zinnith | Pirate crack!

Ahoy, me hearties! Today is the International Talk like a Pirate Day. This calls for celebration. Unfortunately, I'm on medication so the rum is out. So instead, 518 words of pure unbeta'd SGA crack!

It was the engineers who started it. Had it only stayed there, the chaos might have stayed within the reasonable. But apparently, SGA-13 was to blame for spreading the plague. Dr Hosseini might seem like a gentle, quiet guy, but he had a positively evil sense of humour. Fate had conspired to put him on the same team as sergeant Lee, the biggest practical joker in Atlantis, and staff sergeant Garcia, who was just crazy. That was how it spread through the marines as well, up to the point where John came to breakfast on September 19 to find that someone (possibly Garcia) had hung the Jolly Roger from the ceiling in the mess hall.

From there, it only got worse. John overheard Corporal Johnson trying to pick up one of the cute botanists using the phrase “Wanna shiver me timbers?” and did his best to ignore the whispered conversation between a group of chemists conspiring to keelhaul Dr Kavanagh (something John wholeheartedly supported, but he couldn’t tell them that). All the marines seemed to have substituted ‘Yes, sir’ with ‘Aye, aye!’ and when John went to the gate room he found Chuck humming silently, something about “We’re beggars and blighters and ne’er-do-well cads…”

The last straw was when he ran into Teyla and Ronon on his way to the gym. They were both equipped with eye-patches and brightly coloured bandanas. Ronon was wearing an enormous pirate hat.

“Sergeant Lee was kind enough to explain that this day is an international holiday on your homeworld,” Teyla said. “We wish to honour your traditions.”

“Arr,” Ronon said.

“I just remembered, I have something very important to do,” John said and fled to his office.

He liked his office. No one knew where it was so it was the perfect place when you wanted to be alone and play video games or have a quiet nervous breakdown based on the sudden insanity of pretty much everyone on the base.

John hadn’t expected to find the room already occupied. Rodney was sitting huddled in the corner between the filing cabinet and the wall, angrily tapping away on his laptop. John was not sure what to think of this. It was not impossible that Rodney had been caught up in the general chaos and the thought of Rodney-style insults in pirate-talk was nothing less than terrifying.

He carefully approached the filing cabinet. “Rodney? What are you doing here?”

The response was a poisonous glare. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m hiding, since everyone in the Science division have apparently gone mad. Zelenka just called me a scurvy dog!”

John had to smile at that. “A mutiny, huh?” he asked.

”You just wait until March 14…” Rodney mumbled, wild-eyed and somewhat frantic.

John decided the situation called for desperate measures and went for the bottom drawer of his desk.

Which was why, when Elizabeth walked by the door two hours later in search for her two missing staff members, she could hear the faint sound of drunken singing from within.

“Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum…”

- fin -