| abstract | - This Living Spycraft serial is a crossover with the Stargate SG-1 universe and several events and characters derived from this series. The main "villain" presented here is Diancecht, an original System Lord never seen in the Stargate SG-1 TV show. The world of Herilia is farther from its sun than Earth from Sol, making it a world that struggles to reach twilight levels of illumination at full noon. This lack of sunlight is offset by rampant greenhouse gases, which make it a habitable, but dim, world. The inhabitants have adjusted, over generations, to these conditions, but the agents are likely to find the place slightly more difficult to navigate. On this world, a Goa'uld named Diancecht seeded a group of humans of Celtic descent. The Herilians threw off his rule in a bloody rebellion centuries ago, taking advantage of the fact that Diancecht's resources were spread thin at the time due to a particularly bloody war with another System Lord. Diancecht didn't return for over a hundred years, after his affairs were back in order, but by then Herilia had forged its own independence, and the System Lord was unable to conquer the planet by force. Instead, he worked behind the scenes slowly shaping the society’s development in an experiment to see whether a world could be more useful to him if its inhabitants didn’t know he was really in charge. For years, this experiment seemed a complete failure, but Diancecht recently stumbled upon a developing Herilian technology that might be useful in the war between the System Lords and the Tok'ra - an exploration into human bio-feedback. Diancecht immediately recognized the combat applications of this technology, which was previously ignored by the Goa’uld because it generally helped humans. Soon after, a Goa’uld exile named Arawn became marooned on Herilia. Thinking that Herilia was unclaimed or abandoned, the exile attempted to declare himself the world’s lord. Arawn was familiar with the Herilian people’s true origins, and assumed that they would simply accept his claim, but Diancecht secretly helped guide the Herilians against Arawn, and though many hundreds of the world’s inhabitants died, they managed to resist Arawn, and capture him more or less alive. The Herilians placed Arawn’s brain-damaged remains at a secure military installation, where Diancecht has posed as one of their highest-level bureaucrats ever since, developing a new bio-feedback weapon that targets a human host who’s been physiologically altered by Goa’uld blending. Diancecht has convinced the researchers that this weapon will only affect Goa’uld, without impacting the host, but in truth, a Goa’uld could simply ignore the vicious effects the weapon has upon its host body’s senses. A blended Tok’ra, however, which freely shares with its host, would be devastated, perhaps even disabled. Recently, Stargate Command visited Herilia during a routine exploration. Colonel Eriksen, the officer in charge of the SGC’s field base on Herilia, quickly became suspicious of the Herilians’ true agenda, and located their secret lab, located in a skunkworks in the mountains about 100 miles from the Stargate. So far, he hasn’t been able to penetrate the facility, however, and he’s finally decided to bring in people specifically trained for covert entry. The agents - Earth’s top-rated spies - are tapped for the mission, either due to their previous experience with off-world phenomena (during the Living Spycraft serial, Outbreak) or due to their discretion with extreme situations and amazing technology (as exhibited by the Agency’s premier enemies, Earth’s criminal geniuses).
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