"Strong wills and fatalism, at least, don't make us stop trying. Actually, what you said reminded me: What can you share about the Wraiths you mentioned? They're physical, and vampiric, but called 'wraith'?"

"That's what we call them at least. I don't know what they call themselves. We haven't had occasion to talk with any. I think I mentioned before that they feed on people's vitality somehow. I'm not really sure how it works but someone in the prime of their life can change to looking like someone at the end of a long life in less than a minute if they're feeding as fast as they can."

"They can also restore people to youth, it's something they do rarely to reward the humans who become Wraith Worshippers. Or as part of torturing people."

"Eugh. I've never heard of our vampires healing their victims, though I suppose I wouldn't be shocked to hear they can. Do they feed often?"

"I'm not sure. Nobody is really able to safely observe them enough to know. What we do know is that they hibernate sometimes for centuries at a time when they've taken too many of us and there aren't enough to sustain them. Sadly their last period of hibernation ended a bit over a year ago."

"Hibernate collectively? That's interesting. Vampires here can sleep - well, 'sleep' - for very long times, especially if they've been killed and are recovering, but outside a major Vampire War that kills several leaders, almost never as a group."

Though he's not particularly believing her, as the one person here who is potentially hostile even if this isn't a Chaos trick. It's still data.

"They leave watchers awake to warn them of any threats and to ensure we don't forget about them, to ensure we don't ever believe ourselves safe or get powerful enough to challenge them. Until Sheppard's people came I didn't believe anyone could stand against them."

"Because of inadequate weapons? Numbers?"

"The Wraith are stronger individually but that can be overcome. Their true power is in their darts, and their larger starships. Most of the peoples of my galaxy don't have aircraft or weapons that can damage even a single dart and en masse they are even harder to defend against. And if a world developed enough to fight the darts, a cruiser or a hive would simply bombard them from orbit."

"To be clear, wraith darts aren't projectiles; they're flying craft that can shoot bursts of fire, for lack of a better word, and use culling beams to simply disappear people on the ground beneath them to be rematerialized later inside of their hives where they don't have a chance to fight back."

'Peoples of my galaxy', and they still weren't beating the vampires. That's sort of terrifying.

"Are the culling beams understood to be magic?"

"No they're technology, they operate on the same principles as ring transporters, Asgard beaming and to a lesser degree Stargates." 

"Interesting. There's not much magic in your galaxy, is there? Even your souls have less than normal."

"It's something of a matter of debate but most people who know about them consider psychic powers to be magic. And there isn't really another good way of describing the uh... ascended." Rodney, Sheppard and Teyla all wince slightly at the last word.

"...I owe you an explanation of that part. As far as I've ever heard, there are three humans at most who have ever transitioned from being made of flesh to magic. The imperial god Sigmar, possibly a goddess from even further south called Verena, and the First Necromancer, Nagash, who sacrificed whole cities to power his transformation. Unless you count Daemon Princes, former men who served Chaos loyally and thoroughly enough to be rewarded with mutating gift after gift until they got the ultimate reward of being made a daemon who cannot die. Those, there are hundreds of, and tens of thousands who attempted it and got turned into mindless gibbering horrors instead along the way. And they call it a couple things, but the 'path of glory' and 'path to ascension' are the main ones."

"That makes sense. It's always hard when there's that kind of overlap."

"It's come up a lot in your traveling?"

"It's not the most common kind of misunderstanding. But it's one of the more challenging ones to handle when it does. I think odd marriage practices happen more often and those are also thorny to untangle."

"Would giving examples be amusing, or annoying?"

"I haven't personally encountered them much. There was one particularly strange case where sharing a slice of cake was their equivalent of a marriage ceremony. Argos was tragic in other ways but my people fixed it."

Should he ask? Yeah, probably. "What was the problem in Argos?"

"A person named Pelops was experimenting on the people there at some point he left but he left behind a device that made people age unnaturally quickly. They were born, lived and died in just 100 days until we shut down the device."

"Gods watch over us. That's... well, I've heard things as bad in their own ways, but not obviously worse, and that's a nastily exclusive category."

"Yeah. It's one of the things that sticks with you."

"At least you fixed it. I wish I could say the same, but most horrors I've run into there was only one relief on offer." He touches his belt where a scabbard usually hangs.