"We can check on things for you if you come back with us. Checking yourself also works though."

Well that helps decide things some. That and the fact that they probably can charge her cell phone! And have wifi!! And probably have earth food even though they don't have doritos or snickers they might have apples or steak or apple pie or fried chicken or ice cream sundaes or... 

Okay but none of those things are actually important (even though they might be nice) but meeting all of the people that she's going to be working with to help save the, well, galaxy (gosh) is important, and it might give her a good place to learn to start figuring out how to solve this problem. Going into this she thought there was going to be one bad guy like Voldemort or the White Witch or whoever the guy was from Lord of the Rings and not, like, a whole bunch of people that ate other people! It's a pretty daunting task but she has a lot of magic now and she can at least help.

"I think we should go back with them," she says. "Even if we have to wait there a while they can check on Sateda for you and they might have some ancestor technology I can look at and we can help them fight the wraith together rather than apart. And we're better together." That's what every book on the subject she's ever read has told her. That's why the power of friendship always wins. 

"Works for me."

At this point they have finally made it back to the clearing with the portal, what Ronon calls the Ring and Sheppard called the Gate. There's a big cylindrical something that wasn't there before in the clearing.

Several soldiers come jogging up "Sir!" and take Ford off of Sheppard's hands. The portal is lit up and the soldiers carry Ford through it.

"That ancestor tech?" Ronon asks.

"It is. It comes in handy especially with space gates."

"I think the Travellers mentioned those. I haven't ever been through one myself."

"Travellers? Space gates?" Is asking questions impolite? Probably not and also she's already asked them so it's far too late now. And also what is that round thing? It wasn't here before. It has a window on the front (or it could be the back or the sides but it looks like it could be the front) so it could be, "And is that a spaceship?" she asks, wonder in her eyes and voice. 

"The Travellers have some of the best tech of anyone in the galaxy. They avoid the wraith by mostly avoiding planets with rings. I got my gun from them early on. Haven't run into them since though."

"Sounds like people we might want to meet. I guess you probably don't know how to get in touch though. Space gates are Stargates like that one except they're in orbit around the planet instead of on its surface. The Jumper here is a spaceship so it can get to them. It doesn't have a hyperdrive though so you can't really use it to get between systems. Even going between planets in one system takes a long time."

It might not have a hyperdrive, but spaceships are still spaceships, right? Even if it does take a long time to travel between planets or something. "So then these Stargates are how most people travel between planets and systems and stuff?" she asks, turning to look at it again. "But you have others with hyperdrive shipping things back and forth between here and Earth, you said, right?" Spaceships are still spaceships but ones with hyperdrive still seem cooler. "Also, how do you make the gate thing work? I tried it out when I got here but I couldn't figure out how to make it do anything other than light up the symbols on that thing there." She points. 

"Yep, that's right. For the Stargate, you dial the six symbols of the address for where you're going and then press the big button. Dialing randomly usually doesn't work."

"Oh, I thought it might be something like that. I just didn't know the right combination! And the big button in the middle is the enter button." Okay she needs to stop being quite so silly now! "So these link to other gates elsewhere, right? Cool!" So there's just a whole bunch of magic (or not so magic?) portals all over the place on different planets and stuff and that's how people get around! That's so cool!! 

"There's Stargates in at least three galaxies and there's probably more. There's a lot we still don't know about them, gates have 9 chevrons and the most we've ever gotten to light up is 8."

Three galaxies! "What's a chevron?" she asks, but has a sudden intuition. (Is that how her language skills are supposed to work?) "Is it, like... those triangular things?" She points. 

"Yep, that's right. We haven't had much presence in the third galaxy but we know it has gates because one of our allies has a bigger presence there."

"Allies?" More aliens, probably? Though everyone here is human (as far as she can tell) (except the wraith of course), so maybe they're human too. She hopes they're aliens through. 

"The Asgard, they're an old ally of the ancestors who are still around."

Asgard? Where has she heard that before... oh right! "Isn't that like, the Norse gods thing? Like with Thor, from the Avengers?" Her mother will never ever know she's seen that movie because Jenna will never ever tell her and Rachel was sworn to secrecy. Those movies were fun though. 

"The Avengers?" a man comes out of the back of the Jumper. "Sheppard, how did you find a comic book fan on a random planet?"

"She's from an alternate reality like that weird mirror thing in the old mission reports, except she came through the Stargate somehow."

"Through the Stargate... oh, that does sound possible that would require ... no it couldn't work quite like that but maybe? I'll have to think on that some more. She isn't having any symptoms of Entrophic Cascade Failure right? You would have mentioned that."

Ronon looks surprised and thoughtful but doesn't speak up just yet.

"I'm pretty sure I'm not suffering from, um Entrophic Cascade Failure, whatever that is." Though it does sound concerning, whatever it is. She's not suffering from it, right? "And I don't read comic books, I just saw the movies like everyone else. Well, some of them." She hasn't seen any lately, ever since Rachel's parents started being harder on her and stuff and keeping a closer eye on her even when she was hanging out with her friends. Rachel still wouldn't really talk about why but hopefully she's still okay. She should check on her when she gets home if she remembers, she hasn't talked to her in years now. 

"You would know if you were. It's pretty dramatic. You get episodes where you kinda blur into the surroundings a little, it's also supposed to be really painful. I guess that means we don't have a you in our reality or else something about coming through a Stargate is different from coming through the quantum mirror. What's this about Avengers movies though? We don't have those here. What are they like? When did they come out? Who played Iron Man?"