"You are kidding me," Harm said. "This story gets better by the minute. What were you thinking when that thing looked you in the eye?"
"What is it with men and the whole lipstick lesbian thing?"
"If the cap…"
"Oh shut up Harm."
"I'll tell Brumby."
"I'll do that myself thank you."
"He'll probably find the whole idea…"
"Not another word."
"Or…?"
"Or I won't finish the story."
"I'll be good."
"Hmm."
*
"'Where wolves pack, man doth not dare'" read Jackson.
"Werewolves, I'll bet," guessed O'Neill.
"Is that footsteps I hear," said Mackenzie.
"Pawsteps maybe?" suggested Jackson.
"Shut up Daniel," suggested Carter.
"Hey."
"Halt, who goes there?" shouted Mackenzie. She was pointing both of her guns along the cavern, tracking the sounds of footsteps as they approached.
A shortish, slender red-headed woman stepped into the light cast by Jackson's palm top light. She had a ready pout and a mole beneath one nostril that was buried beneath her make up so that it was difficult to see.
She had a torch in one hand and a gun in the other. The torch shone on each of them in turn, before the barrel of the gun wavered slightly.
"Scully," Mulder shouted. "It's me."
"Is it my imagination, or is that noise getting louder?" Carter asked.
"Beats me," said Mackenzie. "Any idea what it is?"
"Not really. You?"
"Naw none."
"Are you a werewolf?" O'Neill asked. Her eyebrows didn't meet over her nose, and he was pretty sure that was a dead give away.
The red headed woman looked at him quizzically. "I'm Dana Scully. I'm a federal agent."
"Which federation?" Jackson asked.
"This is Mulder's dream Jackson," O'Neill said scathingly. "Even I worked out that she's an FBI agent."
"I'm looking for another agent, my partner, Fox Mulder," Scully said.
"That's him in the gurney back there," Carter said. "We're in his dream and trying to drag him out of his catatonia and back to reality."
"You'll never get Mulder back to reality," laughed Scully, greatly relieved. "He's never been there."
"Listen, we need to watch out for a werewolf," Mackenzie said.
"That was probably him back there on the floor," Scully said nonchalantly. "He tried to jump me a few minutes ago and well… They still bleed just like everyone else if he is a werewolf."
"What about silver bullets? You need silver bullets to kill a werewolf," said O'Neill.
"Is there another kind?"
"Of werewolf, how would I know?"
"No, bullets. Is there another kind of bullet? You know other than silver?"
"There's lead," suggested Jackson.
"What would you use lead for. Everyone knows you can't kill a werewolf with anything but silver bullets. I mean who would use lead bullets. Don't they spatter when they hit something solid?"
"Well, yeah," said Jackson slowly. "That's kind of the point with some kinds of bullets."
"Let's just keep moving," suggested O'Neill with a 'hands in front of me see I'm not dangerous' show of surrender.
*
"What does this sign say Daniel?" O'Neill said breaking a silence that had lasted for quite some time. There didn't seem to be any end to the corridors of Fox Mulder's mind and they seemed to be trudging along all of them, one after another.
SG-1++ trailed to a halt and waited for enlightenment from Daniel Jackson. He stepped up to have a look at whatever it was that had caught Jack O'Neill's attention.
"Here be Dragons," Jackson translated.
"Oh not again," said O'Neill wearily. "Mackenzie lets go and sort this out. The rest of you wait there with our friend here." He pointed to the prostrate and bound form of Fox Mulder.
"Hey, I am here," Mulder shouted.
"Did you hear that?" asked Scully.
"Yeah," answered Carter. "Seems to just come up every now and then. We have no idea what it is."
"Is it significant do you think?"
"Probably not."
Mackenzie was much better prepared for her second encounter with a dragon. She had her gun drawn and this time she remembered the safety.
"Same drill as last time," O'Neill told her. "Shoot first and leave the war cry until afterward."
She nodded intently. He frowned and then nodded.
The dragon looked much like the last one they encountered. It stood about twice the height of a large thoroughbred horse, but was about three times the width at the girth. The scales covering most of its body were coloured in multiple variations on the theme of metallic green. Its head was vaguely equine, to the shape of its flared nostrils and the wide spread eyes. All the better to triangulate on a target, as O'Neill explained last time.
It looked a lot like a giant lion from the shoulders down, all muscular-purpose and easy grace. It's tail was about four metres long and terminated in a nasty barbed tip. It watched their approach with wary cunning. The tail flicked back and forth like a cat at play. Steam vented from its nostrils.
"Does any thing about this one strike you as different to the last one?" Mackenzie whispered.
"Yeah, possibly. Can't put my finger on it though."
"If I didn't now better I would swear it was paying more attention than the last one."
"Oh what the hell," said O'Neill and drew his gun.
Before he could take any sort of aim, the dragon's tail flicked almost too fast for his eye to see, and batted the gun from his hand. The blow hurt like he had been hit with a baseball bat. The gun landed with a clatter on the stone floor, before sliding to a halt over by the far wall.
The dragon's eyes never wavered in their vigil on O'Neill.
"I think this one might be a bit more of a challenge than the last one," judged O'Neill.
"Whatever gave you that idea?" Mackenzie asked.
"What do you suppose happens if you die in this dreamscape? Game over, try again?"
"God I hope so."
"Yep, me too. I have an idea."
"What is it?"
"We separate, draw a gun in each hand and see if we can get a few bullets into it."
"That's not a plan, that's a pipe dream."
"I'm happy to entertain any and all ideas."
"How about we run away?"
"I'm not sure that is a great idea either."
"Why not?"
"Well for one thing I think it's angry at me and for another it appears to be blocking the only way forward."
"God I hate it when other people use logic on me."
"OK. Ready?"
"As I'm ever going to be."
"On the count of three."
"OK."
"One."
"Hang on do you mean at three, or after three?"
"What's the difference?"
"Long enough to mean the difference between life and death."
"How melodramatic?"
"Yeah but…"
"After three."
"OK."
"One, two."
"Hold it."
"What now?"
"Do you know whether it can count or understands what we're saying?"
"Let's assume that it can't do either. OK?"
"OK."
"Right, on my count. One, two, three."
Lets examine what happened over the next two seconds in slow motion, so we can have some hope of understanding what went down.
O'Neill drew his gun with his left hand. His bruised right hand refused to close on the second gun and he only succeeded in knocking it out of his holster and onto the ground, dislodging the safety at the same time. While it tumbled to the floor we have to move across to Mackenzie to watch what she was doing.
Mackenzie managed to wrap the fingers of her right hand around the butt of one gun and get it clear of the holster. The gun on her left jammed in the holster and despite the best efforts of her hand to clasp it and drag it out, she failed.
The dragon decided that Mackenzie was the healthier of its attackers and lashed out at her first. Before its tail had moved more than a metre, it decided that it had made a slight miscalculation and adjusted the trajectory of the tail with a contemptuous flexure of a few of the muscles of its lower back.
Back to O'Neill. He realised that the gun on the floor was not going to do him any good and he decided that the best way froward was to bluff. He aimed his real gun and also the pretend one, which was not actually in his right hand, at the dragon. He attempted to squeeze both triggers. One of those might work, he thought. He just hoped that the one that worked was the one attached to a real gun.
Back to Mackenzie. She waved the one gun she managed to un-holster at the dragon. She even managed to get it aimed more or less at the dragon and squeezed the trigger.
The dragon's tail flicked O'Neill's gun out of his hand, just before the bullet reached the end of the barrel. The change in orientation of the gun resulted in the bullet heading straight for the cavern ceiling and we'll follow it's trajectory for a moment. It missed the dragon's head by a little over half a metre, clipped a stray stalactite (or mite, I'm not sure and can't be bothered looking it up) ricocheted off the slimy piece of calcium compounds and onto the back wall of the cavern. It was spinning wildly by this stage and making an unbelievably cheery 'wheee' noise as it careened out of control about the cavity.
O'Neill dived for cover, thinking that lying flat on his stomach might be safer from the wayward bullet. We will leave him while he is suspended in mid air. Nothing will change appreciably in his circumstances before we come back to him.
Mackenzie never actually reached the point where her trigger finger closed the release of the firing pin enough for the charge in the cartridge to ignite, before the dragon's tail finished it's twitchy trail and collided with her hand in a bone jarring impact that knocked her gun flying.
The dragon decided that enough was enough and let out a gout of flame that looked more like the afterburner of an F18-A hornet than anything that had a basis in biological reality.
O'Neill would have taken the flame square in the chest if he had been standing up. As it was, the baseball cap that he had been wearing, and had lost during his dive for the floor, turned into a little cloud of carbon dioxide, water vapour and a few traces of soot.
O'Neill hit the floor with a thud, landing on the gun that he had dropped. He was lucky it didn't go off and blow a hole in his chest wall and let most of his circulatory fluid out.
Mackenzie stood transfixed as the muzzled of the reptilian flamethrower rotated to face in her direction. The smell of swamp gas hit her nostrils. Her life flashed before her eyes, and we will ignore that because we haven't got time to list all things that she did while she was drunk at university parties, before the flame stops being a little pilot light in the bowels of this monster and becomes a little more imposing.
O'Neill fumbled with the gun that he found beneath his chest but the barrel was caught in the front of his shirt, between the second and third button.
"Mew," said Mackenzie and did the only thing she could do under the circumstances. She shut her eyes. If this hadn't been Mulder's dream, she might have wet herself as well, but she didn't.
A crack like a whip rang out.
The Dragon looked momentarily surprised.
Lying on the floor, O'Neill looked momentarily appalled, thinking that the gun pointed into the interior of his shirt might have gone off and actually released his circulatory fluid to the atmosphere.
Mackenzie opened her eyes and was surprised to find that she could in fact do that.
The dragon looked kind of different. One of its eyes looked bloodshot (well more bloodshot than normal). In fact when she looked closely, the eye was actually a bloody pit in it's head. Dragon's are a little slow on the uptake and this was taking a little while to work out that it was actually dead.
The message got through eventually and it began the laborious task of falling down.
It chose to fall directly at O'Neill, thus attempting with the last firing of its neurones to take one of its attackers with it.
It was a vain hope. O'Neill was still worried about the gunshot and sat up to be sure his skin was still intact.
The dragon landed on the stones with a thud that was probably heard in Washington (DC) which was actually in a different galaxy to where these people were at the time of the dragon incident.
"Why the hell did you people have to get so close to the damn thing?" asked Dana Scully. She lowered the smoking barrel of her gun from in front of her face and shook her head. "Come on let's get out of here."