John wasn't surprised that the Atlantis reading room didn't contain many books about myth and folklore. He was disappointed but equally unsurprised that there was nothing in the briefing files that even hinted at the present situation even being a possibility. Apparently something besides the Ancients had put a colony or research facility on M6S-868, but the details were sketchy (probably because they hadn't seemed important at the time) and there was nothing suggesting gremlins. As a sort of last resort, John decided to ask around and see if he couldn't track down even one member of the Atlantis team who had a special interest in mythology, or who might have a private book collection, or remember having read some bit of lore or SG-mission file that could help. Something. Anything.
Since the radios couldn't be trusted anymore, that meant going door-to-door. He'd pulled several men off the search teams to help with intel gathering, but it was slow going, particularly because he'd instituted a ban on transporters, so everyone had to use stairs and corridors to get from one place to another, which was taking forever. Atlantis was a big place, all the bigger when you had to walk the length and breadth of it… or at least the inhabitable portions of it.
It was not lost on him that, though Rodney had arrived at the conclusion by a different route, Rodney's assessment of the gremlins matched his own. They were generators of chaos more than anything. Their goal was to disrupt every aspect of life on Atlantis to such a degree that it ceased to function. They had cut the city off from outside support, made travel difficult on every level, tried to turn people against each other, raided food stores, interrupted and taken over communication… but they appeared to have no end goal of their own. So what was coming next?
Passing his own quarters, John decided to take a minute to slow down, get a breath, try to recover his sense of balance and find a viable way forward. He got no further than the doorway, for a pair of reflective eyes shimmered at him as he entered and turned on the light.
A gremlin sat on his mattress, its spiked flail of a tail curled around itself. There was little of the possum about its face, its features were practically human-like, yet weirdly pointy in places they shouldn't be. Its fur was so patchy that it looked like it was afflicted with mange. Its back feet had talon-like claws, and its front feet looked an awful lot like a spindly pair of human hands tipped with curved blades. Its ears looked much more like a pair of horns than anything. It was larger than the others too. Rather than being the size of a large cat, it was more pit bull sized. It grinned at him, showing wickedly sharp, irregular rows of teeth that looked too big for its mouth.
"What the hell do you want?" John demanded angrily.
He figured that if the things could imitate a human voice well enough to fool Beckett, they could probably understand what he said too. The bright black eyes shone with comprehension, but it didn't answer him, except to widen its perverse grin.
"Look," John tried again, "I don't know how you got here, or what you came here for, but you should probably leave while you still can. Because otherwise, I'm gonna have to kill you."
This was apparently the funniest thing the gremlin had heard all day, for it threw back its head and unleashed its irritating laugh in the direction of the ceiling, slapping its knees with its clawed paw-hands in an eerily human sort of way. It stopped laughing as suddenly as it had started, and eyed John's sidearm without evidence of concern. It had no reason to be worried. After all, John had already shot one of these things in the head with the M9 and nothing had come of it.
Slowly, it raised its gaze to look John in the face. It giggled briefly.
"Cryptids are cryptic, that much is true," it said in a grating, nails-on-chalkboard falsetto voice, "I am a cryptid, and so are you."
Abruptly, it sprang from the mattress and onto the nearby desk, sweeping the books and papers and bits of things from the desk's surface to the floor as it landed. It cackled some more.
"Cut that out!" John snapped, unable to entirely hold his outrage, "And get out of my room!"
The gremlin simply swiped a hand across the desk, sending another cascade of work and personal items crashing to the floor, before saying in its irritating sing-song way, "I am what you expect to see and not much less; what truth's in that, no one can guess."
John was in no mood for games, especially not riddles. Not sure what else to do, he raised his M9.
"One bullet may not have done much to your friend, but I'm willin' to bet a whole clip has got to make a dent," John growled.
Though less reassured than ever, Lorne had gotten the only answers Janella had to offer, and he dropped back with Wilson once more, where he would be less able to hear George going on a tangent about how it was fun and all to play Santa Claus, but then depressing to afterwards go home to a night in an empty house watching bad Christmas specials and drinking Coors in your underwear and wondering why writers kept coming up with the same boring, one-dimensional characters for their same-plot, same empty words of good cheer every year. George theorized that anyone coming up with the answer to both that and how those writers managed to get paid would probably have solved a bigger mystery than any other in the galaxy. Lorne wasn't interested.
Wilson was looking at the sky again.
"Something you wanna tell me, Lieutenant?" Lorne asked glancing at the clouds above with affected unconcern.
"I was just thinking, sir," Wilson said with the hesitancy of the new guy on the team not wanting to annoy his CO, "We've been out of contact for over twenty-four hours now. We've missed more than one check-in. Atlantis will have tried to contact us by now."
"Without the jumper's communication systems, we're well out of range," Lorne explained, surprised to have to explain it to a man like Wilson, who certainly should have known the limits of the radios.
But Lorne had misread Wilson's concern, "Yes sir. But, failing to get a response… how long before they sent another jumper? Do you think there might already be another team somewhere on-world, crashed just like us?"
"It's a thought I was trying to avoid," Lorne replied soberly, "But yeah, it's possible."
Especially given how quickly Dr. Weir tended to get anxious if a team was out of contact, and how eager Colonel Sheppard was to do something about any perceived issue. Neither of them was a wait and see kind of boss, which explained why they'd been willing to come out here to the Pegasus Galaxy in the first place. Not just willing, Dr. Weir had fought for the Expedition tooth and nail. There were certainly several opposed parties, or at least parties opposed to the way she wanted to conduct it.
"How will we find them?" Wilson asked, "If they were able, they would've tried to contact us through radio, so either they'd have to be too far away, or..." he didn't finish the thought aloud.
"Ideally, we turn off whatever device knocked us out of the air and the jumpers spring back to life. With a working jumper, it would just be a matter of one contacting the other," Lorne replied, "Failing at that, jumpers can track each other, even when they're cloaked. If the jumper works, it's only a matter of time to find anyone else who may have been caught out here."
But Wilson wasn't about to let him off so easily, "And if not?"
Lorne hesitated, unsure of his answer, uncomfortably aware of how much trouble they would be in if this particular thing they were now pursuing turned out to be a some kind of untamed waterfowl. He didn't really like the list of other options they would have if this didn't pan out. Not only was he not enjoying having to consider those options, he was not keen on talking about them either.
"Well then we'll just have to find them another way," Lorne said, but knew he had remained silent a moment too long by the uncertainty in Wilson's gaze.
It was really true, what people said about timing being everything and it all being in the delivery. Any half-way decent writer could come up with any number of the supposedly great speeches of history. Nearly anybody could say the words of a leader. But what really mattered was when and how they said those words. And Lorne had just mistimed his, and spoken them poorly.
Rather than say anything else, Wilson cast his gaze back on the uncaring sky, looking for answers that were unlikely to be found anywhere in those darkening clouds.
What the hell was I thinking? Lorne asked himself, I could've had Christmas off. But no, I had to go and ask for this. And then I went and dragged my men in with me. Great job, I'm sure Col. Sheppard will be real impressed when he finds out what happened… if he finds out. Why couldn't I have just kept my mouth shut and followed my dad's advice for once in my life?
But he hadn't. And now it was too late. He couldn't go back. He could only move forward. Self-recrimination wouldn't help any of them now. But it was a whole heckuva lot easier than facing the reality that they might not get off this planet, now or ever. And it was certainly much easier than trying to think about how to explain it to his team aloud without destroying their hope or crushing their spirits in the process. He almost wished he was back in that Iratus bug nest. That had been a hopeless situation if ever there had been one. But at least then he hadn't had to figure it all out for himself. At least then he hadn't been alone with the weight of responsibility, and there being no good answers. He could go home, regroup, and let more capable minds come up with another solution.
In his head, he could hear his grandmother's conclusion after every lecture on the horrors that were loose in the world, "Alright, Evan. You tell me. Where is your God now?"
Always she had worn him down to shaking his head, because he didn't have the words to explain it to her, but saying so would only lead her to triumphantly declare herself in the right, without regard for the fact that not having an explanation didn't mean that there was no explanation.
The Stargate discovered at Giza had sat gathering dust for decades because nobody could figure out how to make it work. The project was small and struggling because there were so many people who said it couldn't work, or wouldn't be of any real importance to the world even if it ever did work. And then there were those who thought making it work would be a very bad thing, and so it shouldn't work. But then one man shut himself up in a lab, consumed a mortifying amount of coffee, stole a newspaper and found the answer there. It had been there all along, right in plain view. In retrospect it was obvious. In fact, several people had actually found the answer before him. But not the right people in the right places to really begin the Stargate Program. Only when the right person was in the right place and time did the answer become clear, and change the universe, and the Tau'ri's place therein, forever. That vital answer had of course been: The Point of Origin.
Lorne didn't have the answer to the problem now, but it was out there, and he intended to find it. He was going to find a way home for his team.
The gremlin tilted its head, and gave John a strangely pitying look.
"Friends are for fools, and I know I'm not. Myself as a friend, that's all I've got."
For lack of a better idea, John emptied the M9 into the thing's center mass. The bullets seemed to go right through it, embedding themselves in the wall behind the gremlin, but doing no damage at all to it.
"Dammit!" John exclaimed, and the creature laughed at him, before suddenly leaping for the open window, pausing on the edge to look around and then swinging out.
"Get back here and fight, you bastard!" John yelled idiotically, chasing after it, but the only response was its echoing laughter as it departed and by the time he reached the window it had disappeared.
He backed up and sank down on his bed, still facing the window, setting the empty M9 beside him. He'd barely sat down when a noise from behind startled him and he whipped around to find Ronon and Teyla coming in on the run from wherever they'd been.
"Sheppard!"
"I'm fine," John said, waving their alarm aside casually, "But we've really gotta stop these emergencies that last more than twenty-four hours. I'm getting a little too old for this."
Ronon and Teyla exchanged looks with one another. John wasn't ashamed to admit that they had more stamina than him, in part due to their way of life, and in part due to the fact that they were younger than him. Particularly Ronon, who had to be at least ten years John's junior.
The high stakes, high drive, high energy consumption missions were for the young guys in their twenties. By the time a guy got to being over thirty, he started to slow down markedly, and take longer to recover from strenuous missions. That progressed until he longed for that desk job he had scorned in his youth. John wasn't ready for a desk job, not at all, but just now… well he'd poured useless rounds into the wall, and that didn't speak very well for him at the moment.
But that was best not dwelled on too long, in part because it only served to remind him of his father's objections to his career path, which had included a lot of "What are you going to do when you're not young and stupid anymore, assuming you should live so long?" And other, equally irritating commentary that John had at the time brushed off, but found himself thinking about more and more with each End of the World crisis he found himself facing on Atlantis.
So he changed the subject, "The little bastard was in my room. It talked to me."
"It talked to you?" Ronon repeated with a raised eyebrow, "About what?"
John thought about that for a moment, "You know… I actually have no idea. It sounded mostly like nonsense. Something about being a cryptid and not having any friends. It called me a cryptid."
"I am unfamiliar with that term," Teyla admitted.
"Cryptid. You know, like Bigfoot, yeti, chupacabra… and you have no idea what any of those are..." he sighed, "A cryptid is… like… a creature that doesn't really exist. Well, not outside of anecdotal accounts. So it's more… assumed not to exist, because nobody has proof of it."
Shaking her head gently while a soft smile appeared on her face, Teyla said, "Your world is very strange."
"Well this thing isn't from my world," John reminded her, "And anyway, the term cryptid is pretty recent, so it must've gotten it from someone's computer or something."
"Why would it call you… one of those?" Ronon asked, staying on track as usual.
"Hell if I know," John answered, "Maybe because the Ancients aren't around anymore and it thought anyone with the ATA gene was long gone?"
"Then why not simply say that those with the gene were thought to be extinct? Would that not be more sensible?" Teyla inquired thoughtfully.
"I'm about done trying to find any sense in what these things are doing," John told her, "Personally, I think it only talked to me because it was trying to rattle my cage."
"As it trapped Rodney in the transporter," Teyla recalled.
"Exactly. I think we may be onto something and just don't know what yet, and it's tryin' to keep us from finding out by slowing us down and distracting us."
"What was Rodney working on before he was attacked?" Teyla asked.
John shrugged, "Just more of the same things that already hadn't been working as far as I know."
"And we are asking around for information which may not even be available anywhere in Atlantis," Teyla sighed, pursing her lips briefly, "It does not seem to make sense."
"And that," John said, "I think, is the point."