kengr

No idea *where* this came from, but there I was laying in bed half-asleep after reading some LitRPG fiction.

And suddenly I was picturing am old-style "panty raid". Only done as an RPG or even FRPG scenario...

The mind boggles.

Someone on a mailing list I'm on mentioned a story. I looked it up and it was quite a bit of fun. Seems there are four stories with the same characters.

Needles and Delaney are quite a pair. There is a fair bit of violence.

An Angry Man

An Unreasonable Man

An Implacable Man

An Unstoppable Man

Yes, you read that correctly. Australia (of course it's Australia) has something like 9 species of shark that can walk on their lower fins and survive low oxygen water conditions. Apparently they evolved this to hunt hunt in the tide pools of reefs.

They are small sharks, only about 3 feet long, so they aren't a danger to humans. Give them another few million years and that might change.

Now if you are creating a fantasy world for a book or a game, things could be much more "interesting". Say Great White Sharks that can sneak up on people camping on the beach.

And that could lead to "land sharks" and the like.

"I still say it's gotta be volcanic," argued Arthur.

"It can't be. The moon isn't active enough for that," Dave replied.

It was an old argument but it helped pass the time while they ran the otherwise boring search grid.

Suddenly a light flashed on the control panel of the lunar buggy, and an alarm sounded.

"It's another water vapor spike! And this time we're close. Check the differential detectors, Dave!"

"I am, looks to be off that way," Dave replied as he steered onto a new course.

"Be careful, the map says we're heading for a rille."

Sure enough they found themselves on the edge of one of the small valleys.

"Look, it's definitely a collapsed lava tube. And there's section that hasn't collapsed," Arthur said as he pointed at a dark opening perhaps a hundred meters away.

They quickly suited up after radioing base.

It only took a few minutes to reach the mouth of the lava tube. They entered carefully shining their lights to check for hazards.

"Wow, the vapor level is still high but dropping."

Arthur had been looking ahead while Dave checked the meter.

"Uh, Dave...". His tone got Dave's attention. He looked up. And froze at the sight of bodies. Lots of them.

Many were more like mummies but some were less so. Including one that was obviously freshly dead.

It was months before the investigation was anywhere near complete.

Dave was reading a headline in the rec room "Jimmy Hoffa found on Moon".

"Well, that explains a lot of disappearances. But we still don't know how they got there..."

This is the prologue to a story I'm working on. Possibly set in T-America, but not necessarily.

The old wolf was slowly making his way to what he knew would be his final resting place. He was careful to not leave any traces, though doing so in his condition was straining his already diminished powers.

His wounds were painful, but not as painful as the memories. The last of the People were gone. The men slain, the women taken as captives.

He'd done his best, but there were too many enemies. First it had been other tribes moving into the People's territory. Then the rumors of the white skinned strangers and their new weapons. And the horse creatures they rode.

His predecessors had done their best as had he. But despite their best efforts the People were fewer and fewer with each generation. And now they were no more.

At last he reached to hidden cave. He cast around to be sure no one was around. Satisfied he carefully made his way through the rocks and underbrush that hid the opening.

At last he was in the back of the cave,his eyes didn't need the light to see the sacred paintings on the walls. He nestled himself next to the sacred objects that had been hidden here when it became obvious that the People might not survive.

At last he relaxed the iron control he'd held on his body. His wounds started seeping blood again. The end would come soon. He had failed, but at least the enemies of the People would not be able to take the power he bore.

The last guardian of the People died alone without being able to pass on his duty.

This is a setiup I've been playing with for the Swarm shared universe.

In that universe humans were contacted by a confederation of aliens (who are scared silly of us) because There's an even *more* scary species moving down the galactic arm.

The Sa'arm are some sort of hive-mind, and nobody has been able to communicate with them. They discover a suitable planet ("Earthlike") land, and start harvesting all the resources in sight. This includes the inhabitants, if any.

They dig in *literally) and start producing more Sa'arm, and more ships. Eventually they've used up all the resources they can get at and abandon the planet. the ships they've produced go hunting more worlds to exploit.

The aliens (and humans) are often ignored, until they get in the way, or encounter a food harvesting party. If they attack, they get swarmed and killed.

Being pacifists, the member races of the Confederacy get slaughtered. so they contact us. We weren't their first choice, but that species suicided upon contact because they were *extremely* xenophobic.

Contact with us has a lot of problems. But a deal of sort is worked out. We get access to some technology, and ion return we go fight the Sa'arm (and try to build defenses on Earth).

Anyway, the Confederacy names systems for the jmajor inhabited planet by adding the suffix "-at" to the name of the world. So we live in the Earthat system. this is important...

So there are ships surveying space to look for planets we might colonize, planets the Sa'arm have colonized, and anything else that may be useful. The prelim stuff is done by ships popping out of hyperspace every so often and taking scan of the surrounding sky. These get combined to make 3D maps and decide which stars bear a closer look.

( Discovery of the system )

( system stats )

( A bit of local color )

I'm the schools patent attorney. So I'm used to getting shown oddball items that researchers have come up with. This one was a bit odder than usual. She had a laptop, a small rodent in a cage with something electronic attached to one wall and a sort of skullcap.

"As you know, we've been doing a lot of research on brain activity in mammals. Both detecting specific patterns and using implants to send info to the brain."

I nodded, wondering where this was going.

She turned on the laptop and set it so we both could see, and she plugged a USB cable from the cage into it. Finally she picked up the skullcap and held it out to me.

"The subject rodent has implants that receive signals from the sensor in this cap. It responds to them by moving to the sensing pad in the cage and poking it at a location corresponding to what the user is thinking."

She put on the cap, pushed a button on it, and the animal moved to the solid side of the cage. On the laptop, the cursor moved to make selections

I thought it might be some sort of prank until she let me try the cap. All I had to do was think about moving the cursor and it did.

"So why the animal? Why not just interpret the signals directly on the computer?"

"They aren't easy to decode, but apparently they are similar enough between species that the animal's brain can interpret them reliably after a short period of training. This is the most conveniently sized lab animal that can do the job. Being cute when not being used is a bonus."

I nodded again. I could see that watching it run around the cage and play once the cap was switched off would be relaxing.

"So, let me this straight? You want to patent this assistive technology?"

"Yes, that's right. We want to patent this design of computer mouse..."

Got a variant on an idea I had in the past.

Both Luna and Mars are capable of retaining an atmosphere and hydrosphere for significant periods of time if they were somehow given them.

For Luna it's hundreds to thousands of years. For Mars it'd be *much* long, both because of the higher gravity and being farther from the sun.

Lot's of authors have written about terraforming Mars. I can think of only one who tried it with Luna.

But my new thought was what if Someone (aliens?) did it in the distant past and set up some maintenance methods.

So both Mars and Luna are habitable and have been stocked with terran life forms (including humans)

This wouldn't be obvious to folks on earth until at 1600s or later. Without telescopes, you might notice some clouds and the like on Luna, but that'd be about it.

Mars would likely take until the 1800s or so.

I'm assuming that Luna doesn't have tech beyond Medieval if that. Mars might be more advanced. But no radio at least.

Given all this, History would be mostly the same until recently.

I'm wondering what things you folks think would change in that universe. The big cvhanges would be in the last 100-150 years.

I'm also interested in folks take on how civilizations might develop on Luna and Mars.

ps. I have vague memories of some site that would display maps of Mars and Luna with oceans of various depths. If anybody knows what they are, I'd be grateful for the info.

A little something that came to me the other day...

The chunk of nickel-iron spun slowly in the vacuum. As such things go there wasn't anything special about it.

It was around one hundred meters along various axes. Likely broken off some larger body far in the past.

Wherever it had originated, it was approaching an encounter with another body. Earth, the inhabitants called it.

It wasn't large enough nor moving fast enough to be a "dinosaur killer". It was going to impact at around 30 km/sec. The blast would only be ten megatons or so. Not anything of more than local importance.

Alas, due to the impact point, it was going to be a lot more than a "local" disaster.

Unfortunately for humanity, it struck almost directly above the center of the magma chamber under the Yellowstone caldera.

Not only did it blast through the cap rock, it fractured most of it. so all the pressure that had been building for thousands of years released at once. and the trapped gases in the magma turned it to ash as the massive blast the mere 10 megaton one had triggered broke the pieces of the overlying rock into smaller and smaller pieces.

They'd still be quire large enough to cause lots of damage when they came down..
So would the blast effects.

But the ash, and later steam as various rivers tried to flow back into the immense crater where the magma chamber had been were what caused the lasting damage.

Global warming wasn't going to be a concern for quite some time...

This was a throwaway idea for a Whateley fanfic. Probably not possible even in that universe, but too silly not to go with. I decided to post it after ysabetwordsmith made a particular comment on someone's story.

Sandy was waiting for the last of the new batch of freshmen to show up so zie could take them on the tour. There was a zweet-boing noise from behind zir. Zie turned just in time for the human-sized roadrunner to startle zir with a loud "Meep! Meep!"

Zie was still boggling when the bird held up a sign with one wing. [Hi! I'm Velox.]

The sign flipped around and read [Is this the orientation tour for Twain?] Then it vanished.

"Uh, yeah. What's with the signs?"

[I can't talk anymore. Just make that sound.] flip [But I can manifest these signs] flip [Neat, huh?]

Sandy just shook zir head. Even for Whateley, Velox was a bit odd.

The last few freshmen showed up, and zie started the tour. After showing them the required places and things it came time for the usual "what's your power and how did you get it" talk.

Velox demonstrated his speed. The cloud of dust he raised was weird because it'd rained just that morning.

[Besides being fast, I'm either a reality warper...] flip [... or a probability warper.] flip [Weird stuff happens around me.]

[Don't EVER bring anything made by Acme near me!] flip [no way to tell what'll happen.] flip [but it won't be good for you.]

"What's with your code name?"

He held up a sign with a picture of a bird captioned [Lesser Roadrunner (Geococcyx velox)]

***
"So how'd you wind up like this?"

Apparently Velox got asked this a lot. He dug a paper from somewhere and handed it to the questioner. [Read it out loud, please.]

"Some friends had scored some weed, cheap. And we were having a party at my house since my folks were out of town. We were pretty stoned and I'd queued up all the Warner Brothers cartons on the player. We'd been watching Roadrunner cartoons for a couple hours when we all started feeling weird."

"I managed to call 911 before I passed out."

"Seems the guy who grew the weed had picked up some chemicals cheap. Fertilizer, pesticide, I forget what. They were cheap because they were some devisor stuff that didn't always work right."

"My friends just got sick. I turned into this."