This was written for an SGA gen ficathon and was intended to be much shorter. It's not. It's actually rather longish. Thanks to Madigirl, Sholio, and Uncleagent for their time and advice.

Sam Carter stared into the event horizon; that shimmering, placid facade from which often issued the direst threats and the most wondrous of discoveries. Or sometimes, oddly confusing statements. "Say again, Colonel?"

Even over the radio, Sheppard's impatience was clear. "I said, I need a dozen men and another life signs detector."

"If I had a nickel for every time I've said that," she muttered quietly, tossing a smile at Chuck. He tossed back a slightly scandalized look. Boy, you take over running a flying city in another galaxy and suddenly you're not allowed a sense of humor.

"Before that, Colonel," Sam clarified. "What did you say about McKay?"

"I said, we've lost him. We can't find McKay!"

Sam shook her head, hoping it would make more sense to her after that. It didn't. You lose a contact lens, you lose a sock in the laundry, you lose your keys. Rodney hadn't exactly been dangling from a key chain, right next to the big brass "#1 Gate Team" ornament, and if he were lost, a dozen people walking a grid with flashlights aimed into the grass was not an effective rescue plan.

"Colonel, you've been gone less than ten minutes! Are you saying that you managed to lose a team member almost as soon as the wormhole closed behind you?"

There was a brief pause during which Sam thought she might have heard Sheppard utter something sotto voce and consonant-heavy. "Yes, we did, and every minute we waste repeating what I already said is a minute we could be looking for him! So if you could send us some help and another life signs detector, we—"

"I'm not... wait. Why do you need another life signs detector?"

Teyla answered this time, quickly, as though anxious to be the first to respond. "The life signs detector was with Dr. McKay when he disappeared, Colonel."

"Ah."

"If we're all clear on the distribution of equipment now," interjected Sheppard's voice, "I'd like you to send Lorne's team and some—"

"Colonel Sheppard," she interrupted, beginning to lose patience herself, "I'm not sending another man until I have a clearer picture of exactly what happened to the one we're missing."

There was an explosive sigh from the other end; Sam had a vivid mental image of Sheppard biting the mike off his radio earpiece, spitting it onto the ground, and severing the gate connection. He'd never actually been insubordinate to her since she'd assumed command of Atlantis, but she now sensed the side of him that had littered Sheppard's Air Force career with official reprimands and, more discreetly, more than one CO's medically compelled mental health leave.

She made a decision. "You and your remaining team members come on back, Colonel. I'll post a small team of Marines at the gate to watch for Dr. McKay."

The briefing lacked that feeling of casual laziness Sheppard usually tended to project.

"We were exploring the area." The colonel recounted the events with the haste of a boy explaining to his parents the plot of a movie while his friends wait at the door to the theater where the sequel is seconds from starting. "Rodney noticed some energy readings that didn't seem to fit, so we'd spread out a little. Something tripped me up and I hit the ground. When we got back up, Rodney wasn't there."

Sam frowned. "You tripped, and everyone fell?" Sheppard's team was legendary for their bond, but this seemed extreme.

Teyla leaped in before Sheppard's open mouth could spew something that would only complicate this meeting. "Whatever tripped Colonel Sheppard apparently tripped me, as well. One moment I was walking forward, the next I was face down in the grass."

Sam nodded and looked to Ronon, reclining dangerously in the office chair for which he looked so ill-suited. For a few seconds he simply returned her stare, until he realized she was seeking his confirmation of the experience. He didn't quite roll his eyes. "We all fell."

"When we got up," Teyla continued, "Rodney's P-90 and sidearm were on the ground, but there was no sign of him."

"Did any of you notice – when you all hit the ground, did he fall, too?"

"When we find him, we'll be sure to ask." Sheppard leaned forward, glaring. "Speaking of which, can we get started searching for him soon? We're losing daylight."

Blinking, Sam asked, "You know M48J19's rotational schedule?"

"Do we have reason to believe the planet doesn't have night? No? Then it's safe to assume we're losing daylight!"

Sam took a deep, measured breath. All three of them were watching her with urgent intensity; uncomfortably, she thought of happy domestic dogs who'd escaped from their respective backyards and begun to rediscover their feral roots. "Okay, take Lorne's team and some more Marines. Establish a perimeter and organize a search of the area. Everyone stays in pairs and keeps in radio contact with the rest of the group. You'll report back here by radio every thirty minutes."

Sheppard was on his feet and out the door before she'd finished issuing her instructions. Ronon smirked slightly as he uncoiled himself and followed. Watching their retreating backs with apparent discomfort, Teyla hovered briefly. "John believes that he missed something on that planet, Colonel. He feels responsible for Rodney's disappearance."

"I know. I'd feel the same in his position."

"I'm sure he doesn't mean to be insubordinate."

Sam quirked her mouth. "You're sure?"

With a carefully neutral expression, Teyla insisted, "It is entirely possible."

Sam nodded and waved her away. "Good luck. Hope you have a successful trip." At Teyla's raised eyebrow over the word "trip," Sam winced. "Sorry."

Spinning. Everything was spinning around him. Or maybe Rodney was spinning. Or maybe he was spinning within an environment that was also spinning. Oh, please, did it really matter which one it was? Did it? No! No, it didn't.

All that did matter was that a) he was hating it, and b) he needed it to stop. He couldn't function in such a state, and whoever had captured him would probably want him functional. He knew that he'd been captured because he occasionally heard voices and had felt hands on his arm, shoulder, or back, guiding him as they caused him to float through the air. (Floating! Him! He was floating! Obviously his captors had access to technology that could, in the right hands – ie., his – do a great deal of good.) He hadn't been harmed, so he was clearly considered to be of some value, and as such, he intended to let the relevant parties know how he felt about all this floating and spinning. The human nervous system just wasn't made for this kind of thing.

He was unable to focus his eyes, so he didn't know where to direct a piercing glare. He would have to let his voice carry the weight of authority by itself.

"I don't know who you are or what you've done to me, but I need this to stop," he intoned forcefully.

That it actually came out as, "I... I don't... wh-who... n-need... ssstahhhhhp..." was almost certainly a trick of this bizarre environment. Who knew what the acoustic effects were of a constantly spinning room/ship/planet/universe?

"What? What are you trying to say?"

The voice was impatient and sounded irritated. Indignantly, Rodney thrust his shoulders back and folded his arms.

"Oh, stop flailing. You look ridiculous," commanded the voice. Huh. He'd really thought he'd been crossing his arms. He tried again, and the voice said, "I said, stop fl... oh."

With the suddenness of air rushing in to fill a vacuum, a room – a perfectly stationary one – materialized around Rodney, who was also perfectly stationary. His feet were planted firmly on a hard floor made of rough-hewn, uneven boards under his upright form. Okay, that was an embellishment; he was actually bent at the waist and hunched like a patient with advanced osteoporosis, and his arms were extended from his body and flailing. The familiarity of this posture puzzled him until the memory popped into his head of that awful afternoon when Sheppard had taken the team out for a surfing lesson.

"Better now?" The voice was coming from behind him and to his right, and he craned his neck awkwardly to look at the woman in the room with him. "Sorry about that; I forgot I still had the... Okay, could you drop that pose? You look silly. It's very distracting."

Rodney, exhaling in rapid bursts as he tried to process what had just happened, straightened himself, turned around carefully, and tried to look suitably unimpressed, unintimidated, and force-to-be-reckoned-with-ish. He folded his arms, pretended they weren't shaking, and raised his chin defiantly. "All right, who are you?"

The young woman before him apparently hailed from Planet Biker Chick, or at least, that's what her appearance suggested to him. Her hair was shaved on the back and sides, with a dark brown ponytail gushing from the crown. The hair surrounding the ponytail on the top of her head was cut very short, about a quarter-inch in length, and was arranged in a series of small spikes reminiscent of the silver studs one might expect to find on a black leather bracelet, gauntlet, or – more terrifyingly – collar. On top of all of this, the spiked portion of her hair had been somehow colored to appear silver. Not gray or white, mind you, but literally metallic silver.

She was fiddling with a hand-held gray box, crudely constructed to the eyes of a man who'd been working with the godlike technology of Atlantis for over four years. The woman seemed almost to have forgotten him as she frowned at the device, turning dials with great concentration.

He was about to repeat his demand for identification when he was overcome by a wave of nausea. He flopped forward into hurling position, but the sensation was gone as suddenly as it had come. Straightening again, he shouted, "Hey!" rather weakly.

The woman looked up, frowned at him as though he were not reacting as planned, and fiddled with the dial some more. "Huh. I thought that would turn it off..."

The floor tilted abruptly and Rodney found himself staggering.

"Oops," the woman said, and suddenly the floor was still and level again. Well, it was still; whoever had constructed this place had done so without the aid of a level.

"All right, just what the—" But a powerful tickling sensation in his nose provoked a round of intense serial sneezing, rendering further speech impossible.

"Wow, that's new," commented the woman.

The sneezing ceased, leaving Rodney breathless and desperate for a Puff's tissue, though not the kind with lotion, because that always made him break out. (Why couldn't whoever filled the supply orders at the SGC understand that?) He gazed at his tormentor with dread, wondering how she would abuse him next.

She looked at him appraisingly, still holding the device. "Okay, I think I got it. You feel okay now? Normal?"

He did, in fact, and was therefore inclined to be irate. "What the hell did you do to me? What is that thing? And, and... and who the hell are you?"

She bristled, amazingly enough, in righteous defensiveness. "Hey, sorry, okay? I didn't mean to do all that stuff. It's not like this thing came with detailed instructions!"

He really didn't know where to start with reacting to that, so he focused on the device still in her hands. "You used that on me without understanding what it does? Boy, were you born too late. You could've been Mengele's lab assistant. Now, what is that thing?"

"It... doesn't have a name. Yet."

"Well, where did you get it?"

The woman grinned. "I made it."

Rodney's outrage had merely been budding before. Now he felt it blossom like a rose opening up in time-lapse footage.

"And you need instructions for it? What, did you assemble it blindfolded? Do you have problems with short-term memory? Are you —"

"I said I made it, not that I invented all the technology. I knew roughly what it would do, just not all the specifics. I thought it would only affect balance, but your sneezing suggests that it also—"

Contorting his face in horror, Rodney yelped, "You used me as a guinea pig? It... could have done anything! It, it might've... My head could've exploded!"

"Oh, relax. I tried it out on some other people first."

Rodney's mouth worked silently a little before producing more words. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?" The fact that it actually did make him feel better probably said something about him as a person, but this was no time for soul-searching.

The mention of other people made him think of his team, and a cold knot formed in his stomach. "I was with three other people. Where are they?"

Shrugging casually, she answered, "I dunno."

"What?"

She looked confused. "How should I know where they are?"

Rodney took a step toward her but stopped when she raised the device threateningly. "What did you do to my team?" he demanded. He sounded rather dangerous; it made him wish Sheppard could hear him right now. Ronon too, for that matter.

Sudden understanding flooded her face, and she actually laughed. "Oh! Nothing. Well, not exactly nothing, but nothing worse than I did to you. They're fine, wherever they are. I assume they went back to wherever you came from once the effects wore off."

At his look of confusion, she waved a hand and smiled as though they were meeting under pleasant circumstances. "Look, why don't we sit down and I'll explain everything."

He followed her gesture and noticed a small, simple wooden table and three chairs a few feet away. For the first time, he took a look around; they seemed to be in a one-room cabin, one not terribly well-built. A cool breeze sneaked in through a crack in one wall, and he stumbled slightly on an uneven floorboard as he moved to take a seat across from this puzzling woman.

She had the device on the table and was eager to explain how it worked. "It seems to have a variety of effects on the subject, allowing me to cause vertigo, induce nausea, mess with their spatial orientation. Until just now, I thought it just affected the inner ear, but since I managed to create an urge to sneeze, I'm wondering if it also has the ability to screw with the sinus cavity and nasal passages, or oh! Maybe it works directly on the brain. It's so hard to tell, because—"

"Oh god..."

"Oh, stop it! I told you no one else I tested it on suffered any permanent effects."

He stared at her. "No, you didn't tell me that!"

"Well, I implied it. It's how I rendered you and your friends helpless. I made you all fall down, then I grabbed you while you were all disoriented and hustled you back through the gate." Seeing his face at the mention of his team, she tapped his hand in a brusque gesture of comfort. "But you really don't need to worry about them, okay, because I released them from the effect just before we went through the Ancestral ring."

"Fine," he said, no longer concerned about Sheppard and the others and not really too worried about his own safety anymore, but pretty damned pissed off by the whole situation. "Just who the hell are you, and what do you want?"

"I told you already."

"No! No, you haven't!"

"Well, I would have, if you hadn't kept interrupting."

All set to bark a harsh response, Rodney found he was, amazingly, too angry to properly articulate his feelings, so he sat back in the chair and rubbed his forehead instead. "Just tell me. Why. You brought me. Here."

"Oh, that." She rifled through a leather pouch. "I was answering your request."

He sighed. He was actually losing the ability to feel surprise. Something to do with being in shock, perhaps. "What request?"

She stopped rummaging long enough to flash a look his way, the kind of look that teenagers have been giving parents for decades – the "I guess senility is setting in" look.

A spark of indignation was generated, but all he could manage was, "Sorry, I just don't remember asking you for anything, which is probably because until today, I didn't know you existed."

She rolled her eyes. "I know you weren't asking me specifically. I'm talking about this." She slapped a piece of paper – 8 1/2" by 11" – onto the tabletop and looked at him questioningly. "This was open to anyone, right?"

Staring at the paper, upon which was printed a picture of Rodney and some text, Rodney felt his anger shift and sort of crystallize. "Oh. My. God." He turned his face toward the ceiling, which he noticed would be leaking if it were raining right now, and bellowed, "Sheppard! You ass!"

Huh. Guess he wasn't too angry to articulate it.