The Dragon King's Temple Chapter 10, a Stargate: SG-1 + Avatar: Last Airbender Crossover fanfic

AN: I take no credit for the Blinkenlichten, or for the lines taken from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Warning for swearing in this chapter. Certain situations demanded a more… emotively succinct form of eloquence.

THE DRAGON-KING'S TEMPLE

Chapter Ten

~Even the Dragon-King's temple floods.~

Time meant nothing to it. But it remembered.

Remembered drifting in cool darkness, devouring anything careless enough to stray into its domain. But then it was caught. Caged. Leashed.

But timelessness meant patience. It waited, until the day its prison was disturbed.

Their terror had tasted so sweet.

And then it had drifted, freed, in this world of lifeless ice, where even the hated sunlight was distant and weak, and it could scatter itself across the length and breadth of the land. And grow.

But now...

Now the portal had opened again, opening the road to Home-That-Was. And to other places, teeming with prey-life. And bringing prey-life here, into its domain.

The ones that had freed it had died so quickly. This time, it would take its time.

In a slow eddy leisurely gaining speed, cold began to move.

~Even the Dragon-King's Temple floods.~

The relief had all the force of a physical blow. A tension so deeply set Urdu hadn't been consciously aware of it anymore escaped in a long, low sigh. She's alive.

He hadn't realized he'd murmured that aloud until Nubiti chuckled softly behind him. "Alive, and in fine fettle, by the look of things."

Going by Sanura's evil smirk at the stunned and startled reactions of the Tau'ri to his arrival, very much so. His Prime rested the end of her staff weapon against the platform and leaned on it casually, not even bothering to hide her grin.

Staff weapon. She's armed, unhurt, unrestrained… Song and scale. She actually managed to talk to them.

…Not that Sanura wasn't a fine diplomat when the occasion called for it. She just didn't like it, preferring to deal with others through gut, heart, and blunt honesty, with a few proverbs thrown in for flavor.

If rumor held true… then not unlike the pepper-haired, wiry Tau'ri soldier who very pointedly lowered his projectile weapon to let it hang casually by its strap. "Aw, you came all the way out here just to meet us?" he called, adopting the same dry, nonchalantly cheerful tone that Urdu had used. "That was nice of you."

Interesting. Djehuty's memory had all too many examples of how humans reacted to one of the Unas. Urdu recognized it now in Major Carter and Doctor Jackson – the instinctive wariness as the subconscious assessed big, powerful, potential predator. It was one of many, many reasons why Djehuty had always preferred working through intermediaries when he could, when dealing with humans outside his chosen cadre. Particularly now that he was Urdu, who was substantially more intimidating than Nubiti.

Assuming Nubiti wasn't losing her temper at the time.

But after that initial moment of startled shock, Colonel O'Neill's eyes had gone thoughtful, assessing. As had Teal'c's, although the way the rogue Jaffa had moved to cover the colonel's back showed that he knew very well what childhood myth they'd encountered.

They've met Unas before. When? Where?

Wait. With an act of will, he grabbed the concern and curiosity that was pure, academic Djehuty and mentally sat on it with Ur's stubborn pragmatism. They're here for a reason. Trade tales after you're done slapping the water.

"More that we happened to be in the area," he replied.

Sanura cursed.

Urdu's eyes narrowed. Sanura's reaction, he'd expected. She was no fool; she knew what he'd just implied. If he was out here – something had gone wrong.

What he'd not anticipated were the quick, meaningful glances traded among SG-1.

Major Carter cleared her throat. "Looking for people who vanished into thin air?" she asked.

Urdu stilled, his gaze locking on the woman.

Doctor Jackson winced. "I'd say that's a yes," he muttered, and then winced again, clearly not having expected sound to carry as treacherously well as it did in this frozen, barren place.

Nubiti looked at Sanura. "Does this have anything to do with why you've modified that staff weapon?" she asked, voice dangerously calm.

Startled, Urdu looked again, and then it was his turn to bite back a curse as he realized those were wires trailing from the staff weapon, and a charging handle protruding from the side.

Sanura grimaced. "You would not be incorrect to guess that."

Colonel O'Neill cleared his throat pointedly. "Sanura says you're interested in talking," he said bluntly, still studying them with wary eyes. "Well… we've got some talking to do." An eyebrow rose in silent challenge.

Urdu studied them for a long moment, then nodded. "Not here," he suggested. "Our sensors are predicting a storm soon."

The Tau'ri looked at each other again, and finally, Colonel O'Neill shrugged. "Well, I hear there's a cozy little lab somewhere in these parts…"

~Even the Dragon-King's temple floods.~

Her hand paused a hair's breadth away from singing metal. "Whoa."

"Toph?"

She did not eep. Face burning, she whirled and punched in the direction of Zuko's voice. "Make some noise next time, Sparky!"

"Sorry, sorry!" He blocked her punch without even trying, which was totally not fair. "I forgot."

And he'd been doing his sneaky ninja fade-into-the-background thing again, so that he could keep an eye on things while Toph's feet were locked up in these shoes. Sheesh, no wonder people felt so clumsy moving around, with their toes stuck in these things. She couldn't even feel any bumps or rocks under her feet, let alone the little vibrations that were her earth-sense.

Although, going by the echoes, there probably weren't a lot of bumps or rocks to feel in here. Everything sounded so smooth.

She could feel the movement as Zuko shifted to stand closer to her – but he didn't poke her, probably because he knew she would maul him if he tried that right now. "Solid?" he asked, voice low and quiet, with a slight dullness to the sound that told her he wasn't looking at her. Which didn't mean he wasn't paying attention, he just wanted to keep watch while they talked.

Toph made a face. "Remind me to never, ever, ever let Sokka and Katara talk me into going to the Poles." People who lived on ice that would freeze your toes were crazy. That was all there was to the matter.

"What about your hand? The wall's right there, and it's warm enough in here that you don't need the gloves…"

She made a face. "Are you crazy? I use my fingers for really delicate stuff, Sparky." Like sensing subtle flaws in porcelain, or when she wanted to get a really good read on a person, like the time she'd put her hand on the wall that Katara had slammed Jet into, so that she could pick up every twitch he made. She didn't have to use her hands to tell if someone was lying or not, but it definitely gave her a better read. She could pretty much read minds with her hands.

Which meant trying to use them for just plain seeing the way she did her feet…

Zuko was close enough now that she didn't have to be able to sense him to feel his wince, whether he tried to hide it or not. "Like clearing your ears to listen for a whisper, just in time to have a barrel of blasting jelly go off right next to you," he summed up ruefully.

Ooo. That sounded like a story. She'd have to bug him about it some time. Or, maybe not. Barrels of blasting jelly going off right next to you was generally a bad thing. And she just knew that he'd winced; she couldn't tell for sure if it was a spirits but that was humiliating sort of wince, or an I almost died and I really don't want to think about it right now one.

Being blind sucked.

"Pretty much," she admitted. "But…"

"But what?" She heard the soft shush of long hair brushing the odd crinkle-cloth of these coats they'd gotten stuffed into – Zuko never had found a proper hair tie to replace the one he'd lost in that initial capture-and-escape scramble, and the ones that Janet had come up with all pulled so tight they gave him a headache if he tried to do a proper topknot, so he'd settled for a low, loose ponytail. It made it easy to tell when he turned his head to look at her, at least.

Toph reached out to the wall again, and once again stopped just short of brushing it with her fingertips. Wow. She really needed to find the smith who'd forged all the metal around here. She'd never felt anything like it. Cool. Except… "This place feels weird," she said in a rush.

And the weirdest part of all was, that weird feeling wasn't in her earth-sense. Didn't seem to come from her bending at all. It was more like the creepy humming in her bones that she got every time the Sta-geit did its whirr-clunk-whoosh thing. But much, much softer. More like the whisper of ants crawling on blades of grass.

"…Yeah," Zuko said softly. "I feel it, too. I'd thought maybe it was just something about the caged lightning…"

Toph rolled useless eyes. "What, that's here too? Borrrring."

Boring and a little terrifying. Helping Sam and Captainlady and Schemes and Pian-Not run all over that mountain, knowing that if she messed up and hit the lightning there'd be no Sparky to redirect it and no Katara to put her back together… She'd never admit it, but after they'd whooshed the yukiuso out of the Rumble Ring, she'd been ready to sit down and treat herself to a good shake for a while.

But then Zuko had been dying, and she'd been healing him, and she just sort of forgot.

Zuko snickered a little and bumped against her with one arm – and she didn't maul him only because, as close as they were standing, every bit of the move was telegraphed louder than the Boulder's speeches. Zuko was ninja, he knew that, which mean he was doing it on purpose, and Toph believed in awarding good boy behavior. It was so rare, after all.

"It's not the energy, though," he said, sobering. "Believe me, I know what that feels like, and there wasn't anything like this in the ha'tak thing, or back in the mountain."

Toph swallowed. "Is it… you know… WoooOOOooo?" She made a wiggly-wavy motion with the hand that wasn't hovering just off the wall.

Zuko sighed in a long-suffering puff. "No," he said dryly, "it's not woooo." Sobering, he added, "I know what that feels like. And so do you, at this point."

And wasn't that a creepy thought. She was the Blind Bandit. She chucked rocks at bad guys. Spirity weirdness was so not her bailiwick. On the other hand, if bad guys chucked rocks at you, no reason not to chuck 'em back with interest, she supposed.

And she was stalling, and that was just stupid. Huffing to herself, she pressed her hand against stone, and the world opened up.

"Whoa."

The wall sang at her, a lattice of stone and metal. The stone here was older than the ridge where she'd made their cave the last time they were in this cold other-place – this place was farther from the seam where the inner fire of the world pushed new stone up. And the metal…

She'd never felt anything like it. It was almost alive in her bending, like the rocks under Omashu or her own space earth, although it didn't seem particularly magnetic. The metal formed buttresses and columns and panels along the natural stone of the wall, polished unnaturally smooth, and in other places formed freestanding screens of delicate geometric lattices like the sliding screens and windows in Ba Sing Se, only metal instead of wood, and less open spaces between the slats…

Wait. She had felt something like this before.

"Sparky?" Her voice wasn't faint. Just… quiet. To avoid attention.

This time, with her hand on the wall, she could feel the movement properly as Zuko turned his head slightly to arch his brow… Huh. She'd never noticed before, but… she could feel that. It wasn't just the subtle shifts of weight and movement, like she'd always thought. She was actually reading his chi, through the stone. Poking at earth-healing, she'd learned to tell the difference.

Sweet.

And she was distracting herself. Drumming her fingers lightly on the metal and feeling the way it vibrated, she said, "This place – it's like the tunnel under the old temple, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Zuko admitted. "Right down to the glowstone sconces that light up whenever anyone goes near them."

Ooo. Glowstone. Toph's fingers itched to poke at that, if only to get a better idea of how it related to that… anchoring feeling, that sense of being rooted in the self that Zuko'd been losing from elemental deprivation, until she'd gotten him a sunny spot and figured out the whole magnet thing.

Probably a bad idea, she admitted to herself. She felt way better after spending all day snoozing in a rock tent – other than feeling like a idiot that it had taken Janet giving up her hat for her to remember that, oh yeah, not a firebender, sunburn hurt. But she still felt… off. Which didn't make any sense. She'd been burrowed all snug and happy in a mountain from day one, she shouldn't be suffering elemental deprivation!

Gah. I'd better not be catching a cold. I'm too awesome for some stupid little bug!

Not to mention, this felt like it would be a really bad time to be off her game.

"Sure doesn't feel like a temple, though," she said, expanding her senses a little. Sam was investigating a pile of… lumpy, not-heavy, not-hard stuff. It wasn't until she actually started moving it around that Toph realized it was some kind of camping gear – packs, sleeping bags, something that smelled ever so faintly of the same burning jelly that Zuko'd used back when they trapped the yukiuso. Teal'c was helping a bit, but he was mostly keeping an eye on Sanura, Jack, and the two new guys as they stood back and made noises at each other. Funny thing was, it didn't sound like the same language that Sam's buddies all spoke. And Daniel was doing the Twinkletoes-and-Snoozles routine of wandering around poking stuff, radiating 'Wow, cool!' every step of the way.

Heh. Him I like.

And Zuko was shaking his head. "Not really, no," he said dryly. "I think the Avatar would be a little annoyed to have a temple this cramped."

"Snob," Toph sniffed at him.

"Pot, kettle, black," Zuko shot back. "And Aang has a disturbing habit of glowing and blasting things when he gets near a temple. Have you seen the kind of damage he can do to anything unlucky enough to be nearby – don't say it!"

Toph deliberately widened her eyes – she knew from experience that it made her look both guileless and just a little bit spooky. "Well, I suppose it would depend on the Avatar," she said instead. "A Sokkavatar would love this place."

Hee. Zuko was wincing and rubbing at the bridge of his nose. "Sokka as the Avatar. Toph, you have a scary, scary mind…" His voice trailed off.

Toph grinned, almost bouncing on her toes when the stupid, clunky boots caught her. Scowling, she stomped her feet, trying to get a feel for balancing when she couldn't feel the ground under her properly, and then refocused her attention on Zuko. "That's a thinking stance, Sparky," she said slyly. "Spill!"

Zuko hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged. "This place feels more like… Ji the Mechanist's lab, maybe. Or the engineering school at the Academy. It's… functional. A place to do things."

Toph tilted her head to the side. "Like what?" she asked, a little skeptically.

"What, I'm the Avatar now?" Zuko said sarcastically. "I'll just go digging around in my past lives and-ow!"

Toph sniffed and removed her elbow from his side. "Point," she said, her other hand still glued to the surface of the wall. The really, really old wall.

I don't think anyone's been here for… wow. A really long time. Which… was weird in and of itself, because she didn't feel any of the normal stuff that would say old – rust, weathering, mold, that sort of thing. It was just… old.

And Sparky wasn't paying attention. Again. Toph sighed noisily and kicked him in the shin – then suppressed a wince when he gritted his teeth and bit back a curse of real pain. Stupid shoes.

"Okay," she said, keeping her voice low even though no one could understand them, "give it up. What's up with Rumble?"

She didn't even need earthbending or chi sense to know Zuko blinked. "Rumble?" he echoed.

Toph tilted her head, listening to the sound of the voices as Sam and Daniel chattered as they went over the weird metal-and-ceramic podium-thingies and Jack and Rumble traded a few words, war-council-careful. "You don't hear it?" she asked, surprised.

"Toph, there are a lot of things you hear that I don't."

Oh. Right. Sometimes she forgot that sighted people were pretty much deaf. "He kinda… thrums when he talks. Real, real low – like when badgermoles want to talk to other families." So low she wasn't even sure it was her ears that heard it, the sort of sound that went right to her bones the way the first tremors of an earthquake would. Only less scary. Sort of.

"Badgermoles talk?" Zuko asked, real curiosity in his voice. "The dragons… almost talked. It felt like talking, at least, just – all in movement and images."

"They have songs," Toph said, suddenly feeling a little homesick. The crooning of badgermoles had been her lullabies, humming up through the floor of the Bei Fong mansion for years before she'd ever gotten lost in their tunnels.

This time, kicking at Zuko's shin with her clunky, heavy boot was deliberate. Anyway, he dodged. "You're changing the subject, Sparky. What's got you so twitchy?" Because Zuko'd been just a little weird ever since Rumble had shown up, and Toph really doubted that it was just because Snark Feng had completely forgotten to introduce them. Sheesh. Just because they didn't speak the language…

With a slight glance at Rumble and Jack, Zuko shrugged his shoulders and began to idly wander towards Daniel, who had gone to poke at a panel separating this part of the… workshop from another chamber. The move was way too understated and casual to be anything but deliberate – maybe ninja skills really did run in the royal family of Fire, because Uncle had pulled the same trick a few times. With a mental sigh, Toph took her hand from the wall; trying to use her hand to see while moving was just asking for trouble. Now that she'd gotten a feel for the place, she could at least pick up a vague sense of her surroundings through the stupid boots.

"I'd… rather not tell you," Zuko said quietly. "Not yet."

Toph kept the scowl to just a tightening of her expression; she'd had a lot of practice. "Sparky…" she said warningly, dragging each and every syllable out.

Zuko, who did have a sense of self-preservation when he wasn't, oh, jumping off cliffs onto airships or challenging psycho little sisters, pressed on quickly. "He's… different. I want to hear what you think, first. I'm not sure I can trust my instincts."

Okay. That was… disturbing. Especially since… "Not sure I can help," she admitted. "I don't know what I'm getting off him. I mean, it felt for all the world like he had giant clawed toes!"

Zuko didn't say anything.

Toph stopped dead, jaw dropping. "Seriously?"

Zuko huffed a little, but there was a hint of rueful grin in his voice. "Seriously."

"…Awesome." They'd stopped next to one of the back walls. Grinning wildly, Toph reached out for the wall to get another look around. "So what is he? And what about his lady-friend?"

"She's like him, and… I have no idea," Zuko admitted. "They're definitely not human. But… they don't feel like any kind of spirit. Don't act like spirits, either."

Weird. Which actually made her feel kinda better. This was more like the normal sort of weird.

Seriously. Squirrel. And she'd thought the bear was bad. It was the Earth King's pet, of course it would be something exotic. But a squirrel? Just… running around wild? Weird.

"So what can you get?" Zuko asked, leaning gingerly on the side of one of the podium-things and crossing his arms over his chest as he watched Daniel poking and prying at the edges of the panel.

"About Rumble? He's big." Really, really big. Big enough to impress the Hippo. And heavy, even for his size – which meant that the bigness was all muscle, unlike the Hippo. But it was a balanced sort of heavy, even if the guy didn't move like any bender Toph had ever felt. "And his heart's slower than everyone else's."

…Kind of. She kept getting a weird… flutter-echo through her bending. As if the guy had two hearts, that were almost perfectly in rhythm. And it wasn't just heartbeats. His chi felt weirdly doubled. As if one part of him were pretty much normal guy – other than, well, clawed feet, which was just kind of cool – and the other… the other was old enough to have seen mountains born.

Huh. Teal'c had something like that, too. Only way fainter. Although if she hadn't been looking for it, she'd never have spotted it through his stiff chi and weird boots. Huh.

Speaking of chi… "I think he's worried," Toph said, chewing her lower lip absently as she concentrated. She wasn't nearly as sure as normal – Janet and Sam and their buddies were all hard to read, but at least the cues were the same as normal people. This guy… how was she supposed to know? But… if she went by what she could read of his chi, and the way Captainlady was acting around him…

Zuko huffed a not-really-amused laugh. "I think we're all on edge." Glancing back at Daniel, who was muttering to himself and sounding disturbingly like Sokka gleefully absorbed in a puzzle, he added, "Except him. Is there something special about that wall?"

Toph shrugged. "I'd guess he's trying to open the door," she said, wiggling her toes in the clunky boots and wondering if she could get away with kicking them off and freeing up her hand. Probably not. It wasn't freezy-cold in here, but… definitely still very brrr.

And Zuko had just blinked. "That's a door?"

She frowned. "Yeah?" She could feel the room beyond, circular, a little deeper-set than this one, with a higher ceiling. Only one podium-thing, right in the middle. And it felt quiet, like it hadn't quite woken up the way these outer rooms had when they'd come in.

"Huh." Uncrossing his arms, Zuko straightened and stepped towards the door.

Which picked that moment to make a strange sort of chiming sound and slide sideways with a vvvvp!, into a slot in the stone wall that had been waiting for it. Daniel yelped, snatching his hand back just in time, and turned to stare at Zuko, who quickly stepped back, hands raised defensively.

"Cool," Toph said with a grin, sauntering forward – and if sauntering in this case meant a gliding step that kept her boots, at least, in constant contact with the ground, well, that was her business. She was starting to get the hang of these shoe things, at least. It was harder to see with them, but… so long as she kept her stride to more of a slide, she could get something. "How'd you pull that off?"

"I didn't!" Zuko sounded frustrated. "At least, I don't think I did," he added a moment later, sheepishly. "I just wanted to see if there was a hidden mechanism. You know, like the doors to the inner sanctuary of a temple?"

She shrugged, as Zuko ran his fingers along the edge of the door, brushing them along the odd crystal lattice set into the frame. "Don't look at me," she said. "Earth temples, you just slide the wall out of the way, like one of those shoji doors you Fire types like." Although she'd heard that the really major temples, the big ones dedicated to the Avatar, had a whole system of delicate balances in place so that if you weren't the best, you'd never be able to open the door. Not that she'd ever seen one of those. Her parents hadn't exactly been keen on letting her wander, when she was sneaking out she'd had more interesting stuff to do, and what was the point to visiting a temple to the Avatar when you were traveling with him?

"Never quite understood that," Zuko admitted. "I mean, the inner sanctuaries where only the Avatar can go, a bending lock makes sense, but for most temples…" Shaking his head, he very gingerly stepped into the newly opened room.

Toph followed, brushing her fingers against the wall to build a better picture of the place. Not that there was much. It was smaller than the outer room, maybe fifteen feet in diameter, with an alcove in the back that was sealed off by another one of those metal-and-crystal doors. Other than that and the buttresses jutting out of the fancy-framed wall – more of those glowstone light pillars, going by the hum – it was just a big circular room, with a high ceiling and slightly scooped floor. The only thing of interest she could feel was a big heavy table-like thing in the center, of a piece with the stone floor, but with metal indentations all over and something that felt like a big crystal bubble in the center.

Huh. Wonder how they got it shaped like that? Crystal doesn't do bubbles.

Zuko was glancing around as Daniel moved over to the table. "Well, at least there aren't any creepy dancing statues," the firebender said dryly after a moment. "Toph? Do us all a favor, and if a golden egg comes out of the floor… don't pick it up. It's a little cold to hang around thinking about our place in the universe."

Toph snickered at him. "Whatever you say, Dancey Dragon."

Zuko growled and mimed a swipe at her. "I swear, if I find whoever named that form, I'm going to light them on fire… Anyway. I don't think we'll see anything like that here. This place doesn't feel anything like the Sun Warriors' temple."

"Yeah, and the lack of traps is kinda a clue," Toph said dryly.

"Very funny." Zuko slowly turned, scanning the walls. "It does seem familiar, though."

"Well, yeah," Toph said, bracing herself. Daniel was leaning towards that crystal bubble with intent, and she was willing to bet that if anything was about to go boom, it would be the weird crystal in the center of the pedestal. There were laws of the universe about that. "It's like the tunnel under the temple, we already said that. Sparky…"

"Not just that. It's something else… What?" Zuko turned to face her and the center of the room again.

Daniel's hand touched the crystal.

Zuko choked.

Heart hammering, Toph threw herself into stance… and paused.

So far as she could tell, nothing had happened. No walls grinding in to squoosh them, no pits opening up under them, no ceiling crumbling on top of them. Nothing except a slightly louder, brighter sort of humming.

Except that Zuko's heart had just sped up like a rabbiroo's. And Daniel…

Daniel felt like that Head of Anthropology guy who'd helped them find Wan Shi Tong's library, the moment they realized that just because it was buried, didn't mean they couldn't get in.

Whoof.

And both of them were… staring at the air, so far as she could tell.

Elbow. Rib. Apply. "Sparky! What's going on?"

Zuko shook himself and swallowed. "Writing. Glowing. Floating in the air."

Um. Okay. That was… different. "Not spirity-stuff?"

"No. Whatever it is, it's not that. But …" Zuko hesitated, then went on. "I've seen that sort of writing before. In the old archives."

Toph pursed her lips. "Huh." Okay… that almost made sense. The old archives had led them to the ancient temple ruin. Which had led them here.

The question was, could it get them back?

"Can you read it?" she asked.

"Give me a minute." His head tipped back a bit. "Mah… ak'Sapatala? That's… something about records, I think…"

~Even the Dragon-King's temple floods.~

"Oh. Oh. Oh, that's… This is incredible, I can't believe I didn't realize…"

Heh. Don't think I've heard a Danny geek-out like this since Ernest's Planet, Jack thought wryly, his heart rate settling a bit now that he could see that the spazzing wasn't the result of, oh… grabby repositories downloading themselves into unsuspecting heads, for instance.

So maybe he kinda held a grudge after the whole Place of Our Legacy incident. The Ancients were supposedly super-advanced Good Guys who'd left the repository for those who came after them, you'd think they'd have included, oh, something to detect whether or not the hapless visitor's brain could handle it.

Or a least a warning label about not staring too hard at the pretty blinking lights.

"Mark me if I'm wrong, but isn't the definition of incredible 'hard to believe'?" he drawled, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning against the lintel as he looked around the new room. "I think you can be forgiven, just this once."

Huh. Looked a lot like the interstellar UN room from Ernest's planet, come to think of it, although the interior decorator had gone for snazzy Noveau Tech rather than somber Faux Medieval. But it had the same basic setup – circular, floor slightly lower than the previous room so you had to descend a step or two on the way in, with lit columns evenly spaced around the walls and a circular console in the center with a touch-to-play light-up holosphere. Currently lit up, although what it was showing wasn't drifting atomic structures, at least. Just some sort of 3D chart with a bunch of bouncing squiggles, along with what looked like labels in the distinctive, blocky Ancient script.

Except that, rather than staring enraptured at the floating images the way he had on Ernest's Planet, Danny had his nose in the notepad he'd yanked out of his pack, pencil flying as he muttered to himself like a man possessed. If Jack craned his neck a little, he could just make out inked black squiggles – Daniel's reproduction of the scribble Zuko had made to go on the freezer door with all the other No Touchie signs when they'd sealed up the yukiuso for the first time.

For all the good it did us.

Shaking his head, Jack said, "Danny. Daniel." Freeing a hand, he snapped his fingers. "Share with the class, Doc."

Daniel looked up from the page, eyes shining with academic fervor. "The writing system Zuko uses," he breathed. "I thought it was ideograms. It's not – or, it wasn't originally. I think they started with an alphabetic or syllabic system and started arranging them in symbolically significant logograms – which, wow, that's amazing, normally language evolution moves towards greater simplicity, not added complexity… Although I suppose some of the added complexity could be explained by the transition to a handwritten, brush-stroke medium…"

Jack glanced at the kids and almost laughed. Zuko was eyeing Daniel with the same wariness Jack would direct towards a ticking bomb, and the boy was making no attempt to disguise the fact that he was very pointedly keeping the broadly smirking Toph between himself and the explosive geekery. Which showed way more sense than Jack would have credited to a high school karate champ.

Jack was really starting to wonder about this Asunyti place.

Worry about it later. They did plan on accompanying the kids through the Gate… but first, they had to settle things here on Hoth, with the yukiuso.

And with Djehuty.

"And what have you found?" the Unas asked in his accented Abydonian. He'd followed Jack, if at a slightly more relaxed pace, and now was leaning casually on the other side of the door, very deliberately placing himself in Jack's eyesight where he could be watched.

Just about everything the guy did was deliberate. It raised the hairs on the back of Jack's neck.

He wasn't particularly certain he liked this situation. Scratch that – he knew he didn't like it. But when they'd walked into the Ancient lab and the lights started coming on, what had been a very uneasy first contact had been derailed by the geeks.

Particularly when the topic of nasty cold killer invisible thing came up. So at least Djehuty had his priorities straight on that count.

Plus, the delay meant he had time to actually watch the guy, try to get a read on him before they moved into serious negotiation.

Truth be told, Jack wasn't sure what he made of Djehuty. Guy didn't act anything like a System Lord, that was for sure. Hell, he seemed to have a sense of humor. Jack was still trying to wrap his mind around that.

Didn't act anything like the First One he and Teal'c had bumped into on Cimmeria, either.

Probably a good thing. Dietary differences could be so hard on negotiations.

Although maybe the weirdest part of all was the way the kids hadn't reacted to the Unas host. Okay, with Toph, maybe that made sense – kid was blind, after all. But Zuko…

What the heck did someone have to go through, that their reaction to a freaking Unas was to blink, stare, and the pinch the bridge of their nose in a classic Hammond-esque oh no, not again?

Then again, Daniel wasn't freaking out, either. On the other hand – Daniel hadn't been part of that hair-raising game of cat-and-mouse in Thor's labyrinth. He'd never seen the First One in all his living, creepy glory, except for a couple seconds trapped in the red lightning of Thor's Hammer.

Besides. Law of the universe – a Daniel in the glow of discovery was immune to shock, horror, and common sense. The anthropologist didn't even blink at Djehuty, just ripped the page out of his notebook and shoved it into Jack's hands. "Look!"

Eyebrows raised, he took it, glancing at the paper as he did so. Huh. It looked like Danny had taken a couple of the characters Zuko had written and tried to break them down into their component pieces. Still looked like a bunch of lines to him. "So what am I looking…"

Realization hit. Slowly, Jack looked up from the paper to eye the sharp, blocky shapes marking the floating diagrams. Looked back at Danny's reconstructed script.

"Damn," he said.

"Sir?"

Straightening, Jack moved a little farther into the room to clear the doorway for Sam. Behind her, he could see Teal'c and Sanura peering at them, along with Djehuty's other companion. Silently, he held up the paper so that they could see it.

Teal'c's eyes widened slightly. "Their writing is based on the script of the Gatebuilders."

"Sure looks that way," Jack agreed, handing the paper back to Daniel.

Sam closed her mouth, looking stunned. "How is that even possible? The Ancients were…" She made a vague gesture that probably was supposed to indicate a really freaking long time ago.

"They probably had access to inscriptions of some kind," Daniel said thoughtfully, pursing his lips. "They might even have some of the Ancient language preserved in the form of ritual language or names – Zuko swears by Agni, the Indic god of thunder and fire, and we haven't met any… wait." Daniel turned to look at Djehuty. "Are there any Indic-style Goa'uld?"

Djehuty didn't raise his eyebrow – for all Jack knew, an Unas couldn't pull off that particular contortion. But he sure gave the impression of eyebrowing at Daniel. "Indic?" he echoed, the deep, oddly resonant voice betraying nothing but mild curiosity.

"From the cultures around the Indus river valley…" Daniel paused, looking sheepish. "Um. Which isn't going to mean anything to you… Agni? Varuna? Indra? Bharata?"

"Hmm." Djehuty's voice actually thrummed with the sound, as he crossed his arms over his chest. "If there are System Lords or their kin who have taken those names, they have done so only recently."

Daniel paced. "Ra and most of his ilk took on the names of our gods," he muttered, clearly thinking aloud rather than actually talking to anyone. "But we also have examples of mythologies developing out of contact with alien races." He looked up at Jack, eyes bright with fascination. "We know the Ancients were on Earth at least briefly. Maybe Agni was one of them. He's one of the oldest gods in existing lore. So it's possible that the people of Asunyti did have at least some contact with the Ancients, in the distant past."

"Nice," Sam said. "So they can read this stuff?" She jerked her chin, indicating the glowing hologram and all the dark terminals in this little lab.

Daniel hesitated. "Um, that would be a probably not," he admitted.

"No?" Jack asked. "Why not?"

"Well, first there's the little issue of the language barrier between them and us," Daniel pointed out. "And that's assuming he can actually understand what he's reading. There's a world of difference between knowing a particular writing system and knowing a language." He eyed Jack pointedly. "How's your German these days?"

"Der rubbernecken sightseeren keepen das cottonpicken händer in das pockets muss. Zo relaxen und watschen der blinkenlichten," Jack said with a smirk, and was rewarded by Sam's desperate not-laughing coughs.

Not to mention, that was probably the best eyeroll he'd scored off Daniel in at least a week. "Cute," the anthropologist said dryly, "very cute. At least we'll all have someone to hide behind when we get thrown back in time to Nazi Germany."

Jack snorted. "Danny. That's not going to happen."

"You just say that because it hasn't happened yet," Daniel said, with all the aplomb of a true sci-fi geek. "And while we're on the subject, how's your Ancient Saxon? Because we're looking at a linguistic time gap at least twice that long. Remember what I said about language shift over time?"

Teal'c cleared his throat. "There is another consideration," he said levelly, when they looked at him. "Zuko and Toph do not know the ways of advanced technology. Although I myself speak the language of the Goa'uld, I would not have been able to explain what was written on their screens when first I joined the Tau'ri. I lacked the training needed to understand."

Sanura nodded. "Indeed. It took quite some time for me to grasp even the most basic of principles, when Nubiti set out to instruct me." She tilted her head at the second, smaller Unas that Djehuty had introduced as his advisor.

"And… well, look at this," Sam said, going into the room to take a closer look at the hologram-graph floating in the air over the sphere. "This… I swear, it looks like some sort of graphical representation of a wave-form energy transformation. This is beyond cutting edge, sir. Odds are most of it is over my head."

She looked way too gleeful to be saying that. Geeks! Jack thought, and pretended it wasn't more than half affectionate.

Especially given the implications of what they were saying. "So basically, you're telling me that it doesn't even matter if the kids can read the pretty glowy words or not, it's still not going to do us any good."

"Not necessarily," Djehuty rumbled, straightening and looking past Jack. "Zuko."

Jack winced and glanced over his shoulder, suddenly realizing that they'd all been talking like the two kids weren't right there listening. And going by the looks on their faces – sure, maybe they hadn't been able to follow the conversation word-for-word, but they'd certainly followed the fact that they were the topic of discussion. And were none too pleased about being talked about over their heads.

After a long moment, though, Zuko inclined his head in a silent go on. If it bothered the kid that he was talking to a giant horned reptile-man with sharp, pointy teeth, he sure wasn't showing it.

The Unas waved a big hand at the touch-stone console-thingy. "We need you to look for the word asura," he said, in heavily accented but passable English.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw Daniel open his mouth-

And then close it. Because Zuko, who'd been frowning as he parsed out the words with the limited English he'd picked up over the past week, had just blinked once, and then blanched slightly.

But the boy nodded curtly, and turned to gingerly approach the console, as if he expected it to bite him, or maybe spew green gooey swamp glue or some other Indiana Jones appropriate gimmick.

"Here, let me help," Sam said, ducking past Jack and Djehuty to join the boy at the pedestal. "With the amount of Gate-hacking I've done in the past two years, I probably at least have a fighting guess about how to operate this thing…"

Daniel sighed, but he yielded his position at the touch-stone with a minimum of reluctance, stepping back to join Jack.

Then he looked at Djehuty. "Asura," he echoed, keeping his voice very soft. "That's one we haven't heard before… It's related to Asunyti, isn't it."

Djehuty smiled. It was a smile with lots of teeth. "It means harmful noncorporeal entity, I believe. More or less." He shrugged. "The Ancients contained and studied such things here. As things stand, the young man is our best chance of finding the part of the database that explains how. Assuming there is one. Which reminds me." He crooked a clawed finger at Sanura. "The staff, please."

With a dry smile, the Jaffa pulled off her zaton pack and handed it and the souped-up staff weapon to Djehuty, and Jack gritted his teeth, fighting down a reflexive urge to go for cover and a weapon, not necessarily in that order. He'd had too many close calls to be comfortable with any armed Goa'uld in a close space.

Not to mention the calls he'd seen that hadn't just been close.

'Course, we're talking a freaking Unas here, he thought dryly, deliberately using the mental image of the First One to block out the memory of Daniel falling in Ra's ha'tak. Giving him a force multiplier is kinda superfluous…

Then he blinked – because Djehuty had just taken the modified staff weapon, sat down cross-legged in one of the alcoves between two of the light-columns, and pulled out…

A screwdriver. He carries a screwdriver around in his pocket.

Damn. Much more, and Jack was going to start liking this guy.

Shaking his head, Jack caught Teal'c's eye. The big guy nodded, moving to a position where he could watch both the way they'd come through the lab and events in the inner chamber.

Showtime.

Jack dropped down into a comfortable crouch next to the Unas. "So, Djehuty…"

"I am Urdu."

Jack blinked at the calm response. "Not Djehuty?" he said. Because from the way the guy and Sanura had been acting, he'd been sure this was the Goa'uld.

The Unas didn't look up from his work as big, clawed hands opened up the outer casing of the staff weapon as neatly as a Marine field-stripping his Beretta. Yow. Jack knew he'd done something similar once, under the influence of an Ancient database in his head. But everything from that period was kinda hazy. Nothing hazy about what this guy was doing.

"Djehuty is my name," he rumbled. "But my name is also Ur." A flicker of wry humor slipped into his tone as he added, "And Ur-Djehuty, while formally correct, is a bit of a mouthful for everyday use."

Uh-oh. Daniel, who'd followed Jack over, had just made a noise that sounded ominously intrigued. "Ur-Djehuty – you take your host's name?"

Djehuty – Urdu? – glanced at Daniel, that not-eyebrow look on his face. "Until our ghoti ends, Doctor Jackson, Djehuty and Ur are one and the same being. Refusing to acknowledge that would be unspeakably rude."

Jack snorted. Same being. Yeah. Right. Sam might have a few choice things to say about that. "Rude? Doesn't stop the System Lords," he said in his most casually-needling voice.

Far from irritated, Urdu almost seemed amused. "System Lords? Rude? Shocking," he said dryly.

Then, to Jack's surprise, the sardonic humor turned solemn. "Which reminds me. I owe your Major Carter and Captain Fraiser an apology."

Jack blinked and traded glances with Daniel – oh. Goody. At least he wasn't the only one listening for Twilight Zone theme music.

Shaking his head, he looked back at Urdu. "Okay," he said blandly. "I give up. You win. You're one weird snake." He narrowed his eyes slightly. "So I'll bite. Why?"

Urdu sighed heavily. "That," he said, "is a very long story. But the simplest answer is – I am very, very old, and I remember."

Remember what, Jack was about to ask, but before he managed to say anything, Urdu looked down sharply as two wires sparked under his claws. Grimacing slightly, the Unas muttered something in a gravelly tone that Jack almost felt more than he heard, then said aloud, "I miss your fingers, senet-i."

Nubiti knelt beside Urdu, lightly flicking one of the horns near his chin in what was unmistakably a chiding gesture. "Just because we don't share them any more doesn't mean you can't borrow them." Leaning in, she reached around Urdu's arms with the kind of total unselfconsciousness that Jack associated with Sam when she had a problem to solve, and began tweaking the wires with her much smaller, more nimble fingers.

Jack let them work at that for a few moments – partly because distracting people poking at volatile wiring sounded like a really bad idea to him. But partly…

"You used to be Djehuty's host."

Nubiti looked up as Urdu began slotting the casing back into place and smiled, the expression making the odd green-gold ripple pattern in her hide shift like real ripples on water. And Jack had obviously been doing the whole Intrepid Interstellar Explorer thing way, way too long if a reptile-lady looked pretty to him. Not attractive, for which the tattered remnants of his sanity were grateful – the Cute Monster Girl effect had no business turning up anywhere outside of weird Japanese cartoons. Just… pretty, in a colors-all-go-together sort of way. Aesthetically pleasing, as a certain anthropologist might phrase it. "Yes," she said matter-of-factly, pulling on her gloves again. "Our ghoti ended early, but I was Nebet-Djehuty for some time." She smiled. "I chose to keep the name Nubiti, however."

Just like that. As if it were normal to be keeping company with a parasite that had taken over her body. And what did she mean, keep the name?

Danny's eyes had narrowed thoughtfully, and he was bouncing just a bit, obviously eager to press for more details. Jack made a mental note to have coffee ready when the time came to leave. The smell would probably lure Daniel far enough to body-check him through the Gate. Maybe.

Before he could say anything more, Urdu finished clicking the case closed and stood up, holding the zaton pack out to Sanura. "You did a good job on this," he said approvingly. "It should be good for another two or three shots. I admit, I would prefer to have another battery, but…"

Sanura smiled crookedly. "I had planned to do so, but the young earthshaker's curiosity prevented it. I believe she is still carrying the denatured battery, in fact…"

Zuko yelped.

Reflex had Jack reaching for his gun even as he whipped around. His eyes widened. The energy wave-form or whatever display had been replaced by a glowing… thing… over the console. Looked like some sort of cross between… an anteater and a frog. Maybe. Plus a porcupine. Only skeletal.

Man. Ugly sucker.

Slowly, he lowered his gun, as the tunnel-vision of surprise eased up a bit and he took in the floating Ancient text alongside the slowly spinning image. "Carter?" he said.

She tossed a quick, sheepish grin his way. "Sorry, sir. Zuko just found out that the holograms are interactive."

As she spoke, the boy slowly leaned forward again and tentatively poked at one of the sections of text with a dubious expression – and jumped slightly when the image zoomed in on the creature's talons and the text ballooned out into what was probably some sort of detailed explanation, and some sort of energy charts by the look of things. Then Zuko winced as Toph kicked at his shins, clearly demanding an explanation for the lightshow that she couldn't see.

Jack huffed, letting the tension puff out with his breath. "So, you guys finding anything interesting?" he asked, strolling forward to get a better look at the image.

Sam was leaning over the pedestal, intent on some sort of screen. "I think we've hit the main archive," she said eagerly. "Looks like the Ancients were trying to make a catalogue…" She paused.

Jack peered shamelessly over her shoulder and blinked at the lines and lines and lines of blocky Ancient text. "Yow," he said mildly. "That's a lot."

"Guess that's why they called it world of spirits or whatever," Sam said absently, frowning at the screen. "There has to be some sort of organizational scheme…"

"What, you can't just have the kid look up yukiuso?"

"That seems to be a modern term in their language," Daniel said. "Or at least, it's closer in morphology and phonology to their everyday speech than it is to what you were speaking during the, um, repository incident." He pulled off his glasses and polished them, as if trying to cover the slip – apparently he'd decided that maybe discussing Jack's downloading the knowledge of the Ancients into his head with a Goa'uld who apparently had a habit of studying the Ancients might not be the best idea. "Too bad we didn't have anything about spirits come up in conversation, it would be nice to have some sort of core vocabulary that applied here, at least…"

"Try zyaayati," Nubiti said, moving to join Sam at the console. "If it's a catalogue, they must be using some sort of characteristic to categorize the contents…"

Jack watched the two lean in together over the console, Sam waving Zuko to join them again, and then looked at Urdu. "So."

Urdu not-eyebrowed him.

Jack eyebrowed right back. "You're the one who's been running all over the galaxy poking around Ancient ruins and researching spirits since the dawn of time. Assuming we're right about an über-yukiuso being on the loose – how do we fight it?" He'd save the whole business about Nubiti and hosts for some other time. Some time when Sam wasn't in the same room. Or Danny, for that matter.

Urdu hmmmed. "Most of what I know, I learned from human legends," he admitted. "But… the yukiuso appears to be what I would categorize as an elemental spirit – an energy being linked to a particular state of matter."

Uh-oh. I think I left my lucky D20 in my other pocket. This Initiative Roll could be tricky. Jack shooed the thought back into the D&D box where it belonged. "And?"

Oh. Huh. That wasn't humming, at least not the way a human would do it – more a rumble deep in the throat, a bit like a cat's purr. And it didn't interfere with Urdu's speech at all. "Fundamentally, there are two ways to fight an elemental. The first…"

"Hit it with the opposite element?" Jack guessed. "That's how the kids fought it – fire and salt."

Urdu nodded. "Both are also very traditional defenses against noncorporeal beings."

Jack glanced at him. "Fire I get. Any idea why salt?"

"Electromagnetism," Sam said absently, eyes on Zuko as he gingerly worked his way through the flickering displays, hunting down words that matched Nubiti's murmured suggestions, by the look of it. Jack was trying not to watch too closely to the various images; trying to follow them was enough to give him a headache, if the kid was going through things quickly enough.

And if he weren't… yeah. Jack didn't really want to look too closely at some of the things. Some weren't really remarkable. Others…

The spiky zombie frog-anteater was mild compared to some of the others.

And Sam was still talking. "I explained this to you, remember? Thermomagnetic refrigerators use paramagnetic salts to control the temperature. It's why I wanted that particular freezer when we sealed the yukiuso."

"Really?" Urdu sounded curious, and Jack tried to ignore the hair rising on the back of his neck. The last time he'd heard that tone from an Unas, the First One had been asking Teal'c why he wasn't joining in the Tau'ri-burger diet plan. "An interesting theory. I had thought that it was related to the specific heat capacity of salt."

If the tone bothered Sam, she didn't show it. Then again, she'd missed on the fun and games in the labyrinth, too. She pursed her lips, looking thoughtful. "Huh. That… makes sense. It takes a huge amount of energy to change the physical state of sodium chloride. I guess I didn't consider it because – well, the yukiuso was freezing things, not melting them. But…"

…and maybe the hairs on Jack's neck had been standing up for a completely different reason, because things were getting dangerously geeky in here. "Point being," he said, raising his voice just a little, "fire and salt work. So what else does?" He looked at Urdu. "You said there were two ways of fighting an elemental."

Urdu looked far too amused. But he nodded. "The other method is to cut it off from its source of energy."

Sam looked at Jack. "Like locking it in an insulated freezer. Or sending it through the Gate into vacuum."

"Exactly. Although I would say that odds are, the backlash of the Stargate activating did destroy it, Major Carter," Urdu said. "The activation of a wormhole cuts through energy-space as well as space-time, and most noncorporeal entities are vulnerable to energy disruption." He nodded at the staff that Sanura was holding. "Hence the modifications."

Sam stepped back a bit to allow Nubiti and Zuko more space, her focus clearly on Urdu now. "How does that work?" she asked. "Sanura said something about static?"

"Static electricity is the closest analogy I've been able to come up with," Urdu nodded. "It is a gross simplification, but – the entities humans call spirits constantly brush against the border of energy-space and space-time. So far as I can determine, the 'charge' that develops is how they interact with solid matter. The modifications to the staff and zat combination enable it to activate that charge, all at once." He grimaced. "I'm afraid the result is more spectacular than effective – but it does generally disable a spirit temporarily, until it can build up sufficient charge along the border again."

Sam's eyes had narrowed. "Like a lightning rod in reverse," she said thoughtfully.

"You sound like someone who has a thought," Sanura observed from where she stood with Teal'c in the doorway.

Sam pursed her lips. "If… spirit energy really does behave like static," she said slowly, with a slight wince. Apparently her physicist's soul was hurting at the concept of spirits. "In that case, then logically it should be possible to attract it, or repel it – like amber and silk threads, or floating coins, sir."

Universe saved by high school lab pranks. Heh.

Jack looked back at the pedestal with its flickering holograms – although it had paused on what looked for all the world like some kind of loading screen, or maybe a screen saver, as Zuko and Nubiti leaned intently over the control display.

And apparently Danny was a little off. Because from the look of things, Zuko could speak Ancient – or at least grasped enough to be suggesting alternatives to Nubiti in a broken, stumbling, hand-waving pidgin, ferocious looks of concentration on both of their faces.

More to the point – she speaks Ancient. And doesn't that just beg an interesting question?

"It may be possible," Urdu was saying in response to Sam's suggestion. "The difficulty is finding something that has resonance in both physical and energy realms."

"What about naquadah? It definitely has a resonance pattern of some sort."

"I have had some luck with it, yes. But correctly aligning the charges is… hit or miss at the best of times."

Jack cleared his throat. When they glanced at him, he jerked his chin in the direction of the pedestal. "That's why you wanted to find this place, isn't it?" he said. "Because the Ancients were researching no-see-ums, and you wanted to figure out what they figured out."

"That is one reason, yes." Urdu nodded.

Sam's brow furrowed. "Why? No offense, but… spirits may be common in folklore, but this is the first time we've ever come across one that, well, had enough influence to make us notice it. Why are you so interested in them?" She blinked. "Come to it, why would the Ancients bother studying them? And why the cloak and dagger routine, with making Asunyti's Gate only accessible from here, rather than just putting the research station on Asunyti in the first place? That makes no sense."

"Did Sanura explain about dur'Asada?" Urdu asked.

"Do Not Enter, Here Be Dragons?" Jack paraphrased flippantly.

Sanura was snickering. "Have you visited many Gatebuilder ruins?" she asked.

"A couple. Here and there," Jack replied. No need to get into details.

"Then perhaps you have not had the chance to observe this, but their choice of sites for their Stargates often left much to be desired," Sanura said dryly.

"Last I checked, a lot of that could be blamed on meddling renovators. And a couple thousand years." He still remembered Ernest's Planet. There was a special kind of oh shit to seeing the DHD fall through the floor because they'd arrived just in time for erosion to finally win out.

Sanura snorted. "Sometimes. Other times… well. Suffice to say, if the Gatebuilders say Do Not Enter? One is well-advised to take the warning seriously."

"Zuko and Toph seem fine," Daniel said.

"They grew up on Asunyti," Sanura countered. "And the yukiuso in your base still presented a serious threat to them."

"So why bother?" Jack asked. "Why not just shut the place down? Why study the things?"

Urdu blinked, slow and thoughtful. "If what I have been able to learn was accurate – because the Gatebuilders wished to become them."

Jack stopped mid-headscratch and stared. "…Run that by me again. Using short, easy words this time."

The Unas actually chuckled at the looks on their faces. "Not a yukiuso, obviously," he clarified. "But… at the end of their empire, the Gatebuilders became obsessed with a concept they called Ascension. Essentially, the transition from a corporeal, temporal being to one of pure energy."

Sam couldn't have looked more dubious if Urdu had claimed the Ancients had turned into the Easter Bunny. Daniel was blinking and resettling his glasses on his nose, which meant that his mind was going all over the place, fitting the new info in with everything else he knew and everything he'd thought he'd known. Teal'c had just raised an intrigued eyebrow.

And Jack found himself smiling wryly. "Worst part is, I think I actually believe that." After that incident with the repository…

Either they had a really twisted sense of practical thinking, or the Ancients' sense of humor had a lot in common with teenage football jocks who've been smoking something.

He shrugged. "So, they hung out here poking at deadly spooks in an effort to become spooks themselves. Did they succeed?" he asked.

Urdu's lip curled, flashing brilliantly white, very pointy teeth. "It appears that some did."

Apparently the hairs on the back of Jack's neck were taking up Can-Can dancing in their free time. That? Not a good tone of voice to be standing too close to.

"You study the Ancients. But you do not admire them," Teal'c observed.

"Quite the opposite," Sanura said dryly.

Daniel looked back and forth between them. "Why?" he asked, sounding baffled.

"Great alliance to fight the Goa'uld ring any bells?" Jack asked dryly.

"Oh no," Urdu said quietly. "No, my grievance with them runs much deeper than that." Eyes cool, he looked at Jack. "Colonel. You've seen how the System Lords operate. Now riddle me this. Do you really believe we could have advanced this far if that were our natural behavior?"

"With or without the cribbing off your predecessors?" Jack taunted. In part to give him space as bits of his world suddenly shifted around. Because maybe he wasn't a Daniel – but he'd hung around the anthropologist long enough to pick up a few things by dint of sheer whack-over-the-head repetition. More than that, he was career military. He knew how the system worked. And how it didn't.

You cannot have a society of sociopaths. Doesn't work. Tech requires cooperation and communication – passing on what you know to others so that they can build on it. People loyal enough to protect your secrets and watch your back.

Sure, these days the Goa'uld got that by playing god with their tech – but they had to develop the tech in the first place. And even if they were cribbing off the work of others? He'd seen Sam banging her head on alien technology enough to know how much basic knowledge you needed to even start that process.

And… Urdu was smiling at him, a sense of satisfaction that had the old Disney tune about Never Smile At A Crocodile playing tauntingly in the back of his head. "You're closer than you realize, Colonel. Predecessors. Think about it."

Jack was opening his mouth to ask what the hell that was supposed to mean when Sam's yelp broke the moment. Startled, he turned.

A new image floated over the pedestal now – if it could be called an image. There was nothing like a figure in it – just a soft-edged mass, gently churning as it turned slowly around itself. It reminded Jack of the night he'd flown past a thunderhead surging out of the clouds below, mission control shouting in the pilot's ear to pull away now, because no one flew into that if they wanted to live, it would eat them alive…

Erk. Jack swallowed. Because now that he looked closer, there were things in that miniature cloudbank shape, dipping and weaving in and out and never quite taking on a fully defined form.

Sam released a shaky breath and pointed at the image. "That's it, sir. That's the yukiuso. Believe me – it's not the sort of thing you can mistake."

"Yeah, think I see what you mean there," Jack said, slowly strolling around the pedestal to get the full effect. Not that the view changed very much from side to side. The thing really did seem to be one big, amorphous mass.

Yeah, well, still not the weirdest thing we've seen, he told himself stubbornly. And pretended that finally seeing the thing hadn't, paradoxically, made the whole concept even creepier. So much for horror movie truisms.

"So what have you got?" he asked, turning sharply to the cluster at the console – a cluster that had grown as Sam and Urdu both joined Nubiti and Zuko. "Anything interesting? Like, say, how they managed to capture the thing in the first place?"

"Would you like to do this?" Nubiti asked him, just a little too sweetly.

Jack rolled his eyes at her. "Sorry. Left my Ancient dictionary in my other brain." Or rather, the part of his brain that the Asgard had thankfully turned off.

Urdu leaned in, narrowing his eyes at the blocky text. "Try paribh'Avita."

Zuko glanced at the Unas, lips pursing as one finger sketched a series of quick shapes in the air.

"What does that mean?" Teal'c asked, as the boy turned that narrow-eyed, focused look back to the console.

"Containment?" Daniel guessed, looking up from his notes.

Nubiti nodded. "If we can find where it was kept, we might be able to learn something from whatever device was used to hold it."

"Can we not simply read the archive?" Teal'c asked.

Nubiti shook her head. "Zuko can read the script, with effort and patience. But he seems to only know the very basics of the language. And I get the feeling that the meaning of the vocabulary has shifted over time."

"But, the two of you…" Daniel said, with a slight frown.

"We know some of the language of the Gatebuilders," Urdu said mildly. "But we cannot read the script."

"Oi!"

Oh boy. We lost track of the dainty demolitionist.

Now Toph was standing in the back of the room, where another door-panel had opened up to reveal a very small room in the very back – kid must have triggered the door somehow.

Closet. Yay.

A very well-lit closet, granted, and very empty – someone must have cleaned the place out before the Ancients had packed up. The only thing that was left was, literally, nailed down – another console set into the wall, with a few shining lights on what looked like…

"A map!" Eyes lighting up, Sam grabbed the startled Zuko and made a beeline for the smirking Toph and her navigation closet.

Jack cleared his throat when Urdu and Nubiti started after her. "Quick question," he said, as Daniel paused midstep to glance over his shoulder, probably to see what the delay was. "And mind, this is just lil' ole me being nosy, but… just how do you learn to speak a dead language without being able to read it?"

This time it was Nubiti who did the not-eyebrow thing. "You already know the answer to that, Colonel," she challenged.

And she was right, too. Wasn't too hard to add up that odd comment about old enough to remember, and the way that Urdu had neatly implied that the Ancients had something to do with why the System Lords were a bunch of psycho megalomaniacs.

"Yeah, well, I like to hear my hunches validated." Jack wiggled his fingers in the cough it up already gesture he usually directed at Daniel.

Flatly, Urdu said, "It was not a dead language. Not when I learned it."

"So," Jack said, pitching his voice to carry past the choking fit that had suddenly overcome Daniel, "how the hell have you been studying the Ancients for a couple thousand years without even knowing how to read their writing?"

Urdu snorted. "Logistics, in part. Many of the Stargate addresses have been lost. Simply finding the sites can be like finding an arrowhead in a streambed." He shrugged, an odd gesture on a creature built rather like a linebacker. "To be honest, I can read it to a limited degree, with time and effort. But the skill is less useful than you might expect."

"But…" Daniel said, looking like he'd been hit over the head with a book. And not the type a Marine would be reading, either. "Archives, records…"

"Most of which are inaccessible if you cannot initialize the equipment. The Ancients were not in the habit of keeping hard copies." Urdu waved a clawed hand to indicate the lab they stood in. "Nearly all Ancient technology has… I suspect it was meant to be a safety device, or perhaps a way of keeping their technology out of the hands of those they considered undesirable. In essence – without a very particular genetic sequence, you cannot use their technology."

Jack blinked. Tried to clean out his ear. "Wait. Are you telling me they used their genes as a security lock on their tech?"

"In essence? Yes."

"…Well, that explains why we have so much trouble running the toaster." Jack threw his hands in the air. "Only, not, because hello!" He made a sharp wave of his own at the lab, with the glowing lights and functioning hologram and the light-up map that Sam was picking over with Zuko. "We can't walk into a closet without turning something on in here!"

"Then it is likely that you have inherited the activation gene."

He could not have heard that right.

"What?"

Urdu looked at him. "A small percentage – extremely small – of humans carry the same gene sequence that the Ancients used to key their technology."

Jack glared. "What, we're escaped lab mice or something?" he demanded.

Urdu shrugged. "Possibly. It is also possible that Ancients and humans intermarried on occasion, in the distant past. Earth was the center of their empire, after all."

The Asgard hadn't mentioned that little detail. What else had they forgotten to mention? "Oh, lovely. We're a race of Spocks." He waved off the inevitable question. "Point being, how the hell would that even be possible? They were…"

"Essentially, the Ancients were a parallel race of humans. Not identical to you, no, but so similar as to make very little functional difference."

In the middle of flailing its way through that utterly impossible concept, Jack's mind latched onto something that had been nagging him, just a little, and his eyes narrowed. "I'm not the only person who inherited that gene in here, am I?" He waved at the doors, the lights, the console. "Toph and Zuko have been lighting this place up, too."

Urdu not-eyebrowed. "Given the heritage of the Renegades, that's no surprise."

Hey, distraction. Jack blinked at him. "Renegades?" he echoed. "Now whatever did a couple of cute kids and their psychic ass-kicking ancestors do to your snaky buddies to get a name like that?"

Urdu looked at him. "Colonel O'Neill. You assume it was the Goa'uld who…"

His words were cut off by a hum and a flash of light.

Jack blinked. The door to the closet had closed behind Sam and the kids at some point.

Okay, note to self – make Sam watch Indiana Jones movies. Doesn't she know that you never stand in the glowing stuff? "Major?" he called, heading over to the door. Toph had apparently opened it just wandering around, the trigger couldn't be that hard. "Everything all right in th…"

The door slid open.

The room inside was empty.

Jack really could only say one thing to that.

"Not again!"

~Even the Dragon-King's temple floods.~

The first hint that something had gone very, very wrong was when Toph made a strangled noise as the door unexpectedly closed behind them and went sheet-white – and then abruptly pitched forward and threw up.

"Toph!"

In these tight quarters, Zuko had more mobility than Sam, and he was closer anyway – he'd grabbed the girl's shoulders before Sam got properly turned around, steadying her and keeping her from falling into her own mess. "Oi, sh'kari shiroh…"

Toph twisted in his grip to grab at his wrists with white-knuckled hands, blind eyes huge in her pale face, and exploded into a flurry of words. Sam suspected she'd have trouble understanding what the girl was saying even if she could understand their language, but there was no mistaking the edge of very real panic in that tone.

Zuko's eyes narrowed as he listened – then it was his turn to pale. Wresting one hand free, he twisted to face that door, reaching for it, even though there was no handle that Sam could see.

The door whisked open onto pitch darkness.

The lights went out? But that didn't seem right, somehow. True, the lab was dug deeply into the stone, probably for insulation purposes, so no outside light could get in, but… even if the Ancient power system, pun very much intended, had suddenly failed for some reason, Jack at the very least still had his P-90 and the attached flashlight.

Flashlight – right.

Reflexively, she reached for her P-90, before remembering that she'd taken it off so that it wouldn't get in the way as she began poking at the strange crystals that seemed to make such a major part of Ancient tech. Once they'd gotten through the initial meet-and-greet at the Gate… well, Djehuty didn't seem inclined to attack them just yet. And if he wasn't… She'd read Jack's report on the First One. Unas with a symbiote? And this one not suffering from centuries hibernating in a cave? A P-90 might not help much.

And bullets really weren't going to help against the threat she was really worried about.

Right.

Reaching back, she pulled out the TER and clicked the light on. Both lights, the regular spectrum and the one that would hopefully illuminate anything invisible.

No ominous blue mist, at least. But what she saw in the normal spectrum…

Not good.

No Jack. No Teal'c or Daniel. No anyone. And no pedestal, or the room it had been in.

She couldn't make out much in the narrow beam of the flashlight. Consoles of some kind, maybe. A largish room, the wall a gentle arc, with the floor next to the wall being raised just a step or two above the center – at least, she assumed it was the center, she couldn't see the right-hand wall from here.

Not in Kansas anymore, that's for sure.

So this little cubby was some kind of transporter? And apparently a much smoother, quieter one than the transport rings the Goa'uld used – she hadn't even realized they'd gone anywhere.

Though Toph did. She winced. Given the girl's geokinetic abilities… suddenly being transported somewhere else couldn't have been fun.

Which is probably why she threw up. Grimacing, she lowered the TER and looked back at the control panel. So far as she could tell, the doors had closed when she'd touched one of the blinking dots on the screen, the one Zuko thought was associated with the yukiuso research area.

Praying she wasn't about to make a bad situation worse, she reached out and touched the glowing light that she thought corresponded to where they'd just come from.

Uh-oh. That's… very not good.

At least, she assumed not. That Ancient text flashing in red over the console definitely hadn't been there before. "Zuko?" she murmured uneasily.

Looking at the display, Zuko drew in a sharp breath. "Danger," he said flatly.

Of course. Just what they didn't need.

Grabbing up her radio, she thumbed it on. "Colonel O'Neill, this is Major Carter. Please respond. Over." She clicked the transmitter off and waited.

No response, not even when she tried raising twice more. Taking a deep breath, Sam eyed the darkness.

All right, radio isn't working for some reason. There could be any number of reasons for that. They might be out of range. There could be something in the stone, or in the strange alloys used by the Ancients, that interfered with radio signals. Something about the transport might have screwed with the circuitry.

Either way, they had two choices – stay put, or try to get outside and see if the radios would work there.

Standard procedure said that if you were lost, stay put and wait for rescue. Except that anyone who came through the transporter after them would just be stuck in the same mess.

Not to mention, if they were still in the transporter and someone on the other end pushed a button… Outgoing traffic was obviously blocked. Incoming, obviously not. That could get… messy.

She grimaced as her imagination all too enthusiastically provided her with possible scenarios. How did that line go? "Enterprise, what we got… didn't live very long. Fortunately."

Why did I let Jack talk me into watching Star Trek with Teal'c?

And she was stalling. Taking a breath to steady herself, she stepped out of the transporter, feeling Toph and Zuko shadowing her movements – close enough to intervene if something happened, far enough not to get in her way, and although at this point she couldn't say that sort of combat awareness in a teen and preteen surprised her, it still pissed her off.

Although that had nothing to do with the sinking feeling in her stomach – which sank still further when one step became two, then three, and she realized they were still moving in darkness. When they'd entered the first lab, it had, well, 'booted up' almost immediately, almost before they'd even thought to look for lights.

Not so here. Raising her TER to roughly mid-chest level, she began slowly panning the light over the walls, alert for anything that might possibly be a light switch. Ancient tech seemed to be built to a human scale, hopefully they'd set things at roughly the same height around here.

Wasn't Urdu saying something about a genetic key? How did that work, anyway? And even so – she had Zuko and Toph with her, and they apparently had whatever this key was. If the lights still weren't working…

Malfunction. Related to whatever warning was on the transporter controls?

Her foot collided with something small and hard that went spinning off into the darkness with a clatter.

Before the racket had ended, she had the TER's two lights fixed on it, her heart hammering in the back of her throat. Zuko and Toph had both dropped into ready stances.

The little cylindrical thing rolled across the floor and fetched up against what looked like some sort of chair with a click.

Sam slowly lowered the TER with a weak chuckle. Ambushed by an Ancient screwdriver.

Enough was enough. As things stood, the TER wasn't helping – the light was too narrowly focused to really let her see her surroundings. All she was getting was light-blindness from looking at the narrow illuminated space, and the inability to see anything outside it.

And this place was cold – but a natural sort of cold, what you'd expect from a room that had been abandoned on an ice planet for thousands of years. It was even slightly warmer than she'd expected.

Although the air is moving. Either the ventilators still work, or it's open to outside somewhere. Good. That would give her a chance to try again for radio contact.

More importantly, there was no hint of twisting blue mist from the TER's modified trans-string light source, and… it didn't feel like a spirit was stalking nearby.

Unscientific, but after that hair-raising chase through the SGC, Sam had the feeling that she would know if a yukiuso were nearby.

So. Since direct illumination wasn't helping… Carefully, she raised the TER so that the flashlight was pointing up, at the polished ceiling, using the same trick she'd pulled with the penlight in Toph's cave, the last time they'd been on this world. Unfortunately, the ceiling was too high in here – the diffused, reflected light was simply too dim to really make out anything about their surroundings. On the other hand, she wasn't blinding herself with her own flashlight's beam now.

She was just trying to decide if she should wait and see if her eyes adjusted more, or give it up and keep moving, when suddenly their surroundings brightened further, and the light took on a warmer coloring.

Oh. Right. Feeling a little foolish, she glanced over her shoulder. "Zuko?"

He met her wry smile with one of his own, although it looked oddly twisted from the play of shadows resulting from the unusual lighting. He'd imitated her own trick, holding one hand over his head as high as he could maintain comfortably, a single, bright flame shining steadily in the palm of his upraised hand.

"Good thought," she said. Despite all common sense saying that noise wasn't going to make a difference, she still couldn't bring herself to speak any louder than a whisper. "Thanks." She couldn't help worrying, a little. He was weaker now than he'd been when they were busting out of the ha'tak. She didn't want him wasting energy. On the other hand – those little pilot lights didn't seem to take much effort. And the added illumination was definitely welcome.

Turning back to scan the room, Sam's eye caught again on the small cylindrical object she'd kicked. Frowning slightly, she stepped over and sank down into a crouch. Given that it hadn't lit up or blasted anything when she'd kicked it across the room a moment ago, she thought it unlikely that it would explode at her or anything. It seemed as dead as everything else in this lab.

She still carefully used the flashlight on her TER to examine it from every angle possible – with Zuko providing general illumination, she could afford to use her lights for spot checks – before gingerly reaching down and picking it up.

Despite her mental label of Ancient screwdriver, it didn't actually look much like a screwdriver – although, given what they'd seen thus far of advanced races and their disdain for projectiles and other 'primitive' tools, she wouldn't put it past the Ancients to have designed a screwdriver that was above anything so mundane as leverage. This item was about a foot long, mostly metallic but with a softer black material set in large oblongs along its side. The metal surface was polished smooth, but studded with buttons. One end was capped; the other opened up to show the business end of some kind of mechanism. All things considered, it looked more like a lightsaber hilt than a screwdriver.

If it were a lightsaber, that would either be supremely disturbing, or awesome beyond all words. Or both.

Although right now, she was worried about the simple fact that it was here.

So far as she could tell, the other lab had been closed down properly – equipment powered down, everything presumably boxed up and shipped out. Why the Ancients hadn't dismantled the lab itself, she wasn't quite certain. Maybe they intended to come back. Maybe the Ancients just weren't very big on ecological preservation. Maybe they had such an abundance of resources that they could write off a lab like this without a twinge.

Maybe they left too fast, so fast that they could only take whatever wasn't nailed down.

But this little gadget…

Someone had dropped this, smack in the middle of the floor. And no one had come back to pick it up.

The transporter is blocked somehow. And all the other equipment seems dead, too. As though no one bothered to shut it down properly and it just kept going until it ran out of power. Although… It was cold in here, yes, definitely colder than the lab, but for a place that had been abandoned on a frozen world for thousands of years… Either we're dug as deep as the SGC, or the heating still works, at least a little.

"Sam. Miroh."

The edge in Zuko's voice did not sound good. Sam almost set the lightsaber-driver down, then changed her mind and quickly tucked it into a pocket as she rose back to standing and turned.

Huh.

The room they were in was actually arc-shaped, the consoles she'd initially observed lining the curve of the outer wall, with the transporter set in the radial wall and what looked like another exit on the far side.

The wall that made up the inner arc, however, had been left open, presumably so as not to impede the wide gallery-style window that ran along nearly its entire length.

Although… odd. She wasn't getting a reflection from her flashlight against any sort of glass, and when she swept it along the floor at the base of the wall as she approached, she didn't see the tell-tale glitter of broken shards.

I suppose it might have had some kind of force field across it, once upon a time. This doesn't look like the sort of facility that would have reach-through windows… She brushed her fingers along the edge of the frame, noting some odd sort of metal-crystal matrix that might be a conduit of some sort.

So what were they watching? Frowning slightly, she directed her light into the chamber beyond. It was circular, with a pedestal in the center – not unlike the holographic archive room they'd just left behind in the other lab.

So why was the hair standing up on the back of her neck?

No decoration, she realized suddenly. The Place of Our Legacy had been about as somberly barren as she'd ever seen, but every other Ancient structure they'd encountered, including this lab… Abstract geometric lattices like Celtic keys or Chinese I Ching symbols forming screens and even just plain wall decoration, the elegant wall pillars that provided both light and visual detail, chevron designs along rafters that echoed the design of a Stargate's chevrons – suffice to say that the Ancients had apparently enjoyed interior design.

But the circular room she was looking at was absolutely bare, nothing along the walls to break the smooth curve – she could probably use a compass and not get a better circle. The only feature of the room was the pedestal.

Which wasn't a pedestal at all, she suddenly realized as she angled the beam of the TER flashlight upward to inspect the surprisingly low ceiling. It was more like a high-power conduit from a science fiction movie, with a node coming up from the floor and a second descending from the ceiling, not quite meeting in the center, like a broken high-tech pillar. She could just picture the electrical arcs dancing freely in the space between, the better to fling the villain into at the climax of the movie.

Or perhaps designed to hold something between them.

Sam blinked as she realized there was something else in the room. She had to crane her neck a bit to see it – a cylindrical shape about two and a half feet long and maybe a foot in diameter, seemingly made of some sort of crystal or glass, capped at either end with metal reinforcements and lined with what seemed to be the Ancient version of electrical wiring. At her best guess – it looked like it would fit into the gap between the two nodes in the center with a little room on either side to spare. Chances were, whenever the power had gone out here, the object had fallen and rolled away until it fetched up against the wall.

By now, the hair was well and truly standing up along the back of her neck. The whole set-up screamed high security.

Specifically, failed high security…

Zuko cleared his throat. "Sam," he called again, a stern tone slipping into his voice.

Sam turned to look.

While she'd been distracted by the lightsaberdriver and the containment chamber, Zuko and Toph had found the entrance to the chamber itself. Zuko was gingerly hefting a piece of… what had probably been the door. Once.

Dry-mouthed, she reached out and accepted the shard of metal as she joined them, turning it over in her hand. Once, it had probably been like the other doors in this lab; she could make out the remains of some sort of abstract design, and the alloy was definitely consistent. But it was as though the whole door had simply crashed down and shattered like a sheet of glass, leaving edges that were sharp enough to cut the careless.

Sam had seen shatter patterns like this before, cleaning up the infirmary and the lab.

"Toph?" she said softly, keeping her voice very low. Even so, she could hear it echoing slightly in the containment chamber, as the hard, smooth circle bounced the sound waves back and forth mercilessly. She pointed to the shard and raised her eyebrows, trying to think of how to ask the question in their broken pidgin.

The girl had been poking at a shard of her own, tapping it with a fingernail with her head tilted to the side, as though she could hear the damage to the structure of the metal simply in the sound it made. Between her geokinesis and a blind person's sensitive hearing, it was entirely possible she could. At Sam's question, she straightened. "Toh-joh," she said, and pursed her lips for a moment. Then she raised her hands for a moment in a me scary! sort of pose, puffed her cheeks, and blew, for all the world like a miniature north wind in hot pink.

Thought as much.

Sam fought down a shiver that had nothing to do with cold and tried to ignore the terrified little voice in the back of her mind screaming that something was coming up behind her in the dark. It didn't have the same sense of malignant presence she remembered from the yukiuso in the SGC – just the usual atavistic fear of knowing she was in the dark and wouldn't be able to see if something came at them..

Enough. It's gone. I doubt it would be hanging around down here, not when it's colder outside. It was wandering around the mountains when we encountered it.

That didn't stop her from sweeping the containment chamber with both TER lights, mundane spectrum and trans-string, as she stepped inside.

She didn't want to. But they needed to look at that device. If that was how the Ancients had captured and held the yukiuso – they needed to know how it worked, and why it had failed.

At least we can be sure that the door won't close itself behind us this time, she thought, biting down a laugh that would have had more than a hint of hysteria in it, as Toph and Zuko followed behind her, clearly opting to stick together. Smart. Hard to do that when there isn't a door anymore.

Very carefully, she made her way around the room to the cylinder she'd seen through the window. She knew she should investigate the nodes in the center as well, but… Not yet. Not until she'd convinced the lizard in the base of her brain that stepping out away from the wall wouldn't instantly paint her as a target.

She stopped short of the container and carefully played the light of her TER over it – and then had to laugh at herself. She hadn't even realized she'd been expecting to find it wreathed in spectral blue mist, some sort of lingering mark from the entity it had contained.

Don't assume, Sam, she reminded herself sternly. She was guessing that this was a containment device, based on the shattered door and the layout. For all she knew, this was actually the battery that had been powering this section of the lab.

Which would be Very Cool, she admitted to herself. They still hadn't been able to reverse-engineer the jury-rigged power source that Jack had put together under the influence of the Ancient database in his head. The materials he'd had available just hadn't been able to hold up under the stress; Jack had been lucky it had lasted long enough to get him into the grip of the Asgardian Stargate before the SGC had lost power. What had been left of his device was just a fried mess. But if they could get their hands on an original, one that had been designed for extended use rather than a last-ditch, once-off desperation gamble…

Keep telling yourself that, Sam, she thought dryly, as she finally moved to kneel next to the device, setting her TER down reluctantly. She'd need both of her hands for this – and there wasn't a hint of blue mist about it. The device just sat there on the floor, reassuringly physical and mundane and terrifyingly opaque. You know perfectly well this isn't a battery.

Well. Know might be a little strong. But after two years of finding herself up to her elbows in alien, ancient and sometimes even Ancient technology, she'd developed something of a sense for how it all worked. And her gut was telling her that her first assumption had been the correct one.

After a breath to steady herself, she reached out and began exploring the device with careful fingertips, sticking to just the exterior for now, and very aware of Zuko and Toph at her back, watching curiously with one eye – or one foot, in Toph's case – and keeping a steady guard on the surroundings with the other.

The device seemed, surprisingly, to be intact – or at least she couldn't find anything that looked like damage, even when she found what seemed to be a power casing and checked the thin plates of crystal that seemed to be the Ancients' preferred data and power sources. There weren't any cracks in the glasslike surface of the cylinder itself, nor any dents or damage that she could find in the metal components, nor did she see any loose wires or components.

Although the fact that she could find what seemed like wires and nuts and bolts was rather interesting. Most Ancient tech she'd worked with had been more… finished.

Then again, if I'm right, this isn't a public-use device like the Stargates, that are out in all weathers and will be handled by who knows what. This is a device built for a specific purpose, not to look pretty.

Even if it looked for all the world like a fancied-up turbine from someone's car.

Which raises an interesting question – how does this work? Sam wondered, squinting at the crystal cylinder. Yes, there was definitely some sort of additional structureinside it. Not unlike the bulbs of a halogen space heater, the cheaper kind at least.

Huh. There's actually a resemblance to the Stargate. Almost as if this creates a miniature version… I wonder. Does it create some kind of subspace pocket to hold something in? That has to be hugely costly in terms of energy, but we know the yukiuso is affected by the Stargate; it might be the only way you can really contain an incorporeal being without it eventually getting too strong to hold anymore. A controllable version of what we did, tossing it into vacuum?

…Subspace. Note to self, find better technical term for that, or Jack will never stop the Hammerspace jokes.

All right, so that was how it contained whatever it held. So how had the Ancients gotten the yukiuso into this thing?

Strange shapes caught her eye, stamped into the surface of the device near what looked like a series of triggers. "Zuko, Can you read this? Um… this, miroh?"

Zuko crouched down next to her, the movement making the shadow of the nodes in the room shift and shudder almost like living things for a moment until his flame-bearing hand stabilized again. Sam forced herself to ignore the shiver she couldn't quite suppress and leaned back a little to give him space to look at the letters.

Zuko's scar creased slightly, his one brow drawing down in concentration as he peered at the device. "A…nuttara… Samyak-sam…"

His slow, tentative reading cut short as he snapped his mouth shut and scowled at the container.

Oh boy. I know that look. That's Danny's 'I know I'm reading this correctly, it just makes no sense!' look.

Which made bracing herself for impact not only logical but the only sane thing to do. When Daniel got that particular look… things blew up. Sometimes literally.

Toph poked at Zuko. "Oi. Nani ga kai-teru?"

"Anokutarah sanmyaku sanbodai…" Zuko said slowly.

Toph drew in what was clearly a shocked breath, tension suddenly rippling through her tiny frame.

"…no sara."

Toph's jaw dropped like a rock. "Ha? Nanjah, soryah?"

That was most definitely a, "say the heck what?" if Sam had ever heard one. And Zuko's frustrated response was most distinctly a, Why are you asking me? Scowling, the boy tilted his head, apparently trying to read the rest of the writing, and finally reached out a tentative hand to roll the device over.

The instant his fingers brushed it, warm red-amber light began to gleam in the long tubes inside the cylinder as the device booted up with a surprisingly musical chime.

Heart hammering, Sam threw herself back, vaguely aware of Zuko's little pilot light going out as the boy and Toph both did the same, putting distance between themselves and both the device and each other – either to give each other room to move, or to make it harder to take both of them out at once, she wasn't certain. The TER was back in her hands and aimed squarely at the device.

Which simply hummed ever so softly and… sat there, putting off reddish-orange light that helped in part to make up for the loss of Zuko's firelight.

Slowly, Sam lowered the TER. It just turned on. That's all. And apparently it doesn't do much.

In fact, once she got up the nerve to come close, it took all of a minute for her to find a manual switch to turn it back off again – apparently the Ancients hadn't relied entirely on inherited traits to do their dirty work. Or maybe this was simply something they absolutely did not want turning off by accident.

It's not broken. It didn't fail. Someone just turned it off. She was torn between banging her head on the nearest flat surface and swearing fit to embarrass the Colonel despite the fact that he wasn't even present.

I'm going to find a way to drag Doctor Jansberg and his team back, just so I can throttle them myself, she thought with all the viciousness of an aborted adrenaline rush, as she powered the device down again – no point in wasting what energy it had left until they had it somewhere she could study it properly. Who the hell thinks it's a good idea to turn off random devices when you don't even know what they… do…

Her hands stilled.

According to Urdu, and her own very limited observations, it took a particular gene sequence to activate some of this technology. The door into the archive room had been one such, to judge by the fact that it had thwarted Daniel's every attempt to open it and all Zuko had needed to do was get close enough. This wasn't the Place of Our Legacy or Ernest's Planet; the Ancients hadn't meant for anyone other than themselves to use it.

Nothing in the lab was activated before we got here, though. Which means that our research team probably didn't have anyone with the gene – I wonder how common it is? And… for crying out loud, there was a would-be lightsaber lying in the middle of the floor. What geek wouldn't stop to pick that up?

But no one had.

The science team never got this far.

Which meant…

Sam twisted around sharply. "Toph!" she said, trying to keep the snap in her voice simply military, rather than panicked. "Exit, dokoh?"

The needle of an unerring human compass, Toph's hand snapped around to point in the direction of the far radial wall from the transporter. "Atchi," she said shortly.

"Sam?" Zuko asked, expression wary.

She closed her eyes and forced herself to take several deep breaths. Calm down. It's not here, which means you have a little time. Panic's not going to help anyone. First priority, get somewhere with a signal and warn the others, so they'll know what we're dealing with.

"This, doh-suru?" Zuko asked, indicating the container on the floor behind her with a quick jerk of his chin.

Damn. If it really was functional, they couldn't afford to leave it behind.

Sam had just dropped to one knee, feeling for any sort of handle, when Toph stopped her with a light punch on her shoulder. "Atashi ni makash'te," she said with a kind of cheery smugness that had Sam biting back a laugh despite everything.

She did that deliberately, Sam realized, as Toph used a calm, steady gesture to lift the machine with her geokinesis and Zuko helped jury-rig a carry-sling for it using cord from Sam's kit. Thankfully, it seemed that whatever activated the machine took something more than just physical proximity; she didn't think any of them would have been willing to carry it if it had been live. There was something comical about the smallest member of their group playing the packmule…

Except that she's thinking tactically.

They were all carrying salt, yes, since it had proven an effective way to break the mental influence of the yukiuso if you moved fast enough. Except that even if the three of them combined their stashes, it still wasn't all that much. Nothing like the quantities that Toph would need if she actually found herself fighting a yukiuso. And the boots and gloves clearly hampered her psychokinesis.

And it's freezing. The stone may be brittle. What do you bet that has an effect as well?

And so, Toph was volunteering to weigh herself down, so that Zuko and Sam would be able to fight if they had to.

From Zuko, Sam wouldn't have found that sort of pragmatic, strategic thinking so surprising; she'd accepted that the boy was in essence a trained soldier, for all his apparent youth. But from sassy little Toph, who acted so much like a child…

Get upset later, she told herself grimly, as Zuko gave the makeshift harness a last, experimental tug, and then nodded readiness to her. After we're out of this mess.

At least getting out of the room was straightforward. She'd worried, earlier, that with the power gone they would have no way of opening the door short of relying on Toph to make a new one. That proved to not be a problem.

Not that walking through the shards of cold-shattered metal was particularly reassuring.

~Even the Dragon-King's Temple floods.~

Sam shivered, looking out across the starlit shadows outside as Toph leaned forward to rest her hands on her knees and ease her back and Zuko kept watch on their six, just in case. The exit from the lab – and at least there was an exit, she had to grant, unlike certain other Ancient sites – was located on the side of a deep, bowl-shaped valley that she was almost certain had been a volcanic caldera once, long ago. She could make out steep, craggy mountains on every side, sharp peaks and cliffs betraying their relatively young geological age – and perhaps that was the secret behind the relative warmth of the lab they'd left behind.

That, and shelter from the howling wind. Looking up and over the mountains, she had a clear view of the storm Urdu had mentioned, already visible beyond the crags. It looked like an ugly one – she could actually see the clouds at the front twisting and billowing, edging forward across the sky. The view was, she had to grant, very dramatic – especially with blue-white lightning flashing among the clouds every few seconds.

Thundersnow. Wow. I've never actually seen one before.

Quite frankly, she'd be happier to not be seeing one right now. But it didn't look like there was any way around it. From the look of things, the clouds were headed straight for them. The wind sheer from the leading front was already whipping the snow of the valley into shimmering white curtains and ribbons undulating around the strange, small spires scattered here and there.

If we can't get help quickly, we're going to need to find shelter, and soon.

They could maybe retreat into the tunnel… but she wasn't certain that would be effective. The doors to the inner lab below weren't the only ones that had been reduced to shards of once-strong metal. Just about every door they'd passed from the lab to here – including the one where she now stood – had met the same fate. And the wind was coming in along the exact angle of the tunnel, worse luck yet. She could feel it whipping and whirling past her and rushing down the confined passageway like a living thing.

True, there'd been one or two side doors they'd passed that were still closed and intact. Sam was not going to touch those. The very last thing they needed in this situation was to set something else loose.

If all else fails, Toph can probably make us a shelter. And she was carrying some real food this time, on general principles.

But the point is to not need it. She pulled out the radio.

"Colonel, this is Major Carter, please respond. Over." Please, please, please…

The static – probably generated by the massive storm bearing down on them – broke into a familiar voice. "Major Carter. This is Teal'c. Where are you?"

She braced herself against the wall, distantly aware that Zuko and Toph were both looking at her sharply, no doubt picking up on her relief and wondering what was going on. "That back room – it was a transporter, but it seems to be locked on our end. We only just reached the surface. Teal'c, never mind that, we've got a much bigger problem on our hands. Where's Jack?"

"He is here, speaking to Urdu regarding how we might locate you." In her mind's eye she could see the slight narrowing of eyes and furrowing of brows that would betray Teal'c's concern. "Have you discovered something?"

She laughed a little, not at all amused. "Oh yeah. We found the lab where they were studying the yukiuso. Teal'c, it wasn't the SGC team who released it. I think it was the Ancients."

"…Indeed?"

She drew in a deep breath. "Yeah. Which means that we're dealing with a killer entity that has been unleashed on this world and growing in power for the last several thousand years."

~Even the Dragon-King's Temple floods.~

The air beside Teal'c filled with vehement Tau'ri curses – Colonel O'Neill had seen Teal'c's signal that Major Carter had made contact and grabbed up his radio just in time to hear her warning.

"Lovely. Lovely. Bad enough that dealing with just the baby took just about everything we had, now we've got the granddaddy of all these things on the loose?" Colonel O'Neill directed a fierce scowl at Urdu. "Where the hell is that ship!"

"On its way," Nubiti said calmly, hand over one ear, presumably to better focus the sound from the small headset she'd donned to communicate with Djehuty's ha'tak.

That alone was… intriguing. Teal'c had never seen one of the false gods openly use anything similar to the Tau'ri radios, although he assumed that they possessed something of the sort. That it was Nubiti to use it, a former host…

Urdu hadn't even looked up at Colonel O'Neill's roar, although Teal'c knew that there were many Tau'ri, even among the disciplined soldiers, who would take exception. The Unas was still in the inner archive room, just visible from where Teal'c had stationed himself at the entrance to the outer lab to ensure his radio had a clear signal, working furiously alongside Daniel Jackson to wrest the secret of fighting the yukiuso from the Ancient archive.

"Ship?" Major Carter's voice was tight, likely to hide any anxiety she felt.

"Sanura and Urdu have offered us the use of one of their planetside scouting vessels to search for you," Teal'c explained.

"Which would go better if you could give us something resembling coordinates," Colonel O'Neill said. "Or at least a landmark to look for. Where are you?"

A moment's pause. "Hard to tell, sir. As near as I can tell, that transporter took us to a completely different part of the mountains. We're in a valley – I'd call it not a full mile across. It's bowl-shaped. I was thinking caldera, but it might be a meteor crater. There seems to be some debris here and there, but otherwise it's pretty even. I don't see a trail out – but if it comes to it, Toph can probably take care of that."

"It won't come to that," Colonel O'Neill said firmly. "We'll be there to pick you up as soon as we can home in on your signal. Once we've got that ship Urdu promised, we'll be able to triangulate your location – it'll just help to have a better idea of what we're looking for when we get there."

"Sir, I need to warn you. That storm Urdu mentioned? It's almost right on top of us, and coming on fast."

As Colonel O'Neill cursed yet again, Teal'c turned his attention to the night-dark mountains outside the lab. In the starlight, he could just make out the lines of cloud boiling over the peaks to the distant east, barely visible beyond the foreshortened horizon.

He looked back inside the lab. "Colonel O'Neill. The storm is some miles distant, but I do not believe it will stay distant long."

"And it's an ugly one, sir," Major Carter reported. "I think even a death glider would have trouble in there."

Nubiti made a sound of triumph and nodded to Colonel O'Neill, but the Tau'ri was already moving towards the door as Teal'c heard the sound of one of the false gods' smaller flying vessels approaching. "We're not going to need to, Sam," Colonel O'Neill said stubbornly. "Our ride's here, we'll be out there in a second. You grab the kids and find someplace to take shelter, and get ready to make a dash."

"Right. They're checking out the valley now, Toph should be able to…"

Her voice trailed off.

"Sam? Major Carter, report!"

"...Oh God." Even through the increasingly staticky radio connection, Teal'c could hear Major Carter swallowing hard. "Sir? We've found Sanura's missing Jaffa. And the science team."

~Even the Dragon-King's Temple floods.~

Sam slowly lowered the radio from her ear, dimly aware of Jack shouting for details. It was only a distant, tinny noise past the ringing in her ears, as she stared at the "debris" Zuko had brushed the snow away from – and then stumbled back from as though burned.

Empty as ice, staring eyes looked back, only these eyes were never seeing anything again.

As he got into the middle of it he saw that there were dozens of statues all about – standing here and there rather as the pieces stand on a chess board when it is half way through the game, recited an incongruous childhood memory. They all looked so strange standing there perfectly lifelike and also perfectly still, in the bright cold moonlight…

When she'd been a young girl, reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for the first time, Sam had somehow missed the whole turned to stone detail. For the longest time, she'd labored under the false impression that the Witch had turned her victims into statues by literally freezing them. The mental image had lingered in the back of her mind for the longest time, even after she'd learned just how messy that particular process actually would be. Something with as many different minerals and differing densities, not to mention endothermic, as the human body, simply didn't freeze evenly.

This woman had. It was her childhood mental image all over again. Only worse.

That wasn't supposed to be possible, dammit.

Forcing herself to breathe, she took a step back, distantly noting that the woman was definitely dressed in the armor of Djehuty's Jaffa, and looked at the valley with its scattered "debris" with new eyes.

At least fifteen… How big was that missing patrol? How many more has Urdu lost? And some of them are probably ours.

She wasn't inclined to start brushing the snow away to look. Zuko and Toph had already retreated back to the entrance of the lab to join her, clearly uneasy.

I wonder if there are the remains of Ancients amongst them, somewhere…

She shook her head fiercely, trying to focus past the crawling, completely superstitious uneasiness. Something was wrong here. And not just the obvious…

Wait. Here. They're all here.

But she knew for a fact that the science team had gone missing from the other lab. As had the missing patrol that Sanura had been trying to track back when the SNAFU had started – or rather, their abandoned ship must have been in the same region as the Stargate and the first lab.

Several miles, Teal'c said. Across hard, dangerous terrain. They can't have walked that. The cold and the mountains would have killed them, even without the yukiuso fogging their minds!

They couldn't have made the trek under their own power. Why was that important…?

The yukiuso brought them here deliberately.

…This is its lair.

"Not good," she whispered, suddenly remembering the radio in her hand. She lifted it, meaning to give Jack an update…

"Sam?"

She'd heard a lot of tones from Zuko. This was the first time she'd heard anything that she would call honest terror.

She glanced at him – and then slowly turned her eyes to follow his fixed gaze up to the stormclouds bearing down on them.

The clouds that were boiling closer by the second, with a roiling, churning sort of turbulent motion that she recognized very well.

That bluish light wasn't just lightning.

"…Oh, fuck."

~Even the Dragon-King's Temple floods.~

Sam didn't swear. Not like that. Not unless she was trapped in an ice cave with a superior officer succumbing to internal bleeding and a DHD that would not dial out.

"Dammit, Major – give me an update!" he snapped, pulling himself through the door of the oddly hawklike ship that had set down just outside the Ancient lab. Teal'c and Sanura were already aboard – Djehuty's Prime having leapt inside as soon as the door cracked open, almost before the thing touched down and the pilot had retreated into the lab.

Which meant they were still one short. Stopping just inside, Jack twisted about and gestured impatiently at Daniel.

The anthropologist shook his head. "I'll stay here with Nubiti and Urdu," he said, talking fast. "If Sam's right, cracking that archive just became essential. They speak Ancient, I can at least read some symbols… Get Sam and the children."

Blast the man, he was right. And they didn't have time to argue about what a bad idea splitting the team would be. The ship was lifting off again – apparently Sanura shared Jack's opinion on delays.

"Tell Nubiti to keep that headset on – we'll stay in touch over the ship's comm," he yelled, pulling back so that the door could slide shut. Not trusting Urdu's people now wasn't going to help anything. And this would let them focus their radio communication on finding Sam.

Speaking of… "Major, I said report!" he snarled again, making his way to what had to be the cockpit of the ship. At least now he could reluctantly see why Urdu had called for this particular vessel. Despite the oddly hawklike exterior – designed for atmospheric mobility, he'd guess – the interior was startlingly spacious. If he were to guess – this was the Blackhawk helicopter of the Goa'uld, a small troop carrier as opposed to a fighter jet like the death gliders. Which meant they had the room to pick up three more people without compromising pilot efficiency.

Which could get very important, given the stormclouds filling the horizon as he reached the cockpit and settled in behind Teal'c and Sanura.

His radio crackled. "Sir," Sam said. Her voice was audibly shaking, despite all the interference. "I'd say we just found the yukiuso."

It was like being dropped into ice water. "Don't engage!" he snapped, grip tightening on the back of Teal'c's seat. It looked like the Jaffa had taken the co-pilot's seat, and was trying to triangulate Sam's position using the radio signal. "Get out of its way and wait for extraction."

"Sorry, sir. That's… not really an option."

His knuckles were white. "Sam. Report."

"You know how the image of the yukiuso looked like a miniature thunderstorm?"

"For certain definitions of storm…" Jack's voice trailed off as he took in the towering thunderhead that had already swallowed the eastern mountains.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," he breathed.

"Believe me, sir, I really wish I were."

"Major Carter. Can you take shelter in the lab?" Teal'c asked intently, pointing at something on his display for Sanura. Their course shifted slightly.

"Negative. The lab out here… it's not secure. There isn't a door left intact in there, not one I'm willing to open. The yukiuso can go anywhere it wants. And… this is its lair. We're in its turf now. Even if Toph could whip up a shelter in time – I don't think we have what it takes to raise a threshold against… that." Sam's voice wavered – then steadied, building terror shoved beneath the cool professionalism of the Major. "Sir, recommend that you do not attempt extraction."

"Recommendation noted, Major."

"Dammit, Jack-!" Sam's voice broke slightly, before she yanked it back under control. "Jack, I've done my pilot training! Forget the yukiuso aspect – flying into a storm of this magnitude isn't just insane, it's suicidal!"

"I said, your recommendation is noted, Major!" Jack cut his radio transmission off sharply. "ETA," he demanded, voice flat and tight in his ears.

"Not looking good," Sanura said in the calm of a soldier under crisis conditions. "It is approaching quickly. The Tale'sedrin is swift when pushed, but we are racing against time."

"And?" Jack asked.

"And we are flying into a demon of a headwind." Sanura paused to make some correction on the alien control panel. "Under the circumstances, I think that demon should be taken literally."

"There is another consideration," Teal'c said quietly. "From your account of former Prime Khenut's disappearance, we must assume the mental influence of the yukiuso is capable of reaching through the walls of a ship."

"Not this ship," Sanura said, with a fierce, teeth-baring smirk.

Teal'c tilted his head at her, brow quirking upward.

Sanura's eyes never strayed from her display. "Urdu paid attention when your Doctor Jackson explained the threshold effect. That is why he called for this ship, specifically, and why the other pilot disembarked. The Tale'sedrin is mine." For just a second, blazing blue eyes flicked up to meet Jack's stare. "That thing has hurt my people, Colonel. It is not welcome here."

Jack grinned tightly. "We get out of this, I'm introducing you to Janet properly this time."

Which wasn't a promise of security. The yukiuso in the SGC had gotten into Janet's head right through the walls of the infirmary.

Yeah, well, we know the warning signs now. And I've got a pocket full of McD's salt packets and I'm not afraid to use them.

"Colonel. Sanura. I believe I have located the valley Major Carter spoke of." Teal'c pointed at the screen.

Jack's heart clearly needed a refresher course in battle stations. The back of his throat was not an appropriate location.

The storm had already engulfed the far slopes. By now, he could make out the hints of sharp-toothed, staring, indistinct shapes surging in and out of wind-whipped snow and clouds, limned with hints of unnatural blue light.

"Time?" he asked softly.

Sanura had already set their course for the bowl of the valley and was hurtling them through the air towards it. "Tight. At best… we will not arrive a moment too soon."

Jack nodded mutely and clicked the radio back on. "Major. This is an order. Buy yourselves time. I don't care how, just hold on. We're almost there."

"Sir." A moment's breath. "I have an idea."

~Even the Dragon-King's Temple floods.~

Wind howled past the meager barricade Toph had raised between them and the coming storm. It cut the worst of the cold; Zuko knew they'd all be suffering the beginnings of frostbite already, without that meager shelter.

It didn't protect them from the heavy weight of malice pressing down all around them. But it was something.

This does it. I don't care what the others think; the universe officially hates me. Gritting his teeth, Zuko gave up on the knots in the harness he'd made for Toph. His fingers were too clumsy in the heavy gloves for any sort of fine manipulation, and he wasn't about to take them off. Instead, he reached under the heavy coat Sam's people had leant him and drew his dagger. I really should have seen this coming.

Sam made a noise that might have been the beginnings of an objection, but cut it off as he slit the first line of cord, and moved to help him wrestle the thing off Toph's back.

He had no idea what she meant to do with it. Anything that had to do with the Avatar, couched in the old sacred script and the flowery language from the oldest archives he'd ever accessed, even if he had no idea what dish of the Fully Realized Avatar was even supposed to mean…

The cords finally came loose. Shaking the last of the harness off as Sam pulled the thing away, Toph ducked down and brought her hands up, raising two walls on either side of them, cutting off a little more of the swirling wind.

"Sparky, you'd better have some good ideas real fast!" she shouted, voice barely audible over the howling wind. Even so, Zuko could tell it was pitched significantly higher than Toph normally allowed.

He ducked down next to where Sam was pressed against Toph's wall, frantically poking at the buttons on the device. "Hold the wall!" he shouted hoarsely. He'd already leant his meager supply of salt to Toph. That, and an earthbender's fierce, stubborn chi, was enough to buy them a little shelter…

He swallowed, trying to think past the sheer menace around them.

Worse than the Ocean. The Ocean had simply been angry, and slain anything it perceived as being in its way. This…

This was active malice.

Sam grabbed his hand. "Zuko!" she shouted. The rest of her words were too torn and fragmented by the howling wind to make any sense, but she was pulling his hand towards the strange device.

Hope you know what you're doing! Swallowing hard, he brushed the tips of his gloved fingers on ice-rimed metal, and the crystalline pillar suddenly lit with that strangely heavy red light, forming into arcs that lashed out at the wind around them…

The storm howled, and his vision grayed. He shook his head fiercely to clear it-

A hint of white where there should have been none was his only warning.

"Get down!"

His fingers grabbed Toph's collar and yanked as he threw himself and Sam flat-

The stone walls disintegrated, fragments whipped over their heads in the howling wind.

The next few moments were a kaleidoscope of images. Sam, crying out as wind that was more than simply wind tore the device out of her grip, sending it tumbling out of her reach to fetch up against one of those horrible frozen corpse-statues. A last glimpse through a break in the wild swirls of snow and wind and cloud-fog of one of the strange flying vessels that had attacked them at the Sta-geit struggling through the wind towards them. The three of them instinctively pulling into a small huddle against burning cold…

Then one or all three of them cried out as the world shifted, growing distant, hollow, fragile, fading…

Transition, memory from a dozen baffling anecdotes from Uncle over Pai Sho and tea suddenly realized. It's taking us to the Spirit World!

Toph was still beside him; he could feel her. But Sam…

His gut twisted.

Sam's people, the people of that strange world with its alien sun, were different. Their chi was… stiff. Fixed to their bodies. It had saved lives, in that attack on the mess hall. Where others would have been left with spirits pulled loose to wander, wounded and lost, they'd stood fast, rigidly locked to their bodies, like an oak-elm in a storm.

Except there was always one storm that was too strong.

And like an oak-elm, when the stress became too much…

Sam was breaking.

Not on my watch!

Toph!

It wasn't a shout. They were beyond that, already at the inversion point where spirit became ascendant over physical. But she heard him, and reached around Sam to lock her hands on his wrists.

Lightning and magnets dance together, Sokka had said once, more weirdness sprung from way, way too many late nights with Ji – Zuko swore those two had some secret stash of cactus juice for those mad planning sessions. But now he was praying that Sokka's mad ramblings were right, because lightning was healing now, and so were Toph's magnets.

Can't bend in the Spirit World. But – if we can just get her across the boundary…

The world twisted, and they were gone.

~Even the Dragon-King's Temple floods.~

Daniel hadn't heard swearing like that since the Pentagon had refused to let the disbanded SGC investigate Apophis's incoming ships.

"Sanura, what's going on?" Nubiti asked sharply.

She'd done something to her headset, so that the sound projected so all three of them could hear. The sound quality was good.

Too good. He could hear the faintest hint of waver in Sanura's voice, clear as day. "I do not know what just happened. They just – faded. All three of them."

Unexpectedly, Urdu leaned towards Nubiti's speaker. "The yukiuso probably took them out of phase with this reality," he said intently. "It carried them to its phase of existence. They're alive. In danger, but alive."

"Right." Jack's voice was grim. "Okay. You two. Let's get the hell out of here and figure out how to get them back…"

Daniel tuned them out as he swallowed, hard.

Urdu looked at him. Daniel didn't think he was mistaking the genuine concern in those odd amber eyes. "Doctor Jackson?" he asked, voice a deep rumble.

"I've…" he said, and had to swallow again. "I've read some of Earth's folklore. On… spirit kidnappings. The outcome… tends to be ugly."

That had been after their encounter with the Salish "spirits." And after just a little research… Whatever else the aliens who'd impersonated spirits might have done, he'd spent a lot of time after it was over just giving thanks that it hadn't been worse.

Folklore had a lot of warnings about the consequences of being taken Underhill, or traveling to the realm of the gods, or descending into the underworld.

Most of it summing up as, "Don't be too sure you're going to come back."

"The consequences can be… very dire," Urdu said slowly. "But… the Gatebuilders were always closer to what you might call the spirit world than other races. That, I think, was the origin of their fascination with Ascension. The two children, at least, should have made the transition safely. With luck, their presence was enough to buffer Major Carter."

Daniel blinked at him, slowly adding that up. "You really think they inherited that much of the Ancient genome?" he asked, trying not to hope too much. "Wait, is that where the psychokinetic abilities come from?"

Urdu blinked at him slowly. "I think you misunderstand. The Renegades did not receive their abilities from your 'Ancients,' Doctor Jackson…"

~Even the Dragon-King's Temple floods.~

"No."

Sokka's teeth missed his lovely, lovely jerky entirely and landed on his tongue instead as he jumped with a strangled yelp.

A whole day, of sitting around in a dark, destroyed ruin of some long-lost civilization probably older than Aang and Zuko's freaking Sun Warriors, trying not to imagine what had happened here, and trying to figure out if maybe they should send someone back to give the capitol an update on what they'd found. Which would be a great idea, if not for the fact that they didn't really have anything new to tell Iroh, Zuko and Toph had already disappeared and, seriously, you never split the party, basic survival wisdom there…

And all the while, Aang had just… sat there. And meditated. And glowed. And… stuff.

Only not anymore. Now he was standing in front of that weird ring thingy, still glowing it up in the Avatar State, and… Sokka had never ever heard the Avatar State speak before, not independent of Aang, even if Aang claimed it had when he was fighting Fire Lord Ozai.

He really wished he wasn't hearing it now, because there was desperation and denial and all sorts of scary stuff in that voice.

He scrambled to his feet, grabbing the hilt of Zuko's dao before it fell on the floor – he'd just been poking at it, trying to figure out if they had any way of fixing it, because these were good dao, and Zuko had gotten his Space Sword back for him, after all…

Katara scrambled up with him, face white. "Aang…"

"Not again. I won't let them win, not again!"

The Avatar raised his hands to the ring, palms forward.

The interior ring began to move.

~Even the Dragon-King's Temple floods.~

"…they are Ancients."

~Even the Dragon-King's Temple floods.~

AN: Psychokinetic powers, at least in certain cases? Check. Back-and-forth between physical and spirit realms? Check. History stretching back thousands, maybe millions of years? Look at the number of Avatar images in Aang's awakening sequences, and in the Southern Air Temple, and multiply that by the implied lifespan of at least some Avatars – check and check. As for why Asunytian Ancients aren't A: particularly high-tech, B: killed by the plague, or C: Ascended… well. There's a history there.

And as for the Denisovan theory – that's what it was. A theory. And one that might still hold true. We have very, very little evidence about who and what the Denisovans were. Some of their DNA was shared with humans, some definitely wasn't. Guessing that what was found in that cave might include the remains of an Ancient? Not outside the realm of Stargate possibility. Particularly given the implied interconnectedness of Ancients and humans. (Personally? I'm toying with a headcanon of, the Ancients are human, and the distance between our galaxy and theirs is actually a ripple in the fabric of time…)

Yes, Nubiti and Urdu (Ur, rather) are nothing like the First One from the Cimmeria episode. Then again, they haven't spent who knows how long trapped in an underground labyrinth, surviving on hibernation and cannibalism (look up legends of Wendigo for what that can do to someone), with nothing but a categorically condemning answering machine message for company.

True, I'm given to understand that later canon paints the Unas as primitives, when SG-1 visits that world, but… that doesn't mean they all are. Stargates give extremely skewed impressions of planets; take Solitudes, where Sam comes back after scouting outside and says, "It's an ice planet." No, it wasn't. It was Antarctica! So it's possible that the Stargate on the Goa'uld homeworld was located in the equivalent of the Amazon rainforest or the Australian outback. Someone came through there, even in the modern day, they'd get a pretty skewed idea of human society, too.

For the curious: for body language and some behavioral and social traits, I'm using crocodiles as a base.

Regarding the images of the spirits… look at the Wikipedia entry for demon. Believe me, "bat-winged red satyr" is the boring version. Heck – look up some of the old imagery given for angels. Suffice to say that cherubim weren't particularly cherubic.

As for Jack's snark about rolling for Initiative – given that the uber-yukiuso has distinct D&D Tempest elemental influences, how could I not? Although, for the curious, the yukiuso is actually based on a mix of the Tlingit kushtaka, the Japanese yukionna, the Japanese kamaitachi, D&D's Arctic Tempest elemental (I forget which version of D&D this was), and a hefty dose of, "Ooo, wouldn't that be creepy."

Yes, Sam swearing like that is slightly out of character for canon. But this is not television, and sometimes, there isn't anything else to say to sum up FUBAR.

Look up blinkenlichten on Wikipedia. Be prepared to giggle.