A/N: I know this chapter is a bit short, not even close to two-thousand words like my usual ones, but I found it quite pointless to stretch it out further. I hope next chapter will be a bit longer. I'm trying to turn this story into a humorous one, and I was wondering if it was working. Please leave a review/send me a message if it's bad.
Reviews are welcome!
Chapter 3
"So, with that set, I think you'll have a few more hours before you should return home." General Hammond concluded.
"All-right. Thank you, General." Michael said.
"Dismissed."
The whole group consisting of SG-1 and the two small boys left the conference room.
"So, what do you want to do?" Sam asked the boys that were walking alongside her through the corridors of the SGC.
"Well, I don't know about Malcolm, but I'm hungry." Michael said.
"Yeah, me too." Malcolm added.
"All-right. Then let's get something to eat." Carter said.
They made their way towards the mess hall, ignoring the surprised look of people in the hallways. Two little kids were not a common sight in the SGC, the most secret base in the world.
"So what do you guys do here besides travelling through the Stargate?" Michael asked when they all stood in line for food.
"Well, besides going through the Stargate we fight bad guys, kill bad guys, hurt bad guys and protect Earth from bad guys." O'Neill answered.
"Aren't you forgetting something, Jack?" Daniel said.
"Oh. Yeah. And we search for all kinds of cultural and technical mumbo-jumbo with which we keep our resident scientists busy."
"Mumbo-jumbo?" Michael asked.
"Is a technical term. Used to describe things usable for keeping Carter and Daniel here busy."
"That's not mumbo-jumbo. The things we do here may be the most important discoveries ever." Carter retorted.
"More important than the invention of pizza?" O'Neill mocked her.
"Yes, more important than the invention of pizza." Carter said in an annoyed voice.
"And more important than the invention of beer?"
"Sir, you're hopeless."
"Hopeless with beer and pizza."
Malcolm and Michael, who had followed the discussion with interest, were having trouble to contain their laughter.
When they had all gotten their food, they walked to SG-1's usual table. O'Neill and Teal'c grabbed extra chairs for Malcolm and Michael to sit on.
"But now serious. What do you guys do here?"
"Let's start at the beginning, shall we?" O'Neill started. "A long long time ago..."
"In a galaxy far, far away." Daniel finished him.
"In Egypt," O'Neill continued like he hadn't heard Daniel, "some guys found the Stargate buried in the sand. They dug it up and after several years of travelling the globe and sitting in dusty old museum basements someone managed to find out what the thing did. Well, what it was supposed to do, actually, because the thing didn't work."
Whole armies of scientists had bent themselves over the problem of getting the thing working, until Daniel here came, and figured it out in an hour or so. A team consisting of Daniel, me and a couple of other guys that aren't around anymore went through, and found ourselves on a planet called Abydos.
Abydos was, and still is, a desert world, so we encountered nomads comparable to the ones in Egypt. So Daniel almost had a heart attack from happiness, were it not that he was sneezing about twenty-four seven."
"Allergies." Daniel commented when he saw the questioning looks from the two boys.
"So we figured that it was just a boring, dusty old planet in which only Daniel would be interested, until we encountered aliens. You see, the nomads we encountered were just humans like you and me. But these aliens were worm-like parasitic creatures that take over their hosts and control them against their will."
"So what did you do?" Michael asked in awe.
"Well, we kinda blew up their flying pyramid ship, made friends with the Abydonians because we killed their false, tyrannical god, and left Daniel behind."
"You left Daniel behind?"
"Yeah. The guy wanted to pick up more of their culture. And probably because he'd found himself a girlfriend there. So we returned, without Daniel, but because we blew up an alien ship people thought it was too dangerous to continue exploring. That, and none of the other combinations worked."
"Dialling combinations?"
"Yes. You see, Daniel here figured out that each address corresponds to a unique position in space, give or take a few thousand miles. So not each address has a working gate on the other end, and when there's no gate you can't dial. So the program was abandoned."
"So how come you are going to the gate now?"
"Well, a few years later some other bad guys came through, shot up a few folks and then returned back through the gate. So we dialled the only address we knew of to check if everything was ok, and where the heck those aliens had come from. So we went there after checking if it was safe, found Daniel there married to a woman called Sha're. The guy hadn't been sitting still because he spoke, and still speaks, their language fluently, and apparently he had found some kind of tablet with all kinds of addresses on it."
"So there were more planets than Abydos with a working gate?"
"Yes. We dialled those addresses, but none of them worked. Turns out the cartouche was about ten thousand years old, not surprising because it was dusty as hell and Daniel found it in an equally dusty old temple that belonged to the alien we blew up. So Carter here figured out it had something to do with planetary drift, built a very smart computer that calculated all the current addresses and we are constantly going through the gate to explore the planets the thing spits out."
"And what happened to the aliens that attacked Earth?"
"Well, they turned out to be an enemy of the alien we blew up on Abydos. That was kind of a big guy in intergalactic terms, and all big intergalactic rulers have arch-enemies. So those aliens, which were of the same race as the guy we blew up called the Goa'uld, were soldiers of Apophis. And Apophis was the enemy of Ra, the alien we blew up."
"Ra and Apophis like the Egyptian gods?"
"Yeah, exactly those." Daniel clarified.
"Apophis took Daniel's wife, Sha're, and a friend of us called Skaara, and left. And that's essentially, in short, how the 'war' between us and the Goa'uld started." O'Neill concluded.
"So we're at war?" Michael asked.
"Essentially, yes."
"What?" O'Neill said after receiving frightened looks from Malcolm and Michael.
"Aren't they going to attack us?"
"They did, but they failed. We have a barrier, the iris, in front of the gate. If they come here without authorization from our size they'll slam into the iris and die. And if they come by ship we have allies that can help us."
"We have allies too? Cool!" Michael said enthusiastically.
"Yes. The Asgard protect us from the Goa'uld. But they won't interfere or help us out in technological aspects, so we have to figure those out ourselves. Which is where you come in handy."
"Can't you figure it out yourselves?" Malcolm asked.
"We can, but it takes a lot of time. Carter here is just as smart as you are, which is way smarter than I am, but with three heads it gets easier than with only one."
"Don't forget Daniel." Carter interjected.
"Sam, I'm not from the technological department. Michael and Malcolm here are way more useful to you than they could do in my subject, I think."
"Yeah, Carter. You do the big honkin' space guns while Daniel reads dusty old books." O'Neill said.
"We have space guns too? Awesome!"
"No, not yet. But we're working on it."
"Are we close to having space guns?" Michael asked O'Neill.
"Well, Carter, are we?"
"I don't precisely know how far we are, that's up to the guys at area 51, but we're making progress."
"So you're stuck?" Michael answered.
"Stuck? No, we're definitely making progress."
"When someone says he's making progress, he's stuck. When someone says he had a breakthrough, then he's making progress." Michael said philosophically.
"Who said that again?" O'Neill asked.
"I just did." Michael said dumbfounded, the look on his face making Daniel and Malcolm almost cry out laughing.