Chapter 5: Settling In

Dawn tacked a poster up on the wall of her new office, trying to add a little colour to the place. It was a picture showing the estate that had become the main Watcher HQ in Westbury. She stepped back and whispered the words to the spell that would activate it. The picture shimmered to life.

The poster was a gift from Willow. It was like looking out a window that showed what had been happening seven hours ago at her home. The seven hour delay was so that the time shown in the picture was the same as the local time at Cheyenne Mountain; Dawn could've made it show a live picture, by speaking a slightly different spell, but then it would be dark half the time she was in her office. She stepped toward the poster for a closer look. The illusion was perfect: it was like she had a hole in her wall that she could look out, without even the slight interference that would be caused by a plate of glass. She could see Buffy leading a couple of Potentials through their morning exercise routine in the back garden. They looked so real that she almost wanted to shout and wave to them.

Dawn smiled, and felt a little smug. Here she was, half a mile underground, and she had the only office in the place that had a window to the outside world. Even the window in General O'Neill's office just looked out into another underground room.

She moved on to the next item of 'decoration' for her office. She started to attach the brackets to the wall from which she would hang her second-best sword. That sword had caused her a lot of trouble when she brought it into the Mountain. The guards had passed most of the personal items she brought in with her with only a slight glance. She had brought in some of her own books, pictures of Buffy and the Scoobies for her desk, her 'poster' for her wall, and the sword. The guards had really balked at her bringing that into the base. It had taken several phone calls, working her way up her chain of command, first to Dr. Hayes, then to Dr. Jackson, and finally to General O'Neill himself, for the guards to pass her sword. And then the guards at the next checkpoint had balked as well.

She had finished hanging the sword, and tested to make sure that she could draw it quickly if she needed it—others might think that it was just a piece of eccentric decoration, but Dawn thought of it as an essential weapon—when there was a thump on her door.

"It's open!" she called: a nice non-invitation invite for whoever was outside to come in. Even if a vamp didn't need an invitation to get into her office, not inviting unseen people through doors was a long ingrained habit.

"Uh…my hands are kinda full," came Elliot's voice through the door.

"Oh!" Dawn opened the door, and saw Elliot in the hall, holding a stack of books. "Come on in." She stepped back to let him through. He came in and dropped his stack of books on her desk, beside the stack of her own books. "Sorry, things are still a bit disorganized in here."

"We give the new people a little time to get settled in," said Elliot. "Inspection isn't until 0900." He saw Dawn's startled expression, as she checked her watch. "Kidding! The civilian staff would revolt if we made them have inspections. You've seen Dr. Jackson's office. As long as you keep yours neater than it, no one can complain."

"I guess I won't have to worry, then," said Dawn. "So, what do you have there?"

Dr. Hayes took the top book off the stack. "Basic Goa'uld vocabulary, and grammar text." He set it down on her desk, and picked up the next one. "Asgard." He kept going through the stack. "Furling, Ancient, a rather peculiar form of Sumerian, spoken on P3X-2243…and a bunch of others." He pointed toward the computer on her desk. "They're all available on-line, as well, but I still prefer real books."

"Me too." Dawn picked up a book off the stack and looked at it. "Spent too much time in the company of a librarian over the last decade."

Dawn saw that Elliot's attention had drifted to the poster on her wall, and she quickly checked to make sure that it had reverted to a plain, flat, image, the way it was supposed to when anyone else entered her office.

"Nice picture," said Elliot. "Where is it?"

"Westbury, England," said Dawn. "It's kinda my home."

"Nice place to grow up."

"Oh, I grew up in L.A., and Sunnydale, California. We only moved to England after Sunnydale turned into a hole in the ground."

"Oh, I heard you were from Sunnydale," said Elliot. "What was that like?"

"It was different," said Dawn.

"Were you there for the collapse?"

"Uh…yeah."

"That must have been amazing to see."

"Yeah, it was pretty amazing, but I was mostly just wishing that the bus would move faster."

"Move faster?" asked Elliot.

"Yeah," said Dawn. "I was watching out the back window, seeing the street collapse behind us. I was the last person to get out of Sunnydale alive."

Elliot suddenly lost his eager look. "Oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking. It must have been terrible for you."

"It's okay," said Dawn. "It was a long time ago."

Elliot could tell that she didn't want to talk about Sunnydale. "So, what's that place?" he asked, indicating the picture again.

"That's kind of a school, that my sister runs, now" said Dawn. "I was actually in Oxford, for most of the last six years."

A brief silence fell. Elliot turned back to the books on her desk. "Well, once you've settled yourself in here, you can start to work on familiarizing yourself with these languages. We like to have everyone have a basic knowledge of Goa'uld. You might want to take a look at the Ancient too: it's close to Latin, which you already read, so you should be able to pick it up fairly quickly."

Dawn picked up another one of the books, and flipped through its pages. "Okay, so what do I do after lunch."

Elliot grinned at her. "Don't worry, we'll give you a couple of weeks before we expect you to read Goa'uld. After lunch you get to meet Master Sergeant Callahan. You're lucky: we're just starting a new prep-class for civilians who are in line to go off-world."

Dawn looked around at the other civilians that surrounded her in the gym. She and Cassie were the only women in the group. They were accompanied by half a dozen men. She recognized a couple of them from her section, but she hadn't gotten the chance to get to know any of them yet. Most of them looked out of place, like they didn't think that they belonged here. Part of her agreed with that assessment. They didn't look like they belonged. Some of them looked like they had never lifted anything heavier than the Oxford English Dictionary. Her attention moved to the man in a Marine uniform who had just entered the gym through another door. He looked like he belonged here. He looked like he belonged in any damn place that he thought that he belonged.

"Alright! Listen up!" the man called out. "I am Master Sergeant Callahan! You may call me 'Master Sergeant!' Do you understand me?"

There was a mumbled response to his question.

"I can't hear you!" said Master Sergeant Callahan.

The response this time was louder, but still a confused mixture of. "Yes, Master Sergeant"s, and "Yes, Sir"s.

"First lesson!" said Master Sergeant Callahan. "Only officers are called 'Sir.' Enlisted personnel are addressed by their rank! Do you understand me?"

"Yes, Master Sergeant!" called out nearly everyone. Dawn worked hard to keep the smile off her lips.

"Better," said Master Sergeant Callahan, but he didn't really sound satisfied with their response. Dawn felt that if they were really military, and not a bunch of civilians there for a basic introductory course, that Callahan would have really reamed them out.

Callahan started to stalk, back and forth, in front of them, with his hands clasped behind his back. He'd take half a dozen steps before he would turn, and start back in the opposite direction. "Alright, people! You are all civilians, and we don't intend to even try to turn you into soldiers. We have lots of soldiers already. It takes years to train a soldier properly, and I don't have years to work with you! I am here to teach you how to work with soldiers, and give you the basics for how to handle weapons safely, so that you are not a hazard to yourselves, and everyone else within a few hundred yards, if, God forbid, any of you should ever find yourselves with a rifle in your hands. You will also be taught some of the basics of unarmed combat…mostly just to show you how much you don't know.

"We aren't planning to send any of you into combat, but we have learned from harsh experience that sometimes, some of our civilians will find themselves trapped in a combat situation. So I am going to teach you how to behave if you find yourself in such a situation. The most important thing that you are going to learn, is how to follow orders! If the shit hits the fan while you are off-world, your survival, and the survival of all those with you, will depend on how well you obey the orders given to you by the soldiers who will be with you.

"Make no mistake! If you find yourselves in combat, then you are going to have to follow the orders of soldiers! The lowest ranking private in the SGC knows ten times more about combat than any of you, and if the shit hits the fan, you will be expected to carry out the orders of privates. Their job will be to keep you alive, and if you don't follow their orders, they won't be able to do it!

"You will also learn the basics of wilderness survival. Many of the worlds that you may go to have little or no civilization on them. You will be camping, and it isn't the sort of camping where you've got an RV with a nice shower, and a toilet! This will be 'dig your own latrine' camping.

"But first, and foremost, we are going to get you into shape! Good physical conditioning will be the number one factor in keeping you alive! So with that in mind, we're going to start out with a little run…"

Dawn sat on the bench in the women's locker room to tie her shoes. "Well, we survived the first week."

"I'm not so sure," said Cassie. "I think I need to go die now."

Master Sergeant Callahan had spent the week running them all into the ground, pushing them all to the point of exhaustion. It took longer for some of them, than others. A few of the guys had been rather embarrassed by how poorly they had performed, especially when it quickly became apparent that both Dawn and Cassie were in better shape than most of them.

It hadn't done them much good though. Master Sergeant Callahan wanted to see what everyone had, which meant that he had just pushed Dawn and Cassie harder than the rest.

Dawn looked up at Cassie. "So, does that mean that you're too tired to show me where any of the fun clubs are in town tonight?"

"What did you have in mind?" asked Cassie.

"Oh, just some place where we can meet some guys, do a little dancing, that sort of thing."

"You think you can go dancing, after what Callahan did to us?"

"Well, not right now," said Dawn, "but give me a couple of hours to rest, and have dinner, I'll be good to go. Come on! It's Friday night!"

"You may have the weekend off, but I've got to report back at noon tomorrow."

"So, I won't keep you up past midnight," said Dawn. "Maybe we could talk a couple of the guys into going with us. That's one nice thing about working here: no shortage of guys who are in good shape."

Cassie grinned at her. "Maybe for you, but most of the guys on the base are afraid to date me. General Jack has a real deadly glare whenever he notices someone taking what he thinks is too much interest in me."

"So, I guess we'll have to find some place where no one knows your 'uncle' is a General," said Dawn.

Dawn finished making the last touch-ups on her makeup, and went out into the main room of her new apartment. There were still boxes stacked up around the room: boxes that she had packed from her flat in Oxford, and still hadn't unpacked. She hadn't stayed at the Council House long enough to get settled there before she had moved again.

She heard a knock on her door. She went and looked through its peep-hole, and saw Cassie waiting in the hall. She unlocked and opened the door. "Hey Cassie, come on in." One of the first things she had done after moving into this apartment was replace the peep-hole with a little gadget that Andrew had invented. It was sort of a mini-periscope, with mirrors so you couldn't see vampires through it. Anyone you could see was safe to invite in.

Cassie stepped across the threshold, and looked around. "Nice place." Her eyes settled on the sword in its brackets on the wall near the door. "What's with you and swords?"

"I just like to have them around," said Dawn. "They make me feel safe."

"You aren't one of those immortal guys are you?" asked Cassie.

"Nyah," said Dawn. "But I wish I could figure out how they managed to carry those swords around without anyone noticing them. The longest blade I've been able to hide that well without wearing a trench coat is only about eighteen inches."

Cassie's eyes moved up and down, looking for a place where Dawn might be hiding a weapon. Dawn was wearing tight fitting slacks, and a red silk blouse.

"Don't worry, I'm not carrying tonight. Even an eighteen inch blade needs more clothes to cover it that what I've got on." She grabbed her jacket and put it on. "Now come on, the guys await!"