It becomes rapidly clear that he, while not having been blessed with an abundance of upper body strength, is also approaching the problem at an entirely unworkable perspective in rather more than one sense.

He scowls at the obstinate device, rolling one shoulder smoothly back, and wedges the sharp edge back into the center of the mechanism, angling it away from him rather than in adjacency. The parallels between certain current and past events are irresistible, but to exist in a state of reminiscence is perilous and ill-advised. And so he resists.

Yet - when he embarked upon his relentless unraveling of the ninth chevron address, he did not embark with the expectation of failure. He would devote every inch of his mind to feverishly exploiting its every twist and nuance, because nothing could resist his mind and it would have no choice but to yield to the superior, immovable force that opposed it. He'd commenced with every confidence that the address would open to him as all things inevitably opened to him, only to be met with, what - defeat by an alien cypher encrypted in another language, to be solved by a child with no meaningful forays into academia whatsoever.

Any similar failures now will not be tolerable. This is an entirely different arrangement of wholly distinguishable, separate factors. A strictly mechanical undertaking. No locks. No cyphers seeded into 'gates whose properties were incompletely understood.

He will not fail her now. He will not fail her now.

With a low, angry hiss and the groan of separating edges, the hand opens to him.