By

Linda Chapple

It was an ordinary planet. It was a little bizarre how quickly they had come to find that kind of statement coming to mind. It was only a handful of years since the stars had opened up to them and yet they could now step through a Stargate, look around and think 'nothing out of the ordinary here'. It was a little unsettling, this blasé acceptance of the wildly extraordinary as run of the mill. Even the technological miracle that was the Stargate had become almost humdrum. You dialled up a destination, you stepped through, and you were there. Nothing to it. You did it almost every week. No big deal. The most incredible advance ever made by Mankind, and the only time it ever seemed out-of-the-ordinary was when something decided to go wrong.

Well, that hadn't happened to PX4 939. O'Neill looked around and sighed to himself. Flat open clearing filled with short green grass. Surrounded by some medium height, straggly trees that looked a little like pines. Some small hills in the near distance. Blue sky, some wispy white clouds. Ordinary. Totally and completely ordinary. He sighed again.

"O'Neill?"

Jack turned to give Teal'c a reassuring smile. "Nothing's wrong. Just wish that sometimes the sky could be a different colour, or the grass be ten feet tall, or something."

"Sir, if the sky was a different colour, we would probably find the atmosphere to be toxic and it's highly unlikely that grass could grow to ten feet without falling over under its own weight-"

"Carter, will you quit that?" O'Neill groused. "I was just making idle conversation, okay? Sheesh, I'd hate to watch an SF movie with you in the audience. You'd be critiquing everything instead of rooting for the good guys to zap the bad guys."

"Sorry, sir. Force of habit, I guess," Carter said with a small smile. She looked around herself and breathed in the cool, fresh air. "Nice," she said in appreciation.

"I guess," O'Neill said with another inner sigh. Maybe he shouldn't have indulged in that marathon SF film season last weekend. After the wonders dreamed up by Hollywood, real life star travelling seemed a trifle… well, flat. He could count the exotic aliens he'd met on the fingers of one hand and all the planets had started to blur together into one homogenous mass. "Well, I guess the sooner we get started, the sooner we can get back to Earth. Daniel, you take the southern sweep, Teal'c goes west, Carter you have north and I'll head east. We meet back here in a couple of hours at most, but if you don't see anything interesting, get back here and wait for the others."

And if any of us do see anything, I'll eat my hat, he thought to himself as he made off in his designated direction.

One hour and sixteen minutes later, Teal'c settled down beside the DHD to wait for the others. His own explorations had revealed nothing of any great import and he had decided to return to the Stargate to await the rest of the team. It wasn't that there hadn't been anything of interest to the west. The trees had only extended for a few hundred meters before they had fallen away and Teal'c had found himself on the edge of a great escarpment that had extended in either direction for what looked like a good few miles. In front of him, the terrain had fallen away in gentle, stairlike drops until it had spread out into a great plain. A vast sea of grass had undulated under the influence of a mild wind, shimmering gold and green in the sun. Here and there was a haze of purple, blue or yellow where swathes of flowers lifted their heads to the sky.

It had been a beautiful sight, but there was nothing relating to Go'auld activity. After a few moments to appreciate the view, his sense of duty prodded Teal'c back to stand guard on the Stargate. Just because there didn't seem to be Go'auld around, that didn't necessarily mean that there weren't any. SG1 had triggered traps like this before and Teal'c had learned not to let his guard down the hard way.

The area around the Stargate looked exactly the same as it had when he had left. Teal'c settled down to wait for the others, settling into a light trance which helped him to stay alert while preventing him from becoming dangerously bored. The passage of the birds in the sky above him were ignored, as was the sound of the wind sighing through the trees, but he came alert immediately when there was a rustle in the bushes on the perimeter of the Gate clearing. He swung his staff weapon around as he turned to where the foliage of the small, sturdy bushes was being agitated by the passage of some creature. It was unlikely that a fully-armed and aggressive Jaffa team was crawling through them on their hands and knees, but Teal'c hadn't lived as long as this by taking foolish chances. He was ready for almost anything to appear.

Apart from a small white dog, standing on its hind legs and carrying a basket.

Teal'c blinked.

The dog refused to disappear. It obviously spotted him, since it paused for a few seconds to study him, its head to one side. It was a peculiarly large-nosed dog and Teal'c somewhat dazedly registered that it was wearing a powder-blue cloak that was actually a small blanket tied at the throat. The basket was a wicker one and inside it were what looked like brightly coloured eggs, piled high.

The dog evidently decided that Teal'c posed no threat, since it uttered a small bark and proceeded towards the Stargate in what could only be described as exuberant bouncing leaps. As it came alongside him, it reached into the basket and tossed one of the eggs in his direction. Teal'c shied to one side, half-expecting the object to either explode or emit some kind of toxic cloud. Instead the egg just dropped to the ground and rolled a little way before coming to a halt, refusing to look like anything other than a brightly coloured egg.

By the time Teal'c had recovered, the dog had reached the DHD. Without missing so much as a beat of its dance-like progress, it leaped up on to the DHD and proceeded to tap dance out a set of co-ordinates. There was one last jump onto the activation dome, where the dog held a one-legged pose for a heartbeat, the other leg held at right angles while the arms extended on either side for balance. Then it jumped back down and half-leaped, half-danced its way up the stairs. It was so short that the quantum-foam eruption passed easily across its head and with one last leap it was gone. With the usual rumbling whoosh, the Stargate shut down, leaving Teal'c to stare after the departed… creature.

He was still standing there when a disgruntled O'Neill arrived back, picking bits of a thorn bush out of his anatomy. Carter and Jackson were trailing after him, Carter doing her best to muffle her giggles, while Daniel was explaining the socio-mythic connotations to something concerning a being called 'Brer Rabbit'. O'Neill finally turned to give the archaeologist his patented 'I-have-a-gun,-remember?' look.

"I don't care about the inherent power of the folk hero, Daniel. Those damn thorns hurt, okay?"

Jackson's eyes lit up. "In many societies, the act of self-mutilation or ritual blood-letting was considered to be-"

"Hey, time out!" O'Neill yelped. "We are so not getting into that!" He turned back to wave at Teal'c, pausing when he saw the egg that the Jaffa had finally got around to picking up. "Holding out on the candy, Teal'c? Carter's gonna get you for that."

"I do not understand, O'Neill. I am holding an egg of some kind."

"Yeah, I know," O'Neill acknowledged, "but that's an Easter egg. Where did you get it?"

Teal'c gazed down at the egg warily. "The dog dropped it."

O'Neill blinked, then glanced back at the others. No, they looked as confused as he felt. "Uh, what dog would that be, Teal'c?" he asked carefully, hoping this wasn't going to turn out to be some weird mystic Jaffa-warrior type thing.

"The dog that came out of those bushes, wearing a cape and carrying a basket, and activated the Stargate before disappearing through it."

The other three stared at him in silence.

"Pardon?" O'Neill finally asked.

Teal'c obediently repeated what he had said, adding some additional information and proffering the egg to O'Neill for him to see it. O'Neill eyed it with all the wariness of a leader who had had seemingly innocuous artefacts transform into something lethal in the blink of an eye. The egg, however, refused to live up to expectations and remained intact and distinctly non-lethal. It was coloured a deep sapphire blue with delicate gold-leaf flowers and vines all over it.

"Oh, my…."

The team turned to see that Daniel had taken off his glasses and was polishing them furiously. That generally meant that he was going to say something which would be guaranteed to wind up O'Neill. He was also grinning broadly. "Jack, you're slipping. Do you honestly mean to say that you don't recognise what Teal'c just saw?"

O'Neill stared at him incredulously. "Since when would I know anything about two-legged dogs making like the Easter Bun-" He stopped in mid-sentence and graduated from staring to goggling. "You're kidding me! This is some kind of put-on, isn't it?" He swung back to glare at a bewildered Teal'c.

"Jack, this isn't a put-on and Teal'c isn't trying to put one over you," Daniel said soothingly. Teal'c immediately managed to look faintly insulted. "He just told you what he saw."

""And now you're trying to tell me that what he saw was real and somewhere out there is the Easter Beagle?!" O'Neill yelled in outrage.

"Easter Beagle?" Carter's bewilderment lasted for only a couple of minutes before her eyes widened. "You mean the Peanuts Easter Beagle? But he was just a figment of Charles Schultz' imagination! Wasn't he?"

Daniel Jackson shrugged. "That's what everyone assumed, but how else can you explain Teal'c seeing something he knows nothing about, but which we all recognise? If one of us had seen it, then it could be explained as a hallucination. Besides," he smiled, "hallucinations don't generally leave Easter eggs behind them!"

Teal'c stared down at the egg. "This is what Dr Frazier meant when she told me that I owed her an egg?" he said with relief. "Perhaps she will accept this one?"

"I think she'd love that one," Carter said after she had checked it over. "It's definitely more Faberge than Wal-Mart."

"This is good?" Teal'c clarified.

"Very good," Carter reassured him.

"Stop looking so shell-shocked, Jack," Jackson said as he started to dial up Earth's address. "Look on the bright side."

"There's a bright side to finding out that a cartoon character is alive and well and bouncing all over the universe?" O'Neill croaked.

"Sure there is." Jackson tossed a look of pure mischief over his shoulder as he made for the activated Gate. "It could have been Halloween and Teal'c could have had an encounter with the Great Pumpkin!"

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