#Shut up and stick a nailgun in your tongue

[welcome-home-official]

People are really getting mad over how other people are enjoying certain fandoms huh? Like, actually getting mad that people are making light-hearted content of a grim video game. Get a fucking grip, why are you allergic to fandom having FUN?? There is no 'correct' way to enjoy a video game.

[originaldetectivesheep]

The Thirty and One Nights' Momentary Diversion - It Came From Below The Basement

Tonight brings another tale of the Applied Physics lab -- and the fearful consequences when some of the lab folks get involved with a dark secret from the Nuclear Medicine department.

It Came From Below The Basement

I pulled up short, looking around as far as I could manage inside the applied-physics lab without actually crossing the threshold of the doorway.  It wasn't a perfect solution, but you were almost certain to not get hit with a fatal arc if you stayed all the way outside the lab.  Inside, Riley and Yuping were hunched up over something that looked like a large piece of heavy steel tubing with weird taps and reinforcements in it; they had welding masks on, and there was the hiss of cutting torches in the air, so there probably wasn't anything electrical about to go off if I came in.  But it always paid to check.

"Yo," I said, holding up a hand, still a couple steps back from the doorway, "I'm here – you wanted me to grab Remy from here and help him get his bike out, right?"

"One second," Yuping said, not looking up from what he was working on, "Live hot work area.  Please stay out till we take off masks."  I nodded and stayed put.  

As they were finishing up, Remy jogged up from the hall, still in his warmup tracksuit from the taekwondo team.  "Hey!  Leo!  What up!" He shook my hand, and I dapped him back, accepting the chest bump at the end; he was in weirdly good spirits for some reason.  "Are you here to help too?"

I nodded.  "Yeah; Riley called me in.  I guess I'm the one who gets these jobs – but just yanking a bike out of the mud shouldn't be so bad."

Remy nodded.  "Yeah – I should mostly be able to take care of it myself, but that pond's got all kinds of weird crap in it, and I wanted to be careful. But I thought Sajitha was going to help, too – have you seen her around?"

"Sorry, loverboy," Riley said, coming around to the doorway, smacking one heavy welding glove on top of the other with a sound like someone was punching a sandbag, "but unlike you gonks, Sajitha is gainfully employed, and she's on shift all this week.  If you want to make a date so that you can haul a bike out of a contaminated mudhole together, you can do that, but I thought you wanted to get it as soon as the water level dropped so that no one would steal the frame, which means tonight.  Leo's all the help you're going to get. I mean, if I wanted to scotch my schedule into the middle of next week, I could maybe spare Carolína, but you'd have to wait for her to get back from the aerospace pod with our chivitos and scrap titanium first, and I really need her here to make sure we get the calculations right for the backpressure off the Littlejohn adapter.  We're late enough as it is.  If you want that carbon frame back, then Leo's –" Riley paused, an extremely unusual circumstance in any case, and looked down the hall past us.  "Actually, no.  You'll probably have some more help – Jeremy's going that way anyway."

We turned around, and saw a stoop-shouldered guy with glasses and a long goatee who was probably pretty genial-looking when his eyes weren't full of desperate fear, walking up the hall at us as fast as he could manage without panicking.  He kept coming, and we shifted out of the way so that he could face up to Riley.

His tongue or his throat or something wasn't working, so Riley had to start.  "Jeremy.  We've been expecting you; I've got bad news, but it was a long shot anyway."

He finally gulped his voice back.  "It – it's not done?"

"It's not done.  We're close, but we needed to make a change so that we're only violating federal laws instead of international conventions. Yuping's not a citizen and I can't hang treaty violations on him. You'd only need to use it in the worst case – you'll be all right."

Jeremy shook his head.  "I – I can't go out there believing that we're not going to see the worst case.  I want to be sure – but the water level's already too low.  When will it be done?  What are we going to do?"

Riley snorted and stared at the ceiling.  "Well, shit.  If it's the worst case, hide under a car and call the FBI.  In the infinitely more likely not the worst case, you've got Remy and Leo right there – Remy, Leo, this is Jeremy, a good duder, nuclear medicine; Jeremy, this is Remy in the taekwondo warmups, and Leo's the one in the Boca Juniors shirt with all the holes in it, they're friends of the lab and usually not totally useless – and they can help you lug the washing machine out of the mud and put it in the truck.  If you really want backup, I can make you sign out a couple nailguns, but that's it – this is a physics lab, not an armory."  Jeremy nodded like he was accepting this, but I shot a look at Remy, and he had the same shit-scared what-the-hell-did-I-get-into-this-time look on his face that I did.  This always happened.  This always always always happened, to the point that I seriously questioned why I was even friends with Riley any more, why any of us were who weren't part of the lab, but the facts remained: Remy was a good dude, and it hadn't been his fault that his bike ended up in Horse Pond on West Campus, and if I was going to go over and help him drag it out, and there was something about or in the pond that might make a nuc-med guy want to involve nailguns and the FBI, it was better to stay close to him rather than go sticking our noses in something blind.

"Right," I said, more weakly than I meant to, "we got it.  Let's go do this.  It's just a bike and a washing machine, right?"

If there was an upside to having this dude Jeremy's case dumped on us, it was that we could ride over to West Campus with him in the facilities truck instead of having to walk all the way over on the David R. Berkowitz Memorial Bike Path and Sexual Assault Alley behind the grad-student tennis courts.  "So what was this thing with the washing machine?  Why did it get thrown in the Horse Pond?" I figured it didn't hurt to ask.

Jeremy's eyes were dead set on the road ahead.  "It's complicated, and it involves some extremely bad disposal practices that we could get in a lot of trouble for.  If we just get an illegal dumping fine and a Superfund judgment out of this, I will cry with relief – the dumping part is nothing, nothing, next to what could be at the bottom of that pond."

"Well, sure," I said, not sure what he was freaking out about and not sure that I really wanted to know, "but, shit, you weren't like dumping reactor slag in there.  What's the deal?  What's so bad?"

"You won't believe me if I just tell you right out – I don't want to believe it either.  So, I guess, to start, you know that in nuclear medicine, we bombard a lot of stuff, and that gets radioactive. Anything that meets high-level waste guidelines, we have to account for it and send it over to the nuc plant at Arnold River for processing or disposal.  But stuff that didn't meet those guidelines, the low-level nuclear waste that we couldn't just put in a warehouse for a year until it wasn't hot any more and we could throw it out, we stored on-site – and then we dumped ourselves.

"We let it pile up in an old washing machine in one of the basement labs; it's actually a pretty good containment vessel, double-walled steel, and we sprayed sawdust in between the basin and the outer chassis for more carbon moderation.  And when it filled up, we duct-taped the lid shut, and then dumped it in Horse Pond.  We shouldn't have, but Horse Pond, back ten years ago, was just this hole in the ground on West Campus that was full of water – we had no idea that they were going to put the new dorms in where the woods was and then try to link it with Skene Pond; that's where the problem came from, the water exchange, connecting it to the campus flood control system and then this problem with algae they're draining everything to kill.  We just wanted a water moderator – we should have just dug a hole in the basement and poured concrete over it."  He shook his head, his hands high and tight on the steering wheel.

"The problem was that the guy who taped the machine shut – it wasn't me, I wasn't even in school here back then – didn't check it carefully enough before he did it.  And the machine was already out in the pond before Dr. Ricaldi discovered that she was missing some of her geckos."

I drove my face into my hands.  "For crying out loud, that is the stupidest goddamn Beast From 50,000 Fathoms bullshit B-movie bong-hit plot hook – what in the hell were those geckos even doing in your waste pile, and reptiles drown, goddamnit, so –"

"I told you you wouldn't believe me," Jeremy said, steering off the road and onto the footpath that went over to Horse Pond, where there were already a few students gawking at the stuff that was emerging out of the mud as the water level sank and sank.  "The geckos liked sleeping in the waste pile because it was warm – alpha radiation feels warm, and it was warm and dark, which it wasn't under the sunlamp in their vivarium.  And because Dr. Ricaldi had been letting them sleep in the waste pile, this was a strain that had already demonstrated transdermal respiration in water.  Believe me, if they had just drowned, I would feel a lot better about pulling this washing machine out.  But I can't be sure – there might be currents, or bottom shifting, or any of a hundred other things, but when we scanned where we'd dumped the machine with a magnetometer after we heard that Facilities was going to drain the ponds, we couldn't pick it up. The washing machine is gone – moved, or ripped apart, and no matter what moved it, I'm afraid of what we're going to find." He drew the truck off the path, settling the truck into park.  "Actually, I had a question for you, too – how in the heck did you lose a carbon-fiber-frame bicycle in Horse Pond?  There isn't really a bike path near here – and you wouldn't normally just let it fall in."

Remy was staring hard out the window, out over the muck in the draining pond.  "I don't want to talk about it.  It was another thing for the applied physics lab.  That's it.  That's as far as it goes." It was.  I hadn't heard the full story about how his bike ended up in the pond either.

"Well," I said, shoving the door open on my side, "we may not be able to find your washing machine or your pipe-dream lizards, but at least we should be able to find Remy's bike.  That's a start.  We can get that – if we move quick, we're losing light and the streetlights aren't really up over the pond."  I pointed at the lights along the path; they were coming on, but most of the pond, between the path over here and the big klieg lights that Facilities had up where they were monitoring the outflow on the sluice gate, was falling into darkness.

"Sure thing," Remy said, a little more up for it now that he was out of the truck.  "I think I see it over there – let me get Carolína's grappling hook out of my bag."  He ducked back into the truck to rummage through his gym bag, and Jeremy gave me a weird look as he came around the front of the vehicle.

"Does your friend usually carry a grappling hook to go to taekwondo?"

I gave him a weird look right back.  "Look, it's not his, like he said – and seriously, have you met anyone from this lab before?" I shook my head.  "Look, just go look for your washing machine – you know better than us where it was to start, maybe it just got buried under some stuff.  We'll drag Remy's frame out, and maybe we'll be able to see it better from down on the bottom of the pond." I shrugged my shoulders, leaving Jeremy to whatever weird paranoid fantasy he was about to cook up, and started to carefully make my way down into the muck of the pond.  Even without weird mutant lizards in it, Horse Pond was full of all kinds of junk and weird contaminants, and even beyond that it was a drained pond, full of slick mud that made for bad footing and could be hiding all kinds of sharp rocks or not-dead fish.  I had to be careful, or I was going to end up covered in cadmium and fish turds.

"Leo, hold there – right there, and stay down, yo."  I crouched down, hands wide to balance.  "I can see the frame – I'm gonna shoot the hook out and start dragging back, grab onto the rope and help when it comes down by you."  I squinted ahead, into the bottom muck of the basin – I could kind of make out something like a bike frame, which was probably what Remy was aiming at, but wasn't that a little far out from where he'd told me the bike would probably be?  "Shooting in… three… two… one… go!"  The spring spranged against the housing, and I saw the grappling hook sail out over my head, out past that tangle in the mud that we were thinking was Remy's frame.  The rope landed a few steps away as the head clunked onto something on the ground, and I stepped over quickly to pick it up before it got too slimy, and set my feet to pull.

"Remy, I'm gonna pull on this till it catches," I called back up the slope.  "I'll let you know, and then we can drag it up the rest of the way together."  I was already pulling the rope in hand over hand, and I was struck by exactly how much back tension I got when the hook stuck.

"Leo, DROP IT!" Remy was freaking the hell out – he'd already let go of the rope and was backed up against the truck.  The rope bucked in my hands, like the hook was pulling back; I turned around to see what in the hell was going on with it – and immediately let go of the rope myself.

It wasn't possible.  I had to be high on marsh gas or something.  But the rope had jerked in my hands – the rope had jerked in my hands because the hook wasn't just caught on a bike frame.  The rope was caught on a bike frame that was half-wrapped around one of the massive forelimbs of something that had to be a cross between a gecko and a five-year-old's conception of a dinosaur, standing up on its hind legs out of the muck, all covered in similar bits of metal garbage – and that boxy thing that had twisted a scoliotic curve in its spine as its body grew through it, well, I guess we found Jeremy's missing washing machine.  Wrapped around Jeremy's missing gecko.  Because the HELL anything normal could ever happen here.

The gecko hissed, flailing its forelegs around like a muppet.  How in the hell had it gotten to be fifteen feet tall?  What the hell did it eat in here?  One thing was for sure, I was about to find out in a minute or two if it ate Leo Adairs – I hoped it didn't, because there was no way I could run from this thing, even with it covered in garbage like that, through the muck of the pond to the edge.  I took a step backward, another, trying not to call attention to myself – could they see motion?  Or was that just another bullshit science fiction trope, like, oh, the giant goddamn mutant lizard right in front of me?

"Leo! Get down!  Everybody get down!  Face in the dirt!  Get down nownownownow!"  As if things couldn't get worse, somehow Riley was here – but when Riley told you to get down, you got. I threw myself on my face in the muck, and somewhere behind and above me, a string of explosions ripped off, impossibly loud and impossibly fast, like someone was kicking a hundred empty oil barrels down the concrete bleachers at the football stadium.  I tried to pick myself up – tried to see if I was still alive, still in one piece, and took a fearful look over my shoulder to see how the lizard was doing.

I couldn't see the lizard any more.  There was something making a faint hissing noise, and then the Facilities guys got their light trained on it: the lizard was in two pieces now, the washing machine and most of its torso torn apart by… something.  I turned back around to see where Riley and those explosions had come from: it was Carolína's third-hand Bronco, all of its windows shattered to pieces, with – god damnit, Riley – what could be nothing other than a Bofors autocannon kind of stapled to the roof, a trace of smoke still wisping out of the necked-down front end of its barrel.  They really had – all that crap had looked suspicious forever, but the Applied Physics lab had really built a goddamned tank cannon and used it to blast the crap out of a mutant lizard.

The spiderwebbed plexiglass of the windshield gave and got pushed out of the way, and Riley stood up through it, a foot on the hood, goggles still on as everyone who had not run away from the lizard gawked at this psycho elimination squad.  "I love the smell of cordite at twilight," Riley said to no one in particular.  "It smells like… getting all our radiation sources comped forever, whenever we need to borrow something.  Right?  That was the deal, right? Right?"  This was clearly aimed at Jeremy, who gulped and nodded hard from where he was hiding behind his own truck.

"Hey, Remy, I'm sorry about your bike."  Riley was showing zero indication to get moving and get the giant illegal weapon away before the campus police showed up; maybe the recoil had knocked the engine off its mounts as well as vibrating all the windows to pieces.  "I did try to aim away from it, but cannons, what are you going to do? Anyway, I'm sure it'll be a good sob story and you'll be able to get Sajitha to commiserate, so you'll get something out of this after all."  Remy didn't answer; Riley ducked back down inside the car, probably to go over data with Carolína and Yuping.

I flopped back down in the mud, not caring what might be in it.  It didn't matter.  None of this mattered.  In comparison to hanging out with these maniacs any more, massive full-body cadmium poisoning was looking like a pretty sweet deal.