20 Things Meme
Ara. This is going around, so I might as well play with it.
Twenty things in my personal Shin Kidousenki Gundam Wing deuterocanon:
1. Zechs Marquise and the five Mad Scientists are total, utter, diehard Kidou Senshi Gundam franchise fanboys. The scientists, when commissioned to build an armored personnel carrier and weapon, talked the government into letting them codename it "mobile suit," designed a Gundam, and invented gundanium trying to reverse-engineer gundarium. Zechs instantly identified a Gundam the first time he saw one, because it looked like a Gundam. Whenever he finds himself at a loss, he asks himself one question: "What would Char Aznavour do?" Howard thinks they're all nuts, although like any red-blooded colonial boy of his generation he watched Ultimate Transformers Neo when it was on.
2. There were initially eight people on the mobile suit project. When they scattered, their youngest member went back to finish her master's and claimed that she'd only been the gofer and never let see anything (although she did wind up being put on the Leo project); their main programmer was too well-known to disappear and rejoin them, although she did turn herself into a Howard Hughes-like recluse until after the Colonial Revolution. (If she'd been on the team during the design of Wing Zero, she might have been able to design a shell program that rode on the Zero System and allowed people to use it safely; she would at least have designed a failsafe that cut in and kicked people out before their brain neuropatterns matched records of "dangerously psychotic.") Howard ran around with the sweepers making a big fat distraction of himself, and so the other four doctors and one doctoral student (H) were able to get together.
3. The main cast are mostly bisexual, except for Wufei, Anne, and Howard, who are straight; Hiiro, who is gay (and a late bloomer; during most of the television series, it would have been just as accurate to describe him as asexual); and Dorothy, who stabilized into lesbian tastes, although when she was younger she had kind of a thing for Zechs. (Relena is the one woman whom Hiiro might, in time, bring himself to have an erotic relationship with, although he wouldn't get anything out of it physically that he couldn't get from his own hand.)
4. The history of the After Colony world is distinctly not the history of ours: the two official languages of the Earth Sphere are English and Simplified Japanese, two large chunks of Africa are glowing holes in the ground, and tighter control on early computer patents stifled larger-scale development and led to the microcomputer not being invented until the Mobile Suit Development Team needed something complicated enough to handle all their giant robot's multiple decision trees and fuzzy logic (thus ruling out a largely-ROM computer) and small and light enough to fit under the pilot's seat. Before that, most of the world's computing consisted of remote terminals connected to interlinked mainframes by what is still known as "the Communet" (and now functions exactly as the Internet).
5. Cinq is the country. Cinque is the adjective pertaining to that country. (It consists of what in our world are the Netherlands and Belgium, although after the last invasion a large chunk of the south was carved off, named "the District of Belgium," and proclaimed the equivalent of the District of Columbia for the Earth Sphere government.) Its last queen consort was Katelina. Her daughter was originally named Relena Jehane Peacecraft, although her foster parents turned it into Relena Irene Darlian. By Cinque law, their ruler must marry a commoner and citizen of Cinq, although many of the Cinque nobility are descended from rulers' siblings who founded or married into them and took their spouse's surname, cutting them out of the succession.
6. Dermaill(e) is his title. Catalonia is his appanage. His and Dorothy's surnames are "Read y Domonova i (mother's surname) de la Catalonia." Dorothy tends to put that last part as "de la Catalunya" when dealing with her new inheritance; she is, notoriously, the first of her line in generations to actually speak Catalan. Treize is the son of Dermaille's sister. Dorothy's father's mother was a Peacecraft, Relena's great-aunt, who died before the first Cinque invasion. Dorothy's mother was a Cinque noblewoman, related to the Peacecrafts through three separate noble houses, and thus debarred from the Cinque royal succession. Lady Catalonia, who hid and reared Milliard Peacecraft as Zechs Marquise, hoped that he'd be able to change that law if he were set in power and thus make Dorothy his queen; short of that, she'd have settled for her daughter becoming his official mistress, as had happened a few times in Cinque history.
7. Treize and Lady Anne are older than their publicly revealed ages. Zechs, Noin, and Sally Po are not.
8. Treize's plan to bring lasting peace to the Earth Sphere called for him to be killed in battle all along. Lady Anne was the only other person who knew this. The stress of, in effect, planning for her loved one's slaughter was part of what caused her personality issues.
9. Treize loved Lady Anne more than anyone else in the world, but not more than his principles. He never slept with her, though, instead having affairs with numerous other people, most notably Zechs Marquise. Leia Barton was not among them, however; Marimeia was cooked up in a petri dish from samples Leia had stolen while nursing Treize, and took more effort than the Bartons had initially planned because Treize was, in fact, sterile. (They finally stripped genetic data out of some of his other cells and mixed it in with their cocktail.)
10. Marimeia considers Duo to be a big brother, Relena a big sister, and if pressed would say Anne is her godmother. She adores "Mr. Chang," and fully intends to marry him when she grows up. Wufei is fond enough of her, and thinks she'll grow out of it. Others aren't so sure.
11. The "Preventer 5" short at the end of the Episode Zero manga did not happen; it's a dream that Wufei had after eating reheated curry with cold In-n-Out burgers and washing it down with flat Coke. The rest of Episode Zero, and the Blind Target radio drama, did happen pretty much as depicted.
12. Wufei and Meilan did come to love each other before she died. They really sucked at communicating it, though.
13. Both Trowa and Noin like sex for its own sake. Before Operation Meteor, Trowa/Nameless and Trowa-prime were using each other for sex but didn't actually like each other very much. Noin lost her virginity at the Academy and then was Zechs's first. (He was pining for Treize at the time, but Treize wasn't interested in a boy going through puberty.) While Zechs and Hiiro were preparing for their Antarctic duel, Noin and Trowa bonded over the idiocy of their respective counterparts and then had smokingly hot half-clothed sex in a supply closet. Later, Trowa slept with Nichol, and Noin was Quatre's first and then resumed an affair with Sally Po.
14. Zechs and Noin have a stormy on-again, off-again relationship. First they're happy. Then they start arguing. Then they have an acrimonious breakup. Then Noin goes off and dates or has an affair with someone else. Sometimes Zechs does, too. Once he died. (Noin reacted by helping create Preventer and then by dating Relena for six months before Relena broke it off, suggesting that they both deserved better than the one who was there.) Then they get hit all over again by how much they really do care for and want each other and get back together. The running joke around Preventer is "Who hasn't slept with Noin?"; at the moment, the known list consists of Anne, Hiiro, Duo, Hilde, and Relena, and very few people actually believe the first and last. (Relena dated her but didn't sleep with her; Noin makes passes at Anne every so often, but Anne deflects them by deliberately letting them go over her head; and Hilde and Noin haven't run into each other at the right time, although Hilde says she's tempted to just to see what all the fuss is about.)
15. Trowa and Quatre were drawn to each other from the moment they met. Trowa, perceiving Quatre as more innocent, feels reluctant to start anything -- partly because of this perception of innocence, and partly because he wants to give Quatre more than casual sex but has no idea how to go about it.
16. At the end of the television series, and to a lesser extent at the end of Endless Waltz, Hiiro is nowhere near ready to have an erotic relationship with ANYONE. He's taking a year or so off to get being a friend down.
17. "Maxwell Church" was officially named "Church of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Porziuncola," attached to the Maxwell priory. At the time of the massacre, the latter had for some time only consisted of three nuns: the aging and frail Sister María Esteban, the young and rather vague Sister Tamsin, and the acting prioress, Sister Helen. The priory and church were served by a priest named Father Frederick, erroneously called "Father Maxwell" in some of the contemporary news reports.
18. There was a time during the series when Duo and Hilde could have started dating. First he was hesitant to, and then she was hesitant to, and then somehow without their noticing it they'd slipped past attraction into a solid friendship where they don't think of each other that way. Anyone wanting to date either of them will have to face the interrogation and implied threat of the other.
19. Duo is widely regarded among Preventer and its loose affiliation of "People who once were on our side and who now are or we hope to make our independent contractors" as an expert on romantic and erotic matters, particularly the esoteric and murky field of What Women Want. Actually, he is a virgin and will remain so until his marriage, for the same reasons that he doesn't cut his hair, although he's certainly kissed a girl once or five times; he learned everything he knows about women and sex from reading largely-female-written erotica when bored (space travel mostly consists of a long time in a small space with nothing much to do; bodice-rippers are among the books most often donated to informal communal libraries, and pr0n still makes up a large percentage of the files downloaded off the Communet to be looked at in one's spare time).
20. Relena reads, writes, draws, and knowledgeably discourses on yaoi doujinshi.
Twenty things in my personal Stargate TV deuterocanon (regarding languages and names):
1. The Stargates in the Pegasus Galaxy put a common language (a derivative of Ancient) in people's heads. Most people use this language to communicate with offworlders, and many cultures have adopted it as their birth tongue and forgotten their earlier languages.
2. Gatespeech, although represented as English, is not a one-to-one match. The word for "medical doctor" can also mean "medicine man" or "poisoner." The word for "scientist" can also mean "sage" or "wizard." "Science" comes out as either "natural philosophy" or the specific discipline; the title "doctor" of many of the scientists is a loanword from English and generally pronounced as such. Depending on who's saying it, "major" comes out as "greater," "commander," "captain," or "captain" with some prefix such as "high" or "arch" or "over" or whatnot. About four different Gatespeech words are all represented by English "aunt"; three by "brother."
3. The Ancients who came back from Pegasus are called the Danavi, which means something like "Exiles." Those few Ascended Ancients who were there to greet them helped most of them Ascend; it wasn't illicit THEN.
4. The Ancients' original name for themselves is "Alterans." Since they spent a long time thinking of themselves as part of the Asgard-Ancient-Nox-Furling Alliance, when they got to Pegasus they'd been in the habit of calling themselves "Asuras" for a long time, and thus called their sentient weapons "Asuran weapons," "Asurans" for short. (The planet name "Asuras" is an example of a Gatespeech rendition of a locative=> plural place-name.) The word "Asura" had fallen out of general use by the time their territory was down to Lantea, although it was revived by some factions after they returned to Earth. By the time of the R.U.R. fiasco, the use of -n- as a belonging-to word element had fallen out of general use save for certain set phrases (such as, oh, "Lanteans," "Alterans,") and thus was appropriate to use in forming a proper noun; the usual belonging-to word element in middle-to-late Ancient is -c- (e.g., Velesci, Marica, Atlanteac, Danavicos, Italica).
5. Speaking of Ancient, "argus" is Ancient for the mineral "naqadah." It goes into Latin as a perfectly good fourth-declension noun and spawned a verb "arguo, -ere, -i, -tum" meaning "to make clear."
6. Ra's name, in Goa'uld, is pronounced close to r-schwa. In actual Ancient Egyptian, the word for "sun" was probably pronounced more like "ree" and then a sound at the back of your throat made while moving your jaw back far enough that your upper bicuspids hit your lips. If this is indigenous, the Goa'uld pronunciation may reflect the possibility that Ra, whose pre-human hosts would of course not have spoken an Afro-Asiatic language such as Ancient Egyptian, had trouble reliably pronouncing the dratted word himself. In any case, the "re" in "Sha`re'" may derive from him or the sun, and the "ra" in "Skaara" probably does not.
7. The Asgard used to speak Proto-Indo-European, and taught it to the two groups of people they interacted with. (Or it might be more accurate to say that one set of Asgard taught one group their language, and another set taught the other group THEIR [related] language.) Their language developed along with that of the people they remained in contact with, so that the current Asgard language is closest to the language of the subgroup they last severed contact with.
8. Western and Standard Osgwerodespaec both underwent satemization, the second in response to the first, while Northern Osgwerodespaec underwent centumization. The first Asgard to involve themselves in the affairs of Earth-humans were from groups speaking S. O. and W.O., respectively; internal politics among W. O. speakers caused them to withdraw to purely Idan affairs for some time, during which time N. O. speakers involved themselves with Earth affairs, making contact with the westward-moving branches of one of the sets of people-under-study, and S. O. underwent satemization -- becoming Late Standard Osgwerodespaec rather than Middle -- and passed as much on to those of the studied people who remained in the same general area as the Asgard base. However, L. S. O. vanished as a language circa 2,000 B.C.E., its only descendants the Balto-Slavic, Nuri-Iranian, and Armenian families of Tellurian languages. Western Osgwerodespaec survived for a little longer because Asgard ethnographers deliberately taught it to a nomadic people already speaking a dialect from the similarly evolved Nuri-Iranian family; this people later migrated southwest into the lands of those of their cousins who'd left before satemization, and southeast into the lands of people who'd learned an earlier form of W. O. and whose language(s) had already diverged to quite an extent under influence from the neighboring non-Indo-European languages.
9. While at this time most of the Asgard in Ida had come to speak Early General Osgwerodespaec (a hybrid of Standard, Western, and Northern), those remaining in the Milky Way spoke Colonial Northern and passed it back and forth with the people whom they served as gods. While the Cimmerians still spoke a Standard-family language when the Asgard moved them to their new homeworld, the influence of Middle C. N. O. (Proto-Germanic) and Late C. N. O. (Old Norse) completely overrode their language, whereas G. O. remained distinct although with an increasing C. N. O. flavor.
10. The Asgard cut ties with Earth before Old Norse differentiated, although some of its branch language developments were mirrored in the independent development of LCNO. While that language is still spoken on Cimmeria, the Asgard themselves now usually speak G. O. among themselves (although Thor/Heimdall/Loki etc. all know LCNO and may speak it to each other). LCNO knowledge is built into the transport device on Cimmeria, as GO is built into Asgard ship transporter beams -- except for those on the ships granted to the Tellurians. I'm not sure whether the hard-line Asgard jiggled the beaming device to make sure it took that knowledge out of SG-1's brains when putting them back or not.
11. Several of the Danavi came home the long way (i.e., not through the Stargate, but in such a way that the Wraith, not being there to see their departure vector, couldn't follow them), in four flying cities named Failias, Findias, Gorias, and Murias. When they got to Earth, some took off again for another planet, some parked in out-of-the-way spots on Earth, one set decided Rhodes counted as an out-of-the-way spot (much to everyone else's disgust), and a large set left their cities and colonized Ireland. (They fought the usual battles with the current inhabitants who didn't feel like being colonized.)
12. Also, other Danavi, whether never-Ascended or Ascended-from-Egypt-and-then-Descended, settled around the town of Larissa (in an area they nicknamed "Argus," which the locals later turned into "Argos") and in Latium and points southeastward, although they were pushed out of much of Latium proper by the Latins and Etruscans.
13. All these Ancients naturally spoke Ancient at the time of Descent; while the Danawoi in Argos were assimilated into the Akhaian language and culture, and the Danavi in north Latium were absorbed into the nearest branch of Sabines, those between the Etruscan-built city of Velesther (Danavic: "Velester" or "Velcester") and Safinium/Samnium kept their language, lost their tech, kept their separate identity, adopted the local alphabet, and left some inscriptions. Ancient inscriptions look like this:
DEVE : DECLVNE : STATOM | SEPIS : ATAHVS : PIS: VELESTROM
FA>IA : ESARISTROM : SE : BIM : ASIF : VESCLIS : VINV : ARPATITV
SEPIS : TOTICV | COVEHRIV : SEPV : FEROM : PIHOM : ESTV
EC : SE : COSVTIES : MA : CA : TAFANIES : MEDIX : SISTIATIENS
The thing in the middle of "FA>IA" is a backwards C. It makes a sound like the ch in "checkup."
Note the characteristic Alteran labialization of the interrogative pronoun quis? into the relative pronoun pis. The Decluna mentioned in the above inscription may be the same person as the Dea Marica or Marsh Goddess, whose worship was common throughout the area they descended to and spread to the Latins and Romans, unless of course it's a Declunus. The Vel'sci (as this group of Danavi is known -- it may be influenced by "Velester" or in turn have influenced "Velcester"; the word mostly turns to "Volsci" in Latin) are also known in legend for the warrior queen Camilla whom Vergil gives them. The Latin spoken by Rome's lower classes is thought to have been much influenced by the Velsca language. (The element "velsc" is not thought to be related to Old English welisc, "foreign," usually applied to the Romanized Celts next door to wherever the Old-English-speakers happened to be, except insofar as both ultimately derive from a word meaning "wet." Cf. "well.")
14. Now and then, from time to time, assorted Danavi and/or other Ascended will quietly descend onto a planet somewhere where they think they can pass. One or two of the cultures SG-1 have visited could actually be characterized as post-feral Danavi, who have forgotten most of their history and live mostly in the present. Langara may be among these, although the gene samplings the SGC has from there have certain similarities with but do not match the Ancient pattern as exemplified by the Ayianna samples.
15. Several of the "somewhere"s have been corners of Earth where one might expect to find pockets of isolated cultures; one of the languages currectly classified as Rhaeto-Romance, for example, actually derives directly from Ancient rather than from Vulgar Latin. Other groups of Descended mingled with frontiersmen in remote areas of Canada, Australia, and Argentina.
16. Sha`re' and Skaara are also known to each other as the Abydonian-Egyptian equivalents of "Scorpiface" (Wahã'hhur) and "Lizardbreath."
17. Most of the SGC personnel have learned to speak Goa'uld, although they tend to speak with a pronounced Taur'i accent. This is represented onscreen as English, with a Goa'uld word or three thrown in for flavor.
18. The modern Genii are the result of a melting pot of the remnants of the Genii Confederacy (and hence have Gatespeech as their official tongue); most of the old distinctions between the patrix nobles and the plebe nobles have been erased, as have the distinctions between citizens and associates. The distinctions between the nobles and the plebs, several times reerected, have been as often blurred into near meaninglessness; while Cowan managed to make himself First Speaker, there have been many periods when he would never have been chosen.
19. Marta, one of the Athosian women, has been working on a high chant about the Atlanteans ever since she was unceremoniously evacuated from Athos. In true Athosian tradition, she has lifted a description of Athos from three other epics, lines about the horror of the Wraith from five more (hey, if you liked it there, you'll like it here), and Sheppard's first meeting with Teyla from a Tellurian epic whose language can be kicked into Athoio without undue effort and with the help of only one helpful classicist. (She adapted the beginning of said epic for the beginning of hers, too.) Granted, she had to change the reference to "Artemidi" into someone the Athosians had actually heard of, but...
20. Athoyoan Nouns.
Twenty things in my personal Stargate TV deuterocanon (regarding the world):
1. The reason that the Ancients and the Nox and the Asgard and several other alien races all seem to be built on the human model is because they are all humans or evolutions of same; every so often humans came back in time en masse, thus obliterating or invalidating the timeline they came from, and settled in the time in which they found themselves. The Asgard were the first to come back of the races they know of; the Ancients were the most recent, came back to escape the Ori, and promptly deliberately lost the knowledge of time travel.
2. The reason that the planets all seem to be the same is because they were all terraformed to the same plan and a Stargate set up in a place that looked as if it wouldn't change much in the next few millennia; the plan was originally designed by the Nox, adopted because it wasn't worth the effort to argue with them, and carried on to Pegasus and Ida because that was the way they'd always done it.
3. Ra used to be an Ancient who tried to Ascend and botched the job. At first he possessed people; it turned out to go much, much more easily once he tried possessing a proto-Goa'uld and using that to symbiose. Unfortunately, once he'd possessed the wormlike creature, the offspring it produced remembered his memories. This is why all the other Goa'uld out there can trace their ancestry back to Ra, hesitant though many of them may be to mention it. (Family feeling? What family feeling?)
4. Most of the Goa'uld are sociopaths. Most of the Tok'Ra are enlightened sociopaths or borderline sociopaths; many of them can actually name three or four people whom they care about at least as much as they do themselves, and quite a few believe it would be wrong to take unwilling hosts even if it didn't do bad things to themselves. Nearly all of the Tok'Ra, however, oppose Ra / take willing hosts / don't use sarcophagi because they believe it will be better for them in the long run, much as the "guidelines for evil overlords" lists suggest funding hospitals for babies to be born in, subsidizing and uplifting populations who might otherwise be the first to rebel, and providing one's subjects with year-round free Internet access.
5. Ra facilitated the Ancients getting themselves Ascended and off his personal fiefdom ASAP; he really didn't want to fight them, no matter what excellent hosts they might make. He also facilitated their inseminating his human slaves; the Abydonians are/were the remnant of his breed-back-to-Ancient-physiology program.
6. One of the Ascended Ancients, called Rabban or something like it, started turning into something rather like an Ori. Nobody really called him on it (and several of them joined him) until after he kidnapped his Descended wife the second time and tried to brainwash her into re-Ascending (rather than torture, which previous experience had shown didn't stick). Her new husband and brother-in-law teamed up with a couple of armies of Asgard and Furlings and kicked his ass. The anti-Ascended weapon her new husband had somehow acquired was of considerable use. There is actually a big long epic about this, although not as long as the one about the five brothers (NOTHING is as long as the one about the five brothers).
7. The Ancient genome differs from the human in several other respects than mere possession of the "ATA gene." For one, Ancient lifespans are longer than human ones, even before you start bringing standards of medical care into it. However, humans are much more fertile; human fertility is "on" all the time except for necessary refreshment breaks and running out of genetic material, whereas Ancient fertility is "off" unless stimulated. Mara's plan in "The Tower" wouldn't have worked unless she'd been in close contact with Sheppard for weeks if not months. (Sheppard's very possibly at a point where he could impregnate Teyla, however.) For another, Ancients and people with a sufficient amount of their DNA are immune to all viruses of the herpes family, including chicken pox. They can't even be carriers for them. Between this and the above impossibility of their one-night-stands with strangers resulting in fertilized eggs, people from families with a strong Ancient streak tend to be haphazard about safe sex practices even when they don't know exactly why their risk might be lower.
8. The ATA "gene" is actually a submissive gene that turns on a sequence of genes needed for the use of Ancient technology. Someone with all the necessary genes in the sequence, most of which are dominant, will best be able to use the technology (viz. Sheppard). Even when lacking some of them, people will be able to use it in some manner or another; the ATA therapy only delivers the turn-on gene. (Rodney has more than half of the sequence and half an "ATA gene." O'Neill is missing a submissive match to two of the submissive pairs Sheppard has, but has a submissive pair that's mismatched in Sheppard: the two therefore have slightly different skill sets with the technology.) All of these genes are located in areas that pre-Beckett genetics classified as "junk DNA."
9. Pale-skinned people make up a majority of the population of Pegasus for three known reasons:
-1- The Ancients tended to tailor the genetic stock of their seeded colonies to the location they were putting them in; when planting a colony on a world with a terrestrial stargate, they tended to plant the colony near if not next to the stargate. As mentioned above, the Ancients tended to put stargates at about the forty-first or forty-second parallel more often than not.
-2- Half of the thousand worlds, at one time or another, especially since the advent of the Wraith, tried to live mostly concealed from above; since cover blocks the sun as well as prying eyes, being able to take in all the Vitamin D one could get became an evolutionary advantage.
-3- A third of the thousand worlds, at one time or another over the last ten thousand years, have worshipped/propitiated the Wraith and thus seen pallor as desirable. There are tantalizing hints that many worlds saw fair skin as sexually desirable before the Wraith came, but not enough data to clearly document.
10. Ancestral Athosians were Teyla-colored. Due to outworlders marrying in and to outbreeding on a more ephemeral level, most of them are now considerably paler. Every now and then someone is born of the forefathers' shade of brown, though; this is seen as a lucky sign, and a mark of favor for the House they were born into. It undoubtedly helped Teyla be chosen leader.
11. Most of the cultures of Pegasus are fairly advanced astronomically and have enough of a working knowledge of astrophysics to be able to judge when they're going to have to correct Ring addresses for stellar movement / galactic drift. This is part of why Teyla's knowledge is so valuable; any addresses in Atlanteac databases have to be run through the computers in order to figure out where they are NOW. Rodney and most of his division will do this without mentioning it before bringing potentially-interesting addresses to other people's attention (after all, it's perfectly obvious that it had to be done, they also convert Ancient measurements into metric before asking people to look for an object of x size). This purely practical knowledge does not necessarily translate itself into understanding of why the stars behave that way, and at least one culture fervently believes everything is run on invisible spheres with epicycles. (Despite having mostly-accurate addresses for their trading partners; the DHD searches for the nearest stargate to the locus it was given within a large but not infinite radius, so it can still reach most of them.) Some of the "lost" worlds are lost because, some of the stars in one of the symbols having gone out, local astronomers are unable to accurately predict whither that locus point has gone and therefore what symbol should be used instead or when it should be used instead of a now-inaccurate symbol. This is why the Atlanteans stand a better chance of finding them than the locals; they have much, much spiffier computers to run simulations on.
12. The Athosians believe that people have a responsibility to reproduce themselves, preferably sooner rather than later. If the reproduction dies or gets culled, you're supposed to reproduce yourself again. If at some point in all this you really can't for reasons beyond your control, you're expected to ask someone in your House to reproduce you for you; Athosians have communal, wide-open marriages. People are born within a House (or adopted into it from outside) and stay within that House until they marry another House (and it is marrying the House; generally, one is thought of as marrying one's own generation within that House. Children may refer to their nongenitors in their House by variations on mother/father, aunt/uncle, grandparent, great-aunt, cousin, etc. "Adoption" is, in effect, a marriage ceremony, involving a proxy if the child is too young to go through the ceremonies); there is no divorce as such, although a member of a House could technically marry another House if they so pleased. The net effect of this is to try to ensure that there's always someone to look after whatever children might be produced; depending on how the child's birth parents chose to deal with their Responsibility, the child will be "born into" the House prepared to care for it. Outsiders can marry into a House (these aren't the bad old days before Trev of the Hosting had to marry out of his House in order to wed Cally Lonely-Arm the Runner, although these days most Athosians believe her Runner status and Runners in general to be apocryphal); sometimes Athosians will be wed to outworlders, marrying out of their Houses by default, although their kinship ties will be remembered. For all that marriage is perceived as a lasting tie, nobody really cares who you're sleeping with as long as it isn't going to cause a ruckus in your House and you're not running the risk of producing a child within the dangerous degrees of inbreeding.
13. During the "barbarizing" period, when some Athosians had realized that their cities were giant Wraith deathtraps and others still clung to them, many of the "barbarians" lived in a quasi-Celto-Greek culture, domesticating large ratite-ish predatory birds and harnessing them to chariots. Many of the Athosian epics (the "high chants") reflect this time, although composed later with a blithe disregard to matters of intellectual copyright.
14. Most of the Athosians are allergic to peanuts. This was discovered the first night when Wex brought on a severer reaction early by running around (with an immune Jinto) until he gasped, wheezing. Rodney, depressingly familiar with the symptoms, was first on the spot and harangued the medical staff while they helped him; the medical staff then monitored the other Athosians, several of which later threw up or developed hives -- fortunately, not as many of them had eaten the Earth food, and of those, not everybody ate foods containing peanut oil or peanuts. Later testing proved that it was the peanuts. Between Elizabeth's handling, the medical staff's calm competence, and Rodney's obviously real if blustery concern, this worked to strengthen Athosian ties to the Atlantean Expedition rather than otherwise. (The kids are still more likely to play any of the other members of his team than Dr. McKay, though.) Teyla, however, is not allergic. Nor is her genetic daughter.
15. The Athosians, by the way, now have an extreme interest in replenishing their population as quickly as they can afford to feed them, and therefore have extended many sexual invitations to the Atlanteans without bothering to explain that pregnancy is in fact the object rather than an unwanted byproduct. This has led to a number of awkward and/or humorous situations, and was one of the main factors behind Sergeant Bates' dislike of having them in the city (although he was circumspect in the discussions with Dr. Weir, not wanting to get into the subject of Marines behaving like... well... anyway, not wanting to get into that as long as he didn't have to).
16. The Athosians keep up their ties with their trading partners both by marriage and by fosterage. Orin, from "Letters From Pegasus," had been fostered with Emmagan when he was young (and brought a lovely wave of blue-spot with him. Oh well, the kids had to get it sometime). Torren's mother had been of Orin's people. Teyla's mother's genetic father was a visiting Genii trader who took one of the Athosian women up on her invitation. The Athosians consider Teyla married to AR-1, and any child she bears will be seen to have the men of AR-1 as its fathers, if not father-of-blood.
17. The Genii surface village seen in "Underground" is populated year-round by people who actually live there. Despite efforts to keep ties between it and the Underground alive (arranged marriages between people born in Gatewaystead and those Underground; the alderman of Gatewaystead always has a seat on the Speakers' Council), the Gatewaystead culture has developed several obvious points of difference from the more technologically advanced Underground. One of these is the preservation of the worship of an agrarian deity (Cora, who died and returned) who was once worshipped on several of the planets of the Genii Confederacy and whose worship has spread to a number of agricultural worlds whose people have or once had contact with the Genii; while some of the contacts with the Underground have been ritualized into Corian forms, the people Underground practice Ancestor (Ancient) worship.Many of the Undergrounders dismiss Gatewaystead and its people as superstitious, backward conservatives; this is an impolite attitude to hold of your shadow sacrifices (your scapegoats, moreover, whose number you keep up by lot whenever the village starts to look underpopulated) but, sadly, a very human one.
18. Cowan was conducting a political coup behind the scenes during "Underground." Alderman of Gatewaystead, he'd had his eye on the First Speaker's Chair for some time; he used the news of the Wraith's awakening and thus the fact that the Genii Anti-Wraith Operation had just become obsolete to push for a vote of no confidence in the government, and the reports of the power of the Atlanteans to claim that he was the man who could recover victory from the jaws of defeat, and thus got himself elected First Speaker even as the first mission was going pear-shaped. Once it had so gone, he found himself riding the tiger; in order to avoid being deposed as quickly as he'd shot to power, he put all the blame on the Atlanteans and rallied his people against them, careful to assign command and thus responsibility for the coming raid to a man who might be good enough to pull it off but who was too dangerous to have around: Kolyas have been Speakers since there was a Confederacy and taken their turn at First Speaker for a thousand years. The last First Speaker Kolya left a son who's not involved in politics (although he's one of the radiation poisoning sufferers in "Coup d'État") and a first cousin twice removed (Acastus Kolya). If the Atlanteans kill Commander Kolya, that solves that problem; if he delivers Atlantis into Genii hands, that solves that problem. The ideal solution would be for Atlantis to be captured but for Commander Kolya to perish of wounds taken in the process (and someone in the party might have been charged to see that that happened in the event, but he'd have been one of the scores-at-one-blow); in the event, Cowan got the worst of both worlds, although he did at least have a ready-made scapegoat to shift the blame onto.
19. On Sateda, homosexual relationships were things old people had. There were known instances of younger people suffering their elders' attentions out of duty or respect (and it was seen as suffering those attentions if the younger people were decent folk) and a greater degree of sexual irregularity was tolerated from Specialists (who, after all, might not live to get old) but Ronon is still going to be startled and discombobulated by offers from men, especially from those under the age of, oh, forty at least.
20. Kate Hewlett plays the Janet-equivalent character on Wormhole X-treme. Every now and then, when the geeks of Atlantis are deconstructing the show, someone will bring up the slashy potential of her character with Major Monroe and its inherent hotness. Rodney will half-nod and then start banging his head into the nearest flat surface, because the character as portrayed is enough not-Jeanie to start noticing but nowhere near enough to not feel guilty about it.
Twenty things in my personal Stargate TV deuterocanon (regarding the people) and one to grow on:
1. Daniel Jackson doesn't have the ATA gene, but otherwise he's closer to the Ancient genome than any of the Tellurians attached to the SGC before Sheppard was inducted, beating out O'Neill (and Jonas Quinn, for that matter) by a small margin and Carson, Miko, Rodney, and Samantha Carter by larger ones.
2. The Ancients didn't choke Morgan le Fey off. She faked it because she was fairly sure they would act if the questioning went on much longer and this way she didn't have to argue with Daniel about it.
3. Teyla tracked down an older man who wanted a child without a mother necessarily attached and got her Responsibility of Reproduction out of the way when she was fourteen; she comes into fairly regular contact with the resulting girl and her father, given the closed population, but she's closer to Jinto and perhaps one or two of the other kids.
4. After escaping from the Wraith hive ship with the surviving culled Athosians and Marines, Sheppard and Teyla explained matters quickly to Elizabeth and took back off for Athos while the Wraith were (hopefully) disorganized. Sheppard had already retrieved the escapees from the encampment near the gate; with Teyla there to guide him and reassure her people that it was all right, they managed to evacuate two encampments that the Wraith had missed, and retrieve fugitives from four others before the puddlejumper announced that the Wraith had arrived to start shelling Athos. They ducked through an uninhabited world Teyla knew the address to on the way back every time, to prevent the Wraith from following them to Atlantis and ensure that they could bug out fast without having to wait for the GDO. Perhaps eighty percent of the population of Athos made it to Atlantis, one way or another; Teyla will see the faces of the other twenty percent in her dreams for the rest of her life.
5. Teyla spent most of the frenzy leading up to the first Siege of Atlantis having hot sex with all sorts of people. She regrets none of it. Most of the survivors don't regret it, either.
6. Elizabeth slept with Teyla and Zelenka (at the same time) during the frenzy leading up to the first Siege of Atlantis, and with Lorne during the mess that was late-second-year. Both times, she immediately regretted it; she pretends neither of the occasions ever happened, and it cut off the chance that her relationships with any of them will develop into Relationships without more work than you can put into something without acknowledging one of the root causes.
7. Simon Wallace was the love of Elizabeth's life (so far), and it takes her a long time to get over him. She spends a bunch of the second year in Atlantis throwing out overtures to Sheppard and Caldwell to prove to herself she's still a desirable woman, but she wouldn't know what to do if either of them tried to seriously take her up on it.
8. Back before she met Simon, a young Elizabeth was married to a barely-legal Rodney for about a year before their burgeoning careers tore it apart. That ship has SAILED. In its distant wake, it turns out to have left friendship, exasperated fondness, a strong streak of frustrated irritation, and an assortment of shared-background-jokes that leave everyone else blinking in their wake (not helped by the fact that neither of the two have bothered to let anyone else know what they did when they were young and stupid and thought love solved everything).
9. Ronon inherited the "offworld chin" from ancestors who emigrated to Sateda generations ago, as have many Satedans. Other than that, his phenotype is pure Satedan; the Ancients settled Sateda with Neanderthal man, hence the massive frame and muscles. (Most of the skeletal differences aren't readily apparent under the muscles and hair, and a good diet complete with plenty of milk makes all the difference in average height.)
10. When Ronon was little, he wanted to be a castrato opera singer when he grew up. Either that or a cowboy. Sateda didn't have horses, so Satedan cowboys rode animals of the genus Cervus that people on my side of the Atlantic would call "elk" and Europeans would call "large deer" or perhaps "wapiti." These animals are commonly domesticated in Pegasus, and Gatespeech has different words for them and for deer; the former tends to hit the ears of people who haven't seen said animals as something akin to "hart."
11. Aiden Ford is an Eagle Scout. His experience with camping started with his grandparents, who used to drive out of the city to one of the national parks/forests and go camping in tents, and was only honed by Scouting.
12. By contrast, Meredith's parents used to make him go to Wolf Cubs because they thought it would build character and instill useful virtues. What with the whole mess with the non-working model of a nuclear explosive device and everything, it all sort of dribbled off and he was never officially inducted into a Scout troop (or whatever the Canadian male equivalent of a bridging ceremony is).
13. Rodney is straight. Except when he's not.
14. After he drove the nails into the coffin of his marriage and before he started working on the Stargate proper, during work that sent him to the U. K., Rodney dated Carson Beckett for a week and a half before Carson decided he was probably straight and Rodney said he'd thought he'd noticed a certain lack of spark. Before he came to Atlantis, this held pride of place as his most amicable breakup and the only one where they managed to be friends afterwards from the get-go.
15. The McKay name comes from one James McKay, who left Boston for Canada when the Fugitive Slave Act passed and there married one Leesy, who'd walked from Kentucky to Canada while pregnant with the child of her owner/uncle/father. According to the elitist terminology of the time, he was an "octoroon" and she a "musterfina"; they spent most of the rest of their lives in their new country passing as white, as did their children. Rodney and Jeanie are probably in the first generation to bring this up in public, and the first generation to be confident that most of said public won't give a hoot.
16. The McKays have another secret. Which they're not talking about. Rodney's not the world's best liar, so he always makes sure to have a few other layers of secrets he can give away one by one and fool people into thinking that's all there is. The James McKay thing works splendidly for that. So does Leesy's knotted family tree.
17. Jeanie McKay Miller and David Hewlett once ran into each other in the middle of Toronto and had a very odd conversation for two minutes before they realized they weren't talking to their own siblings. Strangely enough, they don't seem to be related.
18. Elizabeth feels as if she's older and wiser than Sheppard. Sheppard feels as if he's older and wiser than Elizabeth. This makes for interesting dynamics.
19. When Chaya shared with Sheppard, she replenished his reserves of the kind of strength it takes to be in a situation where you really can't do anything to help and not dash off half-cocked in all directions and get MORE people killed. He hadn't realized how much he needed it until it was back again; Antarctica hadn't built it back up again anywhere near as much as he'd assumed it had. He's always going to be grateful to her for that. She also left him with random historical trivia, a better Pegasus-Alteran vocabulary/accent, and a vague memory of how he would go about Ascending if he wanted to, which he doesn't. (Except perhaps to get out of the Sanctuary, although he'd want to be sure he could Descend again first.)
20. John Sheppard is directly descended, within a relatively short number of generations, from Descended Danavi who preserved some of their history.
21. He actually knows this, but he's gotten into the habit of not saying it for so long that he has trouble finding the words to hint at it to other people. Besides, they might ground him, and he wants the sky the way Hill-men want their Hills.
Twenty things in my personal Shin Kidousenki Gundam Wing deuterocanon:
1. Zechs Marquise and the five Mad Scientists are total, utter, diehard Kidou Senshi Gundam franchise fanboys. The scientists, when commissioned to build an armored personnel carrier and weapon, talked the government into letting them codename it "mobile suit," designed a Gundam, and invented gundanium trying to reverse-engineer gundarium. Zechs instantly identified a Gundam the first time he saw one, because it looked like a Gundam. Whenever he finds himself at a loss, he asks himself one question: "What would Char Aznavour do?" Howard thinks they're all nuts, although like any red-blooded colonial boy of his generation he watched Ultimate Transformers Neo when it was on.
2. There were initially eight people on the mobile suit project. When they scattered, their youngest member went back to finish her master's and claimed that she'd only been the gofer and never let see anything (although she did wind up being put on the Leo project); their main programmer was too well-known to disappear and rejoin them, although she did turn herself into a Howard Hughes-like recluse until after the Colonial Revolution. (If she'd been on the team during the design of Wing Zero, she might have been able to design a shell program that rode on the Zero System and allowed people to use it safely; she would at least have designed a failsafe that cut in and kicked people out before their brain neuropatterns matched records of "dangerously psychotic.") Howard ran around with the sweepers making a big fat distraction of himself, and so the other four doctors and one doctoral student (H) were able to get together.
3. The main cast are mostly bisexual, except for Wufei, Anne, and Howard, who are straight; Hiiro, who is gay (and a late bloomer; during most of the television series, it would have been just as accurate to describe him as asexual); and Dorothy, who stabilized into lesbian tastes, although when she was younger she had kind of a thing for Zechs. (Relena is the one woman whom Hiiro might, in time, bring himself to have an erotic relationship with, although he wouldn't get anything out of it physically that he couldn't get from his own hand.)
4. The history of the After Colony world is distinctly not the history of ours: the two official languages of the Earth Sphere are English and Simplified Japanese, two large chunks of Africa are glowing holes in the ground, and tighter control on early computer patents stifled larger-scale development and led to the microcomputer not being invented until the Mobile Suit Development Team needed something complicated enough to handle all their giant robot's multiple decision trees and fuzzy logic (thus ruling out a largely-ROM computer) and small and light enough to fit under the pilot's seat. Before that, most of the world's computing consisted of remote terminals connected to interlinked mainframes by what is still known as "the Communet" (and now functions exactly as the Internet).
5. Cinq is the country. Cinque is the adjective pertaining to that country. (It consists of what in our world are the Netherlands and Belgium, although after the last invasion a large chunk of the south was carved off, named "the District of Belgium," and proclaimed the equivalent of the District of Columbia for the Earth Sphere government.) Its last queen consort was Katelina. Her daughter was originally named Relena Jehane Peacecraft, although her foster parents turned it into Relena Irene Darlian. By Cinque law, their ruler must marry a commoner and citizen of Cinq, although many of the Cinque nobility are descended from rulers' siblings who founded or married into them and took their spouse's surname, cutting them out of the succession.
6. Dermaill(e) is his title. Catalonia is his appanage. His and Dorothy's surnames are "Read y Domonova i (mother's surname) de la Catalonia." Dorothy tends to put that last part as "de la Catalunya" when dealing with her new inheritance; she is, notoriously, the first of her line in generations to actually speak Catalan. Treize is the son of Dermaille's sister. Dorothy's father's mother was a Peacecraft, Relena's great-aunt, who died before the first Cinque invasion. Dorothy's mother was a Cinque noblewoman, related to the Peacecrafts through three separate noble houses, and thus debarred from the Cinque royal succession. Lady Catalonia, who hid and reared Milliard Peacecraft as Zechs Marquise, hoped that he'd be able to change that law if he were set in power and thus make Dorothy his queen; short of that, she'd have settled for her daughter becoming his official mistress, as had happened a few times in Cinque history.
7. Treize and Lady Anne are older than their publicly revealed ages. Zechs, Noin, and Sally Po are not.
8. Treize's plan to bring lasting peace to the Earth Sphere called for him to be killed in battle all along. Lady Anne was the only other person who knew this. The stress of, in effect, planning for her loved one's slaughter was part of what caused her personality issues.
9. Treize loved Lady Anne more than anyone else in the world, but not more than his principles. He never slept with her, though, instead having affairs with numerous other people, most notably Zechs Marquise. Leia Barton was not among them, however; Marimeia was cooked up in a petri dish from samples Leia had stolen while nursing Treize, and took more effort than the Bartons had initially planned because Treize was, in fact, sterile. (They finally stripped genetic data out of some of his other cells and mixed it in with their cocktail.)
10. Marimeia considers Duo to be a big brother, Relena a big sister, and if pressed would say Anne is her godmother. She adores "Mr. Chang," and fully intends to marry him when she grows up. Wufei is fond enough of her, and thinks she'll grow out of it. Others aren't so sure.
11. The "Preventer 5" short at the end of the Episode Zero manga did not happen; it's a dream that Wufei had after eating reheated curry with cold In-n-Out burgers and washing it down with flat Coke. The rest of Episode Zero, and the Blind Target radio drama, did happen pretty much as depicted.
12. Wufei and Meilan did come to love each other before she died. They really sucked at communicating it, though.
13. Both Trowa and Noin like sex for its own sake. Before Operation Meteor, Trowa/Nameless and Trowa-prime were using each other for sex but didn't actually like each other very much. Noin lost her virginity at the Academy and then was Zechs's first. (He was pining for Treize at the time, but Treize wasn't interested in a boy going through puberty.) While Zechs and Hiiro were preparing for their Antarctic duel, Noin and Trowa bonded over the idiocy of their respective counterparts and then had smokingly hot half-clothed sex in a supply closet. Later, Trowa slept with Nichol, and Noin was Quatre's first and then resumed an affair with Sally Po.
14. Zechs and Noin have a stormy on-again, off-again relationship. First they're happy. Then they start arguing. Then they have an acrimonious breakup. Then Noin goes off and dates or has an affair with someone else. Sometimes Zechs does, too. Once he died. (Noin reacted by helping create Preventer and then by dating Relena for six months before Relena broke it off, suggesting that they both deserved better than the one who was there.) Then they get hit all over again by how much they really do care for and want each other and get back together. The running joke around Preventer is "Who hasn't slept with Noin?"; at the moment, the known list consists of Anne, Hiiro, Duo, Hilde, and Relena, and very few people actually believe the first and last. (Relena dated her but didn't sleep with her; Noin makes passes at Anne every so often, but Anne deflects them by deliberately letting them go over her head; and Hilde and Noin haven't run into each other at the right time, although Hilde says she's tempted to just to see what all the fuss is about.)
15. Trowa and Quatre were drawn to each other from the moment they met. Trowa, perceiving Quatre as more innocent, feels reluctant to start anything -- partly because of this perception of innocence, and partly because he wants to give Quatre more than casual sex but has no idea how to go about it.
16. At the end of the television series, and to a lesser extent at the end of Endless Waltz, Hiiro is nowhere near ready to have an erotic relationship with ANYONE. He's taking a year or so off to get being a friend down.
17. "Maxwell Church" was officially named "Church of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Porziuncola," attached to the Maxwell priory. At the time of the massacre, the latter had for some time only consisted of three nuns: the aging and frail Sister María Esteban, the young and rather vague Sister Tamsin, and the acting prioress, Sister Helen. The priory and church were served by a priest named Father Frederick, erroneously called "Father Maxwell" in some of the contemporary news reports.
18. There was a time during the series when Duo and Hilde could have started dating. First he was hesitant to, and then she was hesitant to, and then somehow without their noticing it they'd slipped past attraction into a solid friendship where they don't think of each other that way. Anyone wanting to date either of them will have to face the interrogation and implied threat of the other.
19. Duo is widely regarded among Preventer and its loose affiliation of "People who once were on our side and who now are or we hope to make our independent contractors" as an expert on romantic and erotic matters, particularly the esoteric and murky field of What Women Want. Actually, he is a virgin and will remain so until his marriage, for the same reasons that he doesn't cut his hair, although he's certainly kissed a girl once or five times; he learned everything he knows about women and sex from reading largely-female-written erotica when bored (space travel mostly consists of a long time in a small space with nothing much to do; bodice-rippers are among the books most often donated to informal communal libraries, and pr0n still makes up a large percentage of the files downloaded off the Communet to be looked at in one's spare time).
20. Relena reads, writes, draws, and knowledgeably discourses on yaoi doujinshi.
Twenty things in my personal Stargate TV deuterocanon (regarding languages and names):
1. The Stargates in the Pegasus Galaxy put a common language (a derivative of Ancient) in people's heads. Most people use this language to communicate with offworlders, and many cultures have adopted it as their birth tongue and forgotten their earlier languages.
2. Gatespeech, although represented as English, is not a one-to-one match. The word for "medical doctor" can also mean "medicine man" or "poisoner." The word for "scientist" can also mean "sage" or "wizard." "Science" comes out as either "natural philosophy" or the specific discipline; the title "doctor" of many of the scientists is a loanword from English and generally pronounced as such. Depending on who's saying it, "major" comes out as "greater," "commander," "captain," or "captain" with some prefix such as "high" or "arch" or "over" or whatnot. About four different Gatespeech words are all represented by English "aunt"; three by "brother."
3. The Ancients who came back from Pegasus are called the Danavi, which means something like "Exiles." Those few Ascended Ancients who were there to greet them helped most of them Ascend; it wasn't illicit THEN.
4. The Ancients' original name for themselves is "Alterans." Since they spent a long time thinking of themselves as part of the Asgard-Ancient-Nox-Furling Alliance, when they got to Pegasus they'd been in the habit of calling themselves "Asuras" for a long time, and thus called their sentient weapons "Asuran weapons," "Asurans" for short. (The planet name "Asuras" is an example of a Gatespeech rendition of a locative=> plural place-name.) The word "Asura" had fallen out of general use by the time their territory was down to Lantea, although it was revived by some factions after they returned to Earth. By the time of the R.U.R. fiasco, the use of -n- as a belonging-to word element had fallen out of general use save for certain set phrases (such as, oh, "Lanteans," "Alterans,") and thus was appropriate to use in forming a proper noun; the usual belonging-to word element in middle-to-late Ancient is -c- (e.g., Velesci, Marica, Atlanteac, Danavicos, Italica).
5. Speaking of Ancient, "argus" is Ancient for the mineral "naqadah." It goes into Latin as a perfectly good fourth-declension noun and spawned a verb "arguo, -ere, -i, -tum" meaning "to make clear."
6. Ra's name, in Goa'uld, is pronounced close to r-schwa. In actual Ancient Egyptian, the word for "sun" was probably pronounced more like "ree" and then a sound at the back of your throat made while moving your jaw back far enough that your upper bicuspids hit your lips. If this is indigenous, the Goa'uld pronunciation may reflect the possibility that Ra, whose pre-human hosts would of course not have spoken an Afro-Asiatic language such as Ancient Egyptian, had trouble reliably pronouncing the dratted word himself. In any case, the "re" in "Sha`re'" may derive from him or the sun, and the "ra" in "Skaara" probably does not.
7. The Asgard used to speak Proto-Indo-European, and taught it to the two groups of people they interacted with. (Or it might be more accurate to say that one set of Asgard taught one group their language, and another set taught the other group THEIR [related] language.) Their language developed along with that of the people they remained in contact with, so that the current Asgard language is closest to the language of the subgroup they last severed contact with.
8. Western and Standard Osgwerodespaec both underwent satemization, the second in response to the first, while Northern Osgwerodespaec underwent centumization. The first Asgard to involve themselves in the affairs of Earth-humans were from groups speaking S. O. and W.O., respectively; internal politics among W. O. speakers caused them to withdraw to purely Idan affairs for some time, during which time N. O. speakers involved themselves with Earth affairs, making contact with the westward-moving branches of one of the sets of people-under-study, and S. O. underwent satemization -- becoming Late Standard Osgwerodespaec rather than Middle -- and passed as much on to those of the studied people who remained in the same general area as the Asgard base. However, L. S. O. vanished as a language circa 2,000 B.C.E., its only descendants the Balto-Slavic, Nuri-Iranian, and Armenian families of Tellurian languages. Western Osgwerodespaec survived for a little longer because Asgard ethnographers deliberately taught it to a nomadic people already speaking a dialect from the similarly evolved Nuri-Iranian family; this people later migrated southwest into the lands of those of their cousins who'd left before satemization, and southeast into the lands of people who'd learned an earlier form of W. O. and whose language(s) had already diverged to quite an extent under influence from the neighboring non-Indo-European languages.
9. While at this time most of the Asgard in Ida had come to speak Early General Osgwerodespaec (a hybrid of Standard, Western, and Northern), those remaining in the Milky Way spoke Colonial Northern and passed it back and forth with the people whom they served as gods. While the Cimmerians still spoke a Standard-family language when the Asgard moved them to their new homeworld, the influence of Middle C. N. O. (Proto-Germanic) and Late C. N. O. (Old Norse) completely overrode their language, whereas G. O. remained distinct although with an increasing C. N. O. flavor.
10. The Asgard cut ties with Earth before Old Norse differentiated, although some of its branch language developments were mirrored in the independent development of LCNO. While that language is still spoken on Cimmeria, the Asgard themselves now usually speak G. O. among themselves (although Thor/Heimdall/Loki etc. all know LCNO and may speak it to each other). LCNO knowledge is built into the transport device on Cimmeria, as GO is built into Asgard ship transporter beams -- except for those on the ships granted to the Tellurians. I'm not sure whether the hard-line Asgard jiggled the beaming device to make sure it took that knowledge out of SG-1's brains when putting them back or not.
11. Several of the Danavi came home the long way (i.e., not through the Stargate, but in such a way that the Wraith, not being there to see their departure vector, couldn't follow them), in four flying cities named Failias, Findias, Gorias, and Murias. When they got to Earth, some took off again for another planet, some parked in out-of-the-way spots on Earth, one set decided Rhodes counted as an out-of-the-way spot (much to everyone else's disgust), and a large set left their cities and colonized Ireland. (They fought the usual battles with the current inhabitants who didn't feel like being colonized.)
12. Also, other Danavi, whether never-Ascended or Ascended-from-Egypt-and-then-Descended, settled around the town of Larissa (in an area they nicknamed "Argus," which the locals later turned into "Argos") and in Latium and points southeastward, although they were pushed out of much of Latium proper by the Latins and Etruscans.
13. All these Ancients naturally spoke Ancient at the time of Descent; while the Danawoi in Argos were assimilated into the Akhaian language and culture, and the Danavi in north Latium were absorbed into the nearest branch of Sabines, those between the Etruscan-built city of Velesther (Danavic: "Velester" or "Velcester") and Safinium/Samnium kept their language, lost their tech, kept their separate identity, adopted the local alphabet, and left some inscriptions. Ancient inscriptions look like this:
DEVE : DECLVNE : STATOM | SEPIS : ATAHVS : PIS: VELESTROM
FA>IA : ESARISTROM : SE : BIM : ASIF : VESCLIS : VINV : ARPATITV
SEPIS : TOTICV | COVEHRIV : SEPV : FEROM : PIHOM : ESTV
EC : SE : COSVTIES : MA : CA : TAFANIES : MEDIX : SISTIATIENS
The thing in the middle of "FA>IA" is a backwards C. It makes a sound like the ch in "checkup."
Note the characteristic Alteran labialization of the interrogative pronoun quis? into the relative pronoun pis. The Decluna mentioned in the above inscription may be the same person as the Dea Marica or Marsh Goddess, whose worship was common throughout the area they descended to and spread to the Latins and Romans, unless of course it's a Declunus. The Vel'sci (as this group of Danavi is known -- it may be influenced by "Velester" or in turn have influenced "Velcester"; the word mostly turns to "Volsci" in Latin) are also known in legend for the warrior queen Camilla whom Vergil gives them. The Latin spoken by Rome's lower classes is thought to have been much influenced by the Velsca language. (The element "velsc" is not thought to be related to Old English welisc, "foreign," usually applied to the Romanized Celts next door to wherever the Old-English-speakers happened to be, except insofar as both ultimately derive from a word meaning "wet." Cf. "well.")
14. Now and then, from time to time, assorted Danavi and/or other Ascended will quietly descend onto a planet somewhere where they think they can pass. One or two of the cultures SG-1 have visited could actually be characterized as post-feral Danavi, who have forgotten most of their history and live mostly in the present. Langara may be among these, although the gene samplings the SGC has from there have certain similarities with but do not match the Ancient pattern as exemplified by the Ayianna samples.
15. Several of the "somewhere"s have been corners of Earth where one might expect to find pockets of isolated cultures; one of the languages currectly classified as Rhaeto-Romance, for example, actually derives directly from Ancient rather than from Vulgar Latin. Other groups of Descended mingled with frontiersmen in remote areas of Canada, Australia, and Argentina.
16. Sha`re' and Skaara are also known to each other as the Abydonian-Egyptian equivalents of "Scorpiface" (Wahã'hhur) and "Lizardbreath."
17. Most of the SGC personnel have learned to speak Goa'uld, although they tend to speak with a pronounced Taur'i accent. This is represented onscreen as English, with a Goa'uld word or three thrown in for flavor.
18. The modern Genii are the result of a melting pot of the remnants of the Genii Confederacy (and hence have Gatespeech as their official tongue); most of the old distinctions between the patrix nobles and the plebe nobles have been erased, as have the distinctions between citizens and associates. The distinctions between the nobles and the plebs, several times reerected, have been as often blurred into near meaninglessness; while Cowan managed to make himself First Speaker, there have been many periods when he would never have been chosen.
19. Marta, one of the Athosian women, has been working on a high chant about the Atlanteans ever since she was unceremoniously evacuated from Athos. In true Athosian tradition, she has lifted a description of Athos from three other epics, lines about the horror of the Wraith from five more (hey, if you liked it there, you'll like it here), and Sheppard's first meeting with Teyla from a Tellurian epic whose language can be kicked into Athoio without undue effort and with the help of only one helpful classicist. (She adapted the beginning of said epic for the beginning of hers, too.) Granted, she had to change the reference to "Artemidi" into someone the Athosians had actually heard of, but...
20. Athoyoan Nouns.
Twenty things in my personal Stargate TV deuterocanon (regarding the world):
1. The reason that the Ancients and the Nox and the Asgard and several other alien races all seem to be built on the human model is because they are all humans or evolutions of same; every so often humans came back in time en masse, thus obliterating or invalidating the timeline they came from, and settled in the time in which they found themselves. The Asgard were the first to come back of the races they know of; the Ancients were the most recent, came back to escape the Ori, and promptly deliberately lost the knowledge of time travel.
2. The reason that the planets all seem to be the same is because they were all terraformed to the same plan and a Stargate set up in a place that looked as if it wouldn't change much in the next few millennia; the plan was originally designed by the Nox, adopted because it wasn't worth the effort to argue with them, and carried on to Pegasus and Ida because that was the way they'd always done it.
3. Ra used to be an Ancient who tried to Ascend and botched the job. At first he possessed people; it turned out to go much, much more easily once he tried possessing a proto-Goa'uld and using that to symbiose. Unfortunately, once he'd possessed the wormlike creature, the offspring it produced remembered his memories. This is why all the other Goa'uld out there can trace their ancestry back to Ra, hesitant though many of them may be to mention it. (Family feeling? What family feeling?)
4. Most of the Goa'uld are sociopaths. Most of the Tok'Ra are enlightened sociopaths or borderline sociopaths; many of them can actually name three or four people whom they care about at least as much as they do themselves, and quite a few believe it would be wrong to take unwilling hosts even if it didn't do bad things to themselves. Nearly all of the Tok'Ra, however, oppose Ra / take willing hosts / don't use sarcophagi because they believe it will be better for them in the long run, much as the "guidelines for evil overlords" lists suggest funding hospitals for babies to be born in, subsidizing and uplifting populations who might otherwise be the first to rebel, and providing one's subjects with year-round free Internet access.
5. Ra facilitated the Ancients getting themselves Ascended and off his personal fiefdom ASAP; he really didn't want to fight them, no matter what excellent hosts they might make. He also facilitated their inseminating his human slaves; the Abydonians are/were the remnant of his breed-back-to-Ancient-physiology program.
6. One of the Ascended Ancients, called Rabban or something like it, started turning into something rather like an Ori. Nobody really called him on it (and several of them joined him) until after he kidnapped his Descended wife the second time and tried to brainwash her into re-Ascending (rather than torture, which previous experience had shown didn't stick). Her new husband and brother-in-law teamed up with a couple of armies of Asgard and Furlings and kicked his ass. The anti-Ascended weapon her new husband had somehow acquired was of considerable use. There is actually a big long epic about this, although not as long as the one about the five brothers (NOTHING is as long as the one about the five brothers).
7. The Ancient genome differs from the human in several other respects than mere possession of the "ATA gene." For one, Ancient lifespans are longer than human ones, even before you start bringing standards of medical care into it. However, humans are much more fertile; human fertility is "on" all the time except for necessary refreshment breaks and running out of genetic material, whereas Ancient fertility is "off" unless stimulated. Mara's plan in "The Tower" wouldn't have worked unless she'd been in close contact with Sheppard for weeks if not months. (Sheppard's very possibly at a point where he could impregnate Teyla, however.) For another, Ancients and people with a sufficient amount of their DNA are immune to all viruses of the herpes family, including chicken pox. They can't even be carriers for them. Between this and the above impossibility of their one-night-stands with strangers resulting in fertilized eggs, people from families with a strong Ancient streak tend to be haphazard about safe sex practices even when they don't know exactly why their risk might be lower.
8. The ATA "gene" is actually a submissive gene that turns on a sequence of genes needed for the use of Ancient technology. Someone with all the necessary genes in the sequence, most of which are dominant, will best be able to use the technology (viz. Sheppard). Even when lacking some of them, people will be able to use it in some manner or another; the ATA therapy only delivers the turn-on gene. (Rodney has more than half of the sequence and half an "ATA gene." O'Neill is missing a submissive match to two of the submissive pairs Sheppard has, but has a submissive pair that's mismatched in Sheppard: the two therefore have slightly different skill sets with the technology.) All of these genes are located in areas that pre-Beckett genetics classified as "junk DNA."
9. Pale-skinned people make up a majority of the population of Pegasus for three known reasons:
-1- The Ancients tended to tailor the genetic stock of their seeded colonies to the location they were putting them in; when planting a colony on a world with a terrestrial stargate, they tended to plant the colony near if not next to the stargate. As mentioned above, the Ancients tended to put stargates at about the forty-first or forty-second parallel more often than not.
-2- Half of the thousand worlds, at one time or another, especially since the advent of the Wraith, tried to live mostly concealed from above; since cover blocks the sun as well as prying eyes, being able to take in all the Vitamin D one could get became an evolutionary advantage.
-3- A third of the thousand worlds, at one time or another over the last ten thousand years, have worshipped/propitiated the Wraith and thus seen pallor as desirable. There are tantalizing hints that many worlds saw fair skin as sexually desirable before the Wraith came, but not enough data to clearly document.
10. Ancestral Athosians were Teyla-colored. Due to outworlders marrying in and to outbreeding on a more ephemeral level, most of them are now considerably paler. Every now and then someone is born of the forefathers' shade of brown, though; this is seen as a lucky sign, and a mark of favor for the House they were born into. It undoubtedly helped Teyla be chosen leader.
11. Most of the cultures of Pegasus are fairly advanced astronomically and have enough of a working knowledge of astrophysics to be able to judge when they're going to have to correct Ring addresses for stellar movement / galactic drift. This is part of why Teyla's knowledge is so valuable; any addresses in Atlanteac databases have to be run through the computers in order to figure out where they are NOW. Rodney and most of his division will do this without mentioning it before bringing potentially-interesting addresses to other people's attention (after all, it's perfectly obvious that it had to be done, they also convert Ancient measurements into metric before asking people to look for an object of x size). This purely practical knowledge does not necessarily translate itself into understanding of why the stars behave that way, and at least one culture fervently believes everything is run on invisible spheres with epicycles. (Despite having mostly-accurate addresses for their trading partners; the DHD searches for the nearest stargate to the locus it was given within a large but not infinite radius, so it can still reach most of them.) Some of the "lost" worlds are lost because, some of the stars in one of the symbols having gone out, local astronomers are unable to accurately predict whither that locus point has gone and therefore what symbol should be used instead or when it should be used instead of a now-inaccurate symbol. This is why the Atlanteans stand a better chance of finding them than the locals; they have much, much spiffier computers to run simulations on.
12. The Athosians believe that people have a responsibility to reproduce themselves, preferably sooner rather than later. If the reproduction dies or gets culled, you're supposed to reproduce yourself again. If at some point in all this you really can't for reasons beyond your control, you're expected to ask someone in your House to reproduce you for you; Athosians have communal, wide-open marriages. People are born within a House (or adopted into it from outside) and stay within that House until they marry another House (and it is marrying the House; generally, one is thought of as marrying one's own generation within that House. Children may refer to their nongenitors in their House by variations on mother/father, aunt/uncle, grandparent, great-aunt, cousin, etc. "Adoption" is, in effect, a marriage ceremony, involving a proxy if the child is too young to go through the ceremonies); there is no divorce as such, although a member of a House could technically marry another House if they so pleased. The net effect of this is to try to ensure that there's always someone to look after whatever children might be produced; depending on how the child's birth parents chose to deal with their Responsibility, the child will be "born into" the House prepared to care for it. Outsiders can marry into a House (these aren't the bad old days before Trev of the Hosting had to marry out of his House in order to wed Cally Lonely-Arm the Runner, although these days most Athosians believe her Runner status and Runners in general to be apocryphal); sometimes Athosians will be wed to outworlders, marrying out of their Houses by default, although their kinship ties will be remembered. For all that marriage is perceived as a lasting tie, nobody really cares who you're sleeping with as long as it isn't going to cause a ruckus in your House and you're not running the risk of producing a child within the dangerous degrees of inbreeding.
13. During the "barbarizing" period, when some Athosians had realized that their cities were giant Wraith deathtraps and others still clung to them, many of the "barbarians" lived in a quasi-Celto-Greek culture, domesticating large ratite-ish predatory birds and harnessing them to chariots. Many of the Athosian epics (the "high chants") reflect this time, although composed later with a blithe disregard to matters of intellectual copyright.
14. Most of the Athosians are allergic to peanuts. This was discovered the first night when Wex brought on a severer reaction early by running around (with an immune Jinto) until he gasped, wheezing. Rodney, depressingly familiar with the symptoms, was first on the spot and harangued the medical staff while they helped him; the medical staff then monitored the other Athosians, several of which later threw up or developed hives -- fortunately, not as many of them had eaten the Earth food, and of those, not everybody ate foods containing peanut oil or peanuts. Later testing proved that it was the peanuts. Between Elizabeth's handling, the medical staff's calm competence, and Rodney's obviously real if blustery concern, this worked to strengthen Athosian ties to the Atlantean Expedition rather than otherwise. (The kids are still more likely to play any of the other members of his team than Dr. McKay, though.) Teyla, however, is not allergic. Nor is her genetic daughter.
15. The Athosians, by the way, now have an extreme interest in replenishing their population as quickly as they can afford to feed them, and therefore have extended many sexual invitations to the Atlanteans without bothering to explain that pregnancy is in fact the object rather than an unwanted byproduct. This has led to a number of awkward and/or humorous situations, and was one of the main factors behind Sergeant Bates' dislike of having them in the city (although he was circumspect in the discussions with Dr. Weir, not wanting to get into the subject of Marines behaving like... well... anyway, not wanting to get into that as long as he didn't have to).
16. The Athosians keep up their ties with their trading partners both by marriage and by fosterage. Orin, from "Letters From Pegasus," had been fostered with Emmagan when he was young (and brought a lovely wave of blue-spot with him. Oh well, the kids had to get it sometime). Torren's mother had been of Orin's people. Teyla's mother's genetic father was a visiting Genii trader who took one of the Athosian women up on her invitation. The Athosians consider Teyla married to AR-1, and any child she bears will be seen to have the men of AR-1 as its fathers, if not father-of-blood.
17. The Genii surface village seen in "Underground" is populated year-round by people who actually live there. Despite efforts to keep ties between it and the Underground alive (arranged marriages between people born in Gatewaystead and those Underground; the alderman of Gatewaystead always has a seat on the Speakers' Council), the Gatewaystead culture has developed several obvious points of difference from the more technologically advanced Underground. One of these is the preservation of the worship of an agrarian deity (Cora, who died and returned) who was once worshipped on several of the planets of the Genii Confederacy and whose worship has spread to a number of agricultural worlds whose people have or once had contact with the Genii; while some of the contacts with the Underground have been ritualized into Corian forms, the people Underground practice Ancestor (Ancient) worship.Many of the Undergrounders dismiss Gatewaystead and its people as superstitious, backward conservatives; this is an impolite attitude to hold of your shadow sacrifices (your scapegoats, moreover, whose number you keep up by lot whenever the village starts to look underpopulated) but, sadly, a very human one.
18. Cowan was conducting a political coup behind the scenes during "Underground." Alderman of Gatewaystead, he'd had his eye on the First Speaker's Chair for some time; he used the news of the Wraith's awakening and thus the fact that the Genii Anti-Wraith Operation had just become obsolete to push for a vote of no confidence in the government, and the reports of the power of the Atlanteans to claim that he was the man who could recover victory from the jaws of defeat, and thus got himself elected First Speaker even as the first mission was going pear-shaped. Once it had so gone, he found himself riding the tiger; in order to avoid being deposed as quickly as he'd shot to power, he put all the blame on the Atlanteans and rallied his people against them, careful to assign command and thus responsibility for the coming raid to a man who might be good enough to pull it off but who was too dangerous to have around: Kolyas have been Speakers since there was a Confederacy and taken their turn at First Speaker for a thousand years. The last First Speaker Kolya left a son who's not involved in politics (although he's one of the radiation poisoning sufferers in "Coup d'État") and a first cousin twice removed (Acastus Kolya). If the Atlanteans kill Commander Kolya, that solves that problem; if he delivers Atlantis into Genii hands, that solves that problem. The ideal solution would be for Atlantis to be captured but for Commander Kolya to perish of wounds taken in the process (and someone in the party might have been charged to see that that happened in the event, but he'd have been one of the scores-at-one-blow); in the event, Cowan got the worst of both worlds, although he did at least have a ready-made scapegoat to shift the blame onto.
19. On Sateda, homosexual relationships were things old people had. There were known instances of younger people suffering their elders' attentions out of duty or respect (and it was seen as suffering those attentions if the younger people were decent folk) and a greater degree of sexual irregularity was tolerated from Specialists (who, after all, might not live to get old) but Ronon is still going to be startled and discombobulated by offers from men, especially from those under the age of, oh, forty at least.
20. Kate Hewlett plays the Janet-equivalent character on Wormhole X-treme. Every now and then, when the geeks of Atlantis are deconstructing the show, someone will bring up the slashy potential of her character with Major Monroe and its inherent hotness. Rodney will half-nod and then start banging his head into the nearest flat surface, because the character as portrayed is enough not-Jeanie to start noticing but nowhere near enough to not feel guilty about it.
Twenty things in my personal Stargate TV deuterocanon (regarding the people) and one to grow on:
1. Daniel Jackson doesn't have the ATA gene, but otherwise he's closer to the Ancient genome than any of the Tellurians attached to the SGC before Sheppard was inducted, beating out O'Neill (and Jonas Quinn, for that matter) by a small margin and Carson, Miko, Rodney, and Samantha Carter by larger ones.
2. The Ancients didn't choke Morgan le Fey off. She faked it because she was fairly sure they would act if the questioning went on much longer and this way she didn't have to argue with Daniel about it.
3. Teyla tracked down an older man who wanted a child without a mother necessarily attached and got her Responsibility of Reproduction out of the way when she was fourteen; she comes into fairly regular contact with the resulting girl and her father, given the closed population, but she's closer to Jinto and perhaps one or two of the other kids.
4. After escaping from the Wraith hive ship with the surviving culled Athosians and Marines, Sheppard and Teyla explained matters quickly to Elizabeth and took back off for Athos while the Wraith were (hopefully) disorganized. Sheppard had already retrieved the escapees from the encampment near the gate; with Teyla there to guide him and reassure her people that it was all right, they managed to evacuate two encampments that the Wraith had missed, and retrieve fugitives from four others before the puddlejumper announced that the Wraith had arrived to start shelling Athos. They ducked through an uninhabited world Teyla knew the address to on the way back every time, to prevent the Wraith from following them to Atlantis and ensure that they could bug out fast without having to wait for the GDO. Perhaps eighty percent of the population of Athos made it to Atlantis, one way or another; Teyla will see the faces of the other twenty percent in her dreams for the rest of her life.
5. Teyla spent most of the frenzy leading up to the first Siege of Atlantis having hot sex with all sorts of people. She regrets none of it. Most of the survivors don't regret it, either.
6. Elizabeth slept with Teyla and Zelenka (at the same time) during the frenzy leading up to the first Siege of Atlantis, and with Lorne during the mess that was late-second-year. Both times, she immediately regretted it; she pretends neither of the occasions ever happened, and it cut off the chance that her relationships with any of them will develop into Relationships without more work than you can put into something without acknowledging one of the root causes.
7. Simon Wallace was the love of Elizabeth's life (so far), and it takes her a long time to get over him. She spends a bunch of the second year in Atlantis throwing out overtures to Sheppard and Caldwell to prove to herself she's still a desirable woman, but she wouldn't know what to do if either of them tried to seriously take her up on it.
8. Back before she met Simon, a young Elizabeth was married to a barely-legal Rodney for about a year before their burgeoning careers tore it apart. That ship has SAILED. In its distant wake, it turns out to have left friendship, exasperated fondness, a strong streak of frustrated irritation, and an assortment of shared-background-jokes that leave everyone else blinking in their wake (not helped by the fact that neither of the two have bothered to let anyone else know what they did when they were young and stupid and thought love solved everything).
9. Ronon inherited the "offworld chin" from ancestors who emigrated to Sateda generations ago, as have many Satedans. Other than that, his phenotype is pure Satedan; the Ancients settled Sateda with Neanderthal man, hence the massive frame and muscles. (Most of the skeletal differences aren't readily apparent under the muscles and hair, and a good diet complete with plenty of milk makes all the difference in average height.)
10. When Ronon was little, he wanted to be a castrato opera singer when he grew up. Either that or a cowboy. Sateda didn't have horses, so Satedan cowboys rode animals of the genus Cervus that people on my side of the Atlantic would call "elk" and Europeans would call "large deer" or perhaps "wapiti." These animals are commonly domesticated in Pegasus, and Gatespeech has different words for them and for deer; the former tends to hit the ears of people who haven't seen said animals as something akin to "hart."
11. Aiden Ford is an Eagle Scout. His experience with camping started with his grandparents, who used to drive out of the city to one of the national parks/forests and go camping in tents, and was only honed by Scouting.
12. By contrast, Meredith's parents used to make him go to Wolf Cubs because they thought it would build character and instill useful virtues. What with the whole mess with the non-working model of a nuclear explosive device and everything, it all sort of dribbled off and he was never officially inducted into a Scout troop (or whatever the Canadian male equivalent of a bridging ceremony is).
13. Rodney is straight. Except when he's not.
14. After he drove the nails into the coffin of his marriage and before he started working on the Stargate proper, during work that sent him to the U. K., Rodney dated Carson Beckett for a week and a half before Carson decided he was probably straight and Rodney said he'd thought he'd noticed a certain lack of spark. Before he came to Atlantis, this held pride of place as his most amicable breakup and the only one where they managed to be friends afterwards from the get-go.
15. The McKay name comes from one James McKay, who left Boston for Canada when the Fugitive Slave Act passed and there married one Leesy, who'd walked from Kentucky to Canada while pregnant with the child of her owner/uncle/father. According to the elitist terminology of the time, he was an "octoroon" and she a "musterfina"; they spent most of the rest of their lives in their new country passing as white, as did their children. Rodney and Jeanie are probably in the first generation to bring this up in public, and the first generation to be confident that most of said public won't give a hoot.
16. The McKays have another secret. Which they're not talking about. Rodney's not the world's best liar, so he always makes sure to have a few other layers of secrets he can give away one by one and fool people into thinking that's all there is. The James McKay thing works splendidly for that. So does Leesy's knotted family tree.
17. Jeanie McKay Miller and David Hewlett once ran into each other in the middle of Toronto and had a very odd conversation for two minutes before they realized they weren't talking to their own siblings. Strangely enough, they don't seem to be related.
18. Elizabeth feels as if she's older and wiser than Sheppard. Sheppard feels as if he's older and wiser than Elizabeth. This makes for interesting dynamics.
19. When Chaya shared with Sheppard, she replenished his reserves of the kind of strength it takes to be in a situation where you really can't do anything to help and not dash off half-cocked in all directions and get MORE people killed. He hadn't realized how much he needed it until it was back again; Antarctica hadn't built it back up again anywhere near as much as he'd assumed it had. He's always going to be grateful to her for that. She also left him with random historical trivia, a better Pegasus-Alteran vocabulary/accent, and a vague memory of how he would go about Ascending if he wanted to, which he doesn't. (Except perhaps to get out of the Sanctuary, although he'd want to be sure he could Descend again first.)
20. John Sheppard is directly descended, within a relatively short number of generations, from Descended Danavi who preserved some of their history.
21. He actually knows this, but he's gotten into the habit of not saying it for so long that he has trouble finding the words to hint at it to other people. Besides, they might ground him, and he wants the sky the way Hill-men want their Hills.