Aisha still wasn't used to the Tau'ri custom of wearing clothing at all times, even after having lived on the First World for four months. She'd begrudgingly accepted their seemingly prohibitive fear of the human form as a universal fact of their military culture. There was a constant, persistent fear of the human body, as though human beings would risk devolving into a degenerate rapist if one were allowed plain view of a woman's body. It was such a persistent and prevalent cultural taboo to the degree that she was actually starting to wonder if the fears were founded in something legitimate, in spite of never having witnessed anything other than rigid restraint in the Tau'ri she'd met thus far.
In private she still allowed herself the simple freedom of disrobing, if only to facilitate the process of seeing to her old wounds.
Aisha looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, running her finger along the scar running down her cheek. When she'd been a Priestess of Heka that mark would have terrified her. Heka would not have tolerated an imperfect image. She would have been beaten to death for having failed to protect herself, then brought back to life so that she could beg for him to allow her survival. If she had failed to be convincing in her pleas the process would repeat until either Heka felt that she'd earned the right to continue living or grew bored and slew her. But for the Warden? The scar felt more like an act of devotion.
One act among many such acts. There were nearly as many scars along her body as tattoos now. The ointment that Doctor Frasier provided her had helped to heal them, though not as effectively as they might have been using Goa'uld magic rather that Tau'ri alchemy.
The wounds she'd suffered while isolated in the corridor of flesh had been quite severe. While the Lord Warden's protections damaged and repelled the antagonistic meat and chitin, it was not enough to entirely discourage the barbed tentacles and razor-sharp teeth. Her memories of the battle were cloudy, the same injury that marked her face had left her badly concussed. Combined with the noxious gases flooding the corridor, she could only remember agony and fear.
She closed her eyes, shuddering as she remembered the dying screams of Tau'ri warriors. She heard them less while she was awake then while she was sleeping. Her prayers seemed to have banished most of the lingering specters haunting her. But there were some ghosts that would linger in one's heart long after the actual spirits moved on to the next life.
She whispered a prayer to the Warden as she crossed her arms and bowed her head, cupping her breasts in supplication. Aisha hoped he was proud of her. She was making slow progress in reaching her goal of preaching to the masses – slow enough to feel nearly infinitesimal – but it was progress.
It had come as something of a surprise when the Tau'ri had asked her if she was seeking amnesty in their nation rather than just informing her of where she was to be relocated as they'd done with lost souls who'd defected from her Lord's light. She had, of course, requested to be allowed to remain on their world on religious grounds.
Of all the dangers she'd anticipated on the wild and untamed lands of the First World, bureaucratic stagnation hadn't ever remotely entered the list. How a culture more meticulously asinine in its scrupulous and unyielding adherence to process hadn't managed to be feared for that alone was an obvious byproduct of its omnipresent predatory megafauna. Even the Jade Empire's cavalcade of cosmic bureaucrats couldn't have conceived of horrific process by which one applied for a Green Card.
The Tau'ri had a form for everything. From the moment of birth someone would pull a sheet of paper out so that the parents could ensure that the child had been properly documented and a raised seal could be demonstrated to the relevant government authorities at any point. Near as she could tell, the purpose of the certificate was to provide adequate documentation that a birth had occurred in the event that having a living person present was not sufficient for one's birth to be believed. Having set the tone with that, the Tau'ri seemed quite determined to ensure that any given action taken in life had been adequately documented for posterity.
She'd filled out enough paperwork at this point that there had to be a small library archived somewhere on the First World exclusively for her. Aisha was sincerely starting to worry that the Tau'ri viewed filling out paperwork as a sort of religious obligation in service of an as of yet unknown god of menial busywork abandoned by the rest of the Patheons in the hopes that he might meet his end on the First World.
She walked out of her bathroom and into the modest apartment she'd been given while her case for amnesty was processed by the legal authorities of the First World. It was luxurious in comparison to her already surprisingly lush accommodations within the fortress housing the Chappa'ai. She'd been allowed to move from the fortress to the planet's surface at the behest of Adrian, the Minister she'd met on her eventful first day.
He was a kind man, if infuriatingly stubborn in his factually incorrect assertion that only his god could even hold such a title. Clever men could be quite inflexible when faced with their own faults. Still, he'd proven surprisingly knowledgeable regarding the tattoos given to her by the Blessed Lady of Nekheb. She was doing her able best to educate herself in the written languages that she now found herself able to speak at a whim - the lady's blessings had apparently only extended as far as speaking the languages. She still had to learn how to read and write the old fashioned way.
His books were stacked on the table in her kitchen, forming a library of Tau'ri religious text from which she was doing her best to research what the Lord Warden's goal for her on the First World might actually be. She was entirely convinced that her presence on the First World was part of his grand design, but it the new Lord of Nekheb's methods were infuriatingly obtuse. She was quite entirely convinced, however, that the Minister's nameless god factored into this somehow. The Lord Warden collected powerful allies, mustering the greatest heroes and villains of the ancient Pantheon to fight at his side.
The nameless god certainly fit that bill, though she found herself wary of his temper. He seemed to have a nasty habit slaying those who disobeyed his rules in remarkably horrific ways, even for the ancient pantheons. Most of his ten major rules were relatively standard for a god, he was to be worshipped above all others, and one could not build idols to his rivals. The prohibition on murder, theft, adultery, deceit, jealousy and perjury were nice bonuses. The odd insistence on not speaking his name was vexing though - how was she to invoke a nameless creature? How does one worship a being with no name?
But the sheer volume of minor sins that one could commit were overwhelming. She had initially worried that her very body was a offense to the eyes of Adrian's nameless god, every devotion etched upon her flesh an apparent abomination. He assured her, however, that this was not the case - pulling up his sleeve to show her a tattoo of his own. She'd smiled politely, internally horrified that he'd elected to mark himself with a man being crucified. When she'd asked about some of the other rules in that very passage, however, it seemed that the value attributed to each individual sin was almost arbitrary. A great many other acts were apparently sinful without ever having been written of within the holy texts of the Tau'ri.
She supposed it would make sense with time. Fortunately, time was about the only resource Aisha currently had in abundance.
The Tau'ri were not uncharitable hosts by any measure. Though they did not permit her freedom of movement, the location in which she'd been detained was even more luxurious than her quarters within the subterranean fortress had been. She was what Adrian assured her was a "small" household by the standards of the Tau'ri. It had previously been a communal place intended to house Officers of the Tau'ri military from one of the affiliated forces associated with the Tau'ri. The Tau'ri apparently separated warfare by dominion. There was a force of Air, of Land and of Sea - though apparently each held partial dominion over all realms of combat.
This house had apparently been previously dedicated to providing temporary lodging to pilots tasked with flying the wedge shaped Tau'ri Gilders built in service of battle at sea. Colonel O'Neill had indicated that they were apparently annoyed to have had their "frat house" repurposed, with a hint of glee in his tone. The three realms of combat apparently held a borderline unhealthy degree of rivalry with each other.
There was an odd assortment of personal items left within the property by the former occupants, some of it obviously left with the intention of being used by the next occupant of the property and some of it accidental remainders abandoned by a man in a rush. There was a shelf full of novels, fictional stories of mystery, murder and intrigue - though none of them seemed to be the first story in their tale. She'd made a genuine effort to read them, but their text was too dense for her currently limited vocabulary.
Fortunately, there was a stack of glossy publications beneath the restroom sink that seemed closer to her current reading level. It was greatly comforting to know that there were women on the First World with fashion sensibilities closer to her own, though she found herself somewhat confused by the simultaneous diversity of appearance and stunning conformity within a body type she'd not previously realized was so common.
As she flipped between articles, educating herself on the music, movies, and fiction of the Tau'ri, she saw more and more perfect bodies. Not good, not great, perfect - they had no scars or blemishes that she could see, their flesh wasn't marked by signs of childbirth, and their torsos seemed quite entirely determined to defy the limitations of gravity.
No wonder the nameless god felt it necessary to specifically call out the evils of envy and lust on a world populated with women who looked like the Tau'ri. If the men of Nekheb found out that there were eligible women who looked like these to be had they'd be making outright pilgrimages to worship at the altar of the nameless god. It was hard not to find her own bruised reflection deeply wanting in comparison whenever she pulled a glossy paged publication from the stack and made eye contact with the buxom girl beneath the logo of a hatted hare.
As she strode into the living room, she made eye contact with the Tau'ri standing guard outside the glass door connecting her kitchen to the outside. Her guard was a woman, as were all the guards in the immediate perimeter of her gilded prison. The Tau'ri seemed convinced that the warriors tasked with her protection and incarceration would be insufficiently inattentive if they allowed men to fulfil that role.
Though, judging by the female guard's appraising smirk, they'd accomplished less with this particular guard than they might have hoped. Aisha rolled her eyes and pulled the curtains shut. She was not ashamed of her body being seen, but felt it was improper to encourage the sort of leering desire she'd seen in that guard.
She flopped down on the sofa, picking up the square, black remote and pressing the red button she knew would active the Tau'ri contraption. Samantha Carter, the woman warrior and blood bound dragon priestess, had educated her in the basics of operating the arcane machine. The Tau'ri insisted that there was no magic to the box, while in the same breath explaining that it was a glass screen that projected invisible messages broadcast through the open air with the use of captured lightning.
The Tau'ri had strange metrics for measuring miracles.
Television was nothing, if not miraculous. She'd spent countless hours studying the world of the Tau'ri through the television, doing her able best to parse the fact from fiction. The "News" was apparently what Samantha Carter felt would best educate her on the realities of the First World, but she found the monotone man sitting at a desk and droning endlessly to be soul crushingly dull. Every time she'd tried to force herself to sit through an entire hour of it she'd invariably wandered to another program due to how utterly incomprehensible she found his references to be.
She'd started compiling lists of questions that came to her as she was watching the Tau'ri programs, scribbling on page after page as she watched. The Larry Fowler show had filled several notebooks by itself, looking more like the ravings of a madwoman when she was done than the coherent thoughts of an educated priestess of the Lord Warden.
She channel "surfed" for a good half-hour before settling on the program documenting the life of the Tau'ri head of state. She knew it was common practice for leaders to provide their people with a narrative upon which to judge their great works, but President Bartlett had taken the curious route of showing his flaws in addition to his successes. He'd even told the story of his opposition in a largely measured way, considering that it was propaganda. She hoped that when her application for amnesty finally reached the desk of the President, he would be as measured with her as he'd been in the other aspects of ruling the Tau'ri.
The drama of it was fixating - the parable told in this chapter of the Tau'ri leader's life was regarding a man who'd committed horrible violence to slay evil men, and the leaders choice to let him die or reduce his sentence because they were slaying a man. It was breathtaking to watch the head of state agonize over the death of a single prisoner. She watched transfixed as the man consulted with religious leaders over the Sabbath Day to find answers and prayed for forgiveness upon ending a single man's life. Truly, President Bartlett was a worthy and gods-fearing man.
The program was over all to soon, switching to seemingly endless morality play of Law and Order. The Tau'ri's choices of morality plays were odd, crimes she wouldn't have even considered worth mention apparently could earn one a lifetime in prison. Honestly, it was a father's duty to beat one's children if they were disobedient. Killing a child in one's enthusiasm was shameful but hardly the sort of thing to merit a lifetime of incarceration. Aisha ignored the program's start and walked over to the closet, pulling out the cardboard box she knew was within it.
The previous occupants of the house had left a pile of boxes marked "Hook' Lives Forever!" and "Fun Times with Chairforce" containing a curious array ways to pass the time. Most of them were the black, plastic squares on which the Tau'ri kept spools of magnetic tape to project images on the screen of a television, but there were a couple of publications like the ones in her washroom. What precisely one did with the dice and the red cups had not yet revealed itself to her.
She'd been watching one of these tapes every day for the past several days and they had yet to disappoint. The tales of the Nakatomi Building Siege, the Ghost Busters, and the love between Maverick and Goose had already been copied whole cloth into her collected parables of the First World.
She pulled a plastic square out of an unmarked sleeve and sounded out the title phonetically, trying to make sense of it "The Taming of Lara, Staring Lara Romany." The box gave her little insight into the films contents, so she decided to just start the film and see if it merited her time.
The film was unlike anything she'd ever seen. Aisha sat, transfixed as she watched the credits roll past proclaiming the film to be a Silverlight Pictures Production made by Arturo Genosa before she was met with a stream of images she'd never even imagined. She'd seen copulation before – all priestesses watched their Lord take the ones before they joined the collective – but her experience of human copulation had been largely conceptual. This was not like any conception she'd seen or imagined.
She felt heat rushing through her body that wasn't entirely limited to embarrassment as she sat, wide eyed, watching human forms entwined in ecstasy. Her heart rushed as she made eye contact with the almost impossibly beautiful Lara Romany, urges she'd suppressed for most of her adult life suddenly coming to the forefront. Was this how mating was conducted on the First World? She tired to imagine the Tau'ri she'd met thus far electing to put themselves in a position of similarly depraved abandon and couldn't quite visualize anyone in the specific role that Romany was choosing to place herself in.
She almost jumped out of her skin when her doorbell rang, yet another Tau'ri custom to which she was only starting to understand. On Nekheb one would just enter the home of another, the idea that guests would be unwelcome or require announcement was entirely alien to her. She walked out of the living room and into the entryway, standing on tiptoe to look through the peephole on the door.
Aisha eagerly opened the door and allowed her guest to enter, thrilled beyond measure to be entertaining so august a personage. She bowed her head deferentially to the Jaffa as he entered, "Welcome, chose warrior of the Lord Warden. You humble me with your presence."
The Jaffa's eye twitched, contempt etched into every line of his stoic face. "I serve no god. I pray to no god. The Lord Warden has no claim to me."
"Nor would he ask for it." Aisha smiled brightly, keeping her eyes down to avoid making inappropriate eye contact with the Jaffa. "But men who do right and righteous acts are in service to the Lord Warden's aims, and he has addressed you - The Shol'va - as his equal."
The Jaffa grunted once but did not walk through the door. "I have been instructed to see to your comfort, puppet of the False Gods but do not mistake us for friends. You had a specific purpose in brining me here, what is it?"
Aisha opened her mouth to ask the question that had been at the forefront of her mind when she'd requested the Jaffa's presence when she realized that in her haste to greet the Jaffa, she had not turned off the film. She was quite certain that her entire body was blushing as she tried to stutter out an explanation for the pained noises of excitement coming from her living room as she Jaffa rose a single brow.
The Priestess wished she could have just melted through the floor as she said "Sorry… just… excuse me a moment!" and bolted from the door back into her living room to stop the film and turn off the television. She ejected the video and turned around to find the massive Jaffa in her living room. "I… I was doing research."
"Indeed." Replied the Jaffa, taking the black rectangle from Aisha and idly looking at the cover. "I presume that this research was not why you requested my presence."
"Not that specific research." Aisha replied, feeling naked in a way she'd seldom felt. "I was hoping to get your advise on what I should be doing to educate myself in the customs of the First World. They trust you, they let you walk on their world."
"They do neither. Nor should they." Teal'c replied. "I am escorted at all times."
"But you have pledged yourself to them?" Aisha blinked. "Can you not walk the streets as one of them?"
"No." Teal'c replied, putting the plastic square down on the armrest of the couch. "And I would not consult the films of the Tau'ri as literal truth. The Tau'ri are people without gods. They invent tales to fill the void left by their absence."
"Are they like that?" Aisha pointed to the square abandoned by Teal'c. "Is there truly a Lara Romany out there?"
"I think that very few true things are learned from Television, especially from the things that exist." The Jaffa pursed his lips. "But there are stories worth learning. Far more valuable stories than the one on this tape."
Aisha didn't correct the Jaffa given that this was the most positive interaction they'd had thus far. Clearly, he hadn't been watching long enough if looking at Lara Romany's body hadn't registered as information worth having. "I have others, if you'd care to show me one worthier of my time?"
The Jaffa grunted, going through the cardboard box and separating out the plastic squares from one another. She wasn't entirely sure what his system for sorting them was, but quite a few ended up on the same plie as Lara's with the same dismissive snort. The man's mouth split into a wide grin as he pulled out three plastic squares from the box, "These will do."
He put the first of the tapes into the player and sat down on the sofa, indicating for Aisha to sit next to him. Aisha curled up with her feet beneath her as a text scroll sped past faster than she could comfortably read it.
Episode IV
A NEW HOPE