The Big Applesauce

He sheathes himself in intent and blinding resolve, gathering himself at the peak of all he is. He knows the form and shape of himself intimately, and that of the Rift nearly as much. He has no physical structure here, nothing but the transcendental construction of his being, spun from energy and enlightened matter.

He forms the configuration of his atoms into a point and launches himself toward the great barrier mantled over the city, driving himself into the obstruction with every high-vibrating strand of himself in an ineluctable quantum-entangled internecine of torquing chiral matter and shrieking electromagnetism, resolving into bright streak of light, and then nothing.

Electrostatic discharge bisects the sky in an erratic jolt, feathering into diverging points before realigning into a single incandescent bolt that slams into the ground with the low, juddering impact of two unrelenting forces colliding on a colossal, rising, universal scale.

Bones grind into the approximation of a human skeleton, molecules stitched together to form organs with the churning of heart and veins and brain and lungs, skin wrapped over the assemblage of physiological necessity, all done with the vibrant immediacy of interconversion of energy to matter between seconds.

The transduction of one phase of matter to another.

Energy becomes flesh.

Light becomes bone.

Daniel Jackson returns to earth.
---
He opens his eyes.

It is very dark.

There is a tightness in his chest, and belatedly he realizes it is because he needs to breathe.

He breathes.

He blinks, eyelashes scratching the air that is too crisp and frigid and sharp, prickling the sarcoline membrane of his skin. He opens his hands, pale, spidery blurs printed against the dark matte of cold sky.

He sits up. His sense howl against the sensation, the exertion of muscle, the grating pull and shift of bone, the sensation of grass tickling bare skin nothing short of a unique somatosensory hell.

Hell. That’s a concept that strikes him as vaguely familiar.

Unfortunately, nothing else about this does.

With nothing else to do and with the whole of him aching, as if only now realizing just how incredibly inconvenient and painful the burden of physical existence is, he makes a list of things that he knows.

He is in a field, broad and open and grassy. The trees are distant pinpricks in silhouette. There is the distant rush of objects hurtling laterally through space by way of paved roads. The sky is a canopy of bright-dotted lights, comprised of stars and a glittering, multicolored swathe of metropolitan luminescence. The field is wet, with dew or rain or both. The air is cool. He is breathless, nameless, clothesless.

Nameless?

That’s a bit worrying.

Or maybe he just knows it’s meant to be worrying. Right now, the only emotions he seems to be able to muster are those of budding distress and confusion.

Also, discomfort. He’s shivering, and he has to remind himself to blink and also to breathe, and something about that doesn’t seem quite right because it’s not spectacularly efficient to have to keep reminding himself of those faculties that really should be involuntary, he’s pretty sure, is he sure though, because he’s not entirely certain where all these preconceived notions about his physiology seem to be coming from, and also he would like some clothes.

The thought crystallizes into relief. That’s something he knows. Desire. He wants something. Namely, to be clothed. Kind of right now. Or just soon-ish. That would also work.

Standing is a trial, walking even more so. His body feels fragile, new, possibly newborn if that didn’t make no biological sense whatsoever. He stumbles forward like a poorly-coordinated child, his legs shuddering in protest with each creaking motion.

First, he needs to get out of here.

[ooc: After a month of glow-jellyfish shenanigans and an ill-advised attempt to bullrush the Rift into letting him go, Daniel has descended and is now human again. Rest assured, anyone who finds him WILL find him clothed, as he’ll have recovered some from a dumpster or something by the time he’s wandering the streets of Manhattan. ALSO word of warning - seeing as his brain’s been freshly scrambled, Daniel’s a wee bit amnesiac. Also slightly aphasiatic? He has no idea who he is and he’s not going to be capable of understanding or speaking English until his memories start trickling back.]

Existence without form or breath or shape is disorienting, the spread of atoms over a plane he doesn't recognize, with the repeated dissolutions and reshapings of an indistinct self. At one point there was pain, and the unspooling of himself into light and purpose, and for a long while there is only amorphous drifting. He hits barriers, dissonant and frequent, where once he should have crossed from one plane to another, one reality to the next, in an effortless slide of energy across the universal boundaries. It is difficult to define emotional state outside of the human context - he only knows that he is not human - but it is a state of affairs that generates confused distress.

Temporal sequencing becomes a problem.

Awareness, too, is difficult to achieve. Gradually he is able to pull together the various components that comprise himself and reshape them into something capable of perception, but doing so strikes him with a revelation disconsolate, and that is that there are no Others here - no Ancients, nothing, simply an empty plane of shifting light and bottomless dark. And he is alone.

He knows he did this, and it was for a reason. But he finds he cannot remember anything, not immediately, and when the memories trickle back with his concentrated effort they are unfiltered and unstructured and unordered until finally he can impose the alien concept of linear time upon the thing, and fully interpret what he is in comparison to what he was.

Daniel Jackson.

The name is the linchpin that generates the outward ripples, spreading from that singular point of origin. It triggers the flood of remembrance, the 'gate, Manhattan, the locked-away knowledge that was once sealed in his head but now coalesces seamlessly into the whole of him now. He cannot delineate his form by shape or size or mass, not any longer, but now he remembers, he remembers what it is he can do and how it is he can do it.

He starts small because he must, drifting as a pair of hydrogen atoms while he glimpses the city on a reduced scale. Then he builds to it, the recollection of his shape. Spectrally manifesting was never truly allowed before, but if there are no Others then he is not bound by their laws. He assembles a body that resembles the one that was human and familiar, and projects it. It takes two tries to succeed, three to sustain it for longer than a meaningless collection of seconds, and no matter what he tries he cannot force his shape to manifest with glasses. Apparently his inner self, or however he chooses to define it, does not need them.

He loses track of how many attempts he makes before he can maintain his form visibly for any significant length of time. But finally, in a ragged burst of energy, the bewildered shape of Daniel Jackson reappears in Manhattan, and there he stays.

[ooc: Daniel Ascended back during the Rift Shitfit of September 4th, and he's only just figured out how to Do Things in his new state of being. Right now he's completely intangible and frequently phasing in and out of visible existence. I've added to his handy-dandy reference post as to what he can and can't do in this state. He can also show up LITERALLY ANYWHERE so if you want in on Ascended funtimes just pick a date and a location, or Daniel can pick one, or whatever.]

For the life (or death) of him, Daniel can't decide what it is he did to deserve a friend like Seth, who has apparently been devoting time to finding Daniel a new place of residence. What's more, unlike Daniel, it seems like he's actually succeeded in locating something feasible. With some of the creative dodging of the building management he's had to do, it's very likely that Lucy's old place won't be tenable for much longer. It'll be frustrating no longer having friends like Bee or Spike or Melanie in easy reach, but the potential consequences of the Rebels forcibly evicting him or, even worse, deciding he could be an asset of some kind, aren't ones he can afford to ignore.

He's putting a lot of faith in someone else's judgment over a potential new living space, but he trusts Seth. He trusts him, and he likes him, and it'd be nice to have a place Seth could visit once in a while instead of Daniel always crashing at his, if only for reciprocation's sake. He already likes the location, far enough removed from the Rebels or ROMAC's respective bases of operations while still within a reasonable radius in relation to the Rift center. The latter wasn't a necessity, but Daniel more or less feels like he needs to have some means for access to it, if only for the sake of any other rifties who might come through. And it's only a few blocks away from the bookstore he may have landed a job at, no less.

Daniel re-checks the address texted to him by Seth, then crams his phone back into his pocket and waits.

It's not that he doesn't like the building. He likes it, he does, he really does. It's just that Daniel can't work out a feasible way to pay for any of it until he can find a decent job, and he's not sure how far archaeology is going to take him here in terms of employment. And, well, he'd prefer to stay out of the museums. For his own reasons.

Somewhat ruefully, he digs out a pen and his rather crumpled list of potential new apartment buildings and runs a neat line through the building he's, unfortunately, about to leave due to pricing being somewhat out of his range. Somewhat a lot out of his range. He doesn't really have a whole lot of range. Daniel gnaws on his pen as he descends the stairs at a thoughtful, leisurely pace, in no hurry to get back to the Rebel apartments. He could potentially stay at Seth's if the Rebels have him forcibly removed, but that's no permanent solution. It all ties into one great loop of broken economy, where he needs to get a job before he can make any plans to officially move out, but in order to facilitate moving out he'll have to have a destination in mind, and in order to make that work he will need, as it so happens, a job. Preferably soon. He thinks he's done an admirable job of adjusting to being spatially and temporally relocated to Manhattan; it's all those little details that are proving to be the most troublesome to navigate.

He gets to the ground floor before he has to fumble for his phone again. He's getting better at grasping the city layout, but Daniel mostly has Lucy and Google Maps to thank for that. Unfortunately, the reception here isn't looking too great. He frowns and gives his phone an experimental shake, as if that will do anything at all, but the little connectivity symbol remains willfully absent.

Daniel pockets the phone with a frustrated grunt. Great. Fantastic.