Of Tricksters and Idioms, by Sophonisba [folklore challenge]
-title- Of Tricksters and Idioms
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Gen. Tag to "Condemned."
-characters- AR-1, Eldon
-disclaimer- Not mine in any way, shape, or form.
-word count-
-summary- In every culture, there are tricksters.
Of Tricksters and Idioms
"So those of you who have Ancestor blood can use their technology?" Eldon asked, rubbing his arm where he'd been vaccinated to within an inch of his life.
"To grotesquely oversimplify -- yes." Rodney rolled his eyes. "Of course, some of it can be used by everyone, like the transporters and the doors and the plumbing."
"The flying machines?"
"That you need a gene for."
Eldon looked a little disappointed.
"How's it going?" Sheppard asked as he wandered into the newly-christened examination room, sweat dripping down his collar. Teyla followed him, her sticks in one hand, relaxed from their recent workout.
"Hasn't done anything suspicious yet," Ronon rumbled from the corner.
"I wouldn't dream of it," their new refugee said earnestly. "I can't believe I'm really in the City of the Ancestors. Ma told me stories about this place... "
"Oh my God, is that why you've been tagging around all afternoon?" Rodney demanded at the same time. "You could have told me. I'd been starting to have very disturbing thoughts." He waved the possible dangers away as he turned to Sheppard. "Seriously, if you were hoping to salvage any kind of technology exchange from our latest misadventure, you can forget about it right now. Calling Elton here a scientist is like calling you a mathematician."
"Eldon," said Eldon.
"But I am a mathematician," Sheppard said mildly.
"You have swift calculating skills. The ability to do relatively simple mathematical operations quickly doesn't make you a mathematician any more than the ability to read text quickly makes me a literary analyst."
"Very true, but they did save time and repetitive stress hand injuries when I was working my way up to the pretty bits."
"You -- you -- you're serious, you couldn't have mentioned this before?"
"I seem to recall you specifically telling me not to reveal any hidden depths I might have," Sheppard drawled.
"Also, the longer the delay the better the look on your face would be," said Teyla.
"Also, the longer the delay the better -- hey! Teyla!"
"Do you then also have the other gifts of the Ancestors?" Eldon wondered. "The mentalism, the healing powers, the levinbolt?"
"No," Rodney snorted.
"Carson actually does seem to have some of the Ancient healing abilities I've been hearing about," Sheppard contradicted. "But they only work as long as he doesn't think he's using them."
"Wait, what?"
"Dr. Shen-si's been keeping track of Carson's patients and experiments as compared to everyone else's. His subjects certainly seem to work better and faster than expected, but it still isn't clear whether it's a statistically significant dancing frog."
"Why didn't I know about this?"
"Shen-si brought it up; I think you were trying to map the auxiliary power relays and work out what spices were in the near-brownies at the time."
"What," Teyla asked, "is a dancing frog?"
"Something that's there except when you look for it."
"It's from a, a story," Rodney explained when Sheppard failed to elaborate in the face of three separate pairs of eyes. "This guy sees a frog singing and dancing and kicking up his heels, which is something frogs aren't physically capable of doing, so he tries to call in somebody else to take a look. But every time he does, the frog goes quiet and just sits there like any normal frog."
"What is the point of that story?" Teyla said.
"There isn't a point. It's just funny. Hence the term -- although the way Sheppard described it, Carson isn't sounding so much Michigan J. Frog as Wile E. Coyote."
"As whom?" Eldon asked.
"It's from a cartoon," Sheppard said. "A story told through moving drawings. A coyote is, um, it's furry and it eats dead things and sometimes it hunts small things, or maybe people's livestock, and it goes around alone or sometimes in a pack."
"Like a hrukkit?" Ronon said.
"What's a hrukkit?"
"It's sort of like a small hruknor." Ronon held his hand parallel to the ground to demonstrate.
"In stories, usually coyote is a trickster," Rodney took pity on his friend again, "and he outsmarts himself a lot. Go bother Anthro and Linguistics if you want the details. The point is, there's a lot of stories about how a coyote tries to set traps and hunt a roadrunner bird. The roadrunner is an even better trickster than the coyote, so it'll just whoosh through as if it didn't notice anything and then the coyote will get caught in his own trap. Sometimes, say, the coyote will chase the bird over a pit trap, but the bird will be light enough to go right over it, and by the time the coyote stops, he looks down and sees that the pit covering has fallen out from under him. Then he falls after it. Never before he looks down and sees nothing's holding him up."
"Why not?"
"Because it's funnier that way," Sheppard told Ronon. "It happens over and over again, and the coyote never seems to think that maybe he should go eat pig instead."
Ronon and Teyla exchanged one of those "Earthlings are so weird" looks that he'd evidently learned from her.
"Not if it was the last pig from the one about the hruknor and the pigs," Ronon rumbled.
"I do not know that one," Teyla remarked.
"Neither do I," said Eldon. "I'm always up for a good story."
Ronon looked from one to the other to the last of his teammates to Eldon, and began. "There were and then again there weren't some pigs, and they were going to set up their households when they learned that there were hruknor in the world.
"The first pig said that the world is wide and the hruknor few, and life is sweet; perchance they might never meet. And so she built a little hut in the place she liked best, and set up her household.
"She was clever, but not as clever as the hruknor. He roamed back and forth across the land endlessly, searching for something to eat; when he happened upon her hut, he threw himself upon it once, twice, and again, and broke the door in, and ate her up, teeth and tail, as long as it took him.
"The second pig said that hruknor cannot be everywhere at once, and that they look high before they look low. And so she slunk from place to place and slept under bushes and crept underwater, and had something of a household at every place she camped.
"She was clever, but not as clever as the hruknor. Everywhere he went he sniffed just in case he crossed someone's trail, and when he crossed hers, he tracked her up hill and down dale; when he happened upon her in a hollow log, he went in after her and ate her up, teeth and tail, in about two mouthfuls."
"I know this story," Eldon said suddenly. "This is the story about the four brothers and the Wraith. I used to love it when I was little."
"Maybe you tell it that way," Ronon grunted, "but it's supposed to be a story about pigs and hruknor. Look at this next bit.
"The third pig said that hruknor are strong and their teeth sharp, but stone is stronger and thicker than teeth are long. And so she built herself a hall with strong stone walls and a heavy barred door upon a mountaintop, and set up her household.
"She was clever, but not as clever as the hruknor. He climbed the mountain and threw himself upon her hall, once, twice, and again, and bruised himself. So he slunk away and brought his whole pack, and they brought fire, and set the hall alight; and when the flames had died down, they made their way through the blackened stones and shared out the roast pig, teeth and tail, little as it was to go around."
"Okay, that's... different... " Sheppard said.
"Wraith," Ronon asserted, "wouldn't eat roast human."
"They would set them afire, though," Teyla pointed out gently, "rather than let them escape entirely."
This was, unfortunately, true.
"The last pig," Ronon eventually continued, "determined to be sensible, and she hid herself in a cave with a stream pouring out its mouth. She fashioned pits and traps and deadfalls that seemed natural, and planted many small plots and stockpiled great stores of food, and set up her household thus.
"And when the hruknor lost the tracks that led from one of her plots and cast about for her trail, the trees fell on them, and the ground fell from under them, and one alone of those who entered the cave left by another way, lost and very hungry indeed; and the pack of hruknor separated and left, looking for food by ones and by twos, and few enough found any before their stomachs ate themselves. But the pig slept warm and well that night and the nights thereafter, on her lovely furry hruknor pelts. So it ends."
"The fourth brother didn't skin the Wraith," Eldon said, making a face, "but he and his children and his children's children lived well and long after the Wraith went back through the Ring."
"The story," Ronon grumbled, "is still about hruknor."
"Please tell us what you have learned of Eldon's science," Teyla smoothly changed the subject.
"It isn't," Rodney told her. "He doesn't know a thing about the fissionable -- it's called aludium, which is much too close to 'Illudium' for a straight face -- he doesn't know about their recent advances, and he knows nothing about the so-called bio-'sciences.' He does have a reasonably apt technical competence, in theory and in my experience with his help kluging the 'jumper; engineering degree?"
"I hold a degree in Applied Physics," Eldon said stiffly.
"You so do not," Rodney snorted, eyes bright. "Kavanagh has a better grasp of physics than you do. Hackenschleimer has a better grasp of elementary physics than you do, and he's enlisted personnel. It's entirely within the bounds of possibility that my cat has a better grasp of elementary physics than you do. Hasn't resume-faking on Olesia evolved to only claiming what you can plausibly pull off?"
"Eldon," Sheppard said pleasantly -- almost sweetly, if the adverb wouldn't have sounded ridiculous applied to him -- "why were you on that island?"
Ronon took one step forward, seemingly holding himself a foot taller.
"They sent me there for a murder, which I didn't do."
"And why," Sheppard wondered, "did they frame you for murder?"
"We shall not send you back," Teyla said gently. "We know of you only how you have treated us, and it is on that that we have judged and will judge you."
"We can't trust liars." Ronon's words were simple, devoid of menace, and yet the room seemed smaller. "Unless they only lie to our enemies." Rodney swallowed, feeling a little nervous for some reason.
"I -- Look, people... disappear all the time, especially ones who leave the backcountry on their way to Oleai City," Eldon stammered. "And the birth-recorders all send copies up to Oleai, but even when people are expected in the city half the time nobody knows what they look like until they show up. If they show up.
"And if they don't, they'll hardly mind if someone else does, now will they? It makes it easier if you hark back to real birth-records when you're running a tap, and how was I supposed to know Eldon of Highbluff had been wanted for questioning in a murder case when he fell off the face of Olesia? They said if I'd been an honest man I'd have checked in as I was supposed to, and they wouldn't spare the expense to have a Highbluff man check me against the official license picture."
"You were... impersonating a physicist?" Sheppard asked, the corners of his mouth turning upwards in a smile.
"I tried to tell them they were making a mistake, I even told them my plans for the tap, but they just thought I was lying to get out of it," the Olesian sighed. "And then one of the later prisoners said that they'd chosen Rannelt of Threewinds a reviewing magistrate, and I'd tapped him. They'd made it treasonable to take money from a government official, and Torrell and his men respected the man they thought I was, so... "
"So what is your name, then?" Teyla asked.
"Oh, it is Eldon. Eldon of Blueriver. It makes boring a tap easier if you're going to look up when they call the right name. I'm an expert bargainer, a good mimic, and I've passed as all kinds of technicians often enough to put in a day's work as each."
"Good," Rodney said firmly. "They won't send us anywhere near enough service personnel -- some nattering about security. As if any number of people wouldn't be willing to sign half their life away just to work for a year in the Lost City of Atlantis."
"Rod-ney," Sheppard drawled, "you know the policy. No indenturing the refugees. He may not even want to stay here."
"It's the City of the Ancestors," Eldon protested. "Uh... sir."
It was a relief to have his initial judgment of "not entirely stupid" proven, even if their newest tagalong had thought he could impersonate a physicist. Which didn't actually make him too different from some of the oxygen-wasters they'd got on the Daedalus, Rodney had to admit, some of them with considerably less excuse.
Oh, well. He'd fit in or he wouldn't, and there was always the mainland; the Athosians and the Exiles, or whatever Teyla's foster-brother and his people were calling themselves these days, couldn't possibly need all of it.
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Gen. Tag to "Condemned."
-characters- AR-1, Eldon
-disclaimer- Not mine in any way, shape, or form.
-word count-
-summary- In every culture, there are tricksters.
Of Tricksters and Idioms
"So those of you who have Ancestor blood can use their technology?" Eldon asked, rubbing his arm where he'd been vaccinated to within an inch of his life.
"To grotesquely oversimplify -- yes." Rodney rolled his eyes. "Of course, some of it can be used by everyone, like the transporters and the doors and the plumbing."
"The flying machines?"
"That you need a gene for."
Eldon looked a little disappointed.
"How's it going?" Sheppard asked as he wandered into the newly-christened examination room, sweat dripping down his collar. Teyla followed him, her sticks in one hand, relaxed from their recent workout.
"Hasn't done anything suspicious yet," Ronon rumbled from the corner.
"I wouldn't dream of it," their new refugee said earnestly. "I can't believe I'm really in the City of the Ancestors. Ma told me stories about this place... "
"Oh my God, is that why you've been tagging around all afternoon?" Rodney demanded at the same time. "You could have told me. I'd been starting to have very disturbing thoughts." He waved the possible dangers away as he turned to Sheppard. "Seriously, if you were hoping to salvage any kind of technology exchange from our latest misadventure, you can forget about it right now. Calling Elton here a scientist is like calling you a mathematician."
"Eldon," said Eldon.
"But I am a mathematician," Sheppard said mildly.
"You have swift calculating skills. The ability to do relatively simple mathematical operations quickly doesn't make you a mathematician any more than the ability to read text quickly makes me a literary analyst."
"Very true, but they did save time and repetitive stress hand injuries when I was working my way up to the pretty bits."
"You -- you -- you're serious, you couldn't have mentioned this before?"
"I seem to recall you specifically telling me not to reveal any hidden depths I might have," Sheppard drawled.
"Also, the longer the delay the better the look on your face would be," said Teyla.
"Also, the longer the delay the better -- hey! Teyla!"
"Do you then also have the other gifts of the Ancestors?" Eldon wondered. "The mentalism, the healing powers, the levinbolt?"
"No," Rodney snorted.
"Carson actually does seem to have some of the Ancient healing abilities I've been hearing about," Sheppard contradicted. "But they only work as long as he doesn't think he's using them."
"Wait, what?"
"Dr. Shen-si's been keeping track of Carson's patients and experiments as compared to everyone else's. His subjects certainly seem to work better and faster than expected, but it still isn't clear whether it's a statistically significant dancing frog."
"Why didn't I know about this?"
"Shen-si brought it up; I think you were trying to map the auxiliary power relays and work out what spices were in the near-brownies at the time."
"What," Teyla asked, "is a dancing frog?"
"Something that's there except when you look for it."
"It's from a, a story," Rodney explained when Sheppard failed to elaborate in the face of three separate pairs of eyes. "This guy sees a frog singing and dancing and kicking up his heels, which is something frogs aren't physically capable of doing, so he tries to call in somebody else to take a look. But every time he does, the frog goes quiet and just sits there like any normal frog."
"What is the point of that story?" Teyla said.
"There isn't a point. It's just funny. Hence the term -- although the way Sheppard described it, Carson isn't sounding so much Michigan J. Frog as Wile E. Coyote."
"As whom?" Eldon asked.
"It's from a cartoon," Sheppard said. "A story told through moving drawings. A coyote is, um, it's furry and it eats dead things and sometimes it hunts small things, or maybe people's livestock, and it goes around alone or sometimes in a pack."
"Like a hrukkit?" Ronon said.
"What's a hrukkit?"
"It's sort of like a small hruknor." Ronon held his hand parallel to the ground to demonstrate.
"In stories, usually coyote is a trickster," Rodney took pity on his friend again, "and he outsmarts himself a lot. Go bother Anthro and Linguistics if you want the details. The point is, there's a lot of stories about how a coyote tries to set traps and hunt a roadrunner bird. The roadrunner is an even better trickster than the coyote, so it'll just whoosh through as if it didn't notice anything and then the coyote will get caught in his own trap. Sometimes, say, the coyote will chase the bird over a pit trap, but the bird will be light enough to go right over it, and by the time the coyote stops, he looks down and sees that the pit covering has fallen out from under him. Then he falls after it. Never before he looks down and sees nothing's holding him up."
"Why not?"
"Because it's funnier that way," Sheppard told Ronon. "It happens over and over again, and the coyote never seems to think that maybe he should go eat pig instead."
Ronon and Teyla exchanged one of those "Earthlings are so weird" looks that he'd evidently learned from her.
"Not if it was the last pig from the one about the hruknor and the pigs," Ronon rumbled.
"I do not know that one," Teyla remarked.
"Neither do I," said Eldon. "I'm always up for a good story."
Ronon looked from one to the other to the last of his teammates to Eldon, and began. "There were and then again there weren't some pigs, and they were going to set up their households when they learned that there were hruknor in the world.
"The first pig said that the world is wide and the hruknor few, and life is sweet; perchance they might never meet. And so she built a little hut in the place she liked best, and set up her household.
"She was clever, but not as clever as the hruknor. He roamed back and forth across the land endlessly, searching for something to eat; when he happened upon her hut, he threw himself upon it once, twice, and again, and broke the door in, and ate her up, teeth and tail, as long as it took him.
"The second pig said that hruknor cannot be everywhere at once, and that they look high before they look low. And so she slunk from place to place and slept under bushes and crept underwater, and had something of a household at every place she camped.
"She was clever, but not as clever as the hruknor. Everywhere he went he sniffed just in case he crossed someone's trail, and when he crossed hers, he tracked her up hill and down dale; when he happened upon her in a hollow log, he went in after her and ate her up, teeth and tail, in about two mouthfuls."
"I know this story," Eldon said suddenly. "This is the story about the four brothers and the Wraith. I used to love it when I was little."
"Maybe you tell it that way," Ronon grunted, "but it's supposed to be a story about pigs and hruknor. Look at this next bit.
"The third pig said that hruknor are strong and their teeth sharp, but stone is stronger and thicker than teeth are long. And so she built herself a hall with strong stone walls and a heavy barred door upon a mountaintop, and set up her household.
"She was clever, but not as clever as the hruknor. He climbed the mountain and threw himself upon her hall, once, twice, and again, and bruised himself. So he slunk away and brought his whole pack, and they brought fire, and set the hall alight; and when the flames had died down, they made their way through the blackened stones and shared out the roast pig, teeth and tail, little as it was to go around."
"Okay, that's... different... " Sheppard said.
"Wraith," Ronon asserted, "wouldn't eat roast human."
"They would set them afire, though," Teyla pointed out gently, "rather than let them escape entirely."
This was, unfortunately, true.
"The last pig," Ronon eventually continued, "determined to be sensible, and she hid herself in a cave with a stream pouring out its mouth. She fashioned pits and traps and deadfalls that seemed natural, and planted many small plots and stockpiled great stores of food, and set up her household thus.
"And when the hruknor lost the tracks that led from one of her plots and cast about for her trail, the trees fell on them, and the ground fell from under them, and one alone of those who entered the cave left by another way, lost and very hungry indeed; and the pack of hruknor separated and left, looking for food by ones and by twos, and few enough found any before their stomachs ate themselves. But the pig slept warm and well that night and the nights thereafter, on her lovely furry hruknor pelts. So it ends."
"The fourth brother didn't skin the Wraith," Eldon said, making a face, "but he and his children and his children's children lived well and long after the Wraith went back through the Ring."
"The story," Ronon grumbled, "is still about hruknor."
"Please tell us what you have learned of Eldon's science," Teyla smoothly changed the subject.
"It isn't," Rodney told her. "He doesn't know a thing about the fissionable -- it's called aludium, which is much too close to 'Illudium' for a straight face -- he doesn't know about their recent advances, and he knows nothing about the so-called bio-'sciences.' He does have a reasonably apt technical competence, in theory and in my experience with his help kluging the 'jumper; engineering degree?"
"I hold a degree in Applied Physics," Eldon said stiffly.
"You so do not," Rodney snorted, eyes bright. "Kavanagh has a better grasp of physics than you do. Hackenschleimer has a better grasp of elementary physics than you do, and he's enlisted personnel. It's entirely within the bounds of possibility that my cat has a better grasp of elementary physics than you do. Hasn't resume-faking on Olesia evolved to only claiming what you can plausibly pull off?"
"Eldon," Sheppard said pleasantly -- almost sweetly, if the adverb wouldn't have sounded ridiculous applied to him -- "why were you on that island?"
Ronon took one step forward, seemingly holding himself a foot taller.
"They sent me there for a murder, which I didn't do."
"And why," Sheppard wondered, "did they frame you for murder?"
"We shall not send you back," Teyla said gently. "We know of you only how you have treated us, and it is on that that we have judged and will judge you."
"We can't trust liars." Ronon's words were simple, devoid of menace, and yet the room seemed smaller. "Unless they only lie to our enemies." Rodney swallowed, feeling a little nervous for some reason.
"I -- Look, people... disappear all the time, especially ones who leave the backcountry on their way to Oleai City," Eldon stammered. "And the birth-recorders all send copies up to Oleai, but even when people are expected in the city half the time nobody knows what they look like until they show up. If they show up.
"And if they don't, they'll hardly mind if someone else does, now will they? It makes it easier if you hark back to real birth-records when you're running a tap, and how was I supposed to know Eldon of Highbluff had been wanted for questioning in a murder case when he fell off the face of Olesia? They said if I'd been an honest man I'd have checked in as I was supposed to, and they wouldn't spare the expense to have a Highbluff man check me against the official license picture."
"You were... impersonating a physicist?" Sheppard asked, the corners of his mouth turning upwards in a smile.
"I tried to tell them they were making a mistake, I even told them my plans for the tap, but they just thought I was lying to get out of it," the Olesian sighed. "And then one of the later prisoners said that they'd chosen Rannelt of Threewinds a reviewing magistrate, and I'd tapped him. They'd made it treasonable to take money from a government official, and Torrell and his men respected the man they thought I was, so... "
"So what is your name, then?" Teyla asked.
"Oh, it is Eldon. Eldon of Blueriver. It makes boring a tap easier if you're going to look up when they call the right name. I'm an expert bargainer, a good mimic, and I've passed as all kinds of technicians often enough to put in a day's work as each."
"Good," Rodney said firmly. "They won't send us anywhere near enough service personnel -- some nattering about security. As if any number of people wouldn't be willing to sign half their life away just to work for a year in the Lost City of Atlantis."
"Rod-ney," Sheppard drawled, "you know the policy. No indenturing the refugees. He may not even want to stay here."
"It's the City of the Ancestors," Eldon protested. "Uh... sir."
It was a relief to have his initial judgment of "not entirely stupid" proven, even if their newest tagalong had thought he could impersonate a physicist. Which didn't actually make him too different from some of the oxygen-wasters they'd got on the Daedalus, Rodney had to admit, some of them with considerably less excuse.
Oh, well. He'd fit in or he wouldn't, and there was always the mainland; the Athosians and the Exiles, or whatever Teyla's foster-brother and his people were calling themselves these days, couldn't possibly need all of it.