sga_flashfic | The Origin of Atlas John, by Sophonisba [folklore challenge]

saphanibaal.livejournal.com posting in

-title- The Origin of Atlas John
-author- Sophonisba (

saphanibaal)
-warnings- Retelling, sexual references, very tall tales, crossover, periodic overtaking of character voice by narratorial voice (one of the perils of oral transmission), my sense of humor
-characters- Sheppard, SG-1 (variations thereof), Ford, Teyla, Bates, others who may or may not be recognized
-disclaimer- The characters aren't mine. The situations aren't mine. Many turns of phrase have been lifted wholesale and plunked down where they'd be funniest, as has Jack's cap.
-word count- 5648
-summary- Now, I could tell you tales of how they renamed the city for Atlas John, and he decided that the new Atlanteans should become cowhands...

The Origin of Atlas John

They tell a lot of stories around the galaxy, of Atlas John and his folk, of the day the City of the Ancestors rose, of the defeat of the Wraith, and of the era of the cowpunchers that they ushered in on a thousand thousand worlds; and you'll notice that most of them are mighty silent on the questions of where he came from, or what they were doing in our neck of the universe anyway, or anything. But this that I am about to tell you is the sure-as-certain truth, as I had it from my grandmother, and she had it from hers.

One day Brighid was looking around the solar system where she and the rest of her family of Ancestors were camping, and she noticed an Ascended Ancestor, on the very next planet to her family's camp, yet. So she went straight home and told Myrddin.

"An Ascended," Myrddin said. "And on the next planet over, yet."

"Next thing you know, they'll be right on the other side of the planet," said old Bleys.

"It's getting too gorram crowded around here, that's what it's getting," said Myrddin. "Pack up the ship, everyone, we're moving up."

So they packed up the ship, but they weren't but a few parsecs out when Diainn began whining that Cimon had touched Vera, and Cimon indignantly announced that he would do no such thing, and Avon threw another fit, and Ceigweneth Llyr popped her head up and announced that it turned out Niamh had left another little present the last time they were onboard and that the ship was liable to blow up the instant she slowed down unless someone did something about it, and Helena helped Bleys and Myrddin take the infernal device apart by telling the latter exactly what a foolish idea it had been to so much as listen to that kong-mao baggage Niamh, and Brighid was very truly run off her feet trying to keep a lid on everything and her husband notified of when they'd be able to slow down again --

-- all of which meant that they were clear to the Sow's Tail Galaxy before they realized the baby had fallen out somewhere along the way, and no idea of where he'd gone.

"Dion comes of good blood and lucky breeding," Bleys pointed out. "I'm sure he'll land on his feet. One way or another."

"If the chick had not broken the shell, he would have died without ever having been born," Avon agreed, and there wasn't much to say to that. There usually wasn't, with Avon.

Meanwhile, Dion-the-baby had landed on a planet, busted a rock to pieces with his head, and was blinking in startlement. By the time he gathered that he was there and his folks weren't, their train had been wiped out by natural dissipation and an ion storm or two. Some babies would have set up wailing about then, what with being lost and confused and teething like anything, but Dion had kept hold of the combat knife Brighid'd made him and started chewing on it.

Now that particular planet at that particular time was full of cats,
Hundreds of cats,
Thousands of cats,
Millions and billions and trillions of cats,
and one of the most curious of them all was called Nightblack.

So Nightblack went to see what had caused the large thump, and there was Dion, chewing his knifeblade and paying no attention to her. This is an intolerable situation for a cat, so she walked up and rubbed her scent against Dion's foot, and then she walked up and rubbed her scent against Dion's back, and then she walked up and would have rubbed her scent against Dion's combat knife, only he moved it out of the way at the last second.

"Sharp," Dion told her.

"Well," said Nightblack, "and what are you doing here, soft kitten?"

"I'm Dion," said Dion, "and I'm lost."

Nightblack looked at Dion, looked at the barren landscape, and looked back at Dion.

"Well, I've found you," she announced. "Come along, Dyohhhhahhnh."

And so Dion -- or Dyohhhhahhnh, as the cats called him -- was raised by Nightblack and her occasional hunt-partners, who taught him to hunt and to wash himself and to mark his property with his own scent, how to turn and walk between or to turn and land on his feet, who scratched him but good when he was about to make a deadly mistake and who sat back and laughed at him when he made non-deadly ones.

Dyohhhhahhnh thrived on the life. He grew tall enough that kittens used to practice climbing on him, quick enough to catch them when they fell until they'd learned, and clever enough not only to walk between (which some, house-bred, cats never learn) but to teach himself to land on his feet -- he finally realized he had a few too many vertebrae to properly twist around the way a cat does, so he took his combat knife (which he'd chewed down to an edge as thin as the layer of water on all the world), reached around, threaded it between and out, and cut a few of the bones out of his back without nicking the nerve-chord. That's the kind of precision work you'll only see out of Ancestors and wyverns; cats could, right enough, but they don't bother to. Why should they? They're cats.

And as well as an excellent and safe kitten-sitter, who could be trusted not to eat them no matter how hungry he got, he was very popular. He quickly learned to lick all the toms his age, and a lot of the older ones, but none of the really old ones, the ones who'd gone silver or white even when they originally hadn't been. Those toms were twice as clever as they were old and sneakier than all that put together, and whenever you tried to lay a claw or a tooth on one of them, there they weren't. Dyohhhhahhnh treated them with respect and never struck back, even when one of them clawed him just to show who was boss. He got pretty good at nearly dodging them, but he never managed entirely; whenever he tried to dodge one's paw, there it was. They were better singers than he was, too, even though most of the uninterested-in-mating cats said Dyohhhhahhnh was one of the better voices in Grand Yowl. (The interested-in-mating ones said that a little pain with their pleasure was one thing, but being ripped apart was another: improvise!)

And so Dyohhhhahhnh lived a pretty good life, hunting things across worlds and eating green things to make his teeth better -- and occasionally sweet things that grew off the green things, although somehow none of the other cats thought they tasted at all sweet. Nightblack told him it was probably because he'd dropped himself on his head when he was a baby -- whenever the hairs on his head or his face got too long, or one of his claws got too splintered and ragged, both of which seemed to happen now and then, whacking it off with the shadow of his combat knife (he could have used the knife itself, but after the first time he cut part of his nose off and had to hold it in place until it grew back together, Dyohhhhahhnh figured the shadow was good enough, even after he got really good with it. Besides, he hadn't really been able to see what he was doing; and while it didn't matter if his nose grew back crooked on one side, he didn't think much of what his life would be like if he cut his head off and then didn't line his throat up properly with his stomach.), even if most of his choices in companionship were limited and really pretty unsatisfying. Besides, every now and then, Nightblack would come and collect him and tell him that she had something useful for him to do with his long skinny forepaws, saving his elders time and energy.

Every now and then, the worlds of the Milk-road Galaxy being what they were in those days, the cats would run across humans. Mostly, the humans would point and yell at the cats, or even shoot at them. The cats, for their part, would play tricks on the humans, who would generally then run, and yell, and turn interesting colors.

Nightblack was careful to point out that on at least one world, many humans had been brought to treat cats with proper respect: cats had tracked down one of the brain-worms ubiquitous among humans, one who had disguised herself as a lioness-shaped upper-dimensional being and coerced some humans to build her a grand building, and locked her in a stone box before running the building to suit themselves. The humans, eventually concluding that Lady Lioness was in fact Lady Cat, had rapidly understood their proper place in the universe.

Granted, the brain-worms had then declared enmity against all catkind, and they weren't very good eating: they were not only tricky to get out but tasted something like the sour sweet things that grew in yellow or pink segments inside a green or yellowish rind. Dyohhhhahhnh was the only cat who'd even touch them, although he did suggest to some of the others that they make a game of clawing between to paw the brain-worms out and see if they could leave the human alive afterwards. Interestingly enough, this seemed to remind a number of them of their place in the order of things, although their best grasp at it seemed to be falling on their faces when in the presence of a cat and not interfering in its pursuit of its pleasures.

One day, Dyohhhhahhnh was wandering about on a world not unlike other worlds when the large metal ring -- the one that humans, not being cats nor yet wyverns, were stuck using when they wished to travel from one place to another without going the distance -- belched forth some humans. They were wearing different clothing from most of the humans, and they smelled nicer than most of the humans, and one of them had very strange eyes, and so he followed them to their camp and sang yowls in the night outside it. The humans didn't yell, but said things in cautious or interested voices.

And then the next morning, he smelled two of the most interesting smells he'd ever smelled in his life. One was sort of burned and a little sharp and something like the sun beating down on your eyelids, and the other one was sweet and rich and not-quite-bloody, and Dyohhhhahhnh followed the smells right into the humans' camp.

The humans were just putting breakfast away when he strolled in, naked as the day he was born, and sat down by their fire while he tried to work out exactly where the smells were coming from. They didn't point or yell or fall on their faces, but started talking to him.

Now Dyohhhhahhnh had spent a great deal of time learning how to understand the speech of just about anything, but not paid attention to how to speak it himself; and, not wanting to open his mouth and sound like an idiot, he naturally didn't pay their speaking any nevermind, but kept on sniffing. The burnt sharp smell was coming from something in a hot glass thing, and Dyohhhhahhnh knew better than to get his fingers burnt; the sweet blood smell was coming, he eventually worked out, from one of the humans. This one, in addition to the smell of whatever, just seemed to naturally smell better than the two humans closest to him, and so Dyohhhhahhnh walked up to the human with yellow head hairs and reached out to hold its arms out of the way so he could properly smell its mouth.

"I realize it's traditional," said the human with spectacles -- which Dyohhhhahhnh had never seen before, and so had put down as funny-looking eyes -- "but it's not her job... "

The human with the furry cap, by contrast, held an arm in front of Dyohhhhahhnh and made a 'tkh' noise with his tongue.

Dyohhhhahhnh looked at him. This was probably a human tom, and Dyohhhhahhnh figured he could take him. He wasn't even planning to reach for his knife when he really noticed the tom's posture and the silver hair peeking out from under the silly cap, which had left the stripy tail of the animal the fur had come from to hang down the back of the silver-haired tom's neck.

Of course a human's body language was all wrong, but this one was in some ways acting just like One-Ear, the oldest, meanest, and sneakiest of all the old, mean, and sneaky toms Dyohhhhahhnh had ever been clawed by. For that matter, this was the first silver-haired human Dyohhhhahhnh had ever seen who didn't look as if a good wind would blow him right up off the ground.

"Hello, sir," Dyohhhhahhnh said politely, pretending he'd never even noticed the yellow-haired human.

"You're a surprise," said the silver-haired human. "We weren't expecting any other humans on Atlas."

"He might be an Ancient, sir," said the yellow-haired human just as Dyohhhhahhnh said "There aren't."

Dyohhhhahhnh caught a noseful of yellow-hair's breath. "You have been eating something nice," he said.

All the humans relaxed a little. Yellow-hair took a packet out of a pocket, poured several small brightly colored things out into a hand, and held it out to Dyohhhhahhnh.

He dipped his head and inhaled the things. They were a sweet hard paste inside a crisp shell; in fact, they were choc'lat, and they were as big a hit with him as they have been with anyone who's ever tried them. He paid no attention to the human's yelp or quick drying of hand on pants, but when the other humans started chuckling, he brought his head up quickly. "What?"

"I don't think Carter was expecting a grown man to do that," the silver tom snorted.

"I'm not a man!" Dyohhhhahhnh yelped indignantly. "I'm a cat!"

Now the humans laughed in earnest. Dyohhhhahhnh puffed his shoulders up and hissed.

"I'm sorry," said the one with spectacles. "It's just... "

"You're not a cat," said the older man. "You're a man."

"What?" Dyohhhhahhnh huffed at him. "Aren't I naked? Don't I have whiskers under my nose and sing? Don't I carry myself as if I've got enough balls for eight males? I'm a cat."

"All humans are naked and plenty of them have whiskers under their nose before they groom themselves and put their clothes on," said the silver-haired man, greatly amused. "Lots of humans sing -- including some who really, really shouldn't -- and any human who's a half-decent pilot carries himself as if he's got enough balls for eight males, even if he's as female as Carter."

Carter balled up her empty chocolate wrapper and threw it at him.

"If you're really a cat," the man with the fur cap went on, "where's your tail?"

Dyohhhhahhnh blinked. He didn't have a tail, and it had proved most inconvenient when practicing twisting in midair. Maybe he'd lost it in an accident...

"Actually, on the Isle of Man -- " the man with spectacles began.

"Or your retractable claws or short foretoes?" the silver tom went on. "I've never seen a cat with neither tail nor claws nor short foretoes."

"Besides," spectacles put in, "cats can't eat choc'lat."

Dyohhhhahhnh turned himself round one way trying to see where his tail would have come out, and then he turned himself round the other way, and then he sat down and flexed and flexed his foretoes, but his claws never got longer and the more he stared at his foretoes the more he could see that there was nowhere for long claws to go when he wasn't using them.

"Well, shoot," he finally said. "I guess I am a man."

"Is something wrong?" said Nightblack, who had come up to the camp when nobody was looking.

"It seems I'm a man," Dyohhhhahhnh said.

"Well, yes, and?"

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Nightblack looked at him in fond and utter disgust before laughing as mockingly as a cat can laugh, which is pretty mockingly. "I'd thought you knew."

"Thanks a heap," Dyohhhhahhnh muttered. He shifted back to human language. "This is Nightblack, my foster mother, and I'm Dyohhhhahhnh."

"Pleased to meet you; my name's O'Neill. John, your first lesson for dealing with other humans as a man is that you'll be a lot less distracting if you're wearing clothes."

"I shall get you some," the fourth human offered, and disappeared inside one of the tents.

Dyohhhhahhnh -- John -- shrugged. Then he looked more closely at Carter. O'Neill had said she was female, which should mean she was a human queen, which -- no wonder she smelled so nice.

"Your name's Carter," he said thoughtfully.

"...yes. Calamity Sam Carter. No relation."

"I'm called 'John,'" he said carefully, lowering his eyelids.

"I noticed."

"Wanna mate?"

"No, thank you," Carter said, backing away. O'Neill made a sound as if he couldn't decide whether to hiss or laugh hysterically.

"I'm Daniel," the other human by the fire said. "Would you like to have some coffee?"

"Sure," said the newly named John, wondering what coffee was. He sniffed at Daniel, noted that the spectacles were some sort of face clothing rather than bizarre eyegrowths, and smiled at him. "Would you like to have non-mating sex?"

Daniel managed not to laugh at him, which was more than could be said for Carter or Nightblack. "Sorry, I'm taken."

"Taken?" John blinked as he accepted the cup of wonderful-smelling dark liquid from the hot glass thing. "But you're not having sex right now."

Daniel carefully explained the concept while John was discovering that coffee, unlike choc'lat, did not taste as good as it smelled.

"You mean humans can mark other humans mine-don't-touch?" John said, abandoning the rest of his coffee.

"If the other humans agree," Carter said.

John let his jaw fall open and bared his teeth. "I'm going to like being a man."

"I may look in on you from time to time," Nightblack told him.

And so John went back through the Ring with O'Neill and his family to the Mother-earth where all the Ancestors once came from, and learned to wear clothes and fly aircraft and shoot guns, becoming known as Atlas John while living under the name of Sheppard. ("Sheppard" was written over the door of his quarters, and he lived under it.)

But life on the Mother-earth now that the Ancestors had all left (except for a few up in the far rolling north acting as teachers or mounted policemen, and the ones in the chambered Nautilus) was really comparatively boring; there may have been interesting things going on in the back corners, but those were exactly where nobody would let Atlas John go, for fear he'd whip all the interesting out and leave the locals nothing to do. And there wasn't enough aircraft fuel to let him fly anywhere near as much as he wanted, so eventually John wound up asking plaintively "Isn't there somewhere more interesting I could go?"

"I could send you to the Pegasus Galaxy," O'Neill said. "Mysteries, possible death, and we don't know if you'll ever be able to get back."

"Sounds great, sir," said Atlas John, and went off to pack three books, a letter, an image-with-sounds of a game (he flipped a coin to decide whether to bring a game of kicked-and-thrown-large-ball or a game of smitten-and-thrown-small-ball), warm socks, medicine for stomachaches, a wheel-wing-blade aircraft, a music player, popcorn kernels, a sword, a hundred gallons of naphthalene, a saddle, headache medicine, a wallscroll, and his combat knife into a small box. He had to kick it a few times before the darn thing would close, and then he had to carry it to the Ring on his shoulder because it was too heavy for his self-moving cart.

On the way to the Ring, one of the big rattling snakes that the Mother-earth is infested with came rolling down the mountain at him, dripping poison from the fangs on either side of the tail in its mouth. Atlas John stepped out of the way to be sociable-like, and what did that rattler do but pull a wheelie and come right back up the slope after John?

"Oh, come on," Atlas John said. "I'll let you have the first three strikes, seeing as I need to put my box down and all, but..."

Well, the rattling-snake didn't want any more go-ahead than that, and it struck John in the forearm, and in the thigh, and it tried to bite John on the butt, but had to change it to the hand rather than get flattened by the box.

"Now that's just unfriendly," Atlas John said. He made sure his box was set down flat so that even if one of the drum lids was loose, naphthalene wouldn't spill out all through his socks and wheel-wing blades. Then, while the rattling-snake was still gaping at him -- rattling-snakes are dreadful poisonous; one bite'll knock a man out of his head, two bites'll knock him stone dead, and on the third bite he'll be knocked into flinders smaller than the eye can see -- John grabbed the rattling-snake by the tail before it could make a hoop again and snapped it out. Then he cracked the rattling-snake a few times, bouncing its head off the mountainside, and tied a knot in its neck, squeezing all the venom out. (It hit a tree, sizzled through it, and then proceeded to start dissolving the fallen bits of tree. John said "Oops," and hoped nobody'd notice.)

"You ready to behave, now?" Atlas John asked.

The snake nodded, and John loosened the knot so's it could breathe before coiling it round one shoulder, lifting his box back onto his other shoulder, and heading into the mountain caves where O'Neill was. He only had one more detour, and that was when the pretty medic-woman took one look at his snakebites and was on him like tawny on millet, trying to suck the venom out.

"Shucks, ma'am, 'tweren't nothin'," Atlas John said. The medic-woman didn't listen.

"You never do see it coming, do you?" Carter observed, drawn by the commotion.

"Queens go out in the open and yell 'I WANT IT, COME GIVE IT TO ME,'" John said plaintively. "I know what to do with 'I want it, come give it to me.'"

"I expect you'll learn what to do with this soon enough," said Carter's hot pilot not-boyfriend.

Carter rolled her eyes, clonked the pilot's and the medic-woman's heads together, and dragged them off to her laboratory by the hair.

"You know," O'Neill said, melting out of the shadows, "I told you you could take a box with you, not a box and a snake."

"You can have him, sir."

"We-e-ell -- wait, don't snakes strike whenever they're irritated?"

Atlas John shrugged. "Well, yeah, but it's just a bit of venom, not spiderspit or anything. Besides, a good punch on the nose'll learn 'em if you're wearing anything you particularly don't want fangholes in."

"Yeah, but I'm about to go live in a town full of politicians, most of which are so annoying that any feller or varmint'd just naturally want to puncture their self importance. I wouldn't want to be responsible for that poor rattler biting one of them and poisoning itself to death. You'll just have to hang onto it."

"Understood, sir," John said, and stepped through the Ring.

On its other side, there were a young man and a woman arguing.

"Hi there," John said, having learned a bit more about human social interaction. "Tell me, who are the toughest guys around these parts?"

"The Marines," said the young man, who was none other than "Boomer" Ford.

"The Wraith," said the woman, who was, by some chance, Slowmatch Teyla.

"Where can I find them?" John asked reasonably.

"Over there," said Ford.

"Duck!" said Teyla.

Now in those days, the galaxy was filled with Wraith, who were terrible and awful and never there when you expected them to be. They'd come flying by in their Darts and suck people up in their reverse cyclones and take them back home for lunch.

Atlas John ducked, right enough, so as to get a better look-see, and sort of accidentally knocked Ford down with him while he was at it.

The Darts flew back and forth, eventually scooping up Teyla, her people, and all the Marines except for Ford, who was trying to return fire from behind John.

"Hey!" said Ford, chasing after the Darts as they started to fly out of the ring.

"Grab onto me and take a deep breath!" Atlas John told him. Ford did, and John whipped his snake loose, whirled it in the air, and lassoed the last Dart.

"What a ride," Atlas John said after the Dart landed on the other side of the ring, all by itself next to a big hive full of sleeping Wraith.

"What a rush," Boomer Ford agreed.

"What do you think you're doing?" the Wraith who'd been flying the Dart demanded. "Dinner should learn its place."

Well, that did it, and John hit the Wraith with the box, set it down while the Wraith was picking himself back up, and proceeded to mix it up. John chewed off one of the Wraith's ears, and the Wraith ate a year or two off of John's life, and Atlas John flexed his hairy chest and ripped the claws off of one of the Wraith's hands, and the Wraith clawed out his appendix with the other as easy as kiss-my-hand, and John grabbed the Wraith's head in both hands and twisted it round till he could look down at his heels.

"I give! Enough!" the Wraith cried, staring at his own ugly ass.

"Glad to see you come to your senses, Mike. Where are the people you just took from the planet?" Atlas John asked him.

"They might be in the larder..."

"Show us!"

So, after a bit of confusion where Mike the Wraith kept going the wrong way by mistake, Atlas John twisted his head the rest of the way round to the front again, handed Mike his box, and sat on Mike's shoulders coiling and recoiling his rattling-snake to prevent treachery, and Boomer Ford followed them through a big-ass thicket of thorns and spiders and skeletons of poor unfortunate fellows who'd tried to get through one way or another. But wherever the Wraith walked, the thorns turned to wild roses, and Ford stayed close enough to avoid getting stuck when they turned back to thorns again.

The halls of the hive were full of sleeping Wraith, and the occasional human servitor, who'd scuttle away once they got a look at Mike.

Finally Mike led them to the larder and opened the door. The leader of the Marines, Gunny Bates, correctly gathering that Mike and Atlas John were on the same side, raised his stitching-gun and shot at them.

"Hm," said John, who hadn't seen a stitching-gun before. Carter and O'Neill's people had much better technology.

Then a couple of the stitching-gun bullets hit Mike. Well, Atlas John knew how tough Mike was, so he said "Hmph," vaulted off the Wraith, walked up to Gunny leaning into the bullets as he went, and took the stitching-gun away from him.

"He's on our side... I think..." Ford said before John could tie the stitching-gun into a pretzel.

"O'Neill sent me," Atlas John got around to telling them. "Hey, weren't there more of you?"

"Those three-day-dead catfish took them away," Gunny told him.

"Probably to the queen's chamber," Mike said. "It's hungry work, waiting around for the spell to be broken."

"And you couldn't have taken us there first?" Atlas John demanded.

Mike shrugged. "You didn't ask."

John knocked one of his eyeteeth out, to be companionable-like, and Mike led him to the queen's chamber.

The Wraith queen was just finishing off a Marine, and Atlas John didn't bother to announce who he was before hauling back and busting her chops.

The queen hissed like a snake and busted his right back, and they got in a good old-fashioned rip-roaring glass-shattering brawl while Boomer and Gunny verified that the old Marine was dead and got around to untying Slowmatch Teyla and the other Athosians, which was the name of her people. Atlas John kept knocking the queen down or cutting bits of her off with his combat knife, and she kept sticking them back on where they grew again, getting back up, and clawing or biting him.

Finally John ripped a silver post from under the ceiling and drove it through the queen's ribcage. Wraith, as people used to know, just naturally can't heal any better nor humans of a wound dealt with silver, and so the queen finally fell over decently dead.

"You broke the spell," Mike said. "They will all wake, now."

"Good," said Atlas John. Then he noticed all the women and children they'd just rescued. "I mean, crap."

So Boomer and a few other Marines put their heads together and blew out the side of the hive, and John put one of the Athosian kids up on Mike and gave Mike a friendly tap when he tried to shake the kid off, and everyone ran hell-bent for leather out of the hive.

Now, while most planets have cyclones and thunderstorms and whatnot -- or don't -- the Wraith planet only had one non-reverse cyclone. It'd wander around up here and down there, bringing miserable weather whenever it came, and proudly holding on tight to the thunder and hail concession for the entire planet.

When the cyclone heard the explosion, it came down to see who had dared tread on its turf, and Atlas John took one look at it looming up over the hive, spun his rattling-snake a few times, roped that cyclone and jumped up onto it. Everyone else followed Mike out through the thornbushes while the cyclone was doing its best to throw John off. Neither bucking nor thrashing had been invented yet, though, and so all the cyclone could do was go round and round and chew up lots of stuff on the ground such as thornbushes and Darts. It tried to chew up the fleeing people, too, but John and his rattling-snake wouldn't let it. That's when Atlas John named his snake Come-along, by the way, because when Come-along said "come along," they just naturally had to come along.

Well, after bouncing off the earth and the stars a few times, that cyclone was reasonably tame, and John guided it down to pick everyone up just as they were firing on the pursuing Wraith and carry them off through the Ring. They went here and they went there, flying from star to star, and when there were no more Wraith around save Mike, Atlas John rode that trembling cyclone right into the City of the Ancestors in the middle of a salt desert. Everyone got off into the city, and then Atlas John dismounted and the whole city lit up, and then that poor cyclone just fell to pieces.

Fortunately, it turned out the only reason everyone'd been able to get into the city was because she'd recognized John as an Ancestor; when the cyclone fell apart, it fell onto a ginormous shield in sheets of lightning and rain, and when it was done shaking itself to pieces, the City of the Ancestors bobbed up and was floating on a sea.

Slowmatch Teyla finally got around to introducing herself, and promised that she and the Athosians would be Atlas John's friends until the stars guttered and went out.

"Likewise," Atlas John said, smacked Mike's wrist when he started eyeing up one of the wounded, and turned to the Marines. "So, who's in charge of you Marines?"

Gunny Bates and Boomer Ford looked at each other, at Come-along, at Mike, at John, and back at each other.

"You are, sir," they said.

Now, I could tell you tales of how they renamed the city for Atlas John, and he decided that the new Atlanteans should become cowhands; of the cowherds on foot and on hartback he gathered to him, not least among them the famous Runner Dex; of how he brought horses back to our galaxy -- oh, and sheep, as nobody really liked feeding Mike good cattle; of how he went head to head and toe to toe with Elizabeth Weir, the great logger and liar who once saved three hundred and fifty-seven barrels of ink by leaving off dotting her i's and crossing her t's, over Pyramid Mountain, and how the matter was eventually resolved to everyone's satisfaction; of Nightblack's later visits; of his doomed romance with Slue-Foot Sar; of how, when he had taught his people to be cowboys and licked them into shape, he turned their charge over to a man he trusted, so that he could get actual cowpunching in without cutting into his flying time; and, of course, of Widow-Maker...

...but all this talking's dry work, and I've built up a powerful thirst.

Current Music: The Beatles -- Help!

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annon-of-rhi.livejournal.com

Ummmm... I really don't know what to say... And I don't know if that's a good thing or not...

I think I liked it? :D

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