Nearly an hour later, John was in Elizabeth Weir's office.
Aside from a few artifacts neatly displayed on silver-gray folding tables, some ceiling and wall plants, the hanging plaque that displayed the symbol which stood for all members of the Atlantis (or Pegasus Galaxy) team, and a chess board that more than suggested she was a member of the Atlantis chess club, Elizabeth's office was mostly undecorated. Having been in her quarters before, John knew this wasn't just her professional appearance. She really was a minimalist decorator, having most of herself wrapped up in her work rather than her surroundings.
It wasn't suited to John's taste, but the setup worked for her.
Another thing that the décor said was that, while she was supporting Dr. Beckett's Christmas party, Elizabeth was not participating in the holiday herself. There wasn't a trace of tinsel or Pegasus Galaxy pine cones anywhere in her office. Frankly, John appreciated that. It was sort of a relief after roaming the decked halls and seeing red ribbons and garlands hanging everywhere anyone could get permission to hang them. Not to mention the stray smatterings of glitter and occasional treacherous faux mistletoe just looking to force someone into an awkward situation with someone else.
"Our guys couldn't find a thing," John admitted to Elizabeth, throwing himself down wearily in the chair across the room from where she sat at her desk, "Rodney's team has picked up a couple blips around the city, but either the creature wasn't there in the first place or else it moved on by the time we could check the areas visually."
A faint, humorless smile crossed Elizabeth's features, "You sound like you don't believe in Rodney's 'creature.'"
Though John had been forced to admit that Rodney had felt something, it was hard to credit that the something was a creature when they could find no trace of the thing.
"Well, he is the only one to have encountered it," John replied guardedly, "And even Rodney admits that he didn't really see it. Besides, it's not like we haven't seen technology that can produce hallucinations more than once," he paused then concluded with a head tilt, "Admittedly, the Wraith's is visual as opposed to tactile, but is it really so much of a leap?"
Elizabeth sat back for a moment, apparently weighing John's words. Perhaps she was also trying to lay aside her personal preference as to which explanation she wanted to be true. After a moment, she leaned forward again, resting her elbows on her desk, and met John's eyes.
"Did you read the report on the Dimension Observer?" she asked.
"The what?" John inquired by way of answer.
Elizabeth offered a knowing smile, and began to tell him about it, "Just over three years ago, an exploring SG-team brought a device back to Earth that they didn't know the purpose of, but recognized as Ancient. Though they had determined it to be harmless using what means they had to measure and test it in the field, it was active."
"Uh-oh," John said, guessing where this was going, but not seeing the relevance at the moment.
"One member of the team, a Langaran, almost immediately reported seeing some sort of flying insect-like creature. He even drew a weapon against it. Several potential witnesses were present, but no one saw it besides him. The Langaran was young, new to 'Gate travel and equally new to Earth, newer still to being a member of an active SG-team. But the SGC has considerable history with alien artifacts, so General Hammond locked down the base and instituted a search," she paused, then concluded, "A search which ultimately turned up nothing."
John didn't know what a Langaran was, but he decided that wasn't the important part of the story, so he didn't ask about it for the moment. If curiosity got the better of him, he could ask later, or look into it on his own time. For the moment, he decided to let Elizabeth stay on the point she was making.
"Concerns developed about the mental and physical health of the Langaran, because nobody else had seen what he had, nor had they uncovered any evidence of its existence. He also had a history working with a hazardous material known as naquadria, which was known by then to cause a lot of health problems, not the least being vivid and elaborate hallucinations. Besides, his description of the creature, in particular its ability to go through walls, sounded purely fantastic."
It was hard to think of anything as being too fantastic to be believed once you'd ventured through the Stargate. Then again, from what Elizabeth said, the Langaran was some kind of alien. And it was easy to dismiss things you didn't understand as fantasy, particularly when they were presented by someone you didn't know very well, someone who was not even from your planet. Never was that more true than when there seemed to be a more easily palatable alternate explanation.
"But it did exist," John guessed.
"It did," Elizabeth confirmed, "And, eventually, everyone started seeing not only that creature, but others like it."
"Because of the device."
Elizabeth nodded in the affirmative, "It turned out to be a means of attracting and observing creatures inhabiting a neighboring dimension. But because they were in another dimension, the creatures could go through people and objects in this dimension, and were unaffected by anything that anyone tried to do to them, including shoot them. It all eventually got straightened out, but the point is-"
"-Rodney may have experienced something real that the rest of us missed. A real creature he felt but we can't seem to find. That causes glitches but otherwise doesn't leave a trace. And I shouldn't dismiss what he experienced lightly," John sighed resignedly, "I get the message."
"Good," Elizabeth said with some satisfaction.
John sighed again and sat back in his chair while pondering his next move, "And to think, I could've been on M6S-868 and this could've been Major Lorne's problem."
"Giving you a problem to deal with was the opposite of the Major's intention," Elizabeth told him.
John was rather surprised by her specific choice of phrase.
"How do you mean?" John asked, curiosity piqued, "I thought Major Lorne requested that mission?"
"He did," Elizabeth replied, but he could see in her eyes that there was more, "Do you know why?"
"Because he wanted to go?" John guessed, knowing even as he did that he was wrong, that he'd somehow missed the obvious (whatever that was) in his assessment of why Lorne was going.
Elizabeth shook her head, and smiled gently, "Because he wanted to give you and your team Christmas off. Major Lorne knows what happened last year, and argued that since he and his team had spent their last Christmas safe at home, it was your turn to do the same this year, inasmuch as that was possible."
"Oh," John responded automatically.
That did sound like Major Lorne, John supposed. Lorne was exceptionally responsive to John's lead, but he was also always trying to read his CO, to guess John's (and probably Elizabeth's) wants and needs before it became necessary to make the request or give the order. But, seeing as Lorne had only been at it a few months, it was to be expected that the Major would get it wrong more often than not.
After a moment, Elizabeth changed the angle of the subject slightly, "When he first arrived I really expected trouble from Major Lorne. But so far he's been conscientious, helpful… respectful, which is a welcome change of pace."
John wanted to object to that statement, but he remembered well his own initially rough interactions with Elizabeth, not to mention the pain in the ass that had been Sgt. Bates. So he said nothing.
"He's a good influence on his men, both morale-wise and behaviorally," Elizabeth went on, "I was about done putting up with Lt. Reed's attitude, but since he's been put under Major Lorne's command, complaints about him have been minimal."
John knew what the complaints had been. In essence, Reed was too tall, dark and scary for his own good. Even when he was on his best behavior, he still had a way of looming and looking threatening. But placed under the command of the comparatively diminutive and perpetually sunny-tempered Major Lorne, Reed's stature and overtly intimidating appearance was naturally diminished. Which really wasn't a change of attitude on Reed's part, merely a change in the way people viewed him. Coughlin and Wilson though, those two were becoming completely reformed characters under Lorne's command.
"When I looked at his file, it was pretty obvious he belonged here," John replied, "He's a pilot, Air Force, born with the ATA gene. He has years more experience with the Stargate Program than me, two of those years were spent serving off-world, he's passably fluent in multiple Milky Way languages, was already working on his Ancient when we got him… I thought 'he's perfect for the job.' And then..."
Sagely, Elizabeth finished the sentence, "You immediately wondered what was wrong with him."
"There's gotta be somethin', right?" John asked, of course the question was rhetorical, because they both knew nobody was that perfect, "Obviously I couldn't ask Sumner why he'd passed over Lorne to begin with, and Col. Edwards was unavailable for comment."
He paused, recalling his frustration at being unable to find a solid source of information, until almost by chance he had found himself speaking to General O'Neill, "Turns out General O'Neill and Col. Edwards went way back. Now, General O'Neill gave me some good insight. It seems Col. Edwards' personal life was goin' to hell the first year Lorne served under him, and since he couldn't go home at the time, he took most of his frustrations out on his men, especially the Major. General O'Neill was convinced that was the main factor behind why he didn't like Lorne. General O'Neill himself hadn't spent enough time with the Major to particularly notice him, but that in itself was good news."
They both knew the Stargate Program and General O'Neill well enough to realize that anybody making a quick bad impression on that man was probably bad news for whoever got stuck with them.
"I didn't even think to question it," Elizabeth softly admitted, dropping her gaze, "Major Lorne specifically requested to be part of the original expedition, but Colonel Sumner turned him down. The Major wasn't even tested for the ATA gene at the time, so I went along with his recommendation without a second thought," she added for clarity, "Sumner and Edwards were friends. Grudgingly, as they belonged to different branches of the military, but friends nonetheless."
Of course, the original Atlantis Expedition was supposed to be more exploration and research at the start. They hadn't planned to go to war. And they hadn't known how badly they would be needing pilots either. So military personnel were not as heavily emphasized the first year. Within that frame, it was easy to see how something as seemingly trivial as personal like or dislike could have made all the difference whether a man was selected or passed over.
John himself hadn't had the first clue about Atlantis, it was almost pure chance his ATA gene had been discovered and he'd been assigned to the Expedition… right over the objections of Sumner. It hadn't even occurred to him that Lorne might have known about the Expedition long before John himself, that he'd wanted to be part of it from the beginning. It was luck that had gotten John his ticket to Atlantis, but luck had done Lorne no favors in giving him a distraught Colonel Edwards as CO. In fact, luck had turned so hard against him that he hadn't even been tested for the ATA gene until almost a year later.
For a moment, John imagined what would have happened had things played out just a little bit differently. If Lorne had been part of the original Expedition. On account of his seniority with the Stargate Program, Major Lorne would likely have been selected as the successor to Colonel Sumner instead of John. How would Lorne have handled that first year on Atlantis? Better? Worse? John recognized a brief flash of totally irrational jealousy, just because he'd realized that, in a different reality, he could have found himself answering to Lorne instead of the other way around.
"I guess we both had a thing or two to learn about making assumptions and leaping to conclusions," John observed, referring to the earlier part of their conversation.
Elizabeth might have agreed with that, but before she could, there was an interruption.
"Colonel Sheppard, we've spotted McKay's creature near the Botany Lab," reported Lt. Edison, "But it bolted before we could stop it."
Elizabeth and John exchanged looks before John asked, "What'd it look like?"
"Well, sir, it looked… kind of like an opossum."
Somewhat incredulously, John asked, "Did you say 'opossum?'"
"Yes sir. I've seen a lot of them by the side of the road on Earth," Edison replied, then added almost offhandedly, "But I've never seen a black one before."
John and Elizabeth exchanged another pair of looks. Possums were pretty commonplace, but neither of them had seen a black one either. Certainly there seemed little chance of such an unusual creature having made its way to Atlantis.
'Go,' Elizabeth mouthed, and John obeyed, more out of curiosity than anything.
Two people had now reported encountering this thing, and somehow the second description sounded stranger to him than the first. After all, hostile alien lifeforms were pretty much par for the course out here. A rogue opossum finding its way to an isolated floating city in the middle of a mostly ocean planet, now that was something to write home about.
John knew he might miss the creature yet again, seeing as Edison's report indicated he'd only gotten a glimpse of it himself, but the effort had to be made. He never got near the Botany Lab, because the thing he'd spent all day looking for suddenly jumped out into the hall with open mouth and bared teeth. Given the old joke, he half-expected it to shriek 'Jehoshaphat.' But it didn't.
He could see where the comparison to an opossum came from, though there was an element of cuteness to the overall ugliness of a real opossum that this creature lacked utterly, despite the superficial similarity of shape and overall bearing. It was a quadruped, black as sin, with bristling hair, rounded ears, a sharply pointed snout and hunched back. Its tail and feet were naked and ash-gray, and the latter sported long, curved claws. Its mouth was full of tiny razor-looking teeth and its beady eyes seemed somehow blacker than black when they glared at him.
Reflexively, he raised the P90 he'd picked up from the armory when the hunt for the thing had started, though it hardly seemed dangerous enough to bother putting a bullet into. The creature snapped its jaws at him, and then raced away in silence that was startling in its completeness. The creature disappeared through an opening in the ventilation system.
John supposed that explained how it had been evading them so long.
After a moment, John realized that he'd gotten the same feeling off the thing as Rodney had described. Something about the look in its eyes said that it despised him utterly, and wished him dead. Because there was no one there to see, he allowed himself a small shudder of sympathy for Rodney, who had actually been in physical contact with it, which must've been much worse.
"I want that thing out of my city," John told himself decisively, "And I want it out now."