This is my first fanfic, so please be gentle. I do not own Stagrate Atlantis, and am making no money from this. Thanks to Bladelover for the Beta.
Col. John Sheppard knew something was wrong the second he stepped through the gate. This is just unacceptable, he thought to himself, handing Teyla his P-90 and hopscotching across the floor of the gate room in the general direction of Elizabeth's office.
It all started about two weeks ago, when a single toad had managed to get through the gate with the team who was returning from a first contact mission with a race called the Gwenarians. John had noticed this stowaway and even casually mentioned it to Elizabeth, but the subject was not truly given a second thought. On the second mission to that planet, another one must have gotten through unnoticed.
Meanwhile, he, Teyla, and Ronon had been away on a follow-up mission to visit a people with whom they had become allies and found that they had been culled by the Wraith. It had been a very demoralizing mission and they had found no survivors anywhere in the village.
But now, with the lumpy little devils everywhere and the deafening croak of a million toads in harmony, John was naturally very annoyed as he finally got to Weir's office to see a ponytail and hear a familiar whiny voice.
"Never should have happened… Enormous breach of protocol… Ignorance of intruder procedure." Kavanagh ranted.
"A pair of toads hardly qualify as intruders in my book, Dr." Elizabeth responded, annoyance starting to show through her diplomatic face.
She then spotted John and said, "Ah, Colonel Sheppard, come in. Dr. Kavanaugh was just leaving." She glared at the latter, one eyebrow raised.
"Yes, well… We'll finish this discussion later," the scientist said after returning Elizabeth's glare for a moment. With that, he departed, a determined look on his face.
Now that the office was completely free of whiny scientists, John stepped inside. "So, how'd it happen?" he asked.
"Well," Elizabeth began. "As you can see, we have confirmation that another toad got through the gate."
"Unless they're like tribbles," John put in. At her blank look, he added, "You know, born pregnant, reproduce through feeding…"
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. "At about 11:00 this morning, we noticed about five of them in the gate room. In two hours, the gate room was full, and by the time we could coax some out the Stargate, more had taken their place. Doctors McKay and Zelenka are working on the problem in the lab."
"At least there's no hair to clean up," John said, and started the long and toad-filled walk to the lab, an image of James T. Kirk covered in tribbles vivid in his mind.
Rodney was having a considerably bad day. The toad problem was perplexing enough without actually having to deal with them while working. There didn't seem to be a way to get rid of them from a single room. You could clear a room of toads and shut all of the doors and windows, but a few minutes later there would be four or five new ones populating the room. So they had to make do with the inconvenience of having toads in the lab.
"Times eleven per hour," Radek blurted out.
"What? Tribbles?" Rodney responded, confused.
"What? No, the toad population multiplies by eleven every hour."
"Huh. That's the multiplication rate for tribbles"
"Yes, that is odd."
At that moment, John walked into the lab.
"Please tell me you've figured out how to get rid of these toads," he said, clearing a path with his feet to the area where the two scientists were working.
Rodney replied, "Not yet, but I just figured out—"
"I figured out," Radek interrupted.
"Okay, we figured out that the hourly multiplication rate for the toads is exactly the same as is for tribbles."
"Times eleven?" John asked.
"Yeah. Weird coincidence, huh?"
"Yeah. And that's all you've found?"
"Well, it's not exactly easy working around these things, you know," Rodney replied.
He turned back to his computer, saw the toad on his keyboard, flung it into a croaking pile in a corner, and quickly erased, "ceewfedcfccfewwwwwwcecefcccccccccccc" from the screen.
"See what I mean? And that's not all we've come up with. As if the multiplication rate weren't bad enough, we've also discovered that the toads are nearly indestructible."
"Wait. You mean they're supertoads?" John asked.
"Yes, I suppose they are," Rodney sighed. "The first sign was when Major Lorne dropped his P-90 on one of these supertoads, and found the toad unharmed. We figured it was just a fluke. About an hour after the toads started to appear, we noticed a lot of problems with the lights. A look at the life-signs detector indicated toads in the power conduits. We opened up a section of a wall, expecting to find leftover toad flambé, but instead found a perfectly unharmed toad, sitting in a current powerful enough to stun an elephant. Needless to say, we were quite surprised."
"Shocked, even?" John quipped.
"Oh, very clever. Anyway, that was when the experimenting began. We tried dipping a toad in liquid nitrogen, but when we brought it out it croaked at us. The flash-frozen toad actually croaked at us. That'll give me nightmares, trust me. After that we tried to shatter the toad, but each of the pieces regenerated and the new toads mated, and now we have two generations of frozen toads hopping around the city.
"Maybe we should just have them toad away," John quipped once more.
"Oh, another hilarious one-liner from Col. Sheppard," Rodney said flatly. "If you can't do anything productive here, why don't you make yourself useful and bring us some lunch?"
John walked out, snickering at the toad that found its way onto the top of Radek's head.
"Ronon, stop this, you are not accomplishing anything," Teyla reasoned, putting out a hand and lowering the Satedan's gun.
"Makes me feel better," Ronon grunted and shot a toad mid-hop, causing it to fall to the floor stunned. A few seconds later, the toad awakened, looked up at Ronon, and bellowed a loud ribbit. The strangest thing: the gun was set to kill.