10
Who: Niki Wolfe, Nicole Desjardins, open
What: Arrival! (Because those are always fun. >.>)
When: 1700 hours, April 21
Where: The morgue
Rating/Status: TBA/Incomplete
Note: A himation is a cloak, and a chiton is a traditional male or female garment of Ancient Greece.
He sighed and set the book down, rubbing at his eyes. He’d learned some of those characters from his time with the Romans, but the other twenty-nine letters, he was still learning. English, he’d discovered, was quite confusing. He much preferred Latin or Greek. Niki’s hand strayed to the knife at his side. While he was at the house of his friend, he didn’t have to hide Theophanes’ knife, and he didn’t have to dress like an American.
Nikolaos Wolfe hadn’t always been his name; he’d changed it after discovering that Antigonus was a much stranger name in the twenty-first century than it had been in his own time. When he’d mentioned his parents’ names to his friend, he’d laughed so hard he cried.
“Zosime? Hilarion? Good Lord, man!”
Shaking the memory away, he stood, stepping towards his armor. It lay over a chair, almost glowing in the warm light. He placed a finger over it. He had a sudden urge to try it on again, and he hesitated. Why try it on? He wouldn’t need it…
He ran a finger over it, reliving battles in his past. He flipped long, dark hair over his shoulder, wincing as he got his fingers caught in a tangle. It wouldn’t be a simple matter, either, to try on his armor. He pulled the folds of his chiton and himation closer around himself, letting out a tiny sigh of relief when he felt his fingers brush across his own knife, and the few possessions he valued enough to carry with him all the time.
Before he could make a final decision about trying on the armor, he found himself gasping for breath as he was dragged through time and space. He followed the path of Kasandros’ ring (or had it been Nikon’s or Panther’s?) and its bearer, panicking out of habit as he saw his surroundings change.
A base, with people he assumed were soldiers…then a crowded ship, wandering down hallways at random, with this seeming to drag out for the longest. Suddenly, scenery changed again and he was rushing through hallways, down to a place that seemed more sterile even than that room his friend had called his “lab.” A woman stood, holding a ring, admiring it, and then suddenly he wasn’t rushing anymore.
He stood, chiton and himation still wrapped around him, and Theophanes’ knife on his hip, his own just inside the himation. Swallowing his fear and confusion, he kept his hand on his knife. Any challenge to come, he was at least partially ready for, though he’d already learned there were things beyond any of his training in this day and age. Things they called guns, which he hadn’t ever seen before in his lifetime, but they had now. His only defense was time manipulation, which he didn’t like to use in warfare. What with the speed of everyone moving around, it was exhausting, and he could only keep it up for so long. Better to just battle it out and rely on his experience and training.
Focusing his attention on the girl, he made a quick analysis. She was only a few inches shorter than he was, with dark hair…she might have been a Celt, or a Roman – possibly even from Gaul, but he doubted it. And then he dismissed the ideas. His world had died with the Roman Empire, and the nations he knew were either no longer existent, or they had been renamed and redivided. All of his thoughts were combined into a few seconds as he stood still, taking stock of his surroundings. No need to waste energy if she hadn’t noticed him yet…
Tales from the Lost City Found 
Of all the things her cousin Aramis could have sent her, the ring was the least useful. Even the antique clothing he’d written about having acquired would have been more useful! For heaven’s sake, what was the use of a signet ring?
Nicole sighed and set the letter down, picking up the ring instead. It was very heavy, and made of gold, with some sort of odd design on its face and sides. It was obviously very old, but in very good shape, and she thought that was probably due to her cousin. He liked to restore old items, especially ones as old as this.
She studied it for a long moment, then held it up to the light. When she was looking up at it, though, she nearly dropped it in surprise. Before her stood a man, with long hair a little bit lighter than her own, and he was wrapped in traditional Greek clothing.
Without hesitating past being sure it wasn’t someone she knew dressed up to surprise her, she screame. «Sécurité ! Il y a un homme étrange dans la morgue !» By then, she was really starting to wish she kept a gun in the morgue…
Translation:
«Sécurité ! Il y a un homme étrange dans la morgue !» – Security! There’s a strange man in the morgue!
Oh, for the love of the gods. The fool had already opened her mouth. But before he could even be upset that she’d yelled, he found that he had not a clue what she was saying. Niki stood stock-still, slipping his hand beneath his himation to reach for his knife.
His fingers wrapped around the hilt of his knife, flexing them once. Then he stepped into the locus sine tempore, as he called it. Everything dimmed, and he walked closer to her, watching her look at the place he’d been. To the outside world, not even half a second had gone by before he dropped back into the normal timeframe behind her. “Quis tu femina es?”
(locus sine tempore – place without time; quis tu femina es? – who are you?)
Fortunately for Nicole, Chuck was in the control room. And being that he’s Canadian — from an area where French was spoken — he understood her call for help. Not to mention the fact that an alarm sounded at his board from the internal biosensors indicating a new and unexpected life form that had just suddenly popped up in the morgue area. And unexpected life forms in the morgue was rather unusual as being that it was a morgue, well, life was generally devoid of all forms expect for those working there.
“Security to the morgue. Intruder alert!” Chuck announced over the comms.
Being the closest to the area, Lorne automatically responded. “On our way,” he said in gathering his P-90 and a squad of Marines.
They arrived shortly after Nikolaos dropped back into real time behind Nicole and in turn, presented his backside towards the Major and the Marines. The Marines took flanking positions on either side of the doorway with Lorne in the middle.
“Hands on your head!” Lorne ordered as he looked down the sight of his P-90, noting the man was attired in something akin to a toga which the Major hadn’t seen since his college days. “Wow, I suddenly feel over dressed,” he remarked and glanced at one of the Marines. “Did the Colonel issue a new bed sheets optional dress code and I just didn’t get the memo? Cause, if I’d know that, I wouldn’t have sent mine to the laundry this morning,” he asked and got a shrug back in reply. “Yah, I thought so.”
As soon as he heard the directions behind him, Niki saw three courses of action. For one, he could do as ordered and place his hands on his head. Second, he could disappear into locus sine tempore and escape to a safer part of wherever he was. Finally, he could go into locus sine tempore and drop to the other side of the strange woman, and threaten her life to get them to let him go, but from a military standpoint, he decided the first option was probably the best; disappearing would eventually lead to getting found again, and taking a hostage only angered them, and in the end, they would get precisely what they wanted, and he would wind up in trouble.
He kept his gaze straight ahead, fingers still wrapped around the hilt of his knife, just in case. “And if I do not?” he asked, stumbling over a relatively thick Greek accent. “What then, miles?”
Niki was willing to talk to them, which was more than he could say for most people, but he didn’t like the attitude of the man who’d said he felt “over-dressed.” With his knees barely covered, both of his calves were entirely exposed, and he’d left his sandals behind in his friend’s house. No need to wear them if there wasn’t a danger of getting something in one’s foot, now, was there. If he’d been in the Band with that man, he doubted they’d have gotten along, and one or both of them would probably have been expelled on grounds that no internal fighting should be tolerated. Even Kassandros had been nicer than that to someone they’d found in the middle of camp.
He also didn’t like the way the man spoke; it sounded awkward and stiff to him, much different from Aramis, whose voice had had a soft French accent, undoubtedly much like Nicole’s. Niki’s own accent, he knew, was difficult to understand at times. He’d spoken Greek or Latin his entire life until four months ago, and he still had trouble pronouncing v’s and j’s.
“That’s Major,” Lorne replied, not understanding what the man meant by the “miles” reference. “And if you don’t do it, then I’ll have to shoot you and make a big mess for Tobias to have to clean up and I don’t think he’d appreaciate that very much. So, hands on your head and turn around, slowly.”