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"What did you just push down there?" Jonas turned around and was not quite fast enough to stop the idiot freshman he'd been burdened with from touching the flame to the fuse.
There was a muffled whomp and a lazy puff of oddly-colored smoke oozed from the mouth of the Colonel's very cherished brass cannon. Just smoke. Jonas whimpered. The formerly sleek, shiny, smooth lines of the cannon now bulged, just a little.
"It was supposed to be a joke," the freshman whined. "A prank." As if that excused it! He was so going to be kicked out when Jonas hauled him into the Colonel's office to explain. Jonas just hoped he wasn't in for the high jump as well.
Some months later, after a dozen too-dangerous-to-be-cute apparently autonomous miniature armored vehicles had crawled from the mouth of the cannon and Jonas had been placed in charge of keeping them occupied and out of trouble, he thought it might have been better if he'd been expelled as well.