Chapter Text
It seems like when the world changes in a drastic way, that it should immediately be obvious to everyone. Like the sky changes color or people speak in tongues. But when the world changed for us one day in late May ten years ago, it did so in such a way that many in the world didn't realize it until a couple days later when the worlds' governments could no longer come up with a good cover story for why strangely glowing structures were popping up in random locations around the globe.
For some of us, the world had changed many years before that though, when a large metal ring had been found in the deserts of Egypt that allowed us to travel to other planets. Needless to say, THAT wasn't made public knowledge at the time, though a military organization was set up to explore through this ‘Stargate’ and, later, to protect the planet from what we found.
My dad was on the first team to go through the gate and one of only 3 that, officially, survived to return. Despite that, the exploration did eventually continue with the help of the 4th survivor, Dr. Daniel Jackson, who had originally remained behind on the planet to study their culture.
There were minor changes over the course of the next couple years, ones that while not world changing were still pretty major here in the United States. One of the biggest in my life, despite my not being born yet, was the decision to officially allow gays in the military and the legalization of gay marriage. Without those two things my existence would have been more difficult considering that Dad met Father while they were both working for the SGC. Of course that I actually exist is thanks to aliens.
But maybe I should start a bit more from the beginning. The beginning was not quite 30 years ago now when a group from the US military, with the help of a rather unpopular archeologist, discovered how to use the Stargate to travel to another planet. During that trip they discovered what was to be the first of a race of parasitic aliens who called themselves Gods to rule over more primitive races throughout the galaxy.
Of course at the time, they didn't realize that there was more than one of these guys, or even that they were parasitic, but they still kicked his ass and over the course of the trip Dr. Jackson, their archeologist, was basically adopted into the family of the leader of the people on the planet and chose to stay behind after the mission was over.He was called back a year later when we found out that there was more than one of those guys out there and the Stargate Command (or SGC) was up and running for good. Over the next couple of years various teams went out and explored the galaxy, making friends and enemies along the way. My dad was briefly taken over by one of those creepy parasitic aliens, but they were luckily able to find out how to get it out of him before it did any damage or got him killed.
He later met my father, who had been brought in by Daniel to help out with all the translating, and one thing led to another and they got married. They’d started talking about adopting when they got included on an offer originally made to another couple within the SGC. Jack O’Neill and Daniel Jackson had gotten together not long after his return from Abydos and during one of their team’s missions had made friends with a race of aliens known as the Asgard. While nowhere close to the tall, blond gods depicted in mythology, they were friends to our planet and their High Commander quite liked Jack. They were the spitting image of what you would visualize if you were thinking “alien abduction” and reproduced by cloning. It was that skill that they offered, in a way, to Jack and Daniel.
Being as they were both male, they couldn’t have children in the normal way so Jack’s friend Thor offered a solution to that. In thanks for a favor the SGC had done for his people, he offered to use their technology to create a child for those couples that couldn’t have them themselves. A number of couples took him up on his offer, mainly same sex couples that worked in the mountain, but also a number of other couples who were having infertility issues. Starting 9 months later, the Great Baby Boom of the SGC started, with the arrivals staggered some to keep from having half the mountain out on maternity leave at once. Jack and Daniel had a son, Jonathon Jackson, and my dads, Charles and Nathan, had me, Nora Marie.
When you hear people talk about being friends since birth, very rarely do they mean it literally, but Jay and I were born 3 days apart and pretty much raised together. Jay’s parents and team mates, encompassing Jack, Daniel, Teal’c (who was an alien they met their second trip through the gate, which almost lead to my dad’s death) and Sam who was otherwise known as Major Samantha Carter, and my dads and their team, Charles, Nathan, Peter and Robert along with Dr. Janet Fraiser, and Lou Ferretti, also from the first mission, made up their extended family.
Janet adopted a daughter, Cassandra, that they rescued on one of their missions while Sam acquired a daughter of her own while in Boston to speak at a convention. She found Faith roaming the street after getting kicked out by her mother and was able to convince their government contacts to put through the paperwork to make it all legal. Faith was a little less than 6 months younger than Jay and I and Cassandra was about a year younger, so we all pretty much went through puberty together and I figure if your friendship can survive that, it can probably survive anything.
Lou had children too, though younger than us. A couple of others were also married with children, which means get togethers over at the O’Neill home were always a bit insane and prone to bizarre happenings, without taking into consideration the fact that SG Teams seem to just attract trouble. Despite all this, things were actually what we’d all call “normal” until the year we turned 11. That’s the year we were all introduced to the supernatural when Faith woke up one morning as a Slayer.
It took Daniel and Father a good month to hunt down information on what had happened and poor Faith pretty much spent the first half of it being examined by Janet, attempting to make sure that she hadn’t just caught something from one of the gate teams. Once the supernatural aspect was discovered, it took a while longer to convince Sam that magic and demons existed and that her daughter was a supernatural fighter of evil. Once Faith got over being freaked out, she thought it was pretty cool.
We’d all grown up being trained to take care of ourselves, I guess that’s just the way it works when your parents are in or work for the military. After Faith’s transformation though, it all got ramped up and Daniel and Nathan got involved, teaching us all information based on the research they were doing on how to identify dangerous creatures and how to fight them. Not that there was much other than theory as it seems that the Stargate tended to keep supernatural beings away. I guess they were a bit freaked out by it, just like we were of them. Can’t say that I was all that upset.
I was a bit more upset when, just before my 13th birthday, I too became a slayer. That led to a whole new round of research, Father was especially frantic this time, as everything they’d found out before said that there was only 1 slayer at any given time. It was during this round of research that Sunnydale came to our notice and who we figured was the “real” slayer, Buffy Summers, who had just died again under odd circumstances. Apparently there had been another slayer a couple years before, Kendra, who had died just before Faith’s transformation.
The whole thought of slayers being “turned on” seemed to mean that there was a genetic marker that should relate to the Slayer gene. Janet started doing private research on it, with permission of the base commander and completely out of the notice of the other staff of the SGC. I often hung out with her after my checkups and asked her questions about what she had found.
I think it was Janet's research that got me interested in Genetics. Never had science been so obviously important to ‘me’ and I was hooked. Things continued on in our version of "normal" for another 2 years, going to school, hoping our families would make it back from work after missions okay, dealing with normal High School issues while trying to do all the extra stuff we had on our plates - self-defense / martial arts / gymnastics lessons, mythology / language / "monster" classes, Jay's computer classes, Cassie's and my medical lessons with her mom and Faith's art classes (she'd taken an interest in painting a couple years ago and despite treating it a lot like a full contact sport most days, she was getting pretty good and Sam was much happier about it after Jack and Dad had spent a weekend to build her a shed to use as a workspace, thus saving her bedroom from the oil paint she'd begun experimenting with).
We'd begun dreading the month of May after Faith's transformation, with mine following in the same month 2 years later and it was 2 years after that, again in May, when things changed again, though this time not just for us.
While I'd never had quite the same level of abilities as Faith when it came to my Slayer abilities, I wasn't complaining. We'd both learned to use what we had and the ability to spar together certainly helped, as otherwise the only person we could really go all out against was Teal'c. But that May was when things finally changed for the world and our teaser that it was coming was when I was ramped up to close to the same level as Faith.
It wasn't until later that we figured out what had happened to cause all these changes. Buffy died briefly the first time, calling Kendra. Kendra died, calling Faith. The Watchers couldn't find Faith due to the Stargate, so figured the main slayer line had reverted to Buffy. When Buffy died the second time, fighting a Hell god (unlike our parasitic fake gods), since she was no longer "primary" Slayer, I was sorta called, but not quite. I got a level of the gifts, but since I too was hidden by the Stargate, I wasn't found either. Since the Slayer gift wasn't apparently passed on, one of Buffy's friends, a witch by the name of Willow, used that to mean that Buffy wasn't actually supposed to be dead or was trapped somewhere in limbo or whatever excuse she came up with to validate what she wanted to do, and she brought Buffy back from the dead (heaven, to be exact). So now, officially we were up to (sorta) 3 active Slayers with Faith being Primary. The cause of this last power boost was the fight they were having with the First Evil. In an effort to defeat it, Willow used magic channeled through the Slayer’s scythe to activate all the potential slayers left in the world. So, I became fully activated and girls of all ages everywhere suddenly had abilities that they didn't necessarily know what to do with. And could potentially do a lot of damage with.
You would think that that would be bad enough, but the effects of Willow's spell were much further ranging than even she could imagine (though not necessarily because of her "power", though she certainly has enough, or even too much in my opinion, but because of what it turns out she was messing with).
What we were only just beginning to figure out, based on Janet's genetic research, was that the gene that decided who could be a Slayer was also related to a gene that they'd recently named the ATA gene, or the Ancient gene, as it could be used to control the technology left behind by a race known only as the Ancients. The ones that had built the Stargates and seeded the galaxy with life.
So, when Willow got fancy with her magic and turned on all the Slayer genes, she also turned on quite a few other things. She activated all the dormant or recessive ATA genes and turned on quite a few previously unknown Ancient outposts across the globe. Never let it be said that magical talent in the hands of someone with not nearly enough training can't be a world altering thing.
So Jay, Faith, Cassie and I, as well as the families of most of the employees of the SGC, didn't see much of our families for the next couple of days as they were quickly being deployed to try to lock down and take control of these new places before someone with a newly activated gene got curious and accidentally blew up the planet or something else happy like that.
That the world didn't immediately figure things out was sort of amazing, though the US at least had the distraction of the news stations obsessing about Sunnydale falling into a hole in the earth after suffering what was being called an earthquake. Estimates were being made on how many lives were lost, though reports were that they'd had enough notice to evacuate much of the town.
The story actually first broke in the UK, who you would've thought would've been more distracted by reports of a couple of historical buildings around having been blown up in recent weeks with no one taking responsibility for the actions. Or maybe that's why the story broke there first; they needed something new to take people's minds off what had been going on. But perhaps telling them that flashing lights had been seen around Stonehenge at night and that people in the area were hearing odd sounds wasn't quite the way to go about it. That people were talking about it being aliens was oddly amusing as we knew that, in a way, it really was.
So, the alien side of things only really stayed hidden another couple days after that before a huge press meeting was held to tell the world about the Stargate and what it meant to the planet. Not that they told everything, but enough so that most rational people had an understanding of what was going on and those that were a little less in touch with reality were imitating scenes from Independence Day (thankfully without the blowing up of major cities) and calling for the return of Elvis, James Dean, or whoever in their world they believed had been taken from earth to entertain themselves. Not that everyone took it well, but luckily it was mainly kept to angry or insulting words for the most part and not much in the way of violence occurred.
Maybe everyone subconsciously knew that the second shoe hadn't yet fallen and that there was more yet to come.
The SGC was nice about their "coming out" in that they didn't blow the whistle on anyone else. Not that the supernatural was as widely acknowledged among those in the know about the classified stuff going on in the world as the SGC was, but as we found out information concerning Faith and I, some of it was passed along and when we found out what had caused all our problems and how it related back to the same small group of people and the major shakeup they'd just gone through, that information too was passed along. Though as we found out later they were already known about in the US and UK due to the Watchers being a mainly English group and due to the rogue military group the US team had had to deal with a few years before.
The Watcher's Council, Slayers and the thing living under your bed managed to hide out for almost another year before they too had their coming out party with the world. Only theirs wasn't quite as friendly as the SGC's had been. Theirs took place in LA and involved an open portal, hordes of attacking demons and an attempted takeover of our plain of existence.
This was also the official meeting of the New Council, as they were calling themselves, and two of their older Slayers, though they weren't aware of it before then. The team in LA had kindly given the government a heads up that this was about to happen, that it was going to be big and that they probably weren't going to be able to play it off as a movie stunt gone horribly wrong. The government thanked them for the information and immediately turned around and called the SGC to see if they had any way to help out the crazy people so that we weren't all overrun.
Teams were drafted and quickly taught as much as they could about how they could fight the creatures they would be dealing with. Daniel and Nathan briefed everyone to the best of their abilities then brought in the local experts to give them a run down on who they'd be fighting with. Which meant that Faith and I (and Jay, as he wasn't letting us do this without him) came home from college over a long weekend.
That was Faith's and my first official unveiling to most of the staff at the base. While they might have been aware that there was something a little different about a couple of the kids associated with staff on base (Cassie was an alien and Jay and I had been created by aliens which could be considered a little odd when you get right down to it), nothing had been officially acknowledged about what Faith and I could do. So we sat everyone down and went over what Slayers were capable of, their abilities and limitations. We reviewed what we'd discovered about the ins and outs of fighting demons over the years since Faith and then myself were called. We took small groups out on hunts around the surrounding area so they could get a test of how things would go before being exposed to things. And most of all we made it clear to them that not all beings classified as demons were actually also considered "evil".
Considering most of those that had volunteered to fight had been with the SGC for years, most were well aware that things weren't always as they seemed and that you couldn't judge a book by its cover, to toss a couple of clichéd expressions out there for you. So, it wasn't hard to get that point across, but there were a lot of show and tells going on over the few short days we had between being told that this was going to happen and getting the call that it was happening.
Thanks to Asgard beaming technology we were able to get there pretty much as soon as we all had our stuff together, and a ship stayed in orbit to grab people who became injured and beam them back to the base for treatment. Our parents had given us strict instructions on how we were absolutely NOT allowed to get hurt. We said we'd try as hard as they would to stay undamaged.
Fighting anything that outweighs you by half your body weight or has claws or horns or skin as hard as rocks is difficult to fight one on one any day. But when you take hundreds of such creatures and have them squeeze through a portal and into the streets of downtown LA and then let loose a couple of hundred defenders to fight them while trying not to hurt or to actually save the innocent by-standers in the area... it's chaos.
Rumors had apparently gone out through the supernatural community so a lot of the harmless demons had left the area and roaming hunters who usually worked alone and dealt with issues had made their way to LA to lend a hand. So we had the Slayers/Watchers, the SGC teams and the random others that showed up to fight all trying to deal with each other. I think our group had it the best as they were all use to being put in dangerous situations on worlds they weren't familiar with and having to fight their way out of things. Since this sometimes meant fighting with a native population they weren't familiar with, they were used to working with and around them. The Slayers were probably the worst off as they were all to use to thinking that they were the only ones that could do this job and that everyone else around them was more of a liability than a help.
Despite everything we were finally able to close the portal and kill those demons that had made it through before they were able to get out into the city to create more problems. I'd heard talk of them possibly having to blow up a building or something to get the portal to close, but it was actually done by two girls that looked slightly younger than myself by the names of Lily and Dawn. Apparently Dawn is Buffy's little sister and Lily is Willow's. They looked pretty beat after the battle was over but they had managed to close the portal without destroying a building in the middle of our battle, so I think they had the right.
I heard their sisters screaming at them afterwards, but they apparently didn't really care as they took off with a guy with an eye patch, who was also ignoring them screaming, as soon as they'd recovered enough to move. I'm glad they left when they did as that at least shut up the other two and it really looked like Jack was about to the point of going over and doing some screaming himself.
The SGC members still on the ground regrouped and then organized to check if there was any additional help needed by the fighters still standing. They got a few more beamed back for treatment and were in the process of heading back to base when we were finally approached by someone from the Watcher's group.
Now, we'd done as much research as possible on anyone we could associated with the group from former Sunnydale as things they did tended to affect our lives more than you'd think considering we'd never met. Because of that I knew that the eye patch guy from earlier was Xander Harris former carpenter and current trainer / slayer wrangler in the New Council. We also recognized the man coming towards us, unfortunately being followed by the still steaming Buffy, as Rupert Giles, head Watcher and unofficial leader of the New Council. Unofficial only in the sense that they were still rebuilding from being mostly blown to pieces the year before and therefore still lacking on the whole voting member front.
Apparently Faith and I had been noticed in the fighting (as had Jay, but as he's a "boy", it wasn't as noticeable to them that there might be a reason for someone so young to have joined the fight that wasn't one of their slayers in training) and he wanted to know why we weren't picked up during the potential culling before the fight with the First as the Bringers had picked off everyone they could find.
In the time it took to ask his question, my parents, Jay and his parents, Faith's mom and their teammates had appeared around us, ready to back us up as needed. Mr. Giles looked a little nervous to suddenly be confronted by almost a dozen obviously annoyed people, some with guns but all heavily armed.
Faith's crack that if the Bringers were looking for Potential Slayers then of course they wouldn't have come looking for us was met with a snort of disbelief from Buffy who asked us if we were trying to deny that we were Slayers. Our response that ‘of course we weren't, but as we'd been Slayers for years now and not potentials when that was happening so not on their radar’ didn't go over well. Nor did my smirk just before we were beamed back up to the ship then back to the base to be checked out by Janet and her staff.
The debrief from that battle lasted for days, though our portion was limited a bit by the fact that we still had the end of our school year to finish and exams to take. With various influences like Janet, Sam, Daniel and my father the 3 of us had been able to get through High School early and we had started college that year. Not all that far away, we were in Boulder, but enough to merit living away from home though if the parents were able to abuse the privilege of beaming technology even that didn't mean they couldn't pop in suddenly for a visit or ask us to come home. They'd promised not to do that unless it was an emergency and so far they'd been pretty good about it.
When Buffy showed up on campus right before our exams ended, we weren’t happy to see her in the least. And her order for us to go to Cleveland to join the other Slayers in being trained on how to handle their abilities didn’t go over well either. Though we did enjoy Jay putting her on her ass when she went to hit him when he said that we were already trained and knew how to play well with others. I then placed a call to Mr. Giles and told him to call his Slayer home before we had her arrested for assault and that if he wanted to verify our training we could come for a short visit after exams were over. The fact that we knew who and where they were and how to contact them seemed to freak him out a little bit, but really did he expect us to not have looked into who they were at some point, as they’d obviously done some of to find us?
So, Buffy was recalled, we finished exams, went to visit the parents for a day or two then road tripped cross-country to Ohio, making plans to visit a few other places both on the way there and on the way back. It was our summer vacation after all. While we’d been tasked to call home regularly, we were free to travel for the most part where we wanted assuming we stayed out of trouble.
It took us a week to get to where the New Council had set up their facility. This was partially because we weren’t in a rush and were making stops along the way, but also because none of us were really looking forward to dealing with Buffy and the others. Especially as Jay had come with us and they seemed to have an odd view of anyone not female involved in “slayer things”. As if defending yourself was only something they were allowed to do.
So, we made it there and luckily didn’t run into Buffy immediately. Mr. Giles (Please, just call me Rupert, or Giles, whichever you’d prefer) was there and explained why we should be there training with them. While I think Faith rolled her eyes a couple times while listening to his spiel, in all I think we were pretty patient while he was explaining how we’d never survive without this training and how did we expect to know what to do when confronted with whatever the creature of the week was if we didn’t have access to their resources.
He seemed a bit put out when we didn’t immediately agree to drop everything in our lives and offer to move into their dorm-like housing with who knows how many other people in order to take him up on his offer, but seemed to think that miserably failing the tests we did agree to would convince us he was correct.
Testing was due to start the next morning, so we headed off to get checked into our hotel, not relishing sharing space with all those strangers and trying to put off dealing with Buffy a bit longer.
We were up bright and early the next morning, years of PT with the parents having ingrained that into us, and we suited up, grabbed our stuff and headed back over. We ran into Xander outside with a group of not quite awake younger girls who were being prodded into running laps. He invited us to join them, so we locked our stuff in the car and took off.
An hour later we were warmed up and sweating lightly while the younger girls were looking rougher and a little annoyed that we weren’t in the same shape. Xander quizzed us on our normal exercise / training routine which made most of them look a little concerned after seeing how impressed he seemed by our answer. They quickly took off to get cleaned up for breakfast just in case he got the idea to expand their morning workout.
After a quick breakfast Xander was back to test us all on our fighting abilities. Despite comments from some of the bystanders about why he was bothering to test Jay, Xander ran through the paces with us all. While we generally didn’t bother with things like crossbows and wooden stakes, we did know from what Daniel and Father had found out that certain weapons were needed for certain things and from Dad and Jack, we knew that there was always the chance that you’d get stuck somewhere when you needed to fight but didn’t have access to “normal” weapons, so knowing how to both improvise or use what was available could save your life. So, if you were in a village with people who thought bows and arrows were the height of offensive weapons, you better know how to use one to defend yourself.
Xander seemed happy with our levels and how well we were able to work together, utilizing each other’s strengths. I got the impression that he wasn’t use to that normally. We were sorry to be passed along to the next batch of tests after lunch, but were more than eager to be done with everything and on our way to our next stop.
Giles’ test was basically a written exam on various demons and how to handle them with various questions on the history of slayers and prophecies. We’d been told we could use reference volumes for the test if we felt we needed them, so we’d grabbed our bags from the car, just in case. I’ll admit that there were a number of things I don’t remember ever seeing before, but based on what information we were given, I was able to make an educated guess that I felt comfortable defending.
That test took most of the afternoon and when we finally finished, an invitation was extended to join them on patrol that night. While it was coached as an invitation we could turn down, it came across as more of a command, or at least as a required part of all the testing we were doing anyway.
So, we joined them later that evening after grabbing a dinner out. They wanted to split us up, but we pushed that we fought as a team and weren’t going into a strange location without trusted backup. So, Xander joined us to ‘supervise’ as well as one of the local slayers we didn’t know and the two witches we’d seen at a distance during the battle. They all seemed friendly. Apparently they were all girls that Xander had been working with directly and this was also a bit of a test for them to see how they did in a live experiment with a few others as backup. While the witches, Lily and Dawn, were allowed to use magic if they needed to defend themselves, or if we came across something that needed it, they were learning physical self-defense too, and that was what they were supposed to be using.
Things were fairly quiet for most of the evening. We did come across a demon early on that the young slayer was about to attack, but we were able to get her to hold back until I had a chance to talk to it; me being our main linguist generally though we all knew at least a few of the more common demon languages. I found out that he was just passing through, looking for a safe place to set up home and I was able, with consultation from Xander and the others, to give him enough information so that he should be able to do so without dealing with too many of the local issues.
About an hour before we were due to head back, we came across a large group of vampires that were happy to see us until they figured out who, or what, we were. Still, they didn’t have the sense to run off so we did get at least one good fight out of the evening. According to the other Slayer, Beth, it was lighter than normal, but we had taken one of the better routes as we had the little sisters with us tonight. Faith had taken a bit of a shine to Dawn, who was a bit of a spitfire especially in comparison to Lily’s more quiet sarcasm, and spent some of the time of the walk back going over some of the moves that they’d used, talking her through how to do them easier. Once we got back to the house, and using me as her practice partner, she demoed what she’d been talking about before getting them to try too.
Jay spent the time talking to Xander about, as we found out later, how he dealt with being one of the few males in what was mainly a female dominated place. Considering that he’d grown up with Faith, Cassie and me he was also use to being surrounded by females, but I think we treat him nicer than we’ve heard Xander is. I at least didn’t try to listen in, so I have no idea if there was any useful information traded, but they both certainly found the conversation amusing.
Eventually the girls had to get to bed, so we headed out after making arrangements to come back after lunch to get our review.
We slept a little later the next morning after having been up so late the night before, but we were still up pretty early to do our PT and wander around town more in the daylight. We found a nice place to stop to eat and eventually made our way back to the Council. One of the younger Slayers we hadn’t been introduced to yet led us to Giles’ office again where we met up with him, Xander, Buffy and Willow. While Willow could tentatively be described as friendly, Buffy looked rather annoyed though whether at us or something else we had no idea.
Giles ran through the review of our fighting skills, general demon / historical / prophecy / language information and how patrol went. There were a few suggestions on things that we could work on becoming more familiar with or reference materials we should probably have, but otherwise was forced to admit that he could see no real reason for us to have to come to ‘slayer school’.
We did agree to help out if needed, but as with the LA invasion, we’d probably have been pulled in anyway because of who we’re related to and what they do. We also mentioned that we didn’t want to get pulled into minor issues. We’re in college and taking heavy loads so it has to be something major to make it worth possibly messing up a class. I could tell Buffy wanted to say something about that, probably along the lines of who did we think we were to try to dictate terms; we should be honored to be allowed to help out, but Giles preemptively glared her into silence.
So we were able to get out of there fairly painlessly with a number of book references that Giles said he’d try to find for us, though I figured we’d pass them to Daniel and Father and see who could find a copy first.
We ran into Lily and Dawn again on our way out and were convinced to sit and talk for a bit longer. They explained the magic training they were doing and we told them about the training program our parents had had us doing for the past couple of years and how they could adapt it to what they were capable of. We exchanged contact info and headed back to the hotel for the night.
Afterwards we headed off from Cleveland and did a run down the east coast, across the south to the west coast before heading back home. It’s good we had 3 drivers as it was a long trip, but we were able to see lots of places and meet some interesting people along the way. As it turns out, we didn’t really have a summer vacation for the next couple of years due to taking classes constantly, trying to get done with things quicker.
Over the next couple of years I worked on my medical degree, specializing in genetic research. Jay was doing an aeronautics degree and Faith got a degree in history and ancient languages. She was the first done as she wasn’t interested in getting a Master’s or PhD, whereas Jay and I were both going as far as we could. We were all under contract with the SGC and were occasionally called in to help out in some form or another. We even went through the gate a time or two, though generally we helped out with things in the mountain.
We also got called to help out with a number of things for the Council. Unfortunately it seems the supernatural world favors the Spring for its big problems, though for the most part they managed to occur before finals.
Scientists at the SGC had been working on a couple translations related to the various sites that had been discovered after all the Ancient places had been reactivated. They were trying to match up the information they were finding with the places they’d explored and make sure they hadn’t missed anything. Not all the references were easy to place, so a number of the linguists were focused on the translations and cataloging any references to location or purpose that they could find. That was the project Faith had been brought in on and between that and beating up on the soldiers on base, she kept pretty busy. But she was happy and would visit us when she could, or we’d come home to spend time with her and Cassie who had stayed closer to home for school.
It was about ten years after the big reveal when the next stage began. Over the years, bits of information about our alien contacts had been revealed to mixed results from the general public. Not all were thrilled that the Stargate was located in the US and under US Military control. The fact that it had been found in Egypt especially caused some grumbling from other governments, but a lot of that calmed down after the first attack centered on Cheyenne Mountain since that’s where the gate is located. After that, most were happy that it was far away from them and those in the US were happy to make sure those protecting them had what they needed to do the job.
Interest in serving there or being hired on as a civilian contractor had fluctuated over the years as well. For the most part though it was considered an honor to be posted there as you had to be not only really good at what you did, but open minded and able to roll with the punches as you really never knew what would happen from one day to the next. If you weren’t able to cut it, you would soon find yourself reassigned or out of a job. There was a core group still around who’d been there since the beginning, but over the years more people had been added and teams had been expanded with the more experienced members leading while everyone got up to speed.
We had made it through our accelerated programs of study and had been signed on as full-time members of the SGC. There were grumbles of nepotism since our families worked there too, but they didn’t have much to base that on as we’d been on contract to the SGC practically since puberty. I was working under Janet’s oversight, getting hours in the infirmary to continue my training, but most of my time was spent continuing the genetic research on both the Slayer gene and the Ancient gene.
We’d noticed since the original awakening that new genes weren’t automatically being activated for those being born with it. If you hadn’t met a certain criteria at the time of the spell, you weren’t affected. This was good as we didn’t have infants being born with Slayer powers, but it did seem like they were still going active once they got to somewhere close to about thirteen years old. The Council had been forced to come up with ways to locate the newly activated ones and let them know what was happening to them. Granted, info on Slayers had made its way into the general public, though it was only bare bones info as the real details were kept protected to protect the newly activated ones from being grabbed by less savory people wanting to take advantage of their abilities. They’d been trying to develop ways to identify Slayers before they were active to better protect them, as it didn’t seem to follow bloodlines as much as the original Watchers believed (which is how they’d missed finding Buffy before she was activated) so our genetic work may help out with that.
The ancient gene was activating after a certain timeframe if you had it recessively, like the Slayer gene, but everyone who had it at the point of the spell had it made active. We were beginning to think that it had also been made dominant as it appeared that parents with the gene were now more likely to pass it along to their offspring, though we were still researching that. There wasn’t a large population with the gene to begin with, so we were also looking into artificially created genes and activating the genes of those born afterwards with non-active genes.