Inna Box

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Though Crystal's attempts at thinking were still not entirely meeting with success, she nevertheless vaguely grasped that perhaps calling Vicky had been a bad idea.

It had started out seeming reasonable enough. Freshly dumped by her boyfriend, Crystal would naturally have wanted to find someone's shoulder to cry on. She could no longer remember quite why she had settled on Vicky. True, they went back over a decade, and the woman was possessed of both a caring heart and a brilliant mind. The problem, of course, was that her brilliance tended to exert itself in a mad-science sort of way. Vix tended to see most problems as engineering problems. Usually best solved using some sort of doomsday device.

Perhaps things would have gone better had Crystal's ex not chosen New Year's Eve as the time to drop the bad news. Alternately, perhaps Crystal should have remembered that Vix kept a large supply of boxed wine around her home even without it being a holiday greatly dedicated to drinking. As it was, though, her outpouring of woe, combined with Vix's wicked mind, all swirled up with liberal amounts of cheap booze... she could see now that it had been a bad combination.

Still, it had been really something watching her assemble that trebuchet so rapidly.

The two women paused by Vicky's truck, the bed of which held a tarp-covered pile of stuff that might have been recognized as a hastily disassembled bit of medieval siege weaponry. The access road they were on snaked through low hills covered with small trees and brambly undergrowth. Downhill and across the street proper, barely visible through the branches, the flashing lights of several emergency vehicles illuminated a small huddle of people outside of Crystal's ex's house.

From this distance it was impossible to hear much, but it was still delightfully easy to imagine how he must be reacting to the unexpected new hole in his living room ceiling.

She turned to Vicky, somewhat unsteadily. "Where did you even find a cow at this hour?"


Man I am finally up to 2007. Awesome.

In celebration, a little tale of vaguely Narbonic-style hijinxery! I got the idea in the shower and just couldn't resist using it.

Younger Days

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"Better'n what Jake wound up with," Red answered, in the deliberate tone of one who is all too aware of what a hilarious comment he is in the process of making. Certainly it set the others to laughing and slyly pounding Jake on the back.

Jake himself was laughing too, but somewhat more reluctantly. "Don' remin' me," he slurred, and had another swig of his beer. "I'm tryin'a forget that tonight."

Dennis hoisted his own can high. "To Jake," he grinned, "because while we've all gotten drunk enough to wind up in bed with strange women, he is the only one of us who's managed to get drunk enough to wind up married to one!" The others cheered and drank enthusiastically.

"I said don' remind me, man," Jake scowled. "Her an' her bein' 'born again'. If I hafta hear her go on 'bout how my drinkin' makes the baby Jesus cry one more time..." He drained his beer, threw the empty over his shoulder, then reached into the cooler for a new one. "Why'd I ever hafta marry her anyway?" he added morosely.

Red snorted. "I think the answer t'that is right there in your hand," he quipped, setting the others off again.

Jake glared at him in the act of opening his beer, but said nothing, and after a few more witticisms at his expense, the conversation moved on to other topics.