Chapter Text
==>Jake: Be bored out of your relatively miniscule juvenile human skull
Oh you are, of that there is no doubt.
You are at the absolute limits of your mind’s ability to keep itself sufficiently occupied without additional outside stimulus. Your trigger fingers itch most days—it’s only natural, of course—but today that itch has spread to all ten of the digits of your upper limb and most of your toes, as well.
You need something to do.
Anything.
==>Jake: Well go outside or something, jeeze
Are you insane? Have you perchance taken a gander at the weather?
It’s a veritable hurricane out there! The sound of the rain pounding against your roof is only rivaled by the distant cacophony of trees being ripped from the earth as a stampede of fell beasts scrambles for cover. Each flash of lightning is punctuated not by thunder but by a chorus of terrible, monstrous screams and bellows into the dark and stormy night.
No, you’re staying right where you are, thank you kindly.
==>Jake: Mope
You are sooooo bored! If only some sort of WHIMSICAL TALKING FELINE sporting a graphically iconic example of millinery were to waltz through your front door and distract you with a myriad of increasingly nonsensical rhyming activities, then maybe you’d—
Hang on. One of your friends is pestering you!
==>Lightning: Crack boom
CRACK-A-BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!
Well fiddlesticks.
==>Jake: Find alternate light source
Looks like that last bolt of lightning knocked out your main power supply. Normally you’d just plug a chunk of uranium into one of your backup generators and keep right on chugging, but you’ve been trying to conserve those, lately, seeing as how your TRANSMATERIALIZER eats radioactive isotopes like they’re going out of style.
While you have multiple computing devices at your disposal, each with its own internal battery supply, their pester function is entirely dependent upon their ability to access the internet. As you are not yet officially engaged in the sort of epic, space-time warping RPG where pedestrian devices such as wireless routers are rendered superfluous by game mechanics, this puts you in a bit of a pickle.
Whatever Dirk wants, it’ll have to wait until this storm blows over.
==>Jake: Find something to do
Like what? El Niño’s got you barricaded indoors and has taken all means of electronic communication hostage. The only other avenue of amusement that springs to mind isn’t appropriate for general audiences.
==>Jake: Oggle your blue ladies by candlelight
Thousand pardons, old chap, but what part of "not appropriate for general audiences" did you not understand?
==>Jake: So read a book or something, fuck, I know you've got some form of the printed word burried under all those piles of ammo
Well now that you mention it, you do have one tome on hand that you’ve been meaning to read.
One of your friends gave you this for your last birthday. It’s some sort of self-indulgent bit of academic geekery and fantasy world building set in a fictional universe you’ve never heard of, but it’s got a seriously wicked looking skull on the cover and so it must be awesome!
==>Jake: Turn to page one
The devil with that! You are an ADVENTUER, and adventurers don’t bother with stuff like prefaces and context and having half a clue about what’s going on before sticking their nose into things. They dive headlong right into the acid-filled belly of the beast, pipes clenched between their teeth and machetes a-swinging.
==>Jake: Flip randomly to somewhere near the middle and start reading
Oh, this looks intruiging!
"Right mandibular second premolar mounted in a set of brass knuckles, a token of concupiscent hatred. In addition to being worn as jewelry, the prominent cusps make this particular type of setting an effective weapon. While some trolls will only wield such a romantic gift while battling their kismesis, others have no qualms deploying them outside the confines of their kismesissitude..."
What the fuck? “Kismesissitude”? “Concupiscent hatred”? What the fuck is that and what does it have to do with nifty alien crania?
Maybe you should start at the beginning…