Challenge #00450-451 - A075-76: Whuffo/The Inauguration of Mayor McToilet
(Can I do this? I’m doing it anyway.)
Free day! If there’s a drabble you’ve been wanting to write but haven’t had the right prompt to do it, now’s the time.
[AN: I don’t know when I’m going to get one of these again, so I’m going for broke. Be warned: the first one included feels inspired by
Challenge #00445 - A070: A Little More Complicated
Rule Number One of Computer Repair: Reboot it, dumbarse.
Rule One-A: If rebooting fixed the problem and it doesn’t come back, you didn’t really have a problem.
Rule One-B: If I actually had to tell you to reboot, regardless of whether you had a real problem or not, I’m still charging you for…
Challenge #00444 - A069: The Test
SPG in the far-future of your own universe. Because robots + space. – Weirdlet
Rael was ostensibly taking Shayde on a tour of the station’s Ambassadorial Meeting Chamber. What he was covertly doing was testing her. If she really was who she said she had been. If she really had existed on Earth…
Romantic vs Classicist*
A seemingly eternal argument between some friends and I.
*As defined by a philosophy student who was party to some of them - he later admitted he got the definitions from ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’.
“Form follows Function. A well-built machine, designed to last decades if not…
Look what the humans of the manor have to put up with
See, Rabbit? Hatchworth and Mayor McToilet know they did something bad
Nobody knew how it happened. Not even Rabbit, who had had the wild flight of imagination to begin with.
Later inquiry revealed that Peter VI had left Steve in charge. Steve left Walter Girl Carolina in charge, who had then promoted Walter Girl Paige. She, in turn, left Michael Reed in charge. Michael noticed that he was the only human in the mansion and, after quickly delegating his authority to The Spine, fled screaming into the wilderness of San Diego. Or as close to wilderness as he could accomplish.
But when Peter VI came back…
There was toilet paper -
-EVERYWHERE.
It was not the prank style of TP'ing. Someone had been… creative.
All over the chandeliers. All over the window treatments. All over the furniture.
There was even a toilet-paper effigy, wearing The Spine’s hat, labeled Peter Stinkypants in bright red lipstick.
None of the robots had called him that since he was seven.
When they bought Bebop back online, and used his connection to bring all three robots to Peter VI’s study, it was everything he could do to not burst out laughing. He found himself grateful that Blue Matter had given him the perfect wooden face for such things.
The Spine had been appointed Mayor McToilet - also in bright red lipstick - during everyone else’s absence for assorted vital errands. His mayoral sash was, of course, toilet paper. It was the only paper tissue he bore on his person. Though there was a cardboard monocle to complete his image.
Rabbit was, to use the right word, festooned. She had cardboard tubes in her cyberlocs, a toilet paper bandanna, and the remains of a TP dress clinging to her everyday clothes.
Hatchworth fared the worst, with a tube covering his smokestack and random loops of tissue tangled all over him. His forlorn, hangdog expression spoke volumes.
“I’m ver-y sor-ry,” Hatchworth managed. “Please don’t put me in the cor-ner.”
The Spine broke next. “Sir, I honestly have no idea how it happened. One minute, I was telling Rabbit I was responsible for the other two, and then the next thing I know…” He shrugged helplessly.
“Well I h-h-happen to think we look pretty good,” said Rabbit, not ashamed at all.
She was the one who wound up in detention. With Bebop as her taskmaster.
(via internutter)
Challenge #00400 - A035: The Growing List of Things Rabbit Should Never Do Again
“And that’s when I discovered my hoodie could get stuck on my nose”
“She walked in-to a pole five times,” added Hatchworth.
“What? It was a fre-freindly p-p-pole.”
“Not that friendly,” noted The Spine. “It knocked half your face off.”
“It was t-t-t-t-tryin’ ta help, Th’ Spine. Not its fault…
(#00341)
Ow.
It wasn’t the usual “one tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor” kind of headache. Those could usually be dealt with by a Tums, a Tylenol, and two bottles of gatorade.
This was knives-in-the-head painful.
Euw. Her entire left side was sticky.
And she was lying on a lot of sharpish, hard, painful objects.
Did she fall asleep in a Lego bin again?
She risked opening an eye.
An abominably cheerful metal face was staring back at her. It blinked, grinned, and vanished from her view of a gravel driveway.
“She’s not de-dead, guys!”
Blink. Try to focus. Fail. There was a tastefully appointed garden. The aforementioned gravel drive. A freaking mansion in the best Victor Frankenstein/Frank N. Furter/Edward Scissorhands style gothic heap.
And a small robotic giraffe gambolling on the lawn, leaving happy puffs of steam in its wake.
Wait.
What?
A man in a dapper suit approached with a tray. As he got closer, she could make out that he, too, was metal. Chrome. And, ridiculously, almost as sexy as his fleshy counterpart in her previous reality[1].
Bless his metal heart, he had gatorade and painkillers.
“When I dream,” she slurred, “I go all out…” It had to be a dream. Occam’s razor wouldn’t allow for anything less.
“Sip slowly,” said The Spine in his delicious velvety Bass. “You organics have easily disrupted systems.”
“This is not real.” Oh yes. The gatorade was already helping. “Walter Mansion is a figment of Bunny’s imagination. You guys are folks in makeup.”
She blinked again, absently picking bits of gravel out of the indentations in her skin. The pain was fading slowly. The world swimming back into focus.
The sky was full of zeppelins and planes. And hot-air balloons. And your regular, everyday clouds. “This is too painful to be a dream. Too weird to not be.”
The Spine snorted. Little puffs of steam escaped his chrome nostrils. “Oh. And I suppose where you came from, technology that works is just thrown away for the next new thing…”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Ri-ri-diculous,” said Rabbit. He was up a tree. “That’d mean you’d be ov-v-verwhelmed with trash and facing a global c-c-climate crisis.”
O God. She could see the clockwork spinning in his head. “Why’re you up a tree?”
“In ca-case of z-z-z-z-zombies. They can’t c-c-climb trees.”
She decided not to argue about why a robot would be scared of zombies. Rabbit had a near-reality orbit at the best of times.
O God. She was surrendering to the continuity. She checked her phone.
“WHOAH! C-c-c-c-cool!” Rabbit scrambled down from the tree. He immediately took lookie-loo position over her left shoulder.
She could hear his clockwork brain working. Yup. It was slipping a few cogs.
What sold her was the smell. Electricity and metal and oxidisation and -yes- steam. And that sort of fusty smell that clothes got when they hadn’t been on a human body for some significant time.
None of her dreams were ever that detailed. “Hi,” she managed. “I’m Paula.”
“Pleased to meet you,” The Spine offered a chrome hand.
When she took it to shake it, he kissed it with cold, metal lips. And her libido still ramped into overdrive.
“Now, how the devil did you get past QWERTY’s security system?”
“Yeah, there’s this fat guy who keeps getting pa-past it once a Yulemas? I get a c-cool hat, but we wanna know how it’s d-d-d-done.”
“Can’t help you there,” she winced. Light was still painful. “Too many sloe gin fizzes.”
“Ooh, those sound fun.”
“Of course. Inebriated organics can do things a mechanical mind can’t even fathom,” said The Spine. “Why don’t you come inside and get washed up? That way you’ll be presentable for the cab, when you’re ready to go home.”
There was still a signal. But Apple Maps was saying her home didn’t exist, any more. Not in this reality.
“Mind if I stay? It looks like I have no particular place to go.”
[1] Strictly IMO, The Spine is teh sexx. Just The Spine. Not David. I’m old enough to be his parent FFS
[Muse food remaining: 7 (fic war prompts: 0) Submit a prompt! Ask a question! Buy my stories!]
How I have felt, on occasion.
Critical system Error at WhattheflyingF.exe
Restoring brain from backup. – RecklessPrudence(#00287)
“You broke him!”
“Nah-uh. You broke him!”
“You’re the one who told him the fifth pun!”
“Did not!”
“Did too!”
Billie the Walter Girl sighed and reached for the Number Five hammer. About thirty PSI seemed about right.
{CLANG!}
“Somebody told a pun,” complained The Spine as he rebooted.
“Yeah, your logic circuits can’t take too many of those,” said Billie. “Gentlebots, do try to limit yourselves to no more than three puns per show in future.”
“What happens at the third pun?” asked Rabbit.
“Well,” said The Spine, “I hit you.”
[Muse food remaining: 22 (fic war prompts, 0). Submit a prompt! Ask a question! Buy my stories!]
Challenge #00279: Welcome Walter's Metal Men
Steam Powered Giraffe are in the x-verse, only they’re really mechanical men (made by someone with Forge-like skill) or living-metal mutants (similar to Colossus). Your choice.
“Sara… What the hell?”
“Dun ma'e me smi'e…” Sara said, drawing on her face with metallic paint. She was wearing,…
Challenge #00269: Vamping it Up
Pierce Opal Silkyoak goes to a swanky vampire party :P
[AN: Smartarse]
She wore black, of course. Black with lots and lots of jet beads that made it shimmered in any available light. A well-selected scattering of diamonds and gold ensured that there would always, always be light.
The rest of…