Jacob's feet hurt from trying to make his way through the brambles and bric-a-brac within the seemingly endless forest of the Furling kingdom. He was not accustomed to long marches, even in the time when he'd been a young man in the Airforce he'd had relatively limited experience with long distance hiking through the wilderness. Selmak was more accustomed to roughing it than he was, but even the Tok'ra tended to have supplies and resources with him when he traveled. There was a small pouch of flint, tinder, and some emergency rations that Selmak and Jacob kept with them just in case of an emergency, but it was sitting in his quarters back at the SGC next to the ruck sack full of clothing and a Zat gun that Selmak deeply wished he had with him right now.
If they lived through this Jacob wasn't ever taking that damn pouch off again, never mind that Selmak and Jacob both disliked how it chafed against their leg. Jacob paused in the woods at a distant flicker of firelight, "Crap. There is someone out there."
"Indeed." Selmak replied mentally, the symbiote's sense of deep disquiet resonating in Jacob's mind. The symbiote was feeling as lost and terrified as Jacob. Selmak literally did not know what they faced in the Furling kingdoms. For all the Tok'ra's warnings about the Furlings, their actual intelligence on the Furlings was essentially an instinctual and primal horror at having to even be around them. "But I don't think that we can afford to walk around this one unless we want to walk down and back to that cave. There Is no safer path."
"I'll pass." Jacob gagged a bit at that thought. Selmak and he had mutually come to the agreement that there was no reason for them to walk into any cave covered in that many cobwebs. Nothing good was going to be in that cave. In the furling realms things that were beautiful were just waiting for the opportunity to kill you and the ugly ones weren't going to wait around for an opportunity to present itself.
"The point still stands, Jacob." The symbiote's voice was a strained. It had been a while since either of them slept. "We can't keep avoiding every camp we see. Eventually we're going to have to interact with someone if only to avoid starvation.
General Carter couldn't really argue against that logic, reluctant though he was to interact with another resident of this place. Jacob wasn't entirely sure how long they'd been in the forest. It was difficult to gauge time considering that day and night seemed to be factors of geography rather than chronology. But, assuming that his watch was still reliable, a fact he couldn't be any surer of than any other element of this horrible place, it had been two days since he'd last had anything resembling a meal. His meager diet of raw songbird eggs and some sort of green tuber Selmak assured him was edible had proven enough to sustain him but not enough to fight back the painful stabs of starvation in his belly.
He was delirious and he knew it. It was hard to focus for long on anything other than just how hungry he was. He ran his dry tongue over chapped lips, considering his options before deciding that he didn't really have a better alternative. "I don't like this."
"They are Furlings. They will not be able to resist a bargain." Selmak regurgitated his second-hand knowledge with surprising confidence. "It will not be a price we wish to pay, but it will be a bargain."
"Screw it, I can't spend the rest of my life wrestling monsters to the ground and beating them to death. It's exhausting." Jacob shook his head, looking down at the red stains along his hands. There had been at least twelve attacks on his person since they'd entered the forest. Some were just beasts, unthinking creatures that seemed drawn to attack him like a moth drawn to a flame. Two had been humanoid creatures, like the woman who'd tried to draw him into the lake. Well – sort of like her, they'd been squat creatures. Ugly things with smooshed in faces, they'd seemed like part of the trees around him till they leapt out and tried to stab him with long stone knives. They were clumsy, however, and no match for his symbiote enhanced strength. He hadn't wanted to kill them, but he was terrified that they'd report him to something bigger and more dangerous if he didn't.
He felt immense shame at the when he'd first seen their little broken bodies on the ground when the fight ended. Winning a fight to the death against what appeared to be little more than children wasn't a victory he wanted to be able to claim. It was a sensation greatly tempered greatly by Selmak's revelation that the stone knives were coated in virulent and almost certainly fatal neurotoxins.
Jacob approached the camp cautiously, keeping an eye out for traps or more of the forest's monsters. He caught glimpses of a single figure in the flickering light of the campfire. They were smaller than Jacob, cloaked in green and sitting in front of what looked tantalizingly like a cook pot full of stew. His suspicious was confirmed as the woman sliced potatoes into the wide pot above the flames.
He made sure to stay a good ten meters from the woman when he announced his presence. "Hey there! Hello."
The figure looked around at him in mild surprise, looking him up and down briefly. Jacob knew that he didn't exactly make a great impression at the moment. His Tok'ra uniform was stained red with blood that had run down his front, giving the scaled patch over his shoulder the distinct impression that he'd freshly torn it from some great, scaly beast. He couldn't quite catch the face of the cloaked figure, but there was a brief pause before a woman's voice echoed across the empty space with a distinctly American twang.
"You have got to be kidding me. I mean, I've had fairies try to sneak into my camp before. I've seen costumes, I've seen spells, I've even had them try to put glamors upon themselves to look like a friend or relative." She pushed the hood of her cloak back, exposing golden-brown hair tied back into a pony-tail. She wasn't happy, but Jacob would have described her as more confused than angry. "I mean, it's not the worst attempt I've seen yet but it's up there."
"I'm half human if that helps." Jacob laughed, holding his hands up. "Now, can I please come closer to your fire? I'm very hungry and that stew smells amazing from where I'm standing."
"I don't know. Can you?" The woman rolled her eyes, looking back to her stew pot as she adjusted the copper bangles on her wrist. Taking that as a tacit permission Jacob approached her slowly, keeping his hands in the air so as not to spook her.
"So did you just miss the entry level "how to be a Fairy" class that they give at orientation?" The woman snorted, her lip quirking up as Jacob walked towards her. Her expression turned to one of utter disbelief as Jacob crossed the trench that she'd dug in the fine brown dirt around her camp-site. He took care not to disturb the trench as he passed over it, noting idly that it formed a circle around the place where the woman had built her fire.
There was an immediate shift in the woman's mood when he crossed that threshold. She was no longer idly amused by his presence. While she hadn't stopped putting food into the pot, she seemed more focused on the knife she was using to cut her food than she had previously been in the act of cooking. "That's a neat trick. I'd like to know how you pulled it off."
"No real trick to it." Jacob replied, sitting down on the ground across from the woman and enjoying the warmth of her fire. "You know, put one foot in front of the other."
"You're not a fairy, are you?" The woman was scrupulously avoiding making direct eye contact with Jacob as she pulled what looked very much like a wand from within her cloak.
"Nope." Jacob replied. "100% red blooded American man. Well, close enough to 100% anyway."
"That would be the human half, I assume." The woman replied in deadpan monotone. "It's the other 50% that I'm more worried about."
"I assure you that we mean you no harm." Jacob's eyes flashed. "We have nothing to gain from such an action."
To her credit she didn't flinch when Selmak took over, which is more than Jacob could say when he'd first encountered a Tok'ra. "That isn't an answer to my question."
"I am Selmak of the Tok'ra, though I suspect that will hold little meaning to you. My people were banished from the first world of men long before Egeria's war began. I am of the bloodline who begat Ra, Zeus, and many of the other so called "gods" of the old pantheons." The Tok'ra supplied. There was a brief moment of pride in his proclamation of his bloodline, overwhelmed by a greater moment of shame for having felt that pride.
"And that would make you the god of what exactly?" The woman's expressionless deadpan would likely have amused Jacob were he not convinced that she was capable of inflicting terrible violence upon them. Selmak believed the woman to be a Hok'tar, one of the advanced humans of the first world. "Advanced human" Jacob wasn't sure about but given the ACDC T—shirt just barely visible within the woman's cloak paired with a set of Levis, he was quite convinced that she was from Earth.
"Other than being a cosmic pain in my ass? Not much." Jacob interjected. "The Tok'ra are actually waging a civil war against the Goa'uld Pantheons to remove them from power and free their enslaved worshippers across the Empire."
"Jesus! How long have you been in the Nevernever exactly?" The woman's brow arched. "Because I've got some good news for you, Greece and Egypt have been liberated for quite a while now."
"The First World was the first to rebel. Other planets have not been so lucky." Selmak replied. "The other realms of the old Gods are still governed as the kingdoms of old."
There was a brief pause before the woman pinched the bridge of her nose in apparent pain. "I take back what I said before. This has to be the worst attempt I've ever seen. You're not even trying to hide the fact that you're not human and you're pairing it with the most insane backstory I've ever heard."
"I speak only truth." Selmak replied abruptly. "And seek nothing more than a meal and safe passage back to the First World."
"Directly to Colorado Springs, Colorado, if possible." Jacob interjected.
"You want me to take you to Colorado?" The woman asked as she returned her knife to its sheath. She still kept the wand in her other hand as she ladled out two bowls of soup. Jacob's mouth watered at the sight of them. "Why?"
"I need to go back there." Jacob replied. "Immediately."
She continued to stare at Jacob expectantly till he finally said. "I'm a General with the Air Force. I got tossed into this forest by something called 'Cat Sith."
"Don't say his name!" The woman's impassive mask broke into an expression of actual horror. "This is the Nevernever! People are listening…. Worse than people as well."
"Sorry. But he was the one who stranded me here. I'm worried what is happening there without me there to help." Jacob shook his head. "If you can help me get back you need to help me."
"And what, pray tell, do I get in trade for this?" Spoke the woman, but there was no real heart in it. Jacob was convinced that she would help him.
"Other than the gratitude of a Two Star General with the United States Air Force?" Jacob smiled. "I have a lot of resources at my disposal. What do you need? Because I need to get back to NORAD ASAP."
The woman nearly knocked over the cook-pot as she stood up and screeched. "NORAD?"
"Yes." Jacob replied.
"The winter court is abducting high-ranking US Military personnel and stranding them in the Nevernever? From NORAD? As in, "we keep track of the Nukes" NORAD?" The idea seemed to horrify her beyond her ability to conceal her emptions. "Why?"
"He didn't exactly stop to explain things." Jacob replied. "He pounced, I went down and there's all she wrote."
There was another long pause before the woman spoke. "I need you to stare into my eyes."
"Sure…" Jacob arched an eyebrow in confusion before Selmak spoke aloud, as much for the woman's benefit as Jacob's. "She wishes to see your soul to know if we are lying. She believes that I have possibly possessed you and made you believe those things – she is wrong but it is the sort of thing that many different parasites would do. It will not be pleasant."
"Any more unpleasant than seeing your memories?" Jacob queried, thinking back to the things that the Tok'ra had shown him from Goa'uld ceremonies. Moloch's reveries were not the worst thing Selmak had witnessed.
"Unlikely." Selmak replied aloud, his eyes flashing as he looked up to stare into the woman's gaze. Their eyes met and suddenly Jacob was transported elsewhere. He was not alone. Draped across his neck and shoulders was an elegant serpent with a skin pattern like white marble ending in the curious frilled head of the Goa'uld symbiotes. He knew in an instant that it was the Tok'ra, Selmak.
He tried to speak to the serpent, but found himself unable to make works, only to experience the rush of images washing over him. He witnessed glimpses of the woman's life. He saw vague memories of what might have once been parents, insignificant wisps of forgotten memories from those who'd left her life in infancy. He caught fragments of the lonely life of a foster child, never quite staying in one place for long enough to belong until finally someone adopted her. He saw a happy family, an adoptive father and brother on a farm – until he saw those feelings of familial love for her brother shape into something different, but no less pure. He saw the feeling of betrayal as her adoptive father became a monster, doing terrible things to her in the pursuit of power.
He was having difficulty understanding the specifics, the woman's conflicting emotions displayed a myriad of conflicting images of the same scene. Some showing her supplication to her adoptive father, some showing her begging and pleading not to do what he demanded. And then the world erupted into fire. Her adoptive father, dead. Her brother turned lover, the source of the flames – a beacon of rage who wished her dead as he had brought death upon her father. And then fear. He saw images of a woman who grew up in hiding, beholden to the debt she'd incurred in order to flee the righteous wroth of her lover and a shadowy cabal of cloaked men with glimmering blades.
He felt her shame, and her hope, and her fear and her guilt. Decades of guilt. Decades of loneness in which she hadn't allowed herself another's touch for fear that she might bring the doom upon them that she brought upon her first love. Decades in which she feared to be alone with any man for fear that she might become victim to mesmerism or mind magics. He felt the love she had for the Summer Court of the Furlings, paired with the absolute terror she had of what she owed them. It was a debt she might never be able to repay – a fate worse than death if it ever were called to task.
He snapped back to his body, keenly aware that Selmak's visions within the woman's mind had been different from his own. He would have to compare notes with the Tok'ra later when they had a moment. The woman was not fairing as well for having seen the inside of his and Selmak's heads. She stood stock still, just shivering as a white glow shimmered across her eyes, her lip quivering as she muttered in what sounded vaguely like the Goa'uld language. When she snapped back into reality, there were tears in her eyes. "I'll help you."
"I'll owe you one." Jacob replied.
"No. You won't." The woman shivered wiping her eyes with her sleeves. "I want to help. This is for me – not you." She cleared her throat. "But I don't know how to get to Colorado. I can get you to Earth, no problem, but getting you to a place that specific means that I'd have to ask for a route. Which means I'd have to trade for it. And if the one who you claim is responsible for sending you here is responsible, then he will have ensured that the cost of that information will be too much for us to afford, at least temporarily."
"It's a step ahead of where I was." Jacob replied. "How close can you get me?"
"Chicago." Replied the woman. "There are Air Force bases in Illinois, right?"
"Scott AFB is four hours outside of the city, but I shouldn't have to go that far to get a secure telephone. The Great Lakes Naval Station is inside the city." Jacob smiled, pleased that something was finally going his way. "I'm Jacob Carter by the way. General Jacob Carter."
"Elaine." Replied the woman, not supplying a last name as she handed him a bowl. "Eat up. We've got a long day ahead of us."
"You don't say." Joked Jacob as he dug into his bowl of stew, with the plastic spoon she offered. "I'm looking forward to getting out of here and back to safety."
"Don't get too excited about it General." The woman's lip quirked in a sad smile. "The closest exit I know of leads into Fuller Park. I don't know if I would describe that as safety."
Jacob sighed. "Fucking Chicago. Anything else I should know?"
"I also don't have any money." Elaine admitted. "I don't exactly use cash out here and credit cards require an address. So we're hoofing it unless you know how to hotwire a car." Jacob smiled and pulled his wallet out of a pocket in his vest, flashing a thick stack of green bills inside along with an array of plastic cards – expense cards with an unlimited credit withdrawal courtesy of the SGC. "I've got us covered."
"Jesus, Daddy Warbucks, where were you going if the kitty hadn't tossed you into the Nevernever? That looks like the set dressing for a rap video about making it rain." Elaine eyed the money in astonishment. "Those are hundreds, aren't they?"
"I don't get to see my Grandchildren that often. When I do get to see them I like to spoil them." Jacob smiled at the memory of Mark's kids. "I was going to buy them new gear for soccer this year."
There was a flash of what might have been envy for the childhood she'd never gotten to have, just a brief twitch of the eye but Selmak caught it.
"Is that all?" Jacob spoke between bites, it really was quite a good stew.
"We're almost definitely going to end up in Vampire territory. The Red Court is actively on the war path for any wizard they can get their hands on and I'm technically a fugitive so even the vampires do attack us we can't risk drawing too much attention to us or the Wizard secret police will drag me off for an impromptu decapitation." Elaine shrugged.
Jacob's wasn't sure if it was his own ager or a sympathetic combination of his anger paired with Selmak's that triggered an involuntary eye flash, but neither one of them very much liked the idea of an American being dragged off for summary execution. "Wizard Secret Police?"
"I honestly don't know much about them. I've spent most of my life fleeing from them. I was only a teenager when I "broke" their laws." Elaine explained, her face looking very much like the scared child from Jacob's earlier vision as she made finger quotes around the word "broke." "There are only a couple of laws in the Wizard government. Seven to be exact. If you violate any of them, to any degree, there is only one penalty – death. I had someone control my mind and force me to break the laws, but the Council isn't really interested in extenuating circumstances."
"They council would wish to execute me on sight as well if it makes you feel any better." Selmak offered. "The Tok'ra rebellion happened long after our expulsion from the first world. I doubt they know the difference between one of the System Lords and one of my brethren."
"Yeah, that sounds like them." Elaine agreed.
"You're telling me that there is a secret government operating on US soil and actively murdering US citizens?" Jacob's voice wasn't loud. He was too angry to shout. "And they were willing to execute a child?"
Elaine passed Jacob another bowl of soup, a sad little smile on her face. "You know. I wonder if the reason that the Wizards are so determined to keep the mortals out of things isn't to avoid that exact facial expression."
"I won't let them kill you Elaine." Jacob replied. "Not a US Citizen. Not while I still draw breath."
Elaine laughed, it was an honest sound like silver bells. "I'm sure they'd be glad to arrange for just that General. But for the moment I'm more worried about the South Side of Chicago than the Wardens."
"The what?" Jacob paused.
"The Wardens." Elaine replied. "They're like the Wizard equivalent to James bond crossed with the terminator. They wear grey Cloaks over their head and shoulders."
"Of course. I should have realized immediately." Selmak Interjected mentally at Jacob. "That's why he picked the title of Lord Warden as his new moniker. He's rubbing the it in the White Council's nose that they not only failed to kill him but he now is using their powers to ascend up the ladder of godhood. Considering that it was Wizards of the first Merlin's Council who coordinated the joint effort between the magical peoples to repel the Goa'uld it's a thematically appropriate choice. Heka DESPISED the Merlin."
"How much should we assume he knows about Earth?" Jacob thought back to Selmak. "The Politics, the shifting loyalties between governments and so on? Do I need to start having nightmares about an Iranian-Goa'uld arms sharing agreement, an Iraqi Stargate Program, or a North Korean space fleet?"
"Presumably he knows everything that a contemporary resident of the first world would know." Selmak replied mentally, shifting uncomfortably in Jacob's skull. "I see no reason to assume that he would not capitalize upon that knowledge."
"There aren't many of them and they don't know that I'm alive." Elaine supplied, apparently taking Jacob's silence for worry rather than introspection. He suspected that she hadn't confessed her fugitive status to many people. "It shouldn't be a problem."
Jacob put down his second empty bowl. "Elaine, I stopped believing that things were just going to go right about twenty years ago. The worst that can go wrong is a good jumping off point for where things will actually go."
Elaine smiled, stood up and messed up the circle with her toe. "Coming?"
"Don't we need to put out the fire?" Jacob pointed to the still bubbling pot.
"Did you think that I cooked ten gallons of stew for myself?" Elaine chuckled as she opened a rip in the air that looked out on a dingy alleyway in the dead of night. "No, the others will get it when they get back. War is hungry work."