Qui Habitat

[domarzione]

Chorós

Nancy Clayton, Yoni Safir, et al. | 17k words

A Qui Habitat story that is remarkably indulgent. I meant it to be a counterpoint to the fact that my main narrators are military men of great power in the city and it is that, but I am not sure I'd consider it necessary to the universe. It doesn't cover new ground, just looks at existing territory from a new perspective and I found myself deleting parts to keep from being repetitive. But it has some good lines and some good parts and I wish everyone to read it. :)
 

Lieutenant Eriksson's entire platoon comes back from a trade mission with food poisoning, which is a problem because they were trading for food. Atlantis could never feed itself off of what comes in the holds of the Daedalus and Odyssey, but it's much worse now and they can't just throw away everything Eriksson's boys brought back with them. And so Medical has to design an experiment to figure it out after Plant Biology can't identify the culprit: they are going to make marines eat things until something makes them sick.

 

"Gentle poisoning," Carson offers with a shrug. "They've done themselves worse harm with their moonshine experiments."

 

"Payback for Weapons Company's near-deer stew," Yoni suggests instead.

 

Eriksson's platoon is not in Weapons Company and is exempted from the exercise. The marines are surprisingly game to eat until they either puke or get the shits, which is kind of exactly what they are being asked to do, but Nancy is reminded that they also volunteer for things like testing out the non-lethal crowd control stuff Engineering comes up with.

 

"You know what Marine stands for, Doc?" Fletcher, one of the Navy Corpsmen, asks. "Muscles Are Required, Intelligence Not Expected."

 

It's the grapes that are the problem, for the record.

Comments

[leonie_alastair]

I love the teaser. Your SGA world is so rich in detail. I'm looking forward to reading this!

[domarzione]

I hope you feel just as excited afterward. ;)

[vaznetti]

I finished the story this morning, and I really liked it -- I think it provides exactly the right kind of counterpoint to the main narrative, but it also felt in tone very similar to some of the other recent work you've done here, in the most recent chapters of Qui Habitat itself. I loved the slow creep of the disaster here, how distant it all is, until suddenly it isn't distant at all. It's been a while since I read all the other pieces and my brain is made of swiss cheese so I don't actively remember much about Nancy except what I read in this story but she seemed very real to me.

I love this AU. I'm always happy to see more of it.

[domarzione]

Thank you very much.

I tried to make Nancy as general-access as possible -- make everyone as general-access as possible so that they could be understood and be relevant without all the backstory. Pretty much everything I ever said about Nancy is in here as a result. :)

I'm very glad the 'slow creep of the disaster' is what you saw because the challenge of writing someone who is not part of the city hierarchy is how much they know or see. Unreliable narrators are hard. I deleted a lot of bits that seemed to perceive too much or thought too grandly about big ideas -- I got sucked into it a bit, but tried not to.