Warnings: Some bad language. Violence, but not graphic.
Summary : Blair is in the Avatar program and is paired with a human soldier, Jim Ellison. They find that he is Cha'la'lei (a Sentinel) and endeavor to find out what that means for them and for the Omaticaya.

Author's Notes: This is somewhere between a Sentinel/Avatar Crossover, a Sentinel/Avatar Fusion, and a just plain AU with bits of both. Some characters are more or less the same, some are a little different and some are simply made up. Any differences in this story from either Sentinel or Avatar were intentional because it worked better with the story I wanted to tell, and because my muse can be dang bossy when she wants to be and this is the way she insisted it happened! How can you argue with a muse?

Author's Notes 2: Huge thanks to my beta and cheerleader, nightwing. And to my fantastic artist, PattRose1. To see her wonderful artwork go to pattrose dot livejournal dot com foreslash 302708.

Sensing Pandora

Grace and I, and a few of the other Avatar drivers, stood at a window overlooking the landing pad.

"Great - more soldiers." Grace grimaced.

No one wanted to comment. We all knew how Grace felt about soldiers, and it was definitely a discussion for another time.

We had heard that another group of hired hands were coming in today, and we were all a little curious about who, and how many, that might entail. Scientists were certainly losing ground on this expedition, as least as far as numbers were concerned. But, that discussion was shelved for the moment, too, because there was a commotion on the field. One of the soldiers, near the back of the group coming off the transport, had dropped to his knees and had his hands over his ears.

"What the shit is that about?"Norm, one of the avatar drivers, asked.

"Beats me," I answered. "It almost looks like he's in pain."

"What could be causing him pain out there?" Norm asked.

As we watched, the XO yanked the man to his feet and berated him as they slowly made their way toward the building.

"Does he have his mask on right?" Mike, one of the other drivers who hadn't been paying a lot of attention to the soldiers, asked without much real interest. One of the female scientists had joined us at the window, and he had been far more interested in chatting her up, than in sizing up the strength of the 'army' Quaritch was amassing.

"As far as I can tell," I answered. I was intrigued, though, and continued watching the man as the XO tore into him and herded him into the building. I hadn't had a lot of time to notice, but from what I had observed of the man before he collapsed, he walked with the same arrogant swagger as all the other 'soldiers'. Now, though, this particular soldier walked slightly hunched over, barely keeping his hands from his ears. The XO was still yelling at him, as he practically pushed him into the building. Norm and Mike were calling the man a 'wuss' and worse. Finally they walked away with a 'party over' attitude, since the rest of the soldiers were off the field, and there really was quite a lot of work that could be done. Somewhere along the line, Grace had stormed off to yell at Parker Selfridge again - not that it ever made much of an impression on him.

I couldn't quite pull my attention away from the man on the field, though, so I headed toward the main doors. As I drew near where the soldier stood with the XO, I overheard bits of their conversation.

"I don't know, sir." The man was trying to explain. "It's just that the noise got the best of me. I wasn't expecting it. It's caused a hell of a headache, sir."

"Suck it up Ellison!" The XO spit out. "There are a lot worse dangers on Pandora than a little noise on an airfield. Shit, man, I thought you had experience!"

"I do sir. I was just unprepared. It won't happen again."

"Make sure it doesn't, soldier." And the XO stomped off.

'Nice guy,' I thought about the XO. But then, it wasn't really unexpected behavior of the military types around here. I watched as Ellison made his way to the group orientation Quaritch was holding, but that didn't interest me at all. I'd seen it before, and was singularly unimpressed.

I made my way back to the lab, and to the work that I really should be doing. The closer I got, the more I heard the commotion in the lab and Grace's angry voice filled the air.

"I already object to soldiers accompanying the helicopter. There is no way in hell that I'm going to assign a human soldier to every avatar. What the hell do you think they can do anyway? Bullets don't work on most indigenous predators, and humans are bite-sized to most of these animals. What possible reason might there be for having them 'guard' the avatars? It'll turn out that we have to guard them and it'll take time from our studies. So, in case you missed the answer, NO!"

"Let me restate this, Grace," Parker was at his asshole best, "This is not negotiable. Much of the funding for the avatar program comes from the same people who run the mining program, and since we have had a couple of fatal or near fatal run-ins with the animals, and the 'people' for that matter, the people with the money want some assurances that the very expensive avatars are not just snacks for all the big-bads out there!"

"Oh, now I get it," Grace answered sarcastically. "Let's feed them the human soldiers instead. You finally had a great idea there Parker. I like that one."

Parker just rolled his eyes. I did have to concede, silently, that Selfridge had a point about the danger at least. Not six months ago, the then-new commander, Colonel Quaritch came to the planet. Grace tried to explain the dangers of the planet, but he was a gung-ho, macho bastard who took as dim a view of scientists in general – and Grace in particular – as she did of soldiers. His first trip out ended disastrously. Several of his team were killed, and he was brought in holding on to life by shear cussedness. None of us really mourned the fact that he was seriously injured, though we wouldn't wish a Thanator attack on anyone. We rather saw it as 'his own fault'. None of us are callous – as a general rule – but for him, we'd make an exception. He was just that much of a bastard. We had more feeling for the three men in his command who had been mauled to death. Oddly enough, though, the predominant emotion was not sympathy (though that was there too), it was anger; anger that these poor men had to follow that asshole into a hostile environment that didn't haveto have 'unknown dangers'. We had tried to tell the colonel about the dangers and he refused to believe we could possibly know anything that he didn't. Well, he and his men had paid for that lack of knowledge.

Damned if he didn't surprise us all though – and honestly disappoint Grace – by surviving his injuries. Then, he further astonished us by staying on the planet and in command of the troops. He even wore the hideous scars on his face – and one assumes on the rest of his body – as a badge of honor. Grace said that he was more dangerous now than ever. Now he had a personal vendetta against the planet and every creature on it, and that he made no distinction between animals and people. He just hated them all. We all knew a confrontation of some sort was coming, but we tried to just live our lives one day at a time and hope that when it came, we could somehow prevail.

Now here we were in a confrontation with Parker and we were losing ground. Grace opened her mouth to argue, but Parker gave her a look that told her any further arguments would be futile. She huffed out an exasperated breath and stormed out the door. 'I think we just lost round one,' I thought, as I crossed the room, passing Parker without so much as a 'hello' and got to work.

I understood Grace's concern about the militarization of the project. The Pandora Project had started out as a scientific venture, funded by Earth's government with thoughts toward colonization. When it had been discovered that the planet's environment was much too hostile for that, official interest waned for a while, though the 'powers that be' did keep a small contingent on the planet, just in case they could find something else to make the initial expense worth it. Grace Augustine had been on one of the original survey teams and had just fallen in love with the planet and with what little she could learn about the people. She conceived the Avatar project, and came up with the money and the scientists to make it a reality.

It was an amazing idea. We combined human DNA with that of the indigenous population and grew something that looked like them that we could control, or 'drive' from our lab. It took about six weeks to grow an avatar body, and it was insanely expensive to do so, which was why there were very few of us. Grace was always looking for money to fund more avatars, and had finally come up with the funds for two more. We just didn't know yet who those two drivers would be. The entire idea was pure genius, though. In the avatar body, we didn't need a breathing mask, we were better proportioned for the environment at about twice the height of humans, and we were more likely to be accepted by the natives, which was as much Grace's goal as learning about the science of the planet.

On the acceptance front, though, we'd only had limited success by that point. Grace had established a school and had even managed to get the children and some young adults to attend. The older adults refused to admit that there was anything we could teach them that they needed to know. The more I learned about the planet – and especially the people – the more I actually agreed with them on that point. Grace mostly agreed with it too, but had seen the school as a means of cultural exchange (in both directions) more than just 'us' teaching 'them', but we hadn't really convinced the adults of that yet.

We had a good thing going for a while. The avatars mingled with the indigenous population – as much as they would let us – and needed very little in the way of protection. That is, until the few humans that Earth's government had left on Pandora, had found a rare mineral – with the ludicrous name of 'unobtainium' – on the planet in an abundance never found elsewhere. Suddenly, the 'powers that be' were interested in Pandora again, and the 'soldiers' started to pour in.

Machines started strip-mining uninhabited parts of the planet, but Grace had said what we were thinking. "That won't hold them for long."

Parker Selfridge was in charge of the unobtainium project, and, while he was an asshole who only cared about the bottom line, he had left the avatar project alone, for the most part. The only change he made, at first, was that we now needed a human security contingent along with us anytime we ventured off-base…hence, more soldiers of fortune who were ex-military or from other walks of life; but, according to Grace, anyone with a gun was a 'soldier' and she took a very dim view of them. Now that Quaritch was in charge of the military contingent, things are starting to change again, and not for the better. This latest change would put soldiers with every Avatar. No one really thought that Quaritch, or Selfridge for that matter, really believed there was any need or any advantage to having the soldiers there. It was a power play, to show us that they were in charge, and an excuse to bring more 'soldiers' to the planet. It rankled all of us, Grace in particular, but at this time, we couldn't really see what we could do about it. All we could do was hope that at some point in the future, a way to fight this militarization process would present itself - preferably before there were enough soldiers to escalate an already tense situation to a full scale war.

TBC