Calling all travellers, please report to gate

[exascendee]

FORM: Crystal
SENDER: Daniel Jackson
RECIPIENT: Everyone
WHAT: Anyone seen a Stargate lying around?
WHEN: Early Bloomingtide. Backdated to some days before phylactery shenanigans because he's gonna be distracted by that.
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: He doesn't have super high hopes at this point, but he's yet to come across anything in his research and he's getting impatient.

[ If this sounds vaguely like someone speaking over an announcement loudspeaker, that's because that's how Daniel is treating this. ]

Hi, my name is Daniel Jackson. If anyone has seen, heard, or read of something called a Stargate, please get in touch with me.

It looks like a large metal ring, about twenty feet tall, with roughly forty glyphs around the circumference, and nine chevrons along the edges. It'll probably be very old, maybe found in a ruin somewhere. Uh, it could also have been called a Chappa'ai, Astria Porta, Ring of the Gods...

Anyway, if this rings a bell for anyone, please let me know. It's important. Thank you.

Comments

[exascendee]

[ He gives a deep sigh - Inessa was definitely one of the people he hoped would've come across something like this during research. ] Thanks...

And, well, you need a combination of glyphs to open the doorway, so the chevrons are sort of the locks while the glyphs are the possible keys. Or, probably more accurate, the combination of glyphs is the address of where you want to go.

[circleprodigy]

Fascinating. [No sarcasm, she really is intrigued.] And is there a projected number of addresses? How many have you discovered?

...I should that that researching glyphs here will more likely than not lead to mage textbooks. That said, the oldest written lore is often found in tomes from the Tevinter Imperium. Elven ruins are also a possibility, though much less convenient.

[exascendee]

Oh, god, probably thousands. We've got several hundred hundred of them discovered, and I've been to... a lot of them. Haven't counted recently.

[ He doesn't have his missions logs, so he'd have to sit down and make a list. Which... is definitely something he would do. He's been here long enough that he's started recreating the most important of his notes on Ancient technology, partly for sharing, partly in case he forgets. ]

And yeah, those are the two main sources I've been trying to dive into. I haven't found any evidence of goa'uld activity here so far, so it seems likely they don't know about this planet, which means if there is a stargate here, it might have been put here by the Ancients thousands if not millions of years ago.

[circleprodigy]

...and thus well-hidden. It's possible they might not be in Thedas, but on another continent. We are only familiar with a portion of this world, and very little is known about the lands and societies from elsewhere.

[exascendee]

There were two of them on my planet, and one of them were in the frozen southern pole, probably similar to the Sunless Lands here.

[ He sighs with tired annoyance. ]

You know, back home, we have ships that can fly? If I just had one of those, I could pop right over the Hunterhorns, the Donarks, or to the Amaranth. Easy peasy. Back in time for lunch.

[ It's not the first time he's been on a planet that is unmapped, but usually they have access to ways to solve that. ]

[circleprodigy]

Perhaps, perhaps not. The Amaranth is not to be underestimated; it's devoid of any sentient species and all colonization attempts have failed. Supposedly, a lone survivor was driven mad and killed himself a short time after being discovered. It makes me wonder about the state of the Veil there, and whether the Breach could have made the status quo even worse from so far away.