[I/OOC] Incidental Bits

[robkelk]

A thread for the stuff that can't ... and, in some cases, shouldn't ... support a story on its own, primarily to get the idea out of our heads so that we can come up with other ideas that we can use. Feel free to add ideas.

Starting off the thread with a bit set in Arc 2:

---

"If we're going to defeat Cinder's deployed forces, we'll need to get you in behind them, here." Tessa pointed at a spot on the map. "However, they have anti-teleport wards deployed. That means getting you five in there the hard way."

Mikoto nodded. "I don't really like combat drops, but we're getting used to them."

"Kazari has also detected heat and radio sensors deployed in Cinder's troops' position, so we have arranged the use of a glider that Hyoga's going to pull to get you to the drop point. The five of you will bail out at 200 feet."

Niiko shook her head. "It has to be 100 feet or lower."

Mii raised an eyebrow. "You're sure? If you jump at 100 feet, your parachutes won't have time to open."

Nana's reply was, "Oh, we get parachutes?"

---

(Yes, it's an old joke -- but by the time we get to Arc 2, all of the Misaka Sisters except for Mimi should have copied Mikoto's electromagnetic-propulsion flight trick at least well enough to land safely from a few dozen meters up.)

[Black Aeronaut]

HAH!!!

[Labster]

Washuu examined the medical diagnostic screens very carefully before commenting, "Well, everything looks to be okay, except you have a black hole attached to your hand. Prayer beads as a magical focus to seal the event horizon, bound to your life force. That's… very unique."

The young man looked very out of place in Washuu's lab, with his dark blue robes appearing as if they had come straight from the Sengoku era. Screens and lights and unfamiliar devices were everywhere, but the teenage-looking doctor was cute, so maybe in a couple years? He shook off the thought, and got back to business, "So, what do you think, Washuu-chan?"

"I think that this is the single dumbest weapon design I've seen in the last million years. I mean seriously, because your body is in contact with the event horizon, you can even be poisoned through it. I'd go with fusion implants instead, which are somehow still safer than this.

"No," Miroku clarified, "How long do I have to live?"

"Look, why don't we just cut this hand off and get you a new one? I have a new prosthetic design I want to try, and you look like you'd make a very healthy guinea pig."

"I can't just cut it off! The curse would devour my whole body."

"Oh right, the magic is drawn directly from your body to maintain the seal. So we just provide an external source of ki." She raised a finger to her cheek in thought, before bragging, "Or even easier, just use a gravitational inversion generator. Ha! I'm so brilliant sometimes that I surprise myself!"

[Dartz]

"It's strange - on the one hand I really want to talk about how I've felt and what things feel like for me and for us. And on the other, I wonder if people really, truly want to know the intimate details."

[robkelk]

"It's strange - on the one hand I really want to talk about how I've felt and what things feel like for me and for us. And on the other, I wonder if people really, truly want to know the intimate details."

"I for one would be interested."

"Kuroko!"

[Black Aeronaut]

“You can always write a book...”

:V

[Dartz]

"It depends on how old you are. All I'll say is, humans are 'compromised' by some requirements that don't apply to us."

[Dartz]

"Thermal expansion has reduced the compression in the engine rotor chambers. It is insufficient to ignite the petroleum mixture at such a low rate of rotation. I believe that if we disconect the primary coolant feed line to the intake manifold heater and feed it directly into the engine intake the cooling fluid will be aspirated into the engine core and generate sufficient compression to achieve igntiion and sustain operation"

"Or you get behind. I get in the driver seat. You push. And I drop the clutch once you get it moving fast enough."

[Rajvik]

Damn it Data, you can't do that with an internal combustion engine

[Dartz]

Damn it Data, you can't do that with an internal combustion engine

It's a factory-approved proceedure to get Mazdas to start with low compression in the engine - which is the real joke. You refit the hose once its running, mind.....   but it's usually a sign that the engine's fucked anyway and you're driving it to somewhere that can fix it, or replace it.

[Black Aeronaut]

Damn it Data, you can't do that with an internal combustion engine

It's a factory-approved proceedure to get Mazdas to start with low compression in the engine - which is the real joke. You refit the hose once its running, mind.....   but it's usually a sign that the engine's fucked anyway and you're driving it to somewhere that can fix it, or replace it.

Bear in mind, knowing Dartz, if he's talking about a Mazda engine then it's most likely a Wankel rotary type and not a reciprocal cylinder.  Which is a somewhat different beast altogether.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wankel_engine

[Rajvik]

Damn it Data, you can't do that with an internal combustion engine

It's a factory-approved proceedure to get Mazdas to start with low compression in the engine - which is the real joke. You refit the hose once its running, mind.....   but it's usually a sign that the engine's fucked anyway and you're driving it to somewhere that can fix it, or replace it.

Bear in mind, knowing Dartz, if he's talking about a Mazda engine then it's most likely a Wankel rotary type and not a reciprocal cylinder.  Which is a somewhat different beast altogether.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wankel_engine

This is very true, at the same time though, damn it

[Labster]

Damn it Data, you can't do that with an internal combustion engine

It's a factory-approved proceedure to get Mazdas to start with low compression in the engine - which is the real joke. You refit the hose once its running, mind.....   but it's usually a sign that the engine's fucked anyway and you're driving it to somewhere that can fix it, or replace it.

Bear in mind, knowing Dartz, if he's talking about a Mazda engine then it's most likely a Wankel rotary type and not a reciprocal cylinder.  Which is a somewhat different beast altogether.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wankel_engine

This is very true, at the same time though, damn it

OOC: Threads like this are the reason why I'm letting other people take AMG and YUA.  I'm gonna step out before people start comparing Elan Vital to Bumblebee.

[Black Aeronaut]

Damn it Data, you can't do that with an internal combustion engine

It's a factory-approved proceedure to get Mazdas to start with low compression in the engine - which is the real joke. You refit the hose once its running, mind.....   but it's usually a sign that the engine's fucked anyway and you're driving it to somewhere that can fix it, or replace it.

Bear in mind, knowing Dartz, if he's talking about a Mazda engine then it's most likely a Wankel rotary type and not a reciprocal cylinder.  Which is a somewhat different beast altogether.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wankel_engine

This is very true, at the same time though, damn it

OOC: Threads like this are the reason why I'm letting other people take AMG and YUA.  I'm gonna step out before people start comparing Elan Vital to Bumblebee.

PffffT!

Now you've done it!  

[robkelk]

He walked over to the nearest phone and picked up the handset. Without dialing, he said, "An emergency situation has arisen...", only to trail off as the dial tone stopped.

He looked at Rob, who had pushed the hook down with his finger and was glaring at him. "There are better ways to find out if there are fanfic characters among the displacees. If you summon Skysaber, you have to find a place for him to live."

After a moment, he hung up the phone. "Yeah. I guess that was a bad idea."

[Bob Schroeck]

<snrk>

[Black Aeronaut]

Pfft. Sure as hell wouldn't have been me - I haven't read any of his stuff, but from what I've heard, I know better.

EDIT: The Global Frequency, however, could be fun to pull in.

[Labster]

"I'm never going to get my Indigo Girls CD back from Kaorin, am I?" Brent lamented.

[Dartz]

"What's got you so Happy, Anri?"

"Data entry,"

"He told me we weren't capable of giving consent to the standards required by his ethical program"

"....I was filling out our VAT return for the month, Sylvie."

[robkelk]

"I'm never going to get my Indigo Girls CD back from Kaorin, am I?" Brent lamented.

"They've gone the way of my Tegan and Sara CDs, Brent," Rob replied.

[Labster]

Arc 4:

"What's quakening–" The redheaded girl began shrinking down, collapsing into her smaller form in a couple second.  "Quack," said the yellow ducking.

"Crap, antimagic." Brent declared, "This is not good.  There's no way we could beat them without magic."  He scooped up the duck and started a hasty retreat through the steely halls of the spaceship.

"Qua… quack-quack-quack-qua-quack!" Entchen warned.

"Yeah, I know they're faster than me."  Brent darted through a steel door.  Not having any way to lock it, he went for the old standby, pulling a knife from his pocket and slamming it into the door control keypad.  The lock sparked, sputtered, then smoked, disabling the door.

Entchen gestured around the room with her left wing.  "Qua–"  A storage bay, and a dead end. The metallic din outside the door grew even louder.

"What's the chance there's a plasma rifle in the crates?  These guys don't seem to big on OSHA rules."  But he never got the answer to that question, as a spot in the door started to glow red, then begin to cut through the door.

"Okay, new plan.  Let's get out of here.  Some magic can't be suppressed; it's written into spacetime itself."  As the cutting torch was halfway through its giant loop through the bay doors,  Brent told the duck, "Sorry about this," and began reciting:

"Through the darkness of future's past
The magician longs to see
One chants out between two worlds
Fire, walk with me!"

The storage bay doors blasted open, but there was no one inside.

In another place entirely, two people regained awareness.  It seemed like a very well lit room, yet all that illuminated them from above was mere starlight.  Long red curtains hung all round them, and a matching plush red sofa lay on the checkerboard floor.

Sitting on this sofa were one human man, Brent Laabs, and one duckling, Entchen.  They were alone in the room, and looked around, not knowing what they were looking for.

And then, there was a pretty blonde girl in a chair, sitting beside the couch as if it had always been there. She spoke, her voice garbled as if she was speaking backwards, "You are a bird, but you are not a bird."  Her voice was somehow perfectly intelligible to Brent and Entchen.

Entchen slowly lifted her wings, then folded them back into place.  She turned to face the girl and quacked, "It's complicated."  This too, was understood by all in the room.

"You are a dancer.  You will dance with me?"  The duckling turned to look over, and nodded up and down four times.  In a blink, Entchen was standing, facing the girl who looked like Laura Palmer.

Brent watched the pair, dancing a slow ballet to haunting jazz.  The dancers looked like a perfect mirror each other's actions, except one was a girl but not a girl, and the other was a duck but not a duck.  He complained, "This place, every single time."

[Bob Schroeck]

At least you're not dealing with the giant or the dwarf.

[Inquisitive Raven]

Let me state for the record that I loathe the word "incant." AFAICT, it's a back-formation from "incantation" that was invented by fanfic writers. English already has a perfectly good word for the purpose, "chant." Note that both "chant" and "incantation" have the same Latin root; they just entered the English language via different, ahem, routes.

Also Grammarly flagged "incant" as an error while I was writing this reply and dictionary.com doesn't recognize the word. I checked.

[Labster]

Let me state for the record that I loathe the word "incant." AFAICT, it's a back-formation from "incantation" that was invented by fanfic writers. English already has a perfectly good word for the purpose, "chant." Note that both "chant" and "incantation" have the same Latin root; they just entered the English language via different, ahem, routes.

Also Grammarly flagged "incant" as an error while I was writing this reply and dictionary.com doesn't recognize the word. I checked.

Sorry to leave you disenchanted.  I'll recant the word I decanted just as soon as I can canter over to the edit post button, and cantilever that word right out.

[Bob Schroeck]

I just can't...