Chapter 1

Interrupted Weekend

Stargate Command

Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

United States of America

Earth

Four Hours Before SGC's First Contact

Major General Jack O' Neill, Stargate Command veteran, was feeling quite exhausted, having worked even more than his usual eighty hours this week. He had eaten, showered, and slept, as well as spent all his free time on call at Cheyenne Mountain's multi-floored SGC bunker. Jack was looking forward to chowing down lot of good wholesome junk food at the newly-opened Old West Coast Buffet, opened by the same folks who opened the same chain of restaurants known as the Old Country Buffet . Then perhaps they'd be watching a bigscreen movie in his residential town of Colorado Springs with Lieutenant Colonel Samantha 'Sam' Carter, Free Jaffa Nation-Earth Liason-in-Chief Teal'c of Chulak, and archaeologist/anthropologist/linguist good old Daniel 'Danny-Boy' Jackson. If their chief medical officer Carolyn Lam deemed it appropriate to release Lieutenant Colonel Cam Mitchell, then he could tag along with them on their weekend activities.

Too bad their buddy George Hammond was currently stuck in Washington running Homeworld Command and having to deal with one too many of the particualrly useless type of politicians, who didn't realize the full necessity of having Homeworld Command and its affiliated Stargaet Command exist. Therefore couldn't come along. Jack, Sam, and Daniel all missed the old coot for being the open-minded, inspiring, supportive, (and, to those who weer fortunate enought to know him well enough) humorous guy he was.

Jack, at this moment in his workday, only needed to wait a b it to follow up doing his part on certain SGC projects he'd either initiated or collaborated on by invitation. Then he finally got to jet the heck off the base for the day, hopefully getting to stay away for the entire weekend. If he didn't get to, then it was likely that, more than just in jest, he might find it necessary to even visit the resident psychiatrist voluntarily. He reflected on their recent week of expereinces thwarting the Ori's inisidious schemes to establish a foothold inside the Milky Way Galaxy.

It had been a pretty routine workweek at the SGC. Routine for those who worked at the SGC at the very least least,. In the time it'd had to deal with Earth's current major alien threat , it was indeed routine. Tau'ri who didn't work with/for the US's top top-secret military unit of Homeworld Command (including the SGC) might be entirely overwhelmed briefly, to know about the exploratory/defensive organization's work.

The SGC's flagship gate-team, SG-1, had been dealing with the likes of the Ori for quite a while now. Among their many powerful and ruthless enemies they had ever faced , the Ori seemed to be the most dangerous to face. They were the closest beings to having real godlike powers, having managed to become Ascended Beings, and were completely ruthless in winning control over all the unfortunate living beings they knew to exist in the universe. The Ori mantra seemed to be"Worship us like sickening sycophants or burn in the sadistic fires of our damnation." Not two very appealing choices. The SGC had been workingto achieve the third choice, which was to defeat the Ori. The odds of achieving this seemed to be lowly low to begin with. But the SGC had pulled off seemingly miracuslous feats that allowed them to kick their various enemies soudnly before. It was well, justa bit harder now.

In an accident caused by SGC associate Vala Mal Doran, the Ori found out there was plenty of life teeming in the Milky-Way Galaxy. That, very unfortunately included Earth; Earth people were just so consistently lucky now, weren't they? And sometimes their luck had just kept getting better and better in short periods of time.

But, frankly, to their great credit, against such daunting odds the SGC had managed again to ameliorate this dire situation. They'd thwarted the Ori so well the past two weeks that they'd incurred no Ori-related incidents for a relatively relaxing two additional weeks. Through human ingenuity and some help from their allies, they'd annoyingly outwitted the Ori, their lapdog Doci, and their lapdog Priors (former regular humans hyper-evolved by by the Ori doing a ridiculously high degree of genetic tampering into extremely pale-skinned religious officials who ).

The Ori were a major thorn in the side of the United States government and its allied governments, Homeworld Command, Stargate Command, and all freedom-loving peoples in the entire universe who had the GRAVE misfortune to ever run into these crusading fanatics. The relevant USA government secret operations and their foreign allies in the International Oversight Agency had managed to also jab thorns right into the Ori's figurative sides too. Yup, the Ori had realized that the Tauri (Earth humans) were very resilient and tenacious and were determined to use all their own tenacity they possessed to remove this bothersome thorn which was preventing them from dominating the poor victimizable cultures of the milky way galaxy.

The Ori had tended to get their own way in their own native galaxy of Cela ever since they'd started outnumbering the Alterran faction. Soon, they had the the guts to practice the 'jerkness' like O'Neill termed it, of banishing all the Alterran faction members from the government and all. They 'conciliatorily' instructed the Alterrans to either accept the wonderful, all-fulfilling ideology of Origin or die. The Alterrans had chosen neither; they could only decide to leave their once-united Avolorian cousins as a third option in order to evade having to choose either most underisrable of the first two. They fled the galaxy, leaving only one unspecified race of beings who had achieved the same level of advancement to resist the Oris' ambitions. This race was also divided into two factions, one peaceful and the other militantly expansionist. The Ori sent a delegation to each faction, requesting that they convert to Origin and that if they didn't, the ZOri would dole out some extremely unpleasant consequences. The peaceful faction replied in the negative. The militant faction also replied in the negative, although soon afetrwards they delcared war on the audacious Ori. Regardless, the Ori seemed to possess some quality which allowed them to defeat both factions' warfare services.

Indeed, this coalition of so-called so-called "inferior infidels" with the Tauri leading them, had somehow managed several times to foil the Ori in their overall attempt to continue shamelessly deceiving their mortal followers and gain newly converted victims. The Ori were getting frustrated that these mere mortals repeatedly outwitted their well-trained single Orici, single Doci, many Upper Priors, Middle Priors, and Lower priors, as well as their Priests, Deacons, Acolytes, and soldiers. Jack took immense pride in the people of Earths' If these dark-natured ascended beings rested during weekends, they probably longed for weekends for an excuse to take a break from hardily scheming only to have the Tauri involved heroically stop them, sometimes at the very last minute. And so, at least at this very point in time, the SGC found the Anti-Ori War to be proceeding manageably, and so they were going to take this predicted phase of time to prepare for encountering future difficulties, as well getting some vital rest and relaxation. When you worked at a place which was conducted frontline operations to defend Earth from such unssavory and unreasonable beings like the Go'auld and the Ori.

Sam Carter, not so unusually, was self-locked in her laboratory working on to help Earth stay in the fight longer and defeat the Ori. While she has, making those so that she could stop the Prior of all different ranks from. She was also working on improving the efficiency of the Daedelus Class Vessel'simrpving technology. Although she was jus starting, she the railguns, missiles, and

Daniel Jackson didn't completely like that everyone around the Milky Way galaxy referred to them as the Tau'ri-the standout race of humans that had brought the Go'auld System Lords to their knees. Sure; the Go'auld, being a powerful overlord race , had influenced the name they made for their, those of the First World of Humans, where all human cultures in the Milky Way had originated. But the inhabtants of Earth didn;t use that anemf or themselves. They were a formidable civilization, but other than Earthling, Earthans sounded mighty, down to-earth (Ok pun) and appropriate. he' ddecided to suggest that to Homeworld Command as their non-Goau'ld derived name. But MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY, this scholar of ancient civilizations (including the millions-to-billions of years old Ancients themselves) felt. Ifhe could just find and hope that the Orisians he weren't as bonheaded and so accept, then he could ensure that

Teal'c had been in what he deemed his 'combat laboratory' most of the day, testing out assualts on Ori armor. He wondered should they ever engage in close-quarters combat, how Homeworld Command personnel and their allies would do agaisnt the footsoldiers. He decided to introduce a tailor-made close quarters weapon to employ against them in this scenario. After all, he found that when the Homeworld Command could only deploy a fraction of the military force in personnel (and some weren't even)

Furling 'Paradise Planet'

Milky Way Galaxy

One Hour After SGC-Furling First Contact

Suddenly, the Furling archway opened and some beings walked out. They looked humanoid, but were definitely not human. Could these be the legendayr Furling who'd left this place behind after they returned or moved on to who-knows-where?

Two Hours After SGC-Furling First Contact

Lieutenant Colonel Rebecca Hynes was experiencing the THE most amazing experience in her life. She'd already experienced more amazing stuff than even NASA astronauts and other Earth space-agencies' astronauts had experienced. But after she and her team had arrived on this planet hoping to salvage some Furling technology in the hopes of using it against the Ori, she'd found a lot more than just Furling-manufactured items which were millions of years. On top of that, she'd now encountered actual Furling! How exciting! And to top even that off, these Furling acted differently towards the 'primitive' Earthans than a lot of more advanced races did. It couldn't be that unlike the Eurondans, they were being falsely civil and welcoming in order to gain some . No, these were the Furling after all, one of the Alliance of Four Races . They had ethics that had come to expect members of the Four Races to have. Becky could be pleansantly surprised thought, that unlike the

Rebecca and SG-2 had really lucked out this time. Usually SG-1 as the generally flagship team got to experience all the cool off-planet stuff first before any of the other SGC personnel got a chance. This time, however, they got a nice one-up over SG-1. Boy,wouldn't Jack (former SG-1 team member) Daniel Jackson, sam Carter, and Teal'c like to know what she knew right now about this race who were contempories of the Ancients themselves! She wondered how close, when each former and current SG-1 team member had been.

She sipped another Furling-provided beverage container full of their equivalent of sparkling water. She felt that both the thermos and the. The Four Great Races It was a conistentcharcateristic of the Furlings that SG-1 had deduced from their first visit to the Paradise Planet. It was elegant

Colonel Hynes couldn't wait to tell her colleagues at the SGC, especially SG-1, that she had just actually met the missing Furling that their senior stargate team had yet to get lucky enought to meet.

Stargate Command

Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

United States of America

Earth

Two Hours After SGC-Furling First Contact

Colonel Samantha Carter stuck her head into General O'Neill's plush office, at least plush by military standards. "Jack, you look like you'er ready to call it the end of your workday. So am I finally. I think I'm done working on everything I need to do and all the unofficial tasks I do using my spare time.

"Wow, Carter!-", Jack responded in complete disbelief. "Imagine that!. For once, Samantha Carter has no urge to work overtime at the SGC investigating advanced scientific concepts and alien inventions or inventing/tweaking her previous inventions. Are you feeling a bit strange today, Sam? A bit not your usual fun-avoiding self it would seem? "

Ever since Jack had statrted working with Sam at the SGC, he knew her to be the supreme workaholic of workaholics, whenever she happened to be working on a physics-related project. When it came to publishing field reports, like every other SGC member, Carter didn't show as much enthusiasm.

Sam only grinned knowingly with quickly raised eyebrows. "Well, since you had to mention it, I do wish I could continue to experiment with upgrading our Anti-Prior Device. However, I need to face the reality that I can't do another thing until. And I believe I've acted on every single idea I curreently could devise in my brain."

Jack nodded with an interested look. "For once, eh?," he smirked deviosuly.

O'Neill then added "Really hoping those other two show up quickly, I'm quite impatient to finally get the hell off this confining way-below-ground-base."

Just then, they could hear Teal'c and Daniel coming down the hall, discussing whether a neutrally-minded gamer would favor the Tomb Raider video game series and the Uncharted: Drake's fortune/Tomb Raider video game series or the Halo video game series /Crysis video game series.

The two argued back and forth with great conviction and skill.

"Daniel Jackson, I believe we must, as the Earthans say, "Agree to disagree."

"Yeah-I guess so, Teal'c. Otherwise we could continue discussing this for, ho who knows-maybe the rest of the year."

"Indeed. It is wise to cease at this point and engage in other more productive forms of leisure activity, such as basketball for example, in which I usually win. Dion't you agree, Daniel Jackson?" Teal'c chuckeled maniacally.

Right after that, the two SGC staff members started a conversation about comparing the Halo races to the races in their galaxy and the other galaxies they knew about.

"The UNSC-aligned Humans would be the equivalent of the Tauri- the Earthans, Daniel Jackson," Teal'c stated this easiest parallel race comparison to the Earth inhabiting humans. They may be less advanced regarding knowledge of the natural sciences and technology than the covenant, but they possess great potential for development, and are prodigious sometimes at developing their knowledge base." Teal'c liked this new name that Jack and Daniel had devised as a homegrown name for this emerging galactic power based on planet Earth.

"Absolutely accurate." Daniel totally agreed.

"Biased a bit of course though." he added and smirked lightly.

Other than the two men agreeing that hard-core fans of either genre would ultimately end up favoring either genre, the two men were enthusiastically arguing away, but not agreeing at all. Teal'c had been purchasing many X-Boxes and shipping them to the Free Jaffa Nation's Anti-Ori Faction temporarily-relocated resistance headquarters. He figured the bored jaffa would rather like them, and it would help them experience a more similar entertainment quality to the Tau'ri. Most Jaffa had been too busy slaving away for their exploitative false-god masters over the centuries to experience such fun mediums of entertainment or to develop homegrown versions with similar functions.

In the middle of debating video games, they heard Chief Master Sergeant Walter Harriman announcing "Unscheduled offworld activation."

O Neil looked up in tremendous frustration at their long weekend being interrupted, stomped his foot and said, l said "[the four ancient races] superdamn them if our base alarm is sounding b/c of those power-hungry, megalomanical, galactic/universal pestilent, evilly persistent, ruthless, parasitic, energy-sapping, soul-buying, deceiving, tastelessly god-posing, overly dramatic, genocidal, brainwashing, nothing-better-to-do than committing tasteless acts of evil…. "

"It is fine to be talking in principle, but you should also keep walking conscientiously and safely O'Neill." said Teal'c smirking moderately. "You are coming the closest to meeting Daniel Jackson's unbroken record of causing casualties just walking down the corridors of this base!"

He gently taking him by the arm to move him forward in safe manner for himself and for others behind and in front of him. Sam and Daniel struggled behind them to keep up with the superhuman Jaffa.

When they got to the gateroom, O'Neill greeted Sergeant Harriman w/ a nod and quick wave and said, "Well, Walt—I'm guessing this is definitely a positive occurrence of an emergency level."

Harriman grinned with his eyes gleaming and his mouth corners upturning excitedly, nodding continously. "Oh yeah, general. You'll want to brace yourself for the exciting, positively shocking nature of this news."

O'Neill responded. "Well., the most positive I can think of is one of our SG team just found how to miraculously defeat the Ori in two minutes."

Walter Harriman "Well, not nearly that good. But not so shabby either in any way. SG2 just found some Furlings on planet SG-1's been to before, and Colonel Hinsworth just confirmed she believes undoubtedly that it is them!"

Colonel Samantha Carter stuck her head into Jack O'Neill's plush office, at least plush by military standards. "Jack,you look like you'er ready to call it the end of your workday. So am I finally. I think I'm done working on everything I need to do and all the unofficial tasks I do using my spare time. "Wow, Carter", Jack said. "Imagine that. For once, Samantha Carter has no urge to work overtime at the SGC investigating advanced scientific concepts and alien inventions or inventing/tweaking her previous inventions. Are you feeling a bit strange today, Sam? A bit not your usual fun-avoiding self it would seem? " Sam only grinned knowingly with quickly raised eyebrows."

O'Neill then added "Really hoping those other two show up quickly, I'm quite impatient to finally get the hell off this confining way-below-ground-base."

Just then, they could hear Teal'c and Daniel coming down the hall, discussing whether a neutrally-minded gamer would favor the Tomb Raider/Uncharted: Drake's fortune games or the Halo/Crysis games.

"I believe we shall simply have to agree to disagree, then Daniel Jackson." Teal'c suggested.

They then got down to comparing the Halo races with the races they'd encountered.

"The Tauri. the Earthans (using Jack O'Neill and Daniel Jackson's proposed homegrown name for the Earth inhabitants) are most similar to the UNSC-aligned humans." Teal'c commented. "And

"Big yup to both." Daneil agreed totally.

"The Go'auld are similar to the Covenenant because they both scavenge technolgies from much more advanced races, which I emphasize greatly that they do not truly comprehend signifcantly. Additionally, I argue that the Go'auld are also similar to the Covenant, at least the so-called Prophets to the very end. "

"And what about the parasitic organism known as The Flood" Daniel inquired with great curiosity.

"I believe a certain someone has become interested in the which-race-is-what theme of the Halo series, my friend"n Teal'c assessed.

'Whoa-no, no-I'm not intertsed in the entire game per say, I'm just interesdted in the new races' physiology, ideology, ya know-all that stuff." Daniel protested.

"Well, allow me to satisfy your curiosity abhout these beings known as 'The Flood' Daniel. In the sense that they possess other beings' bodies and use them as their own, they are akin to the Go'auld. However, they also act like the Replicators in that they wish to reproduce and . They might be like the Borg to in that sense, or "

Other than the two men agreeing that hard-core fans of either genre would ultimately end up favoring either genre, the two men were enthusiastically arguing away, but not agreeing at all. Teal'c had been purchasing many X-Boxes and shipping them to the Free Jaffa Nation's temporarily-relocated resistance headquarters. He figured the bored jaffa would rather like them, and it would help them experience a more similar entertainment quality to the Tau'ri. Most Jaffa had been too busy slaving away for their exploitative false-god masters over the centuries to experience such fun mediums of entertainment or to develop homegrown versions with similar functions.

In the middle of debating video games, they heard Sergeant Siler announce the alarm-raising phrase "Unscheduled offworld activation." over the intercom.

O Neil looked up in tremendous frustration at anticipating that their long-desired weekend was being interrupted, possibly completely. Jack stomped his foot and complained, "Well, now! Superdamn them if our base alarm is sounding b/c of those power-hungry, megalomanical, galactic/universal pestilent, evilly persistent, ruthless, parasitic, energy-sapping, soul-buying, deceiving, tastelessly god-posing, overly dramatic, genocidal, brainwashing, nothing-better-to-do than committing tasteless acts of evil…. "

"It is fine to be conversate, in principle, at this moment, but you should also keep walking conscientiously and safely O'Neill." said Teal'c recommended, smirking moderately. "You are coming the closest to meeting Daniel Jackson's unbroken record of causing casualties just walking down the corridors of this base!"

He gently taking him by the arm to move him forward in safe manner for himself and for others behind and in front of him. Sam and Daniel struggled behind them to keep up with the superhuman Jaffa.

When they got to the gateroom, O'Neill greeted Sergeant Harriman w/ a nod and quick wave and said, "Well, Walt—I'm guessing this is definitely a positive occurrence of an emergency level."

Harriman grinned with his eyes gleaming and his mouth corners upturning excitedly, nodding continously. "Oh yeah, general. You'll want to brace yourself for the exciting, positively shocking nature of this news."

O'Neill responded "Well, the most positive I can think of is one of our Stargate Teams just found how to miraculously defeat the Ori in two minutes or less. Although I'd prefer "

Sam Carter responded, "Em, the Ori got a terrible ascended 'cold' and decided to take a lot of sick months off from trgeting us?"

Daniel Jackson , "Um, the Ori have been reflecting their behavior for the past millions of years and they had a great epiphany that they were acting wrongly. Therefore, they've decided to change their diplomatic relations with us and we needn't worry anymore about their hostile reactions.

Teal'c replied, "The Ori have decided to proselytize peacefully?"

Walter Harriman "Well, not nearly that good. But not so shabby either in any way. SG-2 just found some Furlings on planet SG-1's been to before, and Colonel Hinsworth just confirmed she believes undoubtedly that it is them!"

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