Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 83

Chapter 83 - Burned Midnight Oil

“And so I set out to create a weapon with which the Ori could be put to rest once and for all.” Daniel frowned, staring at the holographic words he had just finished reading for a moment before turning to look at them. “Is that even possible?”

“In theory.” Eventus confirmed with a nod. “The Ascended aren’t unassailable. There’s a device on Atlantis which produces an energetic effect that has been described by Ascended hit by it as a sort of slightly annoying pinching feeling. And there were a couple scientists working on something which could supposedly drag a being from those higher dimensional planes down to our own.”

“As far as I know that last wasn’t for use on the Ascended themselves.” He quickly expanded at seeing the odd looks Daniel and Carter were giving him. “But there’s apparently other animal-like energy patterns up there and our scientists were kind of hoping to study them in hopes of discovering a better way to cheat our way up there.”

“That’s certainly an odd way to put it.” Carter muttered.

“Sorry.” Eventus apologized, tapering down on his amusement at the almost familiar response. “Force of habit from centuries of dealing with certain groups who believed Ascension could only be reached through personal growth and understanding.” 

Not that it wasn’t one method of doing so of course, but as far as study had shown there wasn’t really any point in limiting yourself to any single method.

“Many roads lead to the Great Path.” Daniel murmured half to himself as he turned back to studying the holographic journal.

“Something you heard from Oma?” Eventus inquired.

“Yes.” Daniel said, tapping a key to change the page. “Did you know her?”

Eventus shook his head. “No, and after I heard about your experiences I ran a search through Atlantis’s database. And there was no record of anyone by the name of Oma Desala. So either she was one of the very rare pre-plague ascended, someone born after my people’s return to this galaxy, or possibly even not one of my people at all.”

“Maybe she was using a fake name.” Carter added in, sounding oddly amused at the thought.

“I want to say no.” Eventus admitted, chuckling lightly at the mental image that brought to the fore of his mind. “But Moros apparently decided to call himself Merlin, and Ganos Lal changed hers to Morgan Le Fay. So I suppose it’s completely possible that taking new dramatic sounding names is just a thing the Ascended do.”

“Please don't suggest that to Jack.” Daniel all but begged. “He'll spend the next week trying to give me a superhero name.”

“Kirlenman” Eventus instantly suggested.

“No.” Daniel firmly stated.

A moment of silence followed interrupted only by the occasional tap of a key till eventually Carter spoke. “What's a Kirlen?”

“Really!?” Daniel said, glancing over his shoulder to glare at the woman.

Carter gave an apologetic shrug. “I finished taking my readings five minutes ago, it's something to talk about.”

Sighing in a put upon way that sounded distinctly odd in Vala's voice, Daniel steeled his shoulders in a way that suggested he was going to do his best to ignore them from this point on.

Letting the uncertainty linger just long enough that Daniel might start to believe the conversation wouldn't continue, Eventus turned to Carter with a wry grin. “It's a medium sized rodent like creature that was known for playing dead to lure its prey into the hidden pits it had dug.”

Daniel sagged into himself. “Why is it always like this?” He muttered under his breath.

Eventus’s lip twitched, and for a moment he considered just leaving things there before deciding to throw the body swapped man a bone. 

“Because you take things too seriously, which often makes things more difficult than they need to be while also blinding you to the greater picture.” He held a hand up to forestall the many obvious arguments that the man might make about the subject. “And while I’m sure there’s some complex psychological reason for that stemming from trauma that occurred in your formative years. Consider that fifteen hundred years ago Moros helped build an entire kingdom somewhere that was a shining example of its kind while going around dramatically pretending to be a wizard.”

Shaking his head in bemusement, the Lantean smiled slightly. “And you have missed asking yourself the obvious question of just how Moros got to England to build his cave.”

The glare Daniel was now giving him suggested the mention of childhood trauma may have hit a bit too close to home. “He obviously came through the…” The Archeologists trailed off, his eyes widening in likely realization that the only working Stargate at the time would have been in Antarctica. 

“He had a ship.” Daniel murmured.

“Either a gateship or a hyperspace capable vessel of some kind.” Eventus confirmed, though he would put his currently non-existent money on the second given the ring transporters in Merlin’s cave.

“No.” Daniel corrected with a rapid shake of his head that made his rough ponytail nearly slap him in the face. “I mean yes. But no, I was saying Arthur had a ship, the Prydwen. And legend had it that he used it to travel to the otherworld.”

“Hey.” Carter interrupted, waving one of her hands before pointing at a blinking diamond indicator in the upper right corner of the holographic display. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

Following the woman’s finger, Eventus considered her words before giving a cautious nod. “Assuming you think it’s a low power indicator. The frequency of the blinking puts the power cell at a point nine percent charge.”

“That seems dangerously low.” Carter said in concern. “We might want to go back, because I don't know what might happen if we're still out of phase when the power dies.”

“At the current rate of depletion I'd say we have about five hours left till it hits that point.” Eventus offered. “Though of course that assumes a static rate of energy usage. As to what might happen when that occurs, I'm not actually sure.”

He vaguely remembered something about a failsafe, but he wasn't sure whether that was something Moros had included, or something Carter had added afterwards.

“Daniel.” Carter said.

“Already on it.” He confirmed, holding down the table key till the flash of lepton radiation returned them to their proper dimensional phase.

“You're sure the charging pad will work with whatever Merlin has powering it?” Carter asked him as she moved to plug the scanning device she'd brought along into one of her lab's laptops while Daniel rushed over to the large leather bound brook he’d brought to the lab and began carefully flipping through its pages.

Taking a moment to stretch, Eventus nodded before settling onto one of the stools. “Unless he radically redesigned the crystal type it should work. If for some reason it doesn't though, I can provide you with a more standard replacement.”

“What about showing us how to grow our own?” Carter floated in a slightly hopeful tone.

Eventus took a moment to run through the mental math before making a so-so gesture with one of his hands. “Going by the quality of the crystals you have on the Daedalus I'd say you'd only be able to get somewhere between five to ten percent of the capacity.

It really made him wonder just how they went about mass producing their various bits of alien technology given it was one of many subjects that was never covered in the show.

Carter winced. “Our current method for growing control crystals has a seven to one failure ratio, and anything but basic white ends up with too many impurities to be of use at all.”

That made sense, it was a very fine balancing act between optimization and degradation after all. And even his people hadn’t had below a twenty percent failure rate on that till they had transitioned to various types of directed molecular assembly.

“”Then it would probably be too dangerous for you to even experiment with growing the standard type of energy storage crystals we used.” Eventus returned apologetically. “One of the properties of that crystal design is that it can absorb ambient heat to trickle charge up to a certain percentage of its capacity.”

“So they’re thermoelectric.” Carter guessed.

“Among other things.” Eventus confirmed. “To prevent overload the crystal’s thermoelectric capacity is based on its current energy density. So the more it’s charged the higher the temperature to charge it further becomes.”

“Otherwise they’d explode just from sitting around unused.” Carter followed along with a bob of her head. “Which is basically what you think would happen to any power crystals of that type that we’d try to grow.”

Eventus nodded. “Exactly.”

Glancing over at the wall to check the clock, he grimaced before rising to his feet and offering the scientist a brief look of apology for having to cut their discussion short. “I have an early day with the IOA tomorrow, so I’m going to head over to the commissary for dinner and then spend the rest of the night passed out in bed.”

Looking over at the still engrossed Daniel he offered the distracted man an unseen smile. “And make sure Vala knows she has my continued gratitude for keeping Rayla occupied.”

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Author’s Notes: I always found it odd how they completely glossed over the fact that Merlin had to have a working starship since there was no other way for him to actually get to England at that point in time.

And next chapter, we head back to the IOA, who this time have the beginnings of a plan for making some sort of deal with Eventus. (Or at least half a plan.)