How to make a prisoner talk...

[kengr]

Had a flash of a bit of scene for something. Maybe a story, maybe a gaming session.

Guy wakes up after losing a fight. He's still in his armor, but tied quite securely.

Someone steps into view with an unsheathed dagger.

"We have a few questioned we'd like answered.."

The man with the dagger bends down and casually and apparently effortlessly cuts the straps holding the armor together.

He then picks up one of the smaller plates and glances at the prisoner again.

"As I said we have some questions."

As he speaks the prisoner's eyes bug out. Because his captor is *whittling* at the steel plate with that dagger.

Comments

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

That's vicious. I like it.

[kengr]

Yes, it is.

Being helpless an confronted with the mother of all "Very Sharp Knives" should be just a *bit* unsettling.

Makes you wonder what else might be done with the knife. Not that the knife wielder would do anything like that... would he? *wide-eyed, innocent look*

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that would actually work with any sort of non-magical knife. Good quality steel plate armor is *tough*. Of course, if that knife actually can do it... Yeah, intimidating.

(Engineer with training in materials science. :-)

[kengr]

We can assume magic. And possibly "enhanced" strength (because even with the legendary "monomolecular edge", and "insanely tough" blade, carving steel like that will require a fair bit of force)

Sort of like a scene I used to introduce an unreasonably powerful character in an online free-form RPG.

When first encountered by the existing party he was sitting on a rock. And calmly carving something out of a piece of jasper...

...with his fingernails.

[xander-opal.livejournal.com]

... definitely been reading Ryk's stuff. ;)

[kengr]

Long before Ryk. The "carving with fingernails" bit was part of Nemo's entrance scene.

Rhenium blade?

[capybyra.livejournal.com]

Oh, the SciFi Exotica like Wolverine claws etc or Arenak has a place in many of our hearts. But hmn- there's some recent Vapor Deposited Carbide stuff.. that- yeah- they could be applied to a "semi-mundane looking" dagger yet do an impressive whittle on most non-magical knight armor grade plate :> Hell, it's arguably a plot McGuffin to have a Pernese Dragon chew some sandy Firestone and have it burp into a flask of deep space hard vacuum and sawdust that holds your daggers:> How to blend vapor deposited carbon silicates with magic in one phrase..

Doc Smith's neat stories outside the Lensman and Skylark boundaries also had stuff like Rhenium armor bearing critters that might use Osnomian Karlono bits for Gizzard Gravel. Hmn? so mayhaps that's what grinds in Klono's Gizzard? Rhenium Gravel? /me reads way too much Space Opera. Elf Sternberg can write some neat sexystuff too

Re: Rhenium blade?

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Heh. I write articles about things like this.

There are actually surgical blades which have bonded amorphous vapor-phase deposited diamond. Perfect, monocrystalline iron has been made in tiny amounts since the Twenties, but no-one has figured out how to produce it in large quantities.

If that sort of thing interests you, there's more here:

http://www.dcr.net/~stickmak/JOHT/joht10strength.htm

Re: Rhenium blade?

[kengr]

There's an idea I swiped for an *ancient* Analog (or more likely Astounding).

A space capsule has been recovered with a dead pilot. No indication of what country he's from. He'd had a metal plate with some prongs bent around a conchoidally fractured piece of transparent material.

Lab test reoprt index of refraction as 1.0000, dielectric constant as .999999, and so on.

"Oh god, you realize what this means? They've made it out there. All the way. That's a sample of the hardest vacuum the boys in the lab have ever seen."

I swiped the idea for my D&D games. Hard vacuum *so* messed up several situations. It'd stop fireballs, but not lightning bolts.

The first time they encountered it (a wall across a room) they tried chipping off pieces. Which, of course, fell *up* so when they tried looking for them on the floor...

I'm sure you can come up with other bits of silliness.

In a game where I was a player, one of my mage characters came up with a spell to create the stuff. Which led to all sorts of silliness.

Re: Rhenium blade?

[kengr]

Ah yes, the Subspace "series".

More recently we have Alan Cole and Cris Bunch's Sten with his lovely little hideaway weapon.