Disclaimer: see chapter one
Tense glances were shared between the two groups.
"Tough crowd," came the phrase from a, for once, straight faced Lieutenant Ford.
The groups blinked once, twice, then people from both sides of the room were trying to conceal and swallow their laughter. Their attempts were all for nothing though, as Daemon managed to let a small scoff through the hand covering his mouth, sending the whole room giggling with the face he pulled.
No one tried not to laugh. Even the sullen faced killjoy, Sergeant Bates, seated on the back row of his side of the room, gave a grin when he thought no one was looking.
It didn't matter that the joke hadn't been particularly funny; they had all just needed something to break the ice.
John gave a brief thought to how that one would have had to be explained to Teyla if he'd said it aloud.
Outside the briefing room, the sound of laughter filled the control room and the debarkation area. Several people looked up at the doors diving the room from everyone else, wishing to be in there so that they could discover what the hell was making all those in there create such a cacophony of noise, when the Wraith were only a few weeks away.
"Wait a minute. How do we know, exactly, that you are from the future? This could just all be some elaborate hoax, very elaborate mind you!"
Rodney hated to be a killjoy, but he didn't want everyone's hopes to be raised just to come crashing back down when everything went wrong, and he (and the rest of his team, he grudgingly admitted) had to fix everything.
The grins and chuckles vanished, and Jet could see the doubts begin to flash across the opposite groups faces.
He pathed Shadow and mentally asked her, "Any chance you can pull a rabbit out of a hat right about now?"
Shadow replied, "I can give you the whole menagerie". She pulled a relatively thick journal from one of the many piles she had in front of her, and opened it to a place that she had known she would have to use. She'd even book marked it.
"Hey, it that my…"
She removed the bookmark, and began to speak, letting the words answer his unfinished question. "Yesterday, an elderly woman was discovered in suspended animation in one of the previously unexplored laboratories. Even though we all immediately assumed she was an Ancient, due to her appearance, she later informed us that she was Dr Weir herself, who had travelled ten thousand years into the past, and had met the Ancients before their exodus to Earth."
Shadow raised an eyebrow and lowered the journal to the table, asking, "Do you believe us now? Or should I continue?"
Major Sheppard turned his head to Rodney and asked what the importance of Shadow's 'little speech' had been. He took a few seconds to answer, but stated, "I wrote that, after we found the time travelling Dr Weir."
Shadow picked up the journal again, and recommenced reading it aloud to the room, after finding a relevant place to start. "Dr Weir's time travel, and the subsequent change in the time lines proves quantum theory, that when a person goes back in time, they create a separate reality - a second version of themselves, living in a parallel world. More simply put, my interpretation of the universe is, in fact, split into an infinite number of copies of itself, in which every possible outcome of every decision ever made all throughout existence, all exist somewhere in an infinitely layered 'multiverse'.
Dr Weir spoke for the first time during the entire meeting, having preferred to watch the newcomers and observe how they reacted to their surroundings. "That sounds remarkably similar to what you told me Rodney."