Secondary Source, by Sophonisba [ancient history challenge]
-title- Secondary Source
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Gen. Some minor strong language. A number of literary/popular references, and a lot of talking heads.
-timeframe- Tag to "Sanctuary."
-spoilers- Effectually all of first season.
-characters- Teyla, Ford, Sheppard, Elizabeth, Corrigan, Miko, and a number of OCs.
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Nor is the rest of the Stargate franchise, for that matter. Nor is the game "Final Fantasy VII" or any worldbuilding elements thereof which may have been seized upon as intriguingly similar. Nor, of course, are any of the fictional creations to whom parallels are being drawn.
-word count- 2127
-summary- "Everything one is," when shared, consists of a large number of data; many of which have indefinable anthropological value.
Secondary Source
"I still think that Doctor McKay should be with us."
"If he cut short his dance of gloating over having been utterly, completely, and unabashedly right, he really means it about wanting to never think of or mention this last week again," Ford told Teyla for the third or fourth time.
"Nobody asked me if I ever wanted to mention it again," Major Sheppard said mildly, looking up from one of Anthro and Linguistics's laptops.
"No, we didn't, did we," Elizabeth Weir said slowly. "John, if -- "
"Not until you've finished telling us everything you remember her knowing," Dr. Corrigan said firmly and hastily. "You can decide if you ever want to bring it up again on your own time, AFTER we get it into the record."
"But -- "
"I was joking," Sheppard reassured Elizabeth.
"About this inaction," Teyla suggested.
Sheppard nodded, slowly. "They had a meeting about it. That is, everyone was Ascended, so it was sort of in three different places at once and everyone was overlapping each other and... I'm not sure how to describe it."
"Start at the beginning, sir," Ford offered, "and when you come to the end, stop."
Sheppard smiled wryly, as did half of Anthro and Linguistics (all of whom had managed to cram themselves into the same room, either reading over his shoulder, reading the output of his laptop on the screens of their own, or reading his report over one of their coworker's shoulders).
"Just explain it in your own words first," Elizabeth said firmly, "and you can fill in the details later."
"They were all arguing after... something. And it's like dreams -- I knew what it was that had got them all upset at the time, because she knew, but now I remember the argument but not what it was about."
"So go on before you lose the rest," someone in the back said.
"Whoever it was, someone had been doing something that was interfering, at least is still was according to the most recent definition she had -- and, uh, like I said, I don't know what it was, but the way Chaya and the others were upset, it wasn't, uh, somebody made a bad call and the universe caught them out on it -- it was when someone's been doing something that everyone knew was wrong but they didn't think it was their place to say so and then it's just blown up in everyone's face. Uh, if that makes sense?"
"We copy, yes."
"So they were angry because they were Ancients -- well, they were throwing around four or five different words, but most of them worked out to Ancients -- "
"Different words?" Isabel la Española said sharply, raising her head.
"Well, it's, uh, I could call the Marines humans or Earthlings or Americans or, well, Marines when I'm talking about them as opposed to the Wraith -- or maybe as opposed to the Genii soldiers, because the point was that they were supposed to be Ancients and not Ori."
"...what are Auri?" Corrigan asked.
Major Sheppard shrugged. "Something none of the Ancients wanted to think they were. Maybe it was a name for another one of the four races or something?"
"It would perhaps be the Golden Ones...?" Dr. Nelson wondered.
"Maybe more like the Shining Ones," Isabel a Portuguesa said, "because gold is gold because it shines, and also aura is the word for general light being about, which compares to a meaning Latin picked up and added to their word for wind..."
"Yes, but light you can be in is said 'ow-rah.'" Sheppard blinked. "Huh. Apparently I picked up the language the way she said it too."
"Really," both the Isabels said, light eyes sharpening as they fixed him with intent stares. They went on, in slightly different words, to ask whether that were fading too.
"No, it's there."
"Then history NOW," Corrigan said, "language later."
The small blonde women nodded reluctantly, trying to hide their impatience.
"So since they didn't have to wait their turn to speak to be understood, everyone was arguing at once, but somehow it still took longer than it would have if they had -- "
"Strangely, I'm not surprised," Elizabeth murmured to Teyla.
"Your complicated way of settling order is very efficient," Teyla answered. "I have thought that its instructions would make a useful trade good, if we can manage a demonstration."
Elizabeth blinked at her. "I should have thought of that."
"It is not as if your ways of doing things are usually better than most; it is just that, in this case, they are."
"-- so finally they had the two splinter groups off the one big camp," Sheppard had gone on without them. "I think most of them wound up agreeing because the leader was somebody called Manat Dar, and she must have been their equivalent of Elizabeth or Harry Truman or something because Chaya really, really respected her even though she disagreed with her. Anyway, she was the one saying that whole 'power corrupts' thing with the middle left out -- "
"The middle left out?" Teyla asked.
"There's a, uh, a saying on our home planet. 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' It means that, uh, that you need to be careful about your power, and the more you have the more careful you need to be, only some people go around saying 'power corrupts, and' and then always believe anyone who has any power is lying or cheating or something, which would be a hell of a way to run a railroad. Or a military."
"So Chaya belonged to one of these other groups?" Corrigan asked.
"Well, not then, no. The one guy she thought of as Vivian-with-his-head-in-the-clouds had this whole plan he managed to argue the others into allowing, involving being born into bodies that were sort of like Ancients but not and then doing things there, but it must have been tricky or dangerous or like not being able to fly because she was still sure that it would have been worse than what she was stuck with if they hadn't been able to stop doing it once they were back in the buffer."
"Could you please explain this Vivian person's plan again," Nelson told him, "and this time, so that it makes sense."
"He'd made bodies that were designed so that they were born the way that the Ancients used to get before they ascended. I think he must have done it before the conference, because I don't think the others would have let him afterwards. Then people who wanted could get born into the bodies, and do things that Chaya didn't think were anything to write home about but that were more than we could do without complicated machines, which he'd been arguing that they should be doing because of a promise to someone who -- I think it was a human, and I keep wanting to say it was the prince from a story I heard when I was little."
"Well, it can't be that," Elizabeth said. "It's probably the way the associations were in the parts of your memory where hers got stored."
"I guess you'd know. They were set up on a couple different planets, but not Proculus, and when the bodies died, the people automatically Ascended into some sort of buffer zone and could decide whether to Ascend all the way or to go back and be reborn as their grandkid or something with their memories from last time -- something like the snake people, but not, and that might be where he got the idea for his -- they called them cetera, cet'ra, something like that, sounds familiar for some reason."
"Final Fantasy Seven," Ford said instantly as Isabel la Española said "It means 'other things.'"
"Excuse me?" Nelson said, blinking at Ford.
"What is that?" Elizabeth said.
"Isn't that a video game?" Sheppard asked.
Ford blinked back at them. "I thought everybody'd played Final Fantasy VII. Except Teyla, of course."
"I have," Corrigan offered.
"Was that the one where they had actual cartoon animation for some of the bits, or the one where they were trying for 3-D graphics and wound up with those doll things with odd-looking geometric shapes for hair?"
"The polygon people, sir," Ford answered his superior officer. "And I'm not sure how the game designers would have known -- "
"Possibly the Ancestors told them," Teyla suggested.
"Possibly," her teammate agreed, "but the Cet'ra were supposed to be spacegoing or maybe not but there was something funky going on with their connection to the Planet."
"There was something funky going on with the translation," Corrigan argued. "I can't remember exactly what it was, but I wouldn't trust the American version for anything important."
"Does anyone have access to the original?" Elizabeth wondered.
Everyone in the room looked at everyone else.
The head of Anthropological Studies and Xeno/Anthropolinguistics switched his headset to broadcast on the general channel and asked "Excuse me, but does anyone in the city perhaps have a copy of the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VII?"
There was a stunned pause before Dr. Kusanagi's voice answered tentatively "My little brother also gave me emulations of all the games, to use for trade, when I said to him that I would be working in Antarctica."
"If there's some way you could pull a transcript out of that emulation and send it to us when you have the time," Corrigan said, "that would be wonderful."
"A transcript?" Ford asked.
"I suppose I could try to play through that far from memory," the anthropologist told him, "but my Japanese is terrible. How's yours?"
"Nonexistent."
"Returning... so these Others were built to be Quendi?" Isabel a Portuguesa breathed.
"I think they sound more like the Dwarves," Isabel la Española said thoughtfully. "Who do come back in their family lines."
'Yes, but they only believed, and the Elves knew they did, returning from the Undying Lands -- "
"I don't think she ever knew whether the Cet'ra remembered anything from the buffer zone or not." Sheppard leaned back, stretching. "You'd have to find one of Vivian's people and ask him, and if she'd been able to flag Ascended Ancients down, I don't think she'd have been as lonely as she was."
"Wasn't there a third group of Ancients, back before all this sidetracking?" Nelson asked.
"There was," Sheppard returned to the subject eagerly, "and they wound up deciding to work around the restrictions by sort of indirectly arranging things -- she was working with them, but then Proculus came under attack before they had their thing set up, so there wasn't time to be subtle."
"And then they punished her?" Corrigan wondered, fascinated.
"No, they busied themselves doing something unobjectionable while the mainline Ancients punished her. Their leader visited her afterwards -- I can't remember what her name was now, Chaya mostly thought of her as 'the Lady' -- and congratulated her on saving her charges, and Chaya got mad at the Lady for putting her in a position to break the rules and do what was right and get punished for it. Which I don't get. I mean, uh, the whole point of having a left hand the right hand can not know what it's doing is so you can cut off the left hand if it comes up," he started waving his hands to illustrate, "and you get the choice to be the hand or not, so once you, uh, decide to act and take the consequences, you've decided to take them -- " Sheppard stopped for a moment, having half-plaited his wrists into a knot, and untwisted his arms. He smiled ruefully. "She was kind of annoyed at me for not getting it, too, but the whole point is that whatever comes afterwards is, well, the cost of doing business, and you're supposed to accept it."
"I don't seem to remember you doing much accepting -- " Elizabeth began.
"That was different." Sheppard straightened in his chair. "Afterwards is afterwards, and during is during -- "
"John," Elizabeth began, choked herself off, stared intensely at a corner of the ceiling, and then addressed the empty vicinity of the room's door. "I think we all need a break. Thirty minutes, people."
And she quickly strode out the door.
"I seem to be ticking everyone off this week," Sheppard said ruefully as the anthropologists and linguists broke up into little knots of conversation. "And I thought I'd just got my head on straight, too."
"It's leftover bits of everything, sir," Ford said loyally. "Once we put this month behind us, everyone will be much happier. Teyla?"
Teyla softened her gaze from the oddly intense stare she had fixed Major Sheppard with during his last speech. "I, too, hope."
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Gen. Some minor strong language. A number of literary/popular references, and a lot of talking heads.
-timeframe- Tag to "Sanctuary."
-spoilers- Effectually all of first season.
-characters- Teyla, Ford, Sheppard, Elizabeth, Corrigan, Miko, and a number of OCs.
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Nor is the rest of the Stargate franchise, for that matter. Nor is the game "Final Fantasy VII" or any worldbuilding elements thereof which may have been seized upon as intriguingly similar. Nor, of course, are any of the fictional creations to whom parallels are being drawn.
-word count- 2127
-summary- "Everything one is," when shared, consists of a large number of data; many of which have indefinable anthropological value.
Secondary Source
"I still think that Doctor McKay should be with us."
"If he cut short his dance of gloating over having been utterly, completely, and unabashedly right, he really means it about wanting to never think of or mention this last week again," Ford told Teyla for the third or fourth time.
"Nobody asked me if I ever wanted to mention it again," Major Sheppard said mildly, looking up from one of Anthro and Linguistics's laptops.
"No, we didn't, did we," Elizabeth Weir said slowly. "John, if -- "
"Not until you've finished telling us everything you remember her knowing," Dr. Corrigan said firmly and hastily. "You can decide if you ever want to bring it up again on your own time, AFTER we get it into the record."
"But -- "
"I was joking," Sheppard reassured Elizabeth.
"About this inaction," Teyla suggested.
Sheppard nodded, slowly. "They had a meeting about it. That is, everyone was Ascended, so it was sort of in three different places at once and everyone was overlapping each other and... I'm not sure how to describe it."
"Start at the beginning, sir," Ford offered, "and when you come to the end, stop."
Sheppard smiled wryly, as did half of Anthro and Linguistics (all of whom had managed to cram themselves into the same room, either reading over his shoulder, reading the output of his laptop on the screens of their own, or reading his report over one of their coworker's shoulders).
"Just explain it in your own words first," Elizabeth said firmly, "and you can fill in the details later."
"They were all arguing after... something. And it's like dreams -- I knew what it was that had got them all upset at the time, because she knew, but now I remember the argument but not what it was about."
"So go on before you lose the rest," someone in the back said.
"Whoever it was, someone had been doing something that was interfering, at least is still was according to the most recent definition she had -- and, uh, like I said, I don't know what it was, but the way Chaya and the others were upset, it wasn't, uh, somebody made a bad call and the universe caught them out on it -- it was when someone's been doing something that everyone knew was wrong but they didn't think it was their place to say so and then it's just blown up in everyone's face. Uh, if that makes sense?"
"We copy, yes."
"So they were angry because they were Ancients -- well, they were throwing around four or five different words, but most of them worked out to Ancients -- "
"Different words?" Isabel la Española said sharply, raising her head.
"Well, it's, uh, I could call the Marines humans or Earthlings or Americans or, well, Marines when I'm talking about them as opposed to the Wraith -- or maybe as opposed to the Genii soldiers, because the point was that they were supposed to be Ancients and not Ori."
"...what are Auri?" Corrigan asked.
Major Sheppard shrugged. "Something none of the Ancients wanted to think they were. Maybe it was a name for another one of the four races or something?"
"It would perhaps be the Golden Ones...?" Dr. Nelson wondered.
"Maybe more like the Shining Ones," Isabel a Portuguesa said, "because gold is gold because it shines, and also aura is the word for general light being about, which compares to a meaning Latin picked up and added to their word for wind..."
"Yes, but light you can be in is said 'ow-rah.'" Sheppard blinked. "Huh. Apparently I picked up the language the way she said it too."
"Really," both the Isabels said, light eyes sharpening as they fixed him with intent stares. They went on, in slightly different words, to ask whether that were fading too.
"No, it's there."
"Then history NOW," Corrigan said, "language later."
The small blonde women nodded reluctantly, trying to hide their impatience.
"So since they didn't have to wait their turn to speak to be understood, everyone was arguing at once, but somehow it still took longer than it would have if they had -- "
"Strangely, I'm not surprised," Elizabeth murmured to Teyla.
"Your complicated way of settling order is very efficient," Teyla answered. "I have thought that its instructions would make a useful trade good, if we can manage a demonstration."
Elizabeth blinked at her. "I should have thought of that."
"It is not as if your ways of doing things are usually better than most; it is just that, in this case, they are."
"-- so finally they had the two splinter groups off the one big camp," Sheppard had gone on without them. "I think most of them wound up agreeing because the leader was somebody called Manat Dar, and she must have been their equivalent of Elizabeth or Harry Truman or something because Chaya really, really respected her even though she disagreed with her. Anyway, she was the one saying that whole 'power corrupts' thing with the middle left out -- "
"The middle left out?" Teyla asked.
"There's a, uh, a saying on our home planet. 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' It means that, uh, that you need to be careful about your power, and the more you have the more careful you need to be, only some people go around saying 'power corrupts, and' and then always believe anyone who has any power is lying or cheating or something, which would be a hell of a way to run a railroad. Or a military."
"So Chaya belonged to one of these other groups?" Corrigan asked.
"Well, not then, no. The one guy she thought of as Vivian-with-his-head-in-the-clouds had this whole plan he managed to argue the others into allowing, involving being born into bodies that were sort of like Ancients but not and then doing things there, but it must have been tricky or dangerous or like not being able to fly because she was still sure that it would have been worse than what she was stuck with if they hadn't been able to stop doing it once they were back in the buffer."
"Could you please explain this Vivian person's plan again," Nelson told him, "and this time, so that it makes sense."
"He'd made bodies that were designed so that they were born the way that the Ancients used to get before they ascended. I think he must have done it before the conference, because I don't think the others would have let him afterwards. Then people who wanted could get born into the bodies, and do things that Chaya didn't think were anything to write home about but that were more than we could do without complicated machines, which he'd been arguing that they should be doing because of a promise to someone who -- I think it was a human, and I keep wanting to say it was the prince from a story I heard when I was little."
"Well, it can't be that," Elizabeth said. "It's probably the way the associations were in the parts of your memory where hers got stored."
"I guess you'd know. They were set up on a couple different planets, but not Proculus, and when the bodies died, the people automatically Ascended into some sort of buffer zone and could decide whether to Ascend all the way or to go back and be reborn as their grandkid or something with their memories from last time -- something like the snake people, but not, and that might be where he got the idea for his -- they called them cetera, cet'ra, something like that, sounds familiar for some reason."
"Final Fantasy Seven," Ford said instantly as Isabel la Española said "It means 'other things.'"
"Excuse me?" Nelson said, blinking at Ford.
"What is that?" Elizabeth said.
"Isn't that a video game?" Sheppard asked.
Ford blinked back at them. "I thought everybody'd played Final Fantasy VII. Except Teyla, of course."
"I have," Corrigan offered.
"Was that the one where they had actual cartoon animation for some of the bits, or the one where they were trying for 3-D graphics and wound up with those doll things with odd-looking geometric shapes for hair?"
"The polygon people, sir," Ford answered his superior officer. "And I'm not sure how the game designers would have known -- "
"Possibly the Ancestors told them," Teyla suggested.
"Possibly," her teammate agreed, "but the Cet'ra were supposed to be spacegoing or maybe not but there was something funky going on with their connection to the Planet."
"There was something funky going on with the translation," Corrigan argued. "I can't remember exactly what it was, but I wouldn't trust the American version for anything important."
"Does anyone have access to the original?" Elizabeth wondered.
Everyone in the room looked at everyone else.
The head of Anthropological Studies and Xeno/Anthropolinguistics switched his headset to broadcast on the general channel and asked "Excuse me, but does anyone in the city perhaps have a copy of the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VII?"
There was a stunned pause before Dr. Kusanagi's voice answered tentatively "My little brother also gave me emulations of all the games, to use for trade, when I said to him that I would be working in Antarctica."
"If there's some way you could pull a transcript out of that emulation and send it to us when you have the time," Corrigan said, "that would be wonderful."
"A transcript?" Ford asked.
"I suppose I could try to play through that far from memory," the anthropologist told him, "but my Japanese is terrible. How's yours?"
"Nonexistent."
"Returning... so these Others were built to be Quendi?" Isabel a Portuguesa breathed.
"I think they sound more like the Dwarves," Isabel la Española said thoughtfully. "Who do come back in their family lines."
'Yes, but they only believed, and the Elves knew they did, returning from the Undying Lands -- "
"I don't think she ever knew whether the Cet'ra remembered anything from the buffer zone or not." Sheppard leaned back, stretching. "You'd have to find one of Vivian's people and ask him, and if she'd been able to flag Ascended Ancients down, I don't think she'd have been as lonely as she was."
"Wasn't there a third group of Ancients, back before all this sidetracking?" Nelson asked.
"There was," Sheppard returned to the subject eagerly, "and they wound up deciding to work around the restrictions by sort of indirectly arranging things -- she was working with them, but then Proculus came under attack before they had their thing set up, so there wasn't time to be subtle."
"And then they punished her?" Corrigan wondered, fascinated.
"No, they busied themselves doing something unobjectionable while the mainline Ancients punished her. Their leader visited her afterwards -- I can't remember what her name was now, Chaya mostly thought of her as 'the Lady' -- and congratulated her on saving her charges, and Chaya got mad at the Lady for putting her in a position to break the rules and do what was right and get punished for it. Which I don't get. I mean, uh, the whole point of having a left hand the right hand can not know what it's doing is so you can cut off the left hand if it comes up," he started waving his hands to illustrate, "and you get the choice to be the hand or not, so once you, uh, decide to act and take the consequences, you've decided to take them -- " Sheppard stopped for a moment, having half-plaited his wrists into a knot, and untwisted his arms. He smiled ruefully. "She was kind of annoyed at me for not getting it, too, but the whole point is that whatever comes afterwards is, well, the cost of doing business, and you're supposed to accept it."
"I don't seem to remember you doing much accepting -- " Elizabeth began.
"That was different." Sheppard straightened in his chair. "Afterwards is afterwards, and during is during -- "
"John," Elizabeth began, choked herself off, stared intensely at a corner of the ceiling, and then addressed the empty vicinity of the room's door. "I think we all need a break. Thirty minutes, people."
And she quickly strode out the door.
"I seem to be ticking everyone off this week," Sheppard said ruefully as the anthropologists and linguists broke up into little knots of conversation. "And I thought I'd just got my head on straight, too."
"It's leftover bits of everything, sir," Ford said loyally. "Once we put this month behind us, everyone will be much happier. Teyla?"
Teyla softened her gaze from the oddly intense stare she had fixed Major Sheppard with during his last speech. "I, too, hope."