Just A Thought.

[Bloodscream]

((I was reworking this to be more inclusive of Anaie's quirks.))

The look on Anaies face was a cross between “You big beautiful green bastard” and “I will remember you fondly when you’re gone, cause he’s gunna kill you.”

Bloodscream stared expectantly at the undead rogue.

Anaies face contorted into a twisted grimace of a smirk. She wanted to be clear. She stepped a little closer and examined the translucent image that hovered in front of the large orc. She opened her mouth and spat out an eye into her hand. She held the eye to the projection.

“Explain it to the eye?” she cooed.

Bloodscream repeated it, taking his time. The Grim were an odd bunch, you had to learn to live with some strange people and work around their oddities.

“Right…so I got the idea the other night when we were in the Bastion… something or other happened and next thing I know…I gotta dodge several tons of bear sailing through the sky, near the first staircase?”

“elementals…” Anaie supplied. She was talking to the eye.

“Right…well at the time I couldn’t help but think “It’s a damn good thing I got out the way cause flying bear would smart.”

Anaie nodded sagely. “Hmmm, yes…bear…flying…smart.”

Bloodscream spoke and as he did the projection emanating from his goggles spun slowly. It was displaying a rather fiendish looking pair of rockets on a harness being modelled by a faceless mock up of a bear.

Bloodscream was pointing to various parts as he continued to explain.

“Flexweave harness, twelve inch bands, reinforced with pyrium wire mesh. Dual Ionized Ether rocket boosters, rated at nine hundred holicraps…each.”

Anaie, being an engineer herself, knew the scale in question.

“eighteen hundred?” she asked incredulously.

Bloodscream smiled silently and nodded, waggling his brow for effect.

“holy crap…” the rogue surmised.

“Precisely…” the orc confirmed.

“Do go on…” Anaie pleaded.

“The rockets are synchronised dimensional rippers see? When activated they open a microfracture into the fabric of spacetime, a very brief and very stable microfracture.” Bloodscream explained, the projection of the rocket magnifying and then splitting into its component parts as he spoke.

Anaie loved watching Bloodscream talk about engineering. He got so animated and wrapped up in what he was saying he dropped all pretense at trying to sound like a peon. Anaie wasn’t sure why Bloodscream was ashamed of his brains but Anaie had felt brains were only really good for two things, being used to their full potential or as a light snack for the rogue on the go. Anaies mind returned from a brief trip to a time and place when brains were nice and fresh and just melting in her mouth.

Bloodscream was still outlining the specs for the FBL-1800. That designation hovered in the air beneath the projection.

Anaie, pointed to the floating letters quite certain the eighteen hundred was a reference to the power rating.

“Oh, Furry Butt Launcher.” The orc supplied casually as he continued to describe the process used in creating the Pyrium chambers.

Anaie smiled, just another one of the colourful nicknames Coyotl had gathered along his journey.

“Have you spoken to Coyotl about this?” Anaie asked rhetorically. If the orc had broached this subject with the druid, the wounds would be evident.

Bloodscream shook his head. “Wanted to know what you thought first…”
Anaie popped the eye back into her mouth and crossed her arms.
She moved the eye around in her mouth while shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
She spat the eye back into her hand and held it up to Bloodscream.

“The eye asks: what does very stable fractures really mean?”

The orc poked at the projection hanging in the air before him. He exploded the image of the rockets themselves and the image changed to a larger side cut of the rockets interior.

“Redundant electro ether conductor coils with harmonic crystal stabilizers, my own design. The fractures are generated in the twenty to twenty-five vale range. The rupture is to a dimension I located during one of my less than successful experiments. The ambient reversely ionized particles enter into this dimension through the rupture and create a Crakcrank cascade which as you know, draws MORE of the negatively charged particles into our dimension. The stabilizers prevent the rupture from widening and the resulting siphon starts building pressure, when the particles reach somewhere between thirty and fourty vales… depends on ambient temperature… the cascade collapses, the rupture slams shut, all those trapped particles are compressed into a Eisendork fold and WHAMMO!”

Bloodscream looked at Anaie expectantly.

“You didn’t answer the question.” The rogue remarked coyly.

“What was the question?”the orc asked.

“Stable? Ruptures?” the rogue prompted.

“Oh…right…well I don’t have to tell you how difficult it is to properly synchronize conductor coils under that kind of pressure. So far I’ve only had the one failure.”

“Number of attempts?” Anaie inquired starting to settle into the idea of firing Coyotl at Cho’Gall.

“Eight thus far, I’m still tweaking the prototype”

"Hmmm one out of eight... that's fifty percent! How many Coyotls do we have?"

Anaie hoped Bloodscream had been hiding a spare Coyotl for just such an occasion.

Bloodscream raised an eyebrow. "Just the one last time I checked."

Anaie didn't like uncertainty in delicate matters. "Well when was that? Go check now, I'll wait here."

Bloodscream cracked his neck and took a few deep breaths.

"We only have the one Coyotl." he said slowly, his eyes narrowing.

Anaie popped the eye back into her mouth and closed her eyes.

"Eiff affemps vun faifuwe..." she began.

Bloodscream placed one hand under Anaie's chin and smacked her in the back of the head with the other, ejecting the eye into his waiting hand.
He held his hand there and waited for Anaie to recover the eye, he tried not to think of how slimy it was.

"Thanks." Anaie said as she took the eye into her hand.

“Eight attempts one failure, how bad were the damages during the failure?”

Bloodscream looked pensive a moment. “It’s hard to say…”

Anaie knew when something tried to sneak by, that was her job. Interception and attack was an unconscious reaction.

“Why is it hard to say? Do you have an eye in your mouth too?” she asked.

“Well technically we haven’t found the FBL-1800 Mark 1 yet, there was a dimensional bubble backlash effect during the final stages of ignition, I haven’t really figured out where the device ended up but I did totally fix that oversight and we’ve had seven good runs since!”

Anaie looked slightly dismayed.

“How can I accept a chance that my main vanguard suddenly gets sucked into another dimension never to be seen again simply for the pleasure and thrill of seeing him fired at Cho’Gall with eighteen hundred…”

“Eighteen hundred…” Bloodscream repeated with reverence.

“...holicraps of raw power behind his furry butt?” the rogue finished.

Bloodscream had known all along in the back of his mind that the risk simply wasn’t worth it. He drooped his shoulders slightly in defeat, sighing softly.

“I know…it’s just that…” he began.

“No… that was a question.” The rogue interjected.
“How? Tell me HOW? We HAVE to do this!”

They both chuckled and eventually fell into silence as they both watched the projection spinning silently in the air between them. Visions of several tons of Coyotl hurtling through the air with martial determination, dancing through their heads. In Bloodscreams head, Coyotl was wearing goggles and a helmet.

It was Bloodscream who broke the silence first.

“He’ll never go for it will he?”

Anaie nodded gravely. "the eye agrees..."

“He’d tear your head off and shit down your neck.” The rogue concluded. "Can I have your eyes when you're done with them?"

There was a slight “bzzt” sound and the image between them vanished.

“Just a thought…” the orc concluded, walking away.