At first light Jack O'Neill led Samantha Carter back to her room, in the, probably vain, hope that someone had returned her clothes during the night.

"Are you always this messy when you stay at other peoples houses?" O'Neill asked her.

Samantha Carter's room had been disturbed during the night. It was certainly not arranged in the same way that she had left it. OK, so the bed had been disturbed a bit by her early attempts at sleep, but there were no clothes in the room when she left. She was pretty sure of that. It was the reason that she was wearing the tatty transparent rags that she was wearing.

Yet what they found bore no resemblance to what she remembered..

She looked around and tried to put the pieces together. She had forgotten to put her towel up. It was still on the floor. That was the one aspect that she remembered being the same from when she left the room hours earlier.

The crystal goblet that was now resting on the table was not there last night, she was pretty sure of that.

Carter stood at the doorway and looked around. Her equipment was scattered around the room. The bed clothes had been more than just disturbed, they had been thrashed, as thought someone had - occupied it. The word 'slept' just wouldn't come into her head. Whoever had been in her bed, they had done something much more vigorous than could be explained by her attempts at sleep. I wonder who it was, thought Carter. Memories of Daniel's apparent amnesia came to mind and she felt that horrible sinking feeling in her gut. She gazed at the bed again and hoped it wasn't her … and if she did, she hoped it was alone… And she had memories of the Countess accompanying her to the room but none of her leaving…

And we are going to get out of her head before we see anything that we shouldn't see…

She hurriedly gathered a few items to her, clutched them to her breast, and then found that she was shivering. It might have been from the cold because she was not all that well dressed, but then again it might not…

The dress she had worn earlier in the night was much the worse for wear. It hadn't been much to start with. She had spent much of the night wrapped in a tapestry, after the dress had been shredded by her slide into the dungeon. By the time she had climbed back up the slope it had not been up to anything at all.

She grabbed her gear off the floor and threw the tapestry aside before gathering as much of her clothing onto herself as she could manage in as short a time as possible, conscious all the time that her room had been invaded.

O'Neill had the decency to turn his back while she dressed. She had been so flustered by the lack of memory of the events of the evening that she hadn't even noticed his presence. In fact she had forgotten that he was even there to be honest.

"Umm," said O'Neill, after he realised what was going on. Carter realised that he was in the room with her and gave a momentary start. Oh what the hell it was all too late anyway. She decided to plough onward. O'Neill for his part was wondering what he should do about matters. He was thoroughly confused by Carter's apparent confusion and… Following the rustling of clothing Carter began speaking. "What happens now?" she asked. "We need to head home as quickly as possible, don't we?"

O'Neill made the understandable mistake of assuming that she had finished dressing and turned back to face her. He rather wished that he hadn't and turned back to face the wall so he could move past his embarrassment. She appeared to be wearing three postage stamp sized pieces of lace held aloft by strips of heavy-duty dental floss.

"Yeah," he said much more hurriedly than he would normally respond to such an obvious statement, if only because he had seized on the change of subject. Discussions about the things that were running through his head could lead to wholly inappropriate behaviour. "We have to get our information back as quickly as possible."

"What happened out there?" she asked, shoving her arm into the sleeve of her shirt. She looked up from what she was doing and noticed that he was staring at the wall. She took pity on him. "You can turn back now," she said and shrugged her shirt so that it seated onto her shoulders properly.

"Out in the courtyard?" O'Neill guessed and turned back to face her, slowly. Ah! It was sort of OK to do so now. "I don't know."

All he had to deal with now was a length of leg… but what legs!

"Villagers?" she asked and then bent over to arrange her trousers on the bed. It wasn't a sight to do anything for O'Neill's piece of mind. Her underwear consisted of only three fabric triangles, not the four that O'Neill expected. This modern girl tendency to avoid VPL has unfortunate consequences to the male psyche. They tend to notice these things.

"I think so," O'Neill squeaked and spun hurriedly so he stared out through the window at the early morning sun. With a sinking feeling he heard the tinkle of shattered crystal, and knew that the goblet had been knocked off the table by his wayward holster. He did not dare turn around yet. He could wait a few minutes. He blinked a few times at the discomforting glare pounding through the window, but it beat the hell out of the discomfort he would find elsewhere in that room. By the time he felt game enough to look Carter's way again she was doing up the fixtures that held her trousers aloft. O'Neill was much relieved. "Come on we'll get back with the others and get out of this place."

Carter stared at the broken crystal and fought her tendency to clean it up, Some one else would do it later.

Carter and O'Neill stepped back into the corridor and crept carefully back to Jackson's room. Strangely there was no sound from within. O'Neill frowned. You usually couldn't shut Jackson up, and Teal'c lacked the skills do so any way.

They pushed on the door and found it empty. Well not empty per se. It just had no other people in it. Jackson and Teal'c had gone missing.

"Oh sh…" said O'Neill and his voice trailed off to inaudibility, thankfully for our PG rating. He expected that sort of behaviour from Jackson, but Teal'c was usually more responsible.

*

"So what did happen to you two?" asked General Hammond, regaining control of the briefing from Colonel Makepeace. Hammond had not been happy with the direction that it had been going there for a moment, and tried to get things back onto the right track.

Colonel Makepeace had been hanging on every word that Teal'c uttered, as though savouring the description of the interchange between Carter and O'Neill. If he couldn't have the experience first hand he was determined to milk the vicarious option. Teal'c had wilted under the incessant questions and might have embellished the story a bit. General Hammond certainly hoped so, although with Teal'c that was rarely a consideration. He felt sympathy for O'Neill, General Hammond knew how O'Neill felt about Carter and she certainly pushed the envelope at times. She tried hard not to, but circumstances certainly conspired against her.

He shook his head. "So why did you and Daniel Jackson leave the room while Colonel O'Neill and Major Carter were out?" General Hammond asked before makepeace could embarrass him self (and General Hammond as well, truth be told) further

"We had a visitor…" began Teal'c.

*

The faint sound that they had both heard on the other side of the door attracted the curiosity of both Daniel Jackson and Teal'c. Jackson cur off in mid monologue and both sets of eyes swivelled toward the door. Jackson's curiosity bump was more developed than Teal'c's so he was the one that answered the door. He swung it aside suddenly. Behind him, Teal'c had his staff at the ready.

They found a serving girl waiting in the hallway. It would be fair to say they her eyes were suddenly very wide, and very expressive. Her mouth even dropped open a bit, but she caught it quickly and stood her ground.

The second thing that Jackson noticed about her was that she had all of his clothes stacked neatly in her arms. That observation took a while to dawn on him because, the first thing he noticed was the perfection of her face, the symmetry inherent in her bone structure and her adherence to the golden ratio that found its way into the development of every aspect of human physical development. The ratio of 1:1.618 had been employed accurately and everywhere when she was being put together.

She wore much the same sort of diaphanous piece of confection that seemed to be the fashion throughout the place. If anything, this outfit was even more revealing than the one that Samantha Carter had worn all night. We should point out that this was the second time that Daniel Jackson had encountered this particular girl. He was reasonably sure; we can be more so. It was the one who introduced herself to him as Heidi.

It was only the distraction posed by his own discomfort that prevented Daniel Jackson from spending a few moments checking her out after he took the clothes from her. She stayed in place, waiting for something.

Jackson dropped his clothes on the bed gratefully and started shaking them out in preparation to putting them on. For a while there he had been entertaining the uncomfortable notion that they were gone forever and as much as he wasn't a fan of military finery, it beat this latest alternative offer that he had worn most of the night, hands down. His clothes had not been cleaned, he noticed, and they smelled very bad, but that was of no concern to Jackson. All he could see at that moment was a change of underwear. It might have been yesterday's and it might have been through a twenty kilometre uphill march, but it beat the hell out of the leather and studs that he had worn through the night.

While this inspection was occurring, the servant girl stepped through the door and into the room behind him. She seemed to float along the floor, principally because the skirt of her dress draped to the floor and not because of any bizarre physical evidence. Her legs were clearly visible through the fabric (and also adhered to the ratio of 1:1.619 regarding their length as a portion of her height), it was just that her tread was so light, it almost appeared that she wasn't touching the ground at all. She even had elegant feet Jackson noticed absently, although he had a hard time seeing them when he had been standing close to her because his eye got distracted before he could tilt his head down that far.

Jackson, you have other things to attend to, he admonished himself. He began fussing with the buckles on the leather thing and then stopped because it was only then that he realised that she had come into the room behind him.

She showed absolutely no inclination to leave, much as she had done when he had rather less clothing on during the previous night. Unless she did make some sort of effort to leave, then the he was going to have to dress in front of her. He looked at her for a moment and tried to convey the idea that discretion might be a good idea.

She met his gaze blankly for a moment and then stared at Teal'c. She seemed to have no idea what Jackson's problem might have been.

"I have seen you around and heard you speak," she said urgently. She spoke in the same ancient Egyptian language that Teal'c, Jackson and the rest of the Goa'uld population shared throughout the rest of the galaxy. "I know that you can understand what I have to say." She stepped further into the room and marched across to Teal'c. She stood about half a metre away from him and stared at him, focussing on a point a couple of centimetres above the bridge of his nose, the place where the mark of Apophis had been embossed onto his forehead amid great pain. "I have wondered if that was real ever since I saw it the first time. I could not believe that it could possibly be true. We have… We have… I just can't believe it."

While she was distracted Jackson decided that he wasn't going to get a better opportunity to dress. He began releasing the buckles.

Teal'c swayed slightly to get further away from her. The intensity of her gaze was disconcerting. He raised one eyebrow and tried to disconcert her with that. It failed, let's face it, when it comes to intimidating facial expressions Teal'c's generic raised eyebrow ranks right down there with the gormless grin.

Off to one side of Teal'c and Heidi's little tableau, Jackson's leather ensemble landed with a tingling thud and Jackson grabbed at the underwear hurriedly. We are OK at this point. We have numerous options to avoid seeing anything that we shouldn't see what with our limited censorship classification. The shirt tails are quite long, and we also have the option to watch the interplay between Teal'c and the servant girl. We used both diversions, neatly.

"Umm," said Daniel Jackson, latching the catch on his trousers. He was safe to talk now, but he felt that he needed to go to a great deal of trouble to form the next thought before saying it out loud. His linguistic routine went into overdrive. While he formed the thought, the rest of the room's occupant's went to a great deal of trouble to focus his attention on the thought he was trying to make. "Just what exactly are you talking about?" He asked.

"That mark is the mark of Apophis," the serving girl said, breathlessly. She drew a great big breath. Look into her eyes, Jackson told himself, her eyes, OK, eyes, and of course he failed by about thirty centimetres. The excitement in her voice was starting to leak into her face. Her eyes were wide and her nostrils were distended. As soon as Jackson can draw his gaze up by about those same thirty centimetres, he will be able to see her excitement as well. (And don't any of you think that he can without raising his eye line).

And like she wasn't startlingly eye catching before that little piece of self induced wonder. I mean look at the girl. Jackson managed to look up by an effort of will and caught the tail end of the rapturous expression before it trailed off her face.

"And that is a good thing?" Jackson asked cautiously, struggling to keep his mind on the real task here, which was listening to what she had to say and assessing the consequences. This is not an easy task for the male of the human species. They try to listen to what women have to say, but when confronted with one of them who has such a neat line of symmetry and idealised size ratios, they tend to get distracted by other thoughts and resort to nodding at the right places without actually taking in what is said because their brain is not connected to their ears at all. It is connected to other bits of their anatomy, ones that rarely get used in social discourse, especially when there are more than two people present. Although there are those people who … (remember PG-13, PG-13, PG-13…). Back to the real topic, which was the pathetic attempt by the male human to listen to the words spoken by an attractive female human. They fail dismally, but they do try and it hurts them when their failure is pointed out to them (usually in a loud and shrill voice, or a throaty and scathing voice).

"It is the most momentous thing that has happened to us in, oh so many years." She said.

This was all good stuff, but there was more important information to be distributed.

"And you are?" Jackson prompted.

"My name is Heidi Pravda," she said and grinned as though her revelation was important. She then went and proved that she had some basis upon which to be proud of who she was. "I am the daughter of the leader of our opposition to the night walkers."

Jackson chose that moment to look thoughtful and then pronounce; "I think I understand."

Daniel Jackson has a great line on parallel processing. The biological processor that rests inside his head has been doing variations on it for years. The minor task (listening and speaking) often gets the short shift when the processing power is allocated, but there is still enough left for general personnel interaction. It has come to his aid in this instance because what she has said has lined up with another of his favourite topics, which is the behavioural and sociological mores of ancient civilisations. So he now has two reasons to listen to what she has to say. He not only had the biological imperative to mate with her and therefore must make her positively disposed toward him by listening intently to what she had to say (and thus make her feel that she was important to him) but she was also dealing in the same subject that most interested him in life. She could not be more perfectly suited to him if se had been a fairy tale princess written into a fairy story where he was the hero.

Ideas flashed into Daniel Jackson's mind. The logical process cannot be explained. The human brain is a parallel processing unit and the logic train often appears to have been bypassed entirely by this arrangement. People of Jackson's intelligence often make what appears to be an intuitive leap across chasms as wide as the Grand Canyon from a standing start. They actually don't think that way. What really happens is a great heap of yes/no decisions are lined up and committed in parallel, just waiting for the right information to seed it. As soon as they have that last clue, the whole solution drops out.

"Then you might like to explain it to me," Teal'c said to Daniel Jackson.

"I think we have an underground movement focussed on the idea of Apophis returning to save this enclave."

The girl nodded enthusiastically. Her hair flew about like a silken cloud of midnight. "Yes that is how it is," she said. "The prophesy is passed from mother to daughter. My mother told me, after her mother had told her before that. It is vitally important that I take you to them. They need to know that the prophesied time has arrived."