A Small Problem - Chapter Two
Feb. 18th, 2012 09:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bungakertasA Small Problem - Chapter Two
Disclaimer and general Author's Notes are in the first entry, which is linked at the bottom.
Chapter Two Author's Notes: Thanks to those who pointed out the Brightman thing. My bad. *blush*
Dr. Daniel Jackson was not having a good day.
The morning had been all right. He’d had great coffee. From there it had all been downhill. His knee was still sore from where he’d run it into a tree branch on their last mission. Stupid Skull Warriors. Stupid Baal. And yes, he knew perfectly well that the technical name for them was “Kul” Warriors, but as long as Jack never heard him say “Skull Warriors” he’d be fine.
Then they had left for P4Z-028. It was the standard planet. Lots of trees, a deserted temple with goa’uld markings, and not nearly enough time to do a proper archaeological survey.
Since the temple had been the only shelter on the planet and the sky was threatening rain, they’d all had their lunch next to the altar in the middle of the crumbling edifice.
Daniel was starting to feel that that had been a mistake. It hadn’t been until about fifteen minutes after the three of them had touched the altar that they’d shrunk. Fortunately, anything that they had been holding onto and/or wearing at the time had shrunk with them so they’d been able to keep all their weapons and equipment. And they hadn’t been naked, which was nice.
Getting back through the gate had been an adventure of it’s own. Just getting to the gate had been three hours of walking, walking, and more walking. Thankfully, it hadn’t been too far from the temple.
Then, they’d had to figure out how to dial the gate. In the end, Teal’c had had Daniel stand on his shoulders and then Sam climbed up on top of Daniel. It hadn’t been truly painful until she had stood on the side of his head to catch the edge of the bottom of the DHD, which was, conveniently, near-ish to the ground.
As soon as she’d gotten up, Daniel and Teal’c ran over to the gate with the GDO while Sam started dialing. At first a few random chevrons lit up, but Daniel knew they didn’t go to the address for anything. He had looked back to see Sam picking her way to the center of the Dial Home Device. When she got there, she jumped up and down on the center to clear the chevrons and then shouldered her P-90.
As Daniel had watched in disbelief, Sam set the P-90 to single-shot and had fired on each glyph in Earth’s address. It was a simple matter for he and Teal’c to avoid the vortex “splashing” out from the gate, being as small as they were, and Teal’c had resolutely stuck his staff weapon into the event horizon to hold the gate open as they waited for Sam to jump down and run over to them.
Which brought him to where he was. Sitting indian-style on Kyle Wilson’s hand, headed towards the Infirmary. He glanced behind him to see Sam and then quickly looked back forward. Sam was doing fine and his motion sickness was not helping matters. He was hesitant to talk, though, because that would give away his own very chipmunk-sounding voice. When he, Sam, and Teal’c had been talking on P4Z-028, they’d sounded like the Rescue Rangers. There was no way he’d be the first one to talk here.
As the entered the Infirmary, he got a look at Teal’c and had to smile. The jaffa was sitting on Airman Simon’s hand with his face forward and his head held high. To anyone who didn’t know him, he looked perfectly at ease, despite his reduced circumstances. But Daniel could see that slight tenseness in his grip on his staff and the extra stiffness in his posture. Teal’c was distinctly uncomfortable.
They came to stop on a desk and SG-1 clambered off their various transporters and nodded up to the folks who’d carried them. Daniel, Sam, and Teal’c turned around and flinched as one. They had come face to face with a syringe as long as they were tall.
“Ouch!” Daniel whispered involuntarily, flinching again at his voice.
“I hope they don’t need that for us,” Sam said.
Teal’c raised his eyebrow, gripped his staff a little harder and said nothing. Daniel started counting backwards from five to when the skin on Teal’c’s knuckles would break from the stretching.
“Wow, that would be frightening for someone your size, wouldn’t it?” Dr. Brightman noted, whisking the syringe away. “Sorry. It is an Infirmary, but we’re keeping the needles away from you this time.” She brought out a magnifying glass and a stethoscope. “I don’t think there’s really an operations protocol for examining shrunken members of the facility.”
“Not yet,” announced the last voice that Daniel wanted to hear.
He turned around to find Jack striding into the Infirmary with Paul Davis right behind him.
*~*~*
Major Davis watched as the diminished members of SG-1 shuffled around on the desk in the Infirmary. They’d all been there for a little over a quarter of an hour and the only thing the doctors had determined was that SG-1 was not suffering an illness (though hearing them cough in their tiny, high-pitched new voices was incredibly amusing). It seemed like Brightman had come to a few other conclusions on her own, but she hadn’t shared them yet. When dealing with alien biohazards, there weren’t really any guarantees.
Without any sort of preamble, Sergeant Harriman’s voice came on over the PA, climbing in pitch as it did so. “Initiating Wildfire lockdown.”
Davis frowned. O’Neill strode to the intercom, snatched it up and punched up the Control Room. After a brief moment he sing-songed, “Hellooo-oooh,” into the phone.
O’Neill turned back around. “This is a problem. I think we have to assume that this shrinking thing is sprea—oh, crap.”
The perspective in the room was changing. The ceiling was getting further away and the floor was coming closer. Davis was thanking his lucky stars that his clothes were shrinking with him, otherwise this could be embarrassing. “I would say that is an appropriate assessment, sir,” he commented, dryly.
O’Neill was nodding beside him as they arrived at their new heights. Apparently, the shrinking…whatever it was, was contagious somehow. One foot seemed to be worth about one inch so their respective heights were unchanged. But the table they’d just been looking down on, was now most decidedly up.
“Well,” O’Neill announced. “This sucks.” Then he frowned and crossed his eyes, like he was trying to fix a glare on his mouth. After all, now he sounded like a chipmunk on helium, too.
“Yes it does, sir,” Davis agreed, too irritated to laugh at the general's antics. Why did these things happen to him? He did a good job here. He managed to cajole O’Neill into doing the minimum required amount of paperwork (no mean feat) and kept the Pentagon from swooping in and locking up this whole mountain full of nutballs every other week. Why, why, why? Granted, he’d never been shrunk before, but he’d been on that ha’tak that had crashed into the ocean and then flooded. And then there was the ever-memorable occasion where he’d been taken over by aliens and ended up helping O’Neill partially undress one that looked like Janet Frasier. And the eraser episode. Oh, yes. He still owed Siler for that one. Of course, the sergeant had been discreet about it. Enlisted guys didn’t openly prank the officers, but still the lack of proof didn’t change the fact that everyone knew it was Siler who’d done it.
Brightman came strolling around the other side of the table. She’d been shrunk as well. “That’s that, I suppose. This is an interesting pickle.” She winced at her voice.
“Not quite how I would put it,” O’Neill sighed, “but accurate.”
Some very squeaky yelling came from above their heads and they all looked up to see Carter, Dr. Jackson, and Teal’c poking their heads over the edge of the table to look down at them.
“Carter?” O’Neill yelled back up. “Can you get down?”
Carter’s head disappeared and then came back over the edge. “Yes, sir. It’ll take us a moment…”
The three of them disappeared.
“Right now, I think we should get to the Control Room,” O’Neill told them. “That’s where all the reports will come in, that’s the room that’s got the easiest PA for us to use at this size, so we’ll get there first. We’re going to need to call Washington to let them know our situation, as well.”
Davis sighed. “I feel obligated to point out that, at this size, sir, the Control Room is the equivalent of several kilometers away.”
“At this size, Davis, the door is a bit of a hike,” O’Neill returned, his usual snarkiness sounding quite strange several octaves above his usual pitch. “I guess we’re going to have to start running places if we want to get anywhere.”
Davis resisted the urge to groan with only a very great act of will. He did run some every morning, but he hadn’t done a whole lot of very serious running since his training days. He doubted a lot of these folks had.
Dr. Brightman frowned. “Sir, it’s probable that everyone on the base is already infected, but we should make sure that no one has left. If this…whatever it is travels outside of the SGC, we could have a world-wide epidemic in a very short time. Apparently even physical contact is unnecessary for it to spread.”
O’Neill nodded. “Wildfire automatically locks down air ventilation with the outside world and starts up a set of scrubbers, so, with folks shrinking like this, we’ll have enough oxygen to go a long time.”
“Food, sir?” Brightman pressed.
The three of them looked at each other unhappily. There was no way that people six inches tall could open a refrigerator. Even eating an MRE would be very difficult (assuming they could get to one) and Davis knew for a fact that most of the non-perishable foodstuffs were stored in cabinets that were at head-level when he was his usual height.
“Water’s gonna be a problem, too,” O’Neill sighed.
“Well, sir, actually,” Brightman said, “there’s not a shortage of leaky plumbing on level 25. It won’t taste good, but it won’t kill us.”
“Getting there will be a challenge,” O’Neill mused, “but that's good to know.”
Davis was suddenly struck by an idea. He pulled out his cell phone and opened it up. It was on, but he had no bars. Then again, he was 21 floors underground.
Brightman looked at the phone. “That’s an interesting facet of this shrinking thing. That what we have on us shrinks as well. Could be useful.”
“Yeah. Maybe Siler is carrying something cool that will help us out of all this,” O’Neill grumbled sarcastically. Davis was sympathetic. He couldn't imagine any tools that would be particularly useful at their shrunken sizes.
“Watch your heads!” someone squeaked from above them.
The three of them looked up to see a roll of gauze about to fall down off the edge of the table. They scattered.
The roll came crashing down to the floor, and rolled off, trailing gauze behind it as it went. There was now a long trail of it leading up to the edge of the table and out of sight. SG-1 began descending down the gauze, using their field knives to cut out places for their hands and feet.
“Inventive,” O’Neill muttered.
SG-1 reached the floor and walked over to where Davis, O’Neill, and Brightman stood. A few of the others in the infirmary were just making their ways over from the far end of the room.
General O’Neill stared at Daniel. “Is that a shoe-print on your face?”
Daniel glared at O'Neill and Sam turned bright red. “Yes, Jack. It is a shoe print. My head really hurts and it’s only gonna get worse.”
O'Neill grinned but didn’t push his luck.
“General, we were only able to do the barest of preliminary examinations,” Brightman told him, after consulting with her nurses, “but I was leaning towards the feeling that whatever’s causing us all to shrink is not a biological agent, or at least not strictly biological. I think there’s a machine element here.”
“You’re telling me a machine shrunk us?” O’Neill asked with a bit of disbelief.
“We were on an alien planet, Jack,” Daniel returned in the exact same tone. The general gave him a dirty look.
Davis sighed. These people were crazy.
Chapter One - A Little Bored
Chapter Three - Down In Fraggle Rock
Chapter Four - Working Out The Bugs
Chapter Five - Troubleshooting
Chapter Six - You Can't Always Get What You Want...
Chapter Seven - Research For Its Own Sake
Disclaimer and general Author's Notes are in the first entry, which is linked at the bottom.
Chapter Two Author's Notes: Thanks to those who pointed out the Brightman thing. My bad. *blush*
Dr. Daniel Jackson was not having a good day.
The morning had been all right. He’d had great coffee. From there it had all been downhill. His knee was still sore from where he’d run it into a tree branch on their last mission. Stupid Skull Warriors. Stupid Baal. And yes, he knew perfectly well that the technical name for them was “Kul” Warriors, but as long as Jack never heard him say “Skull Warriors” he’d be fine.
Then they had left for P4Z-028. It was the standard planet. Lots of trees, a deserted temple with goa’uld markings, and not nearly enough time to do a proper archaeological survey.
Since the temple had been the only shelter on the planet and the sky was threatening rain, they’d all had their lunch next to the altar in the middle of the crumbling edifice.
Daniel was starting to feel that that had been a mistake. It hadn’t been until about fifteen minutes after the three of them had touched the altar that they’d shrunk. Fortunately, anything that they had been holding onto and/or wearing at the time had shrunk with them so they’d been able to keep all their weapons and equipment. And they hadn’t been naked, which was nice.
Getting back through the gate had been an adventure of it’s own. Just getting to the gate had been three hours of walking, walking, and more walking. Thankfully, it hadn’t been too far from the temple.
Then, they’d had to figure out how to dial the gate. In the end, Teal’c had had Daniel stand on his shoulders and then Sam climbed up on top of Daniel. It hadn’t been truly painful until she had stood on the side of his head to catch the edge of the bottom of the DHD, which was, conveniently, near-ish to the ground.
As soon as she’d gotten up, Daniel and Teal’c ran over to the gate with the GDO while Sam started dialing. At first a few random chevrons lit up, but Daniel knew they didn’t go to the address for anything. He had looked back to see Sam picking her way to the center of the Dial Home Device. When she got there, she jumped up and down on the center to clear the chevrons and then shouldered her P-90.
As Daniel had watched in disbelief, Sam set the P-90 to single-shot and had fired on each glyph in Earth’s address. It was a simple matter for he and Teal’c to avoid the vortex “splashing” out from the gate, being as small as they were, and Teal’c had resolutely stuck his staff weapon into the event horizon to hold the gate open as they waited for Sam to jump down and run over to them.
Which brought him to where he was. Sitting indian-style on Kyle Wilson’s hand, headed towards the Infirmary. He glanced behind him to see Sam and then quickly looked back forward. Sam was doing fine and his motion sickness was not helping matters. He was hesitant to talk, though, because that would give away his own very chipmunk-sounding voice. When he, Sam, and Teal’c had been talking on P4Z-028, they’d sounded like the Rescue Rangers. There was no way he’d be the first one to talk here.
As the entered the Infirmary, he got a look at Teal’c and had to smile. The jaffa was sitting on Airman Simon’s hand with his face forward and his head held high. To anyone who didn’t know him, he looked perfectly at ease, despite his reduced circumstances. But Daniel could see that slight tenseness in his grip on his staff and the extra stiffness in his posture. Teal’c was distinctly uncomfortable.
They came to stop on a desk and SG-1 clambered off their various transporters and nodded up to the folks who’d carried them. Daniel, Sam, and Teal’c turned around and flinched as one. They had come face to face with a syringe as long as they were tall.
“Ouch!” Daniel whispered involuntarily, flinching again at his voice.
“I hope they don’t need that for us,” Sam said.
Teal’c raised his eyebrow, gripped his staff a little harder and said nothing. Daniel started counting backwards from five to when the skin on Teal’c’s knuckles would break from the stretching.
“Wow, that would be frightening for someone your size, wouldn’t it?” Dr. Brightman noted, whisking the syringe away. “Sorry. It is an Infirmary, but we’re keeping the needles away from you this time.” She brought out a magnifying glass and a stethoscope. “I don’t think there’s really an operations protocol for examining shrunken members of the facility.”
“Not yet,” announced the last voice that Daniel wanted to hear.
He turned around to find Jack striding into the Infirmary with Paul Davis right behind him.
Major Davis watched as the diminished members of SG-1 shuffled around on the desk in the Infirmary. They’d all been there for a little over a quarter of an hour and the only thing the doctors had determined was that SG-1 was not suffering an illness (though hearing them cough in their tiny, high-pitched new voices was incredibly amusing). It seemed like Brightman had come to a few other conclusions on her own, but she hadn’t shared them yet. When dealing with alien biohazards, there weren’t really any guarantees.
Without any sort of preamble, Sergeant Harriman’s voice came on over the PA, climbing in pitch as it did so. “Initiating Wildfire lockdown.”
Davis frowned. O’Neill strode to the intercom, snatched it up and punched up the Control Room. After a brief moment he sing-songed, “Hellooo-oooh,” into the phone.
O’Neill turned back around. “This is a problem. I think we have to assume that this shrinking thing is sprea—oh, crap.”
The perspective in the room was changing. The ceiling was getting further away and the floor was coming closer. Davis was thanking his lucky stars that his clothes were shrinking with him, otherwise this could be embarrassing. “I would say that is an appropriate assessment, sir,” he commented, dryly.
O’Neill was nodding beside him as they arrived at their new heights. Apparently, the shrinking…whatever it was, was contagious somehow. One foot seemed to be worth about one inch so their respective heights were unchanged. But the table they’d just been looking down on, was now most decidedly up.
“Well,” O’Neill announced. “This sucks.” Then he frowned and crossed his eyes, like he was trying to fix a glare on his mouth. After all, now he sounded like a chipmunk on helium, too.
“Yes it does, sir,” Davis agreed, too irritated to laugh at the general's antics. Why did these things happen to him? He did a good job here. He managed to cajole O’Neill into doing the minimum required amount of paperwork (no mean feat) and kept the Pentagon from swooping in and locking up this whole mountain full of nutballs every other week. Why, why, why? Granted, he’d never been shrunk before, but he’d been on that ha’tak that had crashed into the ocean and then flooded. And then there was the ever-memorable occasion where he’d been taken over by aliens and ended up helping O’Neill partially undress one that looked like Janet Frasier. And the eraser episode. Oh, yes. He still owed Siler for that one. Of course, the sergeant had been discreet about it. Enlisted guys didn’t openly prank the officers, but still the lack of proof didn’t change the fact that everyone knew it was Siler who’d done it.
Brightman came strolling around the other side of the table. She’d been shrunk as well. “That’s that, I suppose. This is an interesting pickle.” She winced at her voice.
“Not quite how I would put it,” O’Neill sighed, “but accurate.”
Some very squeaky yelling came from above their heads and they all looked up to see Carter, Dr. Jackson, and Teal’c poking their heads over the edge of the table to look down at them.
“Carter?” O’Neill yelled back up. “Can you get down?”
Carter’s head disappeared and then came back over the edge. “Yes, sir. It’ll take us a moment…”
The three of them disappeared.
“Right now, I think we should get to the Control Room,” O’Neill told them. “That’s where all the reports will come in, that’s the room that’s got the easiest PA for us to use at this size, so we’ll get there first. We’re going to need to call Washington to let them know our situation, as well.”
Davis sighed. “I feel obligated to point out that, at this size, sir, the Control Room is the equivalent of several kilometers away.”
“At this size, Davis, the door is a bit of a hike,” O’Neill returned, his usual snarkiness sounding quite strange several octaves above his usual pitch. “I guess we’re going to have to start running places if we want to get anywhere.”
Davis resisted the urge to groan with only a very great act of will. He did run some every morning, but he hadn’t done a whole lot of very serious running since his training days. He doubted a lot of these folks had.
Dr. Brightman frowned. “Sir, it’s probable that everyone on the base is already infected, but we should make sure that no one has left. If this…whatever it is travels outside of the SGC, we could have a world-wide epidemic in a very short time. Apparently even physical contact is unnecessary for it to spread.”
O’Neill nodded. “Wildfire automatically locks down air ventilation with the outside world and starts up a set of scrubbers, so, with folks shrinking like this, we’ll have enough oxygen to go a long time.”
“Food, sir?” Brightman pressed.
The three of them looked at each other unhappily. There was no way that people six inches tall could open a refrigerator. Even eating an MRE would be very difficult (assuming they could get to one) and Davis knew for a fact that most of the non-perishable foodstuffs were stored in cabinets that were at head-level when he was his usual height.
“Water’s gonna be a problem, too,” O’Neill sighed.
“Well, sir, actually,” Brightman said, “there’s not a shortage of leaky plumbing on level 25. It won’t taste good, but it won’t kill us.”
“Getting there will be a challenge,” O’Neill mused, “but that's good to know.”
Davis was suddenly struck by an idea. He pulled out his cell phone and opened it up. It was on, but he had no bars. Then again, he was 21 floors underground.
Brightman looked at the phone. “That’s an interesting facet of this shrinking thing. That what we have on us shrinks as well. Could be useful.”
“Yeah. Maybe Siler is carrying something cool that will help us out of all this,” O’Neill grumbled sarcastically. Davis was sympathetic. He couldn't imagine any tools that would be particularly useful at their shrunken sizes.
“Watch your heads!” someone squeaked from above them.
The three of them looked up to see a roll of gauze about to fall down off the edge of the table. They scattered.
The roll came crashing down to the floor, and rolled off, trailing gauze behind it as it went. There was now a long trail of it leading up to the edge of the table and out of sight. SG-1 began descending down the gauze, using their field knives to cut out places for their hands and feet.
“Inventive,” O’Neill muttered.
SG-1 reached the floor and walked over to where Davis, O’Neill, and Brightman stood. A few of the others in the infirmary were just making their ways over from the far end of the room.
General O’Neill stared at Daniel. “Is that a shoe-print on your face?”
Daniel glared at O'Neill and Sam turned bright red. “Yes, Jack. It is a shoe print. My head really hurts and it’s only gonna get worse.”
O'Neill grinned but didn’t push his luck.
“General, we were only able to do the barest of preliminary examinations,” Brightman told him, after consulting with her nurses, “but I was leaning towards the feeling that whatever’s causing us all to shrink is not a biological agent, or at least not strictly biological. I think there’s a machine element here.”
“You’re telling me a machine shrunk us?” O’Neill asked with a bit of disbelief.
“We were on an alien planet, Jack,” Daniel returned in the exact same tone. The general gave him a dirty look.
Davis sighed. These people were crazy.
Chapter One - A Little Bored
Chapter Three - Down In Fraggle Rock
Chapter Four - Working Out The Bugs
Chapter Five - Troubleshooting
Chapter Six - You Can't Always Get What You Want...
Chapter Seven - Research For Its Own Sake
