Re: Petty Squabble [ROUND 1] [Fort Ayers, New Atlantis]
09-24-2011, 04:39 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Pinary.
John, truth be told, was not a child expert. He was at home in a number of chaotic situations, sure, and kids have been known to cause chaos at times, but it just wasn't the same. Shooting the kid up and running off laughing, while quite possibly entertaining in the short term, wouldn't exactly be difficult, and it certainly wouldn't make any long-term interactions with the kid's parents any smoother.
For now, there was just about one thing he could think to do. As he made his way down into the military base once more, the kid trailing at his heels, he started telling him a story.
-
So some twenty- or thirty-odd years ago, I managed to get a group of self-styled time-cops on my tail. The Temporal Enforcement Agency, they called themselves. They'd gotten ahold of an old-school Recursive Haven Drive- that's one step above the bottom of the barrel when it comes to time travel- and rigged it into a ship. They called it the Chrono-Cruiser or something equally cliche and unimpressive, if I recall correctly.
Anyway, they got on my tail for- get this- cheating at a lottery. Of all the things they could've thought was "an irresponsible abuse of temporal displacement," it was any decent time-traveller's go-to option for some quick cash. It wasn't even a major win, just enough to prove that I could to blow some retiree's mind! To this day, Phyllis still thinks I'm just some joker. Well, not "to this day," really, but-
Anyway, that's not important. They got on my trail and started following me around. For a group riding in a Rec-H, they were impressively persistent, I'll give them that much. Any sort of Haven drive requires a burst of energy on the arrival end to open your link up, see, otherwise you just shoot off into time until some random burst catches you or the universe ends. These guys manage to follow me twice, each time happening to find a nuclear test or a supernova or something near enough that they didn't spend twenty years waiting for me to show up.
The third time we met up, I was in the middle of something, thinking I'd given them the slip by picking someplace in the middle of nowhere. They found me anyway, though, and wrecked the whole plan. I barely got out of there alive, and a stray shot still dinged my time machine and left me stranded on the backwater hole I landed in.
("Where was that?", Ethan asked. He was having to run a bit to keep up with John, but the kid had energy.)
New York City, if you can believe it, in the spring of 1920. I rode in on the leading edge of Prohibition and the Depression, stuck with a blown time machine and time-cops somewhere on my tail.
After a few weeks of getting drunk in speakeasies and going in and out of the drunk tank, I figured I'd at least managed to shake my T.E.A. tail, so I started getting down to business. Fixing my time machine with the tools back then wasn't going to be easy, but I buckled down and got to work.
I was just getting into the swing of things when New Year's Eve rolled around. New Yorkers always love their New Year's Eve parties, and I figured what the hell.
They tracked me down just as the freaking ball dropped. I kid you not- the second the ball hit bottom and everyone started shouting and making out, there was a gun in my back and we went for a walk.
It turns out- (Here, John couldn't help but laugh.) Turns out I wasn't the only one to take damage in the escape from the last place. They lost their temporal navigation systems, which left them with a choice of using the historical record or giving up and going home.
The poor bastards picked the Tunguska event, which was a good twelve years before I arrived. From there, all they could do was wait. They knew when about I was supposed to show up, and even then, it still took them a good half a year to track me down. Their original captain had started having knee troubles and was in a freaking wheelchair when they brought me into their ship.
The guy coughed and wheezed and told me they were adding their lost years to my "list of crimes," and when I told them where they could shove their list, they pulled out guns and started shooting.
("Wow, what did you do? Did you blast 'em all, bangbangbang?" Ethan made little gun motions with his hands.)
Nah, nothing like that. Only one of them had even kept up their shooting skills for the decade or so while they waited, so the only shot that hit me grazed my shoulder. By then, I'd knocked the one guy out and taken his gun, and the others didn't put up much resistance.
-
"From there," he finished, "I set their Rec-H to activate on a timer and just aim backwards, then got off the ship and watched them take off."
"Where'd they end up?" Ethan was still jogging along beside his new coolguy idol, showing no signs of slowing. Kids and their unnatural stamina.
John gave a wry grin. "Eventually, they were guaranteed to hit something- the Big Bang's a rather hard target to miss, as space all contracts back to that single point. The trouble there is having a ship that can withstand the power of a universe-starting explosion."
Ethan let out a long, breathy "whoa" and continued on.
The two of them were making their way down into the base fairly quickly, and had Ethan been paying attention to anything other than 1920's New York, he might have noticed that they kept passing a neatly drilled series of holes, several feet across, boring straight up through the building.
After another few minutes, in which John tried his best to show interest in the kid's life and wished he'd stuck with the storytelling, the two arrived at the blown-out door to the time capsule's little closet.
They had excellent timing. Just as they arrived, a large, robotic form stepped out of the door, glanced passingly at the two of them, then started clambering up the hole through the structure with incredible speed, carrying with it what looked like a trunk or a case.
After Envoy left, a figure stumbled drunkenly out of the now-doorless-frame as well, stumbling a bit and clutching a slightly-crushed box of Twinkies, which he promptly dropped on the floor. He then followed it down, apparently finding the ground comfortable enough to sleep on.
By the time John had checked the private's pulse and concluded that he was just unconscious, Ethan had already picked up the box of fermented Twinkies and bitten into one.
"Hey," he said, "this tastes funny."
John, truth be told, was not a child expert. He was at home in a number of chaotic situations, sure, and kids have been known to cause chaos at times, but it just wasn't the same. Shooting the kid up and running off laughing, while quite possibly entertaining in the short term, wouldn't exactly be difficult, and it certainly wouldn't make any long-term interactions with the kid's parents any smoother.
For now, there was just about one thing he could think to do. As he made his way down into the military base once more, the kid trailing at his heels, he started telling him a story.
-
So some twenty- or thirty-odd years ago, I managed to get a group of self-styled time-cops on my tail. The Temporal Enforcement Agency, they called themselves. They'd gotten ahold of an old-school Recursive Haven Drive- that's one step above the bottom of the barrel when it comes to time travel- and rigged it into a ship. They called it the Chrono-Cruiser or something equally cliche and unimpressive, if I recall correctly.
Anyway, they got on my tail for- get this- cheating at a lottery. Of all the things they could've thought was "an irresponsible abuse of temporal displacement," it was any decent time-traveller's go-to option for some quick cash. It wasn't even a major win, just enough to prove that I could to blow some retiree's mind! To this day, Phyllis still thinks I'm just some joker. Well, not "to this day," really, but-
Anyway, that's not important. They got on my trail and started following me around. For a group riding in a Rec-H, they were impressively persistent, I'll give them that much. Any sort of Haven drive requires a burst of energy on the arrival end to open your link up, see, otherwise you just shoot off into time until some random burst catches you or the universe ends. These guys manage to follow me twice, each time happening to find a nuclear test or a supernova or something near enough that they didn't spend twenty years waiting for me to show up.
The third time we met up, I was in the middle of something, thinking I'd given them the slip by picking someplace in the middle of nowhere. They found me anyway, though, and wrecked the whole plan. I barely got out of there alive, and a stray shot still dinged my time machine and left me stranded on the backwater hole I landed in.
("Where was that?", Ethan asked. He was having to run a bit to keep up with John, but the kid had energy.)
New York City, if you can believe it, in the spring of 1920. I rode in on the leading edge of Prohibition and the Depression, stuck with a blown time machine and time-cops somewhere on my tail.
After a few weeks of getting drunk in speakeasies and going in and out of the drunk tank, I figured I'd at least managed to shake my T.E.A. tail, so I started getting down to business. Fixing my time machine with the tools back then wasn't going to be easy, but I buckled down and got to work.
I was just getting into the swing of things when New Year's Eve rolled around. New Yorkers always love their New Year's Eve parties, and I figured what the hell.
They tracked me down just as the freaking ball dropped. I kid you not- the second the ball hit bottom and everyone started shouting and making out, there was a gun in my back and we went for a walk.
It turns out- (Here, John couldn't help but laugh.) Turns out I wasn't the only one to take damage in the escape from the last place. They lost their temporal navigation systems, which left them with a choice of using the historical record or giving up and going home.
The poor bastards picked the Tunguska event, which was a good twelve years before I arrived. From there, all they could do was wait. They knew when about I was supposed to show up, and even then, it still took them a good half a year to track me down. Their original captain had started having knee troubles and was in a freaking wheelchair when they brought me into their ship.
The guy coughed and wheezed and told me they were adding their lost years to my "list of crimes," and when I told them where they could shove their list, they pulled out guns and started shooting.
("Wow, what did you do? Did you blast 'em all, bangbangbang?" Ethan made little gun motions with his hands.)
Nah, nothing like that. Only one of them had even kept up their shooting skills for the decade or so while they waited, so the only shot that hit me grazed my shoulder. By then, I'd knocked the one guy out and taken his gun, and the others didn't put up much resistance.
-
"From there," he finished, "I set their Rec-H to activate on a timer and just aim backwards, then got off the ship and watched them take off."
"Where'd they end up?" Ethan was still jogging along beside his new coolguy idol, showing no signs of slowing. Kids and their unnatural stamina.
John gave a wry grin. "Eventually, they were guaranteed to hit something- the Big Bang's a rather hard target to miss, as space all contracts back to that single point. The trouble there is having a ship that can withstand the power of a universe-starting explosion."
Ethan let out a long, breathy "whoa" and continued on.
The two of them were making their way down into the base fairly quickly, and had Ethan been paying attention to anything other than 1920's New York, he might have noticed that they kept passing a neatly drilled series of holes, several feet across, boring straight up through the building.
After another few minutes, in which John tried his best to show interest in the kid's life and wished he'd stuck with the storytelling, the two arrived at the blown-out door to the time capsule's little closet.
They had excellent timing. Just as they arrived, a large, robotic form stepped out of the door, glanced passingly at the two of them, then started clambering up the hole through the structure with incredible speed, carrying with it what looked like a trunk or a case.
After Envoy left, a figure stumbled drunkenly out of the now-doorless-frame as well, stumbling a bit and clutching a slightly-crushed box of Twinkies, which he promptly dropped on the floor. He then followed it down, apparently finding the ground comfortable enough to sleep on.
By the time John had checked the private's pulse and concluded that he was just unconscious, Ethan had already picked up the box of fermented Twinkies and bitten into one.
"Hey," he said, "this tastes funny."