allisnow | 10,000 words and beyond

Here's another snippet from my Huge Honking SGA Gen Fic

The shipments from Daedalus have spoiled us, Elizabeth Weir decided. And then she marveled that drinking Starbucks coffee while checking her email had become some hedonistic indulgence.

During the first year of the expedition, the family and friends of the military members – well-meaning and knowing only that their loved ones had taken some far-away, long-term classified posting – had sent care packages to the address provided by the government. The government, in turn, had stockpiled those parcels only God knew where against the hope that one day the SGC and the expedition would resume contact. Only the interference of Generals Hammond and O’Neill had prevented them from being thrown out, or picked through.

Now that the Daedalus was in operation, however, ferrying personnel and supplies back and forth between galaxies, the backlog of care packages had finally found an outlet. The families of the civilian members had taken a little longer to catch on, many blithely assuming that their loved ones – wherever they were – were staying in the foreign equivalent of a Hilton hotel. But they had eventually rallied as well, and so had the SGC staff and even the crew of the Daedalus herself, and now every day the ship arrived overhead was like Christmas Day in Pegasus.

Elizabeth hadn’t received any correspondence from Simon. She wasn’t surprised. She’d prepared herself for a clean break… or at least as clean as something like that could possibly be. But her friend Michelle from DC had sent Elizabeth’s favorite brand of makeup, a slinky red dress she would have no opportunity to ever wear, an electric coffee grinder and a bag of her favorite Ethiopia Sidamo blend.

She just had to make sure not to brew any when Rodney McKay was around.

One of the new arrivals, Doctor Ashland, had been responsible for setting up the email network under the pretext that it would improve communication amongst various departments as the expedition staff expanded and diversified. And it had, but Elizabeth suspected that it was getting more recreational use than anything else. Individuals traded recipes and gossip, jokes and something called “memes”, and constructed informal public mailing lists focused on certain topics; Elizabeth had seen groups for everything from cricket and aromatherapy to card games and relationship advice. There’d even been a list called KavanaughSucks, but Elizabeth had eventually convinced Dr. Simpson to disband it.