milliways_bar | (no subject)

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(no subject)

Agatha's back in the bar today, at the tables she set up before. The sign and items are all still there. Draping it in a blanket helped keep everything safe.

Well, that and the security system she added.

She's not keeping an eye out for customers at the moment. There's something more importaint on her mind.

In front of her is a slightly used camera, disassembled. Notes and schematics are spread out on the table around it, and there is much tinkering. She's humming an odd tune.

Fear.

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"There you go. Isn't it amazing what a little clever application of technology can do?"

"Yes. Yes, it is. I'm amazed that it hadn't been discovered back home, yet. . ."

"Well, you guys probably had other ways of arranging things. It would've been discovered sooner or later."
The same thing we do every night, Pinky.

"So much was lost during the Great War, and the Other's attacks -- even if it had been discovered, they may not have been able to do much with the technology before an attack wiped out all their research."

Ray nods. "They say that wars generate the technological advances necessary to ultimately pay for themselves, but that's only in my world- and the key word is ultimately. Too much research gets destroyed along the way."

"It really doesn't work that way when the wars almost exclusively are fought between those most likely to make technological advances. Even in the long run, only the odd artifact will survive from any given battle."

"Yeah. Sounds like your wars are more small-scale and personal than the way things are in mine," Ray says. "Though probably just as destructive. I'm just glad the Army turned around and left after we told them exactly how easy it is to misuse our proton pack technology. I'd hate to think what would happen if they were in mass production."

"There were problems for anyone who happened to live between two warring houses, of course --"

She smiles slightly.

"If they're anything like the armies I've seen, they would fall out of use once half their trainees killed themselves before figuring out how to use them and the other half realized some time later that no one taught them how to repair the device. Still, some damage would be done before they caught on."

"Well, see, the thing with the proton packs is that if you have two of them in one place, and you're firing both of them at full stream, and you cross the streams, it causes some serious dimensional cross-warping. The streams basically work on the ghosts by overloading them with enough energy to force them into manifesting fully and severing their connection to the etheric plane, so they're innately local planar breaches. Cross two of the streams and you're forcing two breaches to interact at utterly different angles. The end result, from the user's point of view? Imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light. The first time two recruits sneeze at the wrong moment during target practice, you're doomed."

Agatha considers this.

". . . and the people who think it's a good idea to give an army these devices. They've lived this long, how?"

"Well, that's the thing." Ray says. "once we explained that part to them? Suddenly they didn't want them any more."

"That's a relief. Let's hope they've learned their lesson and leave you to your work."

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