"It looks like what it's advertised to be," Danial remarked, looking around. "A peaceful little city on the coast. With 13 active cemeteries. Seriously, we saw funerals happening in several of the cemeteries and fresh dug graves in others. I don't remember the last time I drove passed a cemetery and saw a funeral happening."
"We've attended a bit more than that in the last three years." O'Neill stated. "Three years and in one day this town may come close to the death toll of soldiers fighting a war. And I don't see any soldiers, out of uniform or not, attending any of those funerals. Whatever's happening here, no wonder people are leaving now that they can."
"But what kept them from leaving before?" Carter asked. "The people we've seen...Sir, they remind me of humans we've met off world, afraid to say something or look someone in the eye. The desk clerk at the hotel last night did the same thing the guards did, he checked a mirror when we walked in. What shows up in a mirror that you can't see looking directly at something?"
"You're the scientist, Carter, any theories?"
"A cloaking device works by bending light rays around an object. A mirror might catch a distortion that the human eye could miss. But the people would have to know someone or something had a cloaking device and they would have had to have figured out it had a weakness. Why not report anything to the authorities?"
"Unless the local authorities are part of the problem." Daniel speculated. "Like the Mayor and whatever his relationship with Jack's daughter was." O'Neill's hands clenched and then he forced himself to relax.
"Since she just came out of a coma," Jack decided he'd looked around enough, now it was time to ask questions. "She's probably at her mother's house. Carter, you have the address?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Then let's go meet my daughter and start getting some answers."
The answers - as well as more questions - started the moment she opened the door. Question 1, how did a barely 19 year old girl three, four days out of a coma look to be in perfect health? Two, Teal'c no doubt noticed one fact about her immediately, she was a warrior. Three, how did she recognize the fact that Teal'c was something else? Because her eyes went straight to his stomach where Junior was.
"What is that?!" She looked hard at his stomach. "Because it's sure as Hell not natural!"
"That's a first." Daniel muttered. No one had ever noticed Junior. Teal'c's odd behavior and way of speaking and the hat he wore to cover the mark of the First Prime of Apophis, but not Junior.
After a moment of startled silence O'Neill spoke. "I'm Colonel Jack O'Neill."
"My new Dad and you've got a demon with you. Or something that is very much off norm. I'm Faith. Joyce, we've got company!" She called back into the house. "Storytime." A woman in her early forties appeared beside Faith and eyed the four people at her door. "He says he's Jack O'Neill."
"Welcome to Sunnydale. We were told you'd come as soon as you knew she existed, a day after is sooner then we thought but, it does show this matters to you. None of this is Faith's fault, I want that clearly understood before we go any further. If you have a problem, I can point you in the direction of who is responsible, but it's not Faith. Understood?"
"I have no intention of blaming a kid for anything, let alone an accident of birth."
"Once you hear everything that may change, but I'm telling you, she's innocent." She stepped back and motioned them in. "Your silent friend needs explaining as well, because even I can tell he's not normal. Faith, honey, go call everyone."
"Queenie's still visiting her parents, but X can't leave work, he's just started training for his position, X 2.0 is just a call away."
"Go call him, this way please." Joyce led the silent and confused people into her living room. "Can I get anyone anything to drink before we get started?"
"No, that's okay." O'Neill insisted. "Just explain what's going on."
"We'll wait for Xander to get here." She answered, just as a young man walked in and stopped and looked hard at Teal'c's stomach.
"That's nasty." He muttered. "What is that?"
The four visitors looked at each other, not knowing what to make of this and O'Neill cleared his throat. "That's Classified and you're not cleared to know about it."
The young man tilted his head and looked at him for a moment. "Classified? Air force and obviously not human." The young man stated."Oh, this is rich, my inner scifi geek is doing the Snoopy Dance. He's an alien." He told the astonished group. "This explanation's going to be easier than we thought, I have no doubt you could spend the next year telling us about your adventures with aliens. But we don't have time, we have a mission of our own to deal with." They still needed to rescue Fred after all.
"You jumped to that conclusion awfully fast." O'Neill refused to back down, one of these people's friends had tried hacking their systems and failed, but could have found something in, say, the NID's system. Until he had permission to discuss it with them, he wasn't saying anything.
"We'll get back to that later." The young man told him. "Let's start with your most pressing question. Yes, Faith is your daughter, genetically speaking. But four days ago she wasn't. Her DNA was rewritten to make her the biological daughter of Jack O'Neill and Joyce Summers."