MoonGate: Part I
Ancient Moon
Chapter 3
Disclaimer: Sailor Moon created by Naoko Takeuchi and owned by Naoko Takeuchi and Kodansha. Stargate is property of MGM
Spoilers: Sailor Moon to the end of the Dreams arc in the manga (that means, for those who only know Sailor Moon from the anime, to roughly the sixth episode of Sailor Moon Stars). Stargate mid-to-late 5th Season.
Author note: I'll be drawing the background for Sailor Moon from both manga and (original) Anime. That doesn't mean that I won't draw from other sources (live action series, musical, videogames, etc.)
A.N. 2: I would appreciate feedback on the story, on how could be improved, or in things that I have gotten wrong.
A.N. 3: this chapter is mostly exposition, so you are forewarned.
Cheyenne Mountain. Briefing Room
"Sorry, I know that I'm late..." Daniel Jackson started to say when he entered the briefing room, only to find that the only people there were Jack O'Neill and Jacob Carter, who were talking about old acquaintances.
"On time, for once." Said Jack, looking at the clock.
"And hello to you also, Jack." Said Daniel, who then looked to Sam's father "Jacob, Selmak"
"Hello, Daniel." Said Jacob "Selmak is also glad to see you, but he is weary from the voyage."
"Ok, now that that is out of the way, where are the rest?" asked Daniel, as he was sitting.
"Sam is gonna be late, she has to prepare something for the briefing, the general got a call from the Pentagon and Teal'c is in the restroom." Said Jack, turning to face the archeologist "So, tell me, space monkey, I heard that they found our missing people."
"Jack, the situation is a bit more complex than that, and I think that we should wait for Sam, to explain this better." Said Daniel "In fact..."
Whatever Daniel was going to say was interrupted by Sam entering the room, carrying a laptop, with Teal'c and a dark-haired woman in pale make-up, black lipstick, black clothes and a incongruously white labcoat, in tow.
"Where is General Hammond?" asked Sam, who clearly expected the commanding officer of the SGC to be there, absently rubbing a small, white pendant she was wearing, while the other woman started to connect the laptop to the screen in the briefing room, and Teal'c sat in his usual place.
"No idea." Said Jack "Probably some pencil pusher in the Pentagon raised a ruckus about how much we spend in toilet paper."
"Or the reason why they are hiring archeologists to work in Deep Space Telemetry." Said Daniel, rolling his eyes "Military bureaucracy can be orders of magnitude worse than anything that I have found in academic circles, something that I would have never thought possible."
"I wouldn't go that far, Doctor Jackson. Although, this time it has a relation to our case." Said General Hammond entering the room, which prompted everybody to rise from their seats. "At ease, gentlemen."
When they went back to their chairs, and the goth woman sat besides Carter, Hammond started to explain the situation for the benefit of those who hadn't been informed of it yet.
"As you probably already know, at 09:12 AM, SG17 and SG19 were sent to P7X-326. They were escorting a team of civilian specialists to study the anomalous magnetic field of the planet."
"And things went South." Said Jack, rolling his eyes "As they always do."
"Yes, Colonel, the situation went South, as you have put it, when they were ambushed by Anubis' Jaffa." Said Hammond, which prompted a grimace on Jack's face. This new Goa'uld was proving to be a greater nuisance than Apophis had ever been "Colonel Keller, commanding officer of the SG17 was killed in the first ambush. Major Dixon took command of the situation and ordered a retreat to the Gate. Under heavy fire they managed to return, but unfortunately Major Mason of the SG19 and Karen Takahashi, a physicist, who were the last ones in crossing the gate, didn't arrive at the SGC with the rest."
"Been there, done that." said O'Neill, realizing what had happened "I'd guess that they were rerouted to another Gate."
"That's right, Colonel. The circumstances were very similar to the ones that led to the discovery of the Beta Gate." said Hammond, who then looked at Carter "Major, would you take the briefing from here?"
"Yes, sir. The analysis of the feedback produced by the Gate led us to theorize that, as Colonel O'Neill has guessed, Major Mason and Doctor Takahashi had been rerouted to another gate." Said Carter, who paused and took a deep breath before continuing "This is when the situation started to get strange."
"Stranger than crossing a wormhole, created by an artifact of an ancient alien civilization, to go to other planets every other day, Major?" asked Jack, in a perfect deadpan tone
"Yes, Colonel, stranger than that." said Sam, chuckling, and then she looked at the other woman "Sally? Your turn."
"For those who don't know me, I'm Doctor Sally Monterosso, from computer sciences. I was analyzing the feedback signal given by the gate in the incident, specifically the parts that showed a variance from the usual, when I noticed that one of the channels that is always blank noise showed a pattern now. I won't enter in the details of how I managed to decode that signal, but when I did it, it showed an Stargate address." She paused, for a moment "Earth's"
"Are you sure...?"
"...That is not an error? As sure as I can be, Colonel. I rechecked three times, and got another person to check again twice. I even checked our logs from the discovery of the Beta Gate, and now that I know where to look, I noticed that the same event happened." Said Sally, who then looked back to Carter "Sam?"
"Sally called me to check if she had done something wrong with the records or the connections. As far as I can say everything was fine with her setup. And then, at 19:23 hours, when we were discussing that, we got a... communication from the two missing people."
"From your expression, I gather that it wasn't through a normal channel."
"No. Somebody called the Deep Space Telemetry program Public Information Office and told us that she had news from Major Mason and Doctor Takahashi." Said the General "She apparently had a recorded mesage from them. According to the message, which by the way use all the correct codewords to indicate that they are well and not coerced..."
"That doesn't mean that they couldn't have been snaked, exposed to nish'ta or some of the other things that we have found out there." Remarked Jack.
"That's why Doctor Frasier is going to go with you in the mission to retrieve them, Colonel." Hammond said "According to the message, they are on the Moon, in an Ancient underground complex, placed under a building that they have described as a Palace, somewhere in the Mare Serenitatis."
"Okay, that really qualifies as strange." Commented Jack "Do we have something about the woman?"
Doctor Monterosso denied with her head.
"She called from a burner phone, somewhere near Colorado Springs." She explained. "She totally turned off the phone afterwards."
"Okay, she doesn't want to be found." Jack said "And there is something in the recording about her?."
The goth scientist looked at the general, who denied with his head.
"Colonel, there was something, but it would be better to leave it for later, as it pertains to the weirder aspects of the case.."
"Very well, but, just a thing, if that Palace is really there, how is it possible that it escaped all the probes that we have sent?" asked Jack, sitting straighter in his seat.
"We don't know, sir." Said Sam, shrugging "Maybe it's under some kind of cloaking or sensor dampening screen or something."
"It's the 'something' that worries me, Major. I'm warning you that I'm not sticking my head in one of those Ancient head-sucking things this time around." Jack said, trying to inject some levity into the conversation.
Daniel rolled his eyes in response to Jack's jest, although he couldn't repress a shiver. They had almost lost Jack that time around, only managing to save him thanks to the same Ancient knowledge that had been killing him, and the fact that the Asgard knew what they had to do.
"So there is a Stargate in the Moon, Major, then." Said Hammond, trying to get the briefing back on track.
"It seems so, sir. From what Doctor Takahashi could tell us in the message, the complex houses what looked like an older model of Stargate, with an, unfortunately non-functional, DHD equivalent." Said Sam "The complex has also, apparently, a gravity generator, an atmospheric generator and some kind of force-field that keeps the atmosphere inside, and that somehow is still working after all these years."
"My Tel'Tak is yours, to go to the Moon, or wherever would be necessary." said Jacob, looking at Hammond "Assuming, of course that the owners of the Palace, whom the unknown woman who called with the message is presumably connected to, allow it."
"Thank you, Jacob. She agreed to call in about..." said Hammond looking at his watch "...an hour, to give another message to us and agree to the mode of the retrieval. And the woman is not precisely unknown." who then looked a Sam, "Major Carter, if you can continue..."
"Don't tell me, she is the wife of the Man on the Moon." said Jack, with the tone of 'here we go again'.
"No, sir. In their message, doctor Takahashi told us that the woman self-identified as Sailor Pluto..." Jack snickered upon hearing the name, but Sam continued as if he hadn't said anything "...a member of a group of Japanese vigilantes that are called the Sailor Senshi." answered Sam.
"The what?" asked Jack, who clearly hadn't heard of them.
'To be sincere, neither had I, before today.' thought Sam, and the said aloud "The Sailor Senshi, Sir."
"Sailor... Soldiers?" ventured Daniel.
"That would be the usual translation, Daniel. " Said Sam "Doctor Monterosso has previous knowledge of them, so I'll leave it to her."
Sally nodded and pressed some keys in the laptop, which brought several images to the main screen. The images showed a number of young women, dressed in what looked like a pervert's idea of a school uniform, if the tight leotards, the short skirts and the high heels were any indication.
"These are the Sailor Senshi, a group of Japanese vigilantes that have shown to have superhuman abilities." Doctor Monterosso said.
This got everybody attention, from the frown on Daniel's face to the incredulous look of Jack, to the arching of an eyebrow of Teal'c, something that she understood well, as the precedents were not exactly encouraging.
"Are they Hok'Tar?" asked Teal'c finally, voicing what was on everybody's mind.
"Apparently, that was also Doctor Takahashi first guess, but according to the message, Sailor Pluto, that's the one with long hair and a staff that looks like an skeleton key, recognized, after a bit of prodding, that she was an Ancient." Said Sally, which brought another batch of shocked reactions from the rest of SG-1, followed by interest in the case of Daniel, remembering Oma De Sala. "By the way, supposedly she was also the one who left the message."
"How...?"
"According to our people she can teleport, but apparently though a way that is not safe for normal humans."
"Are you sure that they are not another bunch of snakes?" asked Jack "Or maybe some group of alien con men... con women, rather."
"We don't think so, sir." said Sam "From what Doctor Takahashi and Major Mason had reported, she seems to be a bit aloof and quite reserved, but at no moment has shown any of the behavior that we usually associate with Goa'uld. And she activated a piece of Ancient technology that had been inert until then."
"Uhuh, so no grandstanding, 'kneel before your God' or 'die, unbeliever' then? That usually would exclude snakes, all right." said Jack "So, Sam, assuming that they are genuine, what do you think about them being really Ancient, hiding under our own noses all this time?"
"Given what we know about them, it fits. The Stargate in the Moon seems to be non-functional, and if they are a group as small as they seem, they may not have had the necessary resources to unearth the Beta Gate. In addition, from what our people in the moon have managed to glean, they don't know about the Alpha Gate, which was brought to Earth by the Goa'uld." said Sally, and added with an apologetic gesture, seeing Jack's expression "Too many 'maybes' and 'could be', I know, Colonel. But there are also their actions during the time that they have been active."
She pressed a key in the laptop and the image changed to a blonde Japanese teenager in a suit different to the others that had appeared before, resembling more a real school uniform.
"This was the first one to appear, more than three years ago, Sailor V..."
Over the next quarter hour Sally told the people in the briefing room a summation of what she could find on the Internet about what the Senshi had done in the last years. She didn't hide that most of her info came from the Senshi Fan Club website, which she was a member, stressing on its incompleteness and relative unreliability.
Afterwards Major Carter was asked to give her opinion.
"...my own impression, sir, given the fact that they have assumed names based on the planets is that they think of themselves as some kind of protectors or guardians of the Solar System. When we return from the Moon, I would like to do a more thorough examination of the data, to offer a baseline for their powers." Said Sam, looking at Daniel who seemed to be mulling over something in his head.
"Very well, Major." Said Hammond, who had also noticed Daniel's reaction "Doctor Jackson, if you have something to add?"
"I would have liked time to do a bit of research, general. But when Sam said they considered themselves guardians or protectors of the worlds, I remembered a text that I have been working on over the last days. It talked about a group of female warriors called, in Ancient, Anima Mundi..."
"The Souls of the Worlds?" said Sam, remembering that Ancient was similar to Latin.
"That's a possible translation, but Anima in Ancient also meant guardian spirit. If those Sailor Senshi are indeed Ancients, they may be the current versions of the Anima Mundi," said Daniel, and then shrugged "I know that this is a long shot, and that I may be wrong, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck..."
"Its' really a bit farfetched, Doctor Jackson." recognized Hammond "But I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand, your instincts have served us well in the past. Anything else?"
"It's the Palace and the underground installation, General. There are bits of folklore all over the world about visitors from the Moon, like the Japanese legend of Princess Kaguya, the related Chinese legend of the Chang'e, the Hawaiian story of the goddess Hina, and other similar legends." Daniel said, her tone almost like a professor imparting a class. "A good numbers of those bits of folklore involve people coming from the sky and/or being retrieved up into it. So, I have been thinking that, at least in part, they may hearken back to visits of Ancient from the Moon." said Daniel
"And what do you base that affirmation on, doctor?" asked Hammond "From what Doctor Takahashi said, the installation seemed to be older even than the one in Antarctica."
"General, from what we have managed to find, the Ancients came from outside our Galaxy, and there were two different waves of arrivals. The Stargate network and a number of the relics that we find seem to date from the earlier era, several million years ago, afterwards they seem to disappear all of a sudden." Explained Daniel "But the Alliance of the Four Races, and most of the things that we have found are from the later period, six to ten thousand years ago, which is coincidentally, or maybe not, the period from which we date the rebellion against the Goa'uld. It wouldn't be impossible for them to reoccupy one of their old bases if it was reasonably intact."
"So, you are telling us that before becoming the pricks that they are now, the Ancients may have helped us to get rid of Ra's ilk?" said Jack. "It's a bit difficult to swallow, given our experiences with them."
"Pretty much. But from what we know, that may had been their last hurrah before retreating to higher planes of existence, or maybe it was..." said Daniel, who snapped his fingers as he realized something "And I think that I may have proof."
Daniel paused for a moment while he browsed his notes, until he found what he was looking for, a picture of a stone with writings on the ancient alphabet.
"Yes, just as I remembered." he said under his breath, turning to face the others "In the last few days I have been trying to translate a few fragmentary texts found in the more recent known settlement of the Ancients in the Milky Way. One of those fragments, the one that I mentioned earlier, dealt with the Anima Mundi and an ancient, no pun intended, conflict in which they were involved."
He then took a deep breath, before continuing.
"Well, another stone fragment had a narration about a figure that we only know through Jaffa legends. The story was told in a vaguely disapproving tone, which may indicate that the decision to help the rebellion wasn't supported by most of the Ancients." Daniel said "It was about a woman with great powers, that they refer to as Aurora Gerula, or 'she who brings the dawn'. It was also said that the servants of the False Gods called her the Dawn Bringer."
Teal'c arched both eyebrows, a gesture that on him was practically goggling. It was strange to see such a reaction from the usually stoic Teal'c.
"Are you sure, DanielJackson?" asked Teal'c, after a pause to recover his composure
"Yes, Teal'c, I'm sure." said Daniel, and then looked at Teal'c "But I think that it would be better if a Jaffa told it."
"It's a story that many Jaffa have heard about, even if the Goa'uld have tried to suppress its spread." He said "It is said that in the first world, when the Gods reigned, a woman appeared, a mighty warrior that even the Goa'uld were afraid to face in combat..."
"What a surprise... not" commented Jack sarcastically
"...It was said that her bow could destroy the chariots of the Gods in the skies, her daggers were made of light and could pierce even the shields of the Gods, her hair was golden like the Sun in the sky and the Jaffa called her the Dawn Bringer." continued Teal'c as if Jack hadn't spoken. "But greater than her power, great as it was, was her capability to inspire the people to believe that they could be more than slaves to the gods. Her rebellion spread, until they drove Ra off of the planet."
"And what happened to her?", said Sam, who seemed to be fascinated with the legend, without noticing that Jacob had given the control of his body to Selmak.
"Her fate afterwards in unknown to the Jaffa, SamanthaCarter." said Teal'c "If the story told something afterwards it has been lost in the fogs of time."
"I may have something to add." Selmak said. "With your permission, general."
"Of course, Selmak."
"The racial memories of the Tok'ra reach to that era, as Egeria was around during the rebellion. While she chose not to pass to her progeny many of her memories of that time, we remember that she, the one that the Tok'ra calls the Dawn Bringer, was offered the throne of Ra and rejected it," said Selmak. "But beyond that, there is not much else in our memories, as Egeria left Earth shortly after the rebellion. She heard, time afterwards, that the Dawn Bringer died fighting one of the remaining Goa'uld on Earth in a land far away from the Mediterranean."
TO BE CONTINUED...