Stargate SG-4: 2005 Sessions
This page covers sessions 9-20 of our Stargate SG-4 campaign.
Mosaic of Blood (Part 1) — P5A-859, session 9
“The sins of the past should not doom us to paint a mosaic of blood.” — Riechsführer Reichtmann
We started this one out back at the SGC, with no upcoming mission: Dr. Raynes took a two day pass and visited her family in Nevada, Lt. Green caught up on his sleep, and Capt. Decker rested up in the infirmary. Upon her return, Dr. Raynes said she had had a terrible time, but wouldn’t elaborate. While in the infirmary, Capt. Decker asked Dr. Gardner to join SG-4 on a permanent basis, and she said that she would consider it.
Shortly thereafter, we were summoned to the control room — to find that a gate address had been recovered from one of the NID laptops. We watched as the MALP went through…and found Nazi World: a concrete bunker, very much like the SGC’s embarkation room, with a sign in German on one wall. And no dialing device.
Gen. Hammond intended to let the MALP gather data for a couple of hours, but authorized SG-4 to go through the gate after that. We reasoned that we could always wait for their scheduled check-in call via the gate, and then ask Hammond to send through the SGC’s naquada reactor to get us home (by dialing manually from Nazi World).
Dr. Gardner accompanied us — which was good, because she was the only one who spoke German. Once through, we discovered that the enormous blast door required a code to activate, which meant we were trapped in the entry chamber for another eight hours.
Or rather, until the space Nazis carrying zat guns and strangely modified MP40s opened it for us, and then took us prisoner.
After some back-and-forth between Oberst Herrscher (whose name we later learned) and Dr. Gardner, our translator, we were put on the back of a transport truck and taken to the Riechsführer’s mansion. During this time, there was a great deal of disagreement between the members of SG-4 about the nature of this planet — were these really Nazis? If so, were they Nazi Nazis? Decker fell firmly in the space Nazi camp, while Raynes thought we shouldn’t judge the book by its cover; Green leaned towards Raynes’s point of view, but felt less strongly about it.
Left to our own devices in the Riechsführer’s audience chamber, we examined his enormous portrait of Hitler, the strange melange of architectural styles — German, French, Greek and a little bit of Egyptian, all with a 1940s flair — and the contents of one of his desk drawers (from which Deck palmed a letter opener). Still unbound and no longer being treated like prisoners, we were introduced to Riechsführer Reichtmann, who seemed pretty genial for a space Nazi.
We were given quarters, and after some explanations on both sides Reichtmann agreed to get us back to the gate room for our scheduled check-in call, and invited us to a gala dinner. We found out that the world was called Löweheim, and that it was populated by a branch of the German army that had travelled through the stargate in 1943 to establish an offworld military base. They appeared to have no genocidal intentions, and did not know the war’s outcome — and Reichtmann seemed so sincere that even Decker (despite channelling Jack O’Neill) started to wonder about the whole space Nazi thing.
Our equipment having been returned to us, we showed up for dinner with slung MP5s, grenades, and full tactical gear. Further discussion over the meal continued to suggest that the people of Löweheim, while they continued in the military tradition of the country they had abandoned fifty years ago, might really be on the level. And they were most interested in finding out how to operate their stargate, which they claimed not to be able to do. We were also apparently their first visitors since the last migration, and they were eager for news of the war (which we gave them in bits and pieces, mindful of shocking them with the outcome).
That night, we caught a servant — who did not appear to be German — snooping around in our quarters. She told us that all was not as it seemed, and that the rooms were bugged. Out on the balcony, we found out that her people had inhabited the planet for hundreds of years before the Germans arrived, and that they were now essentially slaves. She also said she wanted to show us something — something that would convince us of the truth of her words.
Leaving Dr. Gardner to talk to herself and run the bath (for the benefit of the listening devices), we climbed down the building and left the grounds, following the servant, Alizia. She led us through the town to a warehouse compound, where we scaled the wall and made a tremendous amount of noise sneaking up to one of the warehouses.
We wound up in a firefight with two guards — who were firing what looked like MP40s, but shot like intars. We returned fire with zats, pistols and grenades, which didn’t exactly help the whole “stealth” thing. Before polishing off the guards and fleeing the compound, we got to see part of what Alizia wanted to show us: a warehouse full of WWII-style tanks with Death Glider cannon mounted on them.
Alizia led us to an underground tunnel complex that was the headquarters of her resistance movement. Before heading in, we radioed Dr. Gardner and got no answer — but wounded and pursued, we couldn’t do anything for her just then anyway. We opted to wait out the pursuit, and got to meet the leader of the resistance: Hadar Herrscher, a German who knew about the Goa’uld, and who did not align himself with his countrymen.
Unfortunately, we led the Nazis straight to us, and Hadar urged us to go before we were captured. We pledged to help his people — and the people of the other worlds he said the Nazis had visited through the gate (proving Reichtmann a liar yet again) — and he stayed in the tunnels to die. Alizia led us outside…
…where we got caught between a German patrol and a transport truck carrying another patrol — and a 50 cal. We fought for our lives, and Dr. Raynes tried to carry Alizia to safety after the servant fell to machine gun fire. Good grenade work from Lt. Green took out the 50 cal in one fell swoop, and another from Decker took the smaller patrol out of action for a bit. But the other patrol did us in: firing and retreating, carrying and protecting Alizia as we backed into the woods, all but Dr. Raynes were taken down by intar fire. SG-4 fought bravely, and long past the point where “surrender” really should have entered our vocabulary.
It certainly seemed lethal at the time, but as it turned out their intars had a stun setting, and we found ourselves revived and sharing a prison cell. Reichtmann, the Oberst, several guards, and Dr. Hoffmann (soon to be our torturer) showed up to gloat, demand that we tell them how to use our GDO, and then promise to torture us until we did.
To be continued…
Respondeat Superior (Part 2) — P5A-859, sessions 10 and 11
The space Nazis came for Dr. Raynes first, and took Dr. Gardner away shortly thereafter. Dr. Hoffmann tortured Grace like it was going out of style: countless zaps from a pain stick, acid, flesh-eating bacteria — everything he could think of to make her share her secrets, and intimidate Dr. Gardner into spilling the beans as well.
It didn’t work.
Somehow, against all odds, Grace spit venom right back at Hoffmann, and didn’t tell him a single useful piece of information. (Her bravery in the face of incredible adversity prompted Capt. Decker to recommend her for a commendation upon SG-4’s return to Earth.)
Meanwhile, Lt. Green and Capt. Decker put their amazing theatrical abilities on display, trying to get the lone guard outside their cell to come close enough to the bars that they could go for his gun. It might have worked out a bit better if, after Capt. Decker "died” during their mock fight, he hadn’t whispered, “Did he buy it? Is he coming this way?” in full view of the guard.
When bluffing failed, Green and Decker charged the cell door — and broke it wide open, bowling straight through and into the guard. A brief firefight later, the doctors were free, the guards we unconscious, and Grace had snapped Hoffmann’s neck.
We made our escape in a stolen staff car — which, by the time we had run over several Nazis, engaged in a mile-long running firefight with our pursuers, belted through the city at unsafe speeds, and blown a roadblock, was no longer so much a car as a bullet-riddled chassis barely capable of coming to a controlled stop. During the chase, the members of SG-4 soaked up enough hurtin’ to bring all of us within shouting distance of death — but on the other hand, we killed all of our pursuers, destroyed the roadblock by disabling their truck (which subsequently exploded), and got away clean.
Alizia led us to a Goa’uld weapons cache — long since abandoned — out in the forest, and we holed up there for the night. During this time, Sarah did her best to bring Dr. Raynes back into the land of the vaguely healthy using a Goa’uld healing device. Repeated uses of the device left her fatigued, but also got SG-4 back into fighting shape. Leaving the cache with grenades and zats in hand, we headed back into the city to rescue Alizia’s daughter.
We found that the roadblock had been rebuilt, and an unpleasant surprise had been added: a tank sporting a death glider cannon. Crazy driving by Capt. Decker, more excellent shooting by Lt. Green, and a superbly-placed grenade from Dr. Raynes (which rolled under the tank and went off with enough force to lift it off the ground) got us through, and the rescue was accomplished shortly thereafter.
Hadar had given us an old code that was supposed to open one of the bunker’s secret entrances, so we proceeded there next. The code worked, and we made our way down to the Stargate level via the elevator shaft. With everyone still seriously wounded, we tried to be cautious at first, but that didn’t last long. We left a string of dead and unconscious space Nazis in our wake as we hauled ass for the control room — where, naturally, we found the Oberst waiting for us.
Even after the gate operators had been restrained, and Lt. Greeen had killed the Oberst’s guard, she remained unperturbed — and she had our GDO. Lt. Green and Capt. Decker tried to knock her out, and she took both of us down with a couple of well-placed punches. Retrieving a zat, she knocked out Dr. Gardner…leaving only Dr. Raynes. The doctor stabilized the rest of SG-4 before turning her attention back to the Oberst.
She offered Grace a choice: leave, or die with her friends. Grace left, returned through the gate after the Oberst dialed Earth. Back at the SGC, she immediately ordered that code to be stricken from the dialing computer — and then was as surprised as everyone else when the unconscious bodies of the other three members of SG-4 were unceremoniously tossed through the gate. For reasons unknown, the Oberst had returned us all home.
Interlude: SG-4’s Infirmary — Earthside, session 12
Once again, our last mission put every member of SG-4 in the infirmary — leading someone on base to tape up a sign over the word “Infirmary” that made it read “SG-4’s Infirmary.”
During our recovery, the fact that Sarah had experienced another “moment” while in the bunker came up, and coupled with the time in the jail when the team was separated this prompted Capt. Decker to recommend that SG-4 undergo zatark testing.
Hammond gave the okay, the Tok’ra were contacted, and we all went through the tests. This brought back horrific memories of Dr. Raynes’s torture for Sarah, as well as forcing her to use a Goa’uld memory button, and left her shaken. Dr. Raynes, however, was forced to reveal that she had left the rest of SG-4 behind — thinking that the Oberst was going to kill us anyway, and wanting to warn the SGC about the Space Nazi threat to Earth. Coupled with being made to run through her torture in detail during the testing, this caused her to seethe with hatred for Captain Decker.
While Lt. Green and Capt. Decker tried to avoid the two doctors and their ire, Grace and Sarah researched the connection between the Go’uld and Löweheim. Dave and Aaron wound up sparring with Teal’c (to knock out Deck: one punch; to knock out Dave: three punches).
Over the course of the next few days, the tension between Grace and Deck came to a boil — Grace said if she had to make her choice agan, she’d do the same thing, and Deck toed the “I come from a military family, you never leave a man behind” party line. This wasn’t resolved, but rather set aside for consideration after SG-4’s next mission.
After she expressed concern that we didn’t trust her, Sarah was officially invited to join SG-4. This was cleared with Hammond, and for the first time since Extreme left the team, we had a full complement again. Sarah seemed reasonably content with this, having come to the decision that her life was never going to go back to normal — and that at least this way, she’d be doing something with her knowledge.
Shortly thereafter, we all ran to the control room in response to an uncheduled offworld activation alert. SG-10 came through the gate, apparently embroiled in some sort of argument — and then Lt. Colville drew his sidearm and shot Capt. Moore twice in the back.
Trying to stave off further tragedy, SG-4 converged on the gate room. With Hammond ordering everyone to stand down, and all three remaining members of SG-10 pointing guns at each other, Grace gave first aid to Capt. Moore. Dave zatted one of our crazed comrades, while Deck rushed the other two and boxed them out of comission (taking two bullets in the process).
Tragedy averted, we all wound up once again in…”SG-4’s Infirmary.”
Humdrum - Earthside, sessions 13 and 14
SG-4 was fresh out of the infirmary when we heard the incoming wormhole alarm. All of us ran to the observation room, where we saw SG-10 coming through the gate. They seemed very agitated, and before they’d even made it down the ramp Lt. Colville drew his sidearm and shot Capt. Moore. SG-4 raced down to the gate room.
Once there, Capt. Decker exercised his typical caution and rushed SG-10. He took two bullets in the process, but knocked out two members of the team. Lt. Green zatted the third standing member of SG-10, and Dr. Raynes administered first aid to the wounded man.
SG-10 turned out to be suffering from some sort of extreme allergic reaction, so they were isolated while under Dr. Frasier’s care. At the same time, strange things began occurring throughout the base — such as the gate dialing itself, and other quirky little mishaps. Gen. Hammond locked down the base, and SG-4 was tasked with figuring out what was going on.
Dr. Raynes and Dr. Gardner focused on the samples that SG-10 had brought back with them from P3X-457, while Lt. Green and Capt. Decker volunteered to sweep the base with TERs (SG-4’s default response to unusual base activity). Naturally, whatever was affecting SG-10 began spreading to the rest of the base at this time, although no one knew it yet.
So while the two doctors checked over the samples — a plant stalk of some kind, and a dessicated squirrel — Decker and Green wigged out.
The Captain realized — and how could he have missed this before? — that the women on base were responsible for everything that was going wrong. The Lieutenant realized — and how could he have missed this before? — that technology was eeeeevil. While Green began divesting himself of all of his gadgets (starting with his TER), Decker suggested that they systematically incapacitate all of the women on the base.
With Hammond and the rest of his command team sealed up so that they could observe the base without also becoming infected, it wasn’t long before Green’s and Decker’s unusual behavior was noticed. Hammond paged us to a base phone, and Decker indicated that we were about to reconnoiter the womens’ locker room — at which point Green realized that the phone had been corrupted, and zatted it.
At this, the two doctors were dispatched to round up the Captain and the Lieutenant, and take over the troubleshooting operation. A madcap series of events ensued, including:
- Decker and Green zatting someone in the womens’ locker room, and then stuffing her into a locker
- A food fight between infected base personnel in the cafeteria (ended when Green and Decker zatted everyone present, but especially the women)
- Green’s deep conviction that the Goa’uld were controlling us through the lighting system (by which point, he was carrying a club — and he and Decker were feeding off of each other’s psychoses)
- An encounter with Danny Crane, who believed the base was under attack by Jaffa — which later turned out to be completely true, as Maj. Crane heroically defended the base single-handedly from actual Jaffa (he was also convinced that women were the source of all ills — which in retrospect, was just Maj. Crane being Maj. Crane, and not allergy-induced psychosis)
- Dr. Frasier dancing seductively in her office — at which point she was rushed by Green, who smashed her radio to bits and then ran away and hid
- Dr. Frasier strapping Capt. Decker to a gurney and trying to have her way with him, which under normal circumstances would have been fantastic (but in this case only led to incredible awkwardness when everything was over)
- Dr. Raynes and Dr. Gardner discovering Decker and Green — by this point, raving lunatics — and subduing us in the infirmary…
- …and shortly thereafter, Dr. Green zatted a hazmat-suited airman, believing him to be a hostile alien (note: she was not infected)
At this point, the safety of the base was in the hand of Dr. Raynes and Dr. Gardner — among the few who had not succumbed to the infection.
They were able to talk Lt. Green and Capt. Decker into staying reasonably sane for long enough to help them make it back to SG-10’s samples. She had figured out that there probably was something invisible running around the base, and this was when Capt. Decker spread caustic powder all over the infirmary — thinking it was talcum powder — in an effort to spot its footprints. (This didn’t work out very well…)
We recruited SG-10 (now apparently recovered) along the way, and sent them off to check on the Jaffa invasion (which we all thought wasn’t real). Re-arming ourselves, SG-4 regrouped and returned to the spot where the samples were being stored, and Dr. Raynes began examining them in earnest.
Naturally, we found that one of them was gone and the other one had moved. And naturally, Dr. Raynes opted to dissect the one that was still there — which, despite looking like a twig, turned out to be alive enough to emit a piercing, high-pitched screech. This was when the one that had disappeared returned, and starting biting Dr. Raynes.
Unfortunately, no one else could see it, and hilarity ensued as we tried to shotgun it off of the spot on her back where we thought it was. Miraculously, she wasn’t killed — and a lucky shotgun blast caught the little bastard in midair, vaporizing it. After that, enough still-rational personnel were assembled to administer a cure for the strange allergic reaction, and the base returned to normal.
Once everything was shipshape again, Hammond held a commendation ceremony in the gate room. Notable awards included a commendation for Maj. Crane for holding off the Jaffa assault on his own, and a commendation for Dr. Raynes for her bravery under extreme duress on Nazi World.
A brief, somewhat awkward visit to the infirmary later, we were once again ready for action — and Lt. Green received a phone call from his missing sister…
Façade — Earthside, sessions 15 and 16
After receiving a call from his missing sister, Lt. Green visited Capt. Decker in his quarters and asked for permission to leave the base. As SG-4 was on standby, Deck refused — and asked what was going on, since the LT was obviously pretty worked up. Dave wouldn’t share any details, so Deck and Dr. Raynes approached him later in the day, told him they knew he was planning to sneak out of the base, and said that they were going with him.
That proved to be unnecessary, because once Dave told us about the call we went to Hammond, and he gave the go-ahead for SG-4 to investigate. Specifically, the call told Dave to come to an alley behind a local bar — alone — to meet his sister.
We scoped the place out, and set up a signal system in case of trouble. With Deck and Grace close by, Dave waited for his sister, Sara, in the alley. She showed up, and told him that she needed his help. She acted strange, and wouldn’t approach him too closely, and he knew something was up. Just when he had figured out that she was a hologram, she passed on a message — for Maybourne: “Tell him the following: 0-27, 92-11. Do you have that? Make sure you tell him 0-27, 92-11.”
We went back to base and spent some time researching the numbers, but with no real success. Dave guessed that they were a latitude and longitude — but for what, we didn’t know. If that was the case, the coordinates pointed to somewhere in the Atlantic ocean.
At a dead end, we received word that Major Carter had tracked down the possible source of a hacker’s signal — someone had been browsing through the base’s computer system. The signal originated somewhere in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and armed with only that info SG-4 was tasked with a new mission: track down the origin of the signal.
As undercover U.S. military personnel waaaaay out of our jurisdiction, Gen. Hammond asked us to keep things low key. Low key, SG-4. Which of these things is not like the other?
Arriving in Cabo San Lucas, we hired a cabbie for the day and drove around looking for the model of satellite antenna Carter thought the hacker had used. After a fruitless search of the radio tower site atop a nearby mountain, we turned our attention to electronics stores. On our cabbie’s recommendation, we checked out one likely store — and after Dave successfully figured out the local culture (large bribes are welcome), we learned that one such dish had been sold recently to a gringo.
Our search then took us to the marina, where we spotted a motor yacht sporting that same antenna. At that point, we spent the better part of a day trying to come up with a suitable plan for boarding the yacht — figuring that it was stuffed to the gills with rogue NID agents and jaffa, naturally. In the end, we just rented a dinghy and went out there in broad daylight.
Aboard, we found ex-Colonel Maybourne.
In the course of interrogating him, Lt. Green shot him with a zat.
Then, after learning that Maybourne — Harry — was no longer either NID or rogue NID, real rogue NID agents came after us on a cigarette boat. Deck fired up the yacht and tried to outrun them.
Through a sailing regatta, which resulted in several boats being smashed to pieces or capsized.
Then by the classic “charge a large object at high speed (a bigger boat) and hope the bad guys run into it” method.
Which they did. At high speed.
Resulting in a massive fireball that was probably visible from space. As opposed to, say, a low-key fireball.
We then limped our way to a nearby hotel marina — our boat leaking oil and full of bullet holes — and threw several members of the hotel staff into the water when they tried to stop us. Realizing that Maybourne could leave at any time, without us having learned a thing, we agreed to tell him what we knew.
As it turned out, we knew the coordinates for a ring point aboard an Al-kesh orbiting Earth — and under the control of a group called the Trust, rogue-rogue-NID scumbags. We promised to do our best to take them out (which was what Maybourne wanted), and then parted ways with Harry.
Returning to base expecting to have hit another dead end — as the SGC didn’t control a set of rings — we instead learned about one of the SGC’s best kept secrets: the Prometheus. After being roundly chastised by Gen. Hammond for nearly causing an international incident, we were given clearance to board the Prometheus, get up into orbit, and ring over to the Trust’s Al-kesh. There, presumably, we would find Lt. Green’s sister.
We boarded the Prometheus — a wonder-inducing experience for all of SG-4 — and headed for orbit, where we activated the rings and found ourselves aboard the Al-kesh. Not considering that the Trust, while certainly scumbags, were misguided, well-meaning scumbags, we came for a fight — and we got one.
After gunning down several Trust heavies on the Al-kesh’s bridge, we chased one back to the rear of the ship. There, Lt. Green found that the surviving Trust agents were holding his sister hostage at gunpoint — and he tried to trick them into thinking he was unarmed. Meanwhile, having some idea of what was going on on the other side of the ship, Deck and Grace were trying to break into the rear chamber to take the Trust agents by surprise.
Dave’s maneuver failed, and the Trust agents shot his sister in the head — and then beamed off the ship via their prototype Asgard teleportation device. Not thinking that the Trust had abandoned the ship much too easily, we worked on getting Sara Green back to the Prometheus — and found out the hard way that the Trust had rigged the Al-kesh to explode.
The bomb went off just as the last of us ringed off of the ship, and the Al-kesh — which could have been a fantastic asset for the SGC, and for Earth — was blown to pieces.
With one surviving Trust prisoner, and with Sara Green in critical condition, we returned to the SGC to see what we could salvage from this disastrous operation.
Swords & Knives — Aboard a Spaceship, sessions 17 and 18
With Lt. Green’s sister, Sara, in critical condition after being shot in the head by the Trust, we had some downtime back at the base. Deck and Grace, who had learned that Sara Green was willingly working with the Trust — at least at first — set things up so that she was essentially a prisoner. Not that it made much difference, since the likelihood that she would recover (without becoming a vegetable) was very low.
Dave was beside himself, and the situation probably would have gotten much worse had Gen. Hammond not given SG-4 a new mission.
It was the Stargate program’s Blue Plate Special: a new gate address had been dialed, MALP telemetry showed breathable air, a working DHD and no obvious threats, and SG-4 was next in the queue for an exploratory mission.
The gate spilled us out into what we quickly discovered was a spaceship. Based on the emergency lighting and the absence of any evidence that it was occupied, it seemed to be an abandoned spaceship. From that point forward, not a single member of SG-4 could tell you exactly what happened while aboard the derelict ship.
We explored the bridge, and that seemed fairly normal. We couldn’t decipher or use any of the controls, so we moved on to the rest of the ship. It wasn’t long before we started hearing and seeing things — variously, doors opening and closing on their own, children crying, people speaking German, and other oddities. When we explored the next room — sleeping quarters of some sort — it got worse.
Deck found the rotting body of a woman under a blanket, and when he went to get the others, the body disappeared. Grace followed a trail of blood into the mouth of an air duct, and saw a human organ inside. This wasn’t run-of-the-mill creepy anymore: we couldn’t figure out what was going on at all.
In the next room we explored, we saw something scuttle into an air vent — after which point we jammed up or avoided all of the vents that we came across. Strange phenomena, generally of the sort only one of us at a time could hear or see, kept occurring. We found a door that was searing hot to the touch — and in the process, began to formulate the theory that in some form, we were seeing things. Sometimes, if one of us saw something odd and mentioned it to the others, they saw it to — but if we didn’t give them details, they didn’t see it at all.
Still, we were creeped out enough that this theory kind of got set aside — particularly after what happened next.
We set Dr. Gardner to guard the entrance to a large conference room while we investigated the area. Once inside, we found a horribly burned man-thing lurking under the table, and he started talking to Grace as though he knew her. He said things like, “Tell them what you did, Graaaaace. Tell them about our baby!”
Then he grabbed her with his charred claws and wouldn’t let go — at which point Deck and Dave jumped in to help. Coming under the table from the far side while Dave and Grace struggled to pry the burned man’s fingers loose, Deck grabbed his legs and pulled, hard –
– and we tore him in half. Except instead of dying, his torso continued crawling towards Dr. Raynes, clutching at her ankles and repeating, “Graaaaaaaaaaace” in his gravelly, burn-victim voice.
She pumped an entire clip from her sidearm into him before we dragged her away. Then we discovered that Sarah was no longer outside the room.
We looked through the entire level for her, and in the process Dave came across his sister. She was standing in the middle of a room, with blood and brain matter leaking out of her head wound. Somehow, Dave stayed fairly composed, and we moved on. There were other oddities as well — like a shower that sprayed blood — but eventually we made our way back to the bridge.
There we found a clue to Sarah’s whereabouts — specifically, her digital video camera, which showed footage of her being attacked by an unknown person (or persons), and dragged out of the bridge and back down the hall. And the person dragging her away wore boots just like our favorite Space Nazi, the Oberst…
During this time, we also learned that the burned man had been Grace’s ex-husband — and since we had all seen, felt, smelled and otherwise experienced his existence, we stopped wondering what was going on and started to focus on finding Sarah — and getting out. And given how…attached…Grace was to Sarah, she was very persistent about finding Sarah.
Now well and truly freaked out (and in Grace’s case, mostly unarmed — since Dave had taken away her MP-5 after the burned zombie incident), we went to find Sarah so we could get off this godforsaken ship. Grace also discovered that her sidearm now held just one bullet — one bullet that was beginning to look…tempting.
When we reached the elevator, the doors opened of their own accord — and Col. Mark Weathers, his legs seared to the bone by the lava flow that had killed him on P3X-7997, levelled his MP-5 and opened fire on us from inside the elevator car.
We blew him to bits, and then Decker — who Weathers had called out to repeatedly during the firefight, saying things like, “Why me instead of you?” — spent two more clips blowing the bits into smaller bits.
Then Grace got into the elevator, and we lost her next.
Up on the main level, Decker and Green got progressively less stable as they failed to get the elevator to work, and kept running into disturbing evidence that they weren’t alone aboard the ship. Deck also opened the door to the hot room, which blasted a wall of fire into the corridor and the nearby conference room, nearly incinerating both Dave and Decker.
Down below, Grace encountered a zombie shambling down a long corridor towards her, and shot it. Approaching the body, she found it to be none other than Daniel Jackson.
He told her that Hammond had dispatched SG-1 after SG-4 had failed to return to base — after more than two days. We’d only been gone a couple of hours at that point, so Grace knew something was seriously wrong. She led him back upstairs, and despite Deck’s best efforts to booby-trap the elevator with grenades, we were united with Grace and Daniel without any casualties.
As a group, we returned to the gate room to try and get back to Earth. Daniel kept doing things that suggested he wasn’t really Daniel, and after the gate was found to be non-functional this escalated into a standoff: Daniel kept trying to get Grace, who had been eyeing her sidearm in a somewhat suicidal way, to kill him. In the end, after he appeared to turn on us, she did exactly that.
Now even less certain what was real, we returned to the bridge — and found a young child there. He turned out to be Mark Weathers’ son, and Deck was convinced he was some sort of devil-alien. Acting on Grace’s theory that he was behind everything, and probably able to somehow change forms to take on the appearance of our fears, we stuffed him in a locker.
Actually, we killed him before we stuffed him in the locker. It hadn’t helped with Grace’s ex-husband, or with Daniel Jackson, but at that point we were past caring.
He beat at the door for a while — and when we opened it, he wasn’t there. In his place was an aborted fetus with a bullet wound, which flopped out onto the floor and helped Grace along on her slide into insanity. She smashed it to bits. It returned in another form, and we had what we needed: there was a root cause to this madness, and it could only lie on the lower level.
Taking the elevator down to the only place where it would go, we were pushed back by waves of raw, almost physical, fear. Deck bulled through them and opened the door at the end of the hall — where he found giant alien slime eggs and spiderwebs everywhere. Just about to throw all of his grenades into the room, he felt the tingle of intuition — and noticed Sarah Gardner trapped inside one of the slime blobs.
Entering the room together, SG-4 proceeded to haul Sarah out of the alien womb-thing — at which point we were attacked by translucent space bugs. Hosing down their nests with machine gun fire whittled their number down to a manageable amount, and these were dispatched with handguns, fists, and stomping boots — even as they tried to assault us with blasts of pure fear.
With the immediate threat eliminated, we tossed several grenades aound the room, grabbed Sarah’s unconscious body, and fled at top speed. The ship began exploding around us, and we made it back to the gate room — and then through the gate.
After debriefing, we filed our strangest reports ever with Gen. Hammond. Decker left out nothing, while Grace and Dave omitted a few key points. As a result, Hammond appeared to have grave doubts about our sanity and suitability to continue in the Stargate program — as well as our tendency to blow things up first, and then blow things up again later.
A much more sober, disturbed SG-4 spent the next few days on standby avoiding each other — and sticking to brightly-lit corridors.
This was one of the best adventures in the whole season — as players, we were creeped-out and on edge the whole time during both sessions. The icing on the cake was Amy needing to check the back seats of her car — both times — after we left Don’s place at the end of the night. Don built tension and played on our backgrounds and experiences beautifully, and the result was an amazing couple of sessions.
I’m pretty sure “Graaaaaaaaaaaaace” will be heard many times after this campaign is over!
Forgiven, Not Forgotten — P3R-787 and Earthside, session 19
For this session, Don brought back Extreme, Chris’s character from our very first session. As Jaben couldn’t make it, I played both Extreme and Decker, and Don jumped back and forth between the action Earthside and on P3R-787.
Decker
After the clusterfuck aboard the derelict spaceship, Capt. Decker was summoned to Gen. Hammond’s office. Hammond explained that Deck’s inability to keep his team in check, along with his questionable actions and even more questionable mental state, meant that he would have to be temporarily relieved of duty. Dr. Raynes would be given command of SG-4, and Aaron was to take some time off.
Decker was stunned, but he knew fighting it wouldn’t improve the situation. Shell-shocked, he left Hammond’s office, packed his bags, and prepared to leave the base — expecting it to be for good. On the way, he ran into Grace and Sarah, and he briefly explained the situation to them. Letting Sarah go on ahead, Grace cornered Decker in the elevator and apologized for the way things had gone between them — and, if it was her fault, for him losing his command. He said that it wasn’t her fault, gave her an atta-boy on her first command, and generally failed in his attempt to act like this hadn’t affected him deeply.
While passing the guard station on his way out of the complex, Decker was given a package with his name on it. He stuffed it in his pack unexamined, made sure his cell phone was turned off, and hit the road. En route to Denver — where he planned to get drunk for several days — another phone, presumably inside the package, rang. Decker ignored it, and proceeded with his plan.
That night, however, curiosity got the better of him, and Decker opened the package.
SG-4
Meanwhile, Capt. Raynes learned that she was now in command of SG-4, and that she was about to undertake her first mission in her new role. The SGC had brought back Spec. Eliot (also known as Extreme, and now recovered from his foot wound) for this mission, which would take SG-4 back to P3R-787 — or as we had come to know it, Space Snake World. (Lt. Green was with his sister, and needed some time away from the mission schedule, so he would not be accompanying the others.)
Apparently, the crashed Goa’uld ship we’d found pieces of the first time around was leaking naquada into the soil. As we’d surmised, this was what had mutated the snakes — and probably created the magic healing fruit as well. After several more months of leakage, however, the concentration of naquada in the groundwater was harming the natives — and SG-4 was needed to solve the problem.
Techs on base had been able to re-configure the naquada destabilization devices first used on P3X-7997 to act as re-stabilization devices instead, and SG-4 was to plant them around the ship. With any luck, this would re-crystallize the naquada, and the ground water problems would come to an end. This is where Extreme came in: his talents were uniquely suited to setting up and configuring these devices, and he’d worked with them before.
Leading her team through the gate, Capt. Raynes found that SG-4 were remembered by the natives as heroes — except for one native, Jandia: the wife of Drake, who had died while guiding us to the fruit grove on our previous mission. While the rest of the village threw a feast into our honor — and Extreme did his best to sleep with every attractive native woman in sight — Jandia made it clear than she hated SG-4, and Grace in particular.
In the official version of events from that prior mission, Drake had been beyond Grace’s abilities to heal — an acid-spitting snake had bitten him in the neck, and he was dead within seconds. Unbeknownst to anyone but Grace herself to this day, however, she could have saved Drake — but decided not to. Even Jandia didn’t know this: she just hated Grace because she assumed Drake could have been saved.
Naturally, she was to be SG-4’s guide to the likely site of the crashed ship.
The next morning, with Extreme still recovering from a night of drinking, sex and extreme limbo, SG-4 started down the trail to the crash site.
Decker
Opening the package, Deck found that it contained a phone and long chain of emails addressing a rather peculiar issue: Col. Weathers’ wife had some Air Force documents she needed to return, and she wanted to know what had happened to him (as his body had never been returned to her, for obvious reasons). A handwritten note from Hammond instructed Deck to do what he thought best to remedy the situation.
After sobering up the next morning, Deck decided that his course was clear: he needed to visit Mrs. Weathers, convince her that her husband died a hero — hopefully without revealing any state secrets in the process — and collect the documents. Returning to Colorado Springs, he did just that.
Having called ahead, he met Mrs. Weathers and her son (which was creepy, since he’d last seen the kid aboard the derelict spaceship) at her home. Telling most of the truth, Deck told her that he and Mark were part of the same top secret counter-terrorism unit, and that Mark had died rescuing Decker and the rest of his team from a burning warehouse. He poured it on pretty thick, and she bought it — and seemed visibly relieved.
She turned over a box of Mark’s Air Force files, which she had never looked at, and mentioned one more thing as they parted ways: her house was under surveillance, and couldn’t Capt. Decker talk to the Air Force about having that surveillance removed? He said he would, and headed out the door.
Her kid, Bobby, was playing on the sidewalk, and he asked if Decker knew his daddy. Deck said he did, and that he’d been a hero, and the kid asked, “Hey, mister…are you a hero like my daddy?”
Assuming his work was done, Decker tried to return to the base — only to find that he was still denied entry. So he went back to the motel and looked at the files, which turned out be not at all what he’d expected.
SG-4
On Space Snake World, SG-4 spent the day on the trail and then set up camp for the night. During the night, they were attacked by spiders, which Grace dispatched with almost no help from anyone else, blasting three out of the five of them to bits with her MP-5. At one point, Jandia stabbed at one that was attacking Extreme, missing and burying her knife in the ground directly in front of his crotch. Extreme squealed and shouted out, “I’m sorry I didn’t sleep with you!”
The next morning, they encountered several giant snake skeletons along the trail, and resolved to press on at an even faster pace. Reaching the crash site without further incident, Extreme and Sarah began working on the naquada devices — while Grace and Jandia explored the crashed ship itself.
The wreck turned out to be home to a nest of snakes, and after a short firefight — during which, once again, Grace earned her nickname, “Deadeye” — all was quiet again. Jandia and Grace were both wounded in the fight, and Sarah used a Goa’uld healing device on Grace. She paused midway through the process, her hands hovering over Grace’s stomach, and just looked at her. Grace said nothing, but Sarah had detected something wrong with her.
In short order, Extreme was able to plant the devices, calibrate them, and make sure that they were doing their job. With this done, SG-4 trekked back to the village.
There they were once again welcomed as heroes, Extreme slept with many women, and Grace relished the fact that her first command had gone perfectly — even with the hostile Jandia thrown into the mix. The next morning, SG-4 returned to Earth.
Decker
Back on Earth, Decker made several unpleasant discoveries. Weathers, who had trained Decker, Green, Eliot and Raynes along with several other SG candidates, had altered many of the training records. Specifically, he had lowered the scores of any other potential recruits who could have knocked the four of us out of consideration, and put us forward as the obvious choices for acceptance into the Stargate program — as a unit.
He had also written his wife a letter, which she had never read, in which he explained that he had done unspeakable things and should not be thought of as a hero.
And on top of that, he’d been having regular meetings off the base, in secret, at a place called “Phillip’s.” What kind of meetings, Decker didn’t know.
Having called the SGC and established that the Air Force didn’t have Mrs. Weathers’ house under surveillance, Decker decided to stake it out himself. After a fruitless day doing just that, he learned of a restaurant in town called Phillip’s, and headed there to check it out.
After a couple hours wasted at a table inside the diner, he returned to his car to find Maybourne in the backseat. Thinking that Maybourne wanted to trade information, Decker started putting cards on the table, trying to find out what Maybourne wanted.
Disturbingly enough, Harry didn’t want a thing — he came only to warn Deck that the Trust had agents staking out Mrs. Weathers’ house, and that Decker was probably in danger. He also hinted very strongly that he had been the person Col. Weathers had met at Phillip’s over all those years.
Returning to the motel for the box of files, Decker was attacked by Trust goons. He fled through the back window on foot, disappeared into a warehouse park, and stole a UPS truck. Getting away clean — with the files in hand — he returned to the SGC in the stolen van.
Famous Last Words — Menthis, session 20
SG-4 was summoned to the gateroom by Gen. Hammond, and upon arrival the general told us that he’d received a strange call from the Alpha Site. Teal’c then came through the gate, along with another Jaffa — and Garoud, of the Tok’ra. Teal’c introduced the second Jaffa as Ja’raar, and Ja’raar dropped a bombshell: He told us that the Jaffa on his homeworld were in open rebellion, and that they planned to kill Osiris.
Given that Sarah Gardner, formerly Osiris, was now a good friend and a member of SG-4, this promised to be interesting…
Up in the briefing room, further details were provided: Ja’raar wanted Sarah to return to Menthis, his homeworld, and resume the guise of Osiris. With him as her First Prime, she would take over her palace — and resume control of the world.
Meanwhile, SG-4 would land elsewhere on Menthis with Teal’c (in a Tal’tac provided by the Tok’ra) and then try to rendezvous with Men’ak, who had been exiled years ago after being cast down as First Prime of Osiris.
After joining up with Men’ak as his rebels, SG-4 would sneak into the palace and “kill” Osiris in front of all of her still-loyal Jaffa, thus proving that the Goa’uld were false gods, and turning them to the rebellion.
Garoud provided the icing on the cake: The Tok’ra would furnish SG-4 with Osiris’s symbiote, which would be used to make Sarah’s “death” look convincing.
At least, in theory.
Sarah herself was surprisingly willing — even gung-ho — about the whole plan. Unsettled, maybe, but very dedicated to the cause.
In short order, SG-4 — along with Teal’c, and with Sarah all dolled up as Osiris (complete with a voice modulator to let her fake the distinctive Goa’uld voice) — were aboard the Tel’tac and headed for Menthis.
The trip was uneventful. Well, uneventful except for one little problem: One of the hyperdrive crystals burned out, and repairing it took a lot longer than we would have liked. Which meant that we blew our landing window, and arrived on Menthis late.
Actually, two problems — and the second one wasn’t so little: We found out Grace had cancer. Grace being Grace, that was all we could pry out of her. The details would just have to wait, and she probably would have preferred that we didn’t find out at all.
After landing on Menthis, SG-4 went into stealth mode, found a road and started making for the probable location of Men’ak’s camp. Naturally, we ran into a loyalist Jaffa patrol.
Hiding in the bushes, we watched as a rebel Jaffa patrol descended on them like bats out of Hell, and quickly blew them to bits. SG-4 being SG-4, while trying to observe them without being detected, someone tripped over themselves and made a lot of noise.
So we were captured by the rebel Jaffa and taken back to Men’ak’s camp — which was handy, since that’s where we were going anyway. (It would all look planned in the final report…)
Arriving at the camp, we didn’t get a very warm reception. Men’ak didn’t trust Tauri in general, and definitely didn’t trust us. We decided to play it straight, so we shared the details of Ja’raar’s plan with him.
This gave Decker the opportunity to say, “You know Osiris, right? My friend there has her in a cannister in his backpack.” (Which was true — Lt. Green really did have Osiris in a cannister in his backpack.)
Men’ak was coming around to our way of thinking, but being the big Jaffa beefcake that he was, he needed one final bit of convincing: One of us had to best him in hand-to-hand combat, in the Rite of Tomoe Nage.
Being a former boxer, Decker was nominated to face Men’ak. Men’ak was going to fight with a training staff, and the Jaffa offered one to Decker as well — which he declined. He was going to take Men’ak down old school style.
“Old school style,” of course, turned out to be “getting his ass beaten black and blue by Men’ak, who had a big stick.” Decreeing that Decker had fought with honor, however, Men’ak agreed to help us anyway.
The following day, we snuck into Osiris’s palace. After forcing a grate and disabling (but not killing, at Men’ak’s request) a handful of guards — which, with our badass Jaffa escort, was even less of a problem than usual — we made our way to Osiris’s throne room.
And that’s where things got ugly.
Moving up the room’s central aise, we were ambushed by a dozen Jaffa warriors loyal to Osiris, who aimed their staff weapons at us from the balconies above. That threw a minor wrench in our plan to “kill” Sarah, since there were now a dozen more Jaffa to dispatch first, but it didn’t seem like the end of the world.
Until the throne room doors at the far end of the hall opened, and Sarah emerged with her royal guards. And without Ja’raar.
Sarah-as-Osiris called for the Tauri to surrender, which we thought was a nice touch (but still, where was Ja’raar?), and when we spit back venom at her, she grabbed a staff weapon, aimed it at Dr. Raynes and shot her in the stomach.
Sarah shouted, “Kneel before your god! Kneel before Osiris!”
Decker rushed over to Grace, hoping he could stabilize her in time.
And Sarah’s eyes flashed gold — the flash that meant she had a Goa’uld symbiote inside her.
To be continued…