Chapter 215 - Moving Day - Part 1
A knock on the door frame of his apartment drew Eventus's attention away from the interesting puzzle of Goa'uld genetics that had taken up his last few days of work to see Colonel Sheppard standing in the doorway.
“Hey, you got a minute?”
Eventus raised a single eyebrow. “Silvina's overseeing the city repairs, Helia's handling moving her crew down into the city, Trebal's making sure your new doctor and the Tria's medical officers get the full knowledge download needed to assist in restoring the Aurora's crew, Rayla and Melia are binge watching Star Trek The Next Generation, and Anise/Freya and Yami are arguing over what measurements are most attractive on a female body–”
“I'd tell you,” Sheppard interjected with a grin. “But I'm pretty sure Teyla would hit me with one of her bantos sticks.”
“-So believe it or not,” Eventus continued. “Yes, I actually do have a minute.” He gave it a beat. “And jokes on you, I've known Teyla's measurements since she asked me if I could synthesize her a set of the ultrasupport undergarments I made for Rayla.”
An odd look flashed across Sheppard features. “...Really?”
“Yup,” Eventus confirmed. “Her, and I'm pretty sure every single female marine in the city prior to your reinforcements showing up.” He shook his head and let out an over exaggerated sigh. “Who would have thought underwear that provides perfect support, temperature regulation, and breaths like a dream would be so popular.”
“Hold on,” Sheppard narrowed his eyes. “That sounds like the sort of thing I should know about, so how is this the first I'm hearing about it?”
“Oh I don't know,” Eventus put forward with a slightly judgemental tone in his voice. “Why wouldn't female marines want to share their underwear choices with their commanding officer?”
“That's not really what I meant,” Sheppard winced, apparently having realized just how that actually sounded. “It's just that McKay needs to clear any alien technology before it's allowed to be taken into the field.”
Eventus gave Sheppard a moment to realize the obvious problem with that, and the Lantean wasn't disappointed at the nearly full body cringe the man gave seconds later.
“All right, so maybe we didn't entirely think that policy through,” he held up a finger. “Though to be fair, I think this is the first time we've ever actually run into gender specific alien technology.”
“It's not gender specific,” Eventus offered, more than a little amused at the turn this had taken.“The same synthetic materials work for men too.” A contemplative look settled onto his features. “Honestly with how much you soldiers complain about them, I'm kind of surprised nobody asked about socks and boots either. Because we could synthesize all of you sets that looked just like your standard issue ones, but with all the features of the ones we wear.”
Sheppard looked down, giving Eventus boots a confused look. “Your socks and boots have features?”
“Of course,” Eventus grinned. “Temperature regulation, moisture dispersal, sound and vibration dampening, adaptive cushioning that provides practically perfect comfort and support, micro-spike soles for unrivaled traction, and a surface material that stops them from tracking in dirt and debris.
“...I'm gonna be honest,” Sheppard began after a moment. “I hate you just a little bit right now.”
“We used to get that a lot,” Eventus admitted, fighting back a laugh at the almost sulking look that appeared on the other man's face. “But moving away from women's measurements and footwear, you needed something?”
“Yeah,” Sheppard seemingly recovered. “You remember that bet?”
Eventus nodded, turning fully away from the table he'd been working at to focus on the other man. “You decided on a place?”
“Think so,” Sheppard said. “It's this three bedroom place in…” He trailed off for a moment, clearly trying to remember something. “I think the city guide called it residential building eleven? It's that sort of dome shaped one that's basically a couple dozen apartments surrounding an indoor park.”
“Oh yeah,” Eventus followed along. “Those are nice one's, they always tended to be grabbed up by couples looking to start a family though.”
“You don't say…” Sheppard drawled.
Knowing that the Colonel was planning to move in with Teyla it wasn't that much of a surprise that they had picked a place like that given the apartments were on the larger side of things and the Athosian probably appreciated the thought of having readily available access to the closest thing on the city to nature.
“Want me to bring the building's groundskeeping systems back online? It won't be an instant fix or anything, but it should be able to replace everything but the trees with a couple weeks of work.”
“I'll have to ask Teyla,” Sheppard offered. “I think she's planning to bring in some stuff from the mainland.”
That was enough to make Eventus cringe. “That might not be the best idea. Some of the plants on the mainland can have weird reactions to high energy effects because of the cyclic extinction events.”
A concerned look flashed across Sheppard features. “The what?”
“The cyclic extinction events,” Eventus repeated with a slight frown as he wracked his memory. “Didn't I warn you about those?”
“No…” Sheppard said slowly. “No you didn't.” He narrowed his eyes. “How cyclic are we talking about?”
“Every fifteen thousand years or so,” Eventus offered, purposefully leaving out when the last one was in hopes of getting the perfect opening.
“Oh,” Sheppard muttered, his shoulders relaxing slightly. “So we have time then.”
It wasn't exactly the line Eventus had been hoping for, but he would take it. “The last one was about fifteen thousand years ago.” He let a happy look settle across his features. “In fact, scans show this system sun has already begun to enter its solar maximum. Which means we’re about a year or so away from the sun blanketing the system in coronal mass ejections of a level which would wipe out all life on the planet that’s not hiding away deep in the oceans.”
“...But it’s not a concern?” Sheppard questioned.
“Not really,” Eventus shook his head. “Supposedly the last one took us a bit by surprise due to the Lantean’s at the time only relatively recently having relocated the city to this Solar System due to the prior one it had been in suffering a surprise phase state transition. But even then all it took to deflect it was reinforcing the planet's magnetic field with the city’s shield. Though that was the quick and wasteful solution, knowing it’s coming however I’ll probably just have one of the ships disrupt the prominences early. Sure we’ll miss the planet covering mega aurora, but using the shield like that was noted as being a bit of a drain and we can’t limitlessly replace our ZPM’s like they could back in the day.”
“I’m still going to warn Elizabeth about it,” Sheppard said before shooting Eventus a poignant stare. “There anything else we should know about this planet?”
Taking a moment to think about the question, Eventus gave a nod. “The whale-like creatures in the ocean are sentient, one of the small orbiting moons the Wraith threw at us is probably going to fall into the atmosphere in the next decade or so, there’s an intact mobile underwater power station I recently located next to which lays a crashed Wraith cruiser with an absolute monster of a Wraith Queen on board, and one of Helia’s crew may have located two intact stasis pods in a half buried jumper next to the city’s moorings.”
That last honestly had Eventus scratching his head, because he couldn’t think of anyone who might have ended up in that particular position.
Sheppard blinked, clearly not expecting that level of answer. “Let me re-phrase that, is there anything about the planet that we need to be immediately concerned about?”
“The Wraith Queen,” Eventus admitted. “The crew of the Tria is trying to work out a way to take her out with some drones, but her cruiser is sitting on a thin point of the planets mantle and if its reactor goes off it might cause a supervolcano-like eruption that would functionally poison the planet for the next couple decades.”
Preliminary scans of the ship also suggested that there was the high possibility that it was the same vessel as the one that had hit the city with the telepathic weapon early in the siege. So they were being extra cautious on that front given the weapon going off again would probably do really bad things to everyone but him and maybe the Wraith blooded Athosians.
“Anything the Asgard could do to help with that?” Sheppard asked with a slight frown.
Eventus shook his head. “The only ship they currently have in the galaxy is the Samantha Carter, and last I heard Thor was using it to follow up on the information the Asuran’s gave him about the Vanir.”
They had apparently been off again on again trading partners with the Asuran’s, mostly providing extradimensional elements that were difficult to gather with the limited offworld presence the Asuran’s basecode had more or less restricted them to in exchange for spare parts they didn’t have the ability to synthesize themselves.
“Honestly?” He continued. “We’ll probably play it safe there and just use a remote unit to move the power station away from the crashed ship and then not poke the situation any further unless something changes. And in the worst case scenario we can always just gather everyone up and move the city to a new planet.
Cocking his head, he considered the logistics of that for several seconds before scowling and adding a new pair of things to his list. “I’m going to have to see about putting together a mobile ring platform for the Athosian’s, and check if the defense satellite was designed to be relay compatible.”
“Having a quicker way to get to the Athosian settlement would be nice,” Sheppard agreed. “Kind of too bad you can’t just install Asgard transporters on your ships like we did.”
A second passed, and Eventus felt the urge to face palm for not even having considered the possibility of integrating that particular technology into his people’s own ships. “Right… I should probably have Silvina get in contact with the Asgard to examine the feasibility of that.” He pushed himself to his feet and offered Sheppard a smile. “So you wanted help moving?”
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Author’s Notes: Gotta keep those priorities straight after all, and Eventus still hasn’t found out about Teyla’s surprise pregnancy which is really sort of the point for these two chapters.