Disclaimer: I don't own Stargate or any of its characters. This story is for entertainment purposes only, not for profit.
Chapter 1
"This is odd," Daniel murmured, staring at the fresco-like paintings on the wall.
Jack straightened out from his slouch against the far wall of the "party room," as he had come to think of this particular section of the ruins they were in, rubbing the back of his neck to get the kinks out, and wandered over to where Daniel was working. It had been a long morning of doing nothing but watching Daniel work, wandering out of whatever room they were in into the flower-filled fields and staring across to where Carter collected samples of this and that while Teal'c watched her, and wandering back in to watch Daniel work. Thankfully this was a dawn to dusk mission and not an overnighter. He was pretty sure he'd go mad with boredom if they had to stay another day.
"What's odd?" he asked, leaning over Daniel's shoulder.
Daniel looked up and blinked at Jack as if surprised he was there.
"What?" Daniel asked.
"What's odd?" Jack asked with exaggerated patience. "You said something was odd."
"Oh, well look at this," Daniel said gesturing to the wall with his pen.
Jack looked at the paintings and saw more depictions of men and women, well, having fun, for lack of a better description. The ruins were part of some large residence or even a palace, according to Daniel. There wasn't much left. The planet had obviously been deserted for hundreds if not a thousand years. There were a few semi-intact rooms, half buried, some free-standing walls and the rounded tops of wells; the unnatural rise and fall of the earth nearby promised the followup research team a "treasure" of artifacts, as Daniel somewhat wistfully put it. It was unlikely that SG-1 would return.
Daniel had found some "snippets" of Goa'uld writings, which he said were nothing more than supply manifests, but there was no Goa'uld technology apparent and, Daniel said, no evidence that the Goa'uld had had much influence on the society after they had brought the people here in the first place. Daniel had been given the day to study the ruins and, if possible in that short time, try to determine why the Goa'uld had left. Carter's assignment was to search farther afield—so to speak—for any evidence of Goa'uld technology and to try to determine if the naquadah readings the MALP had sent back merited sending a mining team.
When Jack and Daniel had come over a particularly large mound of earth and had seen these two high walls with the faded and cracked but mostly intact frescoes, Daniel's face had lit up as if he'd just spied the woman of his dreams. Jack almost said something to that effect but stopped himself in time as the image of Sha're as Amonet flashed before his eyes. For once, he thought, his brain was faster than his mouth, and he kept quiet.
In the meantime, Daniel had started going on about how the influence of the paintings was clearly Roman, with a bit of Greek, "of course," and even Jack was reminded of the frescoes he'd seen at Pompeii. Like those, the ones here provided an eyeful, with men and women in various states of dress and undress, eating, drinking and being generally merry.
Still, after about twenty minutes, even those had lost their allure, and here they were some three hours later.
Jack stifled a yawn. "These don't seem much odder than the rest to me . . .well, except. . . ." Jack paused and looked more closely. "Well, except for those flying people . . . and animals . . . and the kinda, um, psychedelic. . . ." His voice drifted off, and he stared at the slightly warped images of people, and the giant moon, oversized flowers and cowlike things floating through what looked like falling snow.
"O.K.," he said. "Clearly these folks were smoking the good stuff."
Daniel smiled in response and said, "Maybe so, which is a little strange in itself. I mean, there's no doubt that hallucinatory drugs were used in ancient Rome and Greece, although I'm sure your high school Latin text wouldn't tell you that, but I don't know of any actual depictions of people using drugs and certainly none showing the hallucinatory effects of the drugs. The other sections of the frescoes here are in keeping with what we've seen on Earth of some ancient Roman art: lots of depictions of phallic symbols, for example, which incidentally, are not "pornographic" but rather symbolic of health, and. . . ."
"Daniel," Jack interrupted.
"What?" Daniel paused in his lecture to look at Jack. "Oh, sorry. . . . Anyway, it's not so much that the frescoes here clearly show the use of hallucinatory drugs. I mean it's possible that whatever hallucinogens are available on this planet became a more important factor in the culture, or maybe they were just more readily available. The size of the flower pictured here indicates to me that possibly these flowers—I mean they are all around here, right?—that these flowers are the source of the drug, so. . . ."
"Daniel."
Daniel paused again and let out a slow breath. "Jack?"
"The odd part? I mean, other than that they're stoned."
Daniel put his hand up to his head and rubbed his eyes. "Right. The odd part. Sorry." He turned back toward the fresco and pointed to a figure in the "sky."
"Look at this guy."
Jack looked and saw a floating head with large, exaggerated red eyes and a horrible grimace. Blood seemed to be dripping from its mouth.
Jack let out a whistle. "That's one mean-looking dude."
Daniel nodded and said, "And look again at the expressions on the other faces."
Jack focused on the images of lounging and floating people and gave a small shiver in the balmy air. They all wore identical expressions of terror.
"Whoa," he said. "Bad trip."
"Right," Daniel agreed. "I'd say we definitely don't want to smoke whatever they were smoking."
"So, stay away from the poppies, huh?" Jack cracked.
"Definitely stay away from the poppies." Daniel grinned back.
Jack smiled for another moment and then frowned. He stepped over the low wall at the other side of the room and looked across at Teal'c and Carter digging in the dirt. He keyed his radio.
"Major?"
He saw Carter straighten out and look in their direction. "Yes, Colonel. I read you," he heard her respond.
"Carter. Daniel found some evidence here that those flowers you're wading in might be hallucinogenic, so you might want to exercise some caution."
"Does Daniel know how the hallucinogen is transmitted?"
Jack looked at Daniel, who shrugged. "Typically something like that would have to be ingested or smoked, often after some kind of processing," he said, "but these are alien plants on an alien planet, so. . . ."
Jack gave Daniel a look and reported, "Unknown, Major."
"Yes, sir, Colonel. Understood."
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Sam let go of her radio and said, "A little late for exercising caution."
"MajorCarter?" Teal'c asked.
"Oh, sorry, Teal'c. I was just thinking that if there's some property in these flowers that makes them dangerous to the touch, then I'm not sure whatever we do now will help."
"Indeed."
"On the other hand, if the flowers can transmit some hallucinogen through touch, it's possible that there's no effect unless the skin is broken, so let's try and sanitize our hands and put on gloves to be on the safe side," she said.
"My symbiote should protect me from any ill effects, so I do not believe such caution is necessary in my case," Teal'c responded benignly. "However if you think it would be wise. . . ."
Sam smiled. "Just humor me, Teal'c, O.K.? With the naquadah readings we're getting here, it's pretty unusual that we haven't found any evidence of the Goa'uld ever having mined this planet, right? Maybe there's a reason they've stayed away. In fact, I'd better bag a few samples to take back to the SGC for analysis as well."
Teal'c nodded his head once in agreement. The Goa'uld had apparently abandoned the planet centuries before the human population died out, if DanielJackson's conclusions were correct. Yet they had found nothing on this planet that would cause the Goa'uld to leave behind a large slave population or what may be large amounts of naquadah. It was indeed a mystery, one that had caused Teal'c to be more than usually vigilant for signs of trouble.
Teal'c bent to retrieve the needed supplies from his pack. "As you would say, MajorCarter, Better secure than apologetic."
Sam smiled again, and let it go.