THE NEXT EVENT - by Kolyaaa!

CHAPTER NINE: THE STORY

A/N: I am not getting any sleep. All night long I hear the cackling of the chicken, the scrabbling of mongeese, the slither of the king cobras and the clickity-clack of lobsters in the ventilation system. They are making me a bit nutty, I think. To combat the insomnia, I spent all night cleaning my weapons and baking pies. Fed Julie before the sun came up - she was particularly pleased with the chocolate cream and the sweet potato pies. I filled her trough with fresh spring water. After that, I threw some feed at the other animals and turned a hose on them. Once that was done, I started on this lovely chapter. I hope you enjoy.

A/N: I finally got back to bed and the rooster started crowing! The bastard woke me up an hour earlier than usual.

A/N: Julie, if you're reading this, I'll be baking pecan pies tonight! I just hope I can keep those damn mongeeses out of it!

[{O}]

"Ctesias!" Nonor repeated the name, her eyes aglow. "Long, long ago, before the Wraith darkened our skies, the Ancestors walked among us and taught the people wondrous things."

Despite himself, Dex found himself relaxing, letting the familiar words of the fable wash over him.

"But the universe is wide, and there are wonders therein even older than the Ancients," Nonor continued. "One such is Ctesias – the planet of light - the planet of healing. Ctesias - where the gentle alicorn dwells on the slopes of cloud-shouldered mountains, waiting for a warrior of pure spirit and noble heart to prove to prove worthy-"

"Worthy?" Weir broke in.

Nonor scowled at the interruption.

"What kind of creature?" Sheppard asked, tilting his head at her.

Nonor seemed less bothered by his interruption, and he eyes darted about the room. She focused on a small bronze statue on one of Elizabeth's mantles and pointed.

"Like that there, though larger and healthier and truer of spirit."

They turned to look, and Weir frowned. It was a bronze of Don Quixoite on Rocinante. "A horse?"

"How can you not know what an alicorn is?" Nonor said in reply, disdain dripping off her tongue at Elizabeth's clear inferiority.

Unfazed, Weir made a little hurry-up gesture. "Does this creature have something to do with the salve?"

Dex rolled his eyes. He'd heard the story at least as many times as his sister. "The legend says the creature's horn has miraculous healing powers," he said, placing heavy emphasis on the word 'legend.'

"Horn," Sheppard repeated. "Singular? One horn?"

"Yes," Nonor nodded excitedly, "Here!" And she tapped her forehead.

Weir scrubbed wearily at her own forehead. Sheppard's expression, on the other hand, was alight with manic glee. He only wished Rodney was here to hear this.

"A unicorn?" he cackled. "You're saying there are unicorns in the Pegasus galaxy?"

"Alicorn!" Nonor growled. Only Nonor Dex could growl and look cute doing it.

Weir crossed her arms and tried very hard not to think about the collection of ceramic unicorns that had cluttered her bedroom when she was eleven. "Could you describe these...alicorns for us?"

"Their pelts are soft as feather-down and pure as the sunlight. Their hoofs are cloven and a single horn rises from the middle of their foreheads, straight and sharp as a sword blade."

"And it's the horn that's used to make the healing salve?" Weir asked.

Nonor nodded eagerly. "If a warrior of noble worth makes the journey to Ctesias, the alicorn will prostrate itself before him, or her, and make a willing sacrifice of itself." Her eyes welled at the thought, and she brushed away the tears with a lovely gesture. "So the legends tell us. The proof, you have seen for yourself."

"And how do the warriors make this journey?" Sheppard asked.

Nonor turned a brilliant smile on him. "The proper sequence on the Great Ring has been passed down from generation to generation through our lorekeepers. Haigha, the only lorekeeper to survive the ruin of Sateda, has been teaching me the legends. I know the way."

Dex snorted. "No one has been to Ctesias in a thousand years - if it even exists."

"It exists!" Nonor asserted.

"In nighttime tales to lull babies to sleep, maybe."

Nonor stomped her foot. "The lorekeepers do not lie! Haigha has seen the lost world himself! And so have the select few he has chosen to keep the lore of our people for the next generation!"

"Now, I don't think we-" Weir tried to intervene. She was ignored.

"You?" Ronon scoffed. "You expect us to believe you've seen an alicorn?"

Nonor advanced on him, her hands balling into fists. She looked magnificent in her fury. Sheppard prudently moved out of the way. There was no way he wanted to be caught between the two of them.

A chirp from the intercom interrupted before the Dex siblings could come to blows.

"Doctor Weir?" Beckett's cheerful hail cut the tension in the room. "If all of you would care to join me, we're ready to put this miracle salve to the test."

[{O}]

"Just in time!" Carson's voice greeted them as they entered the infirmary. Carson himself was nowhere in sight, completely obscured by a massive array of diagnostic equipment. It looked like Beckett and McKay had stripped half the labs in Atlantis to monitor this experiment.

Gingerly, they picked their way through the tangled web of cables and power cords on the floor, searching for the source of the voice.

Agitated medical and science staff scuttled around them, adjusting the equipment and arguing with each other. Sheppard narrowly avoided a head-on collision with Zelenka as the Czech barreled by, swathed in surgical scrubs and nose buried in a stack of readouts.

"Carson?" Elizabeth called, raising her voice above the babble.

"Here!" Beckett's voice was closer now. "Now, Rodney, would you just...Hey! I mean it! Quit squirming!"

"I'm not squirming! I'm leaving! Find yourself another guinea pig, Doctor Strangelove!"

They rounded a final bank of beeping, blinking equipment to find Beckett grinning down at Rodney, who sulked on a diagnostic bed as nurses attached a bristling web of electrodes to his head, chest and torso.

"Stay," Beckett admonished his patient, slapping an adhesive-tipped wire on McKay's temple, just above the mottled edge of the bruise that had purpled the left side of his face from jaw to eye. "Zelenka? Do you have the...Ah yes, there it is, thank you."

Zelenka, having added mask and gloves to his ensemble, handed the nearly-empty container of healing salve to Beckett as if it was a basket of live cobras. Beckett unscrewed the cap and inserted a metal probe to extract a tiny dollop of thick, odorless goo. Nonor straightened, seeing the nearly empty jar for the first time, her eyes narrowing angrily. It had only been half-gone when she had graciously handed it to this Doctor Beckett to perform his 'tests.'

"This is ridiculous," McKay said, scooting mutinously away - or as far as the electrodes would allow. "We already know the stuff works."

"Aye. But we don't know why it works. Or how it works."

Beckett turned to include his audience in the discussion. "This substance is like nothing we've ever seen. We ran it through every test we had. Chemical and radiological tests, spectroscopic analysis - we can't find anything that would explain its apparent ability to heal tissue, mend broken bones and re-grow nerves."

"You want to watch it in action," Weir guessed. "In a controlled laboratory setting."

"Exactly. So chin up, Rodney," Beckett instructed, poised to smear the salve on the bruises on McKay's face and neck.

A hand shot out and caught the doctor's wrist, arresting the motion. Beckett let out a yelp as the bones in his wrist ground together.

"Are you mad?" Nonor cried, wrenching the instrument out of his nerveless fingers. "You would waste the most precious substance in the universe on a..." Her gaze raked across McKay with undisguised contempt. "...bruise?"

Sheppard stepped forward, casually inserting himself between the furious Satedan and McKay. He reached up and caught her hand, encouraging her to loosen her death grip on Beckett's wrist. "Easy now," he said. "The doc here knows what he's doing."

Carson gasped with relief as Nonor released his arm.

She locked eyes with Sheppard a moment longer, then reluctantly returned the sample to Beckett. "Wars have been fought," she hissed. "Legendary warriors lost their lives in search of that which you hold in your hand."

"Nonor," Dex growled a warning. He'd had more than enough of his sister's theatrics for one day.

"You're one to talk," McKay spoke up, trying to look superior as he crossed his arms over his chest, but the attempt was hampered by the wires and instruments that clung to various parts of his body and he had to settle for resting his arms in his lap. "I seem to remember you had several bruises yourself yesterday," he said, jutting out a chin in Nonor's direction. "Miraculously, they seemed to have healed."

The woman's eyes widened and she seemed to grow even taller in the tight space. "I am a warrior and a Dex!" she insisted. "The injuries I incurred in battle could hardly be compared with the silly 'bruise' obtained by a weak man tripping over his own feet."

Elizabeth held up a hand, cutting off the debate. "Carson? A word?"

She and Beckett moved a few steps off, heads together. Zelenka tossed an encouraging smile at McKay and hurried to join them.

"She has a point. A black eye isn't exactly a life-threatening injury," Weir murmured, keeping her voice low.

She watched as Sheppard hopped up to sit on the edge of the bed beside Rodney. The scientist was poking unhappily at one of the electrodes attached to his arm. The dark circles under his eyes and the garish bruise added to his air of general misery.

Carson was still trying to massage sensation back into his fingers. "You happened to catch us on a slow day, Elizabeth," he snapped. "We're fresh out of trauma cases. The lass seems to have tended to her own injuries. It's Rodney's contusion or Kavanagh's hemorrhoids. Which would you prefer?"

Weir and Zelenka shuddered. Taking that as a sign that he'd won the argument, Beckett turned back to his patient.

"Now." He said, brandishing the salve. "Where were we?"

[{O}]

Stars swirled lazily on the display screen as the image tilted just enough to give viewers a glimpse of the distant, glowing curve of a planet's ionosphere - Ctesias, if Nonor's directions were right. The MALP's freefall through the vacuum of space continued, offering the viewers back in Atlantis flashes of stars, a white blur that might be a moon and the stargate, event horizon still activated and twinkling as the MALP tumbled farther and farther away.

Sheppard pulled a face. Spacegate. They lost more MALPs that way.

"Oh would you look at that," McKay groused, punching keys in a futile attempt to direct the probe's sensors toward the planet.

The skin on his cheek and neck was smooth and unmarred. The circles under his eyes had vanished, as had the headache he'd been nursing since they returned from the planet. The experiment, as far as he was concerned, had been a rousing success - even if it hadn't answered any of Beckett's questions. The diagnostic equipment had dutifully recorded the effects of the salve - ruptured capillaries repairing themselves, torn and bruised flesh knitting itself whole again, the bruises fading away as if they had never been. But again, there was no clue how the mysterious balm had worked the cure.

McKay caught himself prodding his own cheekbone again, and pulled his attention back to the job at hand. If they couldn't synthesize the salve, their best hope was to visit Ctesias and obtain this mythical 'horn' themselves.

Rodney scowled at the scanty readings coming back from the doomed MALP, then at the woman who had provided the gate address. "You couldn't have warned us this was a spacegate? That's a couple of million dollars worth of precision equipment we just spaced, thanks to you!"

"McKay," Dex growled, curling his fingers around the back of the scientist's chair and tightening his grip until the furniture creaked in protest.

McKay swallowed hard, but subsided, still frowning ferociously at the data.

But Elizabeth was already moving in, eyes narrowing as she studied Nonor. "I'd say this explains why no one has harvested this healing salve in generations," she said slowly.

Dex had turned his glare from McKay to his sister. "Spacecraft are one of the hardest bits of technology to protect from the Wraith. It's been centuries since we have known any people who could travel the stars as you do."

Nonor shrank back, turning to Sheppard in appeal, one long-fingered hand reaching up to clutch the sleeve of his jacket.

Sheppard sidestepped her. "So, when you said you'd been to Ctesias..."

Nonor squirmed. "Well, Haigha always described it so vividly," she said, spreading her hands and giving a helpless little-girl shrug. "I felt like I really was there."

McKay erupted out of his chair and rounded on the Satedan woman with an air of undisguised triumph. "And when he said he'd been to the mystical land of waterfalls and rainbows? Hmm?"

Nonor stiffened, looking regal and incredibly proud. "This lore has been passed down from generation to generation for eons," she stated, rising until she towered over McKay. "These tales are our history, the very essence of our culture, and to be entrusted with the keeping of them is an honor your crabbed and cringing mind could not possibly begin to grasp." She snarled, giving him a contemptuous glance before turning away.

McKay scowled and held his ground - chin still tilted at a defiant angle that made her fists itch to punch it.

"And when were you planning to tell us that this was just a fairy tale?" he asked. His eyes flickered toward his teammates, hoping to see someone ready to jump in and back him up on this one. Weir was watching Nonor through narrowed eyes. Sheppard was still glumly following the MALP's death spiral through deep space. Dex was just...looming.

"Enough, Rodney," Sheppard said, straightening and squaring his shoulders. "I think the salve itself tells us it's not completely...Grimm."

"Agreed," Elizabeth said, sighing a little. "Though the pun was pretty poor, Colonel. Still," she looked again at the screen, "you have go."

"Okay," Sheppard said, taking charge. "McKay, go grab Beckett and a xenobiologist, get them geared up and in the jumper bay in half an hour. Ronon," he looked at the Satedan, "you and your sister too, and see if Teyla's up. I'll meet you up there." He turned and started walking away.

"Wait, where are you going?" McKay asked, watching him leave.

"I'm going to find some specialists of my own - one man in particular." He smiled, "Because we're going on a unicorn hunt."

TBC

[{O}]

A/N: Unicorns! Ha ha ha ha ha!

A/N: LOOK! One of the cobra is attacking a mongoose! Excellent! They're fighting! HA! He's trying to squeeze her! He's wrapped all around her! She's twisting and turning! They're flopping around, banging into things. They're really getting into this. Funny, she doesn't seem to be trying to get away... Wait a minute, cobras aren't constrictors. Oh... and they're not fighting... ah. let me dim the light for them.

A/N: LEAVE MORE REVIEWS! The chicken had to witness this abomination! Don't let her bird brain be sullied again.