Challenge #01140-C043: The Trouble With Kittens
@callmegallifreya - Have some cute
Challenge #00565 - A190: One Fine Evening in a Festival of Masques
A duet between Francouer and The Spine.
On the plus side, the makeup was working. On the minus side, everyone was giving him the stink-eye because he’d decided to test it during an extended costume party all over Paris.
The Spine considered it a point of merit that he had to buy a cheap mask…
(#00786 - B055)
After their strange friends from a different future left, Raoul found a tiny trinket in one of their bunks. It looked like a cylinder… and it had a button, but beyond that, there was no clue of how it worked or what it was.
So, naturally, he pressed the button.
There was no hum. No whirr. No noise of anything mechanical going on, and no hint of what it was supposed to do. Raoul jiggled it. Pressed it against his ear. Tried talking to it. Nothing.
Then he noticed that Francoeur was busy chasing something around the walls and ceiling.
It was a pinpoint of a red dot. Caused… caused by the small cylinder in Raoul’s hand. He almost forgot to be curious about the little cylinder, favouring watching Francoeur scurry about after the tiny red dot and giggling like a child.
Lucille stormed in like one thousand avenging angels. “What the living devil are you two doing?”
Raoul turned off the tiny light and pretended he had been doing exactly nothing at all. “Who? Me?”
Francoeur chittered a mournful little song and pointed to Raoul.
“Really,” Lucille marched over and tore it out of his unresisting fingers. “And what is this?”
“Uuuuuuuuuuuhhhh… really ineffective electric torch?”
“Hmf.” She turned it on, examining the spot in her hand, then against the wall, and then reflected by a mirror. Francoeur chased the dot with chirps of joy.
At length, she decided, “While I agree that this could help Francoeur get his exercise without disturbing half of Paris…” she flipped the little light off. “We should not be messing about with things from a different reality. I’m putting this in a lockbox for all our safeties.”
Francoeur sulked for five days before Raoul began to work out how to make one of his own.
Thus, in that reality, the inventor of the LASER was Raoul DeChagny in 1922, and it was vital in the victories of the second world war.
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(#00785 - B054)
[AN: I already have a much longer one in progress here, so I’ll pretend it doesn’t exist in my continuity just for you. (Seriously, keeping a continuity is vastly important to me and registers on my OCD) You’re welcome]
1912
There was a small dirigible docked with the Eiffel Tower, which some Parisians still called “the tragic coat hanger”. But even they had to admit that it did come in handy as a dock for dirigibles, a lighthouse, and a radio tower.
The peculiar family that disembarked… was something Paris had never seen before.
Two of the men, one older than the other, looked like they’d stepped out of a photograph. Supremely pale of skin and black of hair. Another young man was almost identical to the photograph-boy in everything but colour. He was blonde and a comparative picture of health. The boys’ mother was so unremarkable as to almost vanish from sight. Though she wore demure green, she blended into the scenery until the elder of the photographs caught her up in an enthusiastic hug and kissed her passionately.
Then… she glowed.
Following her onto the tower were four metal people. Giants like the eldest Photograph man, and taller than him with it. They were all dressed sharply in black and red. Copper, silver, brass and bronze.
The copper one played hopscotch on the gantry and, once across, wheeled to face the other metal men.
“See d-dummins? It’s all safe!”
The brass one somehow glided across the gantry. Then the bronze one was the living embodiment of perfect posture and marching form.
Leaving the silver one whimpering and beeping uncertainly on the dirigible.
There was some evident debate held between the metal men by means of birdsong before the copper one stomped all the way back and carried his silver brother to join his metal family.
The Walter family had arrived in Paris.
When they arrived at L’Oiseau Rare, they were given special seating (the automatons had to sit on the stairs since no chair in Paris was robust enough to hold them) and champagne and the show of a lifetime.
They stayed to interview Francoeur, Lucille, Raoul and the Professor about the giant flea who sang.
And it was the robots, bickering in binary, who got Francoeur to talk. After a fashion.
Soon, all five of them were chittering eagerly amongst themselves and jamming with the orchestra’s instruments and generally laying a soundtrack to the humans’ conversations.
And when it was revealed that the Walters were in Paris for Iris’ birthday… well… she got an impromptu concert the likes of which no-one had ever seen.
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