Chapter 1
Methos:
When Sam stumbles on a particular function in the Antarctic base, she isn’t able to figure out why so many blue dots light up all over the globe on their display, or what the blue dots actually are. Two weeks of research, and Jack realizes there is something… different about the people the dots represent.
For one, they keep attacking him with swords.
At first, he thinks it is just an SG-17 thing, since he sent them to check on the blue dots first, because come on, most people attack them with something, usually sooner than later. It’s practically tradition! But then he takes his team – nope, still swords.
Every single one of these people have them, and wait only till he finishes saying “You were singled out by your genetics” before pulling their swords on him.
And that’s just it – swords, multiple! Every one of them!
He hasn’t felt this unwelcome since the Tollen leader had sniffed his overly-advanced-nose at him and called him a primitive.
Now, Jack thinks of himself as a fairly open-minded kind of guy, but come the fuck on.
Swords!
And he thought Jaffa were stubborn with their staff thing.
This one at least seems to be listening, though Jack can see one hand is already in his coat – and that’s the other thing, every one of them are in coats and all have special places for their fancy swords. Now, Jack can appreciate a well-made holster and camouflage like any military man, but sword sheaths? Really? Maybe they are all members of a secret cult who loves medieval sword fighting?
Jack snorts. Right, he would be so lucky.
Ah, seems like Jonas just struck out also with the Calming-The-Natives speech and oh yes, here comes the sword. Ooh, and a gun. This one is better prepared, it seems.
Fuck Jack’s life, he shouldn’t have to zat people when he is dirt-side.
Jack zats him anyway.
He only has so many shirts in his locker and the last two sword-lovers have shredded his last good ones. Jack isn’t into repeating that. Let Hammond sort it out.
Teal’c picks the guy up like a sack of potatoes and Jack has a moment to congratulate himself again for making the Jaffa part of his team. His back isn’t as young as it used to be.
“Right kids, let’s go home. Dad will have questions.” And is he ever glad this is above his pay grade. It will be an interesting debriefing that’s for sure.
***
“I told you already! My name is Adam Pierson, I am a historical researcher in Paris. I was just visiting a friend of mine, when your thugs jumped me!”
‘Adam’ does, in fact, have all the appropriate identifications, and does, in fact, look like he could be a historical researcher. He definitely gives off enough Daniel-vibes for Jack to believe him, if it wasn’t for the sword. And the gun.
George is wearing his paternal trust-me-I’m-a-good guy face, and Jack wonders how the guy is holding out against that, considering Jack himself always feels reflexively guilty whenever that face is turned on him.
“Now son, we know you aren’t just a researcher, or not only anyway. The blood test we administered show that you have a very strong expression of the ATA gene. Do you know what that is?”
“I am guessing some kind of mutation?” one eyebrow goes up. Jack wonders if George ever wants to bitchslap people the way Jack does.
“Not exactly. But first you need to sign some paperwork.”
‘Adam’, or whatever his name really is, refuses to sign anything. In the end, Jonas is the one who gets through to him with his anthropology speeches. Jack has no idea how, since Jack himself would likely have shot Jonas and asked questions never, but perhaps it helps that Adam had nothing better to do in his holding cell other than listen.
That, and Vala helps.
Jack doesn’t ask how. He just knows she does.
Later, when Adam joins Parkers team, he insists they call him John Smith.
And Jack thinks ‘oh my, wouldn’t wish to lose you.’
At least the G’oauld aren’t likely to select him as a host, lanky as he is.
***
Parker:
He didn’t so much hire Parker, as have her land on his head.
Literally.
Now, some of his favorite people have at one point or another, had encounters with his head in a similar fashion, so he doesn’t hold that against her. What he does, however, hold against her, is that she somehow managed to land on his head, from an air shaft that is supposed to be secured, 27 floors below and inside Cheyenne Mountain, which is most definitely, supposed to be, one of the most impenetrable places, on earth.
Later, when she is secured – at least he hopes she is secured, she doesn't look too worried to be handcuffed to a chair and that always makes his eyes narrow – he tries an interrogation. In the midst of the weird geekspeak that Jonas keeps encouraging – while Jack tries for intimidation – somehow, she’s managed to evade about 12 security checkpoints, cameras, patrols, infrared, and gods only know how many other measures Hammond has in here. More alarmingly, only 2 more floors and she would have been at the Stargate.
Worse, Jack really isn’t sure he wants to believe what they do get out of her.
She claims it was a dare.
From someone called Amanda.
Apparently, Jack O’Neill – yes with the two L’s, she is sure she has the right one – had somehow pissed off this Amanda, and Parker owed her a favor.
And apparently breaking into the military facility was “No big deal. Don’t fuss so much. I didn’t even take anything. Yet.”
Jack wishes he has more friends owing him favors big enough that breaking into the most secure military facility in America constituted a no-big-deal.
He would love to send the NID a Parker of his own.
The look on Maybourne’s face alone would be worth the paperwork she would cause.
Jonas assures him she is harmless, and mostly just curious, and being a good friend.
Jack wonders, not for the first time, which actual gods-or-ascended-beings he had pissed off that he isn’t allowed to retire yet.
Jonas, of course, thinks she is marvelous, and before he knows it, he is nodding along while Jonas shows her the 700 places she has to sign for the NDA.
Parker is unimpressed with their employment package, and assures him they would never be able to afford Amanda, who seems to be a kind of mentor to her, unless the SGC throws in a MacLeod, whoever that is. But eventually a consensus is reached by bumping up Parker’s pay grade 3 levels by her being an infiltration specialist.
Jack wants to ask for her credentials but considering she just broke into the SGC and only got found because she promised to hit him over the head for Amanda, he really can’t cast stones.
Jack puts her on SG-12, and after she is the only one to come back a week later from a seeming milk-run planet, he doesn’t fight her too hard when she proposes bringing in Hardison and Eliot.
Jack has no idea where or when she convinces Adam/John-who-turns-out-to-be-called-Methos and the reason Amanda sicced Parker on his head, to join her little rag-tag band but he takes on the role of their Daniel so Jack thinks she got the formula down.
Now to figure out how to get her to owe him a favor.
***
Hermione Granger:
Jack doesn’t find her either, she finds him. By practically accosting him, in the Pentagon no less, and interrogating him about the Wraith of all things.
When he looks around to make sure they can’t be overheard, she notices and informs him that she has already cast a privacy ‘ward’ and not to worry about it, then asks him why the hell he has allowed ‘muggles near dementors’ and how in ‘Merlin’s name’ he expects to get the MACUSA to okay this, also it was good thinking to call them aliens and give them a name like Wraith which she supposes was indeed quite clever and good thinking but still!
Jack is confused because he is pretty sure she had been speaking English until a moment ago, except how he has no clue what she is on about.
She clearly sees his confusion, and her face goes from annoyed, to bewildered, to horrified, to chagrined in the span of a few seconds, and he is pretty sure he hears a ‘shit’, before she whips out a stick and aims it at him.
Considering the number of times aliens have whipped out strange looking gizmos that look seemingly harmless, and then turn out to be extremely deadly, Jack does the only sensible thing he can, and throws his briefcase in her face.
This, is clearly the last thing she expects, because it actually manages to hit her, hard enough to daze her and knock her stick out of her hand. He quickly picks it up and aims it at her, hoping he can figure out where the ON button is before she can get her bearing.
She stares at him is surprise, then dismay, then actually huffs at him as if he is being difficult, then sticks her hand out in an eerily reminiscent fashion as Ra, and half a dozen G’oauld of his acquaintance. He can’t see a hand-device but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have tech on her, so he firms his hold on her stick, and good thing too since it starts to vibrate and try to practically leap out of his hand as if being summoned by her like a dog.
He is just about to lose his grip, when Teal’c zats her from behind.
Thank fuck for paranoid Jaffa.
Honestly, the amount of people he has had to zat dirt-side is starting to exceed the ones he has to zat off-world recently, and Jack isn’t exactly happy about this.
Major Davis runs into them just as the girl – Hermione Granger – she had managed to introduced herself during her monologue – drops.
Jack smells some political bullshit as soon as he sees the Major’s alarmed face, because he looks ready to dive to the floor to stop Ms. Grangers’ fall, and Jack knows for a fact that Davis only really cares to sucks up to the important people. Which means this Ms. Granger is ‘Important People’ in Davis’s books.
He isn’t wrong.
Six hours, a meeting with the President, a meeting with the aforementioned MACUSA, a strongly worded ‘no you cannot wipe his memory, that’s been done too many times and we actually need what’s left of him’ by said President and more paperwork than Jack usually has to see in a year later, Jack is read into the other-other major secret of their world, namely ‘Magic is real Scooby.’
He wants to say he is surprised, but he really isn’t.
Because that’s just how his life goes.
They agree on a full exchange of information, and Ms. Granger – who turns out to be a hero of some sort, is a bit miffed at the pounding headache caused by the zatting, but forgives him readily enough though only because she ‘has a potion to take care of it’, and because Danny geektalks at her until she is geektalking back at him at speed, and Jack recognizes one of Danny’s tribe from 10 paces away – well, anyway, she is read into the Stargate program.
Jack would be annoyed but feels a lot more forgiving when he learns that there are spells the Wraith-aka-Dementors hate and which can kill them quite easily.
Down side? You needed ‘wizards and witches’ to ‘cast’ them.
Up side? He just got his hands on some of those.
Jack can see Sam bursting a blood vessel from her skepticism across the room, but ‘how’ isn’t his department so he doesn’t care. Much.
Granger turns Sam’s coffee mug into a kitten, as a demonstration, and Jack basically decides now is a great time to visit the mess hall till the screaming and incredulity stops.
He does think Sheppard’s wary face would be undeserved when he dials up the gate and informs him he is coming through with Danny and ‘some other people’ but… then, maybe not.
That’s okay though, Sheppard’s a lot happier once he finds out why Jack is stepping foot on his Singing-City as Jack thinks of her, even if he is as ‘happy’ as Jack wasn’t about the amount of the non-disclosures.
He’ll get over it. Jack brought him a Wraith-killer after all.
And pudding cups.
Chocolate ones.
He knows his people well after all.
***
Darcy Lewis:
Jack actually has not one blessed clue how Darcy Lewis gets herself into and onto the SG teams.
One day, she just shows up, alongside a slightly chagrined Major Davis – and Jack is seriously itching for a full-on interrogation with the good Major by now – and another geek by the name of Jane Frosty or something like that, which Sam drools so much over, that Jack suddenly finds himself mentally questioning her sexual orientation. Something he had been certain he was well aware of, especially after the ape-planet incident, and the time-loop incident and the other … anyway! He had been sure she was straight. But the way her eyes fill with honest-to-Hammond lust when she sees Frosty, and how quickly she ferrets her away into her lab to ‘show her their readings’, is a bit unseemly, if Jack does say so himself.
Lewis, left abandoned, looks completely comfortable with the way things worked out, as if this happens to her all the time, stargate, aliens, non-disclosure and the like, and leans a little towards Teal’c, saying, “Soooooo… got any coffee or muffins around here somewhere?”
Clearly, she is his kind of people, so he very graciously offers to show her the mess together with Teal’c.
He has been assured that both Frosty-the-Sam-seducer and Lewis have signed all the required paperwork, by Davis who is anal about this.
Davis, also throws in that the President himself has invited Frosty to assist them. He doesn’t elaborate what they are supposed to assist with, or what Frosty and Lewis’s function are, but he does discover that Lewis is more Vala people soon after, when a week later Lewis somehow manages to talk McKay of all people into being nice to everyone.
It doesn’t last, but still.
He isn’t at all convinced that Lewis doesn’t have her own brand of mind-fuckery-magic, no matter what Granger says.
****
Gerald of Rivia:
This last one isn’t his fault, and Jack will swear that in front of the President if asked.
Sheppard sends him Looks, but Jack is adamant that no matter what anyone says, this one is not his fault.
If anything, it is Sam’s fault because she wanted to see what would happen if you allowed Frosty-the-Jane and Granger lose on the stargate.
Thankfully, not their stargate. Just a random one they found on an empty planet, and good thing too because they totally fry it after yet-another-sword-wielding maniac steps out – this one looking a lot like Ronon-when-he-was-still-running, namely in need of a bath, or ten.
They end up getting to know the not-runner, because they have to wait for a shuttle to come pick them up and that takes three days. Ronon actually bonds a little with him, so Jack wasn’t half wrong.
Jack would have liked to not be there, but Danny had demanded to go, claiming it would be ‘historical’ and Jack knows better than to let Danny lose on a planet without Jack there.
He’s made that mistake enough thanks.
Gerald seems like an okay guy, even when the local bird population turns out to be Pteranodon-sized and equally ill-tempered, and he turns wacko.
Their guns and zats do nothing of course, because of course.
Granger’s magic seems to hurt it, but mostly only enough to piss it off.
Though she does manage to transfigure its wings into chicken wings, resulting in the thing crashing practically on top of them, still alive and now pissed.
So of course, their perfectly normal not-runner-through-the-science-experiment stargate guest drinks a potion which turns his eyes alarmingly like Lt. Ford-post-wraithjuice.
Even more alarmingly, it seems to do something similar, because Gerald turns into Rambo-Gerald and cleaves the thing straight in half, despite it being the size of an Apache helicopter.
Granger is fascinated – and not at all alarmed like a normal person would be – and promises Gerald that if he shares some of his ‘magic potion’, she could likely replicate it for him if he needs more of it.
Honestly Jack is just glad the guy is fairly normal afterwards, despite his creepy black eyes.
At least he was smart enough to bring his fishing gear, and Gerald, after getting away from all the geek-inquisitions, was happy to join him.
Though Jack could have done without the stories of Gerald’s own fishing experiences. Fishing should not involve swords!
Or river monsters!
Honestly.