Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 70

Chapter 70 - Back to the Job

Even though from Eventus’s perspective it had only been a little over three months since the last time he had done something similar, it still felt more than a little nostalgic to be sitting next to his toolbox and working on fixing such a low stakes problem as an unhappy pair that had been body swapped.

Though he would admit, if only to himself due to how petty it was, that he’d much rather be doing this in one of Atlantis’s colorful well lit rooms then the dimly lit military grey lab he was currently working in.

“Please stop fidgeting.” Eventus told Vala as he once more adjusted the position of the trio of quintessence waveform scanners that she was standing in the middle of.

“Why can’t Daniel do this?” Vala complained, looking over to a nearby desk where her own body was flipping through a large leatherbound book with an intensity that suggested a purposeful attempt to tune out the rest of the room. 

“He’s next.” Eventus said, typing a command string into his laptop interface that caused crystals in the scanning array to briefly light up the room in a respectable impression of a rainbow colored strobe light.

“Gah!”

Ignoring the now rapidly blinking Vala’s shock, Eventus studied the extraordinarily large amount of information coming up on the holographic display with a frown.

Just the preliminary data was enough to tell the Lantean that Daniel Jackson's body was anything but normal, something he really should have expected given the many uncertainties connected to someone unascending. However that also left him with a bit of a problem since he didn't know what the body's baseline might be.

“Daniel?” He called out, waiting a moment till the Archaeologist looked up from his book before continuing. “I know this is probably a reach given the circumstances, but is there any chance you recall the quintessence baseline you picked out for your body when you returned to corporal existence?”

Daniel furrowed his brow in consideration before shaking his head. “As far as I know the others returned me the same as I was before I ascended.”

“I'll take that as a no.”  Eventus muttered as he turned back to the keyboard and began scrolling through the data in more depth.

Several more minutes was enough to at least narrow down the energy fields likely involved in the swap, so he looked back up and motioned to the pair. “Swap places please.”

“Finally.” Vala muttered, all but jumping away from the scanning array.

Carefully closing the large book, Daniel let out a sigh and rose to his feet, taking a moment to stretch out the kinks that had formed in his borrowed body’s back before heading over to stand at the same location his own body had been mere moments before.

“You can use a stool if you want.” Eventus told Daniel in an idle tone as the Lantean entered the commands to bring up a blank profile.

“Hey!? Vala protested as the relieved Daniel stepped over to grab one of the chairs. “How come you didn’t tell me I could bring something to sit on!?”

“Because he’s currently cuter than you.” Eventus said, the corner of his lip twitching slightly at the joke.

Vala held up a finger in the obvious beginnings of protest only to stop before she got out even a single word as the realization seemed to hit that he was talking about a person currently inhabiting her own body.

Letting out a humph, the bodywapped woman crossed her arms and pouted at Eventus. “Even in dear Daniel's body I’m still plenty cute.”

Eventus made a so-so motion with one of his hands while he used the other to adjust the scanning array for the newly seated target. “I would say you’re more of a ruggedly handsome scoundrel at the moment.”

“I can work with that.” Vala admitted, sounding oddly happy at the idea.

“Please stop leading her on.” Daniel begged tiredly.

Once more the crystals on the scanning array strobed rainbow, and Eventus began to go through the somewhat more normal data with a frown.

“This explains so much.” He muttered half to himself as he reached the portion of the data outlining the genetic analysis on Vala's body.

He'd wondered for centuries why the Ori had used Vala of all people to carry their Orici given one human should have been the same as any other so far as the idea of implanting a genetically engineered embryo into was concerned. 

“Did you figure something out?” Daniel inquired hopefully.

“Several things.” Eventus admitted. “Vala is descended from one of my people, has an odd form of naquadah perminiating her blood and bone marrow, and seems to have unknown alien genetic markers partially grafted onto her DNA.”

Which he'd bet the still half filled box of jelly filled donuts he'd been brought was Goa'uld DNA, something he now suspected the Ori had used to create a bastardized version of a harcesis containing a large portion of their own accumulated knowledge.

“Didn't know about the first.” Vala admitted as she crunched on a chip from the bag she had grabbed from the counter. “But the last two you can probably blame on Qetesh.”

“A Goa'uld.” Daniel added in after a moment when Vala didn't expand any further. “I don't know how much you've been told about them?” He floated questioningly.

“A symbiotic species that uses their abilities to take over human bodies and pretend they are gods.” Eventus said idly as he switched the interface to display an aetheric overlay of Vala's body. “I assume there's more to it than just that though given how shallow of an existence that would be.”

“No.” Vala corrected in an oddly flippant tone. “It was pretty much just years of sex, drugs, and lording her superiority over others.”

Vala shook her head pityingly. “The worst part of it though? She wasn't even half as good at it as she thought she was.”

Daniel turned a frown of disapproval at Vala, very clearly missing the coping mechanism behind the former host's words.

“By it do you mean the sex? Or her attempts to lord over others?” Eventus inquired to play along.

“The sex.” Vala confirmed with a grin, the tinge of relief accompanying the words just barely audible in her tone.  “I don't know how, given she was in me at the time and I can go for hours, but fifteen minutes in and out and she'd be done for the night.”

Glancing up from the display to confirm the look of complete mortification on Daniel's face, Eventus let a look of idle curiosity fall across his features as he turned to Vala. “And Daniel?”

“Oh, he hasn't tried it yet.” Vala admitted with a put upon sigh. “I keep telling him it would be fine, but he has this silly notion that it would be disrespectful to me.”

“Earthlings really do have a lot of odd hangups when it comes to sex, don't they?” Eventus asked her in amusement, feeling the sudden desire to share some of his own stories of the subject. “In the decades I was dating my last girlfriend we flipped our sexes, swapped bodies, even joined in on a couple multi-partner affairs.”

“Decades?” Vala mused, sounding almost intrigued at the thought. “Good on you. I take it she ascended or something?”

“She was trying to evacuate a primitive culture from a planet that was about to fall behind the front lines of our battle with the Wraith.” Eventus admitted as he zeroed in a particular pair of entangled energy fields which shared several commonalities with higher domain energy utilized by the projection stones. “The lines shifted before she could, and the Wraith cut off access to the stargate. Which was her only way back since she wasn’t high enough priority to risk diverting one of our few remaining high speed transports to evacuate.”

He had been more than a little angry about that at the time, and even made a public enough spectacle about the issue that he had received an “explanation” in his inbox from an unknown member of the council showing that it had been a hard choice between her and seventy others trapped in the Sinaris outpost.

“Well.” He offered, looking up at the pair with a smile. “You'll be relieved to know I have some good news.” 

“Please say you can change us back?” Daniel desperately pleaded.

“I can not.” Eventus informed him with an apologetic shrug. “As far as I can tell, the effect of the projection stones was impressed onto your physical forms in such a way that you're both basically projecting yourselves into each other's bodies.”

Which had only occurred because of the combination of the Goa'uld bracelets and the signals getting mixed around when the amplifier had tried to compensate for one of the stones being removed to keep the connection active.

“The good news is that the energy field generating that effect seems to be slowly fading.”

“Oh thank god.” Daniel muttered, slumping down in naked relief. 

Vala pursed her lips in thought. “So what? A couple days and we'll be back to normal?”

Eventus winced and made a circular motion with two of his fingers. “Longer.”

“Weeks?” Daniel followed up as the look of dread seemed to be slowly returning.

“Longer.” Eventus repeated.

“Months?” Vala tried.

“I'd say somewhere between two to six.” Eventus confirmed with a nod before cocking his head in consideration. “Assuming you aren't exposed to anything that might cause the entanglement to regain energy or somehow become self-sustaining.”

A moderate amount of panic seemed to fall upon Daniel at the last, so Eventus held up a hand to forestall his worry. “Don’t worry though, if the last does happen the whole thing moves into long term problem territory. In which case we can bring you both back to Atlantis and use the better equipment there to try and figure out how to safely break the entanglement without killing you.”

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Author’s Notes: Which might take a year or two to figure out, but Daniel doesn’t need to know that at the moment given how many other concerns he has on his plate at the moment.