Well, this is my long-awaited (in my mind, anyway) parody of Stargate Universe. Let me get one thing straight. I hate SGU. I think it's a disgrace to the Stargate franchise. I also think it has huge potential for a parody. At the same time, I'm going to try to bring it more in line with SG-1 and Atlantis, meaning more action and less drama.
Atmosphere, Part I
Several thousand years ago...
"Behold Destiny, the ship that will explore the universe."
"What idiot came up with this idea?" an Ancient whispered to another Ancient.
"Beats me," he replied.
"Destiny will follow all those gate-seeding probes we sent..."
"So that's where our tax dollars go."
"... and we will travel to it in the near future, through the astria porta..."
"Smartest decision our government ever made. Why seed a bunch of gates that we rarely even use? With that money we could have built about twenty Aurora class cruisers or a shitload of gateships." An angry "SHUSH!" followed his comment.
"... and we shall explore not only our galaxy but the entire universe! We shall seed life, meet new lifeforms, make new discoveries! Ladies and gentleancients, this IS OUR DESTINY!"
A mass applause broke out throughout the amphitheater. All over the galaxy Ancients sat in front of their TVs to watch the launch of Destiny. In the amphitheater, a side wall opened up and there sat Destiny. The audience gasped and continued applauding. The ship began to light up and a sixty-hertz hum filled the air as the main engines powered up. Slowly Destiny lifted off and vanished into the evening sky.
"I wonder if anyone will follow through with it," muttered the argumentative Ancient as he left the amphitheater.
Eli Wallace is best described as a complete and utter loser. After dropping out of Harvard then MIT and finally failing to receive a fake degree in the mail, he went back to playing video games and living at his mom's house. He sat there, like that fat lump he is, simultaneously playing WoW and Garry's Mod and listening to the sweet sound of two Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards and an Intel Core i7-950, or rather the coolers that sat on top of their respective processors.
Suddenly there was a knock at the door. Reluctantly, Eli got up and half walked, half fell down the stairs and wrenched the door open. It was just the UPS guy, with another package. "Sign here, here and here please. Also, unless you want this package damaged, pay me twenty bucks."
Eli groaned and signed the sheet, slipping the man a bill as he took the package. He closed the door, muttering "Fucking UPS guy..."
But he had his package, and he was excited. So after an exhausting haul up the stairs and into his disaster of a room he tore it open. Eli was simultaneously disappointed and satisfied when he saw the contents. It wasn't the OpenPandora he had preordered two years ago. It was a copy of Stargate Worlds, the game he had preordered only one year ago. Excitedly he rammed it into the drive of his computer and ran the installer.
***five days of 24 hour gaming later***
Eli Maxwell had finished Stargate Worlds, maxed all the levels, solved all the puzzles, finished all the quests, and submitted his high score. He sat there like a lump waiting for a dramatically timed event to happen when someone knocked on the door. This better be my OpenPandora, he thought.
It wasn't. It was USAF general and another man that looked somewhat familiar, but not quite. "Oh fuck, recruiters!" shouted Eli as he slammed the door. He tried to run but only made it halfway up the stairs before fainting.
Eli woke up in a gray room in a gray bed with a small gray nightstand and two small gray doors. Overall, the room was very gray, furnished in a drab institutional gray. He moaned as he half climbed, half fell out of his bed. Without warning a man came through the door and whacked him over the head.
Eli woke up, again, in another drab gray room across from the same Air Force general that had visited him before. "Where am I?"
"That's not important. What is important is that I'm General O'Neill, and I'm going to tell you everything.
"Ever heard of the Stargate program? Don't answer, that's a rhetorical question. A while back we discovered a big ring thing that lets you go to other planets. After a long series of adventures a crazy guy had a dumb idea that the ninth chevron does something and he needs your help."
"Wait, what?" asked Eli, confused even more.
O'Neill spoke slower this time. "That's not important. What is important is that I'm General O'Neill, and I'm going to tell you everything.
"Ever heard of the Stargate program? Don't answer, that's a rhetorical question. A while back we discovered a big ring thing that lets you go to other planets. After a long series of adventures a crazy guy had a dumb idea that the ninth chevron does something and he needs your help."
"Can you explain better instead of just repeating it slower?" asked Eli again, raising an eyebrow.
"Absolutely not," replied O'Neill, "Most of it is in the game, some on TV and the rest you'll pick up. Despite failing at life you seem to be pretty smart."
"Well, can't you give me an informative video that sort of answers my questions but doesn't do that good a job and leaves me somewhat confused?" requested Eli in a very foreshadowing way.
"That's what I was about to do." O'Neill shoved a tape into a fortuitously placed VCR. The tape had a partially crossed out and replaced label. The new title was "Danny-boy's guide to the Stargate" but Eli could make out the word "Simpsons" in black Sharpi- permanent felt marker.
The tape had left Eli Wallace with more questions than answers, but he knew why he wasn't getting cell service. Suddenly there was a slight jolt. Ah, we must have reached the base, he thought. Eli was just getting up when the ship started shaking, then there was an ear-splitting crash accompanied by a very sudden, very hard jolt, then another crash and jolt, then a much weaker crash and jolt, and then the ship stopped. Eli had barely caught his breath when the door opened and a female crewwoman bashed him over the head.
"Welcome to Icarus Base."
"What?" Eli opened his eyes and found that he was sitting at a table with a bunch of other people. In front of him was a decidedly unappetizing piece of meat of some sort, covered in some kind of sauce. The blue Jell-o looked good though, and the drink was Pepsi, his favorite.
"I'm Colonel Young, though I'm actually kinda old. This is Colonel Telford-" he waved "-Lieutenant Scott, Senator Armstrong, and of course you've met Cloey."
"Actually, it's Chloe and he hasn't-"
"Shut up!" yelled her father, the senator and cuffed her on the head. Chloe went back to her food.
The familiar but not quite familiar man was there too.
"Excuse me, who are you, anyway?" asked Eli.
"Dr. Nicholas Rush, resident hyperintelligent crazy who suspiciously knows too much." Rush leaned over the table, knocking over plates and cups and expended his hand. It was kind of gnarly and had something brown on it.
"Uhhh, no thanks," said Eli. But Rush wouldn't take no for an answer. He half-jumped, half-slid across the table towards Eli, knocking over more plates, covering the senator with something resembling gravy and nearly removing Telford's eye with a fork. He bowled over Eli and pumped his hand so hard that Eli's wrist almost broke. No one seemed to notice.
"Right, dinner time is over," said Young. Then Eli was knocked unconcious again.
"Would you stop- oh wow!" Eli was lying in the middle of the gateroom. Everyone at the dinner and several others were in the room. In front of him was one genuine, Ancient-manufactured mint condition Milky Way stargate.
"Wait, wait, wait. If you have one of these, why didn't you just send me through?"
"Because the spaceship trip is so much more dramatic and impressive. Plus, this gate is modified to be un-dialable," Young explained.
"Why not just use an iris?" asked Eli, skeptically.
"Because we thought it would be easier. It turned out to require 30 years, six supercomputers and two female astrophysicists to do it," explained Rush, "Come on now, let's try your solution and dial that ninth chevron!" Rush helped Eli up. He wiped the brown substance on Rush's shirt. Rush didn't seem to notice.
Rush began pushing buttons. The stargate began to dramatically spin and lock chevrons.
"Chevron seven... encoded? Chevron eight... ENCODED?! Chevron NINE... will not lock."
"Shouldn't you be at the SGC?" Telford asked Walter.
"Well, nobody else is qualified for this job."
"Then who's doing it at the SGC?" asked Telford. Walter suddenly looked worried.
Meanwhile, Rush was throwing a hissy-fit. "WHY WHY WHY ISN'T IT WORKING?! IN ALL THE SIMULATIONS IT WORKED! BUT OH NO, WHEN WE ACTUALLY TRY IT THE THING DOESN'T FUCKING WORK! THIS PIECE OF SHIT ISN'T WORKING?! IT'S ALL FUCKING WRONG!"
"Whoa, calm down, I didn't even solve it on purpose!" said Eli. He narrowly dodged the fortuitously placed crowbar Rush threw at him.
"SOLVE?! YOU DIDN'T SOLVE ANYTHING! LOOK AT THE GATE! DOES IT FUCKING LOOK ACTIVATED?! ARGH!"
Eli was backing away slowly when the floor suddenly shook and alarms started going off. "Oh shit, we're being attacked at the most inconvenient yet plot-driving time ever!" yelled Telford as he ran out of the gateroom.
Three Ha'tak class ships had started to attack the planet. Up in orbit, in the ship, was Colonel Samantha Carter. And things were not going too well.
"Shields predictably down to twenty percent! Weapons strangely ineffective!" yelled a junior officer.
"Try the Asgard beam weapons!" Carter shouted back.
"Those are the Asgard beam weapons!" the junior officer replied.
On the surface things were going even worse. Icarus base was in the side of a mountain, but it turned out that rock is very bad armor. There were only two 302s, and the base strangely had no SAM sites to defend against Death Gliders. One 302 managed to destroy a Death Glider with an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile before being blown to bits by two others. The other 302 flew around in lazy circles for no real reason.
"Dial Earth!" Colonel Young yelled, "We have to evacuate! Scott, Greer, help me get some more people to the gateroom!"
Rush watched as Young dashed out of the room. He had a different idea. Perhaps the address had to use Earth's symbol as the ninth chevron. Although the pyramid symbol was not even that of Earth's original gate, and that dialing it on anything but the Giza gate would be physically impossible, Rush had no doubts that his plan would succeed.
"Move away from that console!" he yelled at the sergeant behind the DHD and dialing console. "I have a stupid idea and an equally stupid excuse!"
"Well, I was ordered not to, and it's against all logic and common sense, but for the sake of plot advancement, sure."
Rush pushed a bunch of keys and slammed his fist on the DHD. Then the gate began dialing. It shook and sparked and nearly fell off its mounts as it locked the first chevron.
The stargate was rocking back and forth crazily and sparking excessively when Young got back, covered in dust and with Chloe, the senator and a bunch of survivors in tow. When he saw the ninth chevron lock, the gate activate, and Rush smile he knew that things had gone terribly wrong.
"Rush, you son of a bitch! I'M GONNA FUCKING KILL YOU!" Only years and years of being in the military and a desire to become a general stopped him from snapping Rush's neck. Instead, he stood there with a red face and angry expression.
"Can't you just redial Earth?" asked Eli.
"Nope. That would be too easy," replied Rush matter-of-factly.
"Well now we're screwed. We can stay here in a collapsing base on a planet about to explode or go through that into the unknown." Eli made up his mind, grabbed his bag, and headed towards the gate.
"Be sure to take as much supplies as you can!" yelled Rush, packing up his laptop.
"We're about to lose shields! We have taken heavy damage!" yelled the junior officer.
"Just a little longer! We have to recover ALL the 302s and beam up the survivors!" Carter yelled back over the sparks and smoke in the flight deck.
"Colonel, strange energy readings are building up in the planet! The core is going unstable!" the young, female, argubly attractive lieutenant said, "Colonel, the planet is going to explode!"
"Shields are down! One more hit will take us out!"
"We've recovered the 302s and survivors at a suspiciously convenient moment!"
"Set course for Earth and engage the hyperdrive!" Carter yelled.
The Hammond jumped into hyperspace just before the planet exploded in a massive fireball, taking Icarus base, the Ha'tak vessels, and an unfortunate janitor who was stuck in a broom closet with it.
After her ship was safely in hyperspace, Carter contacted Earth. "Icarus base was attacked and destroyed. The whole planet went critical and exploded. We picked up some survivors, but most of them are unaccounted for."
General Landry was on the other end. "We believe those Ha'tak vessels belong- or rather belonged to- the Lucian Alliance. We knew they were coming, but we couldn't get word out to you soon enough."
"They should have evacuated through the stargate. In fact, we detected it activating."
"Well, colonel, they aren't here. In fact, it didn't dial here. Maybe they dialed the wrong planet. We'll find them."
"What if Rush succeeded in his project?"
"Then God help those poor souls who went through."
Hope you liked that first episode/chapter. The intro was inspired by the first bit of "Rising", which I have never actually watched. The end bit was probably the hardest part to write. This is also probably my longest single chapter to date, at just a little under 2500 words.