Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 127

Chapter 127 - Be Careful What You Wish For - Part 2

Over four hundred years of cleaning up his people’s various messes had led Eventus to one, very possibly inevitable, conclusion. His people were flawed on several fundamental levels.

If he had to guess, he would put good money on most, if not all, of those flaws originating from the either intentional and unintentional eugenics caused by their split from the Ori. Or some bit of pre-split genetic engineering that had been forgotten about during their long trek between galaxies. 

Because those were the best explanations he could think of for their extremely atrophied sense of urgency when it came to dealing with things that were on their way to stab them in the face.

Hence after a good deal of thought and consideration, alongside an express desire to avoid having thousands of Rayla-like teenagers running around. He had decided to kill two darts with one drone and pull a reverse of what his people had on Earth all those years ago.

So in a year or two when everything stopped being on fire, he'd start pulling in the best and brightest from Earth and let romance take its course with the remaining members of his people.

“You're going to be allowing immigration?” Xiaoyi said in a tone that suggested she was having a hard time processing that.

“Eventually.” Eventus confirmed, considering the Chinese woman across from him for a moment before coming to a decision. “Did you want to put your name in? Because we have a lot of openings in our diplomatic branch?”

And no offense to Doctor Weir, but everything he'd read suggested she was the type who always tried to come to mutually beneficial arrangements with people. Which, while great for leading the Atlantis expedition, wasn't really the type of cut throat diplomat his people would need if they ever wanted to make peace with the Wraith.

Xiaoyi reached up to massage her temples before focusing her gaze back on him. “Can we please deal with my current problem of being ten years younger before adding more to the pile?”

“It was a bit more than that.” Eventus honestly confessed. “You had heavy metal and toxin buildup in your body that I removed. Particulate damage in your lungs that I repaired. And a lactose tolerance issue that I fixed.”

All things considered she had been in pretty good shape for a woman born in an industrializing nation. 

“Lactose tol…” Xiaoyi began, only to stop herself mid sentence and narrow her eyes at him. 

“You have to be doing that on purpose.”

Eventus furrowed his brow in confusion. “Doing what?”

Continuing to stare at him for a few more seconds, Xiaoyi finally let out a tired sigh. “Moving directly to the point, suddenly being younger could cause me all sorts of problems. So please, please don’t mention what you did to anyone.”

“All right.” Eventus agreed, not sure she had thought that through very well given how obviously younger she looked now. “But I feel like they’re going to notice the differences."

“Most people don’t pay as much attention to tiny details as you apparently do.” Xiaoyi countered dryly. “Trust me when I say the only one likely to notice anything different is my mother.” She gave an acknowledging nod. “And possibly my sister. But at most they’ll just want to know what my new skin care routine is.”

That was oddly depressing for Eventus to hear given it was the Chinese woman basically admitting she wasn't particularly close to anyone outside of her family.

“After all.” The corner of Xiaoyi's lips twitched slightly. “It’s not like you made me taller, or my breasts bigger.”

“For cosmetic enhancements like that I’d need access to a genetic resequencer.” Eventus admitted. “Or possibly a psionic amplifier, but I wouldn’t want to chance mentally controlled genetic alterations on a human without first going through a training course.”

That seemed to throw Xiaoyi for a loop, and she seemed to fight with herself for a moment before her shoulders slumped in seeming resignation.

“Your people used genetic alteration for cosmetic work?”

Eventus nodded. “Cosmetic alterations weren’t really encouraged of course, but part of being happy in life is being who you want, so small alterations were never expressly forbidden.”

Major ones had been, but that was more because there were inherent dangers in that level of alteration to an already developed body that could lead to a person collapsing into a puddle of protoplasm.

“Is that all you wanted to talk about?”

“The only thing that needed this level of privacy.” Xiaoyi admitted as she began to push herself up, only to pause half way and shoot him an odd look. “You’re really not going to ask about what kind of problems this might cause me?”

“Not really.” Eventus said as he stood. “If you need help with anything else about the situation I figure you’d just ask since I’m more than capable of dealing with pretty much any Earth based problems you might run into.”

“Right.” Xiaoyi muttered under her breath as she finished rising. “And you’re being absolutely serious about that too, aren’t you?”

“Of course.” Eventus confirmed, a bit confused about why she would think otherwise. “I’d rather avoid things like blackmail and overthrowing governments of course. But there are a lot of potential options outside of those.”

Technically speaking he was already setting up most of Earth’s governments to be overthrown within the next couple hundred years. But there was more than enough information available on various networked computers to accelerate that to within the next few months if he had a semi-intelligent system start digging into things those various governments would no doubt prefer remain hidden.

Walking over to the hatch, he reached over and tapped the bulkhead control to lower it. “Honestly, you humans are really lucky the Goa’uld System Lords are all suffering from the negative effects of sarcophagus overuse. Because if they actually played the politics and propaganda game like their age and technology would suggest, everyone on Earth would be in huge trouble.”

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Author’s Notes: Cut to Ba’al cackling evilly as he basically does just that and then loosing half of his fortune gambling at the Ritz.