When Henry Deacon arrived at the outside of S.A.R.A.H., it was a strangely forlorn sight. Set up on empty tennis and picnic tables and miniature golf courses, all intended for outdoor fun, were various forms of scientific equipment, with Jack Carter leaning against his house looking rather harried and talking on his phone. Samantha Carter had brought all of SG-1 with her, he noticed with a smile, and a few of them were struggling with a telescope set up on a ping-pong table, while Daniel Jackson spoke in increasingly aggravated tones with someone named Bill Lee on his cell phone.

"No, no, no, I haven't seen any ships. Can't you just e-mail me the satellite telemetry? Uh… yeah I have clearance. Yes yes, I know you're busy with your new plant project, but a whole bunch of Colonel Carter's civilian family members just saw a huge flash of light and I need something to tell them. If the truth isn't classified, I'll tell them that."

Henry saw Zoe and a pale Irish boy talking to another blonde girl and a couple of huge menacing men, and decided to go help the thin man in pinstripes and blonde girl in polka dots with the strange contraption they had out.

"Just a little more adjusting on the flux debilitator… rearrange the feedback…" the man was saying, "Oh, hello! I'm the Doctor, this is-"

"-Rose Tyler, Samantha and Jack Carter's cousin-"

"I'm Henry Deacon. And you're working on… what?"

"Aw, you know, just a little… weather… thing… there!" He stood up and flipped a switch. The "weather thing" lit up, hummed, sparked, let out a trail of smoke, and died with a sort of whistling sound.

"Never mind."

"Here, let me help."

Henry and the Doctor each pulled from his jacket a tool, and then eyed the other's with surprise.

"Sonic screwdriver?"

"Sonic wrench?"

They smiled at each other. Rose rolled her eyes, and went to see what Cinda and Aunt Susan were talking about.

"So… this flash of light, what do you think it was?" the little girl was asking.

"I don't know, dear, really, I don't…" Rose grinned at her aunt, who she hadn't seen in nearly a decade. She rather missed the family reunions, which had stopped when Mrs. Carter died years ago. Good excuse for a vacation, her mother always said, and they had always met Aunt Susan, who was really just a seventy-something cousin, at the airport, because she refused to ride trains. She said they were too dangerous, but that was because her entire family had died on one decades before. Rose supposed that would make anyone rather loath to take a train.

"Aunt Susan, wouldn't you feel safer inside?" Rose asked. Aunt Susan smiled distantly.

"I've seen danger in my dreams, in my childhood games, Rose, that you may never see in real life. Or maybe you have. Just be careful not to forsake your dreams, or they'll forsake you."

Rose shook her head sadly. Aunt Susan was getting to be a little mad. Then her cell rang, and it was her mother. She excused herself, and left little Cinda, who for some reason was acting more somber than usual, to try to figure out what the old lady was ranting on about.

"No, we haven't found what it was yet. They're getting close, though. The Doctor says he found some sort of temporal disturbance, and Samantha is tri… tri… triangulating, I think, the origin of the flash, and it's all very clever out here. No one inside is worrying too much? You're playing charades? The house made hors d'oeuvres? Mum, really, you're the life of the party. Oh… okay. I'll talk to you if we find anything out." She shut her phone and wished she understood everything as well as so many people around her seemed to. She walked over to where her cousin Samantha was finishing tinkering with a telescope.

"I'm telling you, Carter," General O'Neill was saying, "It's gotta be aliens. No offense, T." Teal'c raised an eyebrow.

"That's what I've been saying!" Sheriff Carter exclaimed.

Sam looked up. "Jack, you've been saying everything is aliens for years."

"So has that guy." He pointed at a former conspiracy theorist.

Daniel blinked. "Um, I was right."

"So am I, maybe."

Rose tapped Sam on the shoulder, trying to circumvent more fighting. She thought the problem was aliens, too.

"Samantha? Should Cinda and Aunt Susan be inside?"

"What? Yes. I thought Mark took them in. Where are they?"

They walked back over to the lawn chairs, leaving Daniel and Teal'c to struggle with finishing the equipment and Jack and Jack to look menacingly at each other. Aunt Susan was staring at the cloudy sky again, and Cinda seemed to be talking to herself a short distance away.

"Al, come on! You have to have something!" the little girl was saying. "I just appeared in what seems to be a genius family reunion, hosted by, get this, Samantha Carter's brother –no, I don't know if she's hot, I'm her niece! And apparently there was a huge flash of light just before I got here. Why am I here? You have no idea? Well, an 11% chance is better than nothing…"

"Cinda?" Rose knelt by her young cousin. "Who are you talking to?" She had had enough experiences wherein people spoke to others who were neither visible nor imaginary to be terribly concerned, but the subject of the one-sided conversation was a little unorthodox.

"Oh! Um… my imaginary friend?"

This was soon disproved, as the Doctor ran over seconds later.

"Samantha, Rose! I got it to work- well, we got it to work, brilliant friend you have there- and you'll never believe… who's he?"

"Who's who?"

"That man there. Standing by… Cinda, was it?"

Artemis and Zoe, flanked closely by the Butlers, had come over as well. Rose still didn't see anyone.

"Admiral something, according to his uniform…Calavicci? My, the U.S. Air Force is well-represented here." He looked at Colonel Carter, General O'Neill, and Sheriff Carter.

Jack (guess which one) raised his hand. "Um, I'm actually a Marshal."

Zoe elbowed him. "Not the time, Dad."

Cinda looked at the Doctor in rather cherubic shock. "I might actually have to come clean with you here-"

"He just flickered," the Doctor interrupted, walking around an empty patch of ground, prodding the air with his screwdriver, "but I still see him. I say hologram. Yep," suddenly a man appeared, and the sonic screwdriver passed straight through his shoulder, "definitely hologram."

Cinda sighed. "My name is Samuel Beckett. I just quantum leaped here into the body of Cinda Carter. I don't know why, and I certainly don't know how, but I think I have to save someone's life."

"Sam Beckett?" exclaimed Sam Carter and Henry Deacon. "But you- I heard- why- oh!"

"General," said Admiral Al.

"Admiral," said General Jack.

Rose glanced at the Doctor, and noticed that he, too, was looking elsewhere: at his machine. It was beeping. Daniel was pointing at it with a "what-do-I-do-know?" face.

The alien in pinstripes ran over to his contraption, picked it up, and pointed it at another front yard area of emptiness. Well, near emptiness; the badminton net was incinerated. The point was, another, and more alien, alien appeared. Tentacles, it had, and spots, and three eyestalks. A weapon it also had. A very dangerous-looking ray-type gun.

"Wow," whispered Jack Carter. "Just like in a movie." The Admiral flickered and disappeared again. Zoe elbowed her father again. Together, as the local diplomats, Daniel and the Doctor stepped forward, then looked at each other, then stepped back.

"A doctor?" asked Daniel. "In what, again?"

"What about you?"

"Archaeology."

The Doctor made a rather pitying expression, as if to say, "I laugh at archaeologists."

"Excuse me," said Rose, rolling her eyes. "but who are you? What are you doing here?"

"I am Drika of Yika, and I seek'a someone," said the creature.

"Who?"

"I know not. A traveler, one who has slipped in and out of now and then."

"There's no need to point a gun. We can help you look if you wan-" the creature pointed at the ping-pong table, and it and the telescope disappeared in a bright flash. Rose shut her mouth. Henry stepped away quickly.

"Okay," the Doctor clapped his hands with a grin. "Who all here has traveled through time?" He and Rose raised their hands automatically. Cinda Carter thought a moment, and then slowly raised hers. Sam looked at her team, and they all thought of 1969, and a recent video they'd uncovered in a pyramid with a zero-point module. Good year, thought O'Neill. SG-1 raised their hands.

"What about time-dilation fields?" asked Artemis suddenly from behind his bodyguard. Drika nodded. Sort of. Or so it appeared. Artemis poked the Butlers, and they all raised their hands.

"What about fractured-universe alternate reality futures?" asked Henry.

"Yes." Henry Deacon nodded at Jack and Zoe Carter, and he and the confused latter two raised their hands.

Suddenly, out of apparently nowhere, Aunt Susan cocked her head to the side and raised her hand. That made everyone on the lawn, and the Doctor grinned even wider.

"Brilliant! Drika of Yika, you're speaking of seeking someone near…"

"Eureka," provided Jack with a confused smile.

"Right! Now, we all fit your parameters, though I'm sure I don't know every case."