Disclaimer: I don't own Stargate.

Chapter 3: Sam

Sam wasn't especially troubled when she lost her voice. It was inconvenient and annoying, certainly, and it didn't help that her voice had left her entirely in the middle of a phone conversation with Doctor Lee, but in general hers was quiet work, and Doctor Lee had figured out what happened to her quickly enough.

The word that Jack had briefly lost his voice two days ago had circulated the base like a wildfire, only fueled by the fact that base personnel left and right were coming down with similar symptoms. Still more conveniently, SG-1 didn't have any scheduled missions for the next few days, so after an overworked Doctor Fraiser pronounced her fit for base work, Sam had happily, if silently, returned to her lab.

She barely even looked up when Jack wandered in a few hours later. After all, he often came by with he stated intention of distracting her. The only trouble was that she now lacked a polite way of asking him to go away. Perhaps if he thought she was ignoring him he'd take the hint and leave her alone. However, that plan came crashing down when Daniel followed him inside, looking smug. It seemed as though she had more than a distraction on her hands.

You weren't laughing yesterday, Daniel.

"Word has it you lost your voice, Carter," Jack said.

Yes, well, it was hard not to, since I spent so much time translating for you.

"That's a pity, Sam," Daniel continued. He didn't sound at all sorry for her.

And how long were you talking like a Goa'uld, Daniel? Fifteen hours, was it?

"Do you think she's trying to communicate?" Daniel whispered to Jack, as though Sam couldn't understand him.

Oh no. I will not be your next alien experiment!

"I think this requires further study," Jack replied.

"LET ME WORK!" Sam typed in large letters at the end of a report she'd been working on, then spun the laptop around so her tormentors could read it.

However, Jack and Daniel continued on as though they hadn't seen her request.

"She seems incapable of verbal communication," Jack offered. "Maybe you should try sign language."

Before Sam had quite resigned herself to tapping out her previous message in Morse code, Daniel came up with another idea.

"Telepathy, maybe?"

Sam cringed.

"Perhaps," Jack agreed.

"She seemed to know what you were thinking when you couldn't talk," Daniel pointed out. "Maybe it works both ways."

Oh no.

"Well, I could give it a try," Jack said with a shrug.

Come on. I didn't tease the two of you. Well, not a lot, at least.

Sam stepped back from her desk and Jack moved in to examine a device she'd been working on recently. He picked up part of it and showed it to Daniel.

"So, this here's a doohickey," Jack explained coolly. When the thing split into two pieces in his hand, he narrowly managed to avoid dropping one, then added, "See it's called a doohickey because it's actually got two parts, the doo and the hickey."

Sam would have let her fury be known at that point, but she'd broken that particular piece apart too many times to really blame him for anything.

Jack tried to put them back together the way they were before, but he couldn't make them fit, so he set the two pieces on the desk and continued on, peering into the instrument and saying, "Sometimes the doo and the hickey don't like to work like they're supposed to. Anyway, the doohickey hooks up to the doodinger, which is very similar to the doohickey but differs where the dinger and hickey are concerned. The doodinger's connected to the hopper, the hopper's connected to the whatchamacallit, the whachamacallit's connected to the…um…" he paused for a moment, but seemed to decide that a cliché was justified in this case, "…thighbone, which wraps around this thingy for awhile, it all ends up over here at the dingle. So when you put it all together you get a whatchadoohickeydingermathingycallit von dingle hopper, other wise known as that thing we picked up on P5R-297."

"Enlightening," Daniel muttered.

"Wasn't it though," Jack replied.

"You do know we found that device on P8X-235," Daniel pointed out.

"Where did I say we found it?" Jack asked. When Daniel didn't answer, Jack turned to Sam and said, "That was fun, do you have anything else I can play with?"

Sam's only response was to sit down and bury her head in her arms. It was difficult to tell if whether she was laughing or crying.

"Not a problem, I can find something myself," Jack said, undeterred. "Hey, what's this dimblewhatsit?"

"That's an electron microscope, Jack," Daniel replied.

"I like my name better."

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Author's Note: Every time I read that it just sounds dirtier and dirtier. I didn't mean Jack's "explanation" like it sounded, and neither did he.