Amara (1/3), by Sophonisba [strange new worlds and alien geographies challenge]
-title- Amara (1/3)
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-rating/warnings- Suitable for general audiences.
-spoilers- "Hide and Seek," "38 Minutes."
-characters- Ford, Sheppard, Rodney, Teyla, Ronon
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. One scene was inspired by a picture by, IIRC, milenaa.
-word count- 2638
-summary- The planet of short days and its fallout.
Amara (1/3)
The first time they went to Amara, everyone noticed how short the days were.
"So it's probably actually smaller than most of the places we've been," Ford said, "but since it's spinning so fast the gravity feels like Earth-normal."
"Did you sleep through every unit on gravitation in every science class ever?" McKay demanded. "Rotation only matters when you're on the inside, otherwise you're back to mass and square of the distance -- "
"McKay," Sheppard said, irritated.
"It is said that an Amaran day is a winter's morn and a summer's night," Teyla broke in hastily.
"You can tell that saying came from a planet with seasons," Sheppard agreed.
"Does your world have seasons, then?" Teyla asked.
The other three assured her that yes, it did, and that Atlantis's world (name currently pending, given that Ford wasn't allowed to name anything, Sheppard was thinking of revoking McKay's naming privileges as well, McKay was threatening to do the same right back, and the rest of the city's population's nomenclative rights remained in similar tension) had seasons as well, although it was a bit hard to tell given that the city of Atlantis was parked in a latitude comparable to the Caribbean, or at most Acapulco.
"And the mainland settlement isn't that far north," Sheppard pointed out. "If you get nearer to the poles the seasons start getting bigger and bigger -- in Antarctica where we were, there were days when the sun never rose in winter and daylight hours to match in summer."
"This is known to us," Teyla agreed. "While the Ring was not so far south, our winter sun shone far more briefly that the one of our new home ever does."
"Yeah, that was a pretty short day when we visited," Ford agreed. "It lasted what, three, four hours tops?"
"No wonder the kids were running around in the dark," Sheppard agreed. "It wasn't that cold, though. No snow on the ground or anything."
"You must go to the mountains or the land of winter's evernight for snow to lie on the ground rather than melt upon it," Teyla said reasonably.
"Uh... not where we're from, you don't."
"Earth must be significantly colder than Athos," McKay said thoughtfully. "Farther from the sun, or a different composition of upper atmosphere, or something."
"Probably a good thing the shadow wound up there, then," Ford decided. "I bet it made its way to the equator and is chowing down on sunlight like there's no tomorrow. Teyla? Am I upsetting you?"
"First of all," McKay steamrollered over any response Teyla might make, "what's this 'we' business? And second, let me put it at something approaching your reading level, Lieutenant; home is supposed to look just like it did the last time you were there, not just like ground zero of the climactic battle of a sizable war."
"Hey!" Ford snapped. "My hometown -- at least, the place I was living during high school -- fell into the ground a few years ago. I do know what it's like to lose a past."
"Well -- "
Fortunately, at that point they ran into their first actual Amarans, and everyone had to put on their best manners with more or less success while Teyla made nice with her formal business acquaintances and demonstrated that the Athosians were not reduced to beggary.
The first time they came back from Amara, most of the time immediately after was spent reassuring people that yes, the Amarans were willing to trade thread and herbal soaps and something that wasn't yet corn on the cob but wasn't really grain any more either in return for comparative anthropology and portraits of some of the oligarchs. All in all, it was preferable to the stupid jokes some of the Atlanteans were making over the results of Ford's helpful attempt to translate surnames; it wasn't as if any of them had been at all responsible for the fact that the Amarans named the Ancestor they held responsible for building and teaching them their technological innovations "Keii," and as the prevailing opinion on Amara seemed to be that walking around calling oneself "son of Keii" was tacky rather than outright blasphemous the wilder speculations of some of Hard Sciences were completely unjustified.
Fortunately, they got distracted when AR-1 discovered that the round room full of padded benches that might be beds or beds that might be backless sofas was the Ancient planetarium. Sheppard had it show what the night sky would look like if Atlantis didn't glow like a Tiffany lamp, and then what it had looked like in Antarctica, and then what it had looked like in his hometown when he was a boy.
Then he thought for a while, and told it to show what it would look like from the Gate area on Athos.
It turned out not to be that hard to set up planetarium programs to spool at the punch of a button rather than having to mentally control them the entire time. "Athosian Skies" was the first program he set up; nobody was really surprised when it became a popular stop for those Athosians visiting the city for one reason or another, or indeed a cause for such visits in the first place.
Most of them were surprised, a little, that Teyla watched it as seldom as she did. Sheppard thought he understood: after determining that the Ancient planetarium could, he'd never asked for the skies of his own youth either.
The second time they went to Amara, most of the indigenous population seemed to spend their time carefully not asking where Ford was. After a day or so of that, Rodney and Sheppard each wanted, in their own ways, to scream at the Amarans or break something; Teyla and Ronon carried on an entire conversation on the subject of their teammates' reactions in eyebrow lifts and shoulder twitches.
They'd arrived on the occasion of one of the Amarans' fairs, so said conversation was worked in around dodging the flatbread-throwing competition, admiring the Amaran young-cow-sized sheep from a safe distance, and persuading Rodney that if people carried a large Ancient artifact through the streets on ritual occasions and had done so for as long as anyone could remember, they were unlikely to offer it for trade.
Then one of the rams got loose and charged down the street, which was full of the confusion of scattering people, jouncing lanterns, converging young men eager to help catch the ram, Sheppard performing some complicated move involving awning ropes, counterweights, paper lanterns on ropes, and grabbing a half-panicking physicist and fully panicked small girl in order to deposit the three of them on the upper shutter of the only nearby store window so equipped --
"What the hell was that?"
"I saw it in a movie once. And mind your language."
The girl blinked up at them, eyes still round with terror and hair tightly pulled into three pigtails.
"This may be a surprise, Major-- "
"Lieutenant Colonel."
"Sheppard, but our lives are not written by Rafael Sabatini."
"You sure about that?"
-- and by Teyla choosing that moment to rediscover the lost art of Cretan bull-dancing by practicing on a sheep, although later conversation revealed that it actually was practiced by some people somewhere in Pegasus who were, nevertheless, not Athosian.
The ram attempted to buck Teyla off. Teyla buried her fingers in its wool and held on for dear life. With it largely in one place, some of the helpful men (including Ronon) managed to get ropes on it, and when the ram overbalanced sideways Teyla managed to rotate the relevant leg high enough that she could roll clear.
"Well, that was interesting," Sheppard said, sitting on the shutter and sliding down it until he dropped onto his feet on the cobblestones. "Let's never do it again."
"Seriously, Colonel," Rodney said, gesturing for the small girl to do likewise. "What is it with the American military and these periodic delusions of 'we'?"
"All part of being a team player," Sheppard called as he caught the small girl and handed her to Teyla.
"You have splinters in your pants," Ronon told him helpfully.
The little girl turned out to be Oligarch Sheepherder's youngest daughter Jazny, and rescuing her was good for a meal, a promise of eternal friendship and possibly acknowledged kinship between their two households --
"So he's a cousin, right, Mommy?" Jazny asked.
"Is everyone who has the same last name related on this planet?" Rodney asked the oligarch.
"Oh, no," Nyla Sheepherder laughed, resting her hand near his. "Well, of course if your name is Son-of-Jazer or something, then certainly, but not with the occupational surnames -- we have plenty of Berrypickers and Sheepherders and whatnot, although all of the latter seem to feel especially connected to me for some reason."
"Not everyone can be an oligarch," her older daughter said, looking up from her separate meal at the smaller table. "Most people can't even pass the first ordeal. If a Sheepherder got to be one, that's something they can be proud of by... by... "
"Extension?" Teyla offered, smiling over at the girl.
"Extension," she agreed.
"Ordeal?" Ronon wondered. "Is it dangerous?"
"Why is Meeza eating at a table by herself if Jazny's eating with the grown-ups?" Rodney asked at the same time, using his own tongs to transfer Jazny's chunk of stew back to her own plate from where it had fallen in front of him.
"Nobody usually dies, if that's what you mean," Nyla told Ronon absently. "And Meeza's marked by Keii, so her food has to be where ours can't touch it."
"Meeza mustn't eat kalna roots," Jazny explained.
"People who've been marked by Keii can't eat kalna roots?"
Meeza shrugged. "It varies. Good practice for the one ordeal in Keii's Maze, though."
"Maze?" Rodney asked.
"Keii built the Maze for our own ancestors," Nyla told him. "There are some chambers that everyone passes through, whether they feared it before or not, and that's one of them -- for that one, it's best to run through it and out some other door as quickly as possible." She leaned towards him, breathing in more deeply than the situation perhaps warranted. "You needn't mention that I said as much to anyone else, need you?"
-- and a guided tour of the way to and front gates of Keii's Maze, once Nyla'd put the girls to bed and dawn had advanced enough to see the path.
"Behold the shape of your fear!" Nyla said, waving an arm at the large mirror between the two Ancient-looking columns.
"What, is this like those things from Harry Potter?"
"You're familiar with -- "
"Oh, come on, Colonel, it's impossible not to be in Atlantis. I think the Athosians are familiar with Harry Potter."
"This is the tale of the young witch whose family keep him in a closet?" Teyla asked.
"See? Case in point."
"Yeah, but by 'the Athosians' you imply the Athosians not living in the city, as opposed to Teyla, who lives down the hall and to the right -- "
"Sheppard," Ronon broke in.
Everyone looked in the mirror. The people in the mirror looked back.
"Okay, okay, portrait of the artists as old men, so? My point was that I said Athosians and Teyla was Athosian last I checked -- "
"Huh," Sheppard said thoughtfully. "Am I the only one who's going to keep my hair?"
"Teyla has hair," Rodney snapped, squinting at the older version. The almost-completely-bald Rodney-in-the-mirror squinted at the real Teyla.
"It's... not unheard of for a man to have a more womanly nature as he ages," Ronon offered, voice tight for some reason. "Especially should he exercise more."
"I am said to resemble my mother greatly," Teyla said, voice equally taut. "It is... pleasant, to know how she would have looked had she grown old."
"How is it doing that?" Rodney wondered, and wandered closer, peering at the mirror.
"You do not fear it," Nyla said softly, wonder in her voice.
"Well, getting old sucks, I'll grant you that, and it's not exactly something I'm looking forward to, but it still beats the alternative."
"In most cases," Sheppard agreed.
Rodney shot him a look that went beyond 'dirty' and straight into 'Kill-O-Zap gun.' "You would."
"Is this building full of fears, then?" Teyla asked.
"Something like that," Nyla told them.
"Can we go in?"
"Not until the appointed time, certainly, and the others would need to agree..."
Rodney's face fell.
"But you have passed the first ordeal," she said hastily, "and we have been known to permit outworlders to use Keii's Maze for their own vision quests."
"So you'll talk to them."
"Certainly." Nyla beckoned to them. "Come away now," she said, chivvying and persuading them away from the Ancient building as if they were the sheep whose care her family had been named for.
The sun was rising behind them, picking out uneven cobblestones and dappling the trees.
"You know, it's all very well for the Ancients to have picked out optimal environmental conditions and all," Rodney grumbled, "but just once I'd like to visit somewhere different. Somewhere with purple trees, or mobile flowers, or, or pink unicorns or something."
"Unicorns, McKay?"
"Oh, shut up."
"Unicorns?!"
At that point it blundered out from behind a tree onto the flat ground next to the path.
They had had a long couple of days, the Amaran diurnal cycle had thrown them all off, half of his attention had been on keeping Rodney McKay cheerful yet on edge and not at all inclined to piss off the locals by trespassing in their sacred labyrinth unless they had a Really Good Reason, he still was worried about how to tell the said Dr. McKay that Dr. Waters the new (second-generation-Brazilian) meteorologist was not the wisest woman to date to prove to oneself that one still had it without getting into some variation of "Well, I know she's got Issues from when I was sleeping with her at McMurdo" (which would almost certainly destroy the "cheerful" part of the aforementioned desired mood), and it was hard to sleep when your hosts were having a fair right outside, each one of them apparently on a different sleep cycle.
John Sheppard's reaction, therefore, was perfectly reasonable under the circumstances.
"What? Who? Where?" Ronon demanded, sighting along his gun at several different angles, causing an already-unnerved Nyla to squeak and press up against Teyla.
"There," Rodney snapped, raising his arm as best he could to point with Sheppard's death grip on his shoulder. "By that root."
"Don't have to shout," Ronon snorted as Nyla blurted "The varnak beetle?"
"I'm sorry, am I shouting?" Rodney declaimed. "It's sort of hard to tell, as my ears are still recovering from the decibel level someone thought appropriate."
"I've seen these," Ronon snorted, disgustedly flipping the iridescently black arthropod into the bushes with his gun barrel. "They're harmless. They eat those fruits with the seeds on the outside."
"Well, they could pinch you if you aren't careful," Nyla qualified, "but we were eating varnak stew just a lorken and a half ago..."
"You were not there," Teyla said. "The varnak is smaller and does not appear to swell, but it resembles the forest creatures from which the Wraith once came."
"If you say so," Nyla said, and led the way back to the fair.
"Way to go impressing your long-lost cousin with our ability to face our fears," McKay grumbled.
"Oh, shut up."
"And to think you spent all that time telling me screaming wasn't a survival trait."
Teyla threw up her hands, grabbed both men's shoulders, and pulled them into a forehead-touch with each other with perhaps more force than strictly necessary.
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-rating/warnings- Suitable for general audiences.
-spoilers- "Hide and Seek," "38 Minutes."
-characters- Ford, Sheppard, Rodney, Teyla, Ronon
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. One scene was inspired by a picture by, IIRC, milenaa.
-word count- 2638
-summary- The planet of short days and its fallout.
Amara (1/3)
The first time they went to Amara, everyone noticed how short the days were.
"So it's probably actually smaller than most of the places we've been," Ford said, "but since it's spinning so fast the gravity feels like Earth-normal."
"Did you sleep through every unit on gravitation in every science class ever?" McKay demanded. "Rotation only matters when you're on the inside, otherwise you're back to mass and square of the distance -- "
"McKay," Sheppard said, irritated.
"It is said that an Amaran day is a winter's morn and a summer's night," Teyla broke in hastily.
"You can tell that saying came from a planet with seasons," Sheppard agreed.
"Does your world have seasons, then?" Teyla asked.
The other three assured her that yes, it did, and that Atlantis's world (name currently pending, given that Ford wasn't allowed to name anything, Sheppard was thinking of revoking McKay's naming privileges as well, McKay was threatening to do the same right back, and the rest of the city's population's nomenclative rights remained in similar tension) had seasons as well, although it was a bit hard to tell given that the city of Atlantis was parked in a latitude comparable to the Caribbean, or at most Acapulco.
"And the mainland settlement isn't that far north," Sheppard pointed out. "If you get nearer to the poles the seasons start getting bigger and bigger -- in Antarctica where we were, there were days when the sun never rose in winter and daylight hours to match in summer."
"This is known to us," Teyla agreed. "While the Ring was not so far south, our winter sun shone far more briefly that the one of our new home ever does."
"Yeah, that was a pretty short day when we visited," Ford agreed. "It lasted what, three, four hours tops?"
"No wonder the kids were running around in the dark," Sheppard agreed. "It wasn't that cold, though. No snow on the ground or anything."
"You must go to the mountains or the land of winter's evernight for snow to lie on the ground rather than melt upon it," Teyla said reasonably.
"Uh... not where we're from, you don't."
"Earth must be significantly colder than Athos," McKay said thoughtfully. "Farther from the sun, or a different composition of upper atmosphere, or something."
"Probably a good thing the shadow wound up there, then," Ford decided. "I bet it made its way to the equator and is chowing down on sunlight like there's no tomorrow. Teyla? Am I upsetting you?"
"First of all," McKay steamrollered over any response Teyla might make, "what's this 'we' business? And second, let me put it at something approaching your reading level, Lieutenant; home is supposed to look just like it did the last time you were there, not just like ground zero of the climactic battle of a sizable war."
"Hey!" Ford snapped. "My hometown -- at least, the place I was living during high school -- fell into the ground a few years ago. I do know what it's like to lose a past."
"Well -- "
Fortunately, at that point they ran into their first actual Amarans, and everyone had to put on their best manners with more or less success while Teyla made nice with her formal business acquaintances and demonstrated that the Athosians were not reduced to beggary.
The first time they came back from Amara, most of the time immediately after was spent reassuring people that yes, the Amarans were willing to trade thread and herbal soaps and something that wasn't yet corn on the cob but wasn't really grain any more either in return for comparative anthropology and portraits of some of the oligarchs. All in all, it was preferable to the stupid jokes some of the Atlanteans were making over the results of Ford's helpful attempt to translate surnames; it wasn't as if any of them had been at all responsible for the fact that the Amarans named the Ancestor they held responsible for building and teaching them their technological innovations "Keii," and as the prevailing opinion on Amara seemed to be that walking around calling oneself "son of Keii" was tacky rather than outright blasphemous the wilder speculations of some of Hard Sciences were completely unjustified.
Fortunately, they got distracted when AR-1 discovered that the round room full of padded benches that might be beds or beds that might be backless sofas was the Ancient planetarium. Sheppard had it show what the night sky would look like if Atlantis didn't glow like a Tiffany lamp, and then what it had looked like in Antarctica, and then what it had looked like in his hometown when he was a boy.
Then he thought for a while, and told it to show what it would look like from the Gate area on Athos.
It turned out not to be that hard to set up planetarium programs to spool at the punch of a button rather than having to mentally control them the entire time. "Athosian Skies" was the first program he set up; nobody was really surprised when it became a popular stop for those Athosians visiting the city for one reason or another, or indeed a cause for such visits in the first place.
Most of them were surprised, a little, that Teyla watched it as seldom as she did. Sheppard thought he understood: after determining that the Ancient planetarium could, he'd never asked for the skies of his own youth either.
The second time they went to Amara, most of the indigenous population seemed to spend their time carefully not asking where Ford was. After a day or so of that, Rodney and Sheppard each wanted, in their own ways, to scream at the Amarans or break something; Teyla and Ronon carried on an entire conversation on the subject of their teammates' reactions in eyebrow lifts and shoulder twitches.
They'd arrived on the occasion of one of the Amarans' fairs, so said conversation was worked in around dodging the flatbread-throwing competition, admiring the Amaran young-cow-sized sheep from a safe distance, and persuading Rodney that if people carried a large Ancient artifact through the streets on ritual occasions and had done so for as long as anyone could remember, they were unlikely to offer it for trade.
Then one of the rams got loose and charged down the street, which was full of the confusion of scattering people, jouncing lanterns, converging young men eager to help catch the ram, Sheppard performing some complicated move involving awning ropes, counterweights, paper lanterns on ropes, and grabbing a half-panicking physicist and fully panicked small girl in order to deposit the three of them on the upper shutter of the only nearby store window so equipped --
"What the hell was that?"
"I saw it in a movie once. And mind your language."
The girl blinked up at them, eyes still round with terror and hair tightly pulled into three pigtails.
"This may be a surprise, Major-- "
"Lieutenant Colonel."
"Sheppard, but our lives are not written by Rafael Sabatini."
"You sure about that?"
-- and by Teyla choosing that moment to rediscover the lost art of Cretan bull-dancing by practicing on a sheep, although later conversation revealed that it actually was practiced by some people somewhere in Pegasus who were, nevertheless, not Athosian.
The ram attempted to buck Teyla off. Teyla buried her fingers in its wool and held on for dear life. With it largely in one place, some of the helpful men (including Ronon) managed to get ropes on it, and when the ram overbalanced sideways Teyla managed to rotate the relevant leg high enough that she could roll clear.
"Well, that was interesting," Sheppard said, sitting on the shutter and sliding down it until he dropped onto his feet on the cobblestones. "Let's never do it again."
"Seriously, Colonel," Rodney said, gesturing for the small girl to do likewise. "What is it with the American military and these periodic delusions of 'we'?"
"All part of being a team player," Sheppard called as he caught the small girl and handed her to Teyla.
"You have splinters in your pants," Ronon told him helpfully.
The little girl turned out to be Oligarch Sheepherder's youngest daughter Jazny, and rescuing her was good for a meal, a promise of eternal friendship and possibly acknowledged kinship between their two households --
"So he's a cousin, right, Mommy?" Jazny asked.
"Is everyone who has the same last name related on this planet?" Rodney asked the oligarch.
"Oh, no," Nyla Sheepherder laughed, resting her hand near his. "Well, of course if your name is Son-of-Jazer or something, then certainly, but not with the occupational surnames -- we have plenty of Berrypickers and Sheepherders and whatnot, although all of the latter seem to feel especially connected to me for some reason."
"Not everyone can be an oligarch," her older daughter said, looking up from her separate meal at the smaller table. "Most people can't even pass the first ordeal. If a Sheepherder got to be one, that's something they can be proud of by... by... "
"Extension?" Teyla offered, smiling over at the girl.
"Extension," she agreed.
"Ordeal?" Ronon wondered. "Is it dangerous?"
"Why is Meeza eating at a table by herself if Jazny's eating with the grown-ups?" Rodney asked at the same time, using his own tongs to transfer Jazny's chunk of stew back to her own plate from where it had fallen in front of him.
"Nobody usually dies, if that's what you mean," Nyla told Ronon absently. "And Meeza's marked by Keii, so her food has to be where ours can't touch it."
"Meeza mustn't eat kalna roots," Jazny explained.
"People who've been marked by Keii can't eat kalna roots?"
Meeza shrugged. "It varies. Good practice for the one ordeal in Keii's Maze, though."
"Maze?" Rodney asked.
"Keii built the Maze for our own ancestors," Nyla told him. "There are some chambers that everyone passes through, whether they feared it before or not, and that's one of them -- for that one, it's best to run through it and out some other door as quickly as possible." She leaned towards him, breathing in more deeply than the situation perhaps warranted. "You needn't mention that I said as much to anyone else, need you?"
-- and a guided tour of the way to and front gates of Keii's Maze, once Nyla'd put the girls to bed and dawn had advanced enough to see the path.
"Behold the shape of your fear!" Nyla said, waving an arm at the large mirror between the two Ancient-looking columns.
"What, is this like those things from Harry Potter?"
"You're familiar with -- "
"Oh, come on, Colonel, it's impossible not to be in Atlantis. I think the Athosians are familiar with Harry Potter."
"This is the tale of the young witch whose family keep him in a closet?" Teyla asked.
"See? Case in point."
"Yeah, but by 'the Athosians' you imply the Athosians not living in the city, as opposed to Teyla, who lives down the hall and to the right -- "
"Sheppard," Ronon broke in.
Everyone looked in the mirror. The people in the mirror looked back.
"Okay, okay, portrait of the artists as old men, so? My point was that I said Athosians and Teyla was Athosian last I checked -- "
"Huh," Sheppard said thoughtfully. "Am I the only one who's going to keep my hair?"
"Teyla has hair," Rodney snapped, squinting at the older version. The almost-completely-bald Rodney-in-the-mirror squinted at the real Teyla.
"It's... not unheard of for a man to have a more womanly nature as he ages," Ronon offered, voice tight for some reason. "Especially should he exercise more."
"I am said to resemble my mother greatly," Teyla said, voice equally taut. "It is... pleasant, to know how she would have looked had she grown old."
"How is it doing that?" Rodney wondered, and wandered closer, peering at the mirror.
"You do not fear it," Nyla said softly, wonder in her voice.
"Well, getting old sucks, I'll grant you that, and it's not exactly something I'm looking forward to, but it still beats the alternative."
"In most cases," Sheppard agreed.
Rodney shot him a look that went beyond 'dirty' and straight into 'Kill-O-Zap gun.' "You would."
"Is this building full of fears, then?" Teyla asked.
"Something like that," Nyla told them.
"Can we go in?"
"Not until the appointed time, certainly, and the others would need to agree..."
Rodney's face fell.
"But you have passed the first ordeal," she said hastily, "and we have been known to permit outworlders to use Keii's Maze for their own vision quests."
"So you'll talk to them."
"Certainly." Nyla beckoned to them. "Come away now," she said, chivvying and persuading them away from the Ancient building as if they were the sheep whose care her family had been named for.
The sun was rising behind them, picking out uneven cobblestones and dappling the trees.
"You know, it's all very well for the Ancients to have picked out optimal environmental conditions and all," Rodney grumbled, "but just once I'd like to visit somewhere different. Somewhere with purple trees, or mobile flowers, or, or pink unicorns or something."
"Unicorns, McKay?"
"Oh, shut up."
"Unicorns?!"
At that point it blundered out from behind a tree onto the flat ground next to the path.
They had had a long couple of days, the Amaran diurnal cycle had thrown them all off, half of his attention had been on keeping Rodney McKay cheerful yet on edge and not at all inclined to piss off the locals by trespassing in their sacred labyrinth unless they had a Really Good Reason, he still was worried about how to tell the said Dr. McKay that Dr. Waters the new (second-generation-Brazilian) meteorologist was not the wisest woman to date to prove to oneself that one still had it without getting into some variation of "Well, I know she's got Issues from when I was sleeping with her at McMurdo" (which would almost certainly destroy the "cheerful" part of the aforementioned desired mood), and it was hard to sleep when your hosts were having a fair right outside, each one of them apparently on a different sleep cycle.
John Sheppard's reaction, therefore, was perfectly reasonable under the circumstances.
"What? Who? Where?" Ronon demanded, sighting along his gun at several different angles, causing an already-unnerved Nyla to squeak and press up against Teyla.
"There," Rodney snapped, raising his arm as best he could to point with Sheppard's death grip on his shoulder. "By that root."
"Don't have to shout," Ronon snorted as Nyla blurted "The varnak beetle?"
"I'm sorry, am I shouting?" Rodney declaimed. "It's sort of hard to tell, as my ears are still recovering from the decibel level someone thought appropriate."
"I've seen these," Ronon snorted, disgustedly flipping the iridescently black arthropod into the bushes with his gun barrel. "They're harmless. They eat those fruits with the seeds on the outside."
"Well, they could pinch you if you aren't careful," Nyla qualified, "but we were eating varnak stew just a lorken and a half ago..."
"You were not there," Teyla said. "The varnak is smaller and does not appear to swell, but it resembles the forest creatures from which the Wraith once came."
"If you say so," Nyla said, and led the way back to the fair.
"Way to go impressing your long-lost cousin with our ability to face our fears," McKay grumbled.
"Oh, shut up."
"And to think you spent all that time telling me screaming wasn't a survival trait."
Teyla threw up her hands, grabbed both men's shoulders, and pulled them into a forehead-touch with each other with perhaps more force than strictly necessary.