"If this had been a real emergency..." Though I don't suppose 'duck and cover' would really help against the Wraith. I'm taking a stand. The Wraith are bad!
And so we get to the start of "the Courier" 's career.

Yes... the Wraith are bad, bad, bad... in a Sunnydale kinda way (they're kinda similar to vampires actually, at least in vague outlines).

Welcome back! And thanks for another good chapter, filling in the details.

Very good

When you get to the section on Lance Armstrong will you amend this version to incorporate the revelations which have come out since you wrote the original? Even on first reading it jarred on me because the first thing to come to mind when I hear that name isn't 'sporting hero' but 'cheating scumbag'. Dawn seems to have left Earth before his misdeeds came out (except for his dumping Sheryl Crow) but it would be a nice touch if the HD version had him being caught steroid-handed and banned for life rather than dying of his cancer.

She did leave Earth right at about the time everything was coming out - and the circumstances of her departure were such that her news wouldn't be completely current (she was about two-three months into a two-thousand-mile backpacking trip).

That said, I was always a bit of a fan and am now feeling a bit betrayed. But I don't think that's the way to go, and it wouldn't really make sense time-wise. I might end up cutting him out altogether, and doing something else with that section.

I'm really liking the added interludes and extra touches you're adding this time around.

One thing that sorta threw me: "Her mother was my father's much younger sister" would make her his cousin, instead of aunt, unless you meant to say "SHE was my father's much younger sister," perhaps?

Looking forward to the next chapter

good point.... I might need to go back and change that... thanks for catching it.

I just read this entire story to this point in the last 24 hours. I can't wait until you update. :) waiting for more
Love it

Thank you!

I love detailed reviews, so I'd really love to know what you think, or any questions you may have...

good

Have you by any chance been reviewing your WWII history recently? While reading of Dawn's visit to Kas-Cerine, I kept thinking of the Battle of Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, for some reason, and I noted a Normandy campaign reference in Dawn's mental picture of the town of Jahoar that Tengwar described. :)

In any case, I really enjoyed these additional planet visits and descriptions, as well as the chance to explore Dawn and Tengwar's growing friendship. Well done!

Both of those were in fact deliberate; I'm reading Churchill's "Closing the Ring" at the moment. (I got his six-volume history of the war on Kindle last fall when I caught them on a 75% off one-day sale, though I didn't start reading them until late January or so.) Jahoar was as well, though a little better hidden; Johore is the region surrounding Singapore.

The Kas-Cerine visit was also a chance to highlight the changes that will take place between this timeframe and SGA's... but unless you check back on the original version, you wouldn't see that yet.

Has she ever tested to see if magic works in this reality? Little stuff, that she probably knows how to do?

No, she hasn't. My initial take on Dawn and magic is... all the magic she did - at least that I remember - was prior to the end of Season Six. Considering what happened then, she may well have decided to stop actively trying to learn and/or practice magic, so she probably knows little more than she did then (if in fact, she hasn't forgotten even that)... and may have a strong aversion to using it, even if she does remember.

She may have embraced meditation - as the fact that she did has been mentioned in-story - in a Buffy-like attempt to get in touch with her inner Key powers (similar to Buffy's "new Slayer training" in early Season Five). This she probably regards as a substitute for her earlier quest to learn magic (idolizing Tara and Willow, for example).

very good

I'm a little curious as to whether Dawn's inability to travel to places she hasn't been is an inherent limitation, a subconscious block because of Tengwar's warnings about unfamiliar addresses, or even the Stargate system 'protecting' her until she has better use of her abilities.

Anyway, I'm enjoying all the extra details that are leading up to the Courier.

That's a good point; though I personally doubt the Stargate system is intelligent enough for that third option.

And thank you! I'm having lots of fun fleshing it out. A lot of this is stuff I thought of the first time around, but didn't actually write out...

Hm, the ability isn't as useful as it first appears, she can only go to a place she's already been. And (so far) there has to be a gate at each end. So she can't do anything anybody could do just by putting in the sequence. Of course if she was at a ring where the controls were missing or damaged, then it'd be very useful. Maybe she could use one even if another was open somewhere else on the planet?
I bet the Asgard would just love to study her. Or Rodney... I have the feeling this is just a small part of what she could someday learn to do. I suppose the other big advantage is, she could arrive & people on the arrival end wouldn't know it, unless they saw her walk through, as they'd know the gate hadn't been activated.
next question -could she take someone 'with' her?

Considering *how* she's doing it, I expect that the requirement of the Gate being present... is inherent to her ability. She's using the Gate's latent connections, not simply teleporting herself.

As for the issue with multiple Gates... I'm sure she probably could, but if I recall the series, there was only ever one, maybe two, planets that were known to have multiple Gates. And that one, is the *one* planet that Dawn *doesn't* think has any at all.

There's also a potential advantage in speed - she doesn't have to stop to use the control device. Also, not only would people on the arrvial end not know the gate had been activated... the people on the departure end have no way of knowing where she went, which could be useful if she was being pursued.

A well-named chapter, with extra sociological and economic info about the other residents of Giant Forest as compared to the native cultures of Kera and Dawn, as well as the extra insight into Dawn's ability to sense the Stargate. I especially liked the bit at the end: "she could feel it reaching out, not to her, but to the other Rings, a tangled web of latent power, each strand somehow different. . . ."

Yeah... to go off on a bit of a tangent with what I was thinking... Kera's Sateda is culturally very close to some of the industrialized nations of Earth in a similar time period, which isn't all that far removed from Dawn's time, so the two of them just inherently understand things in a similar way. They're also both from large, multi-city civilizations, which are nearly unheard of in Pegasus, and so even their experiences of things like 'government' and possibly even 'nationalism' are similar. In an ever-so-slightly different variation of this story, Dawn could have become comfortable living as an immigrant in Ring City. However, given the timeframe, such a story would be short and anti-climactic, unless you want a "Glory" style ending (the movie, not the hell-goddess).

As for Dawn's abilities... what I'm imagining with this chapter is that she really, instinctively, already knows how to do what she's trying to learn; she just doesn't know that she knows. In this case, she's trying to teach herself by taking apart the process in slow motion and doing what she's done before, but in a series of distinct steps instead of one quick motion. In the meantime, she's also realizing the sheer scope of what she is dealing with; she's only currently using a tiny fraction of the Ring's potential (though as Allen pointed out, she's got good reasons not to use a large portion of that potential).

so she doesn't even need an address? Very neat. Of course some gates lead to vacuum or poisonous atmosphere. She might not realize the risks she's taking.
It's really too bad about Sateda. What with the Wraith and all, you'd think they'd establish a small colony on another world just to have a civilizational 'backup' or something.

She doesn't need an address. However, she *did* need (or at least want) a familiarity with where she's going, and she has been strongly warned off from using unknown addresses because of just those sorts of risks (Tengwar mentioned that "some Rings cannot be walked")... which would eliminate the risks of inhospitable planets and space gates quite neatly, if she keeps to it. (It also has the additional side effect of preventing her from discovering Atlantis early.) She might even be incapable of using a connection to an unknown destination via this method (she wouldn't know which one it was to pick it out of the ether).

As for Sateda - we don't know that they didn't have such a backup. But to be effective, it would have to be unknown to the Wraith and therefore survive... and in order to keep that secret, they'd have to keep it from everyone else too. But that *might* be the reason why Sateda had (as Tengwar once mentioned), a list of uninhabited planets... and maybe they gave up Giant Forest's sequence because they had deemed it unsuitable for their own uses? There's also the issue that such a small population like Giant Forest's, or like Sateda's hypothetical 'emergency colony' might have, is not capable of maintaining such a technologically advanced society. They would lack the ability to have specialist laborers/researchers/etc. and the society as a whole, over a period of decades, would degenerate to an earlier level of technology for lack of maintenance.

nice work