Challenge #00525 - A150: Not Made to be Broken
FREE DAY!
Of course Steve had heard about the secret weapon code-named Rabbit. It was impossible to not hear about other secret weapons when one is also technically a secret weapon.
This was one of the few he got to meet.
He was used to techies referring to their weapons and vehicles as ‘she’ or ‘he’. He was not used to the pale wraith joining their team as “Rabbit’s chief technician”. He was the palest person Steve had ever seen, which made his black and blue-striped hair all the more startling.
The second thing Steve noticed was the harness he wore outside of his black jumpsuit.
Then his hands moved. “Most people stare at the hair,” said a mechanical voice from the technician’s right shoulder. “Blue Matter took my voice, so I made a new one for the people who can’t be bothered learning sign language. You can speak, by the way. I can hear.”
“Blue Matter?” he said. “Like the kind Colonel Walters Steam Man Band run on?”
“Run with,” said the techie. “Yes. Exactly like that.”
That was his first clue that the military minds behind winning the war were not entirely focussed on what was right for their more… special soldiers. But Steve, being an optimist, had imagined a more advanced model code-named after the Victorian-era copper automaton.
He didn’t actually see her until they were getting on the plane.
She wore loose-fitting paratrooper fatigues. One sleeve fitted with a zipper to make room for her Blue Matter gatling gun. Steve saw it all in that moment. The resigned walk, the thousand-yard stare, the necklace made out of paperclips and the fresh oil streaming slowly from her luminescent eyes.
She didn’t want to be part of this war.
“You’re making her jump out of planes?”
“Not me,” said her techie. Paul. His name was Walter Guy Paul.
Steve sat beside her, all the way to the drop zone. Keeping her company while the rest of the Howling Commandoes ignored her as if she were a piece of ordinance. Reminiscing, where he could, about her days on the stage.
He remembered her from world-of-tomorrow-today style exhibitions and one performance that was a present from his uncle. It was all he could talk about for months. Seven years old, and telling Bucky about every last detail from the Steam Powered Road Show.
“…wish I was b-b-b-b-b-b-back there, now,” sighed Rabbit.
Her stutter was miles worse than it had ever been. Steve shared a Look with Walter Guy Paul.
Steve’s look said, There’s something going wrong with her. She needs help.
Paul’s look said, I know. I can’t stop them long enough to fix her properly.
Which was why he held her hand - the only time he held a fellow Commando’s hand - when it was time to leave the plane.
Their parachutes - all of their parachutes - were army standard. They were not made to support the weight of a steam-powered, copper, clockwork automaton.
And hers… didn’t.
She fell faster than he did. Screamed all the way down. Shot wildly at the enemy and, when she hit… she hit harder. And had the dubious tactical advantage of scattering parts of herself over an area a ten-yard radius.
The plan changed in mid-air. The instant he realised what made Rabbit, the gentle, silly joker of the band such an excellent secret weapon. The United States Armed Forces was treating her like a shrapnel bomb.
Well. The Howling Commandoes were going to treat her like a soldier.
He did not, as the plan stated, immediately assault the enemy encampment. He took down everyone who was shooting at him and then ordered his men to establish a perimeter and gather Rabbit’s scattered parts.
“We ain’t got time for that!”
“Howling Commandoes never leave a man down!” He bellowed.
“That ain’t no man…”
“Then we don’t leave a lady down, neither,” He stood guard over her shattered torso and got out his Parade Ground Bellow. “NOW I GAVE YOU AN ORDER AND I NEVER GAVE IT TO HEAR MY TEETH CLICK! GET OUT THERE AND GET EVERY LAST NUT, BOLT, COG AND PINWHEEL YOU CAN SEE! I DON’T CARE IF YOU THINK ITS SHRAPNEL, WE GOT A SOLDIER DOWN AND WE’RE GONNA FIX HER! MOOVIT MOOVIT MOOVIT!”
Techie Paul landed last, but he’d definitely heard Steve.
The Japanese could have heard Steve. And they were on the other side of Russia from here.
“Wow. You g-g-g-g-g-got all that in one b-b-b-breath,” burbled Rabbit.
He knelt, still watchful and wary for the enemy. “At ease, soldier,” he soothed. “We’re gonna patch you up and then get moving.”
“Nev-nev-never walked home b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-before,” Rabbit sighed. “Some-somethin’ new…”
He took up her surviving hand in his own. Looked her in her mismatched eyes. “I’ll see what I can do about getting you some repair time. About getting you away from the war.”
“Won-won-won’t be mu-much,” said Rabbit. “We’re un-un-under c-c-c-c-c-contract.”
“Then I’ll see what I can do for you.”
Rabbit pulled herself up and kissed him.
Steve Rogers cleared his throat. “I have a girl back home,” he said, blushing.
"So do I,” Rabbit steamed a little. “It ain’t of-of-often folks t-t-t-t-treat me like folks. G-g-g-g-gotta be grateful y-y-y-y-ha know.”
He left her with Paul and promises that she would get back to a base that could help her ASAP.
And he didn’t see her again until well after the war. Years after his deep-freeze.
She’d lost the wigs he’d sent her. Or never got them. But at least they were letting her wear a dress. And she was back where she belonged… in the spotlight, and singing.
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Challenge #00524 - A149: That Ole Time Religion
“All hail the sun god, he is the fun god. Ra! Ra! Ra!”
“Gimmie a Q! Gimmie a U! Gimmie an E-T-Z! Gimmie an A! Gimmie an L! Gimmie a C-O-A-T-L! Whadduzit spell?”
“Quetzalcoatl!”
“Whadduzit spell?”
“Quetzalcoatl!”
“Give hearts! And blood! To make the rain! Why do we love ‘im? We might be insane!”
YYYYAAAAAAAAYYYY!
“Zeus! Zeus! He’s our man! If he can’t do it, Hera can!”
*
Shayde offered Rael some of her popcorn. “This is the weirdest episode o’ Horrible Histories ever, yeah?”
“Mmm,” he agreed.
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Challenge #00522 - A147: Sympathy for the Monster
Rule of Fiction 13: Any monster, fictional or real, will have a romance written about it, often one where it turns out to be “not that bad”. A lot will be absurdly well-written and thought out, and a lot will be barely-readable trash.
Pre-Amity humans and Galactic Alliance again, I’d rather see well written (because your stuff is always well written) but there’s always the Twilight in Space option if you feel like it
[AN: The problem with any Twilight parody is that it gets mistaken for great literature. See: 50 Shades of Grey]
They froze, staring at each other across the open space of the plains between them. He was a brute of a human. All muscles and hair. She was not. All she had in her favour was her height which, thanks to her injuries, she could not use.
He could charge at any moment.
She remembered from her lessons that humans would not attack something that appeared to be docile, so she quickly adopted a submissive pose. Perhaps there was strength in weakness.
There was already strength in eye contact. The beasts’ eyes never left her glowing amber–
*
“Glowing amber? Two pages ago, her eyes were livid blue?”
“They change colour,” grumped Z'chedda. “That’s gonna come out in the next chapter.”
“Mmmm…” Chorish mumbled doubtfully. “You also said this was a rewrite of the movie. I’m not seeing a lot of similarities.”
“I’m making it better.”
“By putting a female lead in who looks exactly like you? Except with the kaleidoscope eyes.”
“Shut up. I think I’m doing okay.”
“I think it’s a little… out there.”
“Really. Why did I even bother showing this to you?”
“Because you wouldn’t shut up about it for three weeks? Because you keep telling me all about this story? Because everything that was wrong with The Beast From Outer Space has been the only thing you ever want to talk about? Because despite that, you’ve seen it like thirty times?”
Z'chedda made a rude noise to her friend. “If you keep being that critical, you won’t get any nest-mates.”
Chorish rolled her eyes. “Whatever. It’s good enough writing, but… kaleidoscope eyes? Really? You had to go there?”
“It happens sometime, okay?”
“Shyeah. With a bigger budget than Beast had… What are you calling this thing, anyway?”
“Beauty and the Beast.”
“O my Gods… That is the worst title ever.”
“What?”
“Nobody in their right mind would want a story with that title.”
“Tell that to my two hundred readers.”
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Challenge #00521 - A146: Necrotheque
“they’re British skeletons of course they’re dancing sarcastically. ”
The place was alive. But only technically.
Crowds of “people” flooded the dance floor and the air was full of the unique miasma of a dance club. Music, people shouting to be heard over the music, stale alcohol and even staler cigarette smoke.
This was Club 86. Where the undead went to live it up.
Maia was busy trying not to freak out. She was the only person… being… creature… in the room who did not have what Nedelcu referred to as ‘special circumstances’.
And this is what happened when a mortal asked her vampire girlfriend what it was like being undead.
A crumble of litches had the dance floor. How moving skeletons could move was a mystery Maia preferred not to think about. But they were moving, and something about what remained of their body language was… familiar.
“Are they… dancing sarcastically?” she asked over the steady bass thumping.
“They’re British skeletons,” said Nedelcu. “Of course they’re dancing sarcastically.”
“How can you even tell that they’re British.”
A level glare. “After a while… you get to know. Besides, they dance like they always lose at Eurovision.”
“OI!” said one of the skeletons.
“Sorry Tony!” Nedelcu called. “I know you won.”
“…how can he talk?”
“That’s one of the questions you don’t ask.”
“Why?”
“Because a Necromancer will tell you.”
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Challenge #00520 - A145: Two Types
http://devisamarama.tumblr.com/post/81454106149/nightvaleradiostation-pewdiepiesfanblog
A character that uses every opportunity to throw her prosthetic arm at people, hand it to them etc.
The Membletak used to be a race of conquerors. As far as manifest destinies were concerned, they were mostly benevolent. They did not, for instance, use germ warfare or treat their conquered planets as dump sites or their conquered people as second-class citizens.
They did rely on heavy taxes, but you can’t have everything.
That is, they were conquerors until they sought to conquer the star system B3K.
There, they encountered a small Terran maintenance station manned by Gillian “Joker” McGee. She not only greeted the invaders with open arms and exclamations of joy, but offered her hand to the Ship’s Captain, Torq’a.
What the Membletak did not know was that “Joker” McGee had previously lost her organic hands to a liquid nitrogen mishap. They did not know that she thought it was funny to randomly detach her artificial replacements.
Therefore, when Captain Torq’a was left holding “Joker” McGee’s hand as she turned away to embrace another crewman, he experienced a sudden and fatal heart embolism and died on the spot.
The surviving crew were so impressed by his surprising demise that they surrendered to the human race at that very instant.
In the annals of Galactic History, Gillian McGee has been the most… entertaining… of the planetary Empresses. She insisted on being announced as the ‘Mistress of the Killer Joke’ until her dying day.
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Challenge #00518 - A143: Salvation From the Lessers
(since you’re a DS9 fan like I am) It was ironic that after the war, the Cardassian/Bajoran hybrids that Cardassia had neglected and cast out were instrumental in its rebuilding, and its rebirth.
Cardassia was in ruins.
It had never been in ruins. Not in all of its glorious history. Certainly, there had been wars in the pre-spaceflight days, but only individual areas ever became ruined.
An entire planet - and entire planetary empire in ruins… Just sucked the very soul out of the Cardassian people. They wandered through the rubble like ghosts. One would stop and pick up a piece of rubble, and half-heartedly add it to a pile.
This had never happened before. Nobody knew what to do.
Or at least, nobody who lived in the Cardassian empire knew what to do.
They came in bright colours and loose clothing. They came with water purifiers and soil reclamation units. They came with Pulaku and Tokta seedlings.
They came with Cardassian faces… or faces that were Cardassian enough. Despite the Bajoran earrings and the Bajoran clothing and the Bajoran accents, they were Cardassian enough for the lost souls to flock to them.
They were Cardassian enough for other Cardassians to listen to them. To follow orders. To forge a new world based on need and skill, not heritage and social standing. To give to those who needed, to make that which worked out of whatever they had to hand.
They came with Bajorans, who said things like, “We’ve been doing this for fifty years, it’s about time you learned how.”
And some remembered. Before it was done unto them… they had done it first.
The Bajorans, the Bajoran-Cardassian hybrids, and the orphans they left behind had no reason at all to help Cardassia. They had every reason to leave the Cardassian Empire - or the ruins thereof - to stew and pickle in its own feculence and slide back to a more primitive standing for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Which was why the most important thing was that, though they came with some old grudges, they also came of their own free will. That they came without hate.
They came to show Cardassia what could be done without being conquerers.
And for the first time in thousands of years, Cardassia learned something new.
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Challenge #00517 - A142: Conclusion-Jumping
One of the many early miscommunications when the humans first started to contact the galactic alliance: Alien expresses interest that human is still alive having broken one or more bones, slightly dense human gets the wrong end of the stick entirely and now half the camp thinks people with injuries like that are killed, because why else would something like a trifling broken arm mean you die?
Susan was learning what many in the new proto-city of Wiwazheer were calling Chickenese. Grey Chicken -aka Trekker- was learning English. Many things, she was sure, were getting lost in the translation.
She was hauling Jaime back to Central - literally the centre of town - to get his arm properly set when Trekker invited itself along and lit on the back of Calico.
“You is preparing dead?”
She answered in Chickenese. “No. Friend no dead. Friend hurt, me taking for help.”
“…’m s'posed'a see little birds,” Jaime mumbled. “‘ey izzat Grey Chicken?”
“Yup. That’s Grey Chicken. Says zir name is Trekker. Trekker, this friend naming Jaime.”
“He is living? Me am seeing fall. Me am hearing bone crack.”
“Friend breaking bone in arm. We is fixing.”
“Us folk breaking bone, us folk dead,” said Trekker in confusion.
Susan did not have the words to ask, Do they kill you or do you just die? That was a question for the doctors in Central, who had Trekker’s DNA on file. All the same, an APB concerning being careful with projectiles around the alien bird would be wise.
And a solid plan to save the bird’s life should the unthinkable happen.
Susan got the impression that Trekker was trying to protect Wiwazheer and all the humans therein from some menace outside of their current experience. Though it was hard to imagine a species of warlike birds if they died from a broken bone.
Now was not the time to judge. Now was the time to take notes and, at the earliest opportunity, run like hell for the xenobiology labs to ask interesting questions.
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Challenge #00516 - A141: Dem Dry Bones
Zoology revision prompt! This is an excerpt about what you can tell from just a skull.
“A defining trait of mammals is specialised teeth. Mammals are the only class on Earth to evolve specialised teeth, with specific shapes for vegetation, meat, insects and combination diets. Reptile teeth are all very similar, single-point and peglike, often not as firmly rooted. They vary in size, for instance snake fangs, but in general are all very similar.”
There were skeletons all over this layer. Not down the ritual pits, but scattered about following some global disaster.
But this one…
This was an intact specimen.
The bones were, as always, bright red. Indicating that significant heat had been part of the disaster. These odd creatures were roasted alive.
Tarta carefully removed the skull from its matrix of ash and earth. brushing it clean enough to determine the details. The brain case indicated intelligent life. Large eye sockets. And a significant hole for the optic nerve. “These beings specialised in visual acuity. Judging by the muscle attachments, they had mobile eyes…”
Tarta scoped the nasal passages. “Smell was evidently a secondary sense. There’s no large structures for auditory input…” A race of deaf cogniscents? It was a theory. Alas, they had no live specimen to test.
But the teeth… the teeth said much.
“This is an omnivorous mammal. Look at these specialised teeth… Chopping teeth in the front and grinding teeth at the back. Ah!” Tarta gathered her students around to show them. “Look. Evidence of dentistry. This specimen had cavities, but they were drilled and filled with a ceramic accretion. These were intelligent creatures.”
“Then why did they blow themselves up?” Jori still felt compelled to raise her hand. “If they were intelligent, why did they bother with war?”
“You’ve seen the other creatures,” said Tarta. “The mammalian predators and the venomous reptiles. You’ve seen the creatures that survived the planetary apocalypse.”
Jori shuddered at the thought of the things outside their dig fortifications. “Yes. They’re all lethal.”
“And that’s the reason why. These beings originally came from a death world. War was how they lived. War was how they ended.”
As far as first impressions are concerned, humans could have done infinitely better than the remains of the colony world Numurica.
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Challenge #00515 - A140: Problematic Material
Video Prompt!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WgXN0kO1JEA
The music, such as it was, was a collection of intersecting beats. The man in the white suit danced in interesting ways.
He wore a white suit with black tie and gloves.
And the interesting thing about the otherwise ordinary room was the grass floor.
Shayde sat pondering the video as it played out. And Rael stood pondering Shayde.
“So what is it?” Rael said.
“It’s art. Near as I can figure, it’s a complete piece… But I cannae figure out where it’s meant tae fit.”
Rael watched some more. “It’s art. Does it have to fit?”
“Kinda me job tae put th’ pieces together, ye ken.”
“And the visual cues aren’t helping.”
“Na. It’s no as if they got the original tape or nothin’.”
Rael coughed. “It’s… digital. I don’t think there was such a thing as original media storage.”
Shayde pondered this revelation. “Eee, tha’ just makes it trickier…”
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Challenge #00514 - A139: One Dank Morning in the Dire Halls of MegaGlobocorp, West Esterly
“Should you choose to accept it, your mission - which you are required to accept or you’re fired - is…”
Working as a faceless minion in MegaGlobocorp was never fun. It was a dangerous lottery before one even made it to the labyrinthine spread of the offices. As unskilled labor, Dar had the marvellous advantage of having twenty bosses to tell her when she messed up. And a random number generator assigned her at random, to one of the fifty Higher Executives.
None of which communicated with her immediate superiors.
Dar joined the endless line of fellow minions trudging towards the open maw into a day’s worth of misery and working through lunch break. She couldn’t remember the last time she had actually had free time at lunch. Nobody did.
The bosses didn’t like their minions to have free time on the company dime.
As she drew closer to the scanner, Dar began the same prayer shared by hundreds in her position. Not Withers. Not Withers. Anyone but Withers. Please, merciful powers above, not Withers.
Dar inserted her arm into the machine and heard the gatekeeper intone, “Dar Mackelvoy. Withers.”
Shit.
Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit…
Dar resolutely donned her cardboard safety gear and reported to the dispenser of doom.
Withers. God, no.
She ran her company tattoo under the scanner and received an ordinary-looking box. She had to open it. No time for delays. She got docked treble time for delays.
Fucking Withers. Ugh.
“Good morning. EMPLOYEE. THREE. SEVEN. TWO. NINE. ZERO. ZERO. FOUR. ALPHA. PHI. Your mission, should you choose to accept it - and by ‘choose’, we mean 'you have no choice’,” Dar rolled her eyes at the pre-recorded chuckle, “is to proceed to the. RED. SECTOR. and DELIVER. NUTRIENT. PACKETS. to the. LABORATORY. EXPERIMENTS. ZERO. THROUGH. TWO. THOUSAND. If you fail in this mission, you fail at life. This message will self-destruct in five seconds. Maybe! Hahahahahahahaa!”
Of all the executives in all the byzantine halls of this benighted company, she had to draw the one who thought he had a sense of humour.
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