Monique
It may be somewhat… unworthy of me, but I find I cannot regret too much that things have played out the way they have. Kieran Drake was a true monster, of course, and I hope greatly that he is devoutly miserable in whatever hell his misbegotten soul has found its way to. And I certainly regret the pain that the bastard has caused in his wake. Even so…
I have never, in the previous two years, seen Dr. Tatopoulos look so settled as he does now. Not exactly calmer, rather more comfortable, as if a half-felt itch has finally been scratched. In some ways, it serves as a reminder that he was never fully human, that despite the limiter keeping his other half suppressed, he was still something other, with needs going unmet. That is no longer an issue, and so perhaps the pain was necessary, as one must sometimes debride a wound to be sure it heals.
As well, I no longer need to hold my tongue about some of the more unusual dangers the world holds. While most of HEAT were far more accepting of the Ghostbusters and their area of expertise than Dr. Tatopoulos had been, the idea that the world was full of creatures far different than humanity might have been too much even for them. Or perhaps not, given how quickly they had believed Major Hicks and myself. At any rate, it is a relief to know that I need not worry about Randy following the wrong young lady into a secluded hall at a gaming tournament. Not that such a scenario had worried me often, of course.
And perhaps least important, but still rather satisfying, it meant that I finally had had a chance to stretch, to pit my abilities against someone capable of challenging me, of making me sweat. The Slayer, Buffy Summers, had been extremely skilled, being only bolstered by her supernatural abilities, rather than relying on them. Dr. Tatopoulos had improved sharply as well, though he was not a challenge, per se– but he did force me to work, and not get overconfident in my skills.
This morning, directly after breakfast, I had retired to what had once been a ballroom in the hotel, now transformed into a combination of gym and sparring ring. Faith Lehane, the second Slayer, had joined me, and the two of us had spent a good two hours in practice, first warmups, then drills, and finally sparring, armed and weaponless.
Her styles were quite interesting. In terms of weapons, she seemed to prefer somewhat longer blades, as opposed to Summers' tendency towards short swords. In both weapons and hand-to-hand, her style was at its core a street brawler's style, but one that was refined and expanded to cover weaknesses and make use of tactics.
Calling a halt by mutual agreement, the two of us settled onto one of the benches along the ballroom wall, sipping at water bottles as we rested.
"So, how do I compare to B?" she asked, pushing dark hair back from her face.
"You are equally skilled, but you favor strength where she prefers precision. Not that I would deem either of you lacking in the other quality, but it is clear how your approaches differ," I replied.
She laughed, though there was a bit of self-deprecating snort in the sound. "Yeah, I've always been the wild child. B… you can totally tell she used to be a figure skater, she's got this… grace, this balance, you know? I never really managed that one. Then again, she was maybe a little too buttoned-up, especially when I first hit town. I mean, Angel'd skipped in February, then Kendra died in May, and I hit in October, she was kinda reeling, you know? Maybe going through the motions, a little. I guess, after she helped me, I wanted to help her back, help her find the rush. I was pretty damn fucked up at that point."
I had surmised something of that nature, mostly from things that she and Wesley had not said, as well as certain holes in the stories from the group I had met in Sunnydale. I said nothing, however, sensing that she was not finished.
"My watcher, Diana, she got killed by this vampire– Kakistos was his name, so old and evil he had cloven hands and feet. And I freaked the fuck out and ran. Headed for Sunnydale, not sure why. Guess it just felt like the place to be. And then Kakistos caught up with us."
She laughed again, this time more reflectively. "She called him Khaki Trousers. To his face. I have never seen a vampire look that offended, it was the funniest fucking thing I ever saw. And we killed the bastard. And then Jenny said I was coming home with her, so I didn't have to sleep with one eye open the way I'd have to in a fucking Sunnydale motel. I was gonna argue, but… somehow, it didn't happen. Some mornings I still pinch myself, can't believe it's real, y'know? I'm just a fucked-up street kid, how'd I get this lucky?"
"And you are still waiting for everyone else to realize their mistake and walk away, non?" I asked, one eyebrow arched.
"How'd you know? And why the hell am I suddenly babbling about all of this,anyway?"
"To answer both those questions, I would say that like often recognizes like. Would it surprise you to know that I had a temper as a young girl?"
She gave me a once-over. "Honestly, yeah. Also, how young? You're like, twenty-seven, right?"
"I am. I would say my temper came on slowly, but my father was a Frenchman who could trace his ancestors back to the days before France was France. My mother was the daughter of immigrants from what had been known as French Indochina, and is today called Vietnam. As you can imagine, not every child or adult I interacted with was kind."
A snort. "No shit. And you weren't one for turnin' the other cheek, I'm guessing?"
"No, not generally. I was small and wiry, and ignoring the bullies would only have encouraged them, so I fought until I could not fight, and then I ran. It was then that my father, concerned, found me a teacher in Hung Ga, a Chinese martial arts style. I took quite well to the discipline of the style, perhaps a bit too well. I have been accused in the past of being… over-controlled. It can be unhealthy."
"Yeah, I eventually figured out what I needed– what B and I both needed wasn't the rush, it was more… doin' what we were made to do, y'know? Protect people, stop bad guys, and look damn hot doin' it. Sometimes you just gotta go with the flow."
Faith took a long drink from her water bottle, then grinned. "Speaking of B, she's said some good things about her big bro. Think he'd wanna go a few rounds later?"
I arched an eyebrow at her and she waved the hand not holding the water bottle. "Talkin' totally about sparring, she says he's damn good with a short sword. Not that he isn't fine, but I kinda suspect I'm too young for him, and besides, it'd just be weird, what with the thing with him and B."
"Oui, Dr. Tatopoulos is skilled with a blade, and an exceptionally fast learner. I would suggest, if you wish to spar with him, you collect him from his lab and force him to have lunch, then insist he accompany you to the gym. Otherwise, he will subsist on granola bars and scientific inquiry until someone objects."
And while Dr. Chapman would generally be the one objecting, her current state left her with a good deal less force of personality than usual. Which could be a further problem. Stretching, I threw my sparring partner a nod and headed to claim a shower. I had the feeling that something important was approaching, and I intended to do my best to be ready.
Reno
Guard duty in the hospital building always freaks me the fuck out. I hadn't been with the unit back when the invasion hit, but I'd heard all the stories, and given some of the shit I'd been through in my misspent youth, I had some… issues with "mental and physical restructuring," yo. At least I didn't have to stay in the hospital room with those two poor bastards, but I did have to check on 'em every so often, and that was bad enough. Especially since whatever turned 'em got stopped before it finished, so you could still tell these guys used to be human. Let's just say that brought up a few bad memories an' leave it at that.
But a job is a job, an' me and Private Chan were stationed on this damn door for a four hour shift. There are definitely worse people to be stuck doing guard duty with– Alisa Chan is smart and funny as hell, plus bein' a walking encyclopedia of anything related to cars. We were discussin' the pros and cons of modern Beetles vs. the classics when the boss lady came along the hall, trailing one of the doctors in her wake.
Chan and I instantly snapped to attention with a pair of salutes, and she smiled at both of us. "At ease," she told us. "Anything to report?"
"They've been sleeping kind of… fitfully, ma'am," Chan said, looking over her shoulder at the observation window. "Like something's changed and they can feel it. But no sign of actual consciousness."
The Lady nodded, nibbling on her lip. "All right, then. Would it be a problem for me to go in there?"
The doctor– Lentz, that was his name– shook his head. "No, ma'am. It's not a sterile environment, we just have them on intravenous feeding. The fact that we even pulled that off is a minor miracle, considering."
"Mmm, not as much as you'd think, circulatory systems are pretty much standard, and as for the nutrition… well, they're compatible for a reason," she said, pushing the door open. Chan and I exchanged glances, and I followed the group into the room, just in case.
The Lady moved to stand between the two hospital cots, and slowly, like watching an unoiled hinge move, the two heads turned to stare at her, though their eyes were still as blank and empty as before. Reaching out, she brushed a wisp of brown hair away from what was left of Dr. Hoffman's face. Her face was a mask of pity as she shook her head.
"No one should have to live like this," she murmured, almost to herself. Turning to Sopler, she gently brushed a hand over his forehead, like my mom used to do when I had a fever. Then she levitated both cots up and a little closer to her before putting one hand on each man's shoulder.
The room filled with a… thrumming sound like the sound of an engine running somewhere below the floor. It reminded me of riding the ferry to Seattle on the weekends, low and deep and everywhere, a vibration in my bones as much as in my ears.
Meanwhile, a weird greenish glow was starting up on Sopler and Hoffman's heads– wait, it was starting at the edge of the bits that still looked human. And it was spreading outward. Slow, but noticeable, like fire eating at a piece of newspaper, the glow spread, leaving behind human skin and features in its wake. Engulfing the head, and now the shoulders, spreading further and further as the vibration seemed to get stronger. I found my hand going down to my sidearm almost unconsciously, not sure why.
Sopler and Hoffman were floating up off the beds now, and their entire bodies were covered in that same green glow. The thrumming built to a point where I was honestly surprised that the glass in the windows wasn't shattering, and then faded away completely. Leaving two unconscious, fully human guys laying in the hospital beds.
The Lady wobbled, and Lentz dashed forward to catch her before she could go ass over teakettle on the floor. She smiled up at him in thanks.
"I'm all right, just… that was a lot of energy at once," she told him. He supported her anyway, as the two men in the beds slowly woke up.
"I… what in the world?" That was Hoffman, sitting up with one hand to his head, looking around the room. "Was… was that a dream?"
"Afraid not," The Lady replied, as she moved to where both he and Sopler could see her better. "You guys have spent the last two years bodyjacked by alien intelligences– you know what? Let me give it to you the quick way."
She was facing away from me, but I could see both men's eyes briefly flash green, which set something in the back of my head yowling. But I couldn't spare the time to look at it just yet.
"... We understand," Sopler said, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. "How can we help?"
"Let Dr. Lenz check you over first, then meet me back at the base," she said, letting go of the doctor. "We've got a lot of plans to make, and I can definitely use a couple of guys to delegate to."
They both nodded, with the kind of looks on their faces that you saw in religious art. Couldn't blame 'em, seeing as she'd just pulled off what looked like a miracle. Then she wobbled again, and I moved in to get a hand under her elbow.
"Hey, let's get you outside, ma'am," I said. "Thinking what you need right now is ground contact, you'll recharge faster that way." It had always worked that way when Terra–
Ah ah ah, that's one for the lockbox, my friend.
I blinked away sudden dizziness, wondering why I'd heard, just for a second, the voice of Mr. Arrowny, my old Accounting teacher. Oh well– couldn't have been that important.
The Lady regarded me for a second with that piercing green gaze, then gave me another of those gorgeous smiles. "Thank you, Private. I think you're right, that's exactly what I need."
I helped her out of the building, basking in the warmth, and trying not to think about the nagging feeling I'd forgotten something. I'd remember eventually, after all. Probably at 3 AM.
Randy
Okay, seriously, that did it. I was used to Craven getting absorbed in his work, but when even Fred was making it to lunch before he did, that was too much. Nick had been half-dragged in by Faith fifteen minutes ago, with a look on his face that kinda combined anticipation with dread. Which, when I found out she'd made him promise to spar with her after lunch, that explained a lot.
Nick likes to fight, and honestly, he always has. It's just that before HEAT, he mostly kept it to eviscerating idiots verbally, or occasionally coming down on some asshole with the full force of law and science. When Monique joined us and instituted self-defense classes, you could see something in Nick perk up, and you could also see how much he hated liking it.
Getting that limiter off, and especially him meeting Buffy, has absolutely been good for him. He still isn't really comfortable with that side of him, but he's making progress, and… nobody should hate something they are that much. Godzilla helped with that too, even before the whole mind mojo kicked in. Everybody thought I was crazy to be so gung-ho about the giant lizard from the start, but I could see the difference in Nick. It was like somebody'd turned a light on in a dusty old attic. The change isn't much, what with years of grime on the shades and the window glass, but it's still there.
But the point, before I got sidetracked, is that when even Mr. "What Is This Thing You Call 'Rest'" is in the lunchroom before you, you have crossed into the realm of Officially Late. This was definitely unacceptable, and I was gonna go pry Craven out of his lab and then make fun of him mercilessly until he tried to put a virus on my laptop in retaliation or something. We were all worried about Elsie, and I totally got why he'd be more worried than the rest of us, even, but running his ass into the ground was not going to help anyone.
I headed down to the lounge they'd converted for him and knocked on the door. "Hey, lunchtime! You gonna come out and be sociable?"
No answer, which was seriously weird. Sure, Dr. C could get carried away and lose track of time with the best of them, but he didn't usually focus to the point of shutting everything out. In fact, the only time I'd ever heard of it happening was when one of the aliens had mind-whammied him into it to get him out of the way. I knocked again, then pushed the door open, but didn't step through.
… Yeah, this was definitely not good. The room was empty, NIGEL was tucked into a corner, still shut down from last night, and it looked like the rest of the gear was the same. Except the scanner-cam was up and running, but the laptop that showed the output had been shut. Crap.
I poked my head into the men's room on the way back to the dining room, just to be sure he hadn't stopped in there, but no dice. By the time I hit the doors to the dining area, I was just barely not running.
As soon as I walked in, Nick and Monique were both on their feet, Angel maybe a breath behind them. (And dude, that was quite possibly the biggest Dagwood sandwich I had ever seen. Then again, if I had two hundred years of food to get reacquainted with, I'd probably be doing the same.)
"What's wrong?" Elsie asked, struggling to her feet. Doyle put out an arm for her to lean on, and I could see her consider blowing him off before she took it.
"Craven's not in his lab, he's not in the head, and I'm pretty sure he didn't go back to his room for a nap, he'd have said something," I reported. "Plus the scanner-cam is up and running, but nothing that would have let him do any work."
Angel and Wes exchanged glances. "We've got the place warded, right?" Angel asked.
"We do, but those are aimed at keeping out magical creatures of hostile intent," Wesley replied. "Anyone or anything that lacked one or both of those traits would be able to enter unimpeded, except by mundane things like locks."
I heard Nick swear under his breath. "I think we'd better get down there. Faith? Gonna have to take a raincheck on the sparring."
"No kidding. It'll keep, but I'm not letting you out of LA without a match," she told him.
We relocated pretty quickly, some of us bringing sandwiches or whatever along with us. Sitting down in front of the scanner-cam's output terminal, I saw that it was running too, just in the closed position. Which made no sense… unless someone had wanted to hide what the screen showed. Carefully, I flipped the screen upright, to see a set of graphs that looked pretty damn familiar.
I typed in a command, bringing up Elsie's scans from the previous day. Yeah, they were pretty close, but not exactly the same. The baseline soul signature wasn't so erratic, though it wasn't perfectly regular, either. Way more psychic output, but the physical signals were weakened somehow. Which… yeah, I was pretty sure what had happened here.
"Son of a bitch." Fred's soft curse drew everyone's attention. She'd opened up the thaumometer tracker and was flipping through some of the various areas Craven had set the drones to patrol after Elsie's kidnapping.
Doyle winced. "Why do I feel like that's a bad sign?" he asked rhetorically.
"What have we got?" Faith asked, moving in.
Fred pointed at light blue spots, including one that was very definitely here in the hotel, as seen from a bird's eye view. "Stressed space. With the weird green ring around it that Mendel's pretty sure means that it was done by alien tech instead of magic. Thinking we had a visitor."
I saw all the color drain out of Elsie's face, which, there wasn't much there to begin with. She wobbled a little, and Monique caught her deftly.
"I… what… why would she—"
Wes moved in to look at the graphs over my shoulder, and muttered something I couldn't quite catch. Didn't sound like it was suitable for prime time, though.
"I… believe I may have an answer. Are any of you familiar with the works of Carl Jung?"
He got a bunch of blank stares back, but I actually knew this one. "Psychologist, contemporary of Freud, had a theory of the 'collective unconscious,' right? The idea that human brains work certain ways no matter what your culture, so some patterns are gonna repeat all over the world."
Now everybody was looking at me, and I grinned. "Hey, I've read 'The Hero With A Thousand Faces,' Campbell talked about Jung a lot."
"Dare I ask why you were reading a work on comparative mythology?" Monique asked, raising an eyebrow in my direction. She had the same look on her face that she'd had back when she found out I spoke Navajo.
"George Lucas based the original Star Wars trilogy on it, I got curious."
Wes regarded me with a raised eyebrow of his own, then continued. "Jung had a concept called the Shadow, a construct composed of the parts of the personality that were repressed and denied by the main, 'daylight' self. Not just negative traits– anything the primary persona did not wish to acknowledge as part of them might be shoved into this construct."
"Shit." Everybody turned to look at Nick, who was grimacing and giving Elsie a look I couldn't quite read. She looked… wobbly, like she was trying not to break down or fall over.
"What is it?" Angel asked.
Nick winced. "Elsie and I did a full-scale analysis of her DNA, compared it to samples from the rest of us. And also to some scans of Doctors Sopler and Hoffman that Hicks may have sent us under the principle that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission. We– me, Randy, Mendel, Monique– all have a significant percentage of what looks like junk DNA, but matches very well with the alien codons. Elsie has something like half again as much of any of us. Hicks, by the way, has almost nothing."
"Preloran said the aliens had spliced some of their DNA into humans, and that I had a ton of it," Elsie confirmed. "So?"
"So, you said that the other you said that Preloran didn't know what he was doing, that he only had a basic idea of what the machine did. What if he expected it to… pretty much bring your alien heritage forward? Basically make you… well, physically human, mentally one of the Hivemind?"
"Not a follower– a new leader, someone for him to follow, to give him orders," Elsie realized. "It's possible. So?"
Nick took a deep breath. "Elsie, you have PTSD, we all know it. We also know how hard getting treatment for it has been, given that the cause was kind of classified material. Flashbacks and memory repression, but I don't think the memories are the only things you've been repressing. I'd guess that you've had psychic abilities… probably since birth, but they didn't get unlocked until you were under the mind control. Since then, you've been getting by on denial. And then Preloran stuck you into that machine and tried to pull all of that up from where you'd shoved it."
"And she split her Shadow off as an ecto-projection?" Fred asked.
"Oh dear," Wes interjected. "That would explain some of these readings… and also Dr. Chapman's current weakness. Ecto-projections, or familiars, draw upon the caster for their energy. The two of them remain connected. I'd guess that the Shadow is drawing on outside energy, which is keeping the rate of drain very slow, but…"
"But sooner or later, I'm going to keel over?" Elsie finished, looking weirdly calm.
"Or possibly be… absorbed into the Shadow, leaving it as the dominant personality," he answered. "That was something Jung mentioned as a pitfall, though he meant it in a less… physical sense."
I noticed Monique's eyebrow flicker– wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't had two years reading her reactions. On anyone else, it would have been a full-on grimace. I made a note to myself to follow up with her on that later, in private.
Elsie sighed. "Okay, but more importantly… she grabbed Mendel. Why?"
"... Y'know, everybody knows you're gone on him but you," I offered, when nobody else answered. "Don't know why you don't want to admit it, but if you were shoving it down, it went to her. And Shadow archetypes, at least in stories, aren't generally much for self-restraint. They want it, they grab it."
And then, just to make the day complete, Nick's cell phone rang.
Wesley
Looking down at his belt, Nick muttered something in Ukranian that was extremely profane. Surprisingly good accent, though.
"It's Finn," he informed the rest of us, pulling the phone off his belt and flipping it open. "You're on speaker phone, Lieutenant, we've got some old friends of Buffy and company here."
"Got it," replied the voice from the other end. "Lieutenant Riley Finn, Sandy Point Mutant Response Unit, nice to meet you all, so to speak. Nick, we've got an issue. Yesterday morning, the base was infiltrated by an unknown. Female, probably human, but telepathic and telekinetic. Did something to the computers we took off the Leviathan– we haven't been able to figure out what, just yet."
Nick and Monique traded looks.
"Red hair, green eyes?" Monique asked. "Perhaps with a face that felt familiar, but you were unable to place?"
"Yeah, how did you know?"
A sigh from Nick. "Things are a little crazy here, too. Finish briefing us, and we'll fill you in then."
"Yes, sir."
I suspected that had this discussion been in person, the young man on the other end of the line would have been saluting as well. Nick made a face, as the rest of his team hid smirks.
"Anyway, I caught up to her… she asked me where Hicks was, but I managed to screen my thoughts. Then she did some sort of… fascination thing, not sure how to describe it."
"Like a succubus?" I broke in. This was the young man who had accompanied Major Hicks to that first meeting, and Nick had told him we were Buffy's friends– that strongly implied he knew more than most about the world we inhabited.
"Nnno, not really. This wasn't physical, or even romantic, it was more like– meeting your favorite celebrity and finding out they really are as awesome as you'd imagined. I felt like she was smart and nice and I just wanted to do anything I could to make her happy, because she was so amazing. Had to bite the inside of my cheek to shock myself out of it long enough to pull the alarm. Then she grabbed me and knocked me out. Apparently base security found me out cold on the floor and took me to the infirmary, where I slept for the next twelve hours."
"And you called when you woke up?" Randy asked.
"... No. I woke up to find that we'd lost all contact with Monster Island about three hours after they found me. Last transmission off the island was that they'd picked up some sort of spatial distortion on the various types of radar and energy detectors. And Nick… Major Hicks was there on an inspection tour."
I saw Nick clench his fists briefly, before obviously forcing himself to relax. "I see. Any contact since?"
"Nothing. The satellite uplink to their computer systems is basically telling us there's no computer on the other end of the connection. There's no way to get eyes-on, the closest base is American Samoa, and we'd have to send boats, which would take two days to get there. And nobody likes the idea of sending a force in there completely blind. Officially, of course, this is still an internal matter, but… Colonel Abernathy didn't tell me not to call you."
Nick sighed. "We know some of what's going on. How much of it do you want us to tell you?"
"Any magic involved?"
"No, purely psychic phenomena and alien tech right now, and I cannot believe that phrase just came out of my mouth."
A quiet snicker from the other end of the phone. "I guess then just… keep me informed? And I'll let you know if anything here gets past talking and worrying."
"Sounds like a plan. And Riley? I'm sure Hicks is fine."
"Thanks, Nick." A quiet click, and Nick folded his phone back up, clipping it back to his belt.
Elsie rubbed at her face. "She took over Monster Island… why?"
"Strategy," came Monique's clipped reply. "It is an isolated, well-defended base with a large number of capable fighters for use as security. If she is able to overwhelm all of them with the same fascination power that was used on Lieutenant Finn…"
"Maybe not just that," Randy said slowly. "I mean, the aliens chose it to be their main base for a reason, and the first thing she did was hit the computers. Maybe she found something in there that made it good for… whatever she's doing."
Angel folded his arms, leaning back against the wall. "We don't have enough information to speculate. We don't know what she wants– you didn't have any buried desire to take over the world, did you?"
Elsie snorted. "If I did, it was buried well enough I didn't even know about it. That's the problem with repression, you keep stuff from yourself, too."
"We need more data," Nick declared. "Randy, can you 'borrow' a weather satellite or something and get us some visuals on the island?"
The hacker grinned at him. "No problem, jefe."
"Fred– think you can tease some more answers out of the scans Mendel took? I know it's not exactly your field, but…"
"Don't worry about it, Nick, I'm branching out into all sorts of things these days. I'll see what I can do."
"I'll see what I can find in my library. With a better idea of exactly what we're dealing with, I can narrow my search," I threw in. "Doyle, would you mind assisting me?"
He startled, seemingly having been lost in his own thoughts. "Huh? Oh… sure, no problem."
"Great. I'll call GBI and see if they've got any information that might help out," Nick said.
"Non." Monique shook her head. "I will call. You will keep your sparring date with Faith."
Angel perked up. "Can I get in on that?"
"Uh–" Nick was starting to look a bit like a mouse hunted by a cat.
The Frenchwoman smirked. "Mais oui, I'm sure it will be good for both of you."
Elsie sighed. "Then I guess… I'm going to go take a nap."
Mendel
I opened my eyes to see a bog-standard styrofoam-tile drop ceiling. Not exactly new for me, but it was a little odd not to hear the beeping of medical equipment or the swearing of Hicks' field medics. It wasn't my bedroom at home, or the lab at the pier, or my room at the Hyperion– oh. Right.
I'd been booting my equipment up after breakfast, and I'd started with the thaumometer. Which had been a good call, because no sooner was it up and running than it started beeping to alert me to an area of stressed space– right in the room I was currently occupying. Immediately, I'd activated the scanner-cam, being sure to close the lid on the laptop just in case. Then everything had just… shut off. I've been knocked out before, it was usually a lot more abrupt, not to mention painful. This was more like… a jump cut in a movie.
Gingerly, I forced myself to set up. Okay, I was on a twin bed, in what looked like a particularly cheap hotel room. Dresser, mirror, closet, door that probably led to the bathroom, door that probably led to the hall. Or maybe the other way around with the doors, hard to tell sometimes. Cheap gray industrial carpet installed by the lowest bidder, check. And my head wasn't spinning from the change of position, so I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood up.
I was still wearing the collared shirt and khakis I'd been wearing this morning, that was a relief. Somebody'd taken my shoes off, but they were sitting right by the side of the bed, and I quickly toed them on, wishing I'd gone with the hiking boots over the loafers. See, this was why Nick had like, two pairs of boots in black and three in different shades of brown. Repeated abductions had an effect on one's wardrobe.
I'd just finished checking myself over in the room's mirror (Hair in place, no apparent symptoms of illness, haven't turned into a zombie) when the door opened. I could just catch a flash of red hair in the mirror over my shoulder, and so I wasn't too surprised by what I saw when I turned around.
Elsie– or rather, that other Elsie– was standing in the doorway, giving me a smile. Okay, it was more of a smirk, but it wasn't exactly an unfamiliar expression. That was the look she wore right before springing a really good zinger on somebody, or when she was watching somebody, usually me, about to walk into the setup for the punk's next prank.
"You're finally awake," she greeted me. The outfit she was wearing was new– no, wait, I'd seen those pants before. The fuchsia shirt shouldn't have gone with her hair, but somehow, it worked. And the tailoring was definitely… flattering.
"...Um. Yeah, I definitely am," I replied, pulling my eyes up to meet hers. Her smirk only deepened, and I hurried onward. "Where are we, anyway?"
Now the smirk turned into a full-fledged grin. "Come on, I'll show you," she replied. Without waiting for a response, she turned around and headed back down the hall– which still looked like a cheap hotel, honestly. With no better options, I hurried after her.
Any resemblance to a hotel stopped when the elevator reached the top, and we stepped out onto the deck of the Army's observation center on Monster Island. Soldiers were bustling here and there, throwing salutes in Elsie's direction as they passed. On the other hand, they barely seemed to realize I was there. It was… disturbing to say the least.
"So, what do you think?" she asked, sweeping a hand to indicate the island rising before us. "Think Nicky'll like his present?"
I had to swallow to be sure my voice wouldn't crack before I spoke. "You took over Monster Island to give to Nick… as a present?"
The worst thing was, it made an awful kind of sense. Nick had always been vocal about wanting to do research on the various specimens we tangled with, rather than having to always move on to the next monster-of-the-week. But given that our relationship with the US Army kind of had its ups and downs, getting access between giant shrimp attacks could be difficult. I knew that one of the carrots Drake had used to "convince" Nick to join him had been a chance to study the mutations of the world as much as he wanted. And I knew Nick was still tempted, and hated himself just a little for it.
"Well, that's really more of a side benefit," Elsie was explaining, leading me towards where the deck led onto the rock of the cliff. "I've got some plans that I need this place for, but as long as it's mine, why not kill two birds with one stone?"
"Plans that have you brainwashing the entire garrison the way the Hivemind brainwashed you?" I couldn't believe I was talking like this to someone– or possibly something– that had snapped Preloran's neck without blinking, but… it was Elsie. Not all of her, but part of her, split off somehow. No matter what, I couldn't see her really hurting me.
She waved a hand dismissively. "No, no, it's not like that at all. The Hivemind wanted robots; all of these guys– and girls– still have their own minds. They just understand, that's all, and so they're following me."
Understand. Uh huh. I remembered Nick using that word, while Drake's mind-wonkery was still on him. I didn't trust it from her any more than I did from him. But this wasn't a good time to bring it up, so I let it go.
"Okay, so, what are these plans of yours? And why am I here?"
Turning to me, she took both my hands, stepping into my space. She wasn't grinning now– her smile was small and… content. A look I didn't see on her face very often.
"I can answer both of those questions at once. Better close your eyes, though, this bit can get a bit… disconcerting for people who only process in three dimensions."
So warned, I shut my eyes and had the distinct sensation of space inverting around me, like one of those water tube toys. It was, to quote Adams, unpleasantly like being drunk. (What's unpleasant about being drunk? Ask a glass of water.)
When my stomach had stopped flip-flopping, I was standing in a metal corridor, of a design I'd never seen before. Lines of blue light ran through the walls, and at either end of the hall were doors, almost like hatches on a submarine. A light strip on the ceiling cast a glow down on us, about as intense as most fluorescents, but a slightly different color.
"I… where are we?" I asked, looking around myself in awe. Belatedly, I realized I was still holding her hands and let go, blushing just slightly.
Her smile got warmer. "This? This is your present, Mendel. An entire alien spacecraft, from a completely different spacegoing race. Again, like Nick's present, I've got some plans I need it for, but other than that, this thing's for you to study. As much as you want."
… Okay, I was beginning to get how Nick felt. Part of me wanted to grab a notebook and just start walking, but… plans. That didn't sound good, and I couldn't let myself get distracted.
"What do you mean, plans? For that matter, what do you mean, a different race? How did you find this thing?"
"Come on, we'll walk up to the control room and I'll explain as much as I can," she said, taking my arm and tugging me along.
"So apparently Earth was a pretty hot vacation spot over the millennia," she began, "because we've had not one, not two, but three different alien races check the place out for a summer home. The Hivemind, of course, crashed at the end of the Cretaceous and pretty much slept the rest of the time, occasionally waking up to check on the neighbors and to see if their hominid experiment was soup yet. Then about fifty million years ago, a group who called themselves 'Alterans' hit town. They hung out until approximately ten million years ago, when they had to leave due to a plague. Then about eight-thousand years ago, a third group moved in, the Goa'uld. They're nasty assholes– steal bodies, make people believe they're gods, like torturing people for the hell of it. In the middle of this, the Alterans came back, some of them, and had to blend in. Some of them intermarried with humanity."
She flashed me a grin. "Guess who has some of their genetic bits? And no, I don't mean me."
I blinked. "Me? Seriously?"
"Mmmmhmm, I can feel it. It's… electric." Her face was very close to mine, and I could feel my cheeks heating up just a bit. We've been dating for a while, yeah, but… Elsie was never quite this flirty.
Pulling away from me, she laid a hand on a plate beside one of the doors, which slid open to reveal an obvious control room. Consoles stood around the edges, and the front had a large window? No, a viewscreen, currently showing nothing but blue-black.
"We are currently maybe a few hundred miles from Point Nemo, in the center of the South Pacific Gyre. Out there is the wreckage of a few hundred Earth-made spacecraft, and little to no ocean life or oxygen." She walked over to a console and hit a few buttons. The entire room seemed to shudder, and I heard a deep thrum start up. The blue-blackness outside started to lighten rapidly, and suddenly we were breaking through the surface of the ocean out into the open air. The structure– the ship - continued to rise for a few more minutes before the thrumming slowed, shifting into a different note, as the ship started to move horizontally.
"This is an Alteran ship, hidden here during the return, some five thousand years ago. By one very special Alteran. Y'see, the Alterans had been researching how to basically turn themselves into energy beings– they called it Ascension. It came along with various psychic and pseudo-mystical powers. Not all Alterans wanted to take that path. Like the man this ship belonged to. He found a different power, here on Earth, in the wild areas far from the places ruled by the Goa'uld."
I could guess where this was going. "Magic. He discovered magic."
"Exactly. Figured out how to make it work with Alteran science, with psychic powers, with energy manipulation, and recorded all of his studies here. On this ship."
"And the Hivemind found it."
"Yeah, they sent out probes, and those things got everywhere. They didn't know what they had– they don't seem to have been able to understand magic at all. Something about their brains just… rejects it. But they knew it was here, and once I accessed the information in the Leviathan's computers, I knew too."
Coming over to me, she draped her arms around my neck, leaning in to put her face very close to mine. "So… it's going to take this thing three hours to get back to Monster Island. I could go faster, but I don't want to screw up the jetstream. We could take a tour of the ship, oooorrr… we could find some other way to kill time. Up to you."
"I– a tour sounds great," I managed, barely suppressing a squeak. I was not going to– look, call me a romantic, but when I took a relationship to that level, I generally liked the date to include dinner, dancing, and roses. Elsie could obviously read my thoughts, because she grinned, leaned in and pecked me on the lips before pulling back.
"Okay, then… let's start with the controls."
I put all my attention on her, but in the back of my mind, I couldn't help hoping that Nick and the others would find me soon, before I did something I might not actually regret.
A/N - Alterans and Goa'uld property of MGM and Double Secret Productions.