Chapter 232 - The Day After The Next
An incessant poking dragged Eventus back to consciousness, and he lifted his head off his pillow to glare at Rayla.
“Why?”
It came out with slightly more of a whine than he intended, but he didn't see anyone with the elf so couldn't really find it in himself to care.
“You asked me to wake you up for lunch tomorrow if you didn't get up on your own,” Rayla pouted. “You're not going to throw another pillow? Are you?”
“I threw a pillow?” Eventus blinked, not having any recollection of that.
Rayla just pointed at the doorway to his bedroom, next to which one of this bed's large fluffy pillows was laying.
“I want to point out that pillow could have gotten there any number of other ways,” Eventus grumbled as he pushed himself up. “But I'm moderately awake now, so you can go back to whatever it was you were doing.”
“I was about to have lunch,” Rayla said as she began to head back to the living room only to pause mid step. “Oh! Right! Rod wanted to talk to you.”
Eventus blinked. “Rod?”
“Yeah,” Rayla nodded. “You know, Doctor McKay, only, he said I should call him Rod. Of course, John said I should call him Rodney, but Doctor Heightmeyer said you should always call people the name they want to be called. And since he wants to be called Rod, I call him Rod.”
Staring silently at the Elf for several seconds, Eventus finally let out a sigh and made a mental note to have a word with McKay about how he really didn't need to posture like that. “Next time you talk to Doctor Heightmeyer, ask her to explain about posturing and inadequacy issues.”
“I already know about the second,” Rayla offered happily. “Some of the female marines explained it to me.”
A sudden feeling of dread settled over Eventus, and despite the little voice in the back of his mind yelling about how asking anything about that comment wouldn’t end well, he still couldn’t help himself. “What exactly did the female marines tell you about inadequacy issues?”
“That it’s caused when women outdo men,” Rayla said. “And that it’s often connected to inadequate genitile size.” The look on her face turned contemplative. “I don’t think I was supposed to hear that last given they whispered it. And then got really awkward and quiet when I asked if all humans measured that sort of thing or just men.”
“Human women tend to measure different body parts when forming inadequacy issues than men,” Eventus explained, sheer exasperation radiating from him at having to have this particular conversation. “However, inadequacy issues are not just caused by body shape, they also pop up in concerns to things like questionable parenting methods, problematic authority figures during a person's formative years, or toxic work environments.”
“Wow…” Rayla muttered. “Humans have a lot of issues.”
Eventus raised a single eyebrow at her. “I can assure you it’s not just humans, because you haven’t seen passive aggressive pressuring until you’ve seen a first time Lantean parent whose child decides they want to go into the arts instead of sciences.”
“Oh,” Rayla frowned, clearly considering Eventus’s words. “I guess that means I’m lucky you only want me to be the queen of the elves someday.”
“...That was more bowing to inevitability given you’re the first of the elves and likely to outlive the standard elven lifespan by a significant margin.” Eventus finally got out, really hoping Rayla just accepted that as an explanation instead of digging deeper into his ideas for creating a stereotypical elven kingdom.
“I figured it was something like that,” Rayla nodded before heading out the door.
Waiting until he heard the slight hum of the apartment door opening and closing that indicated the Elf was no longer in hearing range, Eventus let out an annoyed groan. “I really need to find that girl some normal friends within her own age-range. Because marines are not a good influence.”
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Having cleaned himself up, and eaten a lunch big enough to make up for what he had missed spending an entire day sleeping, Eventus had made his way to Doctor Weir’s office to figure out just where McKay had gone to.
“Doctor McKay is currently off-world on a scouting mission,” Weir offered apologetically. “He’s scheduled to return later today though, so I can tell him you're looking for him when he gets back.”
“I'd appreciate that,” Eventus said.
The expedition's exploration schedule before he had been woken from u[ stasis had pretty much just been them going down the list of gate addresses in Atlantis's database. Given they had located a number of things whose locations Eventus wasn't entirely sure of himself, he hadn't wanted to overly interfere with that schedule. So the only thing he had done was mark off worlds he knew for a fact contained things like the crystalline dream parasites that were far too dangerous for anyone to go to.
“With everything going on, you missed yesterday's dial in from Stargate Command,” Weir continued. “They included the report on the weapon deployment against the attempted Ori beachhead."
“Transfer a copy to my inbox,” Eventus said, using the human term for the semi-equivalent system in the city’s own text messaging system. “I'll review it later tonight.”
“I already did,” Weir returned, the corner of her lips twitching slightly in barely suppressed amusement.
“Oh,” Eventus chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck in embarrassment. “I really need to get into the habit of checking that more often than I used to.”
His interface was set to alert him if anything tagged as immediate or emergency came in, a system he had had in place for several hundred years, but a side effect of that was that he tended to only check his normal messages once or twice a day.
“Have you gotten a chance to talk to Ea yet?” He changed the subject, knowing Weir had a policy of wanting to meet anyone new in person.
“Yesterday,” Weir confirmed with a nod, only to bite her bottom lip slightly. “I get the sense that she doesn’t think much of us.”
“She probably doesn't,” Eventus confirmed, deciding honesty was probably the best choice here. “The Aurora's crew is young and mostly from the outer colony worlds, to them humans were just somewhat primitive neighbors. The Tria's crew is young and mostly from Atlantis's sphere of control, to them humans are the somewhat ungrateful primitives who we sacrificed everything for. Ea and Atlas however are old and lived on Atlantis itself for longer than your recorded history, to them humans are a species they helped create and spread across this galaxy onto planets they also basically helped to create.”
“So she see’s us as children,” Weir sighed as if she had heard that one before and was particularly tired of it.
Eventus winced, rather suspecting the doctor wasn't going to like the actual answer. “More like particularly clever lab experiments. Part of their proposal for testing the viability of exogenesis, that's the terraforming technology they were working on, involved setting up a small village of humans on the newly terraformed world and seeing whether they managed to survive or not.”
A familiar look of disgust flashed across Weir's face before settling into a scowl. “...Why? With all of your people's technology I refuse to believe you would need to use actual humans for something like that.”
“I honestly don't know,” Eventus admitted. “If I were to guess I'd say it was supposed to be cover for something else they wanted to do with the humans. But if they ever told anyone it's not in any records I have access to.”
Letting out an annoyed breath, Weir stared straight into Eventus's eyes. “I can't believe I'm actually having to say this, but please make it clear to your people that they are not to experiment on any of ours.”
That was a fair enough request, though it had one rather glaring problem that Eventus didn't think Doctor Weir had stopped to consider. “What if they want to be experimented on?”
“...I'm sorry,” Weir began in a confused tone. “What?”
“What if they want to be experimented on?” Eventus repeated before clarifying when it became clear that Weir had meant that in the more general sense. “Seven of your scientists and two of your soldiers have come to me asking if I could make them into Elves, and literally every soldier I have talked to for an extended period of time has floated the question of whether I could give them superpowers of some kind.”
Holding up a finger to forestall Weir's response, he continued. “Theoretically yes, I could turn them into Elves, though I've never tested that genetic template on living humans before so there might be some small risk. And yes, I could also give them abilities roughly analogous to what you call superpowers.” He chuckled slightly. “Or just make them look like superheroes.”
A contemplative look settled across his features as he considered that on a more serious level. “You know, thinking about it I'm kind of surprised none of your people have asked Beckett about cosmetic work yet.”
Weir took a moment to massage the bridge of her nose before focusing back on Eventus. “I suppose given the type of personalities we focused on for the expedition I should have expected things like that, and while I can't forbid you from offering, I'm still going to ask that you don't.”
“Dont worry,” Eventus tried to reassure her. “Turning already grown people into elves or giving them superpowers is a multi month long project at a minimum that I absolutely do not have time for right now.” He cocked his head slightly as a possible workaround occurred to him. “Well, unless they wanted one of the already tested templates like Satedan or Kohalen.”
“That's…” Weir began, only to pause and give Eventus an odd look. “Kohalen?”
“A group of humans we engineered to have improved spatial awareness, kinesthetics, and flexibility." Eventus offered. “As I'm sure you can imagine, they were really great dancers.”
They had also speed run the discovery of unpowered flight, and probably would have done the same for powered flight if the Wraith War hadn’t reached them when it did.
It was clear from the look of intrigue on her face that Doctor Weir wanted to dig more into that particular subject, however she quickly collected herself. “As I was about to say, that’s a subject I’m pretty sure we’re going to be revisiting in the future, but for now I’m going to request that you don’t tell anyone else you can easily turn humans into super-soldiers.”
“I suppose that could cause problems,” Eventus agreed, easily able to imagine how the messy geo-politics of Earth might jump on something like that. “Does that include our ability to turn regular humans into Lanteans?”
It hadn’t been a thing they did often, but every now and then a Lantean would fall in love with a human and last together for enough centuries that it became clear the relationship wasn’t just a passing fancy.
“You can,” Weir began, only to scowl and shake her head. “No, of course you can, you started the same as us after all.”
“There’s the same small risk with already grown base humans as with any significant genetic alteration,” Eventus nodded. “But for anyone actually descended from us the process is about as safe as the ATA gene-therapy Doctor Beckett developed.”
“Then yes,” Weir sighed, sounding suddenly tired. “I’ll have a talk with Beckett and Miyagawa about the subject too.”
“You might want to give them a pass to do cosmetic work,” Eventus offered, thinking back to his earlier conversation with Rayla. “You can probably excuse the other things with the idea of unstudied risks, but cosmetic alterations were purposefully designed to be without danger to the person's health, non-inheritable, and easily reversible. And it’s going to be hard to keep it a secret after the first one of my people shows up looking significantly different then your people remember.”
A series of complicated expressions flitted over Weir’s features before settling into a sort of resigned acceptance. “Should we be on the look out for that?”
“Absolutely,” Eventus confirmed without even having to really think about it. “Both the Aurora and Tria’s crews are young enough that they won’t think twice about adjusting their looks if they start feeling self conscious about a thing. And with Milla’s confirmed pregnancy, I expect she’ll want to have the standard postpartum work done to restore her body to its pre-pregnancy state instead of waiting the months it takes to occur naturally.”
Weir stared at him for several seconds before speaking. “...Really?”
“What?” Eventus shrugged innocently. “We might not have all the cultural issues focused around personal appearance as you, but that’s after millions of years of working out scientific ways to avoid them.”
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Author’s Notes: If Weir thinks this is bad, just wait till she learns about all the other convince technologies the Lanteans actually have and give no thought too.