He awoke on a hard surface which had made his back sore. As he opened his eyes he saw the same grey walls he'd seen before he'd passed out converging into an equally grey roof. When he sat up a man appeared out of nowhere right in front of him. Bolting for his belongings which had been placed on a table he noticed the man continued to look towards the bed while he circled around him. Whatever the man was saying it was mumbo jumbo to him so he quickly got what he needed and left the room. The corridor outside the room was lined with rooms just like the one he'd come from, only a raised platform and a grey table.
After pacing up and down the corridor without finding any way out he begun to search through the rooms one by one. A long time later he heard the man falling silent and as he put his head back into the room he found no trace of the man, but he still had many rooms left to search.
After what he estimated to be half a revolution he'd run out of rooms to search so he got back to the room he'd awaken in. As he sat down on the raised platform he presumed to be a bed the man once again appeared out of nowhere. This time however he understood that the man was greeting him so he said a few words of greeting back, strangely he didn't understand the words coming out of his mouth, but he knew them to be the right ones.
The rest of the man's long speech was still mostly unintelligible to him, but a few words slipped through into his head. Enough for him to make an escape, when the man vanished he got up and got out into the corridor. There at the end of the corridor was the amber light he sought. He swept his hand across it and a bright light surrounded him.
He felt the surface under his feet change to a much softer texture and his brain recognized the planet as Gamia when the light faded away. It was a world they had planned to terraform, but due to the disease which had struck them they had abandoned the galaxy before that was possible. When they were forced to flee back to Avalon they had begun to spread and place the repositories. Then this world had been chosen as a training ground of sorts.
No, not they, it was a race now long forgotten, not memories of his own people. It was memories of someone else which as floating around in his head. Still he had his mission, his goddess had commanded and he followed. Walking up to the Chappa'ai he placed the dialler and entered the address to return home. When the Astria Porta activated he hurried through it to the other side.
Coming through the wormhole, as his brain identified it as, he saw twelve Jaffa with their staffs pointed at him. As soon as they saw who he was they stepped aside. From behind the Jaffa their goddess climbed the four steps up the side of the platform. "Finally one returns from the trials."
As he opened his mouth to speak she waved her hand to stop him. "Come with me." Turning around she begun to walk down towards her temple. In the presence of his goddess and with her silencing gesture he dared not speak, yet somewhere in the back of his head he heard a voice shouting for him to lower his staff and shoot the false goddess in the back. But to him she was a true goddess, where did these strange new thoughts come from? It did not really matter to him, he would perform his duty no matter what the voices in his head said, still the voice grew in strength with every passing second.
Still walking in silence they entered the golden pyramid which was her temple. The passageways she led him through took them through a hidden door down into the large hall where he had begun the trial the day before. There was something new again, day, it seemed to be the same as a revolution of the fiery orb in the sky but the expression seemed to mean more than that, yet the full meaning eluded him. "Rest, tomorrow you will show another through the trials." She said pointing at the same small room he had slept in before.
Without a seconds hesitation he obeyed and sat down on the floor to do so. There was another thing he did not recognised, seconds, it was both the thing after the first and a measure of time. Sixty of the seconds was a minute, sixty minutes was an hour and twenty four hours was a day his mind told him. With his goddess gone he begun to perform Kelno'reem. For almost two hours he tried to achieve it, with no success. Following an advice given to him by his long dead father he closed his eyes and layed down on the floor. Slowly he heard the voice in the back of his head quieting down along with the rest of his thoughts until only blackness remained.
Through the night his head was filled with colorful and vivid images but when he opened his eyes they begun to fade from his memory. As he sat up he saw his goddess looking at him with anger. "You dare defy your goddess?" She shouted as her first prime pulled him off the ground.
Still staff in hand something in him snapped. He slammed the back end into the other man's face and he heard a satisfying crack when the staff hit its target and another as he drove him into the wall. "You dare defy yo..." Was all the hag could say before an orange bolt hit her in the chest from point blank range.
There he stood, behind him the first prime was slumped against the wall with a crushed skull and in front of him his former goddess, a being he had always thought of as immortal and all knowing, was lying dead at his hand. Yet instead of remorse he felt free, a feeling he had never felt before or even known the concept of, and he liked it.
Snapping him out of his thoughts was the voice of someone shouting to sound the alarm. Looking outside he saw Burdoc shouting from the top of his lungs, something a shot from the staff took care of even if it only hit him in the shoulder. Still someone must have heard it because he could hear the alarm. As he ran towards the stairs he could see all of his old masters storming out of the doorway and into the large room. Seeing only one way to avoid all the plasma bolts the storming Jaffa were raining onto anyone and anything that moved he made a dash for the gateway to the trials.
Running as fast as he could towards the gateway he fired the staff at his attackers. A few steps from the gateway he felt a burning heat against his back and he was pushed head first into the gateway.
Once again a bright light enveloped him and he found himself on the hard bed. The man, a hologram as his brain called it, appeared again with the same speech. But this time he understood it from start to finish.
The man talked about the rise of the Alterran race and how they had split into two, one faction leaving the galaxy but still claiming the name Alterran as their own while the others stayed and called themselves the Ori. Their greatest moments and their failures. Their technology and their way of life. Then he finished with their fall, the creation of the repositories and the task that was now programmed into his mind.
Especially intriguing he found the part when the hologram talked about the Alterra's rise in their new home, small populations in thirty six galaxies. Millions of years later their small numbers and aggressive confrontations with native populations in each galaxy had forced them all to return to Avalon. Following the evacuation to Avalon a plague had decimated the population and once again they fled, this time to three galaxies they had seeded with life but then stayed away from to study the paths their seeds would take without supervision. Yet the man in the hologram and two other Alterra chose to build the repositories and spread them into the galaxy so that the seeded in Avalon would discover and use them to gain the knowledge of those who had come before. Through them the Alterran race would rise again in the event that the three new galaxies became their undoing.
To one of the three galaxies the crown piece of their fleet, Atlantis, had been taken. The other two had been settled by the rest of their fleet. As Atlantis was by far the fastest it had travelled to the one furthest away and had seeded a new gate network which would allow access to all but one of the original galaxies, for fear of letting out the plague again from its assumed origin, while also not allowing direct access to the other two new galaxies to isolate them in case something happened. The other two galaxies were suppose to be seeded in the same way but all contact with the remainder of the fleet was lost and never re-established.
As their number began to dwindle in the city they begun to ascend and the Alterran created a race more advanced than the seeds they had spilled into the galaxy but more primitive than themselves to help with their stewardship of the galaxy. When a terrible enemy once again drove them from their new home to Avalon only a handful of the Alterra lived and later ascended while most of the evacuees were of the new servant race.
Yet before the Alterra begun to fade away expeditions were sent to both of the other galaxies through the gate networks which had been seeded there, but once the wormhole was closed nothing more was heard from them. That was the final nail in the coffin for the Alterran race, soon they were nothing but rumours and legends in the galaxy.
The ones who found and used the repositories all died shortly after exposure. While the other grew content as ascended one Alterran retook physical form and designed these trials to find one suitable to be forcibly evolved, his or her DNA changed to that of an Alterran so the knowledge could be safely downloaded. Now he had completed the trials.
When the hologram vanished he thanked it and knew it would not return unless he summoned it. Now he was set free upon the galaxy to restore his brethren to their full glory yet all he had to start with was the ruined armour on his back, both his staff and the rest of his gear had been lost on his way to the gateway but on the upside the wound on his back had healed enough for him to move without pain again. And then there was the list of all gates and planets in his head, which according to the hologram was at the least nine thousand years old. But it was all he had to work with so he made his way to the gate and put his hand upon the red orb of the clavis, or dialler as it apparently was known to the majority of the population in the galaxy, nine thousand years ago. Working his way through the list in his head he quickly crossed several of them as their diallers didn't respond, sadly Terra's dialler reported the gate missing even if it itself still was there and running on low power.
Picking an address at random from those with Alterran facilities he called its dialler and it replied. Looking through the dialler with his mind he saw several Jaffa patrolling the area around the gate. Picking another he got the same result with plenty more Jaffa around. Going back to the top of the list and starting from there he searched until he found a planet with no living things in the vicinity and no registered wormholes since the last Alterran had left the planet.
In his mind Jobos, as the Alterra had called it, was perfect, so he dialled the gate and stepped through. The only Alterran structure was a small stasis research lab of the more sturdy metal design sitting on a cliff high above the gate. The small sensor package in the dialler had shown him a set of rings but when he tried to activate them they refused to move.
Groaning he looked back at the cliff and the narrow path which hugged the cliff face on its way up to the lab. It was either that or falling down on the lab from above, neither of which he felt like trying, but the narrow path still won and he begun the hike upwards. Apart from a few rocks he sent flying down the cliff the trek to the lab was nice and quiet.
Once he was standing below the emergency hatch leading into the lab he swiped his hand over the dormant crystal but to no surprise the hatch did not move. He forced open the locking mechanism with the small wheel on the side of the hatch and with some force he pushed the hatch up and let it slid to the side to gain entrance to the lab. Inside the only light offered to him was the light coming in from the hatch.
Not surprisingly the internal lights refused to power up, just like the rings far below. So he stepped over to a wall which held the power console and tried to activate it, but to no use. With a curse he begun to search with his hand over the smooth surface above the console until he found the small crack and pushed his nails inside. With some difficulty he managed to remove the lid to reveal the dull orange backside of the drained potentia. If he was to gain access to the rest of the lab and open the window seals he would need power he didn't have.
After that he did a quick check of the room he had access to and found a tiny but much needed device. Essentially it was a neural interface which would update information already in his brain when he interfaced with their technology or the other way around. For example it would provide a much needed update of the gate network database in his head when he interacted with the diallers without him needing to memories it every time he dialled.
When he had emptied the lab he climbed down the hatch and sealed it behind him before he made his way back down to the dialler. Again sorting through the list of Alterran facilities he failed to find a single dialler which detected any energy signatures in the facilities they were installed in.
But when he looked outside the galaxy he did find what he was looking for. Half a dozen facilities of different kinds which all still had power, but he did not have the power to reach them and they did not have the power to reach him.
A quick glance at Atlantis new galaxy showed more activity than he had dared hope for. Atlantis herself was even highly active so the seeded on Terra must have had the power to dial there and according to the dialler they had done so only a few years ago. He was staggered by this as the dialler had no gate in close proximity. Still the gate would have to be there for them to reach Atlantis.