Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 20

Chapter 20 - Fix It Or Lose It

“Which was when the giant mutated whale leapt out of the ocean and swallowed Thalia, and the gate ship she was flying in, whole.” Eventus finished as he directed the insect-like maintenance robots over the Hippaforalkus's outer hull.

“That sounds less funny and more… Dangerous.” Norina said, shuffling slightly to try and get more comfortable on the small bench he had pulled out of one of the wall insets.

“It was just a giant mutated whale.” Eventus dismissed, chuckling slightly at the memory of how annoyed Thalia had been after they had gotten her out. “The only really dangerous thing about it was the radiation, and gate ship hulls are specifically designed to block out anything below fifty thousand orsen.”

Norina frowned at him. “If your people didn't consider giant mutated radioactive creatures particularly dangerous, what did you?”

That was a rather loaded question all things considered, but Eventus didn't mind providing a brief highlight reel for the Taranian woman.

“Other than the Wraith? Dream parasites, energy eaters, fractal swarms, and giant telepathic squid were some of the worst… That last one was Janus's fault by the way.”

And why the man had ended up being banned from genetics work by unanimous agreement of the rest of the council. Because one city ship worth of people being mind controlled was enough, thank you very much.

The door chime rang, and Eventus felt his eyebrow tick upwards in surprise, as he really hadn’t thought any of the facility’s current occupants would actually bother with it.

Sending the command to open the door, and feeling a tiny bit bad for the slightly hopeful look that flashed across Norina’s face, he was only moderately surprised to see Teyla of all people standing on the other side.

“Eventus.” She greeted him with a nod of recognition as she turned to Norina. “And I would have to assume you are the Taranians missing scientist?”

“Norina Pero.” Norina returned with an awkward smile.

“She got caught in confinement force-fields outside the room after trying to break in.” Eventus offered as he momentarily switched the repair work he was doing from full manual control to partially automatic. “And given the only thing in the facility’s entertainment database was meditational chants, I figured keeping her around as an assistant would be more productive.”

“It has been… Interesting.” Norina said as she got to her feet. “Hearing about the Ancestor’s various encounters.”

Eventus shook his head in amusement. “Well. It wasn’t like I didn’t ask you how your people ended up here. Or your history in general. You just didn’t really want to talk about it.”

Taking a few steps into the room, Teyla dutifully ignored the various holographic projections in the room to focus directly on him. “Given it has been nearly eight hours since she disappeared, her people were rather worried that something had happened.”

“Eight hours?” Eventus asked in surprise, not having realized so much time had passed given how engrossed he had been in the combination of work and conversation. A very common occurrence for his people that had more than once ended up with his old team having to hunt down field researchers who had completely lost track of what month it was.

“Yes.” Teyla said as the corner of her lips quirked slightly in amusement.

Shooting a slightly apologetic look to the Taranian woman, Eventus gave a nod to the door. “Given you probably have a bunch of biological necessities you wanna take care of like sleep, you’re free to go for the night.”

Norina all but immediately moved to leave.

“But I’ll expect you back here bright and early tomorrow morning.” Eventus continued in a happy tone as she all but fled out the door.

Giving it a moment after Norina left for the Taranian woman to put some distance between herself and the room, Eventus sighed and looked over to Teyla. “I feel kind of guilty about her people, you know.”

“Because of the groundquake?” Teyla inquired as she finally gave in and took a moment to study the holographic representation of the drydock work being displayed over the control chair.

“What? No.” Eventus immediately protested, not really sure why she would think that was what he had been talking about. “That saved them all from dying when the magma chamber erupted next year.”

“I was talking about the fact that I did a genetic scan to answer a question that was bothering me, and it showed that she is descended from one of our more awkward cultural experiments.”

It hadn’t been a particularly bad experiment compared to some of the things his people had been responsible for over their millions of years playing god, just one of the more awkward one’s to run into ten thousand years later.

“More… Awkward?” Teyla asked in a cautious tone as she focused her eyes back on him.

“It was a study about how certain physical features would affect cultural development.” He explained with a slightly uncomfortable grin. “So the scientists working on the project tweaked their genome to maximize physical attractiveness. And ten thousand years later, we have Norina, a thirty seven year old woman who looks barely twenty with a size and perkiness that’s almost unnatural.”

“Size and…” Teyla began only for her eyes to quickly widen in understanding as a similarly uncomfortable look settled across her features. “Ah… Yes… I suppose I could see how such an encounter might be awkward.”

Recovering from her uncomfortableness, the look on her face quickly transitioned to one of almost morbid curiosity. “Did your people do things like that… Often?”

“Small genome twerks and then watch how things developed?” Eventus offered as he switched his focus to the work being done on the weapon array that had replaced a good portion of the long range sensor module. “It was one of our larger areas of study.”

Pausing his work, he reoriented the control chair to a more upright position and took a moment to look over Teyla, focusing in particular on the slightly off color and texture of the woman’s hair. 

“Though your people’s differences are probably from the Wraith DNA, since the Athosians of my time were genetically just baseline humans.”

The look of open mouthed horror Teyla gave him suggested he probably should have been a bit more circumspect in just how he dropped that particular bombshell. Though he wasn’t really sure if there was ever a good way or time to tell someone they were part Wraith given the species current status in the galaxy.

“If it makes you feel better, it probably didn’t happen how you’re thinking.”

Not to say humans and Wraith couldn’t have children together via the natural manner of doing so, even if that had been more of an ‘in theory’ sort of thing since the only scientist who had ever seriously entertained the idea had been a genetics researcher named Lilth. But she had also thought it was a good idea to create telepathic dinosaurs, so even by the standards of his people she had been leaning pretty far into mad scientist territory.

“Do you truly believe I am part Wraith?” Teyla finally asked, clearly hoping he was in some way mistaken.

With a thought he brought up a hologram of two spinning DNA helix with red highlights flashing on certain portions of the structures the two had in common.

“The one on the left is you, the one on the right is one of the Wraith Queens the facility's general database has on file.”

If the Wraith were twenty five percent Iratus bug and seventy five percent human, Teyla herself was something like ten percent Wraith and ninety percent human. With a distinct weighing in what portions of Wraith that ten percent covered leaning heavily towards certain distinct factors of Wraith biology.

“From the looks of things I'd say they were trying to make your ancestors a better food source and ran into the problem that the general robustness of Wraith physiology is directly tied into the same genes as their telepathic abilities.”

Seeing the last didn't seem to be having the effect he had hoped, he decided to switch tracks to the more positive side of the whole thing. “But hey, on the bright side you have slightly increased physical abilities, a longer than average lifespan, limited telepathic powers, and really nice hair.”

“Nice… Hair?” Teyla repeated, scrunching her brow together as if trying to make sense of what he'd just said.

“You have natural highlights and hair follicles that are paradoxically fine, voluminous, and sturdy.” He returned, still moderately impressed at how the Wraith genetics had somehow translated to the woman growing hair that from certain angles looked like it could be a wig. “That’s an apprenticeship level genetic engineering project all on its own.”

Mostly because doing genetics work on fully grown humans had an unfortunate tendency to have them end up as puddles of protoplasm if everything wasn’t just right, but that’s what non-sentient test clones were for.

“I see.” Teyla demurred in an uncertain tone that suggested she really didn’t. But it looked like it had distracted her from the existential dread of learning that she was part Wraith, so he was going to take it as a win.

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Author’s Notes: Poor Teyla, learning so many unfortunate truths about just what sort of things the Ancients got up to in their spare time.