A/N: Thank you to my lovely reviewers, I'll try for monthly updates from now on. (Should give me time to write more of this as well as my other projects)

Chapter 22: Time to Science Part I
In which Victoria is injured in the name of science, Daniel meets Wingnut, and Rodriguez is decent.

"What's our status?" Dr. Isaacs asked, placing a fifth vial on the tray closest to him.

"We've gotten scrapings from most of the major organs, however the heart is posing a problem," Charlie replied, carefully closing the slit in the green teen's throat over her thyroid. "The density of her intercostals coupled with the size and placement of her lungs make it extremely difficult to maneuver."

Isaacs frowned. "Fine, pack up, close her up. You," he gestured to Bill, "get those samples to the lab. I want them on ice and ready for study by the time I get there."

"Yes, sir."

"And for the regeneration tests," the doctor said. "Left side; anterior dislocation of the humorous, crack radius, break ulna, splint lower arm, and fracture three ribs, true, false, and floating." He watched as Bill took his instructions down, making sure the younger man got them right. "Once those heal, repeat on the right and make note of the time difference between dominant and non-dominant sides."

"Yes, sir."

The doctor chose to ignore his assistant's tone and started striping off his gloves and scrubs, chucking them in the in by the door after marveling at the claret blood coating them. Red blood, she had red blood! This was astounding! With the difference in skin pigmentation, he was certainly surprised that the subject had the same colour blood as a normal mammal. It was most likely iron-based, given this fact, but more tests would have to be done to determine…

As the door closed, several sickening cracks echoed through the room, followed by someone running and dry heaving.

v v v

Daniel jogged after the small grey boy, following him through a labyrinth of hallways and down two flights of stairs before they came to a tall set of pocket doors similar to the ones in the…library-kitchen-room, with the exception that these had the name 'Rodger' neatly printed on them. He skirted through the doors just as they were closing and the second they snapped shut, the kid turned on him

"Who are you and how do you know my sister?" he demanded, a faint black glow rimming his green irises.

The archeologist raised his hands placatingly. "My name is Daniel Jackson; I'm a friend of Victoria's."

The boy's eyes narrowed, but lost some of their glow. "Prove it."

"Um… she's about so high, has green skin, purple eyes and hair, knows at least eight languages, and has an unhealthy obsession with blue raspberry Jell-O," he listed off quickly.

"Yeah, that's Ella." His interrogator relaxed, the glow fading to be replaced with worry. "Did she send you to check on me or something?"

Daniel quirked a brow at this. "Um, no…. I'm not actually sure how I got here, especially since Victoria's still missing."

"What do you mean, 'she's missing'?" Rodger – Victoria said she had a brother named Rodger, didn't she? – demanded.

"She was kidnapped five days ago," Daniel replied.

The kid paled even further and closed his eyes, pressing his knuckles to his temples with his face screwed up in concentration.

"Ok, um, a couple of days ago, did Victoria have any kind of weird dreams or fits or anything? Say anything weird in another language that you couldn't figure out?" the boy asked.

The green teen's nightmare from the previous weekend, coupled with the outburst and paint-job, came flooding back. "Yeah, she did."

"When was that?"

Daniel thought hard. "Exactly seven days ago."

"Ella you glorfmorka," the kid growled, running a hand over his face. At the man's confused look, he explained. "Three days ago, I accidentally switched bodies with her, trying to establish a link, and she failed to mention that."

Three days…. "You were the one she was singing to."

Rodger stared at him hard, his green eyes almost boring through his skull to poke through his mind itself (which, given who the kid was related to, wasn't too far of a stretch). After a few seconds, he had evidently found what he was looking for, because an expression of realization washed over his face and he nodded.

Silence reigned for a few moments, driving Daniel to awkwardly glance out the window, reminding him that he wasn't in Kansas anymore.

"Do you have any idea of how or why I'm here?" he asked. "And why you're the only one who can see me?"

"Victoria's probably acting as a magical mental conduit allowing for the unconscious transfer of thoughts between us," Rodger stated. Daniel blinked, trying to figure out a way that could work, and the boy sighed. "Um… her mind is acting kind of like a switchboard because we both have mental bonds with her."

"Then why isn't she here with me?" the archeologist asked, wrapping his head around the explanation.

"Most likely, she's in such a deep state of unconsciousness that she's not even on the mental plane."

Somehow, that wasn't reassuring.

Daniel opened his mouth to ask another question, only to have the entire…world, he guessed, melt away.

v v v

Victoria woke slowly. Sort of. She ascended to her usual mental plane slowly, at the very least, groaning at the ache that ran along her left side.

"Ah, crap," she murmured, probing her shoulder with light fingers without sitting up; dislocated, and it felt like the rest of that side wasn't in much better shape. She tentatively brushed the skin of her upper arm, trailing down to the lower and sending the tiny bit of magic she could spare into the abused limb to jump-start the healing process of the two fractures she felt.

The teen took a deep breath and immediately regretted it as fire laced down her ribcage.

"The fuck did they do to me?" she groaned, closing her eyes and sending a kiss of power to each of the three broken bones.

Somewhere between blinks she found herself in the real world, too-bright fluorescent lights abusing her irises in a steady stream past her face. Victoria looked around, trying to wrap her head around exactly what was happening.

She was on a bed (gurney?) which was moving (she was going head first, no way she could see where they were going), a bag of liquid dangling over her (I.V. bag, first fluids in…how many days? She wasn't sure…) and two shadowy figures guiding her chariot, one on either side. An experimental tug told her both that she was strapped down and that freaking EVERYTHING hurt. It felt like someone had cut her open and poked around for a bit which, glancing down at the bandages on her torso, didn't seem like much of a stretch, especially since her black tee and button-front shirt were both gone.

Victoria let her head fall back with a dizzying thud and let herself be hypnotized by the lights, humming something that vaguely resembled 'Stairway to Heaven' until she knew no more.

v v v

Sometime late Friday night, between coffee pots five and eight, Rodriguez wandered into the lab and disrupted Isaac's concentration by existing. He had been analyzing the samples (astounding colour to them, really just amazing) and recording cell growth rate (several types of tissue, the lungs and skeletal muscles, in particular, kept dividing! It was incredible!) when the psychologist stumbled in, looking for all the world like he had just wasted time doing something stupid, like sleeping.

He grabbed a mug and poured himself coffee, yawning and wandered towards Isaacs and his microscope.

"What's the prognosis?" the younger man asked, fighting back another yawn.

Isaac started to talk, explaining excitedly in words he knew Rodriguez wouldn't understand about cellular regeneration and abnormal pigmentation that isn't caused by a copper imbalance for some reason he can't fathom and the iron-based blood that still runs red even though the skin that bleeds it is green as a fucking leaf.

Rodriguez nodded absently along. "So, what's on today's schedule?"

'Today?' Alright, make that Saturday morning; perhaps the whole 'sleep' thing was justified.

"Tissue reconstruction analysis," Isaacs replied, looking back through the microscope lens.

"So, you're going to see how those injuries you inflicted are healing." Rodriguez had flipped through the older man's report over breakfast, deciding about halfway through that he wasn't all that hungry.

The physiologist grinned, unseen by the other man; yes, that's exactly what he meant, and if these tissue samples were anything to go by, it would be a magnificent sight.

v v v

The next time Victoria was aware of anything, she still hurt, but it was mostly the dull, throbbing pain of the body warning that something was still wrong, but it was being taken care of. She was back in her 'room,' the buzzing of the force field droning as she sat up, right hand rushing to her shoulder with a hiss, followed soon thereafter by a curse as agony blazed to life. Her shoulder was almost comically dislocated, folded in towards her sternum with the skin above her breast bulging out.

Biting back a series of increasingly colourful curses, she moved past it, almost laughing with relief that the only other injuries she could find were the ones she already knew about. Moving back to her shoulder, she fed magic into it to numb the area until the room started to spin.

The teen swung her legs over the side of her bed carefully, placing her bare feet (those bastards stole her shoes) on the cold concrete as she wracked her memory for Janet's lesson on dislocations from the week (or, what she thought was the week) before. Ever-so-carefully, she lowered herself to the floor, scooting to the foot of the bed.

"Spaso technique," she told herself through gritted teeth. "It's the Spaso technique." Victoria grabbed the metal leg around the same height as her collar bone, and moved back until her arm was straight and her lip was bleeding from her biting it.

"Ninety degree angle, check." Her vision was dimming, and she shook her head, breathing deeply through her nose until the darkness receded. She brought up her right arm, grabbing her humorous above the splint (how thoughtful, they splinted her arm but left her freaking shoulder on vacation in Utah without the rest of the joint) and slowly rotating it until a dull clunk and a sucking sensation told her it was back in place.

A strangled sob broke past her lips and she clutched her arm to her chest, curling around it protectively and perversely happy that no-one had thought to give her any food because she was almost certain that it wouldn't have stayed down.

v v v

"You didn't set her shoulder?" Dr. Isaacs roared, rounding on Bill. The smaller man shook his head and scurried away, probably to drop test tubes and spill acid on samples.

Rodriguez drew closer to the small television (Isaacs had bullied one of the techs into running the "almost live" video feed directly into the lab), inspecting the curve of the girl's back and the bones just visible through very dirty BDUs.

"Has anyone given her anything to eat?" he asked, freezing the other doctor and two assistants in place. They looked at each other guiltily as their boss turned an impressive shade of red. The psychologist took that as a "no."

"I'm going to bring our guest some breakfast while you work this out amongst yourselves," he informed them, rising and heading out the door as the fight resumed behind him.

His first stop was the storage room where MREs and other eatables were stored, and he grabbed a blue sports drink, a bottle of water, a large apple, and a few other things that he thought might come in handy before heading towards the teenager's cell.

v v v

A familiar buzzing tickled the edges of Victoria's senses, growing more persistent until the door opened and the shrink from before was there, smelling like sleep, coffee, and food. Her stomach grumbled in response, gnawing at her insides in a painful reminder that she hadn't eaten in several days.

She brought her head up to glare at him, stopping him halfway between the door and the folding chair from before. Hair fell into her line of vision and she growled, blowing it out of the way, unwilling to move from her protective crouch.

In response, the doctor moved slowly forward, stopping just short of where the force field was and laying out his load for her to inspect.

Two large bottles, one full of water and the other electric blue, caught her eye and the acute dryness of her throat made itself known as she tried to swallow without much success; a stack of protein and energy bars sat next to them, accompanied by an apple, an orange, and an MRE labeled as 'Mac and Cheese.'

"I thought you might be hungry," the shrink, Rodriguez, she thought, explained. He sank to his knees and opened the water, moving slowly and making sure she heard the crack of the seal breaking. Wrapping a hand around the neck, he took a sip himself before replacing the cap and rolling the bottle through the shield.

Neither breaking eye contact nor rising from her defensive huddle, Victoria caught the bottle with her right hand. She deftly unscrewed the cap with one hand and sniffed the liquid before tilting her head back and chugging the entire bottle in four gulps. Then she carefully replaced the lid, placing the bottle under the bed and turned her gaze to the blue liquid.

Rodriguez repeated the process, breaking the seal, sipping, and rolling the bottle through for Victoria to guzzle. That bottle joined the first and soon she had eaten three energy bars, the entire orange, and enough chocolate protein bars that her fingers tasted sweet.

The entire time, neither moved save for the systematic open-taste-close-slide and soon the psychologist felt that he could talk with a reasonable chance of the teenager answering.

"Are you feeling better?" he asked.

She sent him an incredulous look and glanced down at the bandages on her otherwise bare torso, the angry brown splotch on the left side of her chest that was the beginnings of a spectacular bruise, and the splint immobilizing her arm.

"I meant from the food, but yeah, stupid question, I guess." He scratched the back of his head in a manner so reminiscent of Daniel that it physically hurt and she averted her eyes. "Is there anything I can get for you?" he asked, noticing the goose bumps rising on her exposed green flesh.

Victoria eyed him wearily, glancing up at the dark corner she knew the camera to be in. Rodriguez followed her gaze, confused for a moment before he realized what she was looking for.

"We don't have microphones," he told her, turning back to the teen. "Just the camera."

The teen stared him for a long moment, possibly reading his mind if her file was right, before deciding that he was telling the truth.

She licked her chapped lips, relishing the moisture for a moment, before speaking. "A couple Advil and a sweatshirt would be nice," she croaked, only half joking.

The psychologist nodded, and rose to his feet. Unwilling to look submissive, Victoria followed suit, standing tall even as she curled her left arm close, supporting it with her right to not strain her shoulder.

Dried blood flaked off her bare stomach and clavicle, fluttering to the floor like macabre snow as her captor turned away.

"I'll see what I can do," he assured her before walking out the door, the steel clanging shut with an echo of finality.

v v v

"Report."

"Our two operatives have been back on active duty for two days, SG-1 is no closer to figuring out where the subject is, they'll be put back on active duty by Tuesday if Frasier can't find some excuse to keep Jackson in medical, and Hammond has started writing the consolation letter for her personnel file."

"Excellent. Any chance that SG-1 will stop looking for her?"

"Unlikely, but in four days they'll have no choice but to relegate it to non-work hours."

"Perfect. Can you get a copy of Hammond's letter?"

"Once it's put in the subject's personnel file I will be."

"Good. That might just be the push we need to break her."

"Understood; it'll be at drop off Omega Zed by Monday evening."

Coming Next Month:

Chapter 23: Bonds that Tie
In which unintentional consequences become apparent and sixteen-year-old logic prevails.