Challenge #02669-G112: The Immortal Master
Some humans fight with blades, those who live on worlds that allow it, use firearms. Or for those aboard stations and ships, crossbows. Me? I refuse to use any of that. My body is my weapon. Sure I carry a utility knife, don’t most of us? But it’s never been used to draw blood. With a single blow I can knock a man down, with a well-placed kick I can knock over a being the size of a tree. My hand, small as it is, can strike a seemingly random spot, and in moments my enemy seizes up and then dies.
My body is my weapon, trained by an art that was many centuries old. It was taught for defense, it was taught for meditation, it was taught, to all things, peaceful monks in temples. Martial arts, kung-fu, tae-kwon-do, judo, tai-chi, ninjitsu, jujitsu, hapkido, aikido, capoeira, sambo, dim mak, kendo, and so many others. I’ve learned them all.
My body, a deadly weapon of war, meant to protect the peaceful. None shall harm those under my care. I won’t let you die, not on my watch. – Anon Guest
Deathworlders come up with so many methods of offensive defence. Their weapons are many and varied, but the most interesting things happen when various administrative forces attempt to ban a rebellion-minded proletariat from rebalancing the scales of justice. Banning weapons never really works. Banning certain types of weapons just leads to the peasantry inventing new kinds of weapons out of ordinary household objects.
When fighting with any kind of weapon is banned, the Deathworlders simply invent methods of incapacitating others bare-handed, bare-footed, and sometimes naked. Many an army has faced a throng of Humans wearing only paint and a grimace[^1], and that alone has caused them to turn around and think about their life choices.
Then there’s martial arts. Training mind and body to be beyond normal Deathworlder limitations and exceed what should be possible with a Deathworlder body. This sort of thing generally takes years and one Human trained in one discipline is a being to be feared. The limit used to be one Human lifetime, but Humans have a way of cheating.
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Challenge #02668-G111: A Study in Humour
Jokes can sometimes lead into a battle of wits. While normal jokes can be represented as a straight kick or punch, puns act as the roundhouse or the hooks or uppercuts. All can be block if they known or prepare. But there’s one genre of joke many dub as “distasteful”. Dark humour, a sucker punch, illegal moves to some. It is not the jokes themselves are funny it’s is the reactions of those in the receiving end which make the jokester burst with laughter. To some dark humour is like food, some don’t get it. – Anon Guest
Laughter is universal. Comedy is not. – A reminder on the Galactic Traveller’s Essential Information FAQ.
There’s a reason why slapstick is reserved for trained professionals. The root of this is in how vastly different varying cultures’ ideas of physical comedy are. Slap a person with a fish, and an Englishman laughs. Collapse the bed under the amorous couple, and a Frenchman laughs. Blow up the outhouse, and an Australian laughs. That’s just the Terrans.
Physical comedy has to be aimed.
Verbal comedy has its ups and downs, as some species are more literal than others, and a well-thought-out set-up joke requires way too much preparation to pull off in a pack-bonding situation. This leaves pranks, which are not appreciated in pack-bonding situations. By the time pranks become appropriate, the pack-bonding is mostly done.
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Challenge #02667-G110: A Chosen Confusion
Caution for Cowardice
Silence for Ignorance
Those who have done so have, almost invariably, learned the differences are vast indeed, and quite often have learned this in a manner whose results ensure they do not ever make that same mistake twice… or do anything else ever again, either… – Anon Guest
It’s almost a joke: A Galactic Citizen and a Deregger arrive at a planet-wide disaster zone… Except that this wasn’t a joke and both Human individuals acted according to type. The Deregger attempted to make a profit, lecturing those already at their worst moments about how they should have prepared for the unforeseen.
The Galactic was quiet, and gave what they could spare, calling for help even though help was distant. Pitching in with sweat equity and doing what they could for others, even though it put them at risk as well. They didn’t waste time or energy on correcting the Deregger, no matter how ample the Deregger’s supplies, how loud their opinions, and how deplorable they were to their fellow cogniscent beings.
The Deregger was an armchair tactician, broadcasting across the devastated planet about how the Galactic opposition was doing everything wrong, causing more harm than help, and otherwise ruining it for commerce. Every single transmission decried the Galactic as a weak coward with less intelligence than an overripe pomegranate, who was somehow passive about the situation despite stealing honest work from the upstanding citizens below. Dereggers can believe in six conflicting ideas before breakfast.
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Challenge #02666-G109: Perplexing Perambulation
“Necessity is the mother of invention… Boredom is the father.” – SilverRey
So many inventions happen because their inventor thinks that they are vital. Others occur because they will create a tactical advantage against an enemy. Some rare and interesting inventions happen because the creator had nothing better to do.
Case in point - weird vehicles.
People don’t need a bicycle that walks on feet, nor do they need a chariot drawn by crab-like legs. They don’t need a powered boat with oars that operate like turtle flippers. That said, once they are built, everyone seems to want one. Well… Everyone who’s a Human.
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Challenge #02665-G108: Temporal Theory vs Reality
In today’s episode of “Fun with Wormholes!” we will discuss how most people’s family lines are actually Mobius Strips! – SilverRey
Today in Fun With Wormholes, we explain how it’s theoretically possible to be your own descendant. It all begins with one simple graph… An X-Y axis graph where one axis is time and the other is distance. On it, a line is travelling away from zero at a slight incline relative to time.
Here is our hypothetical traveller, moving at close to light speeds through space. If they then enter a one way wormhole, they travel faster than light, over vast distances very rapidly. The travelling line moves very far along relative to the space axis, but backwards relative to time. This is usually why we say that time travel is possible, but functionally useless. You may have gone back to the time of the dinosaurs, but it would take you the rest of that time to get back.
People would think that returning through the wormhole may be advantageous to time travel, but not if you use the same wormhole. A different line traces a path forward in time but backwards in distance, once it enters the wormhole, it crashes into the original traveller. Of course, using a different one-way wormhole only puts you deeper in time and into an unknown portion of space. So. How do we become our own descendants?
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