Colonel Jack O'Neill strode up the ramp and stepped through the event horizon.
He disappeared.
The alien presence of Odin accompanied him through the gate.
Sarah Mackenzie followed behind them, stepping gingerly up the ramp. She teased the event horizon. It rippled like the surface of a waterbed at her touch. She watched the movement, her face creased into a bemused expression.
"There really isn't anything to worry about," Samantha Carter said from immediately behind her. Mackenzie had been so engrossed in her examination of the gate interface that she had not noticed the other woman's approach.
"What's it like?" MacKenzie asked. Her voice sounded tiny to her own ears, dwarfed by the enormity of what she faced.
"Like the worlds worst roller coaster ride," Carter suggested. "The further you travel the worst the disorientation. It's related to a dislocation that your consciousness experiences when the stargate disconnects your consciousness from the surroundings. Human consciousness is a quantum phenomenon. Quantum physicists have postulated that for a while. It goes some way toward proving a basis for theology." She shrugged expressively. "This is a long trip. As long as any we have tried in the past."
Daniel Jackson and Teal'c stepped around the two women and through the cloak of the event horizon. Since the conference where they had dumped all this on Mackenzie, Jackson had exchanged the elegant glasses he had worn for a much more robust pair. Mackenzie wondered if the ride was rough enough to justify stronger glasses frames.
Samantha waved her arm in invitation.
For a moment Mackenzie entertained the paranoid notion that she was being pushed forward by a bizarre military suicide cult. It must be irrational, she decided. But that made the feeling no less real.
She took control of herself and stepped up to the gate. She stepped through…
Samantha Carter stepped through just slightly behind her.
Mackenzie endured a gut wrenching ride like some sadistic bastard had tacked the Universe's worst roller coaster design onto the far side of the portal. Her frantic passage was accompanied by a visual track that was intended to heighten the impression that one was about to look at one's breakfast again really soon.
She felt as though she was stretched until she was the length of the universe, flattened until she was the width of the universe, crushed to a pin point as though she were her own little black hole in space, and then spat out through an extrusion press.
Then she re-appeared somewhere else in space-time, only a few moments (or eternities, depending on your scholastic allegiances) later.
She staggered, almost fell to the floor and struggled for a moment to retain the contents of her stomach.
"That trans-spatial ride is still a wild trip," Daniel Jackson told her. "Even after all these years spent crossing the portal, it never gets much better." He reached down and helped her to stand under her own steam. She wobbled for a moment before regaining her balance, leaning heavily on his shoulder. His face looked owlish behind those heavy-framed glasses.
Samantha Carter came through the gate before Mackenzie recovered her equilibrium. Carter skipped a moment before coming to a halt only a few metres into their destination, away from of the stargate portal. She looked down at something in her hand and then wiped her hair from her eyes. She smiled at Mackenzie in encouragement.
Mackenzie's nausea passed reasonably quickly and she managed to take some notice of the people and things that surrounded her.
There seemed to be no sign of Odin or O'Neill.