So there's this fic I'm not writing...
So there's this fic I'm not writing, because I haven't internalized enough of the canon.
It'd start when Sam Carter's cousin Melba, several times removed and probably not a first cousin behind all that, starts working on a Carter Family Geneaology. So Sam sends her some biographic data and pretty much forgets about it, because honestly? The SGC keeps her so busy she barely has time for a life outside of it, much less one belonging to a cousin distant enough she still lives in Virginia.
So, like I said, Sam forgets about it, a bunch of episodes happen, and she comes home one night tired and finds that Cousin Melba has sent her a draft of the Carter Family Geneaology. UPS, because Melba knows these things called computers but has yet to manage the arcane depths of attachments, much less how to turn things she found in paper into computer files. (Whereas the nice page at the library used to run copies off for her until Melba worked it out herself, and she's still a little nervous of all those buttons on the machine.)
Sam really wants something to take her mind off the day she's had, television is being a vast wasteland again, and the library's closed by now. So she starts reading the Geneaology -- maybe she'll get lucky and it'll turn out to have a soporific side effect -- and then something down one of the far branches makes her sit up and go "?"
So then she brings it in to the Mountain the next working day and asks Daniel to look at it, and after a fair amount of excited scholarly muttering and a phone call to someone Daniel kind of knows in the New York Public Library system, it turns out that apparently Sam and Daniel really are, oh, sixth cousins once removed, on their respective mothers' sides. (Which will be farther distant than Sam's dad and his wife were; since I've put them on the same branch, Jacob Carter is also Daniel's -- sixth cousin once removed, did we say? -- whereas Sam's mom was that without the extra generation.)
So Sam and Daniel both say "Huh," and Daniel asks for Melba's address so he can get in touch with her and ask if there's anything he can do for her Geneaology, which is probably full of anthropologic data that will at some point be of value to somebody.
It'd have stopped there, except firstly, they weren't quiet about it, so the entire SGC knows about it sooner or later. Jack O'Neill gets kind of annoying about saying that he knew it or something like it all along. and claiming that it explains a great many things. A lot of the base winds up following his lead. Teal'c just nods and hums and goes back to trying to read one of the works by one of the late Carters on Daniel's branch, a certain Linwood. (Sadly, he decided to start with Kesrick, which is fairly rocky going if you don't get at least some of the myriad allusions.)
Secondly, Cousin Melba is delighted to find out that her sources were wrong about Claire's boy being dead, and makes sure to invite both Sam and Daniel to the next Carter Family Picnic. It's going to be in Tarzana, so much closer to Colorado Springs. (Sam tries to get a picture of the distances involved into her cousin's head; Daniel soon realizes that it's not going to happen without personal experience. Besides, the way things have been going, they'll probably have the much better excuse for not going of having been held hostage by fanatic cultists. Again.)
Life goes on and, since this is my AU, by the time the picnic rolls around the paperwork's been started on Cassie's adoption and Sha`re' has helped rescue herself. They're both having a little -- well, okay, a lot -- of culture shock, and since they're used to large close-knit extended kinship groups, Daniel thinks that they might like to go to Sam's picnic.
Sam points out that it isn't her picnic. but at any rate, she and Daniel and Sha`re' and Cassie and Janet are all going, and so is Teal'c. Partly so that he can see something of the rest of the planet in a low-impact fashion, and partly because, if Daniel shows up with Sha`re', and Sam shows up with Janet and a daughter, that implies a statement that she really doesn't want to be making, not even to her family, maybe especially not to her family. Besides, she and Janet are friends.
(And if one or the other of them might perhaps maybe be considering the idea of what it would be like to be more, that's outside the scope of this story, and anyway Teal'c's never been to Southern California.)
Jack'd come too, but there's official-ish stuff going on and he can't make it. Maybe the invisible 2IC of the SGC is off on his (or, as it might be, her) vacation and needs Jack to sub. Sam promises to pick up a cheesy souvenir for him, and Janet says that she's thinking of a detour on the way back that may involve pictures of Teal'c in mouse ears.
(Jack is kind of just as happy to be missing that part of it. Charlie loved Disneyland.)
So they rent a minivan and start a road trip. SG-1 are kind of used to this sort of thing, and Janet and Cassie mostly get the hang of it, except for the Period of Flaring Tempers Over Gas Stations the second morning that will never be spoken of again.
When they get to the picnic (Janet's kind of startled -- she knew it was in Tarzana, but she didn't realize it was in Tarzana. Daniel read the Geneaology, so he had a pretty good guess; Sam's been to it before; and none of the other three have the background to realize that this isn't on the odder end of normal), most of the Carters-and-relations they first meet are delighted to meet them and happy to let them know that Jack Carter the younger isn't here (marital issues) but Uncle Jack (presumably Jack Carter the elder) is planning to make it down -- apparently rare these days -- and that some of the members of Daniel's branch of the family have not only made it in (from England. And AFRICA.) but are eager to meet him and his lovely wife.
Some of them, it seems, have brought a gorilla along with them who has been raised from infancy as practically one of the family. While those members of the party who have some idea of exactly how complicated it would be to bring a gorilla across national boundaries are still boggling, the gorilla (apparently called Turkiya, or Turk, or possibly Turkey) takes profound exception to Teal'c, hooting at him, and making signs for bad/dangerous/wrong.
Daniel promptly curls his lip back and snarls at her, shouldering his way in front of his team and spitting out something that sounds more like Frank Welker earning a paycheck than an actual language. To which some of the cousins who brought her join in, before taking her off to visit with some circus elephants that one of the local Carter cousins brought by to recuperate and congratulating Daniel on how much of the language he retained. Daniel is rather startled that he remembers the proto-language he and his mother practiced at all, let alone that a Bolgani -- a gorilla -- would recognize it.
Janet, for her part, in between wondering whether gorilla senses had been able to detect Teal'c's symbiote without actually saying so in front of assorted non-cleared Carters, is more than a little surprised that they have met with a gorilla and elephants at a family reunion; Sam says that since they're holding it in Tarzana, the family's going all out, and she wouldn't be surprised to see a chimpanzee or three, before giving Cassie permission to run along and meet the elephants.
Both the gorilla-raising cousins and the rest of the African branch, as it turns out, all would have been delighted to raise Daniel if his grandfather had only let them cart him off to East Africa. As his great-aunt (apparently nicknamed "Sheena" --
-- "Sheena?"
"She used to look kind of like the one in the comic books, and Aunt Sheena was the one you wanted to shoo marauding gorillas out of the living room if Grandpa wasn't around") Jane Ann, it turns out, married an actual prince of a lost city in the heart of Africa (which Teal'c and Sam and Janet are all appropriately amazed by, as they hadn't realized there actually were any; Daniel, knowing a thing or five about stable populations, is not surprised by the relative smallness of the "city," or the draconian measures it used until recently to keep it so), he has several second cousins there who make Teal'c look pale, including someone apparently active in Kenyan politics and a young archaeologist who could be Daniel ten years younger with a sex change and a palette swap. The latter introduces herself as Hathu'su Amonasro and explains that her grandfather picked the surname in order to deal with Europeans after a family racking of literature for suitable examples (and not finding much that wasn't specifically Muslim). It's hinted that there was some trouble in parts of the extended family at first, but Hathu'su and/or some of her first cousins have come to the last few Carter Family Picnics without that sort of incident.
Then it is revealed, in conversation, that of all the relations whom the founder of the Tarzana branch of the family wrote about, often under pseudonyms, the one he's best known for turns out to be Hathu'su and Daniel's great-grandfather. Daniel's a little surprised, not because he hadn't known, but because he'd thought his mother was making it up. (On the other hand, since the proto-language thing turned out to be demonstrably true, despite the fact that logically gorillas and certainly monkeys shouldn't be able to understand it, it isn't that much more of a stretch.)
Meanwhile, Sha`re' offers to help with the dishing out, gets something splattered on her and cuts her finger, and swears (extensively) in Goa'uld. One of the women standing off in a corner gets all excited and starts trying to talk to her in what proves to be hesitantly and weirdly pronounced Goa'uld; said woman, it eventuates, grew up in an isolated bit of Africa where they used to still worship the Flaming Sun and use his language for his liturgy. So naturally both women are remarkably interested in each other, especially when Sha`re' mentions, having discovered her new friend to be a fellow apostate, "Oh, by the way, Dan'yel and his sworn brother O'nil killed him a while back."
So the woman runs over to this tall guy who's as flat-out impressive-looking in his own way as Teal'c and starts babbling away nineteen to the dozen in the same non-language Daniel just found out he knew and that about a third of the gathered relations also seem to understand, and it turns out that:
- the woman may or may not be the second wife of the man she's talking to, but they seem to interact that way (on the other hand, it isn't that different from the way Jack acts with the rest of SG-1);
- the "may or may not" is complicated by the fact that the man in question is still happily married to his first wife, who as a Carter of Virginia expects monogamy. It's not the pattern HE grew up with, but fidelity is a small enough price to pay in return for his wife accepting his need to be patriarch over, at last count, the four children she bore him, the illegitimate cousin they adopted as their elder son, the young woman said son later married, the aforementioned ex-High-Priestess of the Flaming God, seven girls who one by one became their wards or something like it, and any children or grandchildren any of the above may have had;
-and the three of them, due to a unique experience, are considerably older than they look, and likely to remain that way indefinitely: in fact, the former Jane Carter and her husband ARE Daniel's famous great-grandparents.
So while they're all standing around being impressed with each other, Teal'c asks Daniel's grandfather if maybe he'd care to spar, and Hathu'su and Sha`re' and La are having a multilingual very fascinating conversation, "Uncle Jack" appears.
Out of nowhere.
Stark naked.
With an equally nude over-tall and over-armed green... person.
Who promptly collapses.
(Astral travel does deposit you there with autoequalized outer and inner pressure, but anyone born on any known iteration of the Red Planet will feel rather like Flat Stanley on a sudden transition to Tellurian gravity and Terra-normal atmosphere.)
Sam takes unthinking charge as a Carter doctor rushes to help the fallen green man, demands "You have antigravity units, don't you?", sends the Warlord back to get one for his friend, and with the help of some scientifically minded cousins and kibitzing from Teal'c (out of his vast experience) and Sha`re' (remembering bits and pieces from her sublessors), builds on the spot an anti-gravity belt that will leave a Thark feeling no greater weight than that of his birthworld.
So then he'd thank her for the belt and promptly join in what becomes a three-way sparring match, while Daniel tried to tell the interested family members a suitably expurgated record of his and her adventures (not helped in said self-censorship by the surprisingly insightful comments of various cousins who'd learned something or other that touched on the subject) and everyone else watched three of the most famous warriors of modern times match their strength and skill against each other. Janet would say it was better than hockey.
When the match came to a halt (I don't know who'd win! Maybe they'd just call it off when the smell of the barbecue got to be too much, it's not as if any of them have anything to prove) Teal'c would bring away good reports of the green men of Barsoom, and Tars Tarkas would hold that, of all the people he'd be pleased and proud to fight with (in both senses of the word), the brown men of Chulak were not least among them.
And (maybe as part of the fic itself, maybe as a sequel), the extended-SG-1-minus-one would head straight out to the coast to see the ocean (I'm not sure whether some of them would ever have seen it before). While they were standing around on the beach looking at its immensity, Cassie would actually start talking about some of the things she's been keeping bottled up, and Sha`re' would offer her own insights, and so would a young man who happened to be there on the beach at Oxnard (nearly giving Sam heart failure before Daniel quietly pointed out that possession and de facto enchantment weren't actually unique and are believed in in many places on the globe, and Janet contributed a story about an uncle who used to hunt Wendigo and defeat ghosts by destroying their physical anchors with iron, salt, and fire, which gets Daniel started on general comparison of practices while Sam and Teal'c look at each other and then start talking about, I don't know, motorcycles).
Eventually, their new friend would point out that as long as they were in the area anyway, they really should hit Knott's Berry Farm as well; give them directions to it, and to the local Albertson's, where they could buy the tickets; and pass on the address of a friend of his who'd be interested in trading some books to be digitized by the Air Force (including a copy of The Prophecies of Jehane d'Arc, noteworthy for its account of an apparent possession by the lady in question) in return for a microfilm printout of some of the texts Daniel has collected, including the Gesta Filiorum Johanni Sancti Auditoris, which Daniel hung on to because of its account of the defeat and death of what certainly seems to be a Goa'uld (although the chronicler then claims that "that evil soul, spawn of the Serpent in the Garden and pretender to the name of one mighty in his appointed place of garbage collector under the Lord Most High, took up on his death, by a foul agreement with his Lord Belial, the existence of a cacodaemon, whence he still doth wreak mortals woe by possessing them in spirit if not in body").
So they'll swing down to Disneyland the next day (leaving Knott's for the day after that), and since the Indiana Jones ride was still relatively new at the time, they'll stand in line forever for it and then buy Daniel an Indy hat, which everyone else will then insist that he wear all day (well, Sha`re' just thinks that he should wear a hat, remembering -- and describing -- several sunburns which left her to wonder whether she'd married a man or an ant).
Sha`re' and Teal'c will wind up adoring the Small World ride, much to Janet's bemusement and Sam's disgust. Janet will turn out to get dizzy and queasy on even mild roller coasters, and wind up getting left watching everyone's bags and/or visiting stores, where she buys Sha`re' a headscarf, Sam a Daisy Duck hat, herself a Donald Duck hat, Cassie a visor with a picture of Ariel on it because she's really a bit too big for the princess hat with trailing scarf she wanted (plus, bright), and, yes, mouse ears for Teal'c (who will gladly swap out his cap for them). Sam and Daniel will have brought along knapsacks full of all the technical journals they usually don't have time to keep up with and, once read, throw out the ones they don't want to keep for later reference (a trick of the latter's for international travel, particularly customs lines); Sam will prove to be a lot better about actually lightening the load, even now that Daniel could get the full text via online database -- at least until they come out of Star Tours and Teal'c promptly buys a copy of of every spin-off novel in the exit store and wants to put them in her bag; Sam is like "Fine, as long as YOU carry it."
The next day, at Knott's, Sam will indulge Cassie's new passion for churros, to Janet's annoyance; Daniel will finish his magazines and start in on the latest-but-one Elizabeth Peters, which he has a sneaking fondness for that he disguises under his very real respect for Dr. Mertz; Sha`re' will start in on the books she borrowed from her husband's Tarzana cousins, namely the adventures of his great-grandfather, and keep asking him for clarification, real names, or pronunciation (which on one account leads to a diatribe that due to transmission error, in the books black people are consistently referred to by the Mangani word for chimpanzees, and the publishers refused to change it because readers would be used to the wrong way --
"So what is the word for a black man?"
Ape noise.
"What?!"
"It'd be rendered 'Gosahmangani' in that transcription system."
"And 'Tarsahmangani' for a European?"
"Or just 'Tarmangani,' depending on how much body hair he had -- or how apelike he was; I know it's what my mother said was used for her grandfather and aunt, and La was using it for her people on Sunday. Although, granted, La's people claimed to be mingled with the Great Apes."
-- Which Sam would say wasn't possible, and Janet would say could have been the result of genetic engineering even if La's ancestors weren't actually ancient Atlanteans, and Daniel would point out that it was only a mutual cousin several times removed who thought they were Atlanteans based on a mistranslation of La's account, when actually the "Ἀθᾶναι" the priests of Saïs told Solon about was not the Ἀθῆναι he lived in but the planet Abydos; and Sha`re' would say no it wasn't, the Ancients who used to live in somewhere called Atlantis built themselves a city called "Adanai" on "a little island in the long sea north of where the river went in" and were successfully resisting the Goa'uld when the latter got thrown off the planet, so the priests probably moved the name over when they got it mixed up with Atlantis proper and "that big island that blew up and swamped the Labyrinth palace and moved the water in that sea on the fault line away and back in a timely manner," and thus La's people might descend from the people most commonly known as Atlanteans, albeit not ancient Atlanteans, Daniel would enter the caveat that the confusion about which was the Ἀτλαντὶς νῆσος might have been on Solon's or Plato's part, and Cassie would ask whether they could give it a rest already, she had to stand in line with them).
Teal'c would turn out to really enjoy roller coasters, although he wouldn't understand why people were screaming on them if they weren't actually scared.
Cassie would love the dinosaur ride, unveiling a fascination with dinosaurs, and all three Tellurians would fondly recall their dinosaur phases, with references to King Kong, The Lost World, and the venerable iguana-with-a-fin-on-its-back.
And then eventually, after swinging back by Tarzana to return all the books and promising Sha`re' she'd be able to get the ones she hadn't read out of the Colorado Springs public library, they'd head back to Colorado by way of Yosemite. (Which would merit rather a bit of a stop -- Yosemite, after all -- and there'd be a moment when Teal'c looked at Half Dome and recognized the Sierra On-Line logo from the base's collection of computer games, and Janet would be disgusted [especially since Cassie'd follow suit].) The journey back itself would be pretty uneventful, except for the time in Middle-of-Nowhere, Nevada when Sam and Teal'c went to the aid of a barely-legal-if-that young man in a barfight and the three of them wound up pwning. Then the guy they helped out, whose name probably isn't Dirk Schneider, would try picking Sam up, and she'd figure what the heck, she's on vacation and go off with him.
So all six of them come back to the Mountain relaxed and happy and wearing their Disney headgear, and Jack takes one look at them (probably after they've presented General Hammond with a boysenberry pie) and asks whether they got a picture.
And Janet says no, they were waiting for him, and hands him his souvenir cap -- which sort of stuns him, because it's a Davy Crockett coonskin cap like he always wanted when he was a little kid.
So that's pretty much how the fic would go, if I were writing it, which I'm not.
As yet.
It'd start when Sam Carter's cousin Melba, several times removed and probably not a first cousin behind all that, starts working on a Carter Family Geneaology. So Sam sends her some biographic data and pretty much forgets about it, because honestly? The SGC keeps her so busy she barely has time for a life outside of it, much less one belonging to a cousin distant enough she still lives in Virginia.
So, like I said, Sam forgets about it, a bunch of episodes happen, and she comes home one night tired and finds that Cousin Melba has sent her a draft of the Carter Family Geneaology. UPS, because Melba knows these things called computers but has yet to manage the arcane depths of attachments, much less how to turn things she found in paper into computer files. (Whereas the nice page at the library used to run copies off for her until Melba worked it out herself, and she's still a little nervous of all those buttons on the machine.)
Sam really wants something to take her mind off the day she's had, television is being a vast wasteland again, and the library's closed by now. So she starts reading the Geneaology -- maybe she'll get lucky and it'll turn out to have a soporific side effect -- and then something down one of the far branches makes her sit up and go "?"
So then she brings it in to the Mountain the next working day and asks Daniel to look at it, and after a fair amount of excited scholarly muttering and a phone call to someone Daniel kind of knows in the New York Public Library system, it turns out that apparently Sam and Daniel really are, oh, sixth cousins once removed, on their respective mothers' sides. (Which will be farther distant than Sam's dad and his wife were; since I've put them on the same branch, Jacob Carter is also Daniel's -- sixth cousin once removed, did we say? -- whereas Sam's mom was that without the extra generation.)
So Sam and Daniel both say "Huh," and Daniel asks for Melba's address so he can get in touch with her and ask if there's anything he can do for her Geneaology, which is probably full of anthropologic data that will at some point be of value to somebody.
It'd have stopped there, except firstly, they weren't quiet about it, so the entire SGC knows about it sooner or later. Jack O'Neill gets kind of annoying about saying that he knew it or something like it all along. and claiming that it explains a great many things. A lot of the base winds up following his lead. Teal'c just nods and hums and goes back to trying to read one of the works by one of the late Carters on Daniel's branch, a certain Linwood. (Sadly, he decided to start with Kesrick, which is fairly rocky going if you don't get at least some of the myriad allusions.)
Secondly, Cousin Melba is delighted to find out that her sources were wrong about Claire's boy being dead, and makes sure to invite both Sam and Daniel to the next Carter Family Picnic. It's going to be in Tarzana, so much closer to Colorado Springs. (Sam tries to get a picture of the distances involved into her cousin's head; Daniel soon realizes that it's not going to happen without personal experience. Besides, the way things have been going, they'll probably have the much better excuse for not going of having been held hostage by fanatic cultists. Again.)
Life goes on and, since this is my AU, by the time the picnic rolls around the paperwork's been started on Cassie's adoption and Sha`re' has helped rescue herself. They're both having a little -- well, okay, a lot -- of culture shock, and since they're used to large close-knit extended kinship groups, Daniel thinks that they might like to go to Sam's picnic.
Sam points out that it isn't her picnic. but at any rate, she and Daniel and Sha`re' and Cassie and Janet are all going, and so is Teal'c. Partly so that he can see something of the rest of the planet in a low-impact fashion, and partly because, if Daniel shows up with Sha`re', and Sam shows up with Janet and a daughter, that implies a statement that she really doesn't want to be making, not even to her family, maybe especially not to her family. Besides, she and Janet are friends.
(And if one or the other of them might perhaps maybe be considering the idea of what it would be like to be more, that's outside the scope of this story, and anyway Teal'c's never been to Southern California.)
Jack'd come too, but there's official-ish stuff going on and he can't make it. Maybe the invisible 2IC of the SGC is off on his (or, as it might be, her) vacation and needs Jack to sub. Sam promises to pick up a cheesy souvenir for him, and Janet says that she's thinking of a detour on the way back that may involve pictures of Teal'c in mouse ears.
(Jack is kind of just as happy to be missing that part of it. Charlie loved Disneyland.)
So they rent a minivan and start a road trip. SG-1 are kind of used to this sort of thing, and Janet and Cassie mostly get the hang of it, except for the Period of Flaring Tempers Over Gas Stations the second morning that will never be spoken of again.
When they get to the picnic (Janet's kind of startled -- she knew it was in Tarzana, but she didn't realize it was in Tarzana. Daniel read the Geneaology, so he had a pretty good guess; Sam's been to it before; and none of the other three have the background to realize that this isn't on the odder end of normal), most of the Carters-and-relations they first meet are delighted to meet them and happy to let them know that Jack Carter the younger isn't here (marital issues) but Uncle Jack (presumably Jack Carter the elder) is planning to make it down -- apparently rare these days -- and that some of the members of Daniel's branch of the family have not only made it in (from England. And AFRICA.) but are eager to meet him and his lovely wife.
Some of them, it seems, have brought a gorilla along with them who has been raised from infancy as practically one of the family. While those members of the party who have some idea of exactly how complicated it would be to bring a gorilla across national boundaries are still boggling, the gorilla (apparently called Turkiya, or Turk, or possibly Turkey) takes profound exception to Teal'c, hooting at him, and making signs for bad/dangerous/wrong.
Daniel promptly curls his lip back and snarls at her, shouldering his way in front of his team and spitting out something that sounds more like Frank Welker earning a paycheck than an actual language. To which some of the cousins who brought her join in, before taking her off to visit with some circus elephants that one of the local Carter cousins brought by to recuperate and congratulating Daniel on how much of the language he retained. Daniel is rather startled that he remembers the proto-language he and his mother practiced at all, let alone that a Bolgani -- a gorilla -- would recognize it.
Janet, for her part, in between wondering whether gorilla senses had been able to detect Teal'c's symbiote without actually saying so in front of assorted non-cleared Carters, is more than a little surprised that they have met with a gorilla and elephants at a family reunion; Sam says that since they're holding it in Tarzana, the family's going all out, and she wouldn't be surprised to see a chimpanzee or three, before giving Cassie permission to run along and meet the elephants.
Both the gorilla-raising cousins and the rest of the African branch, as it turns out, all would have been delighted to raise Daniel if his grandfather had only let them cart him off to East Africa. As his great-aunt (apparently nicknamed "Sheena" --
-- "Sheena?"
"She used to look kind of like the one in the comic books, and Aunt Sheena was the one you wanted to shoo marauding gorillas out of the living room if Grandpa wasn't around") Jane Ann, it turns out, married an actual prince of a lost city in the heart of Africa (which Teal'c and Sam and Janet are all appropriately amazed by, as they hadn't realized there actually were any; Daniel, knowing a thing or five about stable populations, is not surprised by the relative smallness of the "city," or the draconian measures it used until recently to keep it so), he has several second cousins there who make Teal'c look pale, including someone apparently active in Kenyan politics and a young archaeologist who could be Daniel ten years younger with a sex change and a palette swap. The latter introduces herself as Hathu'su Amonasro and explains that her grandfather picked the surname in order to deal with Europeans after a family racking of literature for suitable examples (and not finding much that wasn't specifically Muslim). It's hinted that there was some trouble in parts of the extended family at first, but Hathu'su and/or some of her first cousins have come to the last few Carter Family Picnics without that sort of incident.
Then it is revealed, in conversation, that of all the relations whom the founder of the Tarzana branch of the family wrote about, often under pseudonyms, the one he's best known for turns out to be Hathu'su and Daniel's great-grandfather. Daniel's a little surprised, not because he hadn't known, but because he'd thought his mother was making it up. (On the other hand, since the proto-language thing turned out to be demonstrably true, despite the fact that logically gorillas and certainly monkeys shouldn't be able to understand it, it isn't that much more of a stretch.)
Meanwhile, Sha`re' offers to help with the dishing out, gets something splattered on her and cuts her finger, and swears (extensively) in Goa'uld. One of the women standing off in a corner gets all excited and starts trying to talk to her in what proves to be hesitantly and weirdly pronounced Goa'uld; said woman, it eventuates, grew up in an isolated bit of Africa where they used to still worship the Flaming Sun and use his language for his liturgy. So naturally both women are remarkably interested in each other, especially when Sha`re' mentions, having discovered her new friend to be a fellow apostate, "Oh, by the way, Dan'yel and his sworn brother O'nil killed him a while back."
So the woman runs over to this tall guy who's as flat-out impressive-looking in his own way as Teal'c and starts babbling away nineteen to the dozen in the same non-language Daniel just found out he knew and that about a third of the gathered relations also seem to understand, and it turns out that:
- the woman may or may not be the second wife of the man she's talking to, but they seem to interact that way (on the other hand, it isn't that different from the way Jack acts with the rest of SG-1);
- the "may or may not" is complicated by the fact that the man in question is still happily married to his first wife, who as a Carter of Virginia expects monogamy. It's not the pattern HE grew up with, but fidelity is a small enough price to pay in return for his wife accepting his need to be patriarch over, at last count, the four children she bore him, the illegitimate cousin they adopted as their elder son, the young woman said son later married, the aforementioned ex-High-Priestess of the Flaming God, seven girls who one by one became their wards or something like it, and any children or grandchildren any of the above may have had;
-and the three of them, due to a unique experience, are considerably older than they look, and likely to remain that way indefinitely: in fact, the former Jane Carter and her husband ARE Daniel's famous great-grandparents.
So while they're all standing around being impressed with each other, Teal'c asks Daniel's grandfather if maybe he'd care to spar, and Hathu'su and Sha`re' and La are having a multilingual very fascinating conversation, "Uncle Jack" appears.
Out of nowhere.
Stark naked.
With an equally nude over-tall and over-armed green... person.
Who promptly collapses.
(Astral travel does deposit you there with autoequalized outer and inner pressure, but anyone born on any known iteration of the Red Planet will feel rather like Flat Stanley on a sudden transition to Tellurian gravity and Terra-normal atmosphere.)
Sam takes unthinking charge as a Carter doctor rushes to help the fallen green man, demands "You have antigravity units, don't you?", sends the Warlord back to get one for his friend, and with the help of some scientifically minded cousins and kibitzing from Teal'c (out of his vast experience) and Sha`re' (remembering bits and pieces from her sublessors), builds on the spot an anti-gravity belt that will leave a Thark feeling no greater weight than that of his birthworld.
So then he'd thank her for the belt and promptly join in what becomes a three-way sparring match, while Daniel tried to tell the interested family members a suitably expurgated record of his and her adventures (not helped in said self-censorship by the surprisingly insightful comments of various cousins who'd learned something or other that touched on the subject) and everyone else watched three of the most famous warriors of modern times match their strength and skill against each other. Janet would say it was better than hockey.
When the match came to a halt (I don't know who'd win! Maybe they'd just call it off when the smell of the barbecue got to be too much, it's not as if any of them have anything to prove) Teal'c would bring away good reports of the green men of Barsoom, and Tars Tarkas would hold that, of all the people he'd be pleased and proud to fight with (in both senses of the word), the brown men of Chulak were not least among them.
And (maybe as part of the fic itself, maybe as a sequel), the extended-SG-1-minus-one would head straight out to the coast to see the ocean (I'm not sure whether some of them would ever have seen it before). While they were standing around on the beach looking at its immensity, Cassie would actually start talking about some of the things she's been keeping bottled up, and Sha`re' would offer her own insights, and so would a young man who happened to be there on the beach at Oxnard (nearly giving Sam heart failure before Daniel quietly pointed out that possession and de facto enchantment weren't actually unique and are believed in in many places on the globe, and Janet contributed a story about an uncle who used to hunt Wendigo and defeat ghosts by destroying their physical anchors with iron, salt, and fire, which gets Daniel started on general comparison of practices while Sam and Teal'c look at each other and then start talking about, I don't know, motorcycles).
Eventually, their new friend would point out that as long as they were in the area anyway, they really should hit Knott's Berry Farm as well; give them directions to it, and to the local Albertson's, where they could buy the tickets; and pass on the address of a friend of his who'd be interested in trading some books to be digitized by the Air Force (including a copy of The Prophecies of Jehane d'Arc, noteworthy for its account of an apparent possession by the lady in question) in return for a microfilm printout of some of the texts Daniel has collected, including the Gesta Filiorum Johanni Sancti Auditoris, which Daniel hung on to because of its account of the defeat and death of what certainly seems to be a Goa'uld (although the chronicler then claims that "that evil soul, spawn of the Serpent in the Garden and pretender to the name of one mighty in his appointed place of garbage collector under the Lord Most High, took up on his death, by a foul agreement with his Lord Belial, the existence of a cacodaemon, whence he still doth wreak mortals woe by possessing them in spirit if not in body").
So they'll swing down to Disneyland the next day (leaving Knott's for the day after that), and since the Indiana Jones ride was still relatively new at the time, they'll stand in line forever for it and then buy Daniel an Indy hat, which everyone else will then insist that he wear all day (well, Sha`re' just thinks that he should wear a hat, remembering -- and describing -- several sunburns which left her to wonder whether she'd married a man or an ant).
Sha`re' and Teal'c will wind up adoring the Small World ride, much to Janet's bemusement and Sam's disgust. Janet will turn out to get dizzy and queasy on even mild roller coasters, and wind up getting left watching everyone's bags and/or visiting stores, where she buys Sha`re' a headscarf, Sam a Daisy Duck hat, herself a Donald Duck hat, Cassie a visor with a picture of Ariel on it because she's really a bit too big for the princess hat with trailing scarf she wanted (plus, bright), and, yes, mouse ears for Teal'c (who will gladly swap out his cap for them). Sam and Daniel will have brought along knapsacks full of all the technical journals they usually don't have time to keep up with and, once read, throw out the ones they don't want to keep for later reference (a trick of the latter's for international travel, particularly customs lines); Sam will prove to be a lot better about actually lightening the load, even now that Daniel could get the full text via online database -- at least until they come out of Star Tours and Teal'c promptly buys a copy of of every spin-off novel in the exit store and wants to put them in her bag; Sam is like "Fine, as long as YOU carry it."
The next day, at Knott's, Sam will indulge Cassie's new passion for churros, to Janet's annoyance; Daniel will finish his magazines and start in on the latest-but-one Elizabeth Peters, which he has a sneaking fondness for that he disguises under his very real respect for Dr. Mertz; Sha`re' will start in on the books she borrowed from her husband's Tarzana cousins, namely the adventures of his great-grandfather, and keep asking him for clarification, real names, or pronunciation (which on one account leads to a diatribe that due to transmission error, in the books black people are consistently referred to by the Mangani word for chimpanzees, and the publishers refused to change it because readers would be used to the wrong way --
"So what is the word for a black man?"
Ape noise.
"What?!"
"It'd be rendered 'Gosahmangani' in that transcription system."
"And 'Tarsahmangani' for a European?"
"Or just 'Tarmangani,' depending on how much body hair he had -- or how apelike he was; I know it's what my mother said was used for her grandfather and aunt, and La was using it for her people on Sunday. Although, granted, La's people claimed to be mingled with the Great Apes."
-- Which Sam would say wasn't possible, and Janet would say could have been the result of genetic engineering even if La's ancestors weren't actually ancient Atlanteans, and Daniel would point out that it was only a mutual cousin several times removed who thought they were Atlanteans based on a mistranslation of La's account, when actually the "Ἀθᾶναι" the priests of Saïs told Solon about was not the Ἀθῆναι he lived in but the planet Abydos; and Sha`re' would say no it wasn't, the Ancients who used to live in somewhere called Atlantis built themselves a city called "Adanai" on "a little island in the long sea north of where the river went in" and were successfully resisting the Goa'uld when the latter got thrown off the planet, so the priests probably moved the name over when they got it mixed up with Atlantis proper and "that big island that blew up and swamped the Labyrinth palace and moved the water in that sea on the fault line away and back in a timely manner," and thus La's people might descend from the people most commonly known as Atlanteans, albeit not ancient Atlanteans, Daniel would enter the caveat that the confusion about which was the Ἀτλαντὶς νῆσος might have been on Solon's or Plato's part, and Cassie would ask whether they could give it a rest already, she had to stand in line with them).
Teal'c would turn out to really enjoy roller coasters, although he wouldn't understand why people were screaming on them if they weren't actually scared.
Cassie would love the dinosaur ride, unveiling a fascination with dinosaurs, and all three Tellurians would fondly recall their dinosaur phases, with references to King Kong, The Lost World, and the venerable iguana-with-a-fin-on-its-back.
And then eventually, after swinging back by Tarzana to return all the books and promising Sha`re' she'd be able to get the ones she hadn't read out of the Colorado Springs public library, they'd head back to Colorado by way of Yosemite. (Which would merit rather a bit of a stop -- Yosemite, after all -- and there'd be a moment when Teal'c looked at Half Dome and recognized the Sierra On-Line logo from the base's collection of computer games, and Janet would be disgusted [especially since Cassie'd follow suit].) The journey back itself would be pretty uneventful, except for the time in Middle-of-Nowhere, Nevada when Sam and Teal'c went to the aid of a barely-legal-if-that young man in a barfight and the three of them wound up pwning. Then the guy they helped out, whose name probably isn't Dirk Schneider, would try picking Sam up, and she'd figure what the heck, she's on vacation and go off with him.
So all six of them come back to the Mountain relaxed and happy and wearing their Disney headgear, and Jack takes one look at them (probably after they've presented General Hammond with a boysenberry pie) and asks whether they got a picture.
And Janet says no, they were waiting for him, and hands him his souvenir cap -- which sort of stuns him, because it's a Davy Crockett coonskin cap like he always wanted when he was a little kid.
So that's pretty much how the fic would go, if I were writing it, which I'm not.
As yet.