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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ladybird" data-source="post: 2298246" data-attributes="member: 10689">Episode 1: Closer to Fine. Part 5 - Behind Door #3...Twenty minutes later, it had gotten even older. The door was still very much locked.Reinhart was pacing restlessly around the room, while Kathleen leaned against the wall opposite Joe, legs crossed and backpack on the ground beside her, her encouraging smile always present, but starting to look a little strained. Ked’rec, impassive as always, maintained his post by the door to the corridor. “So,” began Hramov, a mocking note in his voice. “American technical school is – “Almost in unison, SG-17 turned towards him, glaring.“ – is just fine,” he finished meekly. “Mr. Healy? Why don’t you take a break?” Kathleen suggested gently. “You know, sometimes if you go away from a problem and come back to it…”“Or we could blast through it,” Joe said with a shrug. “We’ve got C4.”“Negative, Mr. Healy!” Kathleen tried – with little success – to keep the alarm out of her voice. “We have no idea how structurally sound this place is, and we are not going to risk damaging anything in this room, or on the other side of that door. Ked’rec!” she cried, seizing eagerly on a new idea. “Why don’t you see if you can pry it open? Maybe the lock will just break if we put enough force on it.”The Jaffa disappeared down the hall for a moment, then returned with a long crowbar. Joe backed away from the door to make room for Ked’rec. “It’s all right, Mr. Healy,” Kathleen consoled him, with only a shrug and a grunt from Joe in response. The crowbar screeched against the stone floor, and Kathleen raised her voice to drown out the noise. “You’ve been doing great work so far. Sometimes you just need to go about solving a problem in a different way…”“Major Fitzgerald?” Ked’rec broke in. “The door will not open.”“C4…” was all that Joe said, as he started to rummage through his backpack.“Still no, Mr. Healy.” Kathleen sighed, rubbing her eyes wearily. “Reinhart. How are you with locks?” Still muttering about explosives, Joe zipped up his backpack again, moving aside to let Reinhart approach the door. After a few moments of work, the lieutenant looked up. “Got it, ma’am!” he announced with a triumphant grin. “Good work, Lieutenant.” Kathleen hauled her backpack back up onto her shoulders, giving Reinhart a relieved smile. “All right, Ked’rec. You go first again – and everyone, be careful. If the door was that difficult to open, there’s got to be something pretty important in there.”Weapon raised, Ked’rec led the way down a short corridor, ending in a squared-off archway. On the other side of the archway, the ceiling opened up, reaching high up into the darkness, and the narrow hall gave way to wide, echoing open space. Deeply etched inscriptions covered the walls, illuminated by Kathleen’s swiftly-traveling flashlight beam. As she stepped further into the room, the light was suddenly broken up by an enormous block of stone that cast a tall, distorted dark shadow onto the far wall. Hramov’s voice sounded artificially loud in the dark, silent room. “It is in the shape of…a tomb. A mausoleum,” he added, finding the right word after a brief search.Cautiously, Kathleen edged around behind Ked’rec, shining her flashlight through the slanted rectangle of the mausoleum’s doorway.  The light reflected dully off of a corrugated metal ring set into the sandstone floor of the mausoleum: the unmistakable pattern of a Goa’uld ring transporter.There was a very long silence.“Um.” Reinhart said finally.And then there was another very long silence.“All right,” Kathleen said. “I think this is the kind of thing that we need to report to the SGC and General Andreyev.” And I think that has to be in the running for the biggest understatement of the year, she thought giddily. “Back upstairs, everyone. And let’s take the notebook and tablet reader with us. We’re going to need more information before we go anywhere near that transporter. A lot more information.”</blockquote>

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