People were real nervous to post their votes publically… though I got at least a couple threats…
What Kind of Life?
“Jace,” Emissary’s face was weary, it was serene. It was the face Jason was afraid to see in the mirror—why he avoided mirrors. Why he avoided people. “This is… more important than men, okay? You need to get this right, and you can’t afford to screw around. If we don’t anchor this thing back in Kelly right now, it’s going to collapse, and who knows what’ll happen then. I’ll just… channel the big red fella and we’ll know what we need to do.”
He was right. There were two steps ahead of them: anchor the obelisk in one dimension, preferably the one they came from. Then, they had to send it back where it came from.
Sally, Finn, and Lydia had basically selected the dimension to set back down in. And one of these controls would fix it in place—would turn off whatever it was about the obelisk that was making the world go haywire outside.
“...Em,” Jason swallowed, felt Nessi push against his leg. “Tell me the truth. If you channel that other program again, how likely is it to… to kill you?”
“I’m not really alive, so—“
“Em. Please.”
“…100%.” Emissary smiled, its body a deeper green than usual, then assuming a red hue—Jason thought—just at the tips of its fingers.
“Then no.”
“Jason, it’s okay.” Emissary took a step forward, and with a bark, Agnessi had leapt into his arms. Jason thought the hologram looked more hesitant that moment than weary. Still, it soldiered on, “Y’know, in a lot of ways, it might be a good thing? If… if my program decompiles, that means your brain isn’t split anymore. I’m a manifestation of your subconscious. The things I know… you could know all that without having to ask me.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“Yeah, well,” Emissary sighed, tried to set Nessi back down, but she wriggled back into his arms immediately. “Neither of us know how to work this control room. Who knows what a wrong guess could do. You’re getting smarter and smarter, so do what your brain tells you is the smart choice to save the town.”
Emissary wouldn’t look him in the eye. The hologram was definitely a rusty-hued green by now. Jason was at a loss.
++
“Hang on!” Lydia screamed, mastering the awkward inversion of gravity, batting a hurtling chair out of the air and lunging across the ceiling to catch Finn as he tumbled. It was like the world around them was rotating, the lighter objects blasted around the room like bits of sand in an eddy. Now the ceiling was the floor, now the wall was the ceiling. The town of Kelly they had painstakingly reconstructed from memories alone collapsed into the sky, then came crashing back to the ground. It reassembled itself, then it dissolved into splinters and brick dust like a pyroclastic flow.
“I’m fine, I’m fine!” Finn insisted, getting a firm hold on a door frame to keep him from tumbling down the hallway-turned-pit. “Keep going, Sally, what’s next?”
“9-11,” Sally called from across the bar. “World Trade Center.”
“Can we please… just skip that?” Lydia called.
“I… I just…” Sally, for the first time, seemed at a loss.
“Well we mentioned it already,” Finn swallowed hard, trying to inch his way across the plaster wall to bring the three of them together. “And we were all already… thinking it… so…”
“This isn’t fun anymore,” Lydia removed her glasses wiped an arm across her brow. The room began to spin again, the tables tumbling down the walls to one corner of the room, pulling the three with them.
“We were dumb to think it ever should be fun,” Finn wailed.
“No, we can’t think like that,” Sally had to scream over the clamor of the furniture crashing to the corner, the snow and wood chips that beat against the windows. “We changed a coupla things around town, but we gotta try to get world-history right or… or who knows. We might not like the dimension we end up in. It’s… parts of it were fun, but… there’s just… effing terrible parts of the world, too, and… the job’s just too big for us, guys. It’s just too big, but it’s our job. Now.”
Finn and Lydia sighed heavily, nodded.
++
“It was good getting to know you, Jason,” Emissary said, softly. Agnessi barked and it poggled her ears, “Yeah, you too, mutt.”
“No, Em, don’t do it.” Jason grit his teeth. “We’ll find another way.”
“Jace—“
“No. We will. We will.” He closed the gap between them and was practically shouting in Emissary’s face before he could realize what he was doing. “You’re a friend, Em. And it’s all well and good to get all… jonesing to sacrifice yourself for the greater good. But if you’re going to ask me what I want, I don’t want you to risk yourself. Who knows… I might… get smart enough and suddenly realize how to work the controls—“
“We don’t have time to waste, Jace. That little gunshot of yours plus being in limbo like this really screwed with the—“
“I know, I know. The entire Chaotic Band, Fixed Point Structure is breaking down, I know what all that means, now!” He snapped. “But… I haven’t had a lot of friends, okay, Em? I haven’t really ever belonged to anything except… except hunting and fishing and spending time alone because I felt like that was all I was good for. And… I know you think you’re just a piece of my subconscious with a fancy holographic body, but you’re more than that. You’re your own person and you’re my friend and I’ll be goddamned if I ask you to throw your life away for this.”
Emissary blinked at him a long moment, and Nessi took this opportunity to unobtrusively slip from his arms, gave the two some space.
“You’re my friend too, Jace. But. There’s nothing really… I mean, I’m like, six hours old. I don’t have anything I care about except the things you care about. And you want to save your town. So I’m willing.”
“I’m not,” Jace swallowed hard. He didn’t know what he was doing, but he couldn’t let this happen. Not to Emissary. “But you can make your own choice.”
“…I’m scared to die,” Emissary whispered. “I like… living?”
“So?”
“…so what do we do instead?”
“...we guess. If we... if we get it wrong... Kelly’s still safe, probably? We’ll just... the ship will just anchor to another dimension. Maybe one where Kelly isn’t... in the way of the falling thing. Maybe it just blows up. I don’t know. But. The only ones we’re risking are ourselves.”
“...okay then.”
++
Finn and Lydia and Sally had wedged themselves into a door frame, looked out at the trees tearing out of the Earth and cartwheeling into the slate-gray matte of January clouds. In another moment, the gravity would shift again, and they’d pound back into the ground as if nothing had happened.
“What are we forgetting?” Finn asked softly, voice barely audible over the rush of ice clattering together as it rose in a huge pillar.
“Probably plenty,” Sally sighed.
“Nobody’ll know except us, though,” Lydia remarked, spellbound by the way the shingles danced off the top of Mr. Bell’s shop and flung themselves in an arc up around and down into the road.
“There’s no way we’re getting back to our dimension, is there?”
“No, I don’t think so, hon.”
“Nobody’ll know except us, though,” Lydia said again, a weary smile on her lips when she looked at her two friends.
“How do you live a life… knowing that these people aren’t the people you grew up with? That the world you’re living in might be different in all sorts of ways than you remembered? Or imagined?” Finn asked.
“I guess the same way you lived before,” Sally sighed. “People change enough in time where they might as well be a version of themselves from another dimension, gosh.”
“We made this place, these people out of our memories of ‘em,” Lydia went on. “And they’re real, just like us. Just as real. I don’t see as I can love ‘em any less than I did before.”
Finn nodded. The clouds above twisted into a dark knot and then snapped back into the same low-slung overcast, the brief flash of sunlight leaving the glitter of the snow burned into his retina for a moment after.
“We’ve seen some shit, huh?”
There was a loud bark that seemed to echo out of the sky. Lydia looked up, eyebrows furrowed.
“Was that Agnessi?”
There was a flash of green light.
And the three were face to face with Stu and an arsenal of guns.
++
“First things first,” Jason wiped his eyes, turning back to the control panel. “In case anything goes south with this little guessing game, we need to get Finn, Sally, and Lydia home. If we can not trap them in whatever nightmare reality we get sucked into if I guess wrong, I bet they’d… y’know. Remember us fondly and stuff.”
“Okay. Umm, how do we—“
Nessi barked, tail wagging happily.
“…really? You can do that?” Jason blinked at the dog. She whined happily. “Okay then, well you better stay back there then too, Nessi. I don’t want anything happening to you…”
The terrier growled low, gave an indignant little huff, then vanished with a pop and a flash of green light.
“Guess it’s just you and me, Jace,” Em smiled weakly, but a second later, Agnessi reappeared, looking very pleased with herself. “Done already, huh pup? Well, guess it’s just the three of us, then.”
“Okay. Here we go. Find the right switch… we stop what’s happening with all the technology and the haywire guns and the weird physics back in Kelly. Wrong switch and… god only knows.”
++
What happens now? Answer, message me, or reply. We’re getting down to the last two choices in the story before it wraps in Chapter 20. Thanks for sticking with this dumb, slow thing!
Which control should Jason use?
A ruby-red lever
Yellow crank
Purple pad
Green, D20 looking button
Brown lever that looks wooden
Set of 8 blue buttons
Silver chain
Light-green motion sensor
Golden toggle
Black triangle switch
Gray joystick looking thing
Transparent crystal
You really need Emissary to channel the other program to figure this out...
In mid-January, a giant obelisk of unknown origin descends into the township of Kelly, Minnesota. It’s protruding from the frozen lake. A dog found it almost immediately, but disappeared mysteriously, and Jason–the dog’s owner–has come to investigate. There’s a hologram named Emissary that only Jason can see, and as the townsfolk mass around the base of the obelisk, the hologram and the college student return to attempt to gather their own answers, but the townsfolk set off an explosion, which Jason narrowly survived when Emissary whipped out some hitherto unobserved powers.
And, oh yeah, the giant obelisk is slowly falling over onto the town.
Jason sighed, expelling a curling wisp of steam that floated up and through the pale green hologram.
“Well, what’re we waiting for then? You just keep that information coming.”
By the time Jason walked to the crowd still arguing on the boat landing, Stu had all but convinced the crowd to take to boats and attach a new set of explosives to the obelisk.
“You want a bigger explosion this time?” Sally crossed her arms, glowering at Stu, his own arms crossed over his chest.
“I know what I saw,” he growled, “We need to get inside that thing.”
“Then what? It’s an effing mother-ship, for chrissakes!” Lydia removed her glasses, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hands.
“We’ll see what we see when we get in there,” the Sherriff offered, hesitant: he’d long since stopped trying to control the situation.
“Wait!” Jason cried from the tree-line.
“Nice hobble,” Emissary snickered beside him, invisible to the crowd. “Very convincing. You build that sympathy, guy.”
“Shut up,” Jace hissed, then shouted to the crowd: “I’ve figured out what’s up with the obelisk!”
“Jason!” Lydia ran over, throwing her arms around Jason despite his wet jacket. “Are you okay, kiddo? Oh my god I knew I saw you out there!”
“I’m fine, Lydia, really.” Most of the crowd looked relieved to see Jason stumbling forward—there was something pretty edifying about that. But it was because most of them knew him as the ‘brainy’ kid from the west bay. Once he flunked out of his program, they would know what he really was, but meanwhile, he needed to play to that image.
“You’re looking wet.” Stu had his hands on his hips, eyeing Jason with a squint.
“I was on the lake when you set off that blasting cap,” Jason seethed for just a moment, but heard Emissary clear its throat beside him.
“I told you he was on the ice, Stu!” Lydia let go of Jason and turned on the older man.
“The fuck were you doing on that ice, boy?” Stu growled.
“The fuck did you blow that cap if you saw me out there?” Jason spat back. That prompted Emissary to clear its throat again, more obviously this time.
“I didn’t see you. Lydia just started screaming her head off. I was back by my truck, was taking cover because I’m not an idiot. She didn’t start saying your name till the bomb went off.”
“That’s not true! I heard her yellow about Jason before you ever hit the switch!” Sally chimed in.
“You seem fine, anyhow.” Stu was unfazed. “So tell me: what were you doing out there?”
“I’m the one who found it,” Jason tried to control his temper, but the way Stu eyed him up like a piece of taxidermy come back to life made Jace’s skin crawl. “Was doing research. When’d you get here?”
“Research?” Stu rolled his eyes, “On what?”
“Answer my question, Stu.”
“Or what?”
Before Jason could fire back, Emissary stepped between the two and fixed him with a serious stare.
“Remember what you’re doing, Jace. Tell them that the obelisk is impenetrable.”
Jason blinked, then nodded imperceptibly. Once he had consciously relaxed his shoulder, he turned to address the majority of the people.
“The obelisk is from space,” he said, adopting his most formal tone. “It’s impenetrable. It’s made of--“ he looked to Emissary, and the hologram shrugged. “—incredibly strong stuff. I believe the whole thing to be a single super-molecule—“
“Ooo, snappy term,” the hologram chuckled.
“—with intensely powerful atomic bonds.”
“You can’t crack it without breaking all of it,” Emissary supplied.
“And you’re not going to be able to blow a hole in the side unless you can blow up the entire thing.”
“How do you know?” Sally asked, nodding along.
“…what?”
“How do you know it’s a super-whatchamacallit?”
Jason tried not to shuffle awkwardly. He literally had no way explaining how he knew. He didn’t really know.
“…well,” he scratched his neck. “Because I met a hologram—“
“Oh no, Jace.” Emissary buried its face in its hands.
“—who was sent along with the ship to talk about its mission.”
“Jason, you boob, don’t you dare!” the hologram moaned.
“Bullshit.” Stu drew a gun from the back of his truck.
“They can’t see me!” Emissary hissed.
“They can if I want them to,” Jason said under his breath as he pointed to a spot in the center of the crowd and stepped back. “If I think hard enough… it’s like you said, right? The obelisk changed me. Here goes.”
Emissary shook its head, but walked to the spot, and the next moment, the crowd gasped in surprise.
“This is the Emissary!” Jason proclaimed, receding to the back of the crowd so they could have all eyes on the hologram. He muttered as he reached the back of the crowd, “Sorry buddy, change of plans.”
“Hello,” the hologram said lamely, “I’m Emissary.”
“The Emissary!” Jason said under his breath. “Be a little more epic, would ya?” Emissary seemed to hear him.
“Greetings,” the green figure drew itself taller. “I am The Emissary!”
People screamed.
“Tell them not to be scared, dummy!” Jason whispered.
“Don’t freak out!” Emissary held his hands up.
“Not like that! ‘Fear Not’ or some shit! You’ve gotta be… like an angel or something.”
“I mean, freak ye not out!” Emisarry corrected. “I have only recently learned this primitive form of communication you fleshlings call ‘speech—‘”
“Nice recovery, but easy on the ‘fleshlings’ business.” Jason whispered, the crowd seemed to be calming a bit. “We need them to like us.”
“I am…” it looked frantically to Jace in the back of the crowd.
“The ‘avatar of the obelisk.’ No! The ‘first contact AI!’ That sounds good.”
“So you’re not real?” The Sherriff still had his hand on his gun, but he had a childlike expression of confusion plastered to his face.
“’The peoples of the galaxy at large have an enlightened view of life,’” Jason supplied. He was loving this. “’And I am as much a sapient citizen of the universe as any of you here.’”
“I am real—“
“—raise your arms. Not that much. There. Welcoming.”
“—for the galaxy people have a sapient view of life,” Emissary continued in a deep, oratory tone. “And I am as enlightened and large as any of you here!”
Jason groaned.
“Where did that thing come from?” Someone asked when the confusing grumbling died down.
“From a distant galaxy. It is the… umm…”
“’Gift of my people…’”
“The gift of my people,” Emissary winked to Jace at the back of the crowd, but a young man between the two caught sight of it and blushed, smiling back at the hologram with a little wave. “Sent to inspire your greatest minds and welcome your people, anon, into our embrace as friends across the cosmos!”
“You’re nailing this, Em,” Jason chuckled softly.
“This obelisk is indestructible to your science,” it continued in a drone. It went on to explain the nature of the obelisk—as far as Emissary and Jason had discovered—in vagaries that seemed to put people at easy. It explained the obelisk contained inside it the key to faster than light travel, and the ability to travel between galaxies. It explained how the giant pillar had been damaged, but that Jason and he were attempting to correct the problem.
Jason, meanwhile, had his eyes on Stu. The older man was watching the performance suspicious, grip tightening and loosening around his rifle. The bed of his truck was full of gun and ammo, each one modified in that particular way the obelisk was haphazardly modifying everything. Who knew how powerful the guns would become? And Stu had them all. The though made Jace feel uncomfortable.
Maybe he could sneak around…
“But Jason has discovered something which concerns you all,” Emissary proclaimed, and the crowd turned as one to face Jason.
“Umm…” he smiled sheepishly. “The obelisk is tipping over. It’s going to fall on the town.”
There was a general gasp.
“How long?” Finn shouted. Emissary held up eight fingers.
“About eight hours, unless we find a way to stop it!”
“Stu,” the Sheriff turned to the scowling man, leaning against his truck. “What should we do?”
“We try again to get in,” Stu said after a moment of hushed silence. Jason couldn’t help but think he was enjoying stringing the crowd along. “And if we can’t, we sink charges into the water. Straight down to the bedrock, on the north end of the big thing. Blow out some of the lakebed so it can tip back.”
Jason scoffed.
“What the hell? That’s not how that works?”
“You got a better plan, physics boy?” Stu barked. “We’ve got eight hours, people, if we can even believe this… faulty goddamn apparition. It’s time we get on with this, and I’m the one with a plan.”
“The explosives you’re using—“ Emissary was cut off when Stu raised his rifle, point it squarely at the hologram’s chest. The crowd tensed and dove out of the way.
“You look like you’re not really all there,” Stu sneered. “Like this bullet’s just gonna go right through you. How come you looked so scared?”
“Do I look scared,” Emissary’s merciful-alien voice was gone. Jason could see the contempt in its eyes.
“All of you are confused and scared,” Stu shouted to the people huddled together out of his firing line. “And I get it. Nothing like this has ever happened. But we’re here now. We don’t have any help from outside, and if we got help, like as not it wouldn’t be help for long. Now you guys have been taken in by all this bullshit, but this little ghost hasn’t told us a single thing that helps us. So I say—“
He pulled the trigger.
The force of the shot propelled him backwards with a grunt. The bullet passed through Emissary—the tree trunk behind him exploding in a shower of fragments, the old red pine toppling over into the parking lot with a crash. There was a new hole in what ice remained on the lake, almost 30 meters wide, the water still falling back to earth as if a depth charge had exploded beneath the lake.
Stu scrambled to his feet, his shoulder clearly badly hurt, his face twisted into a rage.
“We’ve got our own ways of dealing with this problem. So lets do it!”
“Stu, hang on—“ Jason ran to block him from getting in his truck.
“Get the fuck out of my way you little—“
There was a green flash over the water, then a canine ‘yip’ followed by a splash. Stu had paused with his good fist raised high, trying to catch sight of what had landed in the water. Then, with another green flash, a soaking wet Agnessi the bull terrier appeared in thin air above him and landed on him with an angry growl.
“Nessi!” Jason shouted, hopped backwards as Stu fought with the attacking dog. “Here girl!”
Nessi looked up from where she was pulling on Stu’s sleeve with her teeth, then bounded over to Jace’s side, turned and growled as Stu got up again.
“Keep that thing away from me!” Stu screamed, throwing his rifle in the bed of his truck. “Now come on, everybody, we’ve got work to do!” With that he got in his truck and screeched out of the parking lot, about half the crowd following suit.
“Nessi,” Jason kneeled to run his fingers through the dog’s wet fur. “You’re back! And…” he looked after the truck. “I need one of those guns, girl. Just in case.”
Nessi let out a happy bark.
Flash.
She howled from the bed of Stu’s speeding truck.
Flash.
She was standing in front of Jason with a Colt Python in her mouth, tail wagging happily.
“Now we know who got the rest of the access code,” Emissary said dryly.
Return of the Dog. What happens now:
Follow Stu, his plan might work after all.
Follow Stu, he’s crazy and must be stopped
See if the super powered dog gets you inside the obelisk.
And because I’m an idiot, I forgot to enable answers before posting, so PLEASE VOTE HERE!
In mid-January, a giant obelisk of unknown origin descends into the township of Kelly, Minnesota. It’s protruding from the frozen lake. A dog found it almost immediately, but disappeared mysteriously, and Jason–the dog’s owner–has come to investigate. There’s a hologram named Emissary that only Jason can see, and as the townsfolk mass around the base of the obelisk, the hologram and the college student return to attempt to gather their own answers, but the townsfolk set off an explosion, which Jason narrowly survived when Emissary whipped out some hitherto unobserved powers.
Wow, the first time everyone has agreed!
Jason stumbled up onto the shore, a shivering wreck.
Somehow, he had managed to swim across the bay in moments. His clothes were soaked through and freezing solid quickly, hair brittle sticking out beneath his cap. He fell to his knees in the snow—somehow, he had had the presence of mind to come ashore 200 yards away from the boat-ramp where the crowd was gathered. His shivering had stopped as he came out of the water—not a good sign.
“Jason,” Emissary pulled away from Jasons body, a brighter green than it had been before, and stooped to look Jason over. Its face was etched with concern. “Talk to me, buddy.”
“Fine…” it was hard to think, he was so cold. “How did… you do…?”
“We need to get you warmed up—“
“—no, fine. How…?”
Emissary frowned.
“How’d I do what, big guy? I did a couple pretty rad things out there.” A shiver shot through Jason’s spine and he collapsed, “Okay, okay, okay!” Emissary scrambled forward to catch him, but Jason passed through the holographic hands and into the snow. “I’ll tell you all about it… but first you’ve got to get up, Jace. Come one, buddy, just get up.”
All of his limbs felt like they were freezing stiff as the old brown jacket wrapped around him. He managed to turn himself over, bleary eyes staring up at the naked canopy and the colorless sky above.
“Alrighty, that’s a start,” Emissary’s voice was shaking.
There were sirens in the distance. There were never sirens in Kelly…
“Jason,” a green hand waved in front of his face. “Stay with me buddy.”
“Do… magic stuff…” Jason managed to get out.
“Good one,” Emissary said wryly from beneath furrowed brows. “I need you to concentrate on being warm, okay?”
“Can’t…”
“Can.”
“You did… that thing… let me swim so… so fast…”
“Yeah, but I couldn’t have done it without you, okay? So get to it. Think warm. You can do it.”
“I don’t think… so, Em…”
There was yelling in the distance, the siren was getting closer.
“Think about it, Jace. The obelisk: makes cars fasters, makes bombs more… bomby,” Emissary explained hurriedly. Jason wondered for a moment what he was so worried about. Oh, right: Jason was cold. “The oxygen content around this place has already gone up by 6%. You’re a human, you’re all about homeostasis and keeping warm. If the obelisk is supposed to make things more like what they are…”
Jason took a deep breath and thought about being warm: the sensation of it on your skin, the way it seemed to seep inside out. He thought about Christmas break, fed up studying, sitting in front of the fire with Agnesi, digging into the dog’s scruff with a yawn.
And just like that, the shivering started again. He was getting warmer.
“Oh good,” Emissary was visibly relieved when Jason struggled to his feet.
“Okay… so… that explosion….” He was determined to get to the bottom of this now. He began staggering in the direction of the boat landing, where the siren had finally stopped and the yelling had gotten louder.
“The obelisk is sent here to begin improving technology on this world,” Emissary walked after. “It allows the species on the planet it lands on to begin to develop the necessary faster than light travel.”
For some reason it didn’t surprise Jason as much as it should have.
“So… but something’s wrong?”
“Yes. It isn’t supposed to be doing it the way it has been,” Emissary and Jason crept up behind a tree, in view of the crowd of townsfolk standing around the parking lot of the boat ramp. A few of the cars had been overturned in the explosion, and Stu, a few of the bar patron, and the sheriff were in a yelling match.
“Making cars super maneuverable and guns more powerful doesn’t seem to help figuring out FTL… or changing me for that matter,” Jace whispered.
“Right,” Emissary whispered, though he had no reason to, “But every civilization is different. You never know what technology is going to hold the key to FTL. And many places are based on organic tech. Still, it shouldn’t be this dramatic. And it should be… breaking the laws of physics the way it is.”
Jason was about to ask Emissary’s role in all this when the screaming from the parking lot grew louder:
“Sheriff,” It was Sally, from the bar. She was holding Lydia to herself while the other woman sobbed into her shoulder, “Jace Barem was out on that ice!”
“Lydia’s the only one who saw him!” another man interrupted.
“I saw my truck out there!” Finn chimed in and Jason winced, remembering the way it sunk, ruined, to the bottom of the lake.
“Hang on a damn minute,” Sheriff Cartwright held up a hand. “Still nobody’s told me what in the hell that explosion was I heard. OR what that big ass thing is!”
“I can’t tell you what the eff is going on, Abel,” Lydia sobbed, eyes red. Then she pointed at Stu, standing a few paces away and surveying the churning lake. “But Stu just blew up a boy.”
“Far as I’m concerned, all of you let him get away with it!” Said Finn, “All of us…”
“This is horseshit,” Stu turned around, delivering his dismissal calmly. Stu was about Jason’s height, middle-aged, face weathered from working outside and hair stringy like dark cobwebs caught in the wind off the lake. The crowd hushed when he spoke. “Now if Jason was on the ice, it was his own damn fault.”
“How can you say that!?” Sally screamed.
“If he’d shown up with the rest of us, that wouldn’t have happened and—“ Lydia tried to speak up again. “—AND we have bigger things to think about!” Stu’s composure had slipped, his face contorting as he rebuked the crowd. “You see that thing out there? We can’t get a damn message out to the outside world, and what if we could? You’ve seen what that thing is doing to this place. You wanna think about what happens when someone gets their hands on that thing? You wanna think about what they’re going to do to our fucking tiny hick town when they find out we know what we know?
“You saw what happened to those guns, and who knows how they’ll keep getting. Now those were my guns this morning and they’re my guns still. You know what a gun like that could do to people? I’m keeping those close, keep them out of the wrong hands.” Stu spat contemptuously, “And that was my smallest blasting cap. So any of you geniuses wanna think what happens if we get a bunker-buster next to that thing? Or a proper nuke?”
The crowd was hushed, but Lydia and Sally scowled at him.
“Now I told you I saw a crack in that obelisk, a door—“
“None of us saw that!” Shouted a man from the back.
“I saw it, I tell you!” Stu shot back. “And if we didn’t crack it with guns and we didn’t crack it with that blasting cap, I say we try again. We need in that thing before anyone else shows up. Or we’re all fucked. If we don’t control this negotiation, we’re fucked.”
“I can see why you don’t like him,” Emissary whispered, but Jason was staring at the obelisk, still shivering from time to time. “What’s up?”
“The obelisk tipped more…” At least another 6 degrees. “Did the blasting cap…?”
“No,” Emissary shook his head. “That entire obelisk is a single molecule, the atomic bonds that join it together are virtually indestructible.”
“Then how’d it get damaged?”
Emissary shrugged.
“I hope I’ll ‘remember’ that soon.”
“Yeah,” Jason frowned, “If it’s tipping that fast… to the south… oh my god. It’s going to crush the town.”
What should Jason do?
Warn the crowd that the obelisk is going to fall on Kelly
Warning them will start a panic: no
Get a gun first, you don’t want Stu to be the only one with that firepower
You need to help Stu, he might’ve found a way into the obelisk
Jak zwykli mawiać leniwi ludzie - potrzeba matką wynalazków, prawda? W 100% zgadzam się z tym stwierdzeniem. Odkryłam rewelacyjne sosy do makaronu - Agnesi. Gdzie je kupić? Polecam delikatesy online. Zrobię im teraz reklamę, a co! Na razie spróbowałam tylko (aż!) Pesto Calabrese z czerwoną papryką i serem ricotta. I powiem Wam, że smak naprawdę bardzo dobry, nie musiałam doprawiać. Słoiczek wygląda tak:
Widziałam, że mają w swej ofercie jeszcze inne smaki - pesto ze świeżą bazylią, z serem ricotta i orzechami... Proponuję Wam dziś łatwy przepis. Słoiczek sosu wystarcza na obiad dla dwóch osób.
Składniki:
makaron tagliatelle (ilość zależy od Waszego głodu ;))
słoiczek sosu
Krótkie, prawda? ;) Makaron gotujemy al dente, polewamy sosem, mieszamy i gotowe! Możecie to zrobić również na patelni. Szybkie i jakże smaczne danie dla leniwych żarłoków! :)
