Hello! Wraith Headquarters, how can I direct your call?
By: Geoarchaeologist
CHAPTER 1: SHEPPARD'S BAD DAYOn a not so sunny day, at a not so agreeable time, Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard found himself at a large U-Shaped table in the so-called Briefing Room or Conference Room, depending on how involving you felt that day. That day, he was feeling not so parley. It could have just been the rotten weather, what with the clouds darkening and puffening, holding their breaths until they exploded in awesome fury. (And I'm quite aware that I just made up the word 'puffening'.)Awesome for them – the clouds that is, if they indeed thought what it was they were doing to be awesome. Sheppard would have disagreed with them, the clouds that is, if that's what they thought, because he didn't think it was awesome at all. They, the clouds that is, worked up the ocean with fierce winds and rain until it just sloshed about chaotically, abjectly informing any human that happened to be riding along on flat board-like objects that they better shove off. Which is exactly what Sheppard found himself doing.
To make matters worse, and Sheppard had to admit that blaming the clouds was probably silly, though satisfying; four angry objects followed him to shore. The four objects were alive and happened to look like fluffy happy pillows, complete with frilly lace trimming that came straight from your Granny Mabel's couch. Of course Sheppard knew this were not the case; he didn't have a Granny Mabel. It was a good thing this line of thought was occurring to him, because just then the fluffy happy pillows had big scary mouths with gnashing dagger teeth. They just wanted his surfboard, not Sheppard himself. But they weren't about to go into negotiations about it and in fact didn't even inform Sheppard of their plans. They just took the surfboard and flopped their pillowy selves upon it and sailed off, gnawing the boarding along the way.
Yes. It had been a wretched day indeed. Dr. Elizabeth Weir, standing before them in the Briefing Room with her arms interminably folded, could brief them all she wanted, until her mouth oozed with briefingness and she sank and died of it; Sheppard would not conference. Absolutely not. So he demanded silently that it would be a briefing. A man who had just lost his only love, a surfboard that shone like the glitter of stars and had ridden the waters of time, to a group of ravenous upsetting pillows with teeth, was not a man in any sort of state to parley in a conference. Unless they wanted to hear his heart-wrenching story.
Hm.
"My surfboard was just carried off, eaten and probably destroyed by grandma's pillows in the ocean this morning!" Sheppard burst out, no longer able to contain himself.
Weir had a finger in mid-air, about to begin the meeting – in which happened to be more of a briefing than a conference, so Sheppard really had just made a fool out of himself for nothing, and stopped in surprise. She cleared her throat in a sort of confused stammer, the sort you let gurgle for as long as seems normal because you're in the midst of trying to figure out just how the hell to respond to an outlandish comment like that.
Teyla, who really only had sensible and logical things to say, was the first to speak: "Colonel, are you feeling okay?"
"No!" Sheppard informed her, as well as the rest of the team. "Because my surfboard was just carried off, eaten and probably destroyed by grandma's pillows in the ocean this morning!"
"You've said that twice now," McKay leaned back into his seat with that half-closed lids, drawling sort of look that tells us McKay has just come up with some nicely clever waspish retorts. "Which means," he snapped a finger, "You obviously didn't find anything wrong the first time you said it." A concerning look came over him.
"What's wrong is that my surfboard was just carried off, eaten and probably destroyed by grandma's pillows in the ocean this morning! Are my devastating qualms falling on deaf ears? Or what. Because it's for this very reason that I'm not in the mood to discuss anything today. So this better not be a conference."
Weir cleared her throat again, wished she had some papers to shuffle, and stared at her laptop as if she were deeply involved with something important – which she wasn't. Finally she stood back up and said, "It's not really a conference, Colonel, so…anyway, today's agenda…is the Wraith."
"Again?" Sheppard sighed in a depressed sort of way. It was mostly the surfboard, but the Wraith were just as bad as having been diagnosed with depression; they were like their own disease. If you had Wraith, you had bigger problems than Bi-Polarism, my friend. In fact, you might even wish you were Bi-Polar, too, as well as Wraith. At least then, you'd have some really gleefully happy moments of the day. With Wraith, it was just frown after frown after run-like-hell and then frown some more.
"Now what?" McKay drummed his fingers impatiently on the table, clearly having better things to do than get all depressed and worried about the Wraith – though Sheppard would have a hard time choosing between quantum mechanics and death by Wraith, they seemed pretty equal in the degree of suffering. "We just sent them running back to Wraith-Land or wherever it is they came from, how could we possibly need to worry about them today. Can't we just have one day off? Don't they have Wraith holidays? Where they take a break from the daily monotony of killing thousands of innocent people?"
"Well, incidentally, I was just wondering about that," Weir grinned, while frightening Sheppard and his team.
"What – about asking the Wraith when they take their vacations?" McKay puzzled.
"No, I was thinking that we should find out more about their world, their civilization."
There was a bit of a shocked paused followed by worried laughter.
McKay brushed it off completely. "The Wraith? You mean," he beat his chest like a gorilla, while Sheppard reflected how oddly well that suited him, saying, "Me-Wraith! …I doubt there's much to learn or know, and quite frankly, I don't want to know!"
"You should always know your enemy when it is possible," Teyla issued another wise saying to McKay in always a timely fashion.
"Exactly," Weir agreed. "Rodney, we've seen their technology and ships…and remember the research they were conducting on Teyla's people eons ago? To organize their system like this requires central administration; a governing power, education, and labour division. We've never seen it. I think we should take the time, while we have it, to learn what we can. I have a gate-address here within a few hours travel distance to a heavily populated Wraith world, apparently one of the main centres of Wraith civilization, the Ancients once held peace talks here."
"Peace talks?" Sheppard coughed.
"I think the Wraith lied about them – or at least they didn't go well," Weir scratched her head, "Because the delegates were thrown back into the gate as devoured corpses."
"Ah, and you want us to go there?" McKay hardly seemed surprised.
"Yes."
"Okay!" Sheppard agreed brightly, standing up.
McKay, upon seeing Sheppard's mood lift slightly, narrowed his eyes and stared at him with suspicion. "Why are you so agreeable with this freakishly dangerous mission?"
Sheppard lowered his eyes and darkened his expression. "I just lost my surfboard, McKay, as far as I'm concerned, I've lost all sense of purpose. So pack up, we're leaving after lunch."
"Yes but, why do I have to suffer as well, like I cared about your stupid surfboard," McKay was the last to leave the Briefing Room.
Another foreboding mission was about to begin; but at least they weren't going to a planet of deceivingly nice, happy people who end up really having a delightful passion for evil and stealing spaceships for the sole purpose of flying them into brick walls. A good thing indeed. Don't know how much more of that I could take. You'd think they'd take a hint by now.
