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Felina grabs onto the nearest thing to her, which happens to be you. And you grab onto the nearest thing to you, which happens to be...Grand Moff Grand Moff. "What--?!? GET OFF ME!" he howls, swatting at you. He isn't floating away into the sky like everything else around the three of you, for some reason. He stops slapping when he abruptly realizes that fuzzy-n'-busty Felina is also clinging to him. You momentarily reflect that she has that effect on most people. Like the world's squishiest, sexiest teddy bear....mmmm... "You're not drifting off into the blue," she says. "Why? How?" He looks irritated for a moment, but he flips a mental coin and answers. He gestures at his belt. "Planar micrograv generator," he says. "It generates a gravity field perpendicular to the nearest flat surface to whoever's wearing it. Cost me a fortune. They said I was an idiot for buying it, but I don't think they'd be laughing now." He reaches down and twists a dial, and suddenly you feel some weight return--maybe a third of normal. "Look, not that I particular mind the pretty kitty hanging onto me--" "Skunk," she corrects. "Yeah, whatever. You can let go now. If you're within half a dozen yards of me or so, you'll stick to the same surface I'm standing on. The field is flat relative to me. Don't jump too high or you might go sailing away." The two of you sit down on the grass crosslegged. Grand Moff GM pulls off his boots and shakes a stone out of one. After a few moments, he sits down himself. A cow goes sailing by into the sky, moo-ing frantically. It's followed by part of the barn which had housed it, and a barking dog still chained to its house. "If you don't mind me asking...why are you carrying a gravity generator? It seemed like there was a story behind it," you say. The older man stares at you for several long moments. He sighs. "To hell with it," he says. "You know what? I'll tell you. I'm wearing it for the same reason I'm carrying this," he says, pulling a small object out of his pocket. "Portable oxygen recyler." He indicates a gadget on the side of his belt. "Emergency forcefield generator. To hold air in or poisonous gases out. Designed to switch on automatically if there's a sudden pressure drop--or increase, like if you find yourself underwater." He taps a third object. "Subspace emergency beacon." He pulls a gadget out of a pants pocket. "Teleporter obfuscator." From the same pocket, he pulled out a small kit. "This has a plasma welder, handheld tractor beam-grapple and a vibroknife. Also a nailfile." From the other pocket comes a small box. "Hair dye and a facedancer disguise mask. Just in case I have to do a quick fade. And ten thousand credits. And a Sullustan good luck charm...and a Jawa fortune effigy. Apparently they're working. I'm still alive. The uniform is bullet-proof and I'm wearing underwear made of Cortosis weave, because you never know when someone's going to try to put a lightsaber through your crotch." "I take it that this isn't normal," Felina says. "Hardly." A bus filled with screaming children sails by far overhead. "The Taun-Taun was my sixth ship. Every other ship I've ever commanded has been destroyed. Or--lost." He ticks them off on his fingers. "My first ship was the Manifest Destiny. It got destroyed in a battle with rebels. That WOULD have been normal, except that the reason it was destroyed was because some engineer was eating a ham sandwich over an open shield generator maintenance hatch. Let's see...the second--that was the Pride of Corellia, where I went to use the head on my first day on the bridge, and when I came back out, the entire crew had been transformed into statues made of cheese. Except me. No one believed it, but all I had to do was point at 15,000 crewmen who had been turned into perfect statues made of sharp cheese. It was good cheese though. I still have some of it at home. They said it was because it had a faulty hyperdrive, but I know they didn't actually know. And then there was the Taun-Taun I. The pilots were trying to cook meth on the reactor and they blew it up. Taun-Taun II was...actually, no one knows WHAT happened to it. I went on vacation and the ship disappeared from dock. The camera records show it there one second, and the next...gone. They'd started assigning the worst officers to me by then, because they knew that they'd be gone fairly quickly. And then there was the Taun-Taun IV, by which point I was having a hard time getting a ship..." "What happened to it?" you ask. "Destroyed. By mimes. Killer mimes." He gestures at the horizon, where parts of the Taun-Taun are drifting away. "You know, I don't think I'm going to get another ship. I don't even think I want one. I think I want to quit. Do something else with my life for a change." Suddenly, a hemispherical blue-glowing field snaps on around the three of you. "There it goes," says GM, sighing. "The air's starting to thin out a bit. I think your weird friend broke the planet. Or at least the local gravity."
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10/6/2010 9:59:13 PM
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