Sometimes you feel like a damp squib. No, no, that doesn’t mean you need thrown back into the ocean. What it means is that you need to dry out, find an ignition source, and release your inner fireworks in all their sparkly glory.
| Match | Fuse | Fire in the Hole! |
| Cedar | It was the rattiest of rat rods | nother Mike |
| Fiona Grey | “So, what should I expect from apocalypse training?” | Leigh Kimmel |
| nother Mike | The small green lizard slithered across the kitchen floor, a sinous wave… | AC Young |
| AC Young | The cat played a dance on the fiddle. | Becky Jones |
| Becky Jones | The old man sighed. There were times when yelling at the clouds seemed like the sane thing to do. Especially when the weather spells went awry. | Padre |
| Padre | “The comments from the peanut gallery were epic.” | Cedar |
| Leigh Kimmel | It felt as if Murphy had been riding along with us the whole trip. | Fiona Grey |
If, perchance, you are looking for that spark of imagination, there’s always a spare if you neglected to send in a challenge prompt.
| Spare | It happened slowly, and then suddenly. |
| Spare | The lost pyramid was revealed by fireflies. |
| Spare | When the birds suddenly broke out of the bushes and took flight, it was glorious! |
| Spare | When they pulled the cork on the ship in a bottle, the ocean and the ship poured out! |
| Spare | Who’s the leader of the gang… |
Come back and show us what the prompt blew up into, in the comments!
More Odds Than Ends 
I’m not sure what the flying thing in the image is supposed to be, but I can’t help but think of “Cabin in the Sky” from how it sort of looks to me.
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The impression I get is “pegasus but with a deer (probably female) base”.
I may be completely wrong, and I can’t say that the above gives as clear a picture as I would like.
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On re-reading clarification may be needed. I’m attempting to say that my description in the first paragraph of my previous comment may be insufficiently clear. I’m not seeking to disparage the excellent artwork at the top of the screen.
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The art is a refinement of a sketch I had done of a winged deer, so yes, very close!
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This week nother Mike put a match to the fuse: The small green lizard slithered across the kitchen floor, a sinous wave…
—
Icados carefully checked his equipment. He wasn’t entirely sure what was about to happen – the field of bio-alchemy was so new that no-one had even a vague understanding of the underlying theory.
In the centre of the table was the cage containing the ordinary green lizard. It was to be the focus of this experiment.
On the vertices of a triangle surrounding the cage were three vials of vinegar.
Icados’ ultimate goal was to learn how to transfer bad aspects out of creatures so that otherwise dangerous beasts could be kept safely. But removal of traits was harder than adding them, for reasons not at all understood. So, for now he was experimenting, trying to learn what traits various combinations of donors at the foci supplied, and even if these were consistent across the various creatures that could be used as the recipient.
Everything seemed to be in the correct place. Icados took out his wand, pointed it at the lizard, and chanted the incantation. It was the same one that was used for ordinary alchemical transformations, with only the variations that grammar required given that the recipient was a living creature.
The process worked. Beams of light joined the vertices of the donor triangle, then beams of a greener light linked these with the lizard at the centre of the experiment. Then the beams faded out.
Icados studied the lizard. It had changed colour, now being a more poisonous shade of green, and seemed to glow. What changes had the triple vinegar made to the creature?
The lizard brushed against the bars of his cage, and with a loud hiss the metal failed. An escape route was unexpectedly open. The lizard was the first to react, and it shot across the table, and fell to the floor.
Then it slithered, feet slipping constantly on the tiles, bobbing up and down, its body forming a sinuous wave as it went.
Icados shook himself and raised his wand once more. A short word later, and a yellow beam erupted from the tip of the wand, terminating in the lizard’s body. The creature collapsed.
Now to study the creature, to find out how it had been changed, and why it had been able to escape.
Icados went to pick up the dead body, but no sooner had his fingers closed around the lizard’s flesh, than his hand erupted in pain. He let go, went swiftly to the window.
He looked at his hand. It looked as if his fingers and palm had been burned. He turned on the tap and put his hand in the stream of cold water.
He was still nowhere in figuring out what had gone wrong. He looked down at the lizard. It looked as if a pool of liquid was forming around the dead body, and it seemed to be slowly eating into the tiles.
In a flash of insight, Icados looked back at the table, at his experiment. Vinegar. Three times vinegar. Whatever change vinegar provided to the recipient creature, using it on all three vertices of the triangle would significantly concentrate the effect
Now he knew what vinegar would donate. It was a very weak acid, but it would donate acidity. And three times vinegar would make the resultant donation very strong indeed.
If Icados was right, then all liquids inside or produced by the lizard would be extremely acidic. That gave him a possible explanation for the escape. A thin film of acid of the strength he was fearing would eat through the steel bars of the cage very quickly. It would also explain his hand. Acid burns. He would need to go to a healer wizard, and quickly, as that sort of damage was beyond his ability to heal.
But the first thing was to deal with the damage that the lizard was still doing to his kitchen floor. He had to neutralise the acid as soon as possible. In his experimental kit he had sodium hydroxide solution. He didn’t know whether it would be enough, or too much, but he got the full container out, removed the top with great pain, and poured the lot over the lizard.
The effect was instantaneous, and extreme. The combination of the two creating a loud hissing sound, almost immediately followed by the eruption of a cloud of steam. Icados couldn’t react in time, and his left hand, the so-far unburnt one, was engulfed in the hot cloud.
He was able to stumble backwards before the cloud reached his face, but he now had two burnt hands. And if his quick solution hadn’t worked, or had worked too well, creating a dangerous pool of alkaline substances, he had no realistic way of fixing it.
Now was the point at which discretion was the better part of valour. He picked up his wand and through the pain cast the emergency assistance request incantation.
The first wizard to transport himself into Icados’ kitchen was the generalist. He was the one who was tasked with dealing with the minor emergencies and the non-emergencies, and with calling in the more specialist emergency wizards should they actually be needed.
Icados explained the situation as best as he could. The generalist emergency wizard immediately summoned an emergency healing wizard and got in touch with the university to find a suitable chemical wizard.
The emergency healing wizard transported in, and after some initial treatment, Icados was taken to hospital. There the healing wizards on duty decided that it was better to keep him in overnight, as the spells worked best if they were cast to work over a period of hours rather than minutes.
The next morning he returned home to find that the chemical wizard had dealt with the acidic and alkaline leftovers, but hadn’t done anything about the hole in the tiles, or what was left of the body of the lizard. The other remains of the experiment were similarly untouched.
Icados set about tidying up. He had more experiments to perform. The art of bio-alchemy wouldn’t develop its own rules.
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Cedar lit the rust with…
It was the rattiest of rat rods
[aha! A quick check via Google indicates that a rat rod is indeed a ratty kind of hot rod. So, let’s see, we need one rusty, beat up old jalopy, the kind you love to drive, cause if you didn’t love it, you wouldn’t drive it. And maybe a dash of that old beep beep competition? Maybe…]
Saturday night, and the pirate radio stations were rocking. Down at the strip, which was really a flat straight on a road that would never be named, the hot rods lined up for their weekly competition. Glittering chrome, outstanding rims, all they could afford just shone even in the evening dimness.
Then Rudy wheeled into the lineup. That old rattle trap of his, it was the rattiest of rat traps! More rust than paint, and nothing shiny anywhere. But Rudy grinned as he looked over the hot rods on display.
“Hey, y’all, ain’t y’a got nothing better than this to put up against my rod?”
The other drivers looked at each other, shook their heads, and settled into their seats. They knew darn well that Rudy was just nuts.
Then, the flag man stepped up to the line.
“All right! Let’s do this!”
He lifted his flag, and his arm. With his arm, he waved the count as he yelled it. Three! Two! One!
The flag dropped. And those engines roared! Several of the hot rods lifted their front wheels high as they raced off.
But… that rat trap, the pile of rust, was out in front! It was making a mockery of the race!
Several of the hot rods hit their nitro, adding that stink to the air. And they leaped ahead of the pack.
But still, the rusty bumper of the rat rod was out in front of them! The car license wired to the bumper seemed to wink at them as it shook.
And, seconds later, Rudy skidded across the finish line. He slowed down and stopped, off to the side. Where he waved at the others as they came screaming in…
That’s when the radio started playing, “Beep Beep, beep, beep, his horn went beep beep beep…”
[that might do the job? First cut, rough draft…]
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whoops! Fuse, not rust!
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Well, aluminum powder and rust is one way to describe thermite…
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[…] This week at MOTE, AC Young challenged me with: The cat played a dance on the fiddle. This snippet just floated to the surface. My prompt went to Padre. If you need a quick break in your day, head on over to More Odds Than Ends and see what folks came up with in response to their prompt challenges. Refresh your brain and escape for a few minutes! […]
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[…] Leigh and I traded this week – with Murphy apocalypse training. Check out more over at MOTE! […]
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And now mine is up on my LiveJournal at https://starshipcat.livejournal.com/1517446.html. I was going to do the apocalypse training as a joke, until another writing challenge provided a real apocalypse, quite possibly by the bad guys discovering some old human hard sf with rivets about slowships and relativistic spaceflight.
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Becky Jones offered up “The old man sighed. There were times when yelling at the clouds seemed like the sane thing to do. Especially when the weather spells went awry.” this week.
I almost went with wheathur for this one, which is the worst spell of weather we’ve seen in these parts in a long time. But I thought a problem in the early attempts to program the Noah’s Ark simulation would be interesting.
The old man sighed. There were times when yelling at clouds seemed the sane thing to do. Especially when the weather spells went awry. Dagnab it! It was supposed to be a proper thunder cloud and not a pretty, fluffy white one.
Granted, it was a very lovely cloud. It floated through the air on the light breeze, drifting in from the south.
It didn’t cover much of the sky and it was the only cloud floating in the sky which arced in an azure bowl from horizon to horizon.
The old man sighed again. Weather spells were probably the wrong term, although that was what the people in the simulation called them. The weather control subroutines were finicky beasts. Code them wrong one way and you got, well, this. A single, solitary white cumulous cloud floating in an cerulean sky, daintily traipsing from horizon to horizon without dropping any rain on the land.
Code them wrong the other way and.. Well, you didn’t get a thunderstorm. You got a mega-typhoon, with nasty dark rotating cumulonimbus clouds rotating across the sky, raining lightning bolts like the very wrath of God and drenching the land with a year’s worth of rain in a single hour. You had to get it just write.
He sighed again and turned back to the keyboard. He was going to get it properly programed if it was the last thing he did.
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