"Does anyone else think this is a bad idea?" Cam looked around at his companions. "I think this is a bad idea. I've seen something that looks a lot like that before, and I still have trouble getting to sleep when I think about what happened next."

All five members of SG-1 stared at the device sitting innocently on the rock ledge below them, some three and a half miles from the site of the local stargate. A remote drone had noticed the glint of light from a metallic surface half an hour after it was launched through the gate, which lead to it being sent to have a look. The results of that photo-reconnaissance mission had led directly to their presence here on an otherwise unremarkable world that was, as far as they could so far work out, uninhabited. The presence of the gate and a few remnants of masonry they'd found showed it had once had people, but based on the sheer age of the remains, they were long gone for whatever reason.

"It's different from the first one," Sam noted while inspecting it with binoculars. "Smaller, slightly different shape, and the arrangement of the various… lenses, maybe? That isn't the same either."

"It looks like it's stuck to the rocks too, not just lying there like the other one," Daniel added, also inspecting it.

"Is anyone listening to me?" Cam complained. "We really should just leave that thing alone and go find something else to get into trouble with."

"Indeed," Teal'c said gravely. "Colonel Mitchell is correct. We know that whatever entity is responsible for these devices has abilities far beyond those we can field."

"Aren't you just a tiny bit curious about who they are?" Vala asked with a typically smug grin.

"As I recall, you yourself said that you would turn and proceed in the other direction should you encounter such a device again," the huge Jaffa replied with what was almost a tiny smile. His sense of humor was very deadpan, but it was also very real. The woman merely shrugged at him, not looking embarrassed.

"That was six months ago and nothing else has happened. And I'm not suggesting that we take it, just that we look at it." Leaning over the cliff edge, she peered down, then looked from side to side. "Although getting to the thing will be interesting."

"It's a good hundred and fifty feet down a sheer cliff," Daniel nodded, lowering his binoculars and looking down as well. "And if you slipped and missed that ledge, it's another half mile to the ground."

"Don't slip, then," Vala said brightly. "Or if you do, don't miss."

"The ledge or the ground?" the archaeologist asked.

"Don't be silly, Daniel, you won't miss the ground," she told him with a wider grin, slapping him on the back, then grabbing him as he stumbled. Glaring at her as she looked embarrassed, he took a deliberate step back and put Teal'c, who was wearing a very small smile again, between himself and her.

Sam ignored the byplay, used to it by now, and kept inspecting the alien device with immense, although cautious, curiosity. Cam sighed and leaned back on a rock, waiting for the woman to finish her studies. "Definitely a bad idea. Remember the hand big enough to pick up a Humvee like an apple?"

Everyone nodded as one. Not one of the people who had been present for that would ever forget it.

"Do you want to meet the hand again?"

The heads all shook.

"So let's go home. We still need to work out what happened to the Ori, you know. They just up and vanished right when they were starting to be a problem, which makes me nervous. Why? What happened to them?"

"General O'Neill wants us to learn what we can about whoever or whatever made that device, Cam, you know that," Sam replied after a few absent seconds, lowering the binoculars. "That's why we're here. The Ori mystery can wait since it's no longer a threat. I agree we need to work it out at some point, though, they could come back again."

"They're not here, and that is," Daniel put in, pointing at the glinting machine sitting on the rocky outcrop that protruded from the side of the mountain. "And we came all this way."

"It would be a shame not to at least have a quick look," Vala added helpfully. Cam looked at the three, then at Teal'c for backup. The taciturn man merely returned his gaze with no indications that he was going to intervene one way or the other.

"You're no help at all sometimes," Cam grumped, slumping a little. Moving his weapon around to a more secure location on his vest, he took his backpack off and pulled out a coil of rope. "Great. Let me guess who goes first..."

Vala looked embarrassed. "Whoops."

Everyone glared at her. Rubbing her neck, she shrugged, looking up for a moment at the place, high above, where the rope was secured.

The rope that was currently lying in an untidy pile at her feet.

Supposed to be secured.

"You said you could tie a knot," Daniel grated.

"I can tie a knot. Those two even checked it!" She pointed at Cam and Teal'c. "It was securely tied off."

"Yet this bit here," the man said, bending and retrieving the end of the rope, then waving at her, "is supposed to be way up there." He pointed up with the other hand. "Which is where we're going to need to be sooner or later. You were the last one to climb down, so what did you do?"

"Nothing! I promise! All I did was tighten it a little."

"Do I need to teach you the difference between tighten and loosen, Vala?" Daniel shook his head as the brunette woman put her hands on her hips and scowled at him. "Good job. Well done."

"We're not going this way, that's for sure," Cam sighed, lying on his stomach and looking over the side of the thirty foot wide by forty foot deep outcropping they were standing on. "It's damn near straight down, without a lot of serious climbing gear there's no way to do it."

"And the cliff actually overhangs us a little above this ledge," Sam said, looking up, then to the sides. She pointed. "We might be able to climb it if we went sideways about two hundred feet, but you couldn't tell for sure until you got there."

"At which point you would find it difficult to return," Teal'c mentioned. She sighed and nodded.

"It's a hell of a long way down," she admitted.

"Hey, there are lights on inside this thing," a voice said from behind them, making the other four turn and look. Vala, having apparently lost interest for the moment in how they were going to get back up the cliff, had climbed up the short rise to where the alien device was adhering to the extreme edge of the outcropping and was peering into one of the transparent areas, her hands cupped around her face and her forehead nearly touching it. "I think it's on."

"Well, don't touch it, then, you idiot," Cam snapped, hastily going over as well and pulling her back from the machine. "How the hell are you still alive? You're always doing this."

She smiled winningly at him. "I'm a nice person and people trust me."

"Yeah, right," he sighed, making her snicker for a moment. She was irrepressible, unfortunately.

"I'm being serious, I saw a light on in there," she went on, pointing back at the machine. "The other one seemed entirely inert but this thing is doing something."

"I wonder what?" Sam mused out loud, pulling out a hand-held scanning device and turning it on, then fiddling with it while pointing the business end at the egg-shaped construction. This one was about a quarter the size of the one they'd originally found, somewhat flatter, and had more of the transparent areas. Most of the rest of it was the same gray metallic substance they'd failed to identify at the time. "I can't detect any known energy signature coming from it, but it's slightly warmer than ambient, so I think Vala's right. It's doing something."

"Something dangerous?" Cam looked at the alien device and stepped back. "Knowing our luck, it's arming a bomb. That's the sort of thing that normally happens."

"Little paranoid there aren't you?" Vala said although she also stepped away. Just in case.

"Maybe, but considering what I do for a living..." The man shrugged. "And the sort of people we run into."

"Good point."

"Can anyone else hear a very high pitched whine?" Daniel said a couple of seconds later, looking around. The others glanced at him, then each other. "Really faint, right on the edge of audibility."

"Now that you mention it..." Sam tilted her head a little, listening. "Yes, I can."

"Where's it coming from?"

They all turned to stare at the machine.

"Of course. I told you this was a bad idea." Cam stepped back some more. "Now it's going to explode. Or attack us. Or attack us then explode. It's a weapon, it's always a weapon."

"It's an ultra high resolution multidimensional wideband video and audio recording device, actually," a voice they were not expecting suddenly said from behind them, sounding a little annoyed. Vala yipped and nearly jumped into Daniel's arms, Cam and Teal'c whirled around and leveled their weapons, while Sam dropped the scanner and pulled her sidearm out.

"And you've walked right into frame in the middle of a recording I was making for my dad and ruined it," the alien creature who was looking at them from the other side of the ledge complained with an air of distinct miffedness. "Thanks a lot. Now I have to start all over again." She, as far as they could work out, shook her head. "I mean, I pick a perfect place, no one around, no visitors through that weird little wormhole thing for years, set everything up, and the next thing I know there are a bunch of humans rappelling down and poking my camera. Don't you guys have something else to do?"

Walking over to the device, she somehow pushed her hand entirely through the surface, did something, then removed it, as they all gaped in shock. There was a short pause before the device folded in on itself and shrank/distorted/warped into a horribly hard to look at thing the size of a hen's egg. The alien picked it up and slipped it into a pocket, sighing. "Maybe I can salvage some of the footage. It's only an hour or so out of nearly a month. But I had almost the entire sequence done… crap."

"Who the hell are you?" Cam finally managed to say, interrupting the complaining, which was done in perfect English with an odd but faint accent, coming from a mouth that shouldn't have been able to speak like that. They inspected the reptilian figure which inspected them right back. Reaching up she pushed her hat, which he noted with a sense of disoriented curiosity looked like a perfectly ordinary fedora, back on her head over what appeared to be fine feathers. Her expressive scaly face took on an expression of cheerfulness, the irritation that had been so clear before fading away.

"Me? My name is Saurial. Pleased to meet you." She looked at where the 'camera' had been, then back. "Sort of. It would be better to meet when I'm not shooting a recording." She shrugged a little. "Oh well. Shit happens. I'll find another place that's harder to get at and start again."

Sam, who was now gaping a little, her weapon drooping as she stopped paying as much attention as she should have done, asked the thing they were all thinking. "Why are you recording here?"

"Look at it!" Saurial turned and spread her arms, indicating the scene in front of them. "It's incredibly beautiful, isn't it? No pollution at all, no dust in the air, all that violet and blue vegetation… You can see for miles and miles and it's all completely natural. It makes a wonderful ambient background for an office, you know, to relax people. My dad loves that sort of thing. All the sounds of the birds, or what this place thinks are birds, as well." She smiled, tilting her head up to the sky. "And those two suns are pretty damn cool too. This place is neat."

Turning back she fixed them with a look. "You guys really do seem to be tripping over our stuff a lot, though. First you lifted my sister's camera, now you're poking mine. Any particular reason why or are you just lucky and nosy?"

"That, I think," Vala said after a moment. "I know I'm nosy, definitely."

"Oh. Fair enough, then. Try not to do it again, if you could?" Saurial grinned briefly. "Or I'll have to complain officially."

Cam stared at the sheer number of teeth shown in the grin and tried to suppress the faint shiver that ran down his spine.

"Your sister?" he echoed. "That hand was your sister?!"

"Part of her," Saurial smirked. "She's a bit larger than I am."

"A bit?" He gaped. "The hand alone was twice your size!"

"We grow them big in my family," the reptilian alien chuckled. "I'm the runt."

They all looked at each other for a moment. "What did you do to that… camera…?" Sam finally asked. "How did it shrink?"

"It's fractally folded in on itself," Saurial replied. "Useful technique, makes things simpler to carry."

"Did you come through the gate? Where do you come from? How do you know English? How did your… sister… track that other device to our home world? Have you been to our home world?" Daniel suddenly produced a whole series of questions, causing everyone to look at him. Sam seemed to also have quite a few things she wanted to ask, Cam noticed. He was mainly wondering if this was some weird trick to get them to lower their guard. He'd never heard of whatever species this was, and had no idea how or why she could have learned English like a native.

Or why she was wearing a fedora…

"No, we have our own methods of travel," Saurial replied patiently. "I come from another universe, to put it in terms that you could understand. I'm good with languages, and we can track our tech anywhere eventually." She smiled a little. "It might take a while in some cases, but we always turn up sooner or later. Recently I've had to be quite firm with some people who kept borrowing my stuff and trying to claim it. We seem to have mostly stopped it now, although we had to make a few examples." Looking around, she added, "This was just a personal project, though, I had some spare time. Weird universe, this one. Energy beings all over the place, and some of them are really rude. Couple of galaxies over there were a whole bunch of them who were extremely unpleasant, we had to come to an arrangement."

"An arrangement?" Cam had a sudden clenching sensation in his gut. He could see out of the corner of his eye that Teal'c seemed to be looking very thoughtful.

"Yep. We arranged that they'd stop being unpleasant. Seems to have stuck." She seemed pleased. "The ones around here are much less annoying, they keep to themselves for the most part. It's a bit weird, this constant wanting to become immaterial energy some species have. The real world is so much more interesting. I mean, just look at that view!"

She pondered the horizon for a short time, while the entire SG-1 team stared at her, then each other, wondering what the hell was happening. Eventually she sighed with a sort of faint pleased tone mixed with disappointment. "Well, can't hang around here all day, I have things to be getting on with. Like finding a better place to put my camera where hikers won't trip over it."

Saurial looked up at the cliff behind them. "You guys like climbing, then?"

"Not really," Daniel said, turning his head to glare at Vala, who flushed, looking away from fixedly peering at the reptilian female. "We had a rope."

"Forgot to tie it to something?" Saurial asked sympathetically.

"Sort of." He sighed. "More or less."

"OK. Want a lift somewhere, then? It's going to get dark in about three hours and it gets really cold here when the suns go down." She examined them for a moment. "You guys aren't dressed properly for night around here."

Finally lowering his P-90, since it looked like she genuinely was both non-hostile and friendly, Cam looked at her, then around them. "How did you even get here?" he asked. "We didn't see or hear you until you spoke."

With a smile, she shrugged. "I can climb well, as it happens, but I also have other methods available." Walking over to Vala, who was closest, she put a clawed hand on the woman's shoulder, then both of them simply vanished without a sound.

"Holy shit!" Cam turned on the spot, looking wildly around. "What the fuck?"

Teal'c was also looking about for the pair, Daniel was staring at where they'd been, and Sam had pulled out another scanner and was fiddling with it.

"Up here!"

All four of them looked up, to see Saurial, and a stunned-appearing Vala, looking down at them from the top of the cliff.

"Teleportation?" Sam appeared totally fascinated. She squeaked in shock when Saurial suddenly appeared next to her.

"Not quite, but sort of yes," the humanoid lizard laughed, the end of her long tail twitching back and forth. "If you want I can take you right back to your wormhole terminal."

"The gate?"

"That's the thing. It's sort of primitive, but I guess it works."

Sam appeared shocked again, as she turned to Cam with a look of wordless confusion.

He sympathized. A lot. He was also very confused, and had more questions than he could articulate. After a moment, though, he decided that he'd rather ask them in front of the gate rather than half a mile up the side of a vertical drop on a piece of rock the size of a tennis court. "Back to the gate would be fine, thank you," he managed.

"Sure. I'll just get your friend." She disappeared again, reappearing a second later with Vala standing next to her looking like she couldn't figure out what to say, but apparently rolling with it. "OK. It's easiest if I take you one at a time," Saurial said. "Back in a second."

She and Vala vanished once more, the woman barely having time for her eyes to widen. Moments later Saurial was back, next to Sam. Half a second after that both of them had disappeared.

"Holy crap," Cam muttered, shocked at the speed and casual nature of the whole thing. There wasn't even any light effects like the Asgard beaming technology produced, she simply appeared and disappeared like flipping a switch.

Blink, she was there next to Daniel, blink, she and the archaeologist were gone. Then Teal'c. Before he had time to do much more than wonder what it felt like, he found himself standing in front of the stargate DHD, with the rest of his team looking around in amazement. Saurial vanished one last time, and reappeared five seconds later with the rope they'd left behind, which she handed to him having coiled it neatly. "There you go."

"Ah… thanks?" He couldn't think what else to say.

"No problem." She studied them all closely, then smiled. "See you around, maybe. I have to go find another place to put my camera, so no one trips over it again."

"Hey, we have a lot of..."

Cam lowered the hand he raised. The lizard-woman or whatever she was was gone.

"That was… different," Daniel said very slowly.

Sam opened her mouth, thought for a moment, then closed it. Then opened it again, before sighing and closing it once more. With a shrug she began dialing home. As the ring ground into action, Cam tried mentally working out what he was going to put in his report.

It wasn't going to contain very much of use, he was fairly sure of that. Aside from the comment, 'Do not interfere with Saurial's cameras, unless you want life to become weird.'

At least now he suspected that they had a reasonably good idea of what had happened to the Ori, though. Or, rather, who had happened to them. He wondered what her 'arrangements' had actually consisted of, then firmly decided it was probably better not to know.

Exchanging a look with a very thoughtful-seeming Teal'c, he followed the others through the wormhole when it stabilized. Moments later the gate shut down and the area was silent except for the songs from the bird-like creatures.