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11/07/2005: "Nano Day 3"

Day 3 happened on... Thursday? Friday? I can't remember. It was Thursday or Friday... I want to say Friday, since Thursday I think I got mucho distracted messing around with the archives for SDB and the Rawhide-Fic list. This day finished off Chapter 2, falling short of daily word goals again.

Chapter 2 is pretty talky, as it gets all of the reactions for the ending of chapter one, as well as sets up/foreshadows a lot of things for the rest of the story. Poor McKay is coming off rather snarky in the beginning of this, and I really don't mean that... he's going to be a chief character, (next to Sheppard), but Teyla seems to be taking front and center right now. Probably just all the political niceties. Will probably have to go back and tweak a lot of that so John and Rodney don't seem to be at each other's throats so much. (Story is suppose to take place after "Aurora", not directly after "Trinity"... hrm...)

Daily Word Count: 1298

Barclay nodded his greeting to the rest of the team. Rodney crossed his arms, choosing to remain silent for now on the slight. Sure, they didn’t have a giant ancient relic devoted to them, but they weren’t chopped liver.

“I must rejoin Torn and Alech. We got distracted from our hunt.”

“I understand,” Barclay tipped his head slightly, and Naick quietly slipped out of the house. The elder shuffled motioned to his visitors to follow him down a different hallway than that he had emerged from. “Come, I think you’ll find the kitchen far more pleasant, and I can make us some tea as we talk.”

Grateful, the team followed him through the darkened hall, to emerge in the back of the structure. The kitchen was not an overtly huge room, but it wasn’t claustrophobic either. A table large enough to seat at least six people sat in one corner, with two long carved benches instead of chairs. A black stove that resembled a dutch oven sat on the opposite end of the room with a large bronze-colored kettle sitting atop one of the burners. Windows lined the walls with their shutters open so that they let the daylight in.

“Go ahead and take a seat, I was heating the water when Naick came in anyway,” he shooed Teyla off, who had stepped forward to help.

Rodney relaxed unconsciously, not realizing how much the stifling, closed-in dark entrance had bothered him until they stepped back into a more open area. He used to not mind small uncomfortable spaces, but perhaps living in Atlantis for over a year had made him more accustomed to the wide open spaces. He took his time making his way to the table, examining the sparse decorations lining the kitchen. Several utensils were tacked up to the wall, such as pots and pans. A few engraved stone pieces decorated the wall, as well as some clay-fired slabs that had what looked like etchings made by children. Catching Sheppard’s raised brow he picked up his pace and sat down with the rest of his team, but found his gaze wandering around the walls again. Something odd caught his eye, but he was distracted as the Elder began to speak.

“You’ll have to forgive my people Colonel Sheppard,” Barclay gathered a few mugs from the wall and began filling them with tea leaves. “We’ve never gotten many visitors through the Stargate, and well, your arrival does coincide with a dark time for our people.”

“Dark times?” Sheppard questioned.

“Yes. In the past six months, flying crafts like in the legends of long ago have come here, and as they pass overhead, those below it disappear, as if they were sucked up by the ships themselves.”

“Wraith,” McKay mouthed.

“Duh,” Sheppard mimed back and lightly smacked his forehead. Not garnering any action, he glanced over to the other two members of his team, who had twin expressions of surprise.

“You say they have appeared in the past few months,” Teyla started, dipping her head in thanks as Barclay set a steaming mug of tea in front of her. “How long has it been since they last appeared?”

Barclay smiled sadly. “Since the time of the Schafer.”

“Wait, wait,” McKay interrupted, “wasn’t that like ten thousand years ago or something? The Wraith are just appearing now?”

Sheppard rolled his eyes as Teyla gave the physicist an exasperated look. Leave it to McKay to cut to the chase, diplomacy be damned.

“The Wraith?” Barclay frowned as he distributed the rest of the mugs, before taking a seat opposite to Sheppard. “I do not know of creatures by that name… we have always known them as the Deimos.”

“The Deimos?” Teyla frowned.

“Yes,” Barclay took a sip of his tea, a far away look entering his eyes. “Many of us believed them to be only legends. Demons from long ago, forever banished from our planet.”

“Banished?” Sheppard’s eyebrows rose at that. “Like as in, totally gone?”

“Yes, the Deimos were an evil breed of creatures that plagued our planet. When they first appeared, all it seemed they wanted was destruction. They reduced the great capital of Daphnis to ruins within days. Then they began abducting our people. Our ancestors fled to the wilderness in order to hide, but even there they were not completely safe.”

“They still found them.” It wasn’t a question, more of a statement. Barclay met Sheppard’s eyes and nodded.

“Yes, but they were constantly on the move, so it was not easy for the Deimos. That made them angry, as you would suspect,” Barclay chuckled softly. “Legend says that the trees of the old forest surrounding the city protected the ancestors. The Deimos’s ships could not find them through the foliage.”

“Yeah, we’ve seen that in some places,” Sheppard thought back to the planet where they had first met Ronon, and had briefly found Ford. It was probably more due to the radiation that McKay had been ranting about than the trees, but that was too complicated to go into right now.

The older man quirked up one side of his mouth into a half smile at that. “The Deimos had to do most of their searching on foot, so it was harder for them, but not impossible. Our ancestors were living in fear, always on the move, until…”

“Until what?” Teyla asked. She looked almost spell-bound by the story, and John couldn’t help but smile at that. It was hard to see Teyla as anything but the tough-as-nails fighter that she was sometimes, except for small occasions such as these.

“Until Shafer appeared,” Barclay’s eyes lit up as he got into full story telling mode. “They say he was from the great city of Atlantis—”

Ronon frowned slightly. Teyla pursed her lips in concern. McKay’s attention snapped back to the storyteller, his eyes having started wandering the walls again. Sheppard’s expression remained carefully neutral, but his eyes betrayed his surprise.

Barclay didn’t seem to notice their reaction, and continued with his story, “—and he had knowledge and weapons beyond anything our people had seen. He taught them how to fight, how to hide, and how to outwit the Deimos. He gave them hope.”

“What happened then?” Ronon rumbled from the end of the table. Teyla raised an eyebrow at her usually silent team mate, who merely shrugged a shoulder in response.

“There are several versions of the story. Some say that the Deimos had taken the woman that Shafer had fallen in love with, others say that they had killed his companion and sent him into such a rage he could not let them live. In any way it is told, he led an attack on the main ship of the Deimos, and fought each of them off single-handedly. In the end, not a single Deiman lived, and our people were free.”

“Sounds like a regular Superman, doesn’t he?” Rodney commented sarcastically, earning him a kick under the table. “Ow! What was that for?”

Sheppard shrugged innocently, before turning back to Barclay. “What happened to this guy?”

“They say he returned to Atlantis. The statue was built in his honor a generation later, to welcome him upon his return.”

“Why exactly is it that all of you are so convinced this guy is going to return?” McKay shot John a dirty look.

“Because he told us so.”

“Did he now?” Sheppard ignored McKay.

“Yes, he told us that when our people were in trouble again, he would return to help.”

“And you don’t think he could’ve, I don’t know, lied?” McKay challenged.

“Well,” Barclay met the challenging stare without flinching, “as you can see—” he motioned to Sheppard, “he didn’t.”

Well, John thought as he stared into his mug of tea. Crap.