Many things happened while radio silence was the sole inhabitant of this thread.
While I was dealing with the end of term madness, I managed to do a number of things. Among them: write a few dozen pages of analysis and summaries on topics related to law and justice, develop hard case of an unknown ailment (presumably, it is Lichen Planus as result of an allergic reaction), and stab myself in the palm with my 8-inch chef knife.
Oh, I just almost hit the ctrl+s shortcut to save what I jut wrote. Gosh, these reflexes will get time to fade out. I made it a habit of saving my work every couple sentences, although my computer never crashed on me once, while I was writing my papers, and MSWord behaved like a champ. Anyway.
That last point about stabbing myself in the hand is real fun. So I was writing papers and itching a bit here and there when I noticed something very much like an eczema on my fingers. But it was not just plain eczema, instead the tops of my hands were covered in tiny pumpil-like boils. These boils grew, sometimes connected, and when they broke because of tension or my scratching on them like a mindless monkey, they released some kind of liquid leaving this damaged swollen skin, which soon dried up and cracked and looked a bit swollen and kind of like Leto’s hand should have looked when he was growing scales becoming a worm (read Dune, if you don’t get it... Actually, just read Dune, even if you read it already, it’s a must).
Shit, I actually hit ctrl+s now.
Anyway, so the itching spread, skin started getting red, and just dried up along my hands and a bit of forearms, even without tiny boils. Then my face swell like a balloon and the eyes became difficult to open, but it started going away as... Skin on my face started to dry and flake. Awesome. All this while I was bashing my keyboard like a madman, reading obscene amounts of documents and journal articles, recording my bibliography like I had some dementia syndrome which made me obsessed with the particulars of publishing this or that word. That's when my mom decided, since nothing else worked, that it was some sort of spore/parasite disease. The logic is kind of simple: most of the time, pumpils and boils are removing filth from inside your body, and oftentimes this filth is degraded bodies of tapeworms and the like, which had been absorbed by the intestine and now pushed out by immune system. This also kind of explains swollen skin because there’s obviously something in this skin besides actually skin, and what would that be. So, she said: “Aight, we gonna drink coconut milk and shred coconut flesh in the juicer, drink that shit, and it gonna get some of that filth move faster and go away and things like that.” And I said “Yay! Coconut!” And so she brought a bag of coconuts one day. I took out the drill, made some holes, we had some milk, cracked some nuts, removed the fles, and the stuff that comes out of the juicer is a godly delight of a drink — sweet and thick like a milkshake. So everything was fine. That is until one morning I was there all alone, standing at the kitchen counter with a cracked coconut in my left hand and a stainless steel german-style 8-incher chef knife in my right. As I was popping chunks of flesh off of that nut’s shell, my knife slipped. And obviously, I stabbed my left palm, right between the pinky and the ring finger, with all the force. And I thank god that I have sense enough not to use my 10.5-inch Japanese wagyuto knife for this task, because german-style knives are rather thick and heavy, while this japaneze beauty I have is thin like a paper sheet, and I sharpen it almost twice the sharpness of my other knives, so it would probably have split my hand right in two. The knife I was using was thick enough to be stopped by flesh/muscle/ligament, whatever I eventually hit as it sank into my hand. But it did not stop before it cut apart some important blood vessel. I didn't know that until I ran up to the bathroom and put mu hand under cold water. That was when I noticed that blood from the wound flowed more steadily and violently from a small spot right in the middle. I took a piece of paper towel and squeezed it right into the hand, making a fist as tight as I could lest I loose more blood, and ran right back down the stairs into the kitchen. Good move, just in time because my sight faded within a couple dozen seconds and I could not stand anymore. Thank god I have family, and my sister helped me out by giving me half a jug of milk and feeding me half a loaf of butter (half-pound loafs, we get from the farm and two-liter jugs of milk), and then, as I made sure my wound did not bleed very much while holding it above my head, she put some medical glue on top of it and that was almost the end of my adventures. Later that ssame day I got a ride to the university, and delivered my last paper (actually, I have one more due in a couple weeks, but it is what is called “take home exam” and the details of it are only released now because you can’t know what it is about before the term ends). I finished typing it with my right hand, as my left was suspended from a twine I hooked to the top of my bookshelf to keep from bleeding much.
I don’t even know why I write this, just thought it was an interesting narrative to take on. Everything is fine and I am in shape. I type with both my hands, and the only things I can’t do which I normally do are peel fruits (because my hands are so scarred I can’t stand fruit juice sting like crazy), and bash stuff (including splitting coconuts). And I again thank god that I bought that enormous 10.5 inch knife, because it can cut a watermellons and mellons right in half and I can easily cut the fruit into manageable pieces without juice spilling all over my hands.
Anyway. Now I get to continue my playthrough. Which is getting pretty intense.
-------------------Chapter whatever:
The Works-------------------
THe man stared back in a blank manner, without feeling, thought, not even a slight tingle of life. No wonder, the guy had been dead ever since Jubei put tht vicious sword of his right through his neck. It was a miracle his head still stayed in place, dangling on a half-broken spine column and a chunk of neck muscle. Maximilian peered right into his eyes, as if trying to scry some secret truth in them. He then made a disgusted face, and the loyal scientist zipped the body-bag back up. Sometimes cruelty and greatness walk hand in hand, so thought Maximilian as he watched the scientist dip the dead body into huge tanks of biologically active goo. A few hours later, the report was lying on his table:
“... corpse shows motoric ability and basic reflex function. Signs of aggression are prominent, but seem to be controllable. Any form of conscious awareness is absent.
Appendix I: record of observation after release
Stood up, shook head, ran into the wall at an impossible speed and knocked out. Stood up after 3.82 seconds, shook head, ran into the wall at an impossible speed and knocked out. Repeated until a construction worker entered the laboratory. Upon sight of construction worker, the specimen turned its back on the man and ran away in a clear expression of fear, hiding between the tanks and the impact stress tester. There, upon discovery of a stray experimental bee from pop. S-92, started chasing the insect and tried to bash it with fist...”
That should be amusing, but incredibly useless. Maybe if it were let out in the open to roam the island, it would deterr some of the more inquisitive tourists, who visit the premises.
The main goal for the moment was to gather more qualified experts to train better minions. Then, the intel came in that there were particularly prized pieces of historical heritage scattered around the world, acquiring which would show the real extent of power to the world and attract some of the much needed respect.
This would teach them who’s the real power on this miserable planet! The pinnacle of these machinations was the Eiffel Tower. And they thought Copperfield was a magician enough to make things diaspper. Bet a million dollars he could not squeeze the whole tower into a tiny underground room like that. It was actually a brilliant idea from one of the technicians, wile having a dinner over at the mixer. As everyone was watching some poor soul spinning in the bowl, he examined one of the gummy men candies carefully, spun it around with a fork and said something to the effect of “You know, you don’t have to use a giant mixer, I could try and fit him into a regular one. There is this quantum phenomenon... and our laser down at the lab works kinda like that, except we just have to isolate...” and then he went on babbling about some crazy lunatic terminology. Maximilian immediately sent the man to training and gave him a raise. After a few days’ worth of work, the size-reducer was ready and the tower — carefully placed where it could be admired by the deserving personnel. People have since taken real delight in feeding bread crumbs to the tiny Parisian tourists, who were unlucky enough to get caught up on the tower when it was reduced in size. Poor sods.
But, as activities progressed abroad, some governments got really pissed off and tracked one of our operatives to the island... Sending these guys after him:
To you who don’t know or remember: any soldiers good level or above will shoot social minions and workers on sight, and shoot any doors that don’t open on their own when they approach. They also shoot any traps and triggers they see. And that is only half the problem: they also have a really bad habit of shooting all the explosive things point-blank, which means they get caught in the explosion when they destroy anything. This gives them pain, anger, and heat. So basically: they go about killing our minions and destroying almost anything in our base, and... if they succeed at destroying, they gain heat, become more angry, and destroy more things, which makes them gain more heat, become even more angry, and destroy even more things. In short: this is going to be FUN.
This is what I am talking about:
The technician is fixing the door they just shot half-broken, when I set it to no-security-let-everyone-in.
This all happened while operatives in South America have discovered a trained biochemist studying some extremely resilient bacteria living in some volcano. “Discovered” means tracked down, hit on the head, put in a bag, and stuffed into luggage while smuggling him on a flight to the island. The government thought it was too much of a frivolity and sent these people in:
Yes, you’re seeing it right, two more squads of soldiers, only this time it is full squads.
Other governments also sent some activists in, and they all safely entered the base. By this time it was red alert.
And no one made it out alive. This cost some heavy losses on the side of the base personnel... But the base was safe and the lost specialists could be retrained in a relative calmness. The theatre of action was actually that very same corridor leading to the freezer, and all the body bags arrived there almost at the same time when they were walking. Before the fight the freezer was completely empty.
After that it was safe to interrogate the captive specialists, and Redking is off to a great start:
The first biochemist on the premises, he takes off to impart his newly acquired knowledge onto his colleagues. Knowledge should never be kept secret. As part of our program for free access to information, any man wearing a yellow jump suit and getting modest paycheck can become an almost bald man wearing an environment suit and getting a slightly less modest paycheck.
Or a completely bald man in a red velvet suit sitting at a desk and receiving sizable bribes now and again.
When the armed conflicts died down, Maximilian sent some of the smartest men out to search for a special expert: someone, who could shoot a penny a mile away blindfolded and not miss. They died a heroic death in a Siberian gulag, but completed their mission, and even devised a plan on how to acquire the man in our possession.
Later on, their colleagues to the south had found something else, something... important:
This is both great news and bad news. Great news because we get to start collecting arguably the best piece of mystical art in the whole world, it is rumored to be endowed by the powers of the pagan gods of old. However, split into pieces, it is cursed at the moment, and requires special storage to prevent it from affecting anyone too much.
Bad news is that only a couple more minor actions, and we are into some...
This time is better taken to fill in our ranks with any missing specialists.
The plan to kidnap that Siberian sniper prodigy was very nice... It takes a well funded lady with perfectly trained native Russian accent, and he falls into the trap like a fly into honey. He, of course, wanted to go to the far north for honeymoon, and chase some white bears while living in an ice hut. But a few well-placed threats guaranteed the impossible: a permission to spend a month abroad, traveling the hostile capitalistic world. Those who tried to say “no” to their wife, and especially when they were newlywed, will understand why he did not contest her opinion that traveling across the world is the only possible way to spend honeymoon. They boarded their snow-white cruise ship... and never returned again.
At the same time, somewhere in central United States, our operatives have managed to capture Mr. Einstein.
Everything genius is simple, even genius men themselves. All it takes to get Einstein’s attention: tie a neutrino to a stick, wave it in front of him. So long as you don’t let him catch it, he is going to follow it anywhere, even into a black hole, if you manage to approach one in one piece.
These actions raised our notoriety enough to attract the attention of...
That girl is trouble. She never rests, and she never wears anything but her revealing bikini. She is not particularly strong in combat either... but when any of our personnel see her looking into her pocket mirror and rouging her lips. They fall like overripe apples off a tree. Except they fall not on the ground but into the nearest transportation hub. To get the hell out of this place and live the miserable life of a saint in the nearest hole in the ground. Preferably ANVIL, PATRIOT, SABRE, SMASH, or HAMMER ground. In short, she makes anyone who looks at her desert like a spineless boneless sack of sentiments. If she is not snooping around our base, she is definitely snooping around SMASH territory. She moves often, and punches hard. So... if anyone thinks she is near, there is only one suggestion: hide. Running is pointless at this point, just hide, or you are going to become the next barbie boyfriend with a spotless meaningless boring pinky-slinky-candy-shiny life.
Maximilian closed his eyes and sank into his imagination, devising the next steps very carefully, but at an incredibly fast pace. Whatever he was going to do next, ought to be both quick and careful.
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Topic: Let’s play Evil Genius! (Read 10415 times)