Post by rantinan on Mar 14, 2006 19:29:31 GMT -5
This fic was produced by my fiance, inspired by reading Lay ofhte last minsteral, and watchign fuzors.
Gummi’s Bad Day
The PKB had expanded its arsenal in the neverending battle to protect the peace.
Gummi had been against it from the start, feeling that the PKB did not want, did not need, and above all could not safely and justly utilize such power, but it was too late for such objections.
He looked down at the photograph one last time, and waited, listening for the sounds that would foretell the arrival of one Susan Johansen, newest member of the PKB.
Susan did not pilot some new permutation of Genothingie, bristling with more gun barrels than a shinybob convention.
Nor did she ride the new CAS, the Sodomiticus Liger, known for its capacity to appear behind its enemies from nowhere, and impale them to their very cores.
She was not even symbiotically fused with a resurrected ancient destroyer with 'Death' in the name.
The horror she wrought was more fearsome than these, for all that she drove a mere bug.
No, not a Deamantis, merer than that. Yes, 4-wheels, drive shaft, no core at all. that kind of bug. Blue, with green fuzzy dice on the mirror.
If it helps, she called it "Noctus Schadenfreude", and drove it with an inhumanly vicious skill and cunning that had claimed innumerable lives, even if those lives generally had names like "Foofoo" or "Muffy" or, in one isolated case, "Mr. Snoochycuddlekins."
But every weapon must have its name, and the woman whose eyes seemed to stick out beyond the sides of her head due to the psychotic thickness of her glasses made pale the horror of any configuration of angst-ridden CPGs, for she wielded the most fearsome of them all, and rarest on all of Zi, the MBA.
The Peacekeeping Bureau had hired... an accountant.
And then she arrived. Gummi was suddenly worried about child labor laws. Really, he’d seen children using booster-seats to reach zoid controls, but never had he seen someone so diminutive seeming to expect to shoulder the burdens of a Real Job with the PKB.
He did not think about the fact that, in his perspective from which he used this term, 90% of the population did not in fact have Real Jobs, and merely subsisted on income which they achieved through some osmosis-like process he did not fully comprehend.
He was half-numb as he showed her where her desk was, and where the office supplies were, since despite his best efforts, the PKB had a fair amount of paperwork to do. He wondered why he was doing this, and recalled that it had fallen to him because he was ‘the boss’ and he wasn’t quite sure how or when that had happened.
It must have, Ciao would not lie to him, and she was the one who had said he filled that role. This was especially confusing, as he had always operated under the assumption that there had always, and would always, be someone above him to whom he could pass overcomplicated bucks that came his way.
It made no sense that enough people could have retired and that there was no one to receive them. He was certain that if that were the case, someone would have complained that he hadn’t stopped.
Once he was certain Susan was settled in behind an embankment of processed woodpulp that compressed the sturdiest furniture in the bureau, he returned to his own desk, and his own work. His particular duties meant that this primarily consisted of staring angrily at the telephone, daring it to ring and call in something more substantive to deal with, reading magazines, and eating pastries. He still suspected that they should soon look into clearing out some of the old offices that no one had entered for years in order to give one to Ms. Johansen.
Purely out of respect for the quantities and type of work she did for the Bureau, of course. Nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that he was mentally, physically, and yes, even spiritually disturbed to an incredibly profound extent by her shrill, mousy outcries of “Guylos’ Turducken!” or, “Leapfrogging Nyxian Maypoles!”
In addition, it really tried his nerves when she had asked Ciao to come see something she’d come up with. Nowhere near as much as when Ciao had called out for him to come over and look too, though.
It was not that Gummi did not trust accountants; oh no, no one could ever claim he had said he did not trust accountants. It was more that he did not trust papers, specifically, papers which had numbers or words written down on them. PKB papers were alright, of course, those were different, but those were nice, simple things, that had the important bit in a little blank space that went “arrest ________,” “detain ________,” or, when Gummi was going to have a really good day, “incite ________ to cease and desist all actions outside the supervision of the Peacekeeping Bureau.”
But today had not been such a day, today had been a very not good day altogether, for the beloved PKB, his beloved PKB, if he had understood Ciao correctly this morning, had so much, so very much paper that was the other kind. He liked the papers he knew, they were the teeth and claws of the battles of words, or the Riot Act, which was like his Gojulas’s supercannons, you didn’t use them, you just made sure nobody knew you wouldn’t use them. But these, these papers weren’t like that at all. These papers were like that fiddly thing some ligers did with antiprotons. Gummi did not know what an antiproton was, but he considered himself a simple, and straightforward man, and considered that anything that defined itself only as anti- something else had no place on or about his person, oh no. Wouldn’t catch him with anything like that, no siree. He had a general rule about those sorts of papers, he wouldn’t trust any with any words longer than his name. When the time came to read papers from somebody’s lawyer, he considered his name to be ‘G,’ and this had always stood him in good stead.
He didn’t like seeing Ciao so happy about it, either. He had felt he knew Ciao as well as any man could know a woman in this day and age in-a-completely-platonic-and-inofessinsive-to-persons-of-a-different-but-equal-gender-one-of-the-guys-but-plainly-not-a-guy-end-formula-remove-foot-from-mouth-way. He didn’t really understand what was going on, he understood that she was talking about changing the bounty system that’d worked for generations on her first day, the uppity rookie, something about it being nobody’s fault as long as they trusted the PKB with the money in advance, which of course wouldn’t work, most of the bounties got placed by people who were just more criminals with less evidence laying around, so they sure wouldn’t just trust the Bureau to hold the money for them, and the notion that if they couldn’t pay in cash then somebody named Coolie and his Pteras could get involved just didn’t make sense.
He knew things couldn’t be right when Susan said that they were going to put this money, that he’d heard her earlier say people were trusting them with, into some sort of market until it was either time to pay the bounty, or return the money when it expired after a few years. Now, he wasn’t sure what was going on, but Gummi knew markets, they weren’t where you left things you wanted to keep, they were where things got stolen, all the time. And he knew about farmers’ markets, village markets, even black markets and the like, but he’d never even heard of a money market anywhere, which meant it was probably extra black, or something, and now the PKB had hired someone who apparently knew it inside out? Well, good to have her on our side, now, once we know we can trust her, but none of this seemed right to him. Ciao was enthused, though, and he felt inclined to trust her, her instincts and judgment had always been good, except when she was all moony over that carnival guy. He tried to surreptitiously check Ciao’s face for any signs that she might be feeling moony at the rookie. De would be heartbroken if Ciao was. He wasn’t sure if Ciao noticed him do it, and she seemed to be moon-free.
Now they were talking about things that made more sense, maybe this was a good idea if it meant that coffee and donuts were going to be constant rather than random. He could definitely like not having coffee be a question at the end of a long night. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad day after all.
Gummi’s Bad Day
The PKB had expanded its arsenal in the neverending battle to protect the peace.
Gummi had been against it from the start, feeling that the PKB did not want, did not need, and above all could not safely and justly utilize such power, but it was too late for such objections.
He looked down at the photograph one last time, and waited, listening for the sounds that would foretell the arrival of one Susan Johansen, newest member of the PKB.
Susan did not pilot some new permutation of Genothingie, bristling with more gun barrels than a shinybob convention.
Nor did she ride the new CAS, the Sodomiticus Liger, known for its capacity to appear behind its enemies from nowhere, and impale them to their very cores.
She was not even symbiotically fused with a resurrected ancient destroyer with 'Death' in the name.
The horror she wrought was more fearsome than these, for all that she drove a mere bug.
No, not a Deamantis, merer than that. Yes, 4-wheels, drive shaft, no core at all. that kind of bug. Blue, with green fuzzy dice on the mirror.
If it helps, she called it "Noctus Schadenfreude", and drove it with an inhumanly vicious skill and cunning that had claimed innumerable lives, even if those lives generally had names like "Foofoo" or "Muffy" or, in one isolated case, "Mr. Snoochycuddlekins."
But every weapon must have its name, and the woman whose eyes seemed to stick out beyond the sides of her head due to the psychotic thickness of her glasses made pale the horror of any configuration of angst-ridden CPGs, for she wielded the most fearsome of them all, and rarest on all of Zi, the MBA.
The Peacekeeping Bureau had hired... an accountant.
And then she arrived. Gummi was suddenly worried about child labor laws. Really, he’d seen children using booster-seats to reach zoid controls, but never had he seen someone so diminutive seeming to expect to shoulder the burdens of a Real Job with the PKB.
He did not think about the fact that, in his perspective from which he used this term, 90% of the population did not in fact have Real Jobs, and merely subsisted on income which they achieved through some osmosis-like process he did not fully comprehend.
He was half-numb as he showed her where her desk was, and where the office supplies were, since despite his best efforts, the PKB had a fair amount of paperwork to do. He wondered why he was doing this, and recalled that it had fallen to him because he was ‘the boss’ and he wasn’t quite sure how or when that had happened.
It must have, Ciao would not lie to him, and she was the one who had said he filled that role. This was especially confusing, as he had always operated under the assumption that there had always, and would always, be someone above him to whom he could pass overcomplicated bucks that came his way.
It made no sense that enough people could have retired and that there was no one to receive them. He was certain that if that were the case, someone would have complained that he hadn’t stopped.
Once he was certain Susan was settled in behind an embankment of processed woodpulp that compressed the sturdiest furniture in the bureau, he returned to his own desk, and his own work. His particular duties meant that this primarily consisted of staring angrily at the telephone, daring it to ring and call in something more substantive to deal with, reading magazines, and eating pastries. He still suspected that they should soon look into clearing out some of the old offices that no one had entered for years in order to give one to Ms. Johansen.
Purely out of respect for the quantities and type of work she did for the Bureau, of course. Nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that he was mentally, physically, and yes, even spiritually disturbed to an incredibly profound extent by her shrill, mousy outcries of “Guylos’ Turducken!” or, “Leapfrogging Nyxian Maypoles!”
In addition, it really tried his nerves when she had asked Ciao to come see something she’d come up with. Nowhere near as much as when Ciao had called out for him to come over and look too, though.
It was not that Gummi did not trust accountants; oh no, no one could ever claim he had said he did not trust accountants. It was more that he did not trust papers, specifically, papers which had numbers or words written down on them. PKB papers were alright, of course, those were different, but those were nice, simple things, that had the important bit in a little blank space that went “arrest ________,” “detain ________,” or, when Gummi was going to have a really good day, “incite ________ to cease and desist all actions outside the supervision of the Peacekeeping Bureau.”
But today had not been such a day, today had been a very not good day altogether, for the beloved PKB, his beloved PKB, if he had understood Ciao correctly this morning, had so much, so very much paper that was the other kind. He liked the papers he knew, they were the teeth and claws of the battles of words, or the Riot Act, which was like his Gojulas’s supercannons, you didn’t use them, you just made sure nobody knew you wouldn’t use them. But these, these papers weren’t like that at all. These papers were like that fiddly thing some ligers did with antiprotons. Gummi did not know what an antiproton was, but he considered himself a simple, and straightforward man, and considered that anything that defined itself only as anti- something else had no place on or about his person, oh no. Wouldn’t catch him with anything like that, no siree. He had a general rule about those sorts of papers, he wouldn’t trust any with any words longer than his name. When the time came to read papers from somebody’s lawyer, he considered his name to be ‘G,’ and this had always stood him in good stead.
He didn’t like seeing Ciao so happy about it, either. He had felt he knew Ciao as well as any man could know a woman in this day and age in-a-completely-platonic-and-inofessinsive-to-persons-of-a-different-but-equal-gender-one-of-the-guys-but-plainly-not-a-guy-end-formula-remove-foot-from-mouth-way. He didn’t really understand what was going on, he understood that she was talking about changing the bounty system that’d worked for generations on her first day, the uppity rookie, something about it being nobody’s fault as long as they trusted the PKB with the money in advance, which of course wouldn’t work, most of the bounties got placed by people who were just more criminals with less evidence laying around, so they sure wouldn’t just trust the Bureau to hold the money for them, and the notion that if they couldn’t pay in cash then somebody named Coolie and his Pteras could get involved just didn’t make sense.
He knew things couldn’t be right when Susan said that they were going to put this money, that he’d heard her earlier say people were trusting them with, into some sort of market until it was either time to pay the bounty, or return the money when it expired after a few years. Now, he wasn’t sure what was going on, but Gummi knew markets, they weren’t where you left things you wanted to keep, they were where things got stolen, all the time. And he knew about farmers’ markets, village markets, even black markets and the like, but he’d never even heard of a money market anywhere, which meant it was probably extra black, or something, and now the PKB had hired someone who apparently knew it inside out? Well, good to have her on our side, now, once we know we can trust her, but none of this seemed right to him. Ciao was enthused, though, and he felt inclined to trust her, her instincts and judgment had always been good, except when she was all moony over that carnival guy. He tried to surreptitiously check Ciao’s face for any signs that she might be feeling moony at the rookie. De would be heartbroken if Ciao was. He wasn’t sure if Ciao noticed him do it, and she seemed to be moon-free.
Now they were talking about things that made more sense, maybe this was a good idea if it meant that coffee and donuts were going to be constant rather than random. He could definitely like not having coffee be a question at the end of a long night. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad day after all.
