THE GEAR ROOM
"She's in love with him." Bri whispered softly to Lilah as the team geared up.
"Does she know…" Lilah trailed off, glancing at John and Rodney, standing almost nose-to-nose across the room.
"No, and it's going to be ugly when she finds out." Bri murmured. "Keep an eye on it, we can't have them fall apart, too much depends on them right now." Lilah just nodded in response.
John turned away from Rodney and asked "So Bri, want to tell me how you got the gate to dial, and what's so important about this planet that you have to go?"
Brianna sighed. "One, I asked nicely, and two it's the last known location of the Sister City."
"The Sister City?" Rodney asked, pausing with his vest partially zipped so he could look at Bri.
Brianna sighed. Leaning forward so her hands were resting on the table in front of her, she began to explain.
"The oldest legends of Atlantis known on Earth say that when she was built, she was constructed in two distinct halves. Historians have always assumed, as we assumed when we arrived here, that this refers to a physical divide in the city itself, a North and South if you will, of the city we have been living in. It turns out that in actuality if refers to two physically identical cities, which fit together like puzzle pieces; the city of wisdom, Atlantis, and the city of discovery, the sister city, Alleria.
"The city of discovery was sent off, long before the Ancients began their war with the Wraith. It was a formidable weapon, it had to be in order to survive for centuries in a harsh galaxy, and while the Ancients never intended to loose Atlantis, they planned for the worst when they built Alleria. She was equipped with the very best of Ancient technology; she had the capability to destroy five hive ships simultaneously. She was never tested in battle, however. The Ancients were afraid of what would happen should the Wraith get their hands on her, so she never went into battle. They also knew they could never destroy it, it was too important, held too many secrets, and how could they destroy the intelligence they had created, so they hid it.
"They abandoned her, sending a series of commands, shutting down the city entirely except for a cloak. Atlantis sent one last message, in the form of a hologram, through the gate to the people of that planet before she locked the address out of her computer until now. The message read 'When the ones who can reveal it come flying through the gate, you must do all that is in your power to help them keep the city safe. When they arrive, you must reunite the hidden city with it's long lost sister.' Also, the reason there's not information about building ZPMs in the Atlantis database, well, they were built on Alleria, the process was apparently very dangerous, and involved almost flying into a sun in order to charge them. She wasn't able to be very specific."
Brianna sighed again, and looked up from the table at her audience. "So that's where we're going. We're going to find her and bring her home. The city of discovery, Alleria."
"Wow," John said after a pause. "It sounds too good to be true."
"There is one catch though," Lilah said, leaning back against the table in front of Bri, crossing her arms over her chest and her legs at the ankles.
"Knew it!" Rodney said softly to John.
"The second city is very…particular, about who she'll allow to fly her, unless, like Atlantis she got lonely over the years." Lilah said with a glare at Rodney.
"You said 'like Atlantis'" Rodney said slowly. "What do you mean?"
Lilah looked at them seriously. "Both cities are sentient, you know that now, but what you don't know is that they were designed to bond to one or two people, it was a secondary safety measure that was built into their original programming, but it was also a method to ensure that they never got lonely. Atlantis has favored John from the beginning, and had Brianna and I never arrived she would likely have chosen to bond with him once the joy of having company again had worn off. However now that Brianna and I are here, she has chosen to leave John for her sister."
Brianna looked seriously at her brother. "You and Rodney both need to be ready for this. Alleria will be lonely, and possibly slightly annoyed at being left alone, but you will have an advantage. She won't be angry at you, and you will be 'adopted' as a pair."
"How do we know that she'll accept me? You said she was picky, so how do we know?" John looked rather terrified at the thought of being bound to a city.
"Atlantis assures us that her sister will bond with you. Not only does she know Alleria better than anyone, but she still has a rudimentary connection to her sister." Lilah said. "You can liken it to rudimentary telepathy in humans. They can communicate, but nothing as complicated as directions or instructions. That's why we need to go find her. Until Alleria's control of her systems is restored, that is all that we will have. Atlantis gave us the crystal that will allow Alleria to reconnect, and when we put that into place, John you and Rodney will need to be in the chair room, ready to raise the shield and get us to safety before the Wraith realize what we found."
"Wait, we have the crystal?" Rodney sounded surprised. "I thought something like that would have been lost."
Brianna pulled a long, deep blue crystal from an inside pocket of her vest. "This is the crucial piece. It connects the conscious part of the artificial intelligence to the computers that run the city. Rather like the spinal cord of the human body. Atlantis has one too."