when I got cursed, Equestria had five princesses:

"Princess Cadance is the Princess of Love. She was the one I just talked to. She rules the Crystal Empire, which is really more like a territory than an empire now that I think about it... I don't actually know all that much about her personality, but she married Princess Twilight's brother, and I mean, she's the Princess of Love, so she must be a nice pony.

"Princess Flurry Heart is Princess Cadance's daughter. She was younger than me, and didn't have an official position in the government yet. She might have a position now, though...

"Princess Twilight is the Princess of Friendship. Princess Cadance said she was going to send Princess Twilight to pick me up, so there's a good chance she'll be on the radio, or if you let somepony come through the gate, she might be the one in charge of the group that arrives. Princess Twilight is an intellectual, although she's prone to obsessing over things that she really shouldn't. When I left, Princess Twilight didn't technically rule over any land, but she was the de facto ruler of Ponyville, the town we lived in. Um... she's also best friends with the ponies that Cameron, Samantha, and Daniel have become, so that could get a little bit awkward.

"The other two princesses are Princess Celestia, Princess of the Sun, and Princess Luna, Princess of the Moon. They're sisters, more than a thousand years old each. They're the main rulers of the country. Princess Luna is generally in charge of the less popular aspects of government, like espionage and taxes, while Princess Celestia is generally in charge of the more popular aspects, like holding court for anypony to get royal assistance with a problem."

"How likely are we to deal with these older two princesses?" Landry asked, taking Sweetie at her word on their ages, at least for now.

"Neither of them are likely to want to leave Equestria for long," Sweetie replied. She glanced at Carter on the opposite end of the room hesitantly before continuing, "The Princesses control the motion of the sun and moon across the sky. While one can do the other's job, the day-night cycle is much smoother if they're allowed to share the burden."

"What was that?!" Carter cried, her wings flaring slightly. Obviously, she had been listening more closely than Sweetie had hoped. "No. I've seen a lot of incredible things through that gate, but I cannot believe there's somepony who can move a star. Even moving a small moon stretches credulity!"

Carter trotted across the briefing room to join the impromptu briefing. Sweetie wilted a bit, but she defended her statement, "I can't explain it, beyond 'it's magic.' But I have seen both the sun and the moon move in ways that wouldn't be possible if Equestria's celestial neighborhood operated like Earth's. I mean, if nothing else, when I was a filly Nightmare Moon caused a night that lasted for more than a full day. It wasn't an eclipse or anything like that, either, the sun just didn't rise."

"Hold on," Landry said, "who's this Nightmare Moon? I thought you said Princesses Celestia and Luna were the ones to control the sun and moon?"

"Ah, that's a bit of a complicated question," Sweetie replied. "Nightmare Moon was—"

Sweetie was cut off by the radio coming to life. The audio quality was poor, but the words could still be heard, "Hello? Is anypony there? Turnip, is this thing working?"

Another voice could be heard over the line, too muffled to make out the words.

"It looks like this briefing is over. Time for first contact," the general said. Stepping up to the microphone, he responded, "This is Major General Henry Landry of the United States Air Force. With whom am I speaking?"

"Oh, it worked!" The speaker on the other end cleared her throat, and said, "I am Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, Regent of the Crystal Empire, Keeper of the Crystal Heart, The Winged Spear that Scatters the Darkness..."

Landry turned back to Sweetie. With the microphone off, he asked, "Who is this?"

"That's Princess Cadance. I haven't even heard of most of those titles," Sweetie shrugged.

Eventually, the princess finished her roll of titles, "For the sake of expediency, you may refer to me as Princess Cadance of Equestria. I have recently been in contact with one of my subjects, a unicorn by the name of Sweetie Belle. Do you know her?"

"I do know her," Landry said. "She's right here. Sweetie?" The general offered Sweetie a chance to speak into the microphone.

"Hi Princess Cadance!" Sweetie squeaked "Don't worry, General Landry is a good person. You can trust him!"

"It is good to hear that after decades of trying, my efforts have finally paid off, even if only to find one pony," the princess sighed. "General Landry, I would like to send somepony to collect Sweetie Belle, but I understand there is some kind of barrier on your side of the portal?"

The general nodded, although Cadance wouldn't see it, "Indeed, there is. The iris is so close to the event horizon that a traveler's molecules do not have space to reintegrate. Sweetie tells me you were attempting to contact a subordinate earlier. Last night we detected seven travelers running afoul of the iris; if they were yours, I must convey my deepest apologies, as there is nothing left of any of them."

There was silence over the radio, and when Landry looked back to her, Sweetie's ears and tail hung low in sorrow over the loss of life. Even Carter's wingtips were drooping.

"I see," Cadance finally said. "Is it possible to lower the barrier, this 'iris?' Would you permit us to visit you?"

Landry considered for a moment. "Perhaps it would be useful for you to send a representative, and we can talk face-to-face," he suggested. "I am going to have to insist on no more than one attendant for your representative, and anyone you send will need to submit to a medical examination."

Landry instructed Harriman to open the iris, and everyone got their first look at the wormhole from Equestria. While the event horizon still rippled like liquid, it was not the luminous blue the SGC personnel were used to. Instead, the surface was silvery and reflective, giving the impression of mercury rather than water.

"The path is open, Princess Cadance. You may send your representative when you're ready."

Stargate Command Embarkation Room
"I'm telling you, General, you don't need the defense team!" Sweetie stood next to Landry at one of the doors leading out of the embarkation room.

Landry looked around the room. There was one marine behind one of the M2s fixed to the floor, and an armed guard at rest near each of the two exit doors. "This is hardly what I would call a 'defense team,'" he said when he looked back at the young unicorn.

"But Equestria is peaceful!" Sweetie complained. "We haven't had an armed conflict in over 300 years!"

"Incoming travelers," Chief Master Sergeant Harriman's voice came over the room's speakers.

Seconds later, a bipedal saurian creature stepped through the gate. It was covered in deep purple scales, save for its belly and the underside of its tail, which were a pale green color. A trail of deeper green triangular spines ran down the center of its head, to its back and all the way to its spade tipping its tail. The creature was easily six feet tall, with vicious-looking teeth up to three inches long and incredibly sharp claws on each hand and foot.

"That's Spike Thed'ragon," Sweetie whispered to Landry, as the visitor stood to one side of the gate and scanned the room. "He's Princess Twilight's number one assistant."

Shortly after Spike appeared, he was followed by a pony unlike any of the transformation victims. The instantly-noticeable differences were her height, at least twice as tall as Sweetie Belle, and her slightly translucent mane and tail which constantly floated and waved in the air as though she were underwater.

The pony's ethereal mane and tail sported several shades of blue and purple, complimenting her purple coat. The mark on her rump was a six-pointed pink star surrounded by five smaller white stars, and Landry's mind jumped to the image that had appeared on the late Airman Bosworth's skin.

"And that's Princess Twilight Sparkle," Sweetie supplied. "She's an alicorn, so she has the magic of all three pony tribes."

At Sweetie's comment, Landry took a second look at the visiting princess. The horn which he had previously noticed was easily a foot long, and looked sharp enough to impale someone if used as part of a charge. But in addition to the horn, she also displayed a pair of wings, a combination of features not found among any of the transformation victims, so far as he was aware.

Princess Twilight made her own scan of the room, and when she turned to face Sweetie and Landry, she revealed her right eye to be covered in a navy blue velvet eyepatch. She began to descend the ramp leading to the Stargate, with Spike stepping behind her, holding himself with the demeanor of a bodyguard that took his job seriously.

As Twilight approached, Landry also spotted a nondescript straight sword strapped to her side, mostly hidden under her right wing. No armed conflict in 300 years, eh? he thought privately. That might have been true before whatever expelled Cassandra from their world happened, but it looks like peacetime is over.

The Stargate connection cut out as soon as Spike stepped off the ramp. Twilight stopped a respectful distance from the general and dipped her head, "Greetings, General Landry, Sweetie Belle. I am Princess Twilight Sparkle, and this is my assistant, Spike."

Sweetie was dumbstruck with the stark difference between the Twilight she had known and the mare that stood before her now. This close, she could even make out numerous ridges under Twilight's coat, suggesting extensive scarring.

"Welcome, Princess," Landry replied with a shallow bow. "I will lead you to our infirmary for the medical exam in a moment. But first, we are going to have to confiscate your weapon during your stay. I promise that it will be returned to you before you leave."

Twilight blinked with surprise, glancing at the sword under her wing. "Oh! My apologies," she said. "I suppose it wasn't named the 'Forgotten Blade' for no reason. It has practically become a part of me over the years, and I sometimes forget I am carrying anything at all. I must admit, I've accidentally fallen asleep without taking my scabbard off on more than one occasion," the princess blushed.

Landry motioned for the marine that had been manning the M2 to accept the sword as the scabbard unlatched and levitated away from Twilight's barrel, glowing with a pink aura shared by her horn. "Secure our guest's equipment in the armory," he ordered. To the princess and her assistant, he said, "Please follow me to the infirmary, and my Chief Medical Officer can give you a clean bill of health, then we can formally begin our talks. Cass–Sweetie, I would appreciate your presence, as well."

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Chapter 8: Antacids and Nightmares

Stargate Command Infirmary
Princess Twilight spoke with General Landry while following Doctor Lam's instructions for the examination, "I must say, General, this is quite the impressive base of operations you have." The princess eyed the medical equipment that was currently scanning her head as she stood perfectly still, "You've got such impressive technology, not to mention the nullstone everywhere."

"What's nullstone?" Sweetie asked, before Landry could ask the same thing.

Twilight arched one eyebrow, still holding her head still for the scan. "It's the only anti-magic material we've ever encountered," she said. "It's naturally-occurring, but I'm not surprised you didn't learn about it in school, considering the entirety of Equestria's store of nullstone was used for security around Princess-level secrets. According to Starlight Glimmer, Queen Chrysalis had managed to generate a similar effect without actually using nullstone, and her anti-magic field didn't affect changelings. But King Thorax was never able to figure out how it worked after the device was destroyed and Chrysalis was deposed.

"However, I am surprised that you haven't noticed how much of this base is resistant to your magic, Sweetie Belle. Even the doors!" the Princess marvelled. "This place must have cost a significant fortune to build. I can understand why, though, with the presence of the anchor ring."

"The doors... you mean steel?!" General Landry asked as Twilight was released from the scanning machine.

"Isn't steel an alloy?" Sweetie asked.

"Iron, then?" Landry suggested. "Princess, iron is one of the most common elements in this galaxy. This planet's core is made of iron and nickel, even."

Princess Twilight's eyes bulged, and her jaw dropped in surprise. Spike, who completed the medical exam before he would allow Twilight to be subjected to it, spoke up, "Maybe that's why Discord sent Sweetie Belle here, because this universe has so much nullstone? What about other ponies? If Discord found a nullstone-rich universe to send Sweetie to, maybe he sent others here, as well!"

Before Landry could ask Spike what he meant by "this universe" or answer his question about other ponies, Carter walked into the room.

"General! I've deciphered what the gate was trying to tell us about the strange incoming wormhole. It turns out, the signal we were getting means the other side of the connection is something outside any of the Ancients' Stargate networks. Whatever the princess used to dial us, it wasn't a Stargate," she reported. "Oh, hello, Princess," she bowed slightly, noticing the royal alien in the room. "Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter, or Doctor Carter if you prefer," she introduced herself.

When Carter had first begun speaking, she had drawn Princess Twilight's attention, and Twilight had frozen in shock. By the time Carter had bowed, there were tears in the princess' eyes. "You don't have to bow to me, Rainbow Dash," Twilight said, using a hoof under Carter's chin to lift her head. "You never have to bow to me."

After a moment of looking into Carter's eyes, the princess finally broke. Tears of joy flowed freely, and Carter was enveloped in Twilight's embrace. "I've missed you so much," she cried, "you have no idea!"

Carter looked over the princess' withers to General Landry and mouthed, "help me" as Twilight sobbed into her prismatic mane. Sweetie looked up to the General and said, "I told you it would be awkward."

Stargate Command Briefing Room
Once Twilight had composed herself and Doctor Lam completed the remainder of her medical examination – conferring with Sweetie Belle on a few points of basic pony anatomy to confirm that Twilight's readings were normal – the group rejoined Daniel, Cameron, and Jack in the briefing room. Teal'c also joined them, after her recent release from medical supervision, with her tail still in the complex braid she had used on her unsanctioned mission to find Kaggen. She had bandages to rival Sweetie Belle, although many of them were hidden under the PT gear she was wearing, but otherwise remained her stoic self.

Twilight almost lost it again at the sight of three more of her friends, but letting out some of the stress with Carter allowed her to hold back the waterworks. Instead, she seemed confused by Teal'c.

"What in the world is that on your forehead, Fluttershy?" Twilight asked.

Teal'c looked up and cross-eyed for a moment, attempting to see her own forehead, before returning her attention to the princess. "It is the mark of the false god Apophis," she replied with a frown. "As a child, his mark was tattooed to my skin. When I became his First Prime, one of his priests cut into my flesh with a ritual dagger, and poured molten gold into the wound as a symbol of my new status."

"Ah'm surprised it didn't fall off or something during the transformation," Daniel remarked.

"Indeed."

Sweetie turned slightly green at the description of the process Jaffa First Primes went through, but Twilight and Spike seemed unfazed. "Couldn't you cut the gold out?" Spike asked. "It would probably leave a scar, but better a scar than the symbol of an oppressor."

"I bear this mark to remind myself every day of the atrocities I committed in Apophis' name!" Teal'c cried, flaring her wings and stomping one hoof for emphasis. "I burned the tattoo from my son's skin, so that he may be a truly free Jaffa, but he was never a warrior of Apophis. To remove my mark would be to forget the countless innocent lives that were ended by my hoof!"

"Hey, calm down Teal'c," Mitchell said, placing a calming hoof on the other mare's shoulder. "You don't need to snap at them, they don't know your history."

"Excuse me!" Twilight objected. "I was best friends with Fluttershy for nearly two decades! Almost half of her lifetime! I should think I know her history quite well!"

"Oh dear," Sweetie winced.

"Less than two decades? Hah!" Mitchell laughed bitterly. "Teal'c is over a hundred years old! Even if Cassandra is telling the truth, that everypony who's been transformed was one of your citizens sent to the Milky Way by 'Discord,' then by your own admission Teal'c has been a Jaffa for more than twice as long as she's been a pony."

Princess Twilight took a reflexive step backwards at the verbal assault Mitchell was unleashing. This wasn't how her reunion was meant to be!

But Mitchell wasn't done, "We all had lives before this transformation thing started, Princess," she spat. "And we're not going to leave those lives behind just because some pretty purple pony princess from the land of sunshine and rainbows says she's our long-lost friend!"

"Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Mitchell! What the hell has come over you?!" Landry shouted. "You are dismissed!"

"But—"

"I said you are dismissed!"

Mitchell plodded out of the room, ears drooping and head hung low. Sweetie smirked slightly at the look Spike gave her as she left.

"My apologies, Princes Twilight, rest assured that Mitchell will be appropriately disciplined later. That is not how we treat visiting friendly dignitaries," Landry said, gesturing for everyone to take a seat at the conference table.

"Rarity was wrong about one thing, General," Twilight said once she had taken her place at the table, opting to sit on the floor rather than use a chair. "Equestria isn't 'the land of sunshine and rainbows,' or at least it hasn't been since Discord took over."

Twilight's horn flared, and she projected the magical equivalent of a slide show hovering over the table. Some of the images were what Sweetie would have expected following a statement like "Discord took over," such as dancing inanimate objects and upside-down houses. But some of the images were far bleaker. An aerial picture of Ponyville hit too close to home, literally, with half the town covered by an encroaching Everfree Forest, timberwolves roaming the streets, and Twilight's castle smashed into a pile of rubble.

"Discord cursed nine out of every ten ponies," Twilight said as image after image of a ruined Equestria slid by, "starting with my friends and their families, so that we would be unable to unite against him. I don't know if his curse doesn't work against alicorns, or if he just wanted us as his playthings, because the five of us were spared.

"None of the other species were cursed. I can't say why, for certain; hardly anything is certain when it comes to Discord. The griffons tried to strike back, and many of the remaining ponies tried to help, but Discord's chaos magic was too much.

"We princesses led the pony resistance against him. Two years after Discord took control, Dragon Lord Ember finally gave up her title," a picture of a blue dragon with a similar build to Spike appeared. "She tried get Spike to take on the mantle of Dragon Lord, but he refused."

"I was raised like a pony," Spike explained with some sorrow in his voice. "Most of the dragons wouldn't have accepted me as their leader, even if I had taken the title. Besides, ruling the dragons would mean I couldn't be by Twilight's side."

Twilight nodded at him with a supportive smile, "Instead, a shortsighted young dragon named Garble earned the title of Dragon Lord, and he was no friend to ponies, or to Spike." Ember's picture was replaced by another dragon with red scales and a significant overbite. "Discord secured an alliance with the dragons on the simple promise of an infinite supply of gemstones, and a consistent day-night cycle.

"While Discord could manipulate the sun and the moon on a whim, his personality is naturally erratic, and he wouldn't be able to maintain a strict cycle. Acknowledging his own failing in this regard, he kidnapped Celestia and Luna. We don't know where they are now, but day and night have been progressing normally since, so they must still be alive and capable of at least some magic.

"Then, five years into Discord's rule, Cadance discovered the text of his curse, and became convinced that the missing ponies had been sent to an alternate universe. With my help and a hoofful of guardsponies, she has been systematically searching through the Crystal Mirror to find everypony who was taken away. Flurry Heart was left to lead the resistance alone for twenty years, with Cadance and myself stepping away from our search to assist in major engagements against the dragons and the chaos spawn. And now we're here," the princess concluded.

"If you're asking us to send every transformation victim on the planet through the Stargate with you, I'm afraid that's simply not an option," Landry said. "At last estimate, there are 2.7 million transformation victims spread across hundreds of countries, several of which are not friendly to the United States. And," the general stressed, "the civilian population doesn't even know the Stargate exists, nor is President Hayes willing to declassify the Stargate program, so far as I'm aware."

Twilight looked to her friends that were present, and there was no hint of recognition in their eyes. Only Sweetie Belle remembered Equestria. "General, from the way you describe the situation, am I to understand that Sweetie is the only one to have regained her memories of being a pony?" she asked.

Landry nodded, "I haven't received any reports of other victims talking about your world. The doctors have noted consistent replacement of certain vocabulary words, such as 'anypony' instead of 'anyone,' but other than that, we haven't noticed any psychological changes."

Twilight lowered her head in thought, holding her chin in one hoof. As the pause in the conversation stretched and started to become uncomfortable, General O'Neill spoke for the first time since Twilight's arrival, "She didn't fall asleep with her eyes open, did she? I knew a guy in Basic that slept with his eyes open. It was creepy."

Spike shook his head, "No, she's just thinking. It's a bad habit she's picked up, but at least it's better than when she would talk to herself." He returned his attention to Landry and said, "How many ponies did you say there were? 2.7 million?"

"Approximately, yes," the general confirmed.

Spike inhaled deeply, his chest inflating far beyond what the others would have expected was possible. Before anyone could ask what he was doing, he released the breath in a fiery belch, spewing green flames above the conference table. Everyone else save Twilight, who was still lost in thought, ducked in surprise.

"What on God's green earth...?" Landy muttered.

The flames coalesced into several thickly rolled scrolls, which dropped into Spike's waiting claws. As he unfurled the first scroll, he noticed the wide-eyed reaction the others were giving him. "These are copies of the last censuses taken in nations with significant pony populations before Discord took over," he explained, completely missing the point.

Spike partially unrolled each of the scrolls he had summoned, pointing out a figure near the bottom of each. He claimed they were population totals, but the written language was unreadable to most of the people sitting at the table.

"It looks a bit like Cuneiform," Daniel said, "but the divergence is large enough that Ah wouldn't be confident translatin' a document like this without several weeks of study."

Spike's eye ridges rose in surprise. "I guess it makes sense that you all wouldn't be able to read if you'd lost your memories. No offense, generals," he said, giving a nod to the pair of humans in the room. "It's a bit of a surprise to see everypony deferring to Applejack on an unknown language, though."

Daniel frowned. "Ah've got PhDs in archaeology, anthropology, and philology, and Ah'm a polyglot conversant in over twenty languages," she said. "Ah should hope everypony would defer to me on somethin' like this!"

Spike lifted his claws in surrender. "Okay, okay! It's just not what I expected; before Discord attacked, you were an apple farmer, and proud of it," he pointed to the mark on Daniel's flank as though that were all the proof anyone would need. Daniel's gaze followed Spike's pointing claw, and her frown deepened.

"Anyway," Spike returned to the scrolls, "the written language is called Poneiform, and it has been the common language for government work for centuries, thanks to the strength of Equestria as a nation, not to mention its rulers literally controlling the heavens. Even the Dragons write Poneiform. At least, those few dragons who bother to become literate do," he added, with a self-deprecating grin.

Spike pointed to the figures on the scrolls again, "These numbers suggest a planetary pony population of close to 300 million, and as Twilight said, Discord cursed roughly nine out of every ten ponies, so far as we can tell. Obviously, we don't have any reliable census data for after the chaos," he chuckled. "If there are only 2.7 million ponies in this universe, then even if we did get every single one of them back home, that's only one percent of the missing citizens."

The ponies and humans around the conference table looked at each other awkwardly. "You seem to be misunderstanding," Landry said, "there are 2.7 million on this planet. There are absolutely more transformation victims elsewhere in the Milky Way." The general pointed to the window leading to the embarkation room and said, "The Stargate leads to tens of thousands of other planets, possibly hundreds of thousands. There are humans like ourselves and Jaffa like Teal'c out there, and we know at the very least that some members of the Free Jaffa Nation have been transforming. We have one of their leaders in intensive care right now."

Spike's mood brightened considerably at the news. "Interstellar travel? That's incredible! It's like a science fiction book come to life! If even a hundred of those other planets have a pony population like yours, then we might have found the universe we were looking for!"

Twilight took that moment to come out of her moment of deep thought, clopping one hoof on the table and exclaiming, "I've got it!"

"Back with us, Princess?" O'Neill asked.

"This whole curse is borne of chaotic magic," Twilight explained. "Breaking it is going to require the strongest harmonic magic we can field, and that means retrieving the Elements of Harmony."

"But if you take the Elements back, won't the Plundervines overrun Ponyville again?" Sweetie asked.

Twilight shook her head sadly, "The Plundervines are already overrunning Ponyville. Look closely." She projected the same image from before, of a town overtaken by a forest, with wooden wolves roaming the streets. The projection telescoped in on one of the houses; what had appeared from a high altitude to be shadows caused by damage on the roof was actually thick black vines with large thorns. Sweetie gasped and covered her mouth with both hooves, and Twilight said, "I haven't had the opportunity to investigate the fate that has befallen the Tree of Harmony, which was supposed to keep the Plundervines in check. But now that we've found most of the Bearers, I do think that the Elements could turn the tide."

"'Bearers?'" Daniel asked. "Ah'm sorry, Ah think you're assumin' knowledge we don't have."

"Oh, of course! My apologies," Twilight smiled. Her cadence changed slightly as she began her explanation, "The Tree of Harmony was discovered by the not-yet Princesses Celestia and Luna just fifty years following the Grand Unification—"

"Nope!" Spike interrupted the princess, clamping her mouth closed with his claws. Turning to Daniel, he said, "The Elements of Harmony are a set of six immensely magical artifacts which can only be wielded by specific individuals, who are currently Twilight and her friends. They originally came from the Tree of Harmony, and nearly half a century ago the Elements were returned to the Tree."

Spike released Twilight's muzzle when he finished, pointedly ignoring the glare he received in return. "That was entirely uncalled for," she said.

"You were starting to recite your magnum opus on the subject," Spike countered.

"I'm sorry, I still don't quite understand," Carter inserted herself into the conversation. "The two of you keep going on about 'magic,' but what do these Elements actually do?"

Twilight cocked her head as she considered Carter. "Are your people familiar with the fundamental forces of magic?" she asked.

Carter's muzzle scrunched up, "The four fundamental forces of nature are gravitational, electromagnetic, strong, and weak, if that's what you mean."

Twilight shook her head, "I don't think so. The fundamental forces of magic are harmonic, chaotic, thaumic, and inherent. Inherent magic comes naturally to every creature with magic: earth pony strength, unicorn telekinesis, et cetera." She demonstrated her point by levitating the water pitcher kept on the conference table, pouring a glass, and levitating the glass to take a drink.

"Thaumic magic is designed, usually by unicorns. I'll spare you the details of how designing a spell works," she gave Spike a glance, and he smirked back, "but suffice to say it shares some similarities with inherent magic, yet has a significantly broader range of possible applications.

"Chaotic and harmonic magic, on the other hoof, can't normally be used by ponies. Discord is a Draconequus, and is a natural user of chaotic magic, while the Tree of Harmony is a font of harmonic magic, and the Elements of Harmony enable the Bearers to leverage it," Twilight explained. "Further, chaotic and harmonic magic are opposites, similar to acids and matrices."

"Acids and matrices?" Sam asked with one eyebrow raised.

"Acids and bases," Daniel supplied.

"Ah," Sam nodded.

General O'Neill crossed his arms and said, "So... we stuff an Alka-Seltzer down everyone's throat to cure them?"

Sam nodded, hesitantly, "Between what I understand of what Princess Twilight has told us and inferences into the things I admit I don't really understand yet, you're not far off from her basic plan, sir."

Sweetie Belle clapped her hooves and grinned, "The Elements are the antacid and Discord's curse is the heartburn!"

"We do need to retrieve the Elements themselves, of course," Twilight nodded. "And while most of the Bearers are here, we will also have to find Pinkie Pie. That will probably be a tremendous task," she sighed.

"Hold on, Princess," General Landry cautioned. "My people have no experience fighting in their transformed bodies, and frankly I suspect everyone here is interested in finding out how you and Cassandra do what you do. Even if you were to hand me a dossier with perfect intelligence on both these Elements and the location of whoever has become your friend Pinkie Pie, I'm not going to sign off on any mission with my people without retraining them."

Twilight jumped to her hooves, outraged at the general's denial. "You're not going to... these are my little ponies! My friends! You can't hold them hostage!"

"From my point of view, they're my subordinates, and none of them have seen you in their lives," Landry matched Twilight's motion, rising from his seat as well.

Realizing that the first-contact meeting was getting far too heated, Landry took a calming breath and slowly sat back down, his deliberate actions prompting Twilight to do the same. "I am sympathetic to your plight, Princess, not the least because Cassandra-slash-Sweetie vouches for you," he said. "It seems like you'll be able to supply intelligence on the location of these Elements you want us to retrieve, as well. But I meant it when I say that I don't want to endanger my people by sending them out into what is clearly a combat situation, without being confident that the dramatic changes to their bodies will not impede their combat readiness.

"To that end, would you consider acting as a teacher for my transformed personnel, instructing them in the use of the new abilities they apparently have?" Landry asked.

Twilight's eyes sparkled, with a wide grin spread across her face. Spike smirked and said, "General, I think you just said the second best thing to lift Twilight's spirits, right below presenting her with all of her friends with their memories restored." Spike nudged the princess to get her attention and suggested, "You should get Sweetie to help. You gave her a great magical foundation as a filly, and it would let you devote more time to teaching the pegasi and earth ponies."

Twilight nodded, "That sounds like a wonderful idea, Spike! Sweetie, would you be willing to teach these unicorns how to use magic again?"

Sweetie held out a hoof. "Cough up the bits, and I'm in!"

Jack laughed, "Are you sure you were studying astrophysics at Embry-Riddle? Sounds like you were studying art!"

Sweetie shrugged, "I've been a poor college student in two lifetimes, I know what I need for my time."

"PrincessTwilight, if I may?" Teal'c asked. When Twilight gave her attention, Teal'c continued, "The Tau'ri have a considerable capacity for gathering information on their own planet. If you would share a description of your friend you still wish to find, and she is on Earth, we could likely find her before completing the training you have agreed to assist with."

"Who are the Tau'ri?" Spike asked.

"It's a Goa'uld word," Daniel said. "It means 'ones from the first world,' referring to Earth as the planet that humans evolved on."

"So, we might be able to find Pinkie quickly? That's wonderful!" Twilight said.

The princess began to describe her friend in detail, from her coloration, to her cutie mark, to her personality. As the description continued, Daniel started fidgeting and throwing glances to Teal'c. Teal'c, for her part, could not seem to control her wings.

Eventually, General O'Neill interrupted Twilight in the middle of describing Pinkie Pie's place of work, which was completely irrelevant to trying to find a human that had turned into her. "Okay, you two," he said, "who filled your pants with fire ants?"

"General Landry, don't ya think this Pinkie Pie sounds awful familiar?" Daniel asked.

"I wish she didn't," Hank replied. At the questioning look from O'Neill and the hopeful look from Princess Twilight, he added, "Several members of SG-1 ran an unsanctioned mission to attempt to capture a being named Kaggen by the Goa'uld, who I am beginning to suspect is an alias for the Discord that Princess Twilight is talking about. They encountered a Goa'uld System Lord named Ba'al, who was in the midst of the transformation process. The description of Pinkie Pie matches the partially-transformed Ba'al insofar as any partially-transformed individual matches the description of the final state."

"You mentioned the Goa'uld before," Spike said, "who are they?"

"Snakes that wrap around your brain and puppet your body!" O'Neill said.

"False gods, deserving of death," Teal'c added.

Carter rolled her eyes at the others' outbursts, "The Goa'uld are a race of parasites, capable of wholly controlling their host's body. They found Earth thousands of years ago, taking humans as hosts and as slaves, and eventually breeding humans into the Jaffa. 'System Lord' is a member of the ruling class of the Goa'uld Empire."

"An empire which, I might add, we have almost completely disassembled," Jack added. "Killing gods is practically our hobby."

Twilight's ears fell. "They're like Nightmares," she whispered.

"It's worse than a simple nightmare, Princess," Landry said. "Long before the transformations began, Ba'al created clones of himself and his host. According to Doctor Lam, the transformation should have affected all of them."

Spike's eyes widened. "Nightmare Pinkie jumped in the Mirror Pool? Whelp, we're doomed!"

Author's Note

: Murder!
: Murder!
: Enslave!
: Torture!
: Pillage!

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Chapter 9: Even Rocky Had a Montage

Stargate Command Mess Hall
Sweetie Belle stood before her first class of unicorns: a dozen ponies-turned-human-turned-pony who had no memory of how to be a pony. General Landry allowed that teaching a smaller class would likely be more effective, and so he had Sweetie, Twilight, and Spike prioritize members of actual field teams, over ponies who were meant to be support staff.

The group was spread out, occupying maybe half of the tables in the base's mess hall. Since lunch had just ended, the serving line was largely clear; a few bowls of fruit had been left out for anyone who needed a snack between meals, with apples, peaches, and the like.

Sweetie's task was to get this class back to combat readiness before the end of the month, at least as far as their magical abilities were concerned. Two more classes of unicorns needed to be capable of performing the tasks they had been hired for by the end of June. And here she was, barely more than a filly.

"Okay, everypony, your attention please!" Sweetie called out to get the attention of the ponies sitting around the mess hall tables. A few off-duty human personnel stood around the edge of the room, not getting in the way, but curious about "magic class."

One pony raised his hoof, a stallion with a teal coat and black mane, wearing round glasses in addition to the modified PT gear that had become standard attire among the pony personnel. Sweetie nodded to him and he said, "So, when do we get our magic wands?" A laugh made its way around the room, and Sweetie even let herself have a small chuckle.

But they were here to work, and she needed to get the respect of these military types as quick as possible. Sweetie walked up to the joker and asked, "What's your name?"

"I'm Airman—"

Sweetie interrupted him by reaching up and flicking the tip of his horn with her hoof, causing him to recoil and cry out in surprise.

"Your 'wand,' mister Potter," Sweetie tried to do her best Alan Rickman impression as she walked back to the "head" of her class, "is firmly attached to your forehead. It's also sensitive, and becomes more sensitive while casting a spell." Once she turned back to the room she was addressing, she said, "The class clown can tell you what it feels like to get your horn hit while not channeling any magic. The pain increases with increased power flowing through it, potentially to debilitating levels. I suppose that means rule number one as a unicorn in combat is to avoid letting your horn get hit."

Sweetie levitated apples out of one of the bowls of fruit, placing one in front of each of her students. "Levitation is the most basic spell a unicorn can cast," she explained, "and as I hope you can imagine, it can be extremely versatile. Just off the top of my head, consider the ability to shoot a gun from behind total cover, or precisely placing a grenade where you want it to go off!

"In Equestria, spells are graded with levels, called 'alliterations.' By convention, each spell is given an alliterative name of a length corresponding to its level. 'Mythal's Muffling' would be a double-alliteration spell, for example, 'Redbelly's Resonance Recognition' would be a triple-alliteration spell, and so on," Sweetie drew on her recent escapades for examples. "Spells with greater alliteration levels are, generally, more difficult and require more power, although there is some overlap. Levitation is often considered to be a zero-alliteration spell, although manipulating greater mass requires additional power, and manipulating a larger number of individual objects at once requires more concentration."

Sweetie began running the unicorns through the basics of channeling magical energy and directing it into a spell, recalling her lessons at Ponyville Elementary. By the time the kitchen staff began setting up for dinner, none of the apples had lifted from where Sweetie had placed them at the start of class, but at least most of her students could channel magic on command.

Stargate Command Gym
The gym was filled with winged ponies, which would have been a curious sight just a week ago. More curious, however, was the array of pony-sized school desks that had been set up for Twilight's class.

"Where in the world did these come from?" Carter wondered aloud.

Princess Twilight glanced away from the whiteboard that had been set up at the "head" of the classroom. "Oh! Don't worry, Rainbow Dash, they're an aetheric construct I'm maintaining for the purpose of flight class," she said. As she talked, she continued to draw diagrams on the whiteboard with a pair of markers grasped in her magical aura.

A titter worked its way through the crowd of pegasi at the name Twilight used for the lieutenant colonel, and Sam's brow furrowed in consternation. Realizing her mistake, the princess blushed slightly and apologized, "I'm sorry, you said you preferred to be called Doctor Carter earlier. I will try to remember that in the future." To the whole group, she said, "Please, everypony, take a seat, and we can get started!"

The pegasi obediently filled the desks, although their amusement at Carter's expense didn't die down quickly and Carter took her seat with more than a little grumbling. Twilight either didn't notice or didn't react to her discomfort as she floated pencils and legal pads to each desk as they did so. When every seat was filled, one stallion spoke up, "I thought this was supposed to be a flight class. Why are we sitting at desks?" He had a grey coat, with a dark brown mane and tail, and a close-cropped moustache.

Twilight smiled. "That's an excellent question, mister...?"

"Lieutenant Anser, ma'am," the stallion supplied.

"Well, Lieutenant Anser, I find that it's vitally important to start from fundamentals whenever learning a new subject," the princess began. "Since all of you have been living as a flightless species for decades, we're going to start with the basic forces of flight: thrust, drag, gravity, and lift," she pointed to a diagram of air flowing around a bird's – or perhaps a pegasi's – wing that she had drawn on the whiteboard, "and if you study hard, hopefully we will be able to build up to practical exercises within three weeks."

Twilight's new students looked at each other, uncertain. Lieutenant Anser spoke up again, "Uh... ma'am? We're in the Air Force."

The other pegasi murmured in agreement, many nodding their heads.

Twilight blinked in confusion. "I thought humans couldn't fly?" She asked. "How do you get in the air to exert an air force?"

Anser cocked an eyebrow. "With... planes? You know, flying machines?"

Twilight turned back to the diagrams she'd drawn, tapping her chin with one hoof. "I think I need to modify my lesson plan..." she muttered to herself.

NORAD Softball Field
A group of earth ponies slowly walked onto NORAD's softball field less than a mile down the road from Stargate Command, with Spike leading them. Daniel stepped up next to him and began, "So, Mister Thed'ragon—"

"Please, just 'Spike' will do fine."

"Okay, Spike. Ah don't understand exactly what is it we're gonna do out here?" Daniel asked.

"Well, I'm not an earth pony, so I can't demonstrate any earth pony magic," Spike replied. "Twilight could, but she's going to be tied up teaching the pegasi how to fly. However, a fair amount of earth pony magic, and probably all of it you'd use in a military context, is essentially an enhancement of normal physical tasks."

With a belch of green flames that set most of the ponies behind him back on their heels at the unexpected sight, a well-used softcover book materialized from within the fire, dropping into Spike's waiting claws. Daniel was close enough to see the faded image on the cover, a golden pegasus wearing a pith helmet escaping from crocodiles.

"What's the circumference of this field?" Spike asked.

"Ah dunno," Daniel shrugged, "a third of a kilometer?"

"And how good are humans at running?"

Another earth pony in the group spoke up, a yellow stallion with a close-cropped red mane, "In Basic, we had to run two miles, timed. The men had to meet 16 minutes, 45 seconds, and the women had to meet 19 minutes, 45 seconds."

Spike cocked an eye ridge at Daniel. Starting to get an idea of what Spike had in mind, she responded, "Between nine and ten laps."

"Okay, everypony!" Spike called to the group. "I want you to start galloping around this field—"

"Two miles? Easy!" A mare in the back of the group called out. "Most of us got Warhawk or Thunderbolt in Basic!"

Spike bared his teeth in an expression that could charitably be called a smile. "Oh, no. As useful as speed can be, today you're going to test the limits of your endurance," he said with some schadenfreude. "It's your first day, so let's say... one hour sustained gallop. Each time I see somepony drop below a gallop, I'll add five minutes for everypony."

Silence reigned. The mare who had spoken up paled slightly as she realized what she was about to get into. "Well?" Spike asked. "Get to it!" he waved his book towards the first base foul line, as he made his own way toward second base.

After a short hesitation, the group of ponies began moving, quickly increasing speed to a gallop by the time they reached the foul line and turned towards home base.

When Spike reached second base, he sat down on the cushion, opening his book and beginning to read. He glanced up every now and then, monitoring the pace of the ponies doing laps.

Stargate Command Security Station
On the closed circuit televisions, General Landry and two members of base security watched all of the pony classes taking place.

Sweetie Belle seemed to have a good read on her class, and while it didn't appear that her students were making progress in leaps and bounds in their first session together, the encouragement she offered them with their achievements suggested things were progressing as well as could be expected.

Twilight's flight class had a turbulent start, but once the princess moved on from the basics of flight physics to the basics of actually using wings, things became much smoother. As it turned out, she had had some prior experience being transformed into something like a human, and was able to leverage the memory of that experience into helping the pegasi figure out how to properly control their wing muscles.

There was little of note in Spike's earth pony class, consisting of nothing but laps around the softball field. One of the security officers had the bright idea to send someone to set up a seismometer near the running ponies; once the group had settled into a coherent tempo, the readings from the seismometer registered the thundering hooves as a small earthquake.

An hour after the exercise began, though, Spike showed no sign of telling the ponies to stop.

"Sir? Should I send a runner to remind them of the time?" one of the security officers asked Landry.

"Put a medical team on standby in the area in case any of them drop from exhaustion, but let Thed'ragon teach his class how he will," the general replied. "It's not like they have anything to do when they stop and come back here."

NORAD Softball Field
As the sun began to dip towards the horizon, Spike turned the last page of his book and stood up, stretching his arms and legs. With a gout of emerald flame, the book disappeared, and the thundering tempo established by the group of galloping earth ponies faltered, uncertain whether that was a signal that they were done for the day.

"It's okay, you guys can stop now!" Spike called as he began walking towards the road.

When the group finally slowed to a walk, they joined Spike on the edge of the field. "I thought you said we'd be running for an hour?" the mare from before asked. "I've barely broken a sweat!"

"I lied," Spike admitted. "I didn't keep track of time at all, and just had you run until I was done with my book." He looked up to the sun and said, "I'd estimate you were running for at least three hours, though, and as you say, you're all barely sweating.

"Lesson one, earth ponies: your endurance is more a product of your expectations than your actual physical abilities. If you believe you can keep going, you probably can keep going. It works in reverse, too: if you think you've hit your limit, you'll feel exhausted and stretched thin, even if an analysis of your body's available energy says otherwise." Spike may not have been Twilight, but it was difficult to avoid picking up the mannerisms of someone you've lived with for a majority of your life. For Spike, this showed when he tried to explain something in-depth, and he instinctively dropped into a tone that was a perfect mirror to Twilight's lectures. "Of course, the downside to that phenomenal endurance is that it's possible for it to exceed your actual ability, such as when you're injured or sick," he added. "Though rare, Equestria has had unfortunate cases such as owners of small farms getting sick or understaffed during harvest time, and then literally working themselves to death."

Spike turned to Daniel and said, "As a matter of fact, I recall a year when you very nearly did exactly that. Your brother broke a rib and smartly opted out of helping with the harvest. Instead of hiring a farmhoof to cover for him, you decided to try and harvest the entire orchard yourself. Twilight and the rest of your friends intervened to help, and it probably saved your life."

"As simultaneously touching and horrifying as that sounds," Daniel said with a frown, "I don't remember any of that. That's not my life."

Leading the group up the road back to Cheyenne Mountain, Spike nodded. "Of course," he granted, "I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Simply an anecdote of the possibilities."

As summer rolled over Colorado, the pony classes continued in Cheyenne Mountain.

Before long, Sweetie's students could levitate at will, most of them able to manipulate up to three objects simultaneously, for a total of around half their own body mass. To Sweetie's delight, Mitchell retained her talent for telekinetic multitasking that had served Rarity so well as a clothier.

Unfortunately, Sweetie's knowledge was lacking when it came to combat magic. Between class sessions, Sweetie had Twilight teach her a single-alliteration energy blast and a single-alliteration shield spell that she could in turn teach her students, at least to those who would likely see combat. They wouldn't be sufficient for winning a duel between master sorceresses in Equestria, but they would be an additional tool to help the Stargate teams in the field.

Unbeknownst to either Sweetie or the princess, several of the base scientists – including some that had become unicorns and some that had not transformed at all – began studying unicorn magic for an explanation of its mechanism. The telekinesis Sweetie had started with was an excellent benchmark, considering the amount of data the SGC had collected over the years on the telekinetic abilities of near-ascended humans.

The pegasi in Twilight's class quickly grew accustomed to using their wings, each able to exert enough lift force to clear the entirety of the base gym in a single leap. True flight had not yet been achieved, however to the delight of many – and to the consternation of both human and pony biologists alike – the pegasi learned to use their feathers for manipulation in many ways similar to the hands they had lost. Door knobs were no longer frustrating obstacles, and writing reports and emails were no longer relegated to voice-to-text programs. They had minimal grip strength and couldn't lift anything especially heavy with their feathers, but many found it an acceptable compromise.

Bra'tac requested to join in on the pegasi lessons once she had recovered enough to be released from the care of Doctor Lam, and Landry happily granted the request; Bra'tac would be able to pass on the things she learned to the Free Jaffa Nation, so letting her into Twilight's class was almost as good as getting Twilight to agree to teach the Jaffa. Of course, she lagged behind the rest of the class due to her delayed start, but Bra'tac more than made up for that with dogged determination.

Spike occasionally lamented being unable to instruct his students in what he called "more impressive" earth pony magic, but his students and anyone who watched their lessons in person or on recording had trouble believing that the exercises he was putting them through were demonstrating less impressive feats of the earth pony tribe. According to many, by far the most extraordinary thing Spike had had the earth ponies do was when he was trying to demonstrate the limits of their strength; almost any group of five earth ponies was capable of lifting the Stargate, and those numbers were mostly due to its unwieldy size. Of course they couldn't remove it from the base's embarkation room, as the only exit that the gate could fit through was in the ceiling and out the top of the mountain, but the demonstration was impressive nonetheless.

Unfortunately, with all of her teammates learning how to be a pony, Vala had little to do when she was finally released from the infirmary. Watching the classes only provided so much distraction, and she ultimately secluded herself in her quarters, coming out only for meals.

Outside Cheyenne Mountain, the world continued to turn. While the existence of the transformations had already been revealed to the world, official sources had been vague on the exact nature of the pandemic. It was only a matter of time, however, until photos of transformation victims began to spread across the internet and the airwaves. One news organization had even managed to get their hands on a collection of photos documenting one individual's progression from man to stallion over the entire period of transformation.

There was a period of uproar and outcry in the public, with people claiming that the military had lied to them. Congress even formed a special committee to investigate the matter... except the committee's membership had been specially selected from among the congressmen and women who had already been read in on the Stargate program. The closed-door meetings with Air Force officials were used to keep Congress in the loop on the issue, rather than to investigate the possibility of wrongdoing by any parties involved.

Eventually, contact with Atlantis was even reestablished. The expedition team reported that none of their members had suffered from the transformation, and they had no reports of any such transformations in the Pegasus galaxy. "A shame," one of the technicians in the SGC Control Room had remarked at the time, "it would have been all too perfect to have a bunch of people in Pegasus turn into pegasi."

Uncertain why the people in the Pegasus galaxy hadn't changed, Landry ordered a halt on travel through the Midway Station until the pony situation was handled. Since the Apollo's arrival hadn't triggered anything, he allowed that using Daedalus-class ships to ferry people and goods between the galaxies would still be permitted, but that meant a round trip of more than a month, instead of an hour.

All things must eventually end, of course. And the SGC's pony retraining was no exception.

"Okay, Princess," General Landry said, "tell me about the Tree of Harmony."

Author's Note

So I've fallen off the writing wagon a bit. Sorry! Here's a Christmas present chapter in apology.

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