"Yes, we left a lot of responsibilities and people who will be worried about us behind. I'm interested in helping while we're here but if we can return we need to do that."

"Then I have some possible options, but I'm guessing we should include Mr. McKay."

"Sounds like a good idea."

McKay is easy to find. He's working at a table with his tablet and his scanner.

He looks up when they arrive. "I heard from Teyla that she's in the clear. I didn't ask but it looked like it took more out of her than we were expecting."

"We forgot that they don't have proper syringes."

"Oh."

"I'm sorry it was more painful than you'd anticipated." He's not really clear on how extracting internal bodily fluids is supposed to be done without short-term wounds but whatever, it'll heal in days. "I have ideas for what we could bring in to help you work out the possibilities of travel back to your home."

"Teyla will be fine," Sheppard agrees.

Rodney perks up. "Oh, that sounds very interesting to hear about."

"So there's two main approaches we could look into; engineering or magic, and they don't much overlap. We have some schools of engineering here, and it would be easy to get a few experts in to work out what we could reproduce, how long it would take to rebuild what tools you know, materials, etc. With a small sample of some of your materials we could also lure a dwarf engineer, who would be much more of an expert, but that would take much longer."

"On magic, we have Ice Witches who could teach the theory, and I could negotiate with a Hag Witch to see if their spirit-binding methods might help your understanding improve. Further afield, with time we could invite an imperial wizard; they are more academic in their studying, and one of the Winds, Chamon the Gold Wind of Metal, has engineering-like studies, as I understand it."

"Much as I like to talk up my abilities, I don't think I could reinvent all the technologies necessary to building a Stargate. Even with all the resources in Atlantis I couldn't build a Stargate from scratch.

"So I do expect we'll need some sort of local magic whether that's from the Dwarves or from one of the human traditions. And I just don't know enough about how magic works and what it can do here to be able to guess which tradition would be best. I've been looking at the data from our trip yesterday all day and I'm still just scratching the surface."