Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 136

Chapter 136 - Late Night Work

It had taken Eventus and Thor nearly five hours to work their way through the backlog of various things they’d needed to talk about. A fact Eventus rather regretted as it meant his dinner had ended up being Asgard nutrition blocks. Food that, while technically edible to both human and Lantean, nonetheless made it clear that despite their similar forms their species shared no biological ancestors.

“And you’re absolutely sure you don’t want a Stargate for Orilla?” Eventus asked as he rose to his feet. “We never got around to building them, but we do have a fourth generation design that allows for selective acceptance of incoming wormhole connections and self-regulates the unstable vortex.”

“Does it still allow a sufficiently advanced species to track the wormhole's path to the world's location in real space?” Thor inquired.

Eventus frowned. “That’s kind of unavoidable, is it really that much of a problem?”

Thor gave a shallow nod. “If the Ori truly have a way to build a Stargate capable of allowing warships to pass through to this galaxy, the best defense we will possess against their crusade is the difficulty they will have in finding our worlds.”

“I suppose I can’t really argue with that logic given it’s the same reason we were never able to wipe out the Wraith.” Eventus admitted with a wince. 

“Is there a specific location you wish me to return you to?” Thor inquired.

“The waiting room from earlier will be fine.” Eventus said.

The bridge of the Asgard vessel vanished with a flash, and he reappeared in the same room they had greeted Thor in earlier.

A low breathing drew his attention to one of the chairs, and he had to hold back a laugh at the sprawled out form of General O'Neill, who by the looks of things had decided to catch a nap.

Walking over he lifted the hat off the man's face. “Jack! Get up! Daniel found a fairy ring and now we're being invaded by pixies who want to steal all the world's sugar!”

Jack woke up with a start. “Dammit Daniel, what did I say about…” He finally seemed to realize where he was, and turned an unamused look at Eventus. “Very funny mister.”

“I thought it was.” Eventus confessed with a chuckle. “And I’m pretty sure you would have done the same given half the chance.”

O’Neill rubbed the back of his head and grinned. “Well yeah, but pixies stealing sugar? Come on, you gotta be a bit more creative with that sort of thing.”

Eventus pouted. “Just for that, someday I’m going to bioengineer pixies with a sweat tooth.”

“Really?” O’Neill asked skeptically.

“No.” Eventus confessed with a sigh. “I wouldn’t even know where to start designing biological brains of that size that allowed a human level of sapience.”

There had been some early thoughts of going the sentient plant route for pixies when he had been working out which fantasy race to start with. Unfortunately he would have had to have worked out the genetic engineering for it from the ground up.

“Put some thought into it, have you?” O’Neill drolled. 

“Of course.” Eventus emphatically confirmed. “You’ve been going through the Stargate for nearly a decade at this point, and you’ve run into what? Half a dozen sapient non-human species?”

“About that.” O”Neill confirmed.

“Given the number of habitable planets in this galaxy’s stargate network there should have been a hundred times that.” Eventus insisted in exasperation. “But all we wanted were humans, standard boring humans that we’ve done thousands of times on thousands of different worlds.”

He grimaced and shot O’Neill an apologetic look. “Not that your people are boring, I meant it more in the sense that Human, Goa’uld, Asgard, and Nox all have distinctly different ways of looking at the universe compared to the much more limited varieties of thought held by just humans alone.”

“Did you have to include Goa’uld in there?” O’Neill frowned.

“Yes.” Eventus nodded. “From what I’ve read in your files, when they’re not being evil they’re actually a remarkably inventive species. And the being evil problem is at least partially our fault due to the sarcophagus corruption issue.”

There was a real temptation to try and see if there was an alternate universe out there somewhere where the Goa’uld had never found the healing core. Because he really wanted to see just what the species would have made of itself without the soul damage and megalomania acting as a yoke around their necks.

“So how'd the meeting with Thor go?” O'Neill asked as stood up and stretched the kinks out of his neck.

“Pretty good.” Eventus admitted honestly. “When the time comes I'm going to be heading back to Pegasus on the Samantha Carter to deal with a couple of potentially apocalyptic problems that the Asgard are uniquely positioned to nip in the butt.”

O'Neill raised an eyebrow. “The Samantha Carter, huh? What are we looking at, a carrier, a scout ship?” He grinned. “A fleet support vessel?”

Eventus shot the man a skeptical look.

“There may be a pool.” O'Neill shrugged innocently.

“Of course there is.” Eventus chuckled, not even bothering to hide his amusement at the idea. “Sadly however the most I can say is that the mission involves transporting Janus back to Atlantis, and might at some point involve planetary bombardment.”

Sadly warning the humans about the Asurans was likely to do more harm than good at this point given they seemed to have inherited his people's general distaste for artificial intelligences.

“So…” O'Neill drawled questioningly. “Special ops ships?”

“One way or another you'll probably find out in a couple weeks.” Eventus admitted, giving an apologetic shrug. “Best case, we might get a new ally against the Ori and Wraith, worst case I'll secure a safe place to house potential refugees.”

“Is it the Furlings?” O'Neill asked almost hopefully. 

“Sadly no.” Eventus sighed. “And before you ask, Thor refused to show me what they looked like too.”

The Asgard hadn't even been willing to say why he was refusing, which was more than a little annoying given the circumstances.

“I did get him to give me the location data and codes needed to contact the Nox though. So that's on the list now”

“Tell Lya I said hi.” O'Neill smiled slightly. “And for Carter’s sake could maybe ask if they hid away any Tolan survivors?”

“Sure.” Eventus agreed, since that question had been on his list of things to ask the Nox about anyways.

“Great.” O’Neill said, motioning towards the door almost tiredly. “Let’s get going then, cause I’d like at least a few hours in bed before I gotta get up and start dealing with the morning's problems.”

“Going?” Eventus repeated in confusion.

“To the hotel.” O’Neill spelled out. “Unless you got somewhere else to stay for the night.”

Xiaoyi had offered her apartment, but it was late enough that Eventus didn’t really want to impose given she was probably still trying to renormalize her body's internal clock after the timezone shifts. “I was just going to sleep in the Jumper, the rear seats pull out into beds, and I figured it would save you several million dollars in security precautions.”

O’Neill seemed to consider that for a moment before nodding. “Works for me.”

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Author’s Notes: Someday Eventus will find out what the Furlings actually look like, today however is not that day. Truthfully the idea of there being a cultural reason behind the secret of what they look like makes me giggle.