Frame of Reference
or
Five times the SGC didn't realize they were dealing with the supernatural and
One time the Winchesters didn't realize they were dealing with an alien.
2008 – Number One
"And this ladies and gentlemen, is my favorite part." Colonel Mitchell lead his small group of ambassadors and politicians to the observation bay windows. As the ranking Air Force officer (without a science project to occupy his time back in the mountain) he had the dubious honor of playing tour guide. At least this group wasn't as bad as they could have been: they asked intelligent questions. But the observation window really was the best part.
For several minutes, he could just stop, relax, stare out the window at his home planet from space and enjoy the view. His tour group quieted as well, everyone lost in their own thoughts and the sight of the blues and greens hanging in space before them.
Until something strange caught Mitchel's eye. From space he watched, bewildered, as a glowing orange line lit up and drew a five point star across the landscape of southern Wyoming. It was only visible for half a minute before it began to slowly fade out.
"Colonel? What was that?" the ambassador exclaimed.
Without answering, he rushed to the intercom button. "Colonel Caldwell? We are seeing some unusual activity on the surface. Are you seeing the same thing?" Doing some quick mental calculations, Mitch realized that the star must be at least a hundred miles wide to be seen from this altitude.
"We see it," came the terse reply. Meaning the bridge crew was going nuts trying to get on top of whatever this was and would Mitch please focus on his baby-sitting duties and let them work.
Hours later...
SG-1 regrouped at their jeep, parked at the epicenter of the star: Calvary Cemetery.
Mitch opened the team meeting with, "Okay, this is what I've got: The body of Private Jake Talley, US Army, MIA from Afghanistan two days ago, presumed AWOL, dead with half a dozen bullets in his chest. We've also a John Doe with one bullet in his chest. What else did you find?"
"There were at least four other people present," Teal'c rumbled. "I found the tracks of two large men, one man of medium build, and one woman. Their focus seemed to center on the doors of the mausoleum. They hiked in from a vehicle a mile away and hiked back out to it. I also found signs of fighting."
"There was nothing in the mausoleum, right?"
"Indeed."
"Some strange residual energy readings all around the area, sulfur powder everywhere, and a lot of unanswered questions." Carter told them, tucking her gear back into the cases. "The star shape is private railroad tracks spanning all across Wyoming. I still haven't figured out what caused the luminescence you observed from the Zephyr. The sulfur wasn't burned, it didn't heat the iron tracks. I can't account for any of it."
"There was a lovely young man out here hunting something called 'Bighorn' who insists there was some kind of mushroom cloud of black smoke big enough to block out the stars," Vala added helpfully. "He also says the smoke chased him until he tripped over the salt lick he left out for the Bighorn. Because of the amount of alcohol on his breath, I don't know if I could call him a credible witness; but in the movies of your planet, the crazy people are usually correct."
"Jackson, did you find any background on the tracks?"
"Uhh... Built in the mid-1800's, financed by Samuel L. Colt, the gunmaker." Daniel shifted some papers around. "There's some historical records describing how insistent he was that the rail lines be laid exactly as he mapped out, even though it didn't make any sense to the people of the time. In fact, two of the townships he was trying to connect had to travel several miles to get to their train station. Apparently, he had to be talked into connecting his lines to the Union Pacific lines and only allowed it after getting it in contract that no one could alter or reroute his original plans. Ever."
"So, nothing useful," Mitch sighed. "Great. The generals are going to love this report."
2009 – Number Two
"What the hell?" Samantha Carter demanded, tapping her keyboard and squinting at her computer screen.
"Sam? Problem?" Daniel looked up from his book.
"Automated alert," Carter continued to work her computer, trying to get a handle on the situation. "After Wyoming, I set up a program to constantly monitor the planet for strong extraneous energy readings."
"And...?" Daniel prompted.
"An energy reading like I've never seen before. Huge. Concentrated in Ilchester, Maryland." Sam began to type furiously. "I need to re-position a satellite."
"Maryland?" Daniel abandoned his book to look over his friend's shoulder. "Should we be worried?"
"I don't know, yet." Carter typed and clicked furiously, trying to get a handle on the situation.
The satellite came into position within a minute. Sam and Daniel watched in shock as a beam of white light erupted from the heart of Ilchester and knocked a jet out of its flight path. The beam dissipated along with the strong energy readings. The computer screen resolved again after the white out, revealing a crater the size of a building behind.
"Oh, just a guess here, but I'm betting that's not good...?" Daniel suggested mildly.
"Crap!" Sam exclaimed and dove for the nearest phone. "General Landry! Sir, I recommend raising the HSAS to Orange. We have a possible extraterrestrial attack. It appears a church in Maryland has been vaporized by an unknown energy. We need to cordon off the area and get teams in place."
Hours Later...
"Wow. That's a big damn hole." Colonel Mitchell drawled. "What did this place used to be again?"
"St. Mary's Convent." Daniel answered. "In 1972, eight nuns were murdered... uh, a lot, by the attending priest."
"How can somebody be murdered 'a lot', Jackson?"
"Stabbed, throats cut, necks broken, and some kind of Judeo-Christian symbols carved into their bodies. One of them arranged like a sacrifice on the altar." Daniel explained, looking queasy.
"Okay, yeah, that's a lot," Mitchell drawled.
Daniel continued, "The priest later claimed he had been possessed by a demon when he killed them."
"Goa'uld?"
"Impossible to know any more," Daniel sighed, reading from his tablet. "The priest died of natural causes in a sanitarium years ago."
"Colonel Carter?" Mitchell called, "Anything?"
Sam climbed out of the crater, scanner in hand. "The energy signature is practically gone. Whatever it was, its not happening here anymore."
"So...?" Mitchell lead.
"So. I'm going to set up another program to alert whenever this type of energy appears on earth. After that, I guess we wait."
2011 – Number Three
Jack O'Neill liked his telescope. Sure compared to the eggheads under Cheyenne Mountain he was an amateur, but that didn't mean he didn't enjoy watching the sky and the stars. Even after all those years of traveling among them, nothing was quite the same as watching them from the roof of his cabin. Tonight, he sat on his back porch drinking beer when he noticed.
For a moment he pursed his lips and considered his beer. Or more accurately, he mentally counted how many beers he'd had so far. He counted two empties next to him and half empty in his hand. That amount of beer not being high enough to cause him to see things, Jack decided to finish his last bottle and then make a phone call.
With a groan, he hauled himself out of his comfy chair to go find where he stashed his cell phone so he wouldn't be interrupted.
"Hey, Jack."
"Heya, Sam. I think I might have had more beer than the two empties next to me, because I'm seeing things." O'Neill explained, as he plopped back on his porch chair.
Back in Colorado, Samantha Cater smiled into her phone. "Pink elephants?"
Jack shook his head. "That I would know was caused by the beer. The full moon was a week ago, right?"
"Yeah."
"So was the lunar eclipse, right? Last week?" Jack continued.
"Yes, sir...?" Sam was beginning to revert to military mode; this wasn't sounding like a typical Jack calling to chat conversation, this was beginning to sound like a precursor to an SGC problem. After a decade of working together, she could hear the difference in his tone.
"Any time paradoxes happen at the office this week?" Jack asked, "Because I am sitting on my back porch, enjoying a beautiful, red lunar eclipse for the second time this week. And that strikes me as strange."
"What?!" Sam demanded, swiveling in her chair to her computer. Swiftly, she brought up security feeds for outside the Mountain and pointed it up at the sky. "What the hell!"
"Ah-ah! I asked first, Sam." Jack chided.
Ignoring her former commander, Sam worked to position several satellites and getting a good look at the night's sky. When she saw nothing, she widened her view and commandeered a few more satellites. "Sir, the Earth, sun, and moon haven't moved from their standard orbits. There shouldn't be a full moon let alone a lunar eclipse."
"And yet."
"Yes, sir. There is some kind of light source, perfectly positioned to fully illuminate our moon from around the Earth," Sam reported.
"Spaceship? Some kind of intergalactic tanning salon?" Jack offered as explanation.
"No, sir. No space vessel of any kind, just... a light, free form... with the same spectrum and luminous exitance as our sun."
"Should I be worried?" Jack queried, voice still mild, but his concern was growing. "Because you only use the really big, confusing words when you get worried."
"Uh... I'll have to get back to you, sir."
"Yes yes. Go tell Landry and probably the President while you're at it. Do your thing. Call me later." Jack hung up the phone.
He shook his head in sadness as he opened another longneck. "All those disturbingly smart people, and it takes a beered up retiree to notice these things. What is the world coming to?"
2013 – Number Four
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Colonel Mitchell glanced up from his car. The old mustang needed a tune up, and it was a beautiful night to tinker in his garage with the overhead door rolled up to let the cool night air in. He took a minute to enjoy the view of distant meteor shower before returning to his engine.
Moscow, Russia
Dr. Daniel Jackson stepped outside from the diplomatic function. Ever since he helped negotiate the deal to rent the Russian's Stargate, he'd been invited to these things to "foster good relations" between countries. Turning his face to the sun, he took in a deep breath before getting his head back in the game. Opening his eyes, he watched a small fiery ball trailing smoke fall to earth a few miles outside the city.
"Probably an old satellite or something," he mused to himself before heading back in.
Honolulu, Hawaii
Master Chief Walter Harriman enjoyed vacation. He'd 'gone native' in his blue and orange Hawaiian shirt complete with a lei. Lounging in a beech chair, sipping a coconut shell full of something frou-frou, he watched the meteor shower. One even landed close enough he could see the splash in the ocean. Briefly, he wondered if this was something work-related and not the innocent natural phenomena it appeared to be. Then he shrugged off all work thoughts and proceeded to enjoy his time off.
Area 51, Nevada
Scientists ran in all directions. Dr. Colonel Samantha Cater was doing her best to corral everybody and get them focused on the job at hand. With limited success. Researchers just weren't good at dealing with the unexpected outside of their experiment parameters.
Computers had picked up thousands of "meteors" suddenly appearing in the upper atmosphere. Not outer space, where meteors were supposed to come from and could be tracked weeks and months ahead of time, the upper atmosphere. Also proving this wasn't naturally occurring, they were falling to earth from every direction at once. Meteor tended to fly in straight lines from one direction, not this scatter shot all pointed at one planet.
If that wasn't concerning enough, her computer readings told her that the meteors had roughly the same energy signatures as the one in Ilchester, Maryland. So far, none of the impact sites had been vaporized, but Sam knew that could change at any moment.
"Dr. Lee!" she called. "See if you can isolate one of them, and get me the best resolution image you can! We need to know what we are dealing with here!"
"Bringing it up now, Colonel!" Bill called back.
Scientists froze to stare at the image of a burning humanoid shape flailing in midair as it fell before curling up into a ball to brace for impact with the ground.
"Dear God!" Carter breathed. Then she dove for the red phone on the wall. "Mr. President. We may have a Foothold Situation, sir. I recommend you and your cabinet go underground now."
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Vala Mal Doran still occasionally wrestled with her new apartment's stove top. She could cook over an open fire just fine, and had learned to bake in a wood-burning oven during her time as Mrs. Tomin. But modern earth conveniences still struck her as so very alien sometimes. Tonight, she'd gone for simple: dump spaghetti noodles in boiling water with a jar of pre-made sauce waiting in the wings.
As she cooked, a presence brushed against her mind. It was asking for help, scared and confused. It wanted permission to join with her, mind and body, until it could adapt to this new situation, this new world it found itself in.
Vala dropped the spoon and pulled a Zat and shot the air in the corner. "Not on your life!" she told it.
2016 – Number Five
General Landry was having one of those mornings, when no amount of Advil or whiskey was going to fix the headache. "Let me make sure I have this right, Colonel. You calculated when and how to connect the stargate so that a wormhole will pass through our sun, even though there are safety protocols to prevent just that happening. You will then send a payload of liquid hydrogen and helium through, an extremely expensive payload of hydrogen and helium I might add. Then you're going to cut off the wormhole mid-transit at the exact right instant so that the payload will rematerialize inside our sun. All this is done with the hope that an infusion of fuel will fix whatever is going wrong with it. Which no one has been able to identify as yet after hours of study. That about right?"
Solidly, Carter replied, "Yes, sir. Until we know what caused this, that's all we can do. At the very least, it won't hurt anything."
"Except for the bottom line of my expense report," Landry said dryly.
A tap at the door interrupted whatever reply Carter could manage. Master Chief Harriman edged in quietly, not wanting to interrupt but knowing he had to. He handed off an official memo to the general.
"Thank you, Walter. Dismissed." Landry read through the document, making everyone else wait. The more he read, the more his heart sank with the bad news.
Something must have shown on his face, because Colonel Carter asked, "Sir?" with a lot of concern in her voice.
"You might have to make those calculations a few more times, Colonel." Landry told her, fighting to keep his voice calm. "We are getting reports in from the Tok'Ra, the Free Jaffa Nation, our teams in the Pegasus Galaxy, from Tomin in the Ori Galaxy, and even from The Destiny all saying the same thing: Every sun and star in every solar system and galaxy we are in contact with has dimmed. Whatever this is, its happening everywhere."
"And all of Creation will dim. Everything will wither and die..." Daniel murmured.
"Dr. Jackson?" Landry fixed the anthropologist with the evil eye.
"Sorry. I was just thinking about how many cultures have prophecies about the end times, Armageddon, Ragnarok, so on. Nearly every culture had a story about how the sun will burn out and the world will go dark. Then I started thinking about how many other cross-culture similarities were proven true by the Stargate Program. Then I guess I scared myself. A little." Daniel finished sheepishly.
Before Mitchell could tease Daniel (as he had opened his mouth to do), the Master Chief knocked again. "Sir? Sirs, Ma'am. We've got new telemetry coming in."
The General and SG-1 abandoned the table and Carter made a beeline for the main computer display.
"Its fixed!" She exclaimed, interpreting that data as it scrolled by. "Our sun's showing full output of heat and light!"
"Well done, Sam!" Vala congratulated. "How'd you do it? For future reference."
"It wasn't me!" Sam protested. "I still don't know why it dimmed, so I wouldn't have the first clue how or who fixed it!"
"No way this was a naturally occurring phenomena?" Daniel wanted to know.
"If it was only our sun, maybe, maybe, you could convince me of that." Sam answered without looking up from her screens. "But every star in the universe? At the same time? Not possible."
"Wait," Mitchell drawled. "Someone or something saved the universe, and it wasn't us?"
Present Day
"Sammy!" Dean bellowed as the monster of the day blasted his brother backwards through a wall will a wave of its jewelry covered hand.
The monster, some kind of Egyptian god (or something that wanted them to think it was, what with the guy-liner, metal skirt, and gaudy jewelry) sneered at him. The whites around his eyes glowed, and when it talked its voice hummed with several tones, like he had an amplifier stuffed down his shirt. "Insects! Kneel before your god and I will consider sparing your petty, insignificant lives!"
Instead of bowing and scraping, Dean pulled his gun and unloaded the entire clip; two in the heart, one in the head, two in the chest, one in the head. He didn't know exactly what he was dealing with here, but not a lot of things in the world could take the hits and still be an immediate threat.
The monster collapsed under the assault.
Cautiously, reloaded gun at the ready, Dean moved in on the monster to verify it was dead.
Some kind of frilled snake sprang out from the monster's cracked open melon. Reflexes honed from a lifetime of hunting, saved him. The Colt 1911 spat out one more bullet, all but exploding the snake thing.
"Sammy, you good?" Dean called, eyes still on the monster, waiting for any more surprises.
Sam, rubbing his head, walked up beside his brother. "I'll live. Was that a flying snake?"
"Eh, jumping snake. Or something like it." Dean shrugged. "Does that jive with any of the lore you read?"
Sam shook his head. "No, nothing I read involved a snake living inside a person. I wonder what it was."
"Dunno, don't care. Its dead, we're not. Let's mark this in the win column and move on. I'm starving. Let's get this fugly salted and burned and go get dinner. I'm thinking Szechuan."