Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 145

Chapter 145 - Powers and Portents

Eventus twitched slightly as the distinctive feeling of a suppression field washed over him, and he frowned at the pair sharing the elevator cab with him.

“Did you activate one of the nullification field generators?” 

“Is that the floaty glowing crystal with the gold ring around it that makes you nauseous if you stare at it too long?” Vala asked.

The frown on Eventus’s face deepened slightly. “It shouldn’t make a person nauseous, but yes, that’s an accurate description of the devices.”

“Given the accidental fires Rayla started using the amplifier, General Landry thought it would be a good idea to place one to cover the general area of the base's guest quarters.” Daniel offered as the elevator came to a stop.

Waiting a moment for the door to slide open, Eventus hefted his bags and stepped out onto the guest floor. “Annoying, but I suppose I can't really complain given you aren't really equipped to handle that sort of thing here any other way.”

His lips quirked slightly at the memory that brought up. “Ironically we had to do something similar with certain children until they could learn to control their gifts.”

“My stepmother just locked me in the cellar.” Vala quipped.

Pausing in his step, Eventus glanced over his shoulder at her. “Have you ever considered therapy?”

“Thank you!” Daniel threw up his arms. “I've been telling her that for the past two weeks.”

“And I've been telling you that I'm a perfectly well adjusted woman.” Vala countered primly. 

“You're really not.” Eventus told her, not even bothering to sugarcoat his words. “You're functional, which is a truly impressive example of mental fortitude given everything you've been through. But as far as being well adjusted is concerned you’re at about the same level as Daniel.”

“Hey!” Daniel protested. “I’m nothing like her!”

Turning fully to stare at the bodyswapped man, Eventus raised a single eyebrow.

“I mean,” Daniel hastily corrected. “Outside of the obvious.”

Eventus let out a sigh of annoyance. “While I’m not a mind specialist, I am over four hundred years old, and that comes with seeing a lot of humans. So trust me when I say, even if it manifests differently, both of you are running from your past traumas in a very similar manner.”

“And yes.” He acknowledged with a nod. “I’m not really one to speak at the moment given I’m knee deep in the river known as repression. But that doesn’t change that you both have issues, and once the Aurora’s mind specialist is back on her feet I’d heavily suggest you both spend a few months on Atlantis dealing with some of them.”

Leaving the somewhat put out pair with those words, he turned and continued on to the door to their previous guest room, reaching down towards the handle only for the door to fly open before he could reach.

“You’re back!” Rayla exclaimed, bouncing slightly in place as her eyes locked on the bag Eventus was carrying with thinly disguised excitement. “Is one of those for me!?”

“Where's Teyla?” Eventus asked, looking past the Elf and into the otherwise empty room without deigning to answer her question.

“She decided to go out with John once she heard you were coming back.” Rayla pouted.

Eventus blinked, glancing at the room's prominently displayed clock before feeling his eyebrow creep up. “General O'Neill only called that in a couple of hours ago, so it would have been a little after eight when you got the message.”

“Eight twenty-three.” Rayla nodded before scratching the back of her neck. “I think she just said they were going out because she didn't want to admit to me that they were going to have sex.”

Considering that for a few seconds, Eventus gave a nod of acknowledgement before pushing past Rayla and into the room. “After several weeks of the pair dealing with bureaucrats and politicians, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Setting the bags down on one of the beds, he turned back around and was completely unsurprised to see Rayla looking up at him with hopeful eyes.

Holding out his hand, Eventus stared expectantly at Rayla for several seconds before letting out a sigh. “The amplifier?”

“Oh…” Rayla muttered in a small voice.

A moment passed before the corner of the Elf’s lips began to quiver slightly as her whole body seemed to droop. “Do I have too? I'm pretty sure finding it was my destiny.”

The context of that word was enough to make Eventus twitch, centuries of warnings repeating themselves in his brain.

“Did you have a vision of the future when using the amplifier?” He asked cautiously.

“No.” Rayla shook her head, and Eventus let out a breath of relief.

“That's good.” He said, deciding now was as good a time as any to have this particular conversation given the amplifier at play. “You need to be sure you tell me if you ever do, because the gift of futuresight is the most dangerous of them all.”

“Seeing the future is dangerous?” Rayla asked, tilting her head in clear confusion.

Eventus gave a grim nod. “Once the energy of the upper dimensions is used by a mortal mind to peer beyond the veil of time, that energy attempts to lock in the single possibility glimpsed.”

Ironically the going theory suggested that without a mortal mind to act as an anchor to the temporal present, peering through time at all should be a functionally impossibility because you'd be seeing every possibility past, present, and future all at once in a jumbled incoherent mess.

“While that is an affront to the idea of free will on its surface, the danger is actually much worse than that. Because the person having the vision doesn’t get to choose which possibility they see, and the only hundred percent successful way to change a “bad” future is by the premature death of someone seen in the vision.”

Functionally speaking, the difficulty in actually changing what a person with the gift of futuresight saw was directly proportional to the strength of their gift. Or, in the case of multiple people with the gift having conflicting visions, the strength of the two seers pitted against each other. 

And while there had been many theories about why the premature death of a sentient being seen in a vision could disrupt even the strongest. The fact that the disruption only occurred with true deaths had made testing such theories a generally abhorrent idea.

“Oh.” Rayla said in a small voice before furrowing her brow. “Is that why you’re not worried about the Ori’s evil wizards seeing what you’re going to do beforehand?”

“One reason.” Eventus confirmed, jiggling his still held out hand expectantly. “Now come on, hand it over.”

“Fine...” Rayla muttered unhappily, reaching down into her shirt and carefully pulling the pendant up over her head before dropping it into his hand. “Here.”

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Author’s Notes: Having to work out a someone realistic reason for the “see the future with perfect accuracy” power we see in Stargate to not be an instant “I win” button for races like the Ancients who would have realistically had a significant number of people with the ability was somewhat harder than you’d think. And while I considered going the "dueling seer's" route, that only really worked against the Ori not the Wraith.