death_gone_mad: Amascut raises her eyebrow at you, you weirdo (dubious)
███████ , devourer of souls ([personal profile] death_gone_mad) wrote in [community profile] milliways_bar2013-06-12 08:17 am

fuzzbombs and ore

A hand comes through the front door and pushed it aside as if it where a curtain. The owner of that hand, the woman who has been introducing herself her as Sarah to most people, stands for a bit, sniffing.

Milliways looks like it usually does and it smells like there was an upward blip in the kitten population, but the extra kittens are no longer present. Cubefall must be over! Sarah disappears behind the the front door-curtain again for a while and comes back bearing her staff of light (A svardstaff looking thing) over her shoulder with two large sacks of rock and a cage full of chinchillas red furred chinchompas hanging off it.

"Bar, could you get this iron ore and coal to Skaði?" she asks the bar as she leaves the sack of rock on the countertop. The sacks of ore and coal disappear, obligingly.

That taken care of, she puts the staff back on her shoulder and looks about for someone. Even if you aren't that someone, she can be convinced to bring out one of the cute fuzzies for petting purposes.

[personal profile] herr_bookman 2013-06-13 08:01 pm (UTC)(link)
"Stars and garters I didn't realize they were that unstable!" he says, dropping the staff as he follows her scramble for cover.

"A whole cage would be a hilarious improved weapon," he remarks, sizing up the remains of the blast. He's starting to think he should stay far, far out of whatever her throwing range is.

"There's no way to dissect them, is there? If we could find out what reaction makes them explode, we may be able to neutralize it."
herr_bookman: (glasses)

[personal profile] herr_bookman 2013-06-13 09:29 pm (UTC)(link)
Autor shrugs. "If you can neutralize the reaction, you might be able to learn how it works, and then reproduce it in other things."

He adjusts his glasses. "Are they fast runners? Should we let them loose and hunt them down, or just toss them? And why grab them by the tail?"

[personal profile] herr_bookman 2013-06-14 06:49 am (UTC)(link)
Autor nods, and then shakes his head. "I can't even fathom how these have evolved to this point. A death in a burrow would set off such a nasty chain reaction."

The rest of her explanation is met with more nodding. "Well," he says, and leans the Staff of Light up on one of the practice range's barriers. "Did we want to bother setting up targets, or just start flinging a few?"

Later on, they can experiment with fuses of sorts.
herr_bookman: (glasses)

[personal profile] herr_bookman 2013-06-14 05:00 pm (UTC)(link)
Autor shrugs. "Not sure. We could set a few loose and throw them at one another, though that would use them up twice as quickly."

[personal profile] herr_bookman 2013-06-15 03:05 am (UTC)(link)
Autor laughs. Nervously. A bit. He wouldn't want to be among the first three or four people discovering how the chinchompas work.

"They must have made a terrible mess," he says, edging away from the cage again. "I wonder if anyone took bets. Who cast the spell?"
herr_bookman: (glasses)

[personal profile] herr_bookman 2013-06-15 03:58 am (UTC)(link)
"Were-sausages?" the kid parrots, blinking at her. "Nothing about that is remotely kosher."

He adjusts his glasses. "Why would you feed one to the chinchompas?" he asks, and then holds up a hand. "No, wait. Never mind. I would have done it, too. Actually, does anyone know what they eat regularly?"

Autor's slowly becoming more and more fascinated with these creatures. She may want to start blowing them up.
herr_bookman: (lean)

[personal profile] herr_bookman 2013-06-15 04:15 am (UTC)(link)
Oh, I'm going to get bitten or blown up or even--"Certainly," he says, and seizes it at the base of the tail. It only takes him a moment to fling it away--he has an arm conditioned from his grenades--and the resulting rodent explosion is disgustingly satisfying.

"These," he says, "are delightful. Though I do still feel badly for them."

[personal profile] herr_bookman 2013-06-15 05:14 am (UTC)(link)
Autor tilts his head. "You mentioned that these are the only two species left," he says. "Between the two, are they really that plentiful?"

They could be, they're rodents. But he still can't wrap his head around how an exploding rat population can evolve to the point where they're overrunning a planet.

Still, watching them explode reminds him, oddly, of eating unicorn mushrooms. He's not sure what he thinks about that.

"I probably would," he says, and clasps his hands behind his back.
herr_bookman: (glasses)

[personal profile] herr_bookman 2013-06-15 05:21 pm (UTC)(link)
"True enough," he says, shrugging, "though I'm fairly certain that's not a justification for what we're doing. If there was a kinder way to exterminate them, then maybe we could..."

That said, he does fling the next one she offers.

[personal profile] herr_bookman 2013-06-15 11:06 pm (UTC)(link)
Autor shrugs. "I don't think it's sentimentality"--as he's never sentimental, never ever--"but just a recognition that we are not only exterminating something, but taking another life for our entertainment purposes."

Then again, people go hunting and have bear baiting and cockfights all the time. So there's that.

"What else can you do to them?"

[personal profile] herr_bookman 2013-06-16 07:05 am (UTC)(link)
Autor stifles his laughter with a hand. "Yes," he returns with a pan just as deceased, "that would be dreadful."

The boy leans over the tin to get a look and jerks his head back when she says, "taking control." He wrinkles nose. "These sound awful. What will the slugs do to the chinchompas? Make them tipsy?"

He gingerly extracts one from her and--mindful of getting bitten or blowing his hand off--sets it down roughly ten feet away.

[personal profile] herr_bookman 2013-06-16 07:35 pm (UTC)(link)
"How on earth were you able to teach them that?" he says, blinking. "Are you teaching the slugs and passing that on? How does that even work? Did you experiment as to what phrases would sink in?"

The kid can't wrap his head around it. Unless they're really that easily trained, she wouldn't have been able to, he thinks. But then she'd be able to teach it other things... right?

In any case, he watches the trained chinchompa waddle after the other one, and shakes his head. "Do you think mine even knows what's coming?"
herr_bookman: (glasses)

[personal profile] herr_bookman 2013-06-16 09:59 pm (UTC)(link)
"If they can carry out simple directions like this, I wonder if you can suggest different things?" he says. "Like, for example, 'charge at the first green thing you see'."

Then he tilts his head. "Provided they see colors in the same way we do."

He crouches down and waits, watching hers scurry after his. "How long have you been working with them?"

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