"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.

"Yeah, I've had to do that a time or two myself. It's never a good feeling."

"Absolutely. Doesn't help to dwell on it, though... Are you all four from different parts of your galaxy?"

It's probably not useful to hide the truth here. "We're from two different galaxies actually. Teyla and Ronon are native to the Galaxy we call Pegasus which is where we all were before we arrived here. Rodney and I are from a different galaxy we call the Milky Way, it has its own threats but at least it doesn't have the Wraith."

"Better to have one thing at a time. And you moved between galaxies with those 'stargates'? Which aren't even magic?"

"We also have ships that can make the trip now, but yes we first did it via Stargate. As for whether they're magic, everyone tells me they're not but I wouldn't know if they were."

"Ha ha," Rodney says sarcastically. "The Stargates are an incredible piece of technology, we're at least decades if not a century from building any ourselves. We do understand a lot of what they do though, even if we're still working on the how."

"The dwarfs would hate it. Maybe not enough to keep them from studying it, but their craftsmen and Engineers are... obsessive, by human standards."

"Unfortunately, we're rather far behind in general so we get by with a mix of gifted tech and things we have either completely or incompletely reverse engineered. Nice as it would be to develop things from scratch our enemies won't wait around for us to do that."

"Humans are willing to do that. The dwarfs have the best technology in the world, but... in an emergency they'll field weapon designs that only had fifty years of testing instead of three hundred. If at least one master of the guild will speak for it."

"I rather doubt we'll get along then."

"Rodney."

"Yes, yes, I'll play nice if it comes to that."

"You'll want to try, eventually." In the optimistic scenario where this is all legitimate and we concede that it is. "If you want to repair, or make more of, your guns and equipment, they look more like dwarf-make than anything else. ...Also they have the only way of manipulating magic mechanically. Runesmiths trap it in metal and stone, and of course it's not complete until it works precisely the same way every time. There are men who approach them in a few endeavors but they're very good at what they do."