Signs of Rapture, part 2 (non-human challenge)

[2ndary-author.livejournal.com]

Title: Signs of Rapture, called Apocalypse (part the second)
Author: 2ndary_author
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Characters: Rodney, Carson (offstage: Sheppard)
Rating: PG-13; spoilers for 'Sunday'
Summary: "the architectural equivalent of calling ollie, ollie, oxenfree"
Notes: A continuation of my amnesty entry, this will probably make more sense if you read that first...

 

Comments

[jennytork.livejournal.com]

oh that's AWFUL......poor John. Poor Atlantis!

I hope there's more......?

[2ndary-author.livejournal.com]

Oh, Atlantis is a fickle city; she's been loved and left before. In fact, she's already a little charmed by one of the new Marines...;)

[bratfarrar]

Wait--wait--they're stripping John of his ability to interface with Atlantis? What?

Agh! Want more now, you evil person you!

[2ndary-author.livejournal.com]

Well, they can't having him walking around and hurting himself, now can they? As it is, Elizabeth had to do some creative truthifying (which is not to say outright fibbing) just to keep SGC from whisking Sheppard 'home.' She's still not sure if it was the right call: the, uh, incidents are becoming more frequent; she thinks he's getting worse.

[lage-nom-ai.livejournal.com]

Aw, this made me feel really sad for John/Atlantis OTP! :(

[slybrarian.livejournal.com]

Oh, ouch. Also, if they forced John, I hope he and Atlantis (and Rodney) blow them all up. Seriously. (Well, okay, all of them but Teyla and Ronon. And Lorne and Zlinky, because they need minions.)

[shalom]

The city might work hard to change him again.

[2ndary-author.livejournal.com]

It certainly could, especially since I've already ditched Darwin in favor of Lamarck!

[teenygozer.livejournal.com]

Huh. It seems to me that what the city really needs is a whole lotta blue-gened people, not fewer, so that it can spread the (really dangerous) lovin's around and not concentrate everything on one pore guy who gets the brunt of it all.

I really like how plausibly you set this up and the clever way you came up with to describe it. Looking forward to more... I HOPE there's more, as I hate to see the John/Atlantis otp come to such a soggy end!

[2ndary-author.livejournal.com]

Well, it's kind of a strength-of-gene thing rather than a divide-and-conquer thing: the fact that lots of people have brown eyes doesn't make my eyes less brown, so even if lots of people had the gene, John would still be trouble. I hadn't thought about the implications of dividing the gene...pretend to be surprised if see that in a future installment;)

[teenygozer.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of a combo of strength-plus-divide & conquer.

As I read, I wondered if an entire city of full-blooded, full-gened Ancients (how many Ancients could live comfortably in Atlantis? Say, a million?) would all be affected by the city and affect the city in return, as John does. Would a million people wake up with a fever if the pipes overheated? If a section of the city was damaged, would it mean *everyone's* knee got wonky (as you had happen to John.) Or if you meant that the city would pick ONE (really rather unlucky) Ancient back then, that one strongest-gened person, to bond with and affect/be affected by/love best, as you have Atlantis bonding with John. It would be like when they pick some poor kid in grade school to be the reincarnation of the Dali Lama and his life as a normal person is ruined forever, for all the honors heaped upon him.

This is just free-wheeling discussion (all prompted by your story), if anything I've mused upon sparks an idea for the next bit of story, feel free to run with it!

[teenygozer.livejournal.com]

...or, you know, if the effect would be dulled by being spread over a million Ancients, all with as-strong genes as John, and nobody would have to bear the brunt of Atlantis' single-minded, obsessive love.

(Sorry about that, I realized I didn't quite finish my thought after I posted the previous entry.)

[2ndary-author.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I see what you mean! No, it was never supposed to work for the Ancients in quite the same way it works on John (although, as the man said, "“It’s alien...We don’t know how it works!”). After all, John really *is* human--in this fic, anyway;)--so he doesn't react the way the Ancients would. However, he has more of this Ancient cast to his genes, so his connection is stronger than that of the other humans. In my mind, John's genetic interface with Atlantis is either
a) malfunctioning (which is to say, this aspect of the gene is supposed to be binary--either Ancient or human--but John's a mutant and the city doesn't know what to do with him)
or
b) evolving (that is, expressing itself oddly because John's neither totally Ancient nor totally human; anyone with the same Ancient cast to human genes would have the same problem)

[dossier.livejournal.com]

Oh, ow! I truly didn't expect you to go this this direction! Wow, like conjoined twins, surgically separating them in order to protect both, or one... I wonder how Atlantis will react?