Originally Posted: Mar. 15th, 2007
Length/Rating: 186 words, PG, Gen
Pairing/Warnings: none
Summary: Sometimes the trees are more important than the forest. (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs)

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In the end, it was anthropologists that proved invaluable in negotiations. Engineers could tell you what civilizations needed for survival, anthropologists could tell you what they wanted.

The people of M2T-2AA7 needed sanitation and ventilation for the miles-deep caves carved as protection from the Wraith. They needed generators for lights and hydroponics for food, and a hundred other things on the engineer’s list marked ‘urgent’ and ‘ASAP’.

But what they wanted was sunlight. A way to let Yavahln, sun goddess and protector, reach through the darkness that entombed them and wrap her people her golden embrace. The same caves that were keeping them safe were slowly driving them insane.

So in the end it wasn’t the generators or the plumbing, but a series of mirrors bouncing light down mile after mile that won Atlantis the naquada she needed. And later, when the biologists diagnosed them with a critical dependency on photosynthetic secretions akin to serotonin, the Yavahln’savin just nodded politely and spent three hours in midday prayers just like their father’s fathers before them.

The anthropologists were careful to be smug where Rodney couldn’t see them.