The white glowing walls of the Asgard establishment reappeared. She brought her hand up before her face so she could look at it.
"Did something go wrong?" Samantha Carter asked her.
Mackenzie pulled herself upright and swung her legs over the edge of the altar. "No," she said distractedly. "We had a long discussion and reached a conclusion."
"You were only on there for a second."
"It didn't feel like that to me," Mackenzie said. She rubbed her eyes. "What are you going to do Odin?"
The Asgard regarded her with it's head tilted to one side. "He is obsessed?" the alien half asked.
"Yes. Very."
"That is bad for his ongoing development," Odin judged. "It leads to monomania and other anti-social afflictions."
"Yes, but that's not necessarily detrimental to his actions within our society. His behaviour will be within the bounds of human normal. He will function in much the same way as the rest of us."
"He needs to be brought out of his catatonic fugue state if he is to be counselled by your psychologists (was that derision in his voice?). That needs to be an experiential thing. I believe you use the term existential to describe this testing of existence through experience."
"Yes, essentially."
"He must be led, or brought out of that place where he hides. It is the only way to bring him through. Will you do that for us?"
"What does it involve?"
"Going in with him again and rescuing him inside the dreamscape."
Mackenzie had a nasty feeling about that. "Can we all go?"
"Certainly. We believe it will be necessary."
That was not a settling thought.
*
Sarah Mackenzie paused in telling her story. Harmon Rebka goggled at her for a moment before getting his mouth shut and his eyebrows back to a less stressing position above his eyes.
"What was it like?" Harm asked.
"Like the thing that Sony would really like to be able to do with Playstation V."
"Ha," said Harmon Rebka. "Playing computer games. You call that work."
"Oh it was work alright."
"So tell on," he said and smirked at her. She did not return the sentiment.
*
Sarah Mackenzie found herself in the same place where she had last seen Fox Mulder. The walls were obviously still too far away to be captured by the spill of light, but they were still there, sensed without being seen. The spill of light shone spectacularly on the restrained form of Mulder. He was still pinned into place by those tiny needles. That same inconvenient plumbing looked after his incontinence as he wore the last time she saw him.
She looked down at herself and was surprised to see she was wearing a form-fitting black singlet top, tucked into a pair of tight-as drill shorts, rolled up at the hem to make them all the shorter.
Well it was better than the outfit she had worn momentarily when she was here last, she decided. And the new outfit had a certain - functionality to it, she decided. A holstered gun sat on each hip and something heavy and metallic was hanging from her back. She looked down at her feet and saw hiking boots and ankle socks.
She knew what she was going to find even before she reached behind her neck and sure enough, there it was; a waist length plait. She hadn't worn her hair that long since she was a little girl. She felt around a little more and identified the thing hanging on her back, almost tangled in her plait. It was a huge knife. The thing might almost have been a broad sword it was so big. She was distracted from her inventory by someone's approach.
Daniel Jackson appeared to step into the light, from no-where at all. His expression was momentarily confused. He noticed Mulder and winced. "That's gotta hurt," he said.
Mackenzie was aware of the emphasis that her posture (reaching behind her back to trace the edges of the knife scabbard) was having on her appearance, especially given the brevity of the outfit she had been granted, and hurriedly dropped her arms back to her sides. Jackson seemed vaguely disappointed by her change in posture, but said nothing.
"I feel like someone took a biopsy sample with a garden spade," Mulder said.
Jackson and Mackenzie behaved as though he hadn't spoken. Instead Mackenzie took a moment to absorb the outfit that Jackson wore into the dreamscape. He wore a robe that was so purple it was almost black. The hem trailed along the floor. The sleeves were voluminous enough to be worn as a dress by any catwalk model. He still wore his glasses though. He looked like a twenty-first century monk.
"So, what are we expected to do? Do you think?" Mackenzie asked. She turned back to look at Mulder and leant forward so she could peer more closely at the needles that pierced his skin. "How do you suppose we get him out of this contraption?" she asked.
Jackson spent a moment to meditate while he checked out her legs. He had a second look because the first one came up with a highly positive assessment. He decided that her butt needed checking out as well, so he spent a bit of time on that too. The shorts were a good selection he thought and congratulated Mulder on his dreamscape scenario.
"I have no idea," he answered finally. His ears had taken control of his mouth because his eyes were up to no good.
Jack O'Neill stepped into the light. His entrance brought Mackenzie back from her inspection of body-piercing-taken-to-extremes.
O'Neill wore combat fatigues, and guns, many variations on the theme of guns. He had semi-automatic pistols, he had a sub-machine gun, and he even appeared to have a rocket launcher slung on his back. Oh, and he had lots of ammunition. It seemed to hang off him everywhere. Any part of Jack O'Neill that wasn't covered with gun metal, seemed to have a leather belt filled with spare cartridges for some sort of projectile weapon. A baseball cap and dark glasses completed the ensemble.
"Those guys must have been real pricks," O'Neill commented, looking at Mulder and frowning.
"Very funny," Mulder shouted at him. "Laugh? I almost started."
No-one took any notice.
Teal'c stepped into the light. Mackenzie goggled at the way he had been dressed. Well, if she though her outfit was brief, Sarah Mackenzie revised that thought the minute she spotted Teal'c. He looked like he was wearing his little brother's jock strap. It set of the cross-shaped wound in his chest beautifully. He was armed with a long piece of wood with a blackened and sharpened tip.
"Teal'c," O'Neill said in all seriousness, "that does not do you any justice at all."
"Oh I don't know," said Mackenzie.
O'Neill and Jackson stared at her for a moment.
Last of all came Samantha Carter. She stepped into the light and looked around at the others. She was dressed in navy blue. That was it. She was a twilight blue from neck to toe. It wasn't clothing as such; she was just coloured blue. It looked like her skin had been dyed…No it didn't. You couldn't see any of those distinguishing little bits that skin has on it. There was no hair, pimples, moles, navels, or any of those sort of squishy biological things that humans have attached to, or sort of embossed into, their person for the specific purpose of species propagation. Oh, and she had little metal things on her temple that looked like she was standing too close to the hot metal ladle in a blast furnace. She had obviously been splashed and burnt. Her hair was pulled back in the most severe hairstyle you could imagine that the local dragon behind the library desk wearing.
"OK," said Daniel Jackson. "We seem to be in a Playstation game."
"I can work that out for myself Daniel," said O'Neill. "Which one?"
"Seems to be a mixture of Final fantasy eight, tomb raider and star trek and... I have no idea where your look came from Teal'c," Jackson shook his head as if to clear an unwelcome thought from his mind. "Anyway, It looks sort of like he's picked the highlights of each."
"Wonderful," muttered O'Neill.
"I hope it does not get too much colder," said Teal'c.
Carter and Mackenzie spent altogether longer looking toward Teal'c for it to be just his comments that had drawn their attention.
"OK, everyone," O'Neill called. "Suggestions! What do we do?"
"Well we need to rescue Mulder, and get him out of here," explained Mackenzie.
"Sort of figured that was the objective here. It's the nit picking little details that I'm worried about at the moment."
"We won't be under a time limit until we actually move him," Jackson suggested.
"Hey," shouted Mulder. "I'm here guys. You don't have to talk about me in the third person all the time."
"What was that noise?" asked Samantha Carter. She was still trying to work out how she could possibly get into or out of the outfit (?) she was wearing. It just did not seem to be physically possible.
"We have time to plan then," said Jackson.
"Look around Daniel," O'Neill said and pulled his cap from his head so he could muss up his hair a bit. "We plan, to do what?" he asked and placed the cap back on his head.
"OK, so I didn't take that thought through to completion before I started talking."
"Perhaps we should explore the walls of this place," suggested Mackenzie. "We might find a way out." She shrugged. It was a remarkably expressive gesture in that tank top, Jackson and O'Neill both agreed on that. Foundation garments, of any ilk, were not in the wardrobe where that lot had come from. Mackenzie fought an urge to wrap her arms around herself.
"OK," O'Neill brought everyone back to the real business at hand. "Who brought a torch with them?"
"I couldn't hide anything in this outfit," commented Carter. Jackson and O'Neill were suitably appreciative of the structure of her outfit.
"No offence Major Carter," Teal'c intoned, "but you did somewhat better than I in the selection of clothing."
Daniel pulled his torch from a pouch in his robe and switched it on. It looked like he was carrying a glow (nothing else, just a glow) in the palm of his hand.
O'Neill stared at the suspended glow and shrugged. Hey, it was all a dream. They would work out the rules eventually.
They stepped into the dark. It fled before them, banished into the…wherever it is that dark goes. (Hey, if there is a speed of light what is the speed of dark? And while we're on the subject of those sorts of things, how do keep off the grass signs get placed in lawns?)
They found a pair of archways. Each stood about three metres tall and had old ivy growing off the stonework and dangling in the portal so there was only enough room for a small person to march through without being tangled in the vines. Both archways appeared to lead into long hallways. A faint glow could bee seen in the distance along one of the tunnels. The other one was completely dark.
O'Neill looked along the tunnel with the light that was hovering somewhere in the distance. He looked up. Above the archway there was some engraving embossed into the rock.
"Can you read that, Daniel?" O'Neill asked.
"Is says 'here be dragons,'" Daniel replied. "And then it goes on to say, 'dungeons and impenetrable mazes."
"And the other one?"
"'Short cut home.'"
"Suggestions people."
"Well," Samantha Carter opined. "If I was the evil overlord of a place like this, I wouldn't place a sign that said 'short cut home' above the short cut home."
"No, neither would I," replied O'Neill, "but I'm a paranoid bastard."
"I agree with Sam," Mackenzie offered.
"I agree with O'Neill," said Carter.
"What?" asked O'Neill archly. "That I'm a paranoid bastard or just a…"
"I'll let you guess."
O'Neill and Carter shared a look. "Teal'c?" O'Neill asked.
"It does have a light at the end of the tunnel," Teal'c said. "Perhaps it's a fire." The last was added wistfully.
"Daniel?"
"I don't know," Jackson screwed up his face thoughtfully. "I have a bad feeling about that tunnel."
"Tell."
"Nothing concrete, just a vague foreboding."
"It's probably the sandwiches we had for lunch disagreeing with you. All right people, that's our decision. Let's go."
They stepped into the tunnel marked 'Here be dragons, dungeons and impenetrable mazes.