Remove these ads. Join the Worldbuilders Guild
Mon 10th Dec 2018 02:56

Meditations on a Grapple Gun

by Xylund

It’s like fucking music. You pull the trigger and all these gears move in concert towards a single purpose and blam! Grapple! There’s no arguing, no what-iffing, no yes-butting. Click-whir-sproing!
 
That’s what I admire about Corrin. There’s no gap between impulse and action. His impulses are completely random and that’s a problem, obviously, but at least there’s no standing around and chin-stroking and hem-hawing. He’s a breath of fresh- ah, well, that loincloth is pretty pungent, but he’s a bracing change in air quality, at least.
 
It’s obvious that Annie and “Jack” haven’t seen much real action (of any sort). I was never the guy giving the orders, true, but on the ground it became clear that plans aren’t worth spit. Things get improvisational pretty damn fast once the charge is sounded. You wade into the thick of it, you see what’s what, and you start with the smashing until things look more or less the way they’re supposed to. Chaos doesn’t respond to reason or planning. It’s kind of built into the definition of the term.
 
But “Jack” has all these romantic notions of how the world’s supposed to be, and while his innocence does have a certain appeal, it’s just not the way things are. To make a world like the one in his head, you’d need to start by killing off 99% of the population and going from there. The wider the divide between the reality and the ideal, the more fucking gore you have to wade through to get there. That’s just the way it is. Jack is dangerous.
 
And Annie… she goes on about how old she is but I don’t know what she got up to for all those centuries. Planning what she was gonna do once she stepped out of her druid grove or whatever? Like, literally drawing intricate diagrams on the forest floor plotting out every step she was going to take once she ventured out into the wider world? Because, holy shit, what a control freak! All the know-it-allness of an officer with twice the out-of-touchness. When I’m feeling charitable I can see that she must have led a solitary life, and that she’s used to doing most things by herself and taking the time to analyze everything in the privacy of her mind and waiting until she’s perfectly comfortable before dipping even a toe into unknown waters. But you know what? There are no known waters! Even the pool in her druid grove or whatever was fed from somewhere. Man-eating fish, man! They exist! At a certain point you just have to say, “fuck it,” and dive in and keep doing so every moment of every day. That’s why the gods gave us man-eating fishwhackers.
 
So yeah. When I saw them all go charging across the beach – with Annie in giant crocodile form which, fine, that’s pretty cool – I’ll admit it: I was relieved. And I was in no hurry to follow them. It doesn’t technically qualify as abandoning your comrades, right? The last I saw of them as they disappeared over the dunes, they seemed fine. They seemed happy. Look, I’m not proud of it, but that’s what I told myself.
 
And comrades? I mean, come on. I’ve known them, what, a week? An entertaining week, but still. And I just met the thief today (he seems cool actually, he gets it). So it’s not like we’re bonded by blood. And it’s getting pretty goddamn clear that we’re never gonna have the cohesion or clarity of purpose of a grapple gun. They’re all pretty lacking as gears go.
 
Kern though. He’s seen some shit, I can tell. He’s got that whole religion thing going on, true, but he doesn’t seem too into it. With some guidance, he could be made to see that it’s just a tool. The gods don’t really care about us. They fill our heads with ideas and bless our swords and pat us on the backs with a, “Go forth, my child, and cleave some shit for my divine kicks.” They should be respected, but all this praying and “my god is better than your god” is nonsense. They’re using us, so we have to use them right back. That’s the nature of the transaction, and the gods admire those of us who figure it out.
 
Kern and I could do some good. We could beat some sense into the world. I mean, “Jack”’s heroic vision of the world is out of the question, unattainable… but that doesn’t mean some improvements can’t be made.
 
I don’t believe that the gods speak to us through omens or portents or any of that crap – they prefer to couch their arguments in the form of sharp objects to the face – but the coincidence of finding two grapple guns so close together, and so shortly after I fixated on the idea of buying one in the Lorholt markets, seizing on this ideal of mechanical perfection the same way a rat might cling to a bit of wood in the rushing sewers… ugh. Damn it, flask is empty, brb.
 
But yeah. The first gun we found was a miracle of gears, pure functionality, as if to demonstrate everything a grapple gun could be. And the second was all cracked and gears missing, just a mess. Not unsalvageable, but fixing it would mean staying in Lorholt and no doubt wading in sewers or swimming in poop rivers because apparently that’s what Lorholt is all about. The cleanest place in this city is the whorehouse and who knows what diseases lurk beneath the surfaces there….
 
And if that’s not a goddamn metaphor, I don’t know what is (which is possible, I don’t really get what the difference between a simile and a metaphor is… military education, alas and alack). But I can stay with these people and swim in metaphorical poop and hope that somewhere along the line we emerge as a symphony of interlocking gears, all meshed together in unison towards the completion of a clear purpose, OR I can view the situation by the sober(-ish) light of day, wash the shit off my armour, and cut my losses. We’ve basically rescued the priestess at this point. Job done. No reason to stick around. It was fun but later, fools. Back to sproing!ing solo. Kern can come if he wants. Yeah.
 
That’s probably the way to go.
 
Hail Grennan or whatever.