(#00786 - B055)
After their strange friends from a different future left, Raoul found a tiny trinket in one of their bunks. It looked like a cylinder… and it had a button, but beyond that, there was no clue of how it worked or what it was.
So, naturally, he pressed the button.
There was no hum. No whirr. No noise of anything mechanical going on, and no hint of what it was supposed to do. Raoul jiggled it. Pressed it against his ear. Tried talking to it. Nothing.
Then he noticed that Francoeur was busy chasing something around the walls and ceiling.
It was a pinpoint of a red dot. Caused… caused by the small cylinder in Raoul’s hand. He almost forgot to be curious about the little cylinder, favouring watching Francoeur scurry about after the tiny red dot and giggling like a child.
Lucille stormed in like one thousand avenging angels. “What the living devil are you two doing?”
Raoul turned off the tiny light and pretended he had been doing exactly nothing at all. “Who? Me?”
Francoeur chittered a mournful little song and pointed to Raoul.
“Really,” Lucille marched over and tore it out of his unresisting fingers. “And what is this?”
“Uuuuuuuuuuuhhhh… really ineffective electric torch?”
“Hmf.” She turned it on, examining the spot in her hand, then against the wall, and then reflected by a mirror. Francoeur chased the dot with chirps of joy.
At length, she decided, “While I agree that this could help Francoeur get his exercise without disturbing half of Paris…” she flipped the little light off. “We should not be messing about with things from a different reality. I’m putting this in a lockbox for all our safeties.”
Francoeur sulked for five days before Raoul began to work out how to make one of his own.
Thus, in that reality, the inventor of the LASER was Raoul DeChagny in 1922, and it was vital in the victories of the second world war.
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