Instant Story

Fragmen of stupri mauris. Quare non opus est? — RecklessPrudence

[AN: I ran this through a translator and got: “Piece of fucking shit. Why not work?” :D LOL ]

There’s working on repairs with trained technicians… and then there’s working with someone who’s learned certain things by rote as part of a holy ritual. Someone who - though she had the brains to work out that the rituals were supposed to be useful, and had successfully applied some of them in other circumstances - still applied those rituals because they were the only way she knew.

Isobel could tell when her friend and ally Jem was reciting an incantation. Mostly because they were far more eloquent.

“Cock-sucking son of a bitch! Work you firkin dick biscuit!”

Sometime, possibly when they were on a break, Isobel would educate Jem on exactly what she was saying. And what some of those ritual gestures meant at the time they became part of the ritual.

As it was, she took it as a general sign that Jem was having trouble. Which left the problem of communicating what the trouble was with an ancient dialect that neither of them could use with accuracy.

Yep. Toasted circuit board. She’d have to fabricate a new one. “This one?” She disconnected it and showed it to her. “Bad-bad beans. Meringue umbrella. Jello roof.” And, in final clarification, turned her thumb downwards and blew a raspberry.

Jem blew a raspberry in agreement. “Fuk dup the ass.”

Okay… Isobel could work with that one. This whole first contact situation was going to give the Archivaas conniptions.

There were no replacements on their vessel, now called some variant of Home. Arta. They called their ship Arta.

Isobel would have to make a new one. Good thing they had plenty of raw material.

Jem kept treating the tech printer as an amazing holy relic. Isobel’s attempts to show her it was just a machine had negligible influence, but Jem would happily watch something come from component elements in avid and reverent fascination.

And holy song.

Such a pity that the ancient engineers of her ancestry had had a very crude taste in music.

Isobel would never have believed, before her arrival in Arta, that Charlotte the Harlot could have ever been sung reverentially.

With the new circuit in, the air generator whirred sluggishly into life. Isobel helped Jem restock it’s necessary supplies and tweak it into full functionality.

"Effing eh?” prompted Jem.

“Effing eh,” Isobel agreed. “Nek minit? That dick biscuit,” she selected the machine that looked ready to collapse.

Jem’s face said it all. “Jussinbeebur…” she muttered.

Isobel felt inclined to agree.

[Muse food remaining: 17. Submit a prompt! Ask a question! Buy my stories!]

Series of posts, each blank line denotes a new poster:

[Comparing real-life understanding of tech by the people maintaining it to a fictional universe] Of course, this is minus the stupid witch doctor rituals.

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” comes to mind. And a lot of other rituals.

Doesn’t that actually help with a significant portion of callers?

[Fictional universe organisation] rituals work too, except when they don’t. Doesn’t make it any less

“On most airplanes, in an emergency oxygen masks will be deployed from above your seat. This is an Australian airplane however; in an emergency, we will deploy drop bears from above your seat.”

Either way, the lack of oxygen problem is quickly solved. – RecklessPrudence

“What? Why would you do something that barbaric?” Esterhazy boggled.

“Well, the oxygen systems are tied to the landing gear, see,” Shirl expanded without missing a beat. “If there’

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space—each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision. – RecklessPrudence

Nobody knew what the natives called it. There were no natives to ask. Whatever had happened on this world had destroyed all but the simplest and toughest of organic life, but left the buildings and infrastructure to be slowly buried

“Wow, how’d you get it to work?”
“I ran a Physical Impulse Mechanical Stress Routine”
“Huh?”
“I kicked it.”
“Ahh.” – RecklessPrudence

It really only took ten minutes to fix, in the end. A little heat. And a lot of whacking with the right kind of maintenance.

She charged them an Hour for her work, part of which was a ‘luck tax’. As in, they were lucky they reached

I’ve made jokes about “Reboot… with steel toes” and “troubleshooting with a 12-Gauge - PULL!” plenty of times! – RecklessPrudence

A certain sign of doom amongst engineers is whistling backwards. It means something expensive is about to happen. When they hiss through their teeth whilst breathing in… there’s very little to be done.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” asked Rael, off-the-books-apprentice.

“Eh,” the engineer currently in charge shrugged. “Pass me

“Yes, I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can find his way by moonlight, and see the dawn before the rest of the world.” - Oscar Wilde c/- RecklessPrudence

Everyone who met her knew that there was something wrong with Sai’dut. She would talk to herself, or stop her appointed tasks to stare at something irrelevant, she would grow forgetful or latch on to some asinine entertainment and learn everything that nobody wanted to know

An Outside Context Problem is the sort of thing most civilisations encounter just once, and which they tend to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encounters a full stop.
-“Excession,” definition of an OCP c/- RecklessPrudence

Thus it is that the Cogniscent Rights Committee has passed numerous laws to prevent them. Shipping through inhabited systems with recognised intelligent life native to them is generally forbidden until such time as that native population has regular and reliable space flight.

Google Maps is accurate. Apple Maps is the product of Dali and Picasso smoking a joint before painting the child of a canary and penguin with a frightened cat used as the paint brush, then selling the result as a map. – RecklessPrudence

There’s an old human saying, that there is no such thing as an accurate map. Maps lie.

For a start, they compress thousands of square distance units into flat expanse capable of -for instance- being held by

On a scale of one to “I will invent a time machine explicitly for murdering your parents,” how mad do you think [person] is? – RecklessPrudence

“Ambassador Z0rk? He’s always tetchy.”

“That’s tetchy?” Shayde boggled. “Remind me never tae get him PO'ed.”

“Pee… ode?”

“Pissed off. Angered. Riled. Bluidy furious.”

Humans. They were equally confusing in any temporal zone. At least she wasn’t mysteriously speaking

“But, how did you know that the file contained their secret plans for world domination?”
“Because it was labelled ‘secret plans for world domination’.” — RecklessPrudence

K’orvoth could not believe that the humans would be that stupid. Or stupid enough to lable said plans in all known languages where anyone could read it.

Or to leave such things on an unsecured commconsole in the open.

He could not believe this windfall. “Decrypt it at once,” he ordered. “We

First submission since the identification of an ableist slur. Edited from original form, thusly:

I love the image of his brain just clearly rebooting because too much ridiculousness and unbelievability is hitting it at one time. – RecklessPrudence

Harry stared up at the edifice that was Security Chief ‘Sherlock’. It was hard not to. Sherlock stood at 6'4" and she was a diminutive 5'2".

“…i know i’m in trouble, there’s no need