Jack O'Neill looked at Daniel Jackson in a wholly new light. It was not a nice light; it was in fact quite a nasty light. "Where did you get that outfit Daniel?" O'Neill asked before he could stop himself.

Jackson had the good grace to look embarrassed for a moment before answering. "I didn't chose it," he explained weakly.

He was dressed in a complicated arrangement of black leather straps and studs. It looked a bit like someone had gotten carried away when they were designing the mechanism to secure a jockstrap in place. 'If they get hit from this direction then it would be knocked loose so we need a strap that goes over the shoulder…' and a few more stupid ideas like that one before finally committing the design to the tannery.

"Who did?" O'Neill was having trouble focussing on any thing else now that the dam was broken. It was a bit like the that the first question was like the little leaky crack in the dyke and there was no little boy standing near by to put his finger into it so the water was going to start eroding his resolve really quickly if things don't change soon. He felt a back log of puns bubbling to the surface.

Jackson drew a quick breath and then said, "The last thing I remember before Teal'c sneaked in through the gap behind the tapestry was having a quite cognac with the Count. In between those two events…" he shrugged. "I have no idea."

"Out for the Count?" suggested O'Neill. "Or was that down?"

"Oh very funny," Jackson mocked.

"I wouldn't recommend that outfit in future."

"Do you feel OK?" asked Samantha Carter. She had a sneaking suspicion that Daniel had been less lucky than she had, and that was a conceptual stretch. Her outfit was no more sensible than his, and probably equivalently degrading, but at least she had been left alone.

Hadn't she…?

"Can we focus on the real issue here, please?" Jackson implored. "It's not as though this outfit is any worse than the one that the Countess chose for Sam," he said, thus backing up Carter's own internal argument.

Until this point in the conversation, Carter had been largely unaware of the way she was dressed, well partly (dressed that is). After a few hours wearing the thing she had become used to it, even if she was still occasionally aware of the way O'Neill was staring at her out of the corner of his eye, and she was not unhappy about that attention. She even felt no jealousy in the way he was focussing on Daniel at that moment because she felt the same insatiable curiosity to knew what happened.

"So when you woke up did you…?" she sort of half asked, unable at the last moment to commit the question in her mind to her output buffer.

Daniel looked at her. He wasn't going to save her by guessing what she was trying to ask and then answering her. If she wasn't going to say it out loud, he saw no reason to answer it. He stared her down. She shook her head. "Wouldn't we be better occupied by looking at this," he pointed his torch into the dark and made it less so.

The beam of his torch found the head of a man sprawled on the floor of the corridor. The entire SG-1 team turned to look at the face on the floor. It had the same animation as a store-front dummy.

"OK, you're right Daniel," said O'Neill. "But as soon as this little adventure is over, I want a full report."

"Not on your life," pledged Jackson.

"Come on. You have to tell."

"Look he has fang marks on his neck," said Carter. She had crouched down to examine the body.

"I'm serious, Daniel," said O'Neill, trying to sound like he was giving an order when he really wasn't.

"So am I," vowed Jackson.

"And he looks really pale," commented Teal'c.

"Are you two going to contribute to this investigation, Daniel, Colonel?" asked Major Samantha Carter USAF and dressed like a harem girl from an Arabian nights story in a bad B-grade movie, made recently enough to seek an R classification certificate.

"Yes," sighed O'Neill.

"I've already had a look," explained Jackson.

"He looks really anaemic," suggested O'Neill. "But then again so does every body in this place. They should get out more."

"Except for the serving girls," said Jackson.

"Yeah they looked pretty good," commented O'Neill.

"There's a dead body on the floor," reminded Carter.

"Yeah, OK," conceded O'Neill.

"Exsanguination is not such a bad way to go," said Jackson. "You gradually fade to unconsciousness and die in your sleep."

"I know we've been through a lot Daniel, but I don't remember you dying that way at any time in the past," noticed O'Neill. "Plenty of other ways…"

"Well yeah there is that."

"You can't bleed to death through a wound that small," observed Carter.

"Why not?" asked O'Neill.

"It coagulates and heals much too quickly to allow a whole couple of gallons of blood to leak out."

"Unless there was an anti-coagulant involved," suggested Jackson.

"I suppose."

"And those are fang marks right?"

"Yeah."

"Then you would need to have an anticoagulant in the saliva of whoever bit them."

"So what sort of animal was it?" asked O'Neill looking over his shoulder and fingering the butt of his AK-47. The wolf seemed a likely candidate. He said so.

"No," said Jackson.

"What just 'no'? Not, 'I don't think so because…' just 'no'?"

"That's right."

"Why?"

"Well it is a little wound and wolves hunt to eat. This guy would have his throat chewed out and…"

"I think that's enough detail Daniel," said O'Neill, thinking of Carter's sensibilities. The whole water vapour as clothing thing had confused O'Neill.

"You're right Daniel," Carter said, oblivious to O'Neill's solicitous cut off. "A wolf would have ripped his throat out and dined on his entrails. There would be gore all over…Is there something the matter Sir."

"No nothing," said O'Neill. He sighed heavily. "So what was it?"

"Vampire bat," suggested Carter. "They have an anticoagulant in their saliva."

"Oh yeah," muttered Jackson. "Like the Goa'uld would bring them across from Earth."

"Maybe it was a local animal," suggested Teal'c

"The xenobiologists will have to find it if there is one," Carter said.

"So how big would it have to be?" Jackson persisted.

"Looking at the bite marks, it would have to be big, maybe even man sized."

"How would you know that?" O'Neill chimed in.

"Well, the bite radius is like that big," she said and held out her hand so her fingers were a few centimetres apart. "You would need a stomach that was pretty big to take that much food in during a single bite and…"

Everyone was staring at her.

"What?" she asked.

"Then they're vampires right?" O'Neill guessed.

"No sir."

"Well Sam," O'Neill asked techily. "What is it then?"

"They're Goa'uld," suggested Jackson. It came completely from no where and caught everyone by surprise.

"How can they be Goa'uld?" O'Neill snarled. "OK, Daniel, I know that the Goa'uld are bloodsucking fiends. I know that, but this," he waved at the body that sprawled at their feet, "is not that kind of fiend."

"No that's true," agreed Carter. "I can't explain it. I just know that whatever did that, they have a need for blood."

"Vampires Sam," O'Neill said. "You're talking about vampires, real ones."

"Well I guess so," she said dubiously. She obviously didn't agree.

"Do you think we get the whole story here?" O'Neill warmed to the task of speculation. "Do we have to stake them and cut off their heads? Do they have to hide from the sun? Do they have to sleep on dirt and can't cross moving water? Do they have super human strength and can't be killed by bullets or steel or…?"

"I don't know," Carter said. "All I know is that we have a dead body on the floor and that something drained his blood through a bit mark."

"They probably don't, you know Jack," said Jackson.

"But how do we know?" O'Neill persisted.

"Well we don't."

"So we might have the real deal here. We'd be best to play safe."

"What, you mean the whole eat garlic and use the Christian Cross to ward them off and all that?"

"Yeah if necessary."

Carter felt a chill run up her spine, but she was wearing almost nothing and it was probably caused by a stray breeze.

*

"Give me that report," General Hammond instructed Colonel Makepeace. "I think it's about time that I found out what is going on here."

"Vampires?" Makepeace asked. "Blood sucking ghouls?" He pushed the report across to General Hammond who picked it up and began reading.

His lips moved.

"Of sorts," said Teal'c.

"You can carry on Teal'c," General Hammond instructed.