Disclaimer: 'Stargate' and 'Harry Potter' both belong to their respective creators, so I don't own them; I'm just borrowing them for the immediate moment in time and space
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Truth and Revelations
"Oh my God..." Lupin said, staring in shock at where Mitchell's arm had just passed through a solid object. "Are... are we...?"
"Dead?" Mitchell finished, shaking his head as his gaze shifted between his arm, the mirror he'd just passed through, and the device that had apparently done this to them. "Not really buying that, particularly not when Tonks there's still breathing with a pulse; my best guess is... hold on, I read something about this happening before..."
"Read about what; something that... disintegrates people?" Lupin protested, waving his hand at the device and the area around him. "Look at us; we pass through solid objects, there's not even piles of ash on the floor where we were standing, and-"
"Look, Lupin, I get that you're freaking out here, but think about it; why would something designed to kill people like that project writing at the same time?" Mitchell cut in, indicating the illuminated orange text above the device. "There's no way something used to show us that could be designed to kill us at the same time; the Ancients had their issues, but designing something that does that is just way too extreme..."
"Hold on; the Ancients?" Lupin interjected, shaking his head as though making sure he hadn't missed something. "What have they got to do with this?"
"Oh, that's Ancient in front of us; didn't I mention that?" Mitchell asked, looking back at the werewolf in slight surprise.
"Ah... right," Lupin said, nodding in uncertain understanding as he studied the writing in question before he looked back at Mitchell. "Can you...?"
"Read it?" Mitchell finished, shaking his head. "No dice, sorry; Jackson's the resident recognised genius when it comes to this language, and if this is anything like what I think it is, than we're..."
He paused mid-sentence and clicked his fingers, a broad grin spreading across his face at the realisation. "Of course; the crystal skull!"
"The what?" Lupin asked in confusion.
"Oh, sorry; you haven't read that one yet, have you?" Mitchell asked, promptly reminding himself not to bring up the issue of Daniel's grandfather's involvement in the mission he was about to describe unless he had to; from what Jackson had said at the time he got the impression that Nicholas Ballard was a touchy subject at best. "Basically, a few years back Jackson discovered a crystal skull which shifted him 'out of phase' with the rest of the world- he was still there, but he was totally invisible and he couldn't actually touch anything-, and the only person who could see him was this old guy who'd been exposed to the same circumstances a couple of decades back; I'm thinkin' that, if it worked then..."
"It should work now?" Lupin finished, nodding in understanding before he shifted his gaze to look at Tonks. "But... well, Tonks..."
"Don't worry, feel free to stay here until I get Jackson; we only need one of us to get his attention," Mitchell said, smiling briefly at Lupin reassuringly before he turned to walk out of the door of the storeroom- taking care to close his eyes as he did it; the concept of seeing the inside of a door wasn't something he was that keen on-, turning around just in time to see Jackson walking towards him-
Only for Jackson- with Sam walking alongside him, Mitchell noted- to walk directly through him without showing any reaction to his presence, continuing on down the corridor while chatting with Sam as though nothing had happened.
Glancing after the archaeologist, Mitchell swallowed.
"Aw, crap," he muttered, shaking his head grimly. "This is not good..."
If Jackson couldn't see him in his current condition- he'd worry about why that was the case later, although his best guess was that the fact that he hadn't been turned intangible by the crystal skull had something to do with it; maybe he wasn't operating on the right 'frequency' for Jackson to see him or something freaky like that-, then they were in serious trouble when it came to figuring out a way out of this current mess...
"Something up, Harry?" Fred asked as Daniel walked into the commissary a couple of hours later, looking curiously at his almost-brother-in-law as the archaeologist sat down at the table beside him.
"Just... puzzled, really," Daniel replied, staring uncertainly at his tray while picking at his food (the food at Hogwarts remained the best group-prepared food he'd ever discovered, but the SGC still had its good days). "I've been looking for Mitchell and Lupin for the last hour, but they don't seem to be anywhere, and even Tonks is missing; Sam's just gone to check the security cameras to see if she can trace where they went that way..."
"Security cameras?" George added, glancing over from where he sat opposite his brother. "Isn't that a bit extreme? I mean-"
"We're dealing with a resurrected Voldemort who has access to alien technology; add in the issue of the Ori and the Trust and there's nothing too extreme to make sure everyone's where they should be," Daniel said, looking grimly over at Fred; he appreciated that the twins had been living in a relatively peaceful world for the last few years, but after he'd spent the last few years fighting the Goa'uld, a degree of paranoia was almost a requirement even without the likes of the Trust and the NID taken into account...
"The Trust?" George asked.
"Oh, they're this organisation we've been dealing with for the last couple of years," Daniel replied. "They used to be part of the NID-"
"That group that tried to use technology from a race you'd rescued when they didn't want to share it with you?" Fred asked.
"Yeah, that's right," Daniel confirmed. "Back when we began, they spent most of their time trying to take control of the Stargate program, reasoning that we should take any technology we could find out there regardless of whether anyone else might need it- they once used a second Stargate to steal a device capable of controlling the weather from a planet we'd visited-, as well as being backed by a committee of various business conglomerates interested in exploiting alien technology for financial gain. We managed to shut them down after we discovered information about the Committee's influence on NID protocols with some assistance from Senator Kinsey- even if none of us were exactly happy about working with him-, but the remaining renegades went underground as the Trust, resorting to such methods as creating a Goa'uld/human hybrid to try and gain access to Goa'uld genetic knowledge-"
"Genetic knowledge?" George asked in confusion.
"All Goa'uld are born with access to at least some of the knowledge of their 'parent'- Goa'uld breeding's a complicated process that's not really relevant right now-, but the conception of a human child when both parents are Goa'uld hosts allows the child to gain access to all knowledge of the Goa'uld who gave birth to them; theoretically, such a child would have knowledge even regular Goa'uld wouldn't know, which would make control of such a kid a valuable resource for the Goa'uld," Daniel elaborated, before he continued his original story. "Anyway, the Trust eventually managed to gain control of a Goa'uld ship and tried to use it to attack Goa'uld-controlled worlds with the aid of a symbiote poison, but the Trust agents that travelled offworld were taken over by Goa'uld symbiotes, who brought further symbiotes back to Earth and were able to take control of the organisation themselves. These days the organisation's under the control of Ba'al, the last remaining System Lord-"
"Hold on; wasn't Ba'al the guy responsible for that whole mess with Teal'c being kidnapped recently?" Fred asked, clicking his fingers as the memory hit him. "I think I remember hearing his name at one point, but what with Landry keeping us back-"
"He felt that you weren't exactly ready to be trusted with a politically sensitive mission like that given how recently you got involved in this whole mess; it's nothing personal," Daniel said, shaking his head slightly at the twins before he turned back to the current story. "The point is that we don't exactly have a complete guarantee of safety even here; we've been keeping information about your presence relatively secret, but it's not impossible to assume that they could have been kidnapped..."
"Kidnapped?" a voice said, prompting the twins and Daniel to turn and look at the shocked form of Hermione Granger, looking between her old friends in slight shock. "Who's been kidnapped?"
"Possibly nobody; Lupin, Tonks and Colonel Mitchell aren't anywhere on-base, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they've been kidnapped by anybody, Harry's just going over all the possibilities..." Fred said, trying to smile reassuringly at Hermione.
"Actually," Sam's voice said, the astrophysicist's voice cutting into the conversation as she walked over to join the group, her expression slightly uncertain, "I'm not certain what it means."
"Pardon?" Hermione asked, looking at the other woman in confusion.
"I just finished tracking their movements on the security camera footage after we noticed that they were missing," Sam explained. "According to the recordings, Mitchell took Lupin and Tonks to check out our storeroom for some of the alien technology we've salvaged and just don't know what to actually do with, but when Tonks came in contact with something in there it triggered a flash of some sort-"
"The Quantum Mirror?" Daniel asked urgently.
"No, it wasn't the mirror," Sam answered, shaking her head reassuringly at Daniel before her expression settled onto a more concerned gaze. "That's actually what worries me; I don't know what the device they activated does, apart from the fact that we found it at Glastonbury."
"Oh," Daniel said, his eyes widening in understanding. "You're thinking that they activated something that Merlin-"
"MERLIN?!" Fred, George and Hermione yelled out practically simultaneously, spinning around to stare incredulously at Daniel at his last words.
"What does Merlin have to do with anything here?" Hermione asked, looking at Daniel in confusion. "I thought you said that you only told them about who you were when Voldemort came back-"
"I did," Daniel replied, unable to restrain a slight smile of anticipation as he looked at Hermione, wondering how she'd react to the latest news he was about to tell her, the concern over Mitchelll and Lupin briefly pushed aside in favour of the anticipation of her response. "However, we discovered an Ancient treasure-trove- 'Ancient' in the sense of the race who had created the Stargates rather than just being old-, which included, among other things, a tablet that revealed that the person who left the treasure there was Myrrdin, an Ancient who returned to Earth from Atlantis... Myrrdin also being known to us now as Merlin."
The part of Daniel Jackson that would always be Harry Potter first and foremost couldn't help but feel a certain satisfaction at the sight of Hermione, Fred and George being simultaneously silenced by the news he'd just revealed; after so long with Hermione being the one to leave him feeling confused with the various random trivial knowledge she was able to display, or the twins leaving the entire school stunned with their latest prank, silencing all three of them simultaneously was no small task, no matter how long it lasted.
"Merlin... was an alien?!" Hermione said at last, staring at Daniel as though trying to decide if he was making a joke or trying to give her a meltdown.
"Well, in the sense that he wasn't human, yes; what evidence we've discovered suggests that the Ancients originally came from another galaxy before they settled on Earth, but biologically and physically they were essentially just as human as we are..." Daniel said, before he waved a hand dismissively as he turned back to look at Sam even as he made a note to spare some time to talk to Hermione about the implications of Merlin's origin when they'd found their missing teammates. "Getting back to the current issue, what did they actually touch?"
"Great..." Tonks muttered, rolling her eyes as she lay slumped against the wall in a rarely-used room that Lupin and Mitchell had dragged her into- even if they couldn't actually be hurt in this state, neither of them wanted to have to deal with people walking through them all the time-, looking at her husband and her new friend as she processed what she'd just learnt. "So, in other words, we've been rendered totally invisible and intangible to everyone around us, and nobody has any reason to assume that we're anything other than dead?"
"Essentially, yes," Lupin replied, nodding grimly at her. "Believe me, I wish we had better news..."
"Hey, look on the bright side; it can't get worse," Mitchell said with a brief shrug.
"In what way?" Tonks asked, looking pointedly over at him.
"Well, in case you hadn't noticed, we don't have any food in this new dimension," Mitchell pointed out, waving a hand at their surrounds and even passing it through the wall. "Even without thinking about the other bodily issues we've got to cope with right now, we've got some serious problems if we're here too long..."
"Oh no..." Lupin whispered, his eyes widening in shock as he suddenly realised something.
"What?" Mitchell asked, looking curiously over at his new friend.
"It's the full moon tonight," Lupin said, his face ashen as he looked at the other two.
"Yeah, so-?" Mitchell began, only for his eyes to widen in understanding. "Oh crap... you're a werewolf, right?"
"Exactly," Lupin confirmed, his expression becoming grimmer as he spoke. "And given that none of us have wands- or, looking at you, any other kind of weapon- on us at this time, if I should transform at this stage..."
"It won't come to that," Mitchell said resolutely, hoping that he was being accurate in his statement; as much as he might have faith in Jackson and the rest of SG-1, if nobody could even see them this might take longer than they had...
Hopefully this can't get worse, Mitchell amended, deciding not to voice the statement himself; if the universe could leave him trapped in another dimension with a werewolf who was about to transform that night the first time he said things couldn't get worse, he didn't want to tempt it to try and prove him wrong again.
An hour later, having studied the surveillance tapes of the storeroom and determined what device had been activated prior to Mitchell, Lupin and Tonk's sudden disappearance, the group was standing around the device after it had been moved to the lab and hooked up to a power source- how it had activated in the storeroom nobody knew yet, but if they were going to solve this problem-, all of them going over the information they'd gathered about what had happened to their teammates in the storeroom.
"So, what have we got?" Landry asked as he looked pointedly between Lee and Hermione as they examined the device; as the currently-available best experts on science and magic, they'd been put in charge of the research into the device to try and determine what it had actually done.
"Well..." Lee said, shrugging uncertainly as he looked at the general. "We know that Ms. Tonks touched the device... we know that the device does not give off any typical energy signatures emitted by Ancient transporter technology... that leads us to the conclusion that they disappeared without leaving the room."
"How's that possible?" Landry asked.
"Well, I did initially think it was miniaturization, but Minister Granger here was able to confirm that there's no trace of anything like that in this situation," Lee said, clearly embarrassed at the reference to the failure of his original idea. "With that in mind, we've branched out to scanning across various bandwidths, but the most unusual thing we've been able to find so far are traces of lepton radiation, and even that isn't really anything-"
"Hold on; lepton radiation?" Daniel interrupted, looking sharply over at Lee from where he'd been studying the device itself; so far he'd made a few notes about the keys on the 'keyboard' being written in the Ancient alphabet, but he still hadn't managed to determine anything specific about it.
"Is that important?" George put in curiously.
"Well, maybe..." Daniel admitted with a thoughtful nod, glancing over at Sam and Lee. "You remember that incident with the crystal skull?"
"The what?" Hermione asked, looking over at Daniel in confusion.
"Oh, we just encountered this crystal skull on another planet that turned Daniel- and later the rest of us- completely invisible and intangible until we managed to make contact with the alien race responsible for it and get them to turn us back to normal..." Sam said, only to trail off as she realised the implications of Daniel bringing that topic up. "Hold on, are you thinking...?"
"That this device does the same thing?" Daniel finished, nodding at her with a confirming smile. "I'd need to double-check a few things in my books, but from what I can remember, one of the objects King Arthur was meant to have brought back from the Celtic underworld after he went on a quest there was a cloak capable of rendering the wearer invisible that doesn't match traditional invisibility cloaks-"
"Hold on; 'traditional invisibility cloaks'?" Landry repeated, looking pointedly at the wizards gathered before him. "As in, there's such a thing as a real invisibility cloak?"
"Yeah, invisibility cloaks exist, but the portrayal of them in what I've read of Merlin doesn't match the cloaks I know; with a traditional cloak you need to use it to cover yourself completely- such as draping it over your head- rather than just wearing it, for one thing," Daniel replied before he continued. "Anyway, with that in mind, it's possible that this device here is the actual source of Merlin's invisibility; medieval historians could well have attributed the powers of the device to a cloak simply because they didn't understand it, and they could have credited its recovery to Arthur out of deference to the king who was in power at the time. Given what we know now, it seems much more likely that it was Merlin who actually built the device-"
"And... why would he do that?" Fred asked curiously, a slight smile on his face as he looked at his old friend and investor in his new element (He and George were actually rather enjoying the sight of Hermione looking to someone else for answers for a change; she might be the Minister of Magic now, but to them she'd always be their almost-sister-in-law who'd tried to encourage them to do better when they didn't want to). "I mean, I get that alien technology is a bit ahead of what muggles have even now, but what could he need from this thing that he couldn't get by using magic?"
"Well... that's the part I can't figure out yet," Daniel admitted with a sigh before he brightened. "But, on the bright side, we know there's the possibility that Mitchell, Lupin and Tonks are still here; we just can't see them. If we assume that they can still see and hear everything going on around them- the way I could when I was in that state-, we might be able to figure out a way to communicate with them."
"How?" Sam asked. "Since we haven't seen them yet, I think it's safe to say that the same rules that applied in that situation aren't going to be valid here; they must be operating on a different dimensional frequency to the one that you were trapped on back then..."
"True, but look at this," Daniel continued, indicating the device with a slight smile. "What does it look like to you at first?"
"A keyboard... without a visual interface?" Lee finished, indicating his laptop to elaborate on his example.
"Exactly," Daniel confirmed, nodding at the scientist. "However, just because we can't see the visual interface..."
"Doesn't mean that they can't..." Sam finished, nodding in understanding.
"Well, it stands to reason that Merlin would want the device to be interactive on both sides of the dimensional interface; it's probably just difficult to access at this end because he didn't want just anybody using it..." Daniel continued, only for his voice to trail off as he saw the keys on the keyboard beginning to move as though someone was typing on it.
"Oh my God..." Hermione whispered, looking at the keyboard with a slight smile. "Is that...?"
"Them?" Daniel finished, nodding in confirmation as he looked slightly upwards. "Lupin, Tonks, Mitchell, if you can hear me, hit... well, let's call this button 'yes' and that one 'no'... are you all OK?"
After a moment's pause, the 'yes' button was apparently tapped.
"Finally, some progress..." Hermione sighed in relief, exchanging relieved if confused smiles with Fred and George; exactly what was going on might still be confusing, but at least they were getting somewhere.
"OK," Daniel continued, "aside from the interactivity, is there anything else unusual on your end... possibly something connected to the device?"
The subsequent confirming tap on the 'yes' button prompted a relieved smile from Daniel; so far, everything seemed to be working out like he'd suspected.
"Is it some sort of display?" he asked, the 'yes' key being pressed once again.
"OK..." he continued, crossing his fingers about the question he was about to ask. "Can you read it?"
The delay between the question and the response was all that he needed to know even before the 'no' button was pressed.
"It's in Ancient, isn't it?" he said, only waiting long enough for the button to be pressed in confirmation before he pulled over a nearby stool and sat down in front of the device, a notebook in his hands as he looked intently at the object before him. "Now, you guys are going to have to help me translate what you see, but since we don't know what pressing buttons randomly will do we're going to have to stick with 'yes' and 'no' and just... do it one letter at a time-"
"One letter at a time?" Hermione said, glancing at her watch. "Harry, we've only got a few hours left before the sun sets-"
"If you have a better idea, I'd like to hear it," Daniel retorted, his attention focused on the Ancient writing in his notebook as he placed it on the table beside the device, his finger pointing at the line of symbols representing the Ancient alphabet.
He might acknowledge Hermione's point, but he couldn't afford to think about that right now; right now, the best chance they had of saving Mitchell, Lupin and Tonks from being attacked by Lupin when he reverted to his werewolf state (Assuming that he did revert, of course; there was a chance that Lupin wouldn't transform in the first place because he wasn't technically in the same dimension as the moon when it rose, but Daniel wasn't inclined to take that chance) was figuring out what this device did...
This whole situation was reminding him of one of the main reasons he'd left the magical world; the wand now up his sleeve might make his daily life easier, but it led him into some remarkably complicated situations...