The New and Improved Scoobies

Colonel Jack O'Neill stood on the bridge of the Prometheus, watching the alien starship get bigger in the window. He whistled softly.

"Boy am I glad I'm not the one who has to run around convincing hundreds of people that all they saw was a weather balloon," Jack commented. "How big did you say this thing was?"

"Approximately two-hundred kilometers in length, Sir," Samantha Carter replied. "You could fit the entire city of New York in there."

"I have never before seen a vessel with an appearance such as this," Teal'c contributed.

"It looks like a big bar of soap," Jack said flippantly.

"I want to know why they're not responding to our hails," Colonel Cauldwell commented.

Daniel Jackson said, "We don't know anything about what they're like or how they communicate. Maybe they can't hear us, or maybe they've been trying to hail us and we aren't noticing either."

"Carter, are the Prometheus's engines powerful enough to tow that thing if we can't get them to move by asking nicely?" Jack asked.

Carter blew out a slow breath. "Maybe, Sir. But it'll be a tall order. Are we getting any sensor readings yet?"

"None of our systems are penetrating," the tech said, "and I'm not sure how to interpret what the Asgard system is telling me."

"Let me take a look," Carter said, leaning over the console. "Huh."

"Carter," Jack prodded.

"Sir, even the Asgard sensors can't make heads or tails of what that ship is made of, but I can tell you that there are no artificial gravity distortions or naquada, and I mean none at all," Carter reported. "The only concrete readings are at the very center of the ship, which reads like a Fusion plant."

"Radiation?" Colonel Cauldwell asked.

Carter shook her head. "Nothing you wouldn't get from a routine EVA. Still, I would postulate that whatever these aliens are, they stand up to cosmic radiation a lot better than humans do."

"Life signs?" Jack wanted to know.

"Sorry, Sir. The entire ship reads like a very large, very faint life sign," Carter said.

"Carter, are you tellin' me that thing is alive?" Jack asked.

"I can't say one way or the other, Sir," Carter replied.

The alien ship was now a vast pearly wall, curving away like a strange horizon. The Prometheus pulled alongside, and began a slow orbit of the city-sized ship.

"Still no response to communication attempts, Sir. We're even flashing the running lights."

"Alrighty people," Jack said. "Carter, get started on figuring out if we can tow our guests for parking in the red zone. But if that doesn't pan out, what's our next move?"

"There are no seams," Daniel mused. "How do they get in and out of that thing?"

"Maybe they beam everything in or out," Colonel Cauldwell guessed.

"I would call that unlikely, Colonel," Carter said from the terminal where she was working. "If they had beaming tech, we'd have picked up the subspace signature by now."

"It's a slower than light starship," Daniel said suddenly. "It must have hidden its approach somehow, but if it can only travel at sublight, maybe the crew is still in stasis or something similar."

"If they're capable of building a ship as advanced as that thing looks, how could they not have hyperdrive?" Colonel Cauldwell asked.

"Technological progress isn't a linear monolithic ladder," Daniel said. "A culture's history often has more to do with what technologies they do or don't have, than anything else."

"Helm," Colonel Cauldwell ordered. "Take us down for a landing on the alien hull. See if that provokes a reaction."

Buffy was suddenly awake. She felt very strange, all floaty and with the tingly good feelings like she'd just had an hour-long post-slay bath, only moreso. She way laying on something soft and warm, and there was a somewhat less soft, warm pressure on various parts of her body.

The entire night ran through her mind like a dream, and for a few seconds, that's all it was. She slowly opened her eyes, and saw the other bed 'above' her, and became aware that the weight on her belonged to the naked bodies of her friends. The whole of the night came crashing down on her, and Buffy sat bolt upright with a scream.

"Angel!"

Her shout woke Xander and Willow. Willow blinked her eyes open to find herself half-pinned under a very naked Xander, who was staring at her. Xander blanched and leaped off Willow as though burned. He floated across the space between the two beds and bounced against the other one.

"Oh crap. Crap crap crap crap crap," Xander moaned. "Did we...? We... All three of us... Please tell me this is just a beautiful dream."

A wide-eyed Willow looked between panicked flustered Xander and horror-stricken Buffy. Her gaze strayed down Buffy's body and then down Xander's, and she blushed. Xander reflexively tried to hide his erection. Buffy jumped slightly when Willow put a hand on her shoulder.

"Buffy?" Willow entreated.

"Angel's dead," Buffy said numbly, then she blinked, finally registering the naked Willow next to her, and Xander trying futilely to cover his manhood. "Oh my god, we... I had sex with you!" Buffy looked at Willow. "I had sex with you!"

Willow ducked her head in embarrassment and mumbled, "Yeah, and it was all really nifty and amazing, too."

Xander ducked off the edge of the bed in an acrobatic flip, so only his upper body was visible to the girls. "Okay. Okay. We were all under a spell, right?"

"That was way more than just a spell! Oh god," Buffy fretted, scooching away from Willow and covering her chest with her arms. "This is too much."

Willow looked between her two friends, almost feeling betrayed. "I'm the shy nerdy one. Why am I the only one not freaking out about this? So we were possessed and had a wild kinky threesome. What's so bad about that?"

Xander's heart broke a little at the look Willow gave him, and his usual excuse just didn't hold water anymore. He was practically overflowing with attraction to Willow. Xander forgot all about hiding his erection and crawled over to Willow and gave her a hug.

"You're right, there isn't really much of the bad there," Xander said.

"Of course you would say that," Buffy sighed, and abandoned her impulsive attempt at modesty, flopping back with her arms at her sides. "Well, if I can't freak out about the orgy, that means now I have to think about the other thing. Thanks for that."

"I'm sorry about Angel, Buffy," Willow said softly.

Buffy squeezed her eyes shut. "I'll deal."

Xander jumped against her, and Willow realized she'd put her hand on his manly shaft without realizing it. She snatched her hand back, face flaming, but a moment later she deliberately let her hand return there. Xander jumped again, and then slowly relaxed. Willow allowed herself a little naughty smirk.

"So..." Xander said after a moment.

"So," Willow said.

"So..." Buffy began.

"... We're on a fucking spaceship!" Xander exclaimed.

Buffy winced and propped herself up on her elbow. "I'm more worried about the part where we're not, you know, human anymore."

"How much do you guys remember?" Willow inquired.

"I remember Zach Reon's whole life," Xander admitted. "But it's distant, like, it happened to me, but it happened to me before I was ever Xander."

"Me too," Buffy said. "Like I can suddenly remember all this stuff from before I was Buffy. I remember Lyn Rea-Val's whole life. It's actually really great, but jeez she was a pervert."

"Huh?" Willow questioned.

Buffy gave her a flat look. "Two words: Rape Garden."

"Oh right," Willow chuckled weakly. "Lyn loved those. To be fair, though, it was fairly normal for most people to at least play around in the tamer outer tiers, of those places. It was kind of like going to the beach," Willow reasoned.

Buffy got a distant look in her eye and shuddered, but Willow couldn't tell if it was disgust or arousal. Probably a bit of both. Lyn's personality had been a lot like Buffy's, but she'd been born into the Fae and never knew anything else. Reconciling her upbringing with Buffy's wasn't going to be a smooth process.

"Ah, what about you Willow? How much of Eelesia's life do you remember?" Xander diverted.

"Same as you guys," Willow said, probing the back of her mind. "My Dreamlink is still there, and we're still instinctively using our skeletal magnetics to simulate weight..." Willow concentrated, and made her Utility Cloud smooth out her hair, clean it, and twine it into a braid. "Yeah, I can still do that, too."

"Why didn't we change back when the spell broke?" Xander wondered, focusing inward as well.

"I don't know," Willow said. "Oh, but I bet Giles will know something."

"I dunno Wills. Do we wanna tell the Watcher-man we're not human anymore?" Xander asked.

"Hey, guys," Buffy interrupted. She had her eyes closed. "I found those morph setting things. It's really easy to use. I think we should all use them to adjust the way we look until we can pass for our normal selves."

"Ooh, good thinking Buffy," Willow said, pulling out of Xander's embrace and settling in a meditative pose.

"Hey, um..." Buffy opened her eyes and looked between her two friends. "Is it just me or is it weird how not-weird it is that we're all naked? Or that Xander's sporting the erection of god himself? And that it seems perfectly normal?"

"It was normal, for our, um, I guess 'Others'," Willow said. "Remember? Fae guys stay hard even when they're not turned on, probably 'cause of the whole hundred-percent-efficient digestion thing, so it's not like they'd ever need to get it down."

Buffy stared off into space for a second, and blushed faintly. "Oh, right. Lyn thought it was because limp cocks were ugly."

"Holy crap on a cracker!" Xander suddenly yelped, his eyes flying open. "Look in your morph settings, in the part here, over here." Xander sent what could best be described as a menu-path over the Dreamlink.

"We can become boys?" Willow squeaked. "And Xander can become a girl if he wants..."

"Ah, all in favor of forgetting we found that option?" Buffy asked quickly.

Willow and Xander both raised a hand.

"And moving on," Willow said, settling back into her meditative pose.

The three of them all spent nearly an hour tweaking their morph settings, seeing the results in a mental mirror. Willow was the last to finish. She confirmed her choices and was given a very concrete sense that her morph settings would reach their new targets in about six hours.

"So," Xander said. "What do we do now?"

"We've been ringin' the doorbell for an hour. Nobody's answering," Jack reported to the video screen. "Ma'am," he added belatedly.

Doctor Elizabeth Weir frowned in consideration. "Do you think it's safe to attempt to tow the ship into a higher orbit?"

"Carter's still running the numbers, but its not looking good," Jack said.

"Doctor," cut in the annoying tones of Richard Woolsey, "I am authorized to make a judgement call in this matter. A public uproar must be avoided. If towing the alien ship to a less conspicuous location is not doable, your orders are to board the alien ship by any means necessary and attempt to move the ship under its own power."

Jack groaned.

While they waited for their bodies to return to their normal appearances, Willow was delving into the Eliezera's operating system, and Xander had sat and watched her for about ten minutes before he'd given into the urge to fly around the gymnasium-sized room in a superman pose. Buffy had gone wandering off, saying she felt like being alone for a bit. Willow was busy, and while she knew Xander cared about her, she also knew he didn't give two shits about Angel.

Buffy flew in a straight line, commanding the walls to melt away whenever they got in her way. Eventually she reached the outer hull and stopped. After a moment, she put a hand against the off-white surface. She knew how from Lyn's memories, so she pushed and made the hull pull her through.

Standing naked on the outside of the Eliezera in hard vacuum was a surreal experience.

In particular, the silence was immense and oppressive, but also oddly soothing. Buffy faced the sun, realizing she could look right at it without pain, and let it warm her. When she looked away she didn't even have spots in her eyes.

Buffy picked a direction randomly and started walking, staring up at the Earth among the stars. Her tears boiled away as they formed, but the vapor was automatically caught by her Utility Cloud and reabsorbed.

Angel was dead. Pointlessly, randomly, idiotically, dead. Dead for no reason at all. Lyn's memories whispered that in reality that was the only kind of death there was, but that didn't really make Buffy feel better. Death could have meaning, Buffy insisted, and Angel's death hadn't.

Buffy couldn't sigh without air to sigh with, but she made the motions.

She'd been walking for an hour and forty-eight minutes, which she was just aware of the moment she thought about it, when her doubly-superhuman eyes spotted an odd grey lump on the pearly horizon. Curious, Buffy lifted up and flew towards it.

They'd nearly lost Teal'c when they first walked out onto hull of the alien ship. One step off the loading ramp and his magnetic boots had launched Teal'c straight up. Fortunately, the Prometheus' loading ramp is under-slung, so instead of floating off into space, Teal'c just landed upside-down on the underside of the Prometheus like a badass.

Jack couldn't make a watch-that-last-step joke. He just couldn't. Friggin' badass jaffa.

"It would appear my magnetic boots are malfunctioning, O'Neill," Teal'c intoned.

So, Carter did her stuff, and ended up having to nearly invent an entirely new magnetic boot design on the spot.

"Some of the material the alien hull is made of appears to be superconductive," Carter explained. "Superconductors are known to have unique properties when interacting with magnetic fields. I should be able to compensate..."

Once they got that issue sorted out, it was simple enough. Teal'c got the laser drill set up, and Carter got it working. A searing point of light began tracing a circle on the alien hull.

"Uh, guys," Daniel said. "Shouldn't that thing have at least made a groove by now?"

"Carter," Jack complained.

"I'm not sure, Sir," Carter responded, and switched com channels. "Prometheus, this is Carter. Can you scan the hull where we're attempting to cut through, with the Asgard sensors?"

Carter listened, then summarized for SG-1. "Whatever the hull's made of, it'seating most of the laser energy, and reflecting the rest."

"Oh for cryin' out loud," Jack complained.

"This is actually fascinating, Sir," Carter enthused. "Despite the lack of subspace technology, in other ways this ship seems to be far more advanced than anything we've encountered before. If we can study and reverse-engineer this hull material..."

Carter went into technobabble mode, and Jack listened with half an ear while he tried to decide what to do next.

"Jack?" Daniel interrupted several moments later, sounding faint.

"Yes, Daniel?" Jack said.

"I think I might be hallucinating," Daniel said faintly, pointing to Jack's left.

Jack, Carter, and Teal'c turned their bulky space-suits towards where Daniel was pointing, and Jack's jaw dropped. Strolling towards them, as though they weren't in the middle of space on the outside of a spaceship, was an unusually pretty but otherwise normal-looking petite blonde girl with a rich tan. Oh and not only was she not wearing a suit, but there wasn't a stitch on her at all.

The naked girl had an incredulous expression on her face, like they were the ones doing something unbelievably ridiculous. She stared at the Prometheus for several long moments, then she turned to SG-1, threw her arms out, and exclaimed, "Since when does the Air Force have spaceships?"

(AN: If you're wondering, Buffy is touching SG-1's helmets with her Utility Cloud, and that's how they can hear her.)