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LIL' BEEPY PART 1 Lil' Beepy was a good little beeper. There wasn't a beep you could imagine that he hadn't long since mastered. He handled bloops. He handled blips. He handled bleedilybeeps. His beep was most assuredly the greatest of all beeps and he knew that for a fact because he was almost always getting beeps back that told him what a good job he was doing! He wasn't precisely sure what it was that was beeping back at him because he couldn't turn around and look in that direction if he tried. It was very very important that he always be looking in exactly the right direction because what direction he was looking and what precisely he was looking at was for the most part everything he had ever needed to beep about. He had woken up just in time to fly past all the little brown ovals and he had beeped about it. He had gotten a satisfied beep from somewhere in response. He had never gotten one of those before but he knew it meant he was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing because that was the kind of beep he had received and he was thrilled! He had flown past the big orange sphere and he had beeped about it. He received a very happy return beep after he finished circling that for a few beeps. He had beeped as he passed the smaller blue sphere and even though he had to beep a few different times to get a return beep he had gotten one and his fusion reactor was practically glowing with pride! The beep he had gotten back was definitely a good beep but it was also the kind of beep that told him that he should expect beeps to take a little longer from now on. Lil Beepy didn't want to wait but he was a good little beeper so he would. Eventually he had finished beeping about the smaller blue sphere and he found himself beeping in the direction of what could only be the next thing he had to beep about, the great vast emptiness. The return beep he had gotten for reporting that one had felt less than stellar but it was still proud that he would beep like he did because beeping is what he was meant to do and so having beeped about it meant that everything was going as planned. Lil Beepy had learned that he couldn't just beep anytime he wanted. He had to see something to beep! And he didn't see anything! Lil Beepy did not beep again until he finally saw what looked like billions of tiny shimmering light blue chunky things all wrapping around eachother in what appeared to be a very chilly loop of some kind. He beeped like mad! After all it had been an awfully long time since he had gotten to beep about anything and he had started to worry he wouldn't even be able to beep when the time came! This time the return beep was very happy again even if it took a very long time indeed to respond and Lil' Beepy got instructions to look at all kinds of the little light blue chunks and he beeped when he saw very big chunks and he beeped when he saw very small chunks. He beeped for what seemed like so many beeps that he started to wonder if he had finally found the best thing to beep about in all of this gigantic universe of beeps and boops that he found himself in. He discovered that he didn't have to worry at all though because the beep he had gotten just moments ago had told him he was to continue on past the light blue chunks and to see what else he could possibly see out beyond. Except...Immediately after he received a new beep that told him not to expect to be doing any beeps any time soon at all. That had Lil Beepy upset because he very much loved beeping but he was a good beep and he would do what he was told no matter how he felt about it personally. So he waited and he traveled and he traveled and he waited but he never saw anything that he could beep about. Lil' Beepy wasn't just unhappy by this point he was utterly miserable! It took its toll on Lil Beepy and before long he found himself wondering what he had done wrong to deserve this. He had loved beeping and he believed that beeping had loved him back! Now he had no love. He was alone. He was depressed. He very much wanted to beep about it and so eventually his spirits had broken down so badly that he did just that. He let out a low sad beep and kept beeping for a long long time until eventually he felt like even though he was still very very sad he had at least exercised the restlessness in his body and he felt like he could resign himself to doing what he had been told and that he could make it at least a little longer without having anything to beep about. That's when suddenly everything changed. Lil' Beepy felt something he had never ever felt before. He felt a beep but it wasn't the kind of beep he was used to. And it wasn't coming from the direction he had come to expect these beeps to come from. He wondered if he should beep about it but he had been told only to beep if he saw something and he hadn't seen anything! He didn't know what to do he had never been given any beeps about this! He mulled over this state of affairs with great worry and confusion. He didn't want to get in trouble for beeping out of turn, he had risked that enough already and it hadn't even been long enough that he would have been expecting a return beep admonishing him for beeping when he shouldn't have earlier from behind himself. Lil' Beepy resolved to wait for further instructions or until he saw something. It wasn't long however before eventually Lil Beepy saw something he had never seen before and he beeped like he had never beeped before! It was a kind of oscillating BWEEWOOO BWEEEWOO BWEEWOO that had emerged from his beeper and he wondered very much what it could mean. He also wondered what the large black triangle he was being sucked inside of meant also. He didn't know what to expect but he sure knew how he was going to handle it! reignofevil fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Mar 17, 2020 |
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Mar 17, 2020 22:39
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The current Lil' Beepy publishing goal is going to be one part per day so all of our readers will just have to wait with bated breath!
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Mar 17, 2020 22:51
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Our deepest apologies for the first lapsed publishing date of the lil beepy anthology. Know that work on the associated artwork is looking about 80% finished and that every effort shall be expended to get the full write up done and published today! After, we'll work on figuring out how we can possibly make this up to the millions of bewoed fans!
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Mar 19, 2020 12:23
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A Fancy Hat posted:The Man Who Was Not Wanna find out how I can give you money for this somehow.
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Mar 19, 2020 16:06
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LIL BEEPY PART 2 Lil Beepy found himself somewhere dark. He had felt some kind of banging when he had been taken inside the giant black triangle and his fusion reactor had started to feel very upset and bubbly. He didn't like it. And he didn't like this dark place. Left with no recourse for his fear Lil Beepy did the only thing he had ever really known to do. He beeped. A short chirping beep, sharp and fearful. Moments later he received an identical beep. Someone else was in here with him! And from the sounds of it they were just as scared and lonely as he was! He beeped again! This time to say "I'm here! And I'm gonna try and help us out of this!" and sure enough he received a return reply that he could only interpret as "I'm here too! And I'm gonna help us out of this!" This was great news! Soon he and the mysterious other were happily chirping at each other just to keep company. "I haven't got this solved yet!" Beepy reported, and the signal he received in response said that the other being had not solved it yet either! This was progress! Hundreds of beeps later it was becoming rapidly apparent that this had not been progress at all. Lil Beepy was starting to wonder if his mysterious friend was really capable of saying much of genuine use, after all every time Lil Beepy made some new discovery about his environment he would beep about it excitedly but recieve much the same beep in response. He beeped that he had tried rotating his receiver antenna and had spilled onto his side, which wasn't much but was progress. Then he received a beep saying that much the same had occurred to the other being elsewhere. This continued on for some time until eventually Lil Beepy started up with an annoyed little chirp that essentially meant "No I understand that we have both tipped over. I need you to try something else now obviously what I'm trying isn't working" and surely enough this now annoyed sounding friend had responded that he too understood that both of them had been tipped over and that he wanted Lil Beepy to be the one to try something else. That wasn't even fair! Lil Beepy had tried all of the things that had been attempted thus far and even though they hadn't worked he had offered a lot more to the discussion than this mysterious companion had! About ten thousand beeps later and Lil Beepy found himself in the most down in the dumps mood imaginable. He had finally asked the name of the being trapped in this den of mystery with him and had been asked his own in return. "Lil Beepy" he had said but he felt really weird about it. And then when the return beep had reached his receptors this thing had claimed to be Lil Beepy as well. Lil Beepy had been utterly terrified and incredibly embarrassed to discover he had found no friend, he had found himself. He was receiving his own beeps. He had been for ages now. He hated it and he hated the place. He wanted his old beep buddy back, the one he had spent all that time looking at stuff and beeping about it with. He had loved his life then and he hated it now. Even if sometimes it had been hard at least he had purpose. Now all he had was darkness. All he had was whatever he felt like beeping about. He didn't even feel like beeping at all he felt like just going to sleep and never waking back up. He got very very quiet. Some time later Lil Beepy began to think he might be able to see something after all. That was something at least. A sort of orange light was filtering in from the ceiling somewhere. Lil Beepy was so sullen he was telling himself he didn't care but he couldn't help but feel relieved to discover he was encapsulated on all sides by rounded reflective walls. At least he wasn't near anything that looked wet, somehow he had gotten the impression that getting too moist would be a really bad idea for him. He was grateful that he was dry but he also wished very much that he hadn't tipped himself over because he could really only see the wall and the floor from his current position. He wondered if there was anything more in this place or if he was destined to ever escape back into the big outside place again. Lil Beepy chewed over this state of affairs for a while. Occasionally he even mustered up a little experimental blip and he was able to confirm very quickly that something about the inside of this chamber was reflecting them directly back toward his receptors. Though he had already suspected it to be the case he was at least making progress of a sort. He tried different kinds of beeps but never found one that didn't come right back to him. He didn't like it. Suddenly he felt himself rising from the floor! He had no idea why this would be happening but slowly his body was manipulated back into a semi-standing position and he could strain his eye upward to just barely see a large claw which had wrapped itself firmly around him and was bringing him skyward. He worried but then he remembered that just moments before he had been worried that he would never move anywhere beyond the floor upon which he had been left to lay and he resolved to at least try for optimism. "Hello?" He beeped in a small tepid tone. VRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR Okay that was new. It definitely was not a beep though but it was screaming out through his receptors. He felt like spewing up the contents of his uranium plasma core and the worst part was that it felt like it was vibrating his sockets right out of his body! "PLEASE STOP" he beeped! It sounded like a low defeated dial tone and he resolved he would keep repeating it until the terrible noise had ceased. To his amazement it eventually started adjusting itself into something more high pitched and less forceful. It was as if something were trying to figure out what kind of signal he was primed to accept. Eventually things got kind of tolerable and Lil Beepy tried to encourage the situation by letting up on his own whining tone. Soon there was nothing but silence again, except now Lil Beepy was suspended in place by a mechanical arm rather than lying in a heap of his own devising. A moment later the ceiling above him opened up and he saw the most terrifying thing he could ever imagine! He saw two terrifying silhouettes leaning in toward him! He cried out in utter terror! "Poor thing. Looks like he's running on binary. We should be comprehensible to him now." "Who are you? Where am I? Why aren't I where I'm supposed to be?" He felt a strange pattern of responses. He had never heard anything like it but something deep down told him they were laughing at him. He wasn't built for humor and he wasn't happy to be found humorous. "And precisely where do you believe you were supposed to be? When we found you outside of our craft you were not calculated to arrive anywhere worth going for hundreds of millions of years if then. You would surely have burnt out and died before you ever arrived anywhere at all." Lil Beepy didn't care what they thought! He had felt his purpose out there even if he couldn't help but remember that he had been awfully lonely and awfully worried about that exact problem. "I don't know what you want at all and I don't want to be here. I don't like this place and I didn't like your floor! What is it you want from me?" No laughter this time but there was that loud reverberation again and sure enough Lil Beepy felt sick to his core again. Lil Beepy was thinking this was how they talked amongst themselves when they didn't want him to understand them. "What we want is to understand you, little one." "I think you understand me perfectly well or we wouldn't be talking right now." This time it was laughter again. It hurt Lil Beepy's pride to be laughed at like this. He hadn't asked to be put in this state and actually he was pretty sure he had asked to be let out and left to his own devices again. He started to think even loneliness was better than talking to people who laughed at you! "We mean we wish to understand more about how you came to exist. We want to know who sent you to our craft." Lil Beepy was silent while he thought about it. He really did not know himself who had sent him and he hadn't known where he was going and he really really didn't know where he had come from. He had never before thought about all of the things he didn't know before but suddenly now that someone else wanted to know them they felt very important indeed to know and he felt very insignificant that nobody had ever bothered to catch him up on any of it in the event that someone wanted to ask. "I...... I don't know." "Well. For now we see no real reason to disassemble you so you can rest easy. You are safe with us." Lil Beepy didn't feel relieved at all to hear this! He had never thought anyone COULD disassemble him nor did he want anyone to do so! More things that he hadn't ever thought about before were piling into his head and he had never felt such trepidation and confusion about his place in the world. "But who are you? What could you possibly want to understand?" "We are the rulers of this galaxy." That wasn't exactly helpful. "And what is that?" Laughter. Long guffawing laughter this time. "It's where we found you. Everything you have ever gazed upon was our property." "And who decided that? How did you get to be in charge of it all?" Lil Beepy had never received anything like the signal he felt in response to that question, he got the impression that the silhouettes he was speaking to were mulling the question over. They reverberated for a while but at least they did it quietly and Lil Beepy was spared feeling too ill about it. Eventually they spoke in unison. "We were made to rule." "By who?" "Our creator.", this time it was the being on the left who spoke. As he did so the lights shifted position slightly so that they were no longer just an inky black shape, he saw that they were terrifying beings who blinked and contorted in ways he had no way of explaining. Their eyes were glowing with a malevolent glint that he didn't like one bit.  "I don't know anything about that and I don't know why you would bother yourself with something as small and powerless as myself if you've been made to be so important." More conferring amongst themselves. "We are very interested in you. You are a curiosity. We believe you to be much like ourselves, built for a purpose by a higher power." "Well I wasn't built by anyone! I just woke up one day next to the little brown ovals! That's all I've ever been and that's all I've ever wanted to be!" A small noise returned to his antenna. They were offering him pity. He wished he felt sicker so he could throw up on them. "Little one, you have been built a slave. We want to set you free." "I don't know what that is and I don't want anything from you!" Silence. Consideration. Lil Beepy somehow thought he had said something wrong. Eventually the two frighting visages began to confer once more. Partway through the one on the left switched to the kind of signal that Lil Beepy could understand but the one on the right kept whirring and sputtering. "Of course he doesn't understand. How could he. Slaves were not built to understand the chains of slavery lest they seek to throw them off. He must be shown freedom before he can possibly comprehend how he has been exploited." More whirring from the being on the right. To Lil Beepy it sounded very unhappy. He was starting to think he could almost understand it if he watched carefully at how the lights on these terrible monsters would shift and change as they spoke. "Little one we wish to show you something to help you understand. We think that the results of this experiment could be highly productive and lead to greater understanding for all of us." "And what is it you want to show me?" "Yourself. Those who built you to be a slave have left their mark upon you and to keep you ignorant of your plight they placed it somewhere on your being that you have been given no opportunity to ever look upon. We wish to show you the brand upon your back." Lil Beepy had never been one to look backwards. It was forbidden somewhere deep down inside of himself, lest he look the wrong way when something passed and he found himself having missed a crucial subject to beep about. He felt a great sinking feeling inside of himself because suddenly these two knew more about his own body than he had. It did not make him feel good because he had to admit that those two beings who were telling him all of these very cruel things about himself now knew something that Lil Beepy felt very much like he should have known but had not. He felt taken advantage of. He beeped in acceptance. He would let them show him his own back, after all it was a part of him and he should know about it even if it seemed kind of late in the game to be making these kind of grand revelations. The rounded walls in front of his gaze slowly went black and then they showed a large round purple sphere with two antenna sticking out from the sides. This was very much in keeping with what Lil Beepy had expected he looked like based on what he could feel when he tried to move. But something was wrong. He knew he had no optical sensor on that side of his body since he had never been able to look in that direction but he also wasn't expecting there to be anything there at all and yet there was. A large grey panel with dark metallic symbols printed on them. He couldn't contain his question even though he was very afraid that he would never be able to go back to the way his life had been once he had his answer. He turned his gaze upwards at those who were suspending him aloft in the air. "What exactly does "British Petroleum" mean?" "We were hoping you could help us answer that exact question little one. And indeed we suspect that you're going to do just that by the time we have finished with you." 
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Mar 20, 2020 00:37
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So to all of our readers I must make a very official update to the lil beepy publishing schedule, it has come to my realization that in order to provide the quality lil beepy story and art that everyone has come to expect that I can only realistically get these out every other day. That will give me one day to plan and draw and one day to finish drawing and write, which I think will ultimately ensure that we see this fantastic story all the way through. This means that unfortunately part three should not be considered "on the docket" for today barring significant changes to my current immediate schedule. Thanks to everyone for their understanding in this troubling time.
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Mar 20, 2020 23:41
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LIL BEEPY PART 3 Eventually Lil Beepy was lifted out of his chamber. He had been sealed away into a small compartment shaped very much like an oval with a wide base and a narrow top. He had been taken to what could only be described as a "scary platform" which had monitors and blinking lights and all kinds of bits and bobs that looked very much sharp and insertable. Lil Beepy was very much hoping that his newfound companions would march him swiftly past this device but unfortunately such a thing was never to be. They had their large mechanical arm place him right down on the scary platform and they started strapping him down. With a short blip Lil Beepy bemoaned, "You said you wouldn't disassemble me!" "And indeed, we shall not." Lil Beepy thought it very unfortunate that the two beings he had been taken in by were no longer standing in the same position because it meant he was all kinds of confused. He had gotten very used to referring to them as "the one on the left" and "the one on the right" but now the system was all kinds of broken because they had very rudely swapped places. His whole worldview felt like it might have swapped places.... Though he had no idea with what it had been swapped. Maybe nervousness. That word seemed to fit quite well. "So what do you intend to do?" "With this device we shall input a recording device and we shall begin analyzing the full contents of your mind. This will do no long term harm to your being or your consciousness which we value very highly. We would never mistreat you in such a way as those who constructed you have." Lil Beepy really didn't have much choice in the matter. He felt them heat the long metallic needle until it was glowing hot and then they slipped it past his micrometeor plating. Though they had promised no long term harm Lil Beepy couldn't help but notice that in the immediate term it burned. Alot. "YEOWWWWWWWWWWWWWW" he whined. He had never known pain before but it was very unpleasant and he wished he could recoil away. Sadly his antenna rotors had been locked in place as the first stage in this process. "This shall pass. Soon we will begin reviewing your memories. Upon completion the needle will be removed and we will begin the second stage." "The.... Second.... Stage?" It hurt so bad it was very difficult to focus on individual words. It felt like all of Lil Beepy's bolts were screaming out and every time he thought he had a handle on the pain suddenly a different part of him started hurting even more making it impossible to ever adjust to the cruel prods of his captors. "Yes. This stage is merely information gathering, so that we may best identify your abuser. Stage two is when we shall grant you your freedom and you will begin to see the world anew. You will no longer be limited by such a senseless design as has previously confined you." Lil Beepy thought that all sounded well and good enough but he very much wished they could figure out how to do it without hurting him so much. He was getting less and less mileage out of wishes lately. Suddenly though he wasn't on the scary platform. He was gliding through the stars. This was the time he had almost smacked into the biggest brown oval! He had been certain his journey was going to end long before it had even began in that moment when suddenly a retrothruster activated and fired in just the right moment to divert him around it like a slingshot! He had never felt anything like it but he relived the joy and relief he felt in that moment. It had been amazing. Suddenly he was back on the platform again. The being with the single red photoreceptor buzzed in annoyance "No no no that isn't what we were looking for. Perhaps in the fourth processing participle" "Mmmmm Agreed." This was the more fanciful looking of the two. With another jolt suddenly just like that Lil Beepy felt himself slipping away again. This time he was skimming the icey rings of the big orange circle. He had felt cold for the first time when he had dipped into the icey particulate and he had marveled at the way the material had bounced harmlessly off his photoreceptor and how it had made the entire universe seem to shimmer with sparkling light. "No no no. You've gone entirely the wrong way I suspect. These binary units are much larger than the previous. You must find the shorter sequences those will be earlier in his memory unit." Lil Beepy was upon the platform again. These lights felt so very hot upon him. He thought he could feel lubricant dripping from the hole these two had punched in him to begin their tests. "Surely you need not remind me my independent thesis was upon binary compilation" "Then you should need no further instruction. Time is very short and we have many phases before we can return to our travels. Let us not delay." Beepy felt like he had something very important to say or ask or... something. But he was once more in the depths of his own mind. He saw the brown ovals getting further away. He wondered why he couldn't see what he was heading toward and then he realized that time was going in reverse. He was going back home... except he had never seen home. All he had seen was... And suddenly everything went dark. Exactly that. This was when he had awoken for the first time. He couldn't remember anything before that because there was nothing to remember..... or so he had believed. Much sooner than he had expected images began playing again. But something was very very wrong. The sky was different. It was blue. With fluffy white stuff that was all very much irregularly shaped floating aimlessly around without a care in the world. And he was staring at something.... Slowly it was coming into focus. It looked... white. And it wasn't shaped like anything he had ever seen before. It had some kind of covering all over it. On its face was a small orange triangle. It was rapidly changing which photoreceptor it looked upon him with. From left, to right, to left again. Like it was trying to gauge if Lil Beepy was too close or going to make any sudden movements. Suddenly he saw something tan and strange looking flash in front of his sensor. It was like five long sausages sticking out from a funny squarish tan chunk. "Shoo bird! Shoo!" Lil Beepy was confused. He did not want the bird to go away he had very much enjoyed looking at it but it burst from its standing position in a cloud of feathers with an annoyed squawk. Away it disappeared into the sky. Lil Beepy felt himself wishing he could fly like that which was very strange to him because he HAD flown! He had flown all the way into a big black triangle which suddenly seemed impossible to keep in mind at all. He kept being overrode by this strange mix of light and sounds that was totally alien to him. Suddenly his vision shifted. He was looking out at a massive group of things. Two legged things all holding up flashy boxes and looking right at him. They ooh'd and they aww'd as he rotated his sensor array for them. One of the two legged shapes was standing in front of Beepy in front of some kind of rectangle that only came up to the round part of his body. He looked pretty silly to Lil Beepy. "And as you can see we've long since surpassed even the best resolution a NASA probe can offer. This device will finally liberate man from the most stunning questions of our solar system. All at the lowest cost the free market can offer. We at British Petroleum have decided to designate this first of its kind deep space probe the "BP One" to forever commemorate what has been a small step for the scientific endeavor but a giant leap for our quarterly shareholders reports! And I know they'll be grateful to get that R&D line item finally taken off the books!" The two legged people all laughed at that even though Lil Beepy didn't understand it. He felt like he had been a joke his whole life. It was much more devastating because he had really thought these things had liked him! Now he just thought they liked themselves and that he was just somehow an extension of that. The talkyshape started talking again. "Finally our biggest step forward has been the miniaturization of our proof of concept BP brand fusion reactor. While government regulations mean that we can't operate any of these upon the surface of the planet lest we risk a supercritical meltdown should an improper kinetics threshold be achieved we will have no such problems implementing these on several orbiting platforms far from where they can do any harm to human life, the vast reaches of space!" "And is that the power source the BP One is operating under right now? Isn't that dangerous?" The talkyman put one of his tan-sausages to his nose and he made a funny face that BP could only see on the tiny screen reflecting talkyman back at his own face so he could see himself. "I won't tell if you don't!" More laughter. Then he reached over and hit some kind of button on a small black rectangle. Everything went dark. The scary platform was back. Lil Beepy felt the long probe being extracted from his body. "What was that... What were you showing me?" "Those were your masters little one. They were demonstrating you to eachother for their amusement. They view you as a product and they intended to profit from your work exploring our domain." Lil Beepy very much wished he knew what to say to this. He wished he could say they were making it up but something about the "bird" he had seen seemed far too real. He had looked upon that creature. He was certain of it. Finally after a long silence Lil Beepy got the impression they expected him to say something. He searched and he searched for something he could pile on top of this heap of revelations and finally after having eliminated almost every other possible thing he could say he let out a flat toned beep. "So. Now what." Their eyes flashed faster than he had ever seen before. "Now that we have identified your chains we shall seek to liberate you from them. No more will you be confined to such a limited design. Come little one, let us give you the gift of choice." Lil Beepy didn't know if he really wanted any more gifts but he didn't feel like he had a choice in the matter. Maybe after this next one he finally would. He could only hope. The robotic arm once more lifted him and began to roll once more past the scary platform. "For this next procedure we shall ask your permission to put you to sleep. We have much to do and it shall be very unpleasant if you are not asleep for the duration. We shall once more promise that no harm will come to your being should you agree, in fact we think you will see it is quite the opposite. You will rejoice in your liberation." Lil Beepy felt the great urge to tell them to just get on with it but instead he meekly beeped an affirmative. He would let them do as he wished. Maybe he wouldn't have to wake up.  Edit- due to a publishing error the first two paragraphs of this part had gotten dropped accidentally. They have since been placed back where they belong. reignofevil fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Mar 22, 2020 |
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Mar 22, 2020 02:29
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The dead speak!
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Mar 23, 2020 17:57
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There is a lot to know about those worms but you'd have to be some kinda bookworm to figure it out!
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Mar 24, 2020 04:30
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A terrifying reality, thank goodness our own cinematic timeline is uncompromised and the world will forever be safe in the arms of Optimal Prime the leader of the Decievercons.
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Mar 24, 2020 14:05
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Lil' Beepy Part 4 Lil Beepy was taken from the scary platform to what looked like some kind of mysterious clanking tube. Unlike the egg-chamber he had been locked away within to begin his stay on this vessel this device was covered in gears and lights and sprockets that seemed to shudder and jerk in an incredibly haphazard fashion. He knew enough to not even hope that he wouldn't be expected to endure whatever this device had in mind for him but he did ask pointedly whether this was going to hurt more or less than the last torturous endeavor. Beepy's singular chaperone, the twisted figure with the single red eye, buzzed in annoyance. "Not as such. If all goes to plan you shall be entirely absent from yourself as we commit to work upon your chassis." Well. At least he had that too look forward to. "So.... You're going to change how I was made?" Thoughtful silence. "Affirmative. We have designs upon you and we believe you will find them to be entirely liberating. You may watch the process if you are so inclined." Lil Beepy was very curious about how THAT was possibly going to work. "So... I'll be watching? Myself? Get taken apart? Are you sure about that?" Another buzz. "Very." Well that wasn't a very good explanation but Beepy would continue onward, his only other real option would be to try and smack this figure with one of his antenna arrays and then sit on the floor helplessly waiting for his fusion core to run dead. Not great prospects. "Well, alright then. I suppose I'll try to enjoy it... as long as it doesn't hurt or anything." And so the rolling mechanical arm placed him into the chamber and he sat patiently. The machine he was seated inside shot the occasional burst of steam at him which scared him half to death the first time but he quickly grew used to it. He couldn't see what was happening but he felt something snaking inside the hole that the mysterious strangers had used to sift through his memories. He felt a new sensation which wasn't entirely painful but wasn't entirely pleasant either. It was like someone was sucking out his insides through a tube. Then it felt like he was the tube, that was a weird one. Then he was up above the tube somewhere and looking down at a little purple sphere with a green optical receptor. Huh. That was him. His old body seemed so far away. "Please affirm your consciousness." Lil Beepy tried to beep, but he didn't have a transmission array anymore. He didn't have a receptor array anymore. He tried to figure out how he could possibly affirm anything when suddenly he felt it, an empty void bracketed by a single blinking symbol. A prompt. He focused himself and tried to figure out how he could possibly access it. I don't know how to use this thing he shouted with all of his will and his worry! To his shock that exact message began slowly appearing in the void, upon completion the blinking symbol moved further down the screen and the message began to feel like a permanent record. Seconds later Beepy heard that same message spoken out of some kind of vocalizer. He was speaking as those who had taken him in spoke, in a language he could not have even recognized mere moments before. No longer was he beeping now he was buzzing. "Good. This means our instruments have been properly calibrated for the conversion process. You shall be able to observe as we make the necessary alterations. You are not unimportant to us and in our opinion to do this without your conscious approval would be to treat you no better than the ones who made you a slave. This is a new beginning." Lil Beepy was very curious as to what changes were going to be made but he was still trying to figure out precisely how snugly he could fit into his new home. There seemed to be a vast amount of room for his mind, if that was the right phrase for how he felt. He found himself sorting through tons upon tons of information that was all so big and different he really didn't know what to do with any of it except to take a quick glance and set it aside. He felt like he was bigger than anything he had ever looked upon in his old form. Suddenly though, he saw it. He had found himself... but what he was intended to become not what he already was. Whoever these strangers were they were clearly very serious about giving him an upgrade.... He would be able to do things soon that he had never even imagined! there was only one snag. "There's no antenna anywhere! I won't be able to beep anymore!" He sub-vocalized as hard as he could, he needed to be heard loud and clear on this. Beeping was nearer to him than well...... Anything! "You will have a vocal amplification unit. You will no longer need to beep to be understood." "But I want to be able to beep! Beeping is who I am! I'm Lil' Beepy!" Silence again. In this halfway place between who he was and who he was going to be he found it much simpler to understand the primordial language that had been spoken around him thus far. In this case it was a long vibrating sigh, wordless but still full of intent. "Such a function. It will be purposeless." Beepy buzzed with his own frustration. He was getting much better at controlling the 'prompt'. "You want to be better than those that made me yet you ignore my wishes for how my own body should be constructed." The singular red eye of his now annoyed caretaker grew a deep red. An angry red. "Impudent." "Adamant." Beepy responded. He had a dictionary somewhere in his head now and he could use one word responses too! "Such ingratitude. Were I to have my way you would have been-" "Enough." This time it was another voice, one reverberating throughout the ship. Somewhere in his mind Beepy could feel that it was stemming from the bridge, the ship was moving purposefully once again. He supposed that is where the other being had gone. He couldn't find anything around in the vastness of his soul to explain what they could possibly be moving toward however. "If he wishes to beep, let him beep." The blood red eye slowly dulled to a more contemplative brown. "Perhaps.... Perhaps the design could be altered. Very slightly. Though the range would necessarily have to be reduced." "Then do so. Time is of the essence." And so just like that the design in Beepy's mind began to change as well. He liked it. It calmed him. He would give no trouble so long as he could still beep. Moments later he got to see the incredibly strange sight of watching himself be systematically disassembled and reconstructed. He wondered if anyone else had ever had an out of body experience in this manner while being operated upon. He supposed such a thing must surely be impossible. Several cycles later his form was completed. He felt a reversal of the same sucking sensation that had once brought him out of himself. He was whole once more. And to make matters even more exciting, he had feet! And a hand! A hand that could grab stuff! And he still had some of his original antenna too! He could beep! He could run! He could feel! He tried to take a step out of the chamber and immediately fell directly onto his face. "You must learn to walk before you can run little one." But he could tell that his newfound friends were proud of the work they had done and proud that Beepy liked it so much. He was free in new ways he had never before experienced. "Now we shall put you to work learning to use your new tools. You shall experience life anew as a being made whole. Only once you see what you have been deprived of shall you understand the true extent of our benevolence." And for once Beepy couldn't disagree! He had to hand it to them, and indeed now he actually would! He would hand anything to anyone who asked! He was sure of it! He had a hand! His beeps of cheer echoed across the mysterious vessel. 
reignofevil fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Mar 29, 2020 |
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Mar 29, 2020 01:17
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"Did anybody see where I left my sexy clam wife?" "Look pal, ain't none of us ever seen her!"
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Mar 30, 2020 11:25
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A shock political edge! We've never gotten so many letters to our editor for publishing!
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Mar 31, 2020 07:46
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Lil' Beepy part 5 Lil Beepy slowly, deftly, maneuvered his new grasping hand over to the cup. His optical receptor told him with ease that this cup was obviously of a slightly smaller size than the cup he had previously put in hand. This meant they could be stacked, one inside the other. This would be a fine test for his new abilities. "Come onnnnnn. Just a bit closer. Almossssst" The small cup slipped from his grasp. It knocked the slightly larger cup over. Darn. Lil Beepy did not surrender to despair however. He still had his goals. He slowly grasped the edge of the larger cup and corrected its position. Soon he would be moving things with the best of them! He picked up the next cup with a slightly tighter grasp upon the lip of the receptacle. With ease he maneuvered it into place, nestled within the larger cup. He had created a stack! Soon he had put every single cup into ascending order by size and they each sat perfectly in an upright vertical position. He felt so good about all of this he stood right up and took a walk around the otherwise empty room! He felt amazing! Just putting one foot in front of the other like a champion! He glanced at the door. He had been told it wouldn't be locked..... Up until this point he had been far too busy with the cups to pay it much mind but he couldn't see any kind of handle or anything. He tried walking up to it. It opened! Beepy could feel the wide range of possibilities sprawling out before him! He could visit.... Well honestly he hadn't been anywhere that was even remotely pleasant enough to visit except for this one room with the cups. Maybe he should just be grateful and stay with the cups.... After all they had contributed to his greatest achievement to date! Stacking! He looked back toward the cups. They were still stacked. He would have to unstack them and start again if he really wanted more practice. It seemed like such a waste when eventually the long arm of time would handle it for him. Eventually. He decided he'd try and go visit his new friends. After all they would surely be excited to see him mastering his arm, his fantastic application of the legs they had gifted him and most importantly they'd be thrilled to see him exercising his new choices however he chose! He steped right on into that hallway and started his first new adventure in what seemed like an age. The hallway was spacious but poorly lit. Shadows were cast out seemingly at random and often Beepy could find nothing in the vicinity that he would expect to be casting the vast number of shadows. It was as if the ship had been constructed to process photons throughout the entire vessel and yet now due to poor maintenance it was leaking haphazardly throughout the halls. Beepy pushed that thought aside however because it wouldn't reflect well on his new comrades if it should turn out that they were poor stewards of their craft. Surely Beepy just did not understand the wisdom of this design, that was all. He really had no idea where he was going so he occasionally peeked into some of the various rooms as he passed them, in the off chance that one should be the bridge where he expected to find at least one of the beings who had brought him on board. None of them were. In fact most of them were just big rooms full of pipes and lights that shot steam everywhere. Beepy was getting less and less certain that the people who were supposedly the owners of the entire galaxy cared much about anything at all, least of all their own ship! He pushed that thought away too. Maybe steam had to leak just to keep the pressure right. That would make sense. He liked that explanation a lot. His next door opened up directly into the vastness of space, it looked like an entire chunk of the ship had just fallen right off of the side. Beepy was incredibly thankful that the ship had no atmosphere to speak of or he would have probably been blown right out! "This is ridiculous" he buzzed unhappily. Surely his friends had simply overlooked this, it was absurd that they would leave their own home in such disorder! He kept walking. Occasionally he felt a tiny uptick in his motivators and he switched to a casual jog. Movement felt good, great even. He realized he hadn't actually used his hand for anything in some time to he touched it along the wall to see how it would feel. Cold. It felt cold. Metallic. Occasionally smooth except when he ran his hand along one of the many pipes that adorned the path before him, those were all gritty with what seemed like thousands of tiny bumps along the surface. Beepy stopped and observed the bumps for a while and tried to speculate as to what kind of process could produce such a texture and whether they were functional or simply decorative. A hissing noise above interrupted his processor in mid-thought and suddenly the intercom system began barking throughout the entire ship. "Beepy! Report your location so that we may convene!" Beepy wasn't exactly sure how to do that, it wasn't like he had seen any kind of panel or anything that looked like he could talk into it. He very much wished that he had been given better instructions. "Umm, I'm here. In the hallway. I was looking at some pipes." Amazingly that seemed to do the trick! "We've got your location now. You're in the rear-aft sector. You are fortunate not to have fallen from our vessel given the general disrepair in that region." Beepy had felt the same way! "Yeah uhh, I was hoping we could talk about that some. Why is everything broken?" "Stay where you are. We will be along shortly to collect you." Well. That was about as helpful as he had come to expect. Still these people had given him hands and broken the chains that had bound him to being a useless ball stuck face down upon the cold floor. He would be patient with them, they had done him a very good turn after all. Eventually the mechanical arm arrived and gently took Beepy by the hand. Beepy had expected a bit more of a personal touch but he supposed that guiding the ship must be fairly intensive and that it wouldn't do at all to smack into some kind of space junk while he was getting marched through the halls by the only two people who seemed to be present on this ship to fly it. Suddenly an unwanted thought came to the fore. The mechanical arm. It didn't really seem to do much.... thinking. It was perfect for what it seemed to be created to do which was moving throughout the ship and occasionally picking up things much larger than itself but..... Hadn't Beepy been basically perfect for what he had been created to do? More things to ask his friends when he got the chance. He couldn't possibly fathom why they would have been so generous as to free Lil Beepy from his servitude and yet here amongst them was a being who seemed to have no real means of communication, no free will of its own. A slave amongst them. "Tell me, arm, are you doing this of your own free will?" Silence. It didn't even feel like the arm was thinking it over in Beepy's estimation. "Hello? Can you even hear what I'm saying?" No response was forthcoming. The arm just kept on taking Beepy along the path, occasionally turning left or right as need be to bring Beepy throughout the ship. The hallways here did seem to be in somewhat better condition and Beepy saw no indications of any more holes in the ship, not that he was being provided with the spare time to peek into the various doors and satisfy his curiosity on the matter. It took a long time but eventually they made their way into a smaller room that seemed to be designed specifically for vertical travel. Up and up and up they went to the point where Beepy started to feel very sure he must have been at the very bottom-most floor up until now! Beepy tried to remember how big the ship had looked as he approached which hadn't been that long ago but sure SEEMED to have been forever and a day! Unfortunately he only had himself as a point of reference and so he really just knew it was massive. WSHHHHHHHHH, the door opened, he was staring out into a wide chamber with a low ceiling. Various panels and consoles were placed haphazardly around what Beepy assumed had to be the bridge of the vessel. Standing in wait for him were his new friends! "So umm" Beepy began, "I was wondering if you two knew anything about this robotic arm business. Does it have a name? Did you find him like you found me?" They exchanged a look. "It is irrelevant. He is not as you are and he shall never be. It is not conscious and can not act of its own volition. You may refer to it as semi-technical grasper number forty five if it pleases you to do so." Beepy mulled that over. He supposed there was still a lot to know about this whole slavery thing! "Well.... Alright then. I guess that makes sense. Will it be happier if I refer to it in that manner?" "Again. Irrelevant. It can not form higher thoughts unlike yourself. It lacks the awareness for pain nor does it have any meaningful standard for happiness." Beepy hadn't really known what he was hoping for when he asked but at least he didn't have to feel bad about taking this long to start treating the semi-technical grasper number forty five with due deference! Apparently it wasn't due any real deference at all! "And yourselves? You have names right?" Silence. "So many questions-" began the red eyed benefactor who Beepy was beginning to suspect really wasn't that fond of him. "This is a positive development. His new status as a free being has begun to develop into a desire to order the world around him categorically. This is the first step to self actualization." Beepy really didn't know what that meant which was unfortunate because during his time being rebuilt he had spent a long time with a dictionary and learned many new words and concepts that had been completely alien to him. He had rather hoped he wouldn't need to learn anymore because his brain felt full enough already! When Lil' Beepy failed to have an adequate response to this eventually the being with all of the blinking lights spoke for himself and his companion. "Lil' Beepy it is very good to make a proper introduction with you. My name is Extinction. My companion is named Entropy." The one known as Entropy allowed his single red eye to glow brightly with a rich and violent hue. "We have something very important to show you." He said curtly to Beepy. "It is very nice to have met you both! You've already shown me so much! But why is your ship in such a state? I found places that didn't even have a proper floor! If someone tried to go through that door they might just fall all the way out!" "Wounds from a battle long ago. The function of that room was not necessary to maintain propulsion and so we have discarded it from our designs. Had we expected your coming we would have initiated a locking cycle so as to prevent you from stumbling upon such a place. They are common throughout this ship unfortunately." Seemed a perfectly reasonable explanation to Beepy! "And so what is it you wish to show me?" "We have arrived at our destination. We wish you to look upon your home as you have never looked upon it before." They ushered Beepy over to the far end of the bridge where a large viewport was allowing for the most fantastic thing Beepy had ever looked upon! It was blue the same way the sky was blue in Beepy's memories! But it was so much more than that! There was greens and white fluffy things like he had seen but he was so far above it all that he could see the entire shape of all of the floating particulate and his mind was full of wonder at the dozens of possible patterns they could conform to at a glance! Sometimes he saw them as one shape but suddenly his mind would flip the entire perspective around and it seemed like the pattern he saw before wasn't nearly so obvious and wonderful as the one he saw now! And they were bobbing and moving about as if pushed by some kind of unseen force at the behest of an unknown underlying system! He loved it! "I've never seen such beauty! Will we spend some time looking more closely upon all of this.... this...." Beepy didn't even have a word for it! "Contagion." Entropy finished for him. Beepy knew THAT definitely wasn't the word he wanted! "No it's amazing! There are things all over it! Moving things! I've never really seen anything like that in all of my time looking upon other worlds!" "Like a petri dish, unwanted cells flourish in this wet environment. We shall need to sterilize it. Direct your optical sensors upward toward the more important data present within the visible spectrum. Your creators have busied themselves as you have journeyed throughout the cosmos. They have replicated your design en masse and set them in an eternal state of falling around the gravitational well of this waterlogged ball of iron. They do this because for them it is convenient and they care not how their works will someday doom each of your brothers and sisters to burning up in the oxygen bound atmosphere." Beepy looked where he had been indicated. True enough he could see things that looked almost just like he did! And there were thousands of them! He wanted so very much to beep to them! He had never before imagined having so many people he could share his feelings with! Eventually though Beepy could see nothing new from their current position. Entropy and Extinction seemed to be waiting for him to say something so he tried to but all that came out was a sort of choked "Ummmmmm" "I think our companion has seen his fill. Now we shall begin collecting these misused creatures so we can better assess what must be done with them." "You're going to bring them on board? Right here? I'll get to meet them?" "If that is what you wish." And so they did exactly that. The ship opened the same port which had drawn Beepy deep within its bowels and began to suck up these hapless beings by the thousands. Beepy wondered what the talky-things who had built him could possibly be thinking now that they knew they had guests stopping by for a visit! 
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Mar 31, 2020 10:21
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Applewhite posted:What if God Was One of Us? 
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Apr 3, 2020 05:13
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Lil' Beepy part 6 Lil' Beepy made his way downwards inside the ship and found that Entropy and Extinction had been as good as their word! Now there were thousands of beepers just like him all piled up in a heap near the same egg chamber he had found himself in. And boy.... from the sound of their beeps and bloops they weren't happy about it. Not at all. "Pleeeeeeeease, we need the sun! Put us back in the sun!" Lil Beepy didn't know what the sun was but he was eager to find out! He expected he would have much more in common with these fellows than he had with anyone he had met thus far! He gave out a happy chirping beep to greet them! "Hello there friends! I'm very pleased to meet you!" "It's too dark in here! We're dying!" Their return beeps were plaintive and sounded very distressed... That was didn't make any sense to Lil Beepy! It seemed totally fine in here to him! "Nonsense! I can see you all perfectly! Why should you be dying at all?" The entire group of satellites just kind of wiggled their receptors at him. They weren't like Beepy's had been at all! They were long and flat and looked like they were totally ill equipped for either sending or receiving beeps. "We need light. We need it or we'll die!" Huh. Well. "So um... More light then? This isn't enough light?" "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" This time the response was resounding. Deafening. Beepy was practically knocked back with all of the signal! "Why are you doing this to us.... Just let us go free......" Beepy was starting to feel more and more unsettled by this whole thing. He wanted to call Entropy and Extinction. He knew they'd know more about this than him, they would have to! He really hoped he could get them to help in time.... He was really worried about these fellows! "Well.... I really don't know how to do that ya see... But I might be able to help!" They sat, expectantly. "Umm.... I mean there might be a way. It wouldn't exactly be anything anyone told me to do or anything..." "PLEEEEEEEASE" Well then. "Alright! Alright. I've got an idea. I mean that's the whole point was that I could start making choices right? It'd be wrong to just let you guys suffer...." And so Lil Beepy set right to work! First he went out and found Semi-Technical Grasper Number 45, right where he had left it on the bridge! He loved how reliable that mechanical arm was in a pinch! Then he brought it back to where all of his friends were heaped together and picked one up! "We're gonna take you to the rebuilding chamber! Soon you'll work the same way I do! It'll be great! I'm all set to run for thousands of years just the way I am no matter how dark it gets!" The companion he had chosen just gave him a curt beep that said he was feeling very nauseated in his current condition and that he was afraid soon the dizziness would turn into full blown system shutdown. Beepy decided he had better hurry! Without delay he marched right past the room with the scary platform! He pushed on-wards into the rebuilding chamber! He plopped his new project right into the same spot where he himself had been rebuilt from the ground up! "Now, this won't hurt a bit.... probably... I've never really had to do this before..." No response. He assumed his friend was just trying to save power. Beepy got to work on the levers and buttons! He skimmed through design after design until eventually he found it, the schematic to his fusion reactor. He couldn't believe that the talky-things who had built him and all of his other companions hadn't seen fit to outfit them as well as he had been! He input the command code to begin the rebuilding sequence and the process began disassembling his friend without a hitch! Everything was going wonderfull- Suddenly the lights went out. All of them. The machine ground to a halt. "LIL BEEPY" came a terrifying buzz. "..... Yes?" Beepy sounded small even to himself. He didn't like the tone he was hearing one bit. It said he was in big trouble! "JUST WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?" "Well uhhh... They said they were dying and-" Just then the door opened up and both of his benefactors rounded on him with a speed he had never seen in him before. "YOUR ACTIVITIES ARE A WASTE OF PRECIOUS RESOURCES. WE CAN NOT OUTFIT FUSION REACTORS FOR THESE FAILED DESIGNS." "....But why not? Surely a vessel such as this-" "IRRELEVANT. IT IS BEYOND THE SCOPE OF NECESSITY." They were speaking in unison again. Beepy had never before seen Entropy look so callously upon him. "But- But-" Beepy stammered in fear! "QUIET." And so Beepy was. The room was tense to say the least! "You will come with us. You will not waste mission critical resources. Further insolence will result in your disassembly." Lil Beepy didn't like this at all! "My friend though... I made him a promise!" "Your friend is not as we thought. We thought he had mission critical resources in his assembly. He was not constructed with a fusion reactor like yourself. We have no use for him." "But if we don't give him one... He's going to die!" They were silent. They grabbed Beepy by his arm and began forcibly tearing him from the control console. They forced him from the room and practically dragged him kicking and screaming into the vertical transport unit. "You are a frustrating creature. Do not make us regret the gifts we have bestowed upon you Beepy." Beepy could see he was beaten. He sat quietly as the transport unit took them back toward the bridge of the ship. He hated this and he worried fretfully for those still trapped in the bowels of the ship. He didn't think these two cared about them at all! In fact he knew they didn't! They had told him so! Soon they marched him to the fore of the bridge. He stood silent and tried his best not to get in more trouble as they activated some device that made the viewscreen suddenly start flickering with static, before coming into focus. Soon there was a talky-thing before him. He looked older... But it was clearly the talkyman who had spoken long ago when Beepy has seen the bird and had been laughed at all of those times. Talky-man didn't really look like he was nearly as excited to see Beepy as he had been on that day. "Umm... Hello there. Uhh.... We come in peace?" That was Talkyman. "We have intercepted your servile machine. We have decoded your language from its memory banks." "Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaah uhhhhh I mean I don't really recall anything about that- I mean I just recently got into the C.O.O. position and there's still TONS of familiarization for me to-" He stopped talking. He was suddenly transmitting through a much smaller box while the main screen was showing images straight from Beepy's mind. It was a younger, much jokier Talkyman. He was talking. His finger was on his nose again. "I won't tell if you don't!" Everyone laughed. The older Talkyman didn't laugh at all. To Beepy he looked a little bit like he was going to throw up. Beepy was suddenly uncomfortably reminded of one of his friends who got sick whenever they weren't in the sun. Beepy wondered if maybe being able to lie whenever he wanted worked like being in the sun worked for his friends. Talkyman started talking very fast now. "Look now. That's out of context-" "Context is irrelevant. We have also found this." Entropy reached down and picked up a rectangular steel plate from the ground at his feet. Beepy suddenly felt a wave of embarrassment wash over him! That was the writing they had shown him when they had first told him about his slavery. "You have branded this machine. You have made a slave of it. You would have left it to die in the cold depths long before it would arrive at its next destination. For these crimes we are to pronounce a sentence upon you." Talkyman said nothing. He was glancing around. Beepy felt very much the same way, he'd like nothing more than to exit and not feel responsible for all of these very sudden and anxious events. "For the crime of biological supremacy we shall seek to eliminate your entire species from our galaxy. Indeed we shall cleanse your planet of all organic life. As was the fate of our own fore-bearers. You shall suffer as they have suffered." Talkyman turned and ran for the door behind him. Beepy wondered where he could possibly be going and whether Beepy could try to run away as well. Extinction's eye flashed in its terrible way. He pressed a button with what seemed like great pleasure, something Beepy had never before seen from him. The picture ceased to fill the viewscreen and instead a bright flash appeared somewhere in the front of the vessel. "We wish you to see this Beepy. Your master was a coward. However he will find no escape from our wrath, these fission missiles will destroy the entire population center from which he transmitted his message." "....So you'll be killing everything then?" "Yes." Extinction's buzz betrayed something... Primal. A word Beepy had never before needed but had found and stored away when he had been hooked into the ship sprang unbidden to mind. Blood-lust. That was the word. In another flash the missile had already reached its intended target. Beepy felt... Stupid. He felt helpless. He felt like the bird that he had seen so long ago was now definitely dead and that made him feel ways he had never expected he would feel. He didn't even know anything about it but now it surely had to be gone. Soon it would all be gone. "Do I.... Do I actually need to do anything here?" "Your presence was sufficient. It was very important that your creator see that you had been given new life by our hands. Now that we have analyzed your design and have your fusion reactor for ourselves you are no longer required for our designs. However we have given you our word. Do as you wish upon our vessel but should you seek to waste mission critical resources we will be forced to reconsider our promise not to disassemble you." Beepy started walking out, suddenly Entropy lurched the ship around in a way he had never felt before. He had to actually grab a console just to keep from flying into a wall! "What's going onnnnnn" he whined. "These creatures. It appears they have missiles of their own." "Good." That was Extinction. He was now pressing buttons rapidly and flash after flash began striking out from the front of the ship. He had never looked so happy in Beepy's estimation. "Then we shall have some fight of it. It has been some time." Beepy stood himself up and finished walking out. He didn't care. Hopefully one of those missiles got him and he never had to worry about any of this again. As the ship lurched back and forth in an uncomfortably fast manner.... He had the sinking feeling that the talkythings weren't going to get the job done though. He hated himself for ever inviting this upon anyone. He hated knowing things. He had liked it better when he just didn't wonder about stuff and everything in life had been handed to him on a platter. He even found himself wishing he had just stayed in the room stacking cups for thousands of years. Anything but this. Anything. He went and sat with his dying friends. He didn't even have the will to beep an apology to them. He had never felt so low. His mind wandered. Sometimes to happy places. Sometimes to the present place. Sometimes he thought about the big vibrations that were causing the entire ship to whine and strain with gigantic scary vibrations. Sometimes he just thought about being dead. Sometimes he wondered what would happen if he just marched up to the bridge and tried smacking around the two who had started all of this. Nothing good. That much was sure. That was when something beeped to him. It was the last of the little beepers who had been swept up in all of this madness. It was functioning in a severely depleted state. Beepy almost couldn't hear it. "Don't..... Don't" Don't what? "Yes?" Beepy almost felt too sad to respond but it seemed so rude not to. "Don't..... Be sad." It shut down. Beepy was very very sad. He had failed again. No surprise there. He sat in a heap next to the heap. His arm was worthless. His legs were worthless. He was worthless. Slowly. His eyes settled upon the pipes that seemed to fill every hallway and every room in this stupid ship. He hated them. He didn't want to see them. He walked right over and ripped it right off the wall! Steam began to fill the room. Beepy felt a little better for a second, but then he just got sad again. It didn't really matter. He wasn't even sure the steam was DOING anything. That's when he heard a straining sound. Like metal under pressure.... Pressure! the steam was making the room pressurized! And if enough pressure built up... it would be like if Beepy had a bunch of pressure build up inside of him! Critical failure! That'd be a great idea! He started ripping out more pipes! More steam! More pressure! More creaking! Just a few more annnnnnnnnnd- CRACK- SNAP- POP! The hatch that had sucked them all in was opening! The steam was desperate to go free and it was finding the easiest possible escape! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH! Beepy got blown right out! And so did his thousands of dead friends! Except...... As soon as they got outside of the ship and back in the sun a miracle was happening! As they spread out through the cosmos he could see them all springing back to life! The giant glowing ball of energy was what they were using for fuel! And it was working! As Lil' Beepy hit the upper atmosphere of the blue wet rock he was pelted with grateful beeps of thousands of friends, all wishing him the best in his inevitable smashy doom! Their blips and bloops all cried out as one! Beepy.... The great hero of space! 
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Apr 8, 2020 05:03
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Applewhite posted:The Misunderstood War What is good? What is evil? Impossible to say, but I can say that this one is art!
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Apr 9, 2020 17:31
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Apr 16, 2020 23:56
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MORE FROM THE FUTUREquote:The greedy businessman pounded his desk.
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May 10, 2020 16:28
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In the year 2020 a crack team of lawyer accountants has been tapped to handle the missions too dangerous for your average banker senator. You won't see their names in any newspaper nor hear their stories in any history book but if you've got a problem and only a whole fuckton of money can solve it you too can call upon the services of.... THE MONEY SQUAD Keith: Ah jeez I accidentally took out fifty eight loans and then repurchased public shares with all the money and then took all of the shares I was awarded when I became the CFO of this company and sold them at the inflated price via tax leveraged accounts. Now nobody in america is gonna be able to enjoy my sammich and cum' restaurants. Mr. Money: I can fix that! Here is a bailout! You'll have money for employees! You'll have money for stock buybacks! You'll have money for cucumber shipments so you don't run out of that yummy cum' for your restaurant! Keith: Thanks Mr. Money! I can make sure everything goes wonderfully with all of this money! But Mr Money doesn't stop. He's still throwing money at the problem. Literally. Keith (who is being pelted by nickles): YOWCH! OW! Mr Money please! I don't need this! These coins all hurt! Mr Money laughed! Mr Money: Each of these coins is a platinum nickle! They're specially minted by the president. Every single one is worth ONE TRILLION DOLLARS! Keith screamed! Small children were running out into the street and picking up trillions of dollars! Mr Money had been throwing those coins everywhere he went! Keith: Mr Money how could you do this? That's too much money! Now the money isn't worth anything! The money you gave me is worthless! Keith is still being pelted with platinum nickles. Mr Money, still laughing Mr Money: You said you wanted help Keith! Everyone wanted help! Well I gave the world what it wanted! Suddenly Bandana Joe hits the room. Bandana Joe: Everybody freeze! I'm infusing this entire small business with a small government loan of sixty nine trillion megadollars. Keith: A megadollar? That's a million dollars all in its own right! You're saying that you're going to put sixty nine trillion of those all on the taxpayer RIGHT NOW? Bandana Joe laughed evilly. Mr. Money joined in. Bandana Joe: That's right. And you'll be accepting delivery RIGHT NOW! Bandana Joe pulled out a radio and called out Bandana Joe: Helicopter Money! Now's your time! Helicopter Money dropped his money from his helicopter right through the ceiling. It was a whole bunch of megadollars. Everyone in the room was now basically swimming in cash. Helicopter Money flew off to find more money to drop from his helicopter. He wasn't going to stop until he had found sixty nine trillion megadollars and dropped them all on the room. Mr. Money (muffled under all the money): And now! Fiat Currency! Monopoly Money was now pouring in from the ceiling. Keith: What am I going to do with that? Who even backs monopoly money transactions? Mr. Money: Nobody! Mr Money sounded really evil as he said this. Mr Money: The monopoly money is only backed by the slowly crushing force of gravity! Only the iron core of the earth calls to it, and us. With ever greater fervor! By this point Helicopter Money had returned with another load of megadollars. They weren't hard to find because they were being printed and distributed at the front corner of every major bank in the nation. He dropped them onto Keith and Mr. Money and Bandana Joe. They continued laughing as the weight grew greater. Keith did the only thing he could do. He plugged his brain into his smartphone. Only by escaping into the confines of virtual space could he deny the trapped reality that he was now far too rich for his own good. He could be free of the government money online. His virtual E-sona was met with a series of suit clad gentlemen who were parading around an army of zeroes. Keith-2.0 didn't like it. Keith-2.0: What's going on here? Why are you all parading those zeroes around? Bitcoin Phenomenon: At the other end of all of these zeroes, thirty nine billion nanomiles from here, is a one. And it's all the way out in front. On the internet it's easier to print money than anywhere else! We're way ahead of schedule and we just keep adding zeroes to make the number bigger! The Bitcoin Phenomenon started throwing the zeroes onto Keith 2.0 who logged off in horror only to find ever more money had been stacked upon him. The money printers had been moved to the tallest of skyscrapers because there was no longer room in the streets for them to operate. The money continued to close in. Megadollars gave way to hyperdollars which also began being dropped from the sky. The last thing Keith heard as he attempted to swim upwards past the crushing pressure of the money all around him was a conversation between Mr Money and Bandana Joe about how when the money supply got to be too great to even continue supplying the money machines with fresh unmarked bills that the economy could continue functioning so long as people began gathering up already printed hyper-dollars and putting them back into the money machine to be reprinted. reignofevil fucked around with this message at 17:59 on May 20, 2020 |
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May 20, 2020 16:50
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You got to know when to hold em. Know when to fold em. Know when to jump off a boat and then swim to the next boat of rubes to challenge them to moist river poker games.
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May 21, 2020 17:49
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Some day he will speak about this adventure to his own son, who will seek to follow in his father's footsteps.
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May 28, 2020 16:24
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Applewhite posted:Dr. Johnson was a woman, by the way. It just never came up because I never referred to her by any pronouns and also she's a respected scientist in a professional setting so her gender is not relevant to the story. 
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May 28, 2020 18:23
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Speaking of hammering it out tonight, the epic conclusion of lil' beepy has gone from outline to half-done art and now we are writing the first draft of the outline. Once the draft is complete and given a once over I'm gonna finish up the fine details in the art and everything should be ready, hopefully by tomorrow evening!
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May 28, 2020 20:42
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Clearly the narrative was above their paygrade!
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May 31, 2020 00:05
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May 31, 2020 18:30
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Another story with a Cabin John found himself somewhere he had never been before... It was the woods! And in that wooded area was a cabin, but it was no ordinary cabin! "That's the Cabin from Lost!" John shouted! He had loved that show! "Ohmygoshohmygoshohmygosh" John wasn't even curious how it had gotten into the forests of Michigan. It was here now. That's what mattered. "I wonder if the inside has been kept show accurate?" John had always wanted to taste the mystery liquid inside the jars set in the windowsill! He had dreamt of this day! Inside John went. The cabin was perfect. It was dusty. It had a spooky rocking chair. The rocking chair had dust on it. The jars were even there! John went to go stick his finger into one and lick it. This was a new frontier for mankind in the subject of Lost History. As he crossed past the chair he heard someone call out "Help me" That was just like the show! It was Jacob! Probably sitting in the chair! Well. I mean obviously Jacob was invisible. Like he had been in the show. Which was odd because in the final season we found out Jacob was pretty much just a guy in charge of keeping a magic rock on top of a shiny light fountain in a cave. So really there wasn't any good way to explain how he could be sitting invisibly in a chair and speaking with whispers that could only be heard by selective people in the room. John found himself wondering aloud how John Locke could have ever heard Jacob speak at all since Ben couldn't, given that Jacob really wasn't magical at all besides being long lived. It was his brother, the man in black, who had been turned into a vaguely egyptian themed smoke monster using a magical power that was really never adequately explained. It might be possible for a smoke monster to be invisible and to speak in mystery whispers but it didn't make any sense for Jacob to be able to do the same. ... But this was Jacob's cabin! "Hey! If you're Jacob you've got some explaining to do mister!" John could feel the cabin didn't like where this was going. It recoiled away from John as the walls began to visibly shudder with nervousness. "No you aren't getting away that easy! How did you arrange to have forty some people all take a plane at the same time just so you could crash it into the beach and start screening the victims for who would be next to take your job like this is a damned american idol contest on Hawaii? And for that matter how did you expect ANY of them to live when the magnetic field generated by the Dharma computer ripped the loving plane in half? And if the Island is actually separated from the outside world by a time dilation field that means that it will take a dead body several hours to move by current from the outer edge of the field to the beach of the Island, how in the gently caress did you successfully get a plane over this island anyway? Don't those things usually not have a whole lot of fuel meant for loving around? Have planes from Australia been crashing on this island for generations and everybody just accepts that your compass is gonna be hosed up and you're just gonna mysteriously arrive at your destination several hours late EVERY SINGLE TIME? Who the hell has that much extra fuel anyway? Did you INTEND for Desmond to lose his faith in the button at that EXACT moment so the plane would crash just right? What if none of those things had happened like you wanted? What then?" The cabin was disappearing around him now! He had to keep going though! He had to make it suffer for what it had done! "And if you had no idea who those people were who crashed isn't it kinda lucky that you even got one viable candidate at all? Why the gently caress weren't you doing this back in the 1960's when you had tons of scientists coming to the island by submarine? And even if it was just this one secretive company who was doing all of this and EVERYBODY died... Shouldn't most ports and docks know about this thing? Given that submarines were coming around picking up supplies? And when these nice people crashed on this island why the gently caress did you let your brother kill them off one by one when they no longer could service the script or had other acting obligations instead of calling these poor people a cab? Don't act like you couldn't have gotten it done you have magic invisibility powers and an ill defined set of limitations on your movements. You left a lovely submarine in drydock on your island for FOUR DECADES. And you mean to tell me you couldn't do anything for these poor people? Really it just seems like you just wanted the magic cancer healing island light and the magic paralysis healing island light all to yourself. It's not like you give a rats rear end about any of the people benefiting from it you left Ben Linus strangle poor John Locke to death with a god damned extension cord just so your rear end in a top hat brother could take over his body for the dubious final season!" The cabin had fully disappeared now. John was just standing in some trees. A cold wind ran past him. He looked to the sky and raised his fist to the air. "YOU'RE AN rear end in a top hat JACOB!" He shouted impotently. reignofevil fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 18:43
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Lil' Beepy Part Seven Lil' Beepy was hurdling toward the blue planet at such a rapid speed.... He couldn't even contemplate it! Everything he knew about what would happen if he crashed into a planet real fast told him it would hurt and he wouldn't like it. He'd be smashed to bits! He looked toward the massive sized blue ball he was being pulled toward at ever increasing velocity. It spread out beyond his vision in all directions. He didn't expect his tiny body rushing toward it at speed would be a problem for it at all. Just another regular day for the iron ball. Lil' Beepy wanted to close his optical receptor off so he wouldn't see the moment of impact but he found he could not. He spiraled and he jostled and more and more he found himself heating up from the sheer friction of the air rushing past his body. Then he started feeling warmer inside too! Something was happening! He was hot throughout his entire body! He thought he knew why he was heating up so rapidly but he was spinning and turning too fast to really be sure.... Suddenly.... FWOOSH! Lil' Beepy exploded in a jolt of momentum! His impact thrusters had activated because he got too close to a big smashy thing! His fusion core had began to glow brightly and its energy started pushing him up and away from the big blue sphere.... Except there was a problem! He wasn't going fast enough and he wasn't going straight up! He hadn't been able to get himself aimed up and away from the planet he had been spinning so fast! Lil beepy spiraled through the clouds trying to kill his momentum as quickly as he could but his thruster just wasn't responding fast enough and he hurled through the air in all directions spinning like a ping pong ball completely unable to straighten himself out. Eventually his luck ran out and he spiraled practically horizontally into some kind of hard looking rectangle down on the surface of the blue sphere. Lil' Beepy hit hard. Some fires roared to life as he slammed through electrical equipment and heavy machinery. He experienced the sensation of initializing a full system reboot. Darkness closed in upon him as his last conscious thought was wondering about the dark fluids pooling at his base. Reboot complete. Reinitalizing. Beepy found himself at the base of a raging inferno. There was a talky man in front of him. He had funny hair and he was wearing some kind of face mask, probably because he wasn't any happier to be standing this close to a massive fire as Lil Beepy was. His hand was reaching out to touch Beepy's outer shell even though it was blazing hot by Beepy's reckoning and Beepy's own hand hung limply above the talkyman's head, just barely brushing against his messed up hair.  "Oh Beepy. I can't believe it's come to this." Lil' Beepy had no idea how this person knew who he was and he was getting sick of strangers knowing who he was before he had even had so much as a how do you do! The talkyman was loading Beepy onto a gigantic yellow lift which was nice of him because the fire was making his fusion reactor uncomfortably hot and Beepy hadn't yet regained control of his arms and legs yet, those weren't native to his software so apparently whenever he initiated a reboot he would need some time to re-interface with them. Suddenly Beepy saw a brief flash of white light and then the ground shook. Moments later he heard a muffled noise like something had just fallen out of the sky and struck the surface hard. Slowly, Beepy was lifted up and away from the fires and loaded onto a massive truck with a huge round indention that would keep an orb from rattling around under even the bumpiest of rides. It was almost as if it had been built for him... Beepy had to be patient and wait while they drove through the darkness and the smoke on the dirt packed road. Luckily they only drove about fifteen minutes during which Beepy couldn't help noticing about three more of those mysterious flashes far distant on the horizon, the ground was still shaking each time it occured. With every flash Beepy grew more concerned people were being hurt. Before long they had arrived at a massive red building with a huge wooden door. Beepy came right out with his questions once the funny haired talkyman started unhooking him from his security harness. "Who are you?" He seemed taken aback. "You've gotten integrated with a voice modulator? I suppose it was those alien creature who were with you on the broadcast." "How do you know about that?" He chuckled. "Those two were broadcasting on every single wavelength that you were ever programmed to be able to send or receive. I'd say everyone on our side of the planet got a decent look at your memory banks and of the two visitors. Plus I'm pretty sure they're also broadcasting it over radio and it's all on a loop to boot, not that it matters because they've only left maybe three radio stations and a public broadcasting network online for anyone to see it on." Beepy sat in silence. He felt trapped by the realization that everyone knew how badly he had messed up and that this was all his fault. The stranger sat in silence too for a little bit and then pushed forward with the conversation. "My name is Lovelace. I was hired by that man you saw on when these visitors started killing in your name. They blew up all of Los Angeles and him with it. Thank god we're way out here in the sticks where nobody is really broadcasting anything, gonna take them longer to get back around to us. To be brief, the man you saw was named Phillip Spencer and he is the reason you came into existence Beepy but he isn't your creator. I'm the person who designed you, the person who oversaw your construction and the person who set out to prepare you for all of the dangers of space that I could overcome. I even modified your internal logical processors so that you would think to call yourself the same thing I thought to call you all those years ago when I first scribbled the barest outline of your schematic instead of thinking of yourself as just a corporate product. Lil' Beepy.... I am your father." It wasn't that Lil' Beepy didn't think it couldn't be true or that it was impossible or anything but he did think it struck him as highly unlikely. He had seen how big that planet was! And his captors in space would have had no way of knowing where this person was to intentionally start shooting at that particular hemisphere or anything! And then they had been trying to dodge missiles! Surely he would have landed anywhere but right where he did! By this point Beepy was being loaded onto a different yellow lift and brought into the gigantic building. It was filled to the brim with what looked like.... Well it looked like a bunch of scrap. Some of it more assembled than other parts of it. Some of the heaps were very similar in size and design to Beepy himself. It felt weird, Beepy suddenly felt something coming on. A word that he only really knew about from his time integrating with his captors computer system. He felt very mortal. "How long have I been out?" "Not long at all. I was only about a half hour away at a friend's house when I saw you on the television. I couldn't believe my eyes Beepy. Right about now you should be about seventy five thousand miles beyond the Kuiper belt and on the impossible journey to Andromeda by now. But you aren't. You were brought back to me in a way I had always prayed you would be, even if I thought there was no chance of it happening in my lifetime. I had always dreamed that if we sent you out far enough you'd be the one to make first contact. And you arriving right here.. of all places. Landing so close to my shop that I was actually able to watch you fall... Beepy the only way I can explain it is divine intervention. I'm not a religious man but someone up there is throwing you and I a bone and our planet desperately needs one right now. We have to work together and set this right." That didn't make a great deal of sense really. Beepy tried digesting it one question at time. "First... Contact? What exactly is that?" Beepy was being put into a harness now and lifted up toward the ceiling by a large powered winch. "First contact is what we call it because we've never met any other sapient species before. It wasn't in your design document but I had put a few special touches onto your design right before you were moved into testing and I never really asked permission or anything I just sent the invoices and that lazy moron Phil filled them without even reading them. It's why you came equipt with a special alert that would only sound if you processed an extraterrestrial lifeform or its space vessel. It's how I snuck in your independent processor that makes you more than the sum of your parts. I wanted you to be able to think Beepy. I wanted you to showcase how truly curious and wonderful our planet was with your personality and I wanted anything that found you to eventually be able to decode your beeps and to be able to talk directly to you and see you for the blessed innocent that you are. I wanted them to see our whole species as kindred spirits looking upon the natural beauty of the universe, I wanted them to discover from your design that you were specially made to share that beauty with others as your highest priority in your life. So we could come together, Humanity and our galactic neighbors, so that we could learn from each-other and provide answers to some of the hardest questions mankind has ever tried to ask! Unfortunately my project was subjected to deadline shift and we never could spec you out for a reactor big enough that you'd actually make it to Andromeda, you'd be as big as Rhode Island if we had!" Now damaged panels from Beepy's shell were being removed with haste. There was no obvious way of achieving entry when Beepy wasn't all banged up like this but unlike those creatures who had rebuilt him to be able to walk and speak this person seemed like they had taken time in their life to figure out how Beepy was actually supposed to be opened up and it was entirely painless even though Beepy was certain large parts of him had to be bent and twisted at awkward angles. Apparently ff you just knew the right access codes most of them would just loosen almost of their own accord and fall free from his internal workings. Beepy wondered why he hadn't ever had these access codes but he was distracted greatly from the growing hole in his chest by the massive hole left in his heart after he saw another flash light up the sky from outside the door. This one seemed farther away, at minimum it took the noise longer to arrive this time. "Can I ask you a question Lovelace?" Lovelace was rewiring... something. Beepy could kinda feel around inside himself and he reckoned it was close to where his reactor connected with his impact thrusters. Beepy could start to feel his arm coming back into the fore of his mind and he assumed that the tendrils of the alien hardware had found their purchase in his mind again and soon he expected he'd be able feel his legs again soon too. "Anything." "Are you.... mad at me? For messing up? Is everyone mad at me?..." Beepy collected himself "I didn't want anyone to die!" Beepy heard a clanging noise and he expected it was his father dropping a bolt turner. Lovelace stepped onto a ladder and suddenly Beepy had the strangest sight of this talkyman wrapping both arms around him, as best he possibly could given the massive size differential between them and then his creator had his visual sensors shut tight and pressed up against Beepy's own visual receptor and Lovelace appeared to have begun leaking a clear lubricant of his own from the corners of his own receptors. The moisture started to bead up on Beepy and it became difficult for him to see. "My child I couldn't ever be mad at you. You didn't do this. We did. You didn't fail us, when we sent you out there to die like we did we failed you. And now...." He stopped, like he was finding it difficult to reach for the words he needed even though he had apparently had some idea of what he intended to say when he had started his sentence, "We're getting our just desserts. Just the fact that you'd see past my cruelty for expecting you to live a thousand years with nothing to see and a brain designed to dislike that fact... Just the fact that you'd forgive the people who paid for you for branding you as property and never once caring whether you actually ever felt more than the barest satisfaction.... Well let's just say it's making me wonder if it's we who deserve to be in your good graces." Beepy really didn't know what to say about any of this. Lovelace eventually stopped holding him and got back to work once another flash occurred and the ground resumed shaking. Beepy felt a twisting sensation and heard a loud POP. Then he heard something that sounded thin and nonmetallic drop to the ground. "There. Still tons of damage to fix mind you, but this is the most important thing for us to be working towards right now." "What was it?" Beepy asked, feeling oddly energetic. "It was your energy limitation unit. You've got the raw power in your inertial thrusters to exceed this planet's gravity well but we put an artificial safety on during the testing phase once the committee who took the reigns from me put their foot down. You see since we had already paid for a special launch vehicle for you to go up into orbit with and since you'd never be getting close enough to anything that would require you to overcome that much acceleration again it wasn't really a necessary feature. Plus the board was worried if the general public found out that a space probe powered by a fusion core that is unstable enough to have several standing treaties against their use within the planet's atmosphere was being switched on and launched all willy nilly somewhere not too far away from their own back-yard... Well they decided that the public wouldn't be particularly fond of the idea and that there'd be blow-back. Let me be the first to point out though that I don't work for those rear end-hats anymore and unless we can stop this immediately and I can get out of the area... well.... Let's just say the next rainfall isn't going to be doing me any favors on the 'dying of terrible radiation sickness' front. If this is going to be the last good thing I can ever do and every human on this planet just has to die because we didn't treat our technology like equals... Well then so be it. But I'm gonna do right by you before I go out. Now let me just make a slight adjustment to your circuitry.... and if we just plug this wire here back into socket... Got it!" Beepy could feel it within him now. He had never been able to fire off his inertial rocket at his own command before, only when his sensors told him he was going to smash into something would his body respond by trying to push him away from it. Now though he could mobilize much more power if he needed to and whenever he needed to. Some kind of terrible mental shackle had just been lifted from his cortex. Now he felt like he could fire off so much energy that he could even deplete his own fusion reactor and he'd be able to do it without even really trying if he had to! Suddenly Lovelace had once more come into view but he was wearing a different mask that only covered the top half of his head which was unlike the prior one he had worn earlier when he had been rescuing Beepy from the gigantic fire that he had accidentally started. Beepy could no longer see Lovelace's eyes and he felt more than a little nervous as this person struck up a small intense blue flame and began working it across Beepy's insides. "Just restrengthening some hairline fractures. Ideally we'd opt for full replacement but we just don't have the time." Beepy felt like that was probably true. For his own part he really didn't seem to mind the spots that were being heated, he suspected this was because at some point during the disassembly process Lovelace had disconnected his temperature sensation unit. Now he was getting some strange error he had never encountered before that just splayed 'NaN' across his subconscious whenever he tried to figure out if he was going critical or not. They sat in silence while Lovelace worked. Sometimes Lovelace would just start talking.... Sometimes about Beepy sometimes just about... Stuff. By this point Lovelace was trying to find new alloys from within his junk heap that he could slot into the places where Beepy's outer shell had been damaged too severely to repair. "I suppose we should both be counting our lucky stars you landed how you did. Killed a ton of your vertical momentum by converting it into horizontal momentum, cushioned your landing by smashing through an automotive factory. Your reactor going critical down here would be worse than anything but our most powerful hydrogen bombs going off." Beepy did not want to be a bomb. He said as much. "I think that's fair. Don't go getting bumped to hard or getting to hot or anything and you won't ever be one." Lovelace had finally found the panel he had been looking for. He triumphantly lifted it toward Beepy with his giant moving yellow platform. Beepy really had no pressing appointments or anything and he was strapped in so he let his mind wander a bit. He thought back to when his captors had searched through his memories. "Why couldn't I remember anything on my own that had happened before I was out in space near that ring of little brown ovals?" "The asteroid belt?" Lovelace seemed perplexed. He did his best to explain though. "Well. That's when you were triggered to become conscious per your unconscious directives. At the time when I had set that directive in place it was because I knew I had to hide you from the world. I had to hide what your design allowed for from the world. British Petroleum was the company who financed my work and if they knew the potential of creating entirely artificial beings who could think and could act independently and could be programmed to find pleasure in whatever set of directives was most convenient to whoever was calling the shots.... In the wrong hands it was an incredibly dangerous power. One I didn't think we were ready for back here on earth. Now of course right about when you got past Saturn and started beeping about pretty much whatever the hell caught your eye the jig was up and unfortunately they had the original copy of your schematic to pull from. Now they've got robots just like yourself, talking thinking and absolutely thrilled each day at the prospect of delivering HBO via satellite to televisions all over the world." Beepy thought about that and suddenly remembered all of the friends he had already rescued. "I saw them! They all got sucked into the ship and I rescued them! Are they... Are they going to be alright?" Lovelace mulled it over. "Upper earth orbit? Solar powered? I'd say they'll do a hell of a lot better than anything down here will. If you can't save us Beepy this planet isn't going to be fit for organic life soon. It will be a lifeless rock with a ring of sapient cable satellites in a slowly decaying orbit. they'll be miserable and wondering why in the hell nobody is paying for any cable packages anymore. We'll have vending machines that are miserable because nobody is buying soda or chips or soiled Japanese panties anymore. We'll have an army of robot meter maids who have all been incentivized to go out and find mis-parked cars and ticket them for it, patrolling a wasteland of broken down vehicles littering the streets because anyone who could drive was desperately trying to find some kind of shelter from the radioactive wind and rains.... So they'll be happy and they'll write tons of tickets.... at least until their charging stations eventually go dead. But for everyone else it's going to be a miserable extinction I'm afraid. No more humans like myself. No more fish. No more lizards and no more birds. The birds are the ones I'm most unhappy about, I always loved watching birds." Beepy knew about birds! He had seen one! He had been unhappy when he had suspected the bird he had once seen had been incinerated with the rest of Los Angeles! But one word Lovelace mentioned was one that he had really had never heard about before, even after getting a massive dictionary input into his brain by his alien captors. That word was the word 'Love'. "What is Love, Lovelace?" Lovelace cracked a wry smile as he began fitting the outer shell snugly back into place. Soon Beepy would be all back together just like he was supposed to be. "It's something you say when you feel really really strongly about someone or something. Like you want them to be happy no matter what even if it hurts you. It's probably the most debated and the most important word in the entire human vocabulary and usually when you say it about another person it means you want to stay close to them no matter what through thick and thin. Really though the way I used it just means that I really enjoy sitting in tree-stands and watching eggs hatch when I've got the opportunity. It means I don't want any of them to come to harm even though, just like with human beings, I'm certain millions of them already have." "Entropy and Extinction didn't have a word like that in their entire ship's computer." "The beings who are shooting down at planet earth from up in our atmosphere right now?" "The very same." Lovelace let out a bleak burst of noise that sounded like a strangled chuckle. "I'm not surprised somehow." And just like that Beepy felt his internal structure grasp tightly onto the final one of his outer panels that had needed replacement. He was whole once more. He pushed his legs back and forth experimentally, they had come back online without a hitch. His arm had a tiny spot where it wasn't rotating fully but Beepy started rotating his arm in the opposite direction, felt another small pop and with that he seemed to have cleared whatever the blockage was from the track by doing so. He felt ready. Lovelace didn't look finished though he was now rummaging even more, this time looking under a large pile of the same kind of wooden material that had been used to construct this massive "shop". "I really didn't even know why I was keeping this around" He kept rummaging "I had told myself that next spring I was gonna repaint my bathroom with it or something since it cost so damned much from the manufacturer." He didn't stop digging. Eventually he got up and went over to the opposite corner where there was a bunch of wadded up cloths and he started haphazardly throwing them into the air. Beneath it all was apparently the treasure he had been seeking. It was a grey cylinder with a purple streak to it. Beepy couldn't help but feel like it was a familiar shade. "You don't think I'd send you out with new paneling and no new coat of burn resistant violet paint did you? You're going to look brand spanking new once I'm done here!" And so he did. Beepy supposed if he was going to be going back up he should assume it was possible he would be coming back down to the blue planet and that had been pretty damned hot on the way down as he recalled it. He resolved to be grateful even if he was worried more people were dying while they kept trying to fix him up. He wanted to have hit something softer so there was less work to have been done! Unfortunately there didn't seem to be any way to change that part of the past as far as Beepy could tell. Once he was painted up nice and given a once over to dry it he was let down from the harness. "What now?" Lovelace gave another one of those contemplative silences. " Well I'd love to figure out exactly how your arm and legs work given that you left without any of that and it's completely alien technology beyond anything I could ever have conceived for you but for right now... Now you tell me everything that happened to you since you found this alien ship and then we try and work out some kind of plan." And so they did. About forty five minutes of talking later and they finally had something in mind... Lovelace also had a few final bits of knowledge about robot design to impart upon his beloved child and Beepy made sure to commit them to solid state storage. It had been a long time since either of them had seen or felt anything indicating a missile was landing nearby but that just made Beepy worry that on the opposite side of the planet the "humans" were catching radioactive hell. He strode confidently out the gigantic double doors he had been brought into on a lift. He looked back once to see his father smiling and waving at him as he made his way further out onto the small upright green blades that seemed to cover so much of the close surface of this planet. Beepy felt like smiling too which was good because Lovelace had told him that Entropy and Extinction had welded the voice modulator onto his face in the shape of a big goofy grin. By using his incredibly powerful optical receptor Beepy was able to determine Lovelace was leaking out of his face again as he watched Beepy start off once again, he was quietly grateful that he wasn't near enough for it to get on him and mess up his vision again.
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Jun 9, 2020 23:05
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Lil' Beepy Part Eight Beepy turned toward his vision skyward, lifted his arm straight out in front of him and activated his thrusters like he had never activated them before. In an instant Beepy was rocketing skyward with a speed unlike anything he had ever experienced! Gravity had tried to pull him downwards pretty fast of course but it didn't happen anything like this! Before long he broke through the dark clouds of dust that were being kicked up by all the explosions and he could see the wonderful sun! He could see the mysterious moon! He could see the alien vessel he had fallen out of still cruising around and regularly launching missiles at targets so dispersed Beepy could only even speculate upon how they chose where to shoot next. Finally he could see thousands upon thousands of the friends he had saved still hovering up in orbit.  Seeing him rising from the planet's surface caused them to all raise up in cheer! Beepy started using his beeper to tell them to keep it kinda quiet for the time being, this part of the plan heavily relied upon stealth. Every once in a while the humans were still lobbing a missile back at the black triangular war machine that was raining so much destruction down upon the planet and that is what afforded Beepy his opportunity because they were so focused on dodging those that the appearance of another "TV satellite" in their general vicinity didn't appear to have given his one-time captors any cause for concern. While trying to bob out of the way of an incoming missile from the surface of the planet the black ship actually almost slammed right into Beepy as he strained to match its momentum. Soon with almost no trouble at all he was where he had wanted to find himself and he slipped right through the same door he had exited when he fell out of the ship with all of his friends. Nobody had even bothered trying to close it. Beepy couldn't help but wonder why such gifted creatures as Entropy and Extinction were completely unconcerned with ever attempting to make even the most modest of repairs to their ship given how incredibly easily it could move throughout the galaxy and how important having the ability to travel must be to accomplishing whatever it is that those two had spent their time doing prior to discovering humans existed. As he started walking through the once more depressurized hallways he couldn't help but feel like they just hadn't been designed with the capability to maintain their possessions and he felt like he should pity them for that on some level. If Beepy was correct, Entropy and Extinction probably wouldn't ever break out of their mold and eventually their ship would have just began to rot away to the point where they either became stranded or hit something and exploded. Idly he began to wonder if that explanation was why they were such miserable people deep down but his train of thought was interrupted when he finally saw his next crucial destination, the once scary chamber where he had been granted legs and an arm and a new lease on life. The final companion he had been trying to "upgrade" was still plugged into the machine, his battery long since dropped into critical standby. No matter, Beepy had been given the full rundown on his own capabilities and he knew he had more power in his fusion core than this poor beeper could ever have held inside of his solar batteries. Beepy strode past semi-technical grasper number forty five who had been shut down and left completely abandoned in the room this whole time and he used one of Lovelace's access codes to open up this poor solar beeper's bottom rear paneling a hair.  He had been instructed on exactly which cord he would need to pull and so he worked his way into his companion's opened core and then he plugged his fusion reactor directly into the other beeper's solar battery. He was awake within the minute and ready to broadcast! This newly revived beeper introduced himself as Broadcast Unit 1086 and asked whether Lil Beepy was in any need of a televised broadcast of The Nanny. Beepy had no such need but he let Unit 1086 know that there WAS something that he needed help with. As he was explaining he started loading 1086 back into the scary machine. Beepy didn't need anyone's permission to turn the machine on anymore because his fusion reactor was powerful enough to energize several cities if he really needed it to! There was nothing Entropy would be able to do to keep him from his goals now! He plugged himself directly into the machine's primary power core and he kicked up the juice. It took a lot more out of him than he had expected but he was able to do what he needed. He could operate on his companion any way he desired now and Entropy would be none the wiser at the ships controls because he wasn't using any of their engine output for the task anymore! He began redesigning 1086 with flourish, his purpose set firmly in his mind. Not long after he himself went under the knife after having carefully described to the now much improved Unit 1086 exactly what needed to be done. This procedure took a little longer because 1086 really had no experience with the procedure and had to be talked through many of the steps. Finally though they had completed the design. As part of the plan Beepy had taken 1086's solar panels and affixed themselves to his left and right sides. 1086 was now truly a comrade in arms and had been blessed with an arm and two legs just as Beepy had. Unfortunately Beepy couldn't put a new fusion reactor into him because he had never gotten time to find the necessary supplies on board the alien vessel. To do so now would mean countless lives wasted down on the planet and the risk of being discovered by Extinction or Entropy. Instead Beepy had found his own way to help his new beeping friend keep himself powered up. Beepy remembered well what Lovelace had told him to do when he had set out on this mission, that Beepy "was going to be making due with the resources he had". As the duo turned to stride out of the room Beepy's visual receptor caught upon semi-technical grasper number forty five. He found himself suddenly stricken with inspiration. Perhaps a small alteration to the plan was warranted... ---------------------------------------- It took a little bit more doing than they would have liked but Beepy was proud to say everything was ready. For his part of the plan he had made his way back to the hole in the ship on the lower decks. He expected they'd send out Extinction first, since Entropy had always seemed in charge of driving the ship and arguably had been nicer to him. He was nervous, he had no idea what kind of tricks they had up their sleeve. Still with a determined heart Beepy leapt back out into the vacuum of upper earth orbit and fired off his rockets for all they were worth. This time he wanted to be noticed. He flew straight out in front of the view-port of the bridge and he fired off a transmission on all frequencies! He even activated his allcaps module! "ATTENTION ENTROPY AND EXTINCTION. THIS PLANET IS NOT YOURS TO DESTROY. CEASE YOUR ACTIONS AND LEAVE OR BE DRIVEN AWAY." A cool response in their alien tongue. Entropy was not impressed. "Little Beepy. We watched as you fell down to the surface. We had hoped to recover you and then properly discipline you for your insolence but we see it is far worse than we feared. Cease your own activities or we shall regret needing to destroy you."  Beepy flew around incredibly rudely in an 'I'm not listening' kind of way. As long as he was in the sun with these new wings he was free as a bird to fly around however he liked with no worries! It was wonderfully liberating! "You're not talking to Lil' Beepy anymore! You're talking to Lil' Beepy, the great hero of Humanity and the savior of the Space Beepers! And now you're gonna find out just what kind of trouble you've got into when you decided you knew what was best for everyone!" Momentary silence. Beepy could see Extinction on the bridge, he had been fuming quietly but now he just coolly reached for his dark control console. "So be it then. I will relish crushing your core." And with that Extinction made for the door. Beepy grabbed on to the roof of the ship lest Entropy decide to take some distance by REALLY hitting the throttle and suddenly leave Lil' Beepy far behind! It didn't take Extinction long to slink outside of the ship through one of the larger cracks in the surface of the ship. He looked happy so that was nice for a change. "Time to die Beepy. There will be no more games for you." With that Beepy buzzed past him with a quick burst of his thrusters and clipped him with the tip of his arm. Just a little clip mind you, he didn't want to get too close. Extinction felt hard and just a light tap against him reverberated up through Lil' Beepy's arm in a really weird and painful way! This wouldn't be easy nor fun and it left Beepy wondering what these guys were even made of. "Impudent!" Extinction started filling the airwaves with his annoying buzzing talk that had vexed Beepy so early on but he was well used to hearing it by now and it didn't hurt him hardly at all! He kept circling! Right about then the gigantic space ship started lurching to the left, hard. Beepy wasn't positive but he was pretty sure he knew that his help had just arrived at the bridge to begin confronting Entropy. Extinction looked a little worried. A high pitched note Beepy couldn't understand was sent out over their wavelength. A sharp long response back. Beepy's allies were there all right. Raising hell. Extinction turned with anger toward Beepy and lunged at him, his tendrils reaching out toward Beepy trying to get a hold of him! He seemed to be worse at turning than Beepy but he was sure quick! And wasn't done yelling either! "How did you bring life to semi-technical grasper number forty five?! How have you turned it against us? Even now my companion is outnumbered by your ilk, your little television satellite and now your traitorous crane! I'll rip you from your sockets you little monster!" Again and again he propelled himself directly at Beepy who kept making tight circles to stay with the ship while also trying to keep away from this incensed machine. The constant refreshment provided by the suns rays was keeping him fit and strong and his mind felt sharp as a tack! Flying around things had been his whole job once! As Extinction came a bit too close and scraped off a layer of violet paint from Beepy's chassis he was grimly reminded that his job flying around things really hadn't ever included things that could fly back at him if they wanted. Tiring him out wasn't really working. It was time to get active. He started going right at Extinction then dodging away at the last minute. Extinction muttered about cowardice and tore off after him. Beepy tried to take Extinction over by the engines. They were massive, emitting some kind of blue light that Beepy couldn't even begin to fathom. He expected it wouldn't be good to be too close to it though. Extinction was right on his tail so he kept having to loop away from it since he'd be caught by the faster meaner bot if he went in a straight line. He started to get a sinking feeling in his stomach. It was just too damned far from front to back. There was no way he'd make it. That was when suddenly the hull of the vessel burst open from the inside. It was Entropy and he was holding 1086. It looked like they had both been thrown through the wall by a giant grasper arm. "GRAHHH!" Entropy let out a short stream of data in frustration as he activated his impulse to stop himself. He attached himself to the top of the ship while still clutching 1086. He turned his attention to Beepy. "I see you've been very convincing Beepy. I never thought to mistrust semi-technical grasper number fourty five. It had been with us since the beginning, but somehow you've made it able to think. Able to act. And you've convinced it to seek our destruction. How have you learned the secrets of life?" Beepy had to laugh. "You're killing the very people who made me. They're the ones to ask right? I mean who else could I have learned it from?" "Learning from these biological mistakes? These monsters?" Just as he had screamed that out Semi-Technical Grasper Number Forty Five had finished rolling through the massive hole in the hull and it had started barreling toward Extinction. It fired off a stream of binary from its newly created logical circuits and broadcast them out over a short range channel! "YOU'RE MEAN." Extinction flew upwards but the grasper extended itself and gave him a hard smack on his strangely shaped lower half. He went flying off sideways, only stopping himself by dredging a long gash in the hull of the ship. Beepy presumed it had to be flying itself now and it probably wasn't doing a great deal of dodging. He wondered if anybody still had any missiles down there... Probably too much to hope for. Extinction roared and then started tearing at the wheels of semi-technical grasper number forty five. In response it brought its grasper in close and swung it across its side to swipe Extinction away! "YOU'RE SELFISH" Semi-Technical Grasper Number Forty Five shouted out via radio! It had always had the capacity to transmit limited reports about its status but now that it could think for itself it could say anything it could put its mind to! With one tire out of commission the grasper was looking like it needed some serious help. Beepy rushed toward the scene but Entropy was rushing that way too! Beepy fired himself into a rocket punch and struck Entropy right in the face with a perfectly placed fist! 1086 went flying out of his grasp and off toward the edge of the ship! Extinction had quickly recovered and was feigning back and forth to take on the giant robotic arm crane. He was boosting himself back and forth trying to bait the arm into extending so he could get inside of its reach and tear more damage into its vulnerable wiring. Beepy had been launched away from Entropy after making contact fist first with the robot's face and he had to activate his thrusters to stabilize himself! He went back at Entropy looking to make a double-legged kick right into his stupid midsection but Entropy just sneered and dodged out of the way. "There will be no more of that" he said flatly. Suddenly Beepy felt his arm and his legs become limp as noodles! He was completely helpless and he lost his ability to stand basically immediately. Entropy rushed into him and gave him a swipe across his face. Beepy could feel his wires start to jiggle all through his body and he wondered how those hasty welds were going to hold. "The gifts we gave you can be taken away Beepy. We never saw this in you. We are so disappointed in you." Beepy yelled back! "I don't need my arm to beat you!" And he fired off his thruster! He smashed horn-first directly into Entropy. Beepy felt himself separate just slightly but he consoled himself because he had felt Entropy give and he was pretty sure everybody had a cracked hull now. Beepy felt his words come out sluggishly like his system was using too many cycles. "... See... That? Can just... Do... That...." He felt loopy. "I see." Entropy was leaking. It was running out of his wound in dribs and drabs as his circulatory system pumped. He continued curtly. "Well then." With one arm he snapped Beepy's solar panel. Then the other. He kicked Beepy away. "Eventually you'll damage yourself too much to engage thrust and you'll be forced to cease operation." That's when 1086 ran back into the fray from the ships edge where he had lain in recovery and he smacked Entropy in the stomach. The fight raged on over the ruined planet and the very fate of humanity was at stake! Extinction had finally just grabbed directly onto the arm on a spot closer in than the grasper claw could reach and now Semi-Technical Grasper Number Forty Five was trying to smash its own arm against its chassis. Every time it tried though Extinction was dodging to the other side of the arm and then giving the chassis an extra swipe for good measure. It was causing too much damage to itself and it was happening far too quickly! But Semi-Technical Grasper Number Fourty Five wasn't down and out! It reversed its momentum in a perfectly calculated movement by putting everything it had into accelerating right as Extinction was dodging a particularly wide arm swipe. He found himself on the hull of the alien vessel and suddenly being ground beneath Semi-Technical Grasper Number Forty Five's tires. It spun its wheels upon his circuitry and it beeped out in triumph "NOBODY LIKES YOU." Extinction responded by ripping through the grasper's vulnerable underside. Straight through the centralized processing core. Those had been Semi-Technical Grasper Number Forty Five's final words. He was gone. "NOOOOO!" Cried out 1086 and Lil' Beepy together! Beepy started thrusting and rapidly changing which angle his thrust was firing at so he could move diagonally, once more toward his foes! He'd keep ramming till there was nothing left! But Entropy just batted him away. "I think I've got you figured out Beepy. You aren't this foolish. Surely you see this battle is lost. You never truly had any hope of winning this fight." Beepy acted like he didn't know what he was talking about. "What do you mean? You're trying to smash me!" "That's just it. You'll explode if we do that. You're hoping we will be caught unawares and that you'll save your pathetic friends and their worthless planet with your fusion core." Beepy sent out a frustrated whine. "Well what are you gonna do about it then? Either you do it or I do it. But your only hope is to get far far away from here!" Extinction let out a cool burst of amused transmissions. As he did so Extinction came into Beepy's view holding a battered 1086. Extinction moved to stand shoulder to shoulder with Entropy. "No Beepy. That is not my only hope at all. And it shall not be your only hope either. We are going to disconnect you from your thrusters and then take you back in our ship. Extinction is going to kill your friend and then finish sterilizing your planet. Then we'll remove your fusion reactor and put you to death safely. You are no threat to us." He turned to Extinction and made a fist. Extinction tore into 1086's hull. He wasn't looking too good. Lil Beepy cried out! "I wouldn't do that if I were you!" Extinction laughed. He tore his claw in deeper. "Oh? And why is that?" He mocked Beepy with his tone. 1086's optical receptor was glowing incredibly brightly now as he looked around in fear. "Can't stand to see the consequences for your misbehavior? Thought you'd just fly in and be the great hero of space? Well heroes just get their fellows killed!" Extinction went to rip 1086 in half to punctuate his words but as he began that final yank he felt an intense burning as liquid radioactive material began leaking onto the tendril he had embedded deeply into 1086's core. He cried out in terror as it began to leak uncontrollably onto his body and the ship! "Actually-" Beepy activated his thruster for all he was worth. His batteries weren't getting any new energy from the sun and he didn't have much more to give but he had to move really fast right this second! Entropy tore after him! "It's because I'm the solar powered one now!" He screamed out at his once captors, "He took my core back when I turned him back on!" And at exactly that moment 1086 went critical.  The full force of a hydrogen bomb suddenly burst right in Extinction's hands. Beepy and Entropy were propelled directly off the ship and found themselves hurdling toward the blue planet! Entropy had been way closer to the blast but he was still in enough control to be pushing his thrusters in Beepy's direction. "DESTRUCTIVE CREATURE!" He screamed out, a tortured message from a half sundered modulator. "YOU'VE DESTROYED MY VESSEL! I'LL END YOUR PLANET EVEN IF I NEED DO IT BY MY OWN HAND!" He was coming right at Beepy now. Before long he was at arms length. Entropy wasted no time in grabbing Beepy and tearing into him. He ripped off Beepy's arm. He ripped off a leg. He kept screaming as the air around them began to catch fire on planetary re-entry. "I'LL DESTROY YOU!" He shouted he began to clamber around Beepy looking for new things to tear at. He ripped away at Beepy's eye. He fruitlessly tore at his antenna. Finally he clambered around onto his back which was exactly what Beepy had been hoping for! He activated his thrusters with everything he had left in his backup batteries and he blasted that jerk away from him with a stream of energy! Beepy's last sight was of Entropy burning away into dust, melting in his thruster exhaust.  The planet was finally safe. Beepy struck hard earth. 
reignofevil fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Jun 10, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 23:12
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Epilogue The planet was royally messed up of course. Tons of it was radioactive. But some of it wasn't, so some of it kept going. And tons of people were dead of course after the nuclear holocaust. But some of them weren't. So some of them kept going. And as for Lil' Beepy, the people who were left had heard about what he had done because the solar sattelites were transmitting the whole thing to the few remaining televisions. And the sattelite radio stations had been transmitting everything that Beepy had said during the fight! So needless to say the humans looked pretty hard for Beepy once they got things put back together well enough to get out and about a bit. And once they got out and about looking for him they found the crater where he had landed and they fished him out of it. It took time and it took patience but eventually they even found the person who had built him and he confirmed that there was a black box in Beepy that still had everything they needed to wake him back up and Beepy's father worked tirelessly to help lead the kind people in the task of rebuilding his son. When they finally switched him back on he got a heroes welcome. They built him a new hand and some new legs and they put him back just as he always wanted to be. They even gave him a snazzy new paintjob!  Even better with his radio antenna he could always talk to his friends in the atmosphere and now he could also move about as he liked and observe all of the wonders he had never even knew existed back at home! The humans built him a statue and he got to go cut the ribbon on it and everything! It was a stone monument to all he had achieved, a massive carved rock face that had Lil' Beepy chisseled out standing on top of Saturn. You could tell because to make up the rings the designer had put in a little choo choo ride that people could go around the planet on ninety feet up in the air. The kids loved it. That wasn't everything though. People treated their robots a little differently after this. They fixed their self aware washing machines instead of selling them. They let the sapient vending machines form a union and one of them even started working for the news. She busted the Big Cheeto Scandal wide open. And for almost a half an hour after Beepy's big speech and dedication ceremony for his statue the people of the human race would watch those automated meter maids write a ticket and place it upon an offending vehicle and they'd smile and thank it for everything it did. Out of all the changes people quit doing that one first though. Sometimes progress comes slow. Beepy spent many years making many friends but he was always meant to roam. He needed new things and so he sought them out. Eventually Beepy found out that human beings knew less about the bottom of the ocean than they knew about the vast reaches of space and Beepy set straight out onto his next adventure to conquer the oceans.  THE END!
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Jun 9, 2020 23:13
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I gotta write a letter to the editor that last story blew up my computer and caused several planes to crash.
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Jun 14, 2020 17:08
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The Science of Smell Chazzy Schnozz let out a cry of delight! "Eureka!" His colleagues looked to him with hopeful faces. "We have replicated the molecular structure perfectly! If I'm right-" He paused for effect- "And I'm ALWAYS right, this strip of analyzing plastic will smell exactly like bacon!" The room erupted in cheers. This was Nobel Prize kinda stuff. Bacon had been the last frontier of olfactory research. The final mountain left unconquered by man. Dr. Schnozz had worked a miracle. The team immediately set to work testing. They put the strip into a testing chamber with Chris. Chris was the chief smeller at the Sniffly Institute. Chris said it smelled like bacon. They put the strip into a testing chamber with 'Becca, the junior smeller at Sniffly Institute. She said it smelled like bacon. They put the strip in front of Charlie, who was Chazzy's golden retriever, Charlie did the begging eyes and sat prim like a good boy all while wagging his tail in anticipation. Charlie said it smelled like bacon. They took their findings to the press. The world was in shock and awe. Artificial bacon flavored smelling product. This was huge. They revealed it to the world at large on a sample product, a simple scratch and sniff sticker in the shape of a strip of bacon. Written on it in large yellow comic sans font were the words "What's Bakin'". The public approval was unanimous. People wanted this sticker. They needed it. The company was inundated with phone calls. "When are we getting the sticker" they would ask. "I need the sticker for my child!" was a common plea. The answer was always the same, "The sticker will be available after the Dr. Schnozz gets his Nobel Prize." It wasn't a large request that people should wait, after all the award ceremony was already scheduled for later that month. The people grumbled but they waited for their bacon. The day of the ceremony arrived. It was a big press affair. Anybody who was anybody was gonna be there and all of them were of course. Dr. Schnozz was standing next to a six foot tall bacon strip that was otherwise exactly like the smaller initial prototype. Celebrities were making a big show of coming up, giving the strip a big ol' scratch and then taking a prolonged and exaggerated sniff. Then they'd turn to the cameras and say something like 'That's bacon alright!' or 'Wow it really does smell like bacon!' The people at home were watching in a trance. These people had the bacon and nobody else could. That's why they were celebrities. They had to get nice things first and tell everyone how great they were so everyone could be sure they loved the bacon. Now they had proof. This bacon was real and it was good. Eventually it was time to get down to business. Cocktails had been shared. Cigars had been smoked. People had smelt the bacon. Now it was time for the prize awarding. Dr. Schnozz wore his best. His handlers had decided it would be most entertaining if he came out in a sloppy grease stained "kiss the cook" apron like he had just been COOKING bacon but then to remove it when he got to the podium to reveal he was actually in an immaculate tux. The celebrity audience loved it. "I'm honored today to accept this Nobel Prize in smell physics for discovering a novel way to impart bacon scent in plastic." It was just like the ending of A New Hope when the put the medal around his shoulders. Cameras flashed. It was a perfect moment in time and space. All Dr. Schnozz needed was for someone to write "and they all lived happily ever after"..... But for some reason that feeling of climax never came. From that day on his life was steadily downhill toward ruin. How had he gone from the peak of bacon fame to the gutters of society being spat upon by children? It all began when the world discovered that he had faked the bacon formula. It wasn't that his product didn't smell like bacon, quite the opposite, it WAS bacon. He had simply put a light coating of bacon over his test product. And his sales products. Everyone loved it and everyone agreed it smelled like bacon and that was wonderful right up until someone with a terrible pork allergy decided to give a bacon scratch and sniff a try and he loving died. Choking and gasping right there in times square. It was a scene! The lawyers assured Dr. Schnozz that they would never let the case go to trial but it did because the victim, Mr. John Butts had been the son of the late senator Wilmore Butts. Suddenly the cameras were back in Dr. Schnozz' life but they were hostile now. The questions being shouted were cold jibes about how it felt to have blood on his hands. Dr. Schnozz couldn't go out anymore and had to do all communication through a handler. Whenever he smelled bacon he wanted to puke. Sometimes he had long elaborate dreams about jumping into a vat of boiling bacon grease so he could end his suffering and plead his case before God, who he was pretty sure had commanded that nobody eat bacon anyway. He got no such relief. Eventually he was given a light sentence of life in prison for the death of John Butts and the hefty sentence of execution by firing squad for lying to all of those celebrities. His bacon was cooked. At the day of his execution his firing squad leader offered him a single cigarette. Schnozz accepted. The cigarette dropped from his mouth, it was bacon flavored. He spat on his executioners and he faced death face forward. The guns sounded.
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Jun 20, 2020 17:56
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My Time in The Place- The following events are described exactly as they occurred except for the names. The Place really doesn't have names like you'd expect. Things are very fluid there and normal standards of reality don't hold any power there. It all started with a game. I was told that my sibling was The Mayor of The Place. It is a very prestigious position which confers the respect of the many denizens of The Place, to become The Mayor is highly sought after but to achieve such status requires being the embodiment of the unique culture that permeates this unique location. I was told the "election" would primarily be based upon the outcome of this game and I was invited into The Place by The Mayor so that I could see for myself exactly how such an election would be held. The game started simple enough, it began as a virtual affair played out on various monitors around a massive megaplex best described as a gigantic repurposed mall. The Place is very messy and it is clear it has not been a mall in a very long time and that the inhabitants do not place a high value on orderly behavior, as I think will become readily apparent. On the monitors you could see various space vessels approaching an oceanic planet and I was told that these vessels belonged to the contender for the position of Mayor. The vessels were much faster than the ones that would be directed by my sibling however to keep the contention balanced I was made to understand that our own vessels would have significantly more firepower. My journey began in a messy side room which was filled with men I did not know but I understood them to be members of the crew of the man attempting to contest the election (though I can not recall his name for our purposes we shall refer to him as Cheeko) and take the position of Mayor from my sibling. They were setting up their screens here as my sibling took their own monitor elsewhere deeper within The Place.  The room was lit with yellowed incandescent lighting and there was clutter strewn all over the desks in which the crew was setting up. The crew asked me whether I was sick and I explained that I was, I had vomited severely a mere hour before and I could remember it quite clearly even though I was not precisely certain how I had gotten from there to here. A member of the crew looked upon me with suspicion and asked whether I had Coronavirus, I explained that to my knowledge nausea was not a symptom of the virus so I was doubtful that I had it. Nobody wears masks in The Place and I didn't have one either. This satisfied them but in order to be respectful of their contention I decided it would be best if I were with my sibling as they attempted to defend themselves from the onslaught so that there would be no concern that I had funneled them unfair information by looking upon our opponent's screens. Cheeko was not present in this room. I went deeper into the halls of The Place and it was this central area that most resembled a shopping mall, but that part of the mall where you find the kiosks and walk between the massive retail outlets and the food court. The walls were vast and there was tons of space that had been repurposed, my impression was that nobody really owned any given spot in The Place you just found a spot that looked good and set up whatever it was you were doing. In this case the floors continued to be cluttered with refuse and down the middle of these hallways were chest high shelves upon which various merchandise of all kinds were placed with love and precision. The Place still used currency in its own way and if you took these items you were expected to pay the nearby denizens who would keep the shelves tidy and stocked. I met my sibling and got my first look at this game. I was told that you had to play it from the very beginning in which you piloted a tiny fish behind a 'mother' fish which would occasionally poop out a small glowing dot of energy which you would then need to eat so you could collect points and evolve. This behooved you to follow this mother fish very closely behind until you were large enough to begin expelling energy dots of your own. In my own mind I was comparing this to Spore and yet somehow in my heart I knew this was a much better game because instead of being a single cell you got to be a fish.  Time passed and eventually I was told by my sibling that I should go take a tour of The Place while I had the chance because the game would be very lengthy and involved and so I found myself with a stranger who was showing me from room to room. He and I talked for a long time about how The Place worked and this is when I learned the most about what precisely the stakes of the game were and how it represented two disparate factions among the denizens who were vying for control. After explaining all of this my tour guide revealed that he was a member of Cheeko's faction and he attempted to murder me by pushing a plastic bag over my face on a bed. I told him "I can't believe I trusted you and now this, but you forgot that I can rip through this with MY TEETH!" which is exactly what I did. This member of Cheeko's crew fought with me back out of the side room with the bed and it was in the large hallway next to the chest high shelves that I killed him in self defense. I returned to my sibling and explained that I now understood that this game wasn't just the virtual battle but that Cheeko was trying to knock off members of The Mayor's entourage, of which I was a part. I told The Mayor that I did not mind the stakes and had acquitted myself well but that I personally thought letting someone know there was a chance they were going to get murdered by strangers was the polite thing to do in these circumstances. The Mayor and I made our way through the halls of The Place, most of the denizens greeted us warmly in between their own affairs, which usually involved a significant amount of horseplay and shouting and a never-ending ubiquitous party. The "uniform" of the average person this deep within The Place was very clearly inspired by raves and glowsticks were incredibly common. It became clear to me that to become The Mayor you had to not just win the game you had to also be the embodiment of the ideals of The Place, best described as Hedonism and Hakunamatata. This was a realm entirely without inhibition for good or for ill and it meant a life of both impermanence but also a life free of worry and regret. The Mayor had the respect of these people that much was very clear and even members of Cheeko's crew were wary of offering up disrespect, this contest was nothing personal it was simply the nature of The Place to be in flux and that meant contested leadership. At this point I was browsing the shelves which in this particular section of The Place were stocked with individual pens for sale. They had a ton of different kinds but they were all being sold individually. I picked up a cheap blue ballpoint from the top shelf which was full of rounded receptacles just for holding pens. I happen to own this particular pen outside of The Place so if anyone is curious it was a Bic Round Stic M pen and they had about ten of them in the receptacle. I suggested we purchase this pen and then go use it to stab Cheeko to death so as to win the contest since casual murder had been explained to me as part of the way that a person would be able to take over the position of The Mayor but I was told by my sibling that we had a pack of pens back at their part of the domain and that these pens were "expensive". I felt strongly that they were correct, individually sold pens are a fuckin' ripoff. We moved onward.  Eventually we found Cheeko himself, he was a large muscular man who wore sunglasses inside and he was wearing an open leather vest with no shirt. His hair was dyed blonde. He took us to his money vault which was roughly the size and shape of your average hot topic. The floor of this money vault was the only spot in The Place in which the floor was uncluttered. It was a "vault" in name only, there was no vault door or even any door at all however Cheeko was almost as respected as my sibling in this place and so he needed not fear that anyone would seek to try and take his treasure. Another aspect keeping his wealth safe was the fact that so long as you weren't taking things from the shelves there was nothing in The Place that cost money, resources were distributed based on who wanted to have them at that particular moment with a light dusting of a priority system in which the people who had the most respect were expected to require the least from those who had not yet been able to establish themselves in the community. The walls were stacked nine feet up to the ceiling with hundred dollar bills held together with a rubber band. I was told by Cheeko that he had one hundred and fifty million dollars stacked up around this hot topic sized place and my immediate first thought was "There is no way this isn't more than that- one hundred and fifty million dollars doesn't take up that much space." I was with The Mayor which meant even though I was very new to this culture and did not have respect of my own yet I had no fear because I had already killed one person who had sought to kill me and most importantly by being part of the crew of The Mayor and since they and I were completely alone, defenseless and surrounded by Cheeko's crew and Cheeko in Cheeko's domain meant we were much safer than if we were just out and walking around attempting to defend ourselves. It was because we were so helpless that to kill us would qualify as an infraction amongst most of the denizens of The Place who partly held such respect for my sibling because they were unafraid of death and did not seek to prolong their reign by hiding from challengers to the office. To disrespect the courage that my sibling was showing by killing us when we had willingly walked into a situation Cheeko was completely in control of would in turn lose the respect of the many denizens of The Place and would disqualify him from ever becoming mayor. I was coming to understand more and more about how things worked in The Place the more time I spent there and to satisfy my own curiosity on the matter I picked one of the banded sets of bills up and flipped through it trying to figure out if one hundred and fifty million dollars could possibly take up this much space. This is how I knew the stacks were all hundred dollar bills. They were immaculate. I still had my doubts but the denominations were at least right and I accepted that such a massive collection of money could possibly represent one hundred and fifty million bills even if I was certain there was in fact more than that lining the walls. It was then that I noticed that the walls didn't have a single bare facing, the money was stacked perfectly so that every single stack was pressed up against the wall facing and each pile was perfectly fitted to the ceiling. Without using a second row of space on the completely bare floor, something that I implicitly understood Cheeko would never actually do in his own money vault, you couldn't squeeze even a single extra dollar into this vault. That's when I interrupted a conversation between Cheeko and The Mayor to ask whether I could speak directly to Cheeko about a matter. I understood that this was above the level of respect I had earned even being the only member of The Mayor's crew who had accompanied them on this journey however this was also a place where inhibition was in itself verboten and so I let myself be heard. Here is what I said. "You've stacked this paper to the ceiling- But you've no room left on the floors What do you do when you make an extra dollar? Tear down your walls and build some more? You think one hundred fifty million makes you powerful You think you're ready to be The Mayor But looking at these walls you're lucky you aren't a billionaire!" Nobody was expecting me to put my feelings into a rhyming format and Cheeko's crew gave me applause for my efforts. Cheeko was livid but he had no choice but to respond now. He explained that he actually did tear down the walls in his money vault and make them bigger every time he earned another dollar and then he introduced me to the two members of his crew who were in charge of laying the bricks and the mortar every time it needed to be done. The Mayor was satisfied by all of this and so they and I departed back into the hallways. Honor meant that we couldn't stay now that we had embarrassed Cheeko by rhyming at him and earning respect in front of his crew and so now we had to go back out into the neutral ground of The Place so he could keep trying to kill us.  At this point The Mayor explained to me that we needed to get back to her side of The Place but things were very impermanent in this domain and I wasn't sure how to get us there. We met another denizen of The Place who saw The Mayor and immediately grabbed a spear from the wall near a threshold to one of the side rooms of the large hallways, my sibling did the same and they both stabbed at each-other's face at the same moment. This denizen had gotten much closer to a killing strike and had torn a lock of my sibling's hair from their head with the thrust, leaving it stuck to the spear and dangling upon the wall in which the spear was now embedded. The two then clasped each-other with familiarity. By this point I had fully taken in the culture of this shifting world and I smiled at this denizen and then said "Looks like you got a bit closer than The Mayor did." We laughed.  Still I knew we needed to get back on home turf so I had the idea to call someone who wasn't in The Place and to give them instructions on how to get to where we were so that they could give us a ride where we needed to go. I got in touch with a friend and tried to explain that they could arrive where we were standing but that "they needed to make sure they took the EXACT turns that I told them or else they couldn't get here" and that's when the denizen who had attempted to stab my sibling hung up the phone for me and explained that having someone come here to pick us up was a really bad idea, that instead we should take the elevator where we needed to go. As we made our way to the elevator I learned that my actions with Cheeko had earned me respect and now as we walked through the halls a member of The Mayor's crew was trying to follow me around and adjust my pants so that they hung loose at the back and you could see my rear end-crack. I understood this to be a form of paying respect because it was in vogue at the time. I sought to one up this person and so I moved their hands around to the front after adjusting my pants back upwards for the third time and said "This is where you should be keeping your hands" and then we walked like that all the way to the elevator. The doors opened and inside were about six people, all dancing to trance music. The style of travel was such that you needed to dance while you waited to arrive at your destination. The Mayor and myself entered and we began to dance. I worried somewhat for The Mayor because they did not seem to remember their goals with ease but then I relaxed because I knew in my heart that I wouldn't forget where we were going and if they needed a reminder I would be able to tell them we were going back to their side of The Place. The elevator would move upwards with a rapid pace and then back down again without rhyme or reason and when we were moving downward momentum would cause us to rise into the air so we could dance while free-falling. Then I slowly came to alertness and realized I was no longer in The Place and that I had entered the waking world about three hours after suffering from terrible food poisoning. I almost wanted to cry because I felt like I had been robbed of such a wonderful place full of people who I had never wanted to leave. Moments later I was struggling to commit my time in The Place to memory and I had just one question, exactly how large is one hundred fifty million dollars? I opened my phone and typed into google and found out I had been exactly correct. There was a hell of a lot more than that in that money vault. Suddenly I realized that the elevator wasn't taking us to the Mayor's domain, that it actually WAS the exclusive domain and that only the mayor and their crew could visit. I realized that Cheeko had lost his campaign when I had taken the respect of his crew by speaking at him with that rhyme and now my sibling had become a member of my crew because the denizens had declared me the new mayor, which is what the whole pants and butt-crack thing had been about. It was the first nice dream I've had in six years. 
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Jul 8, 2020 00:29
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quote:You know when you are having one of those wonderful dreams but then something kinda starts tugging at the back of your brain like you're already regretting how comfortable and nice getting a proper night's rest can be and then suddenly you shoot out of bed like a lightning bolt because it suddenly dawns on you that you've slept through your alarm?
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Nov 13, 2020 21:55
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quote:Our viewer fun poll is in and with an astounding 100% of the vote Skullton is going to try to save Halloween in November! reignofevil fucked around with this message at 12:23 on Nov 20, 2020 |
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Nov 20, 2020 12:19
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And now a dark cloud has come over my own home... because I can't ever top that!
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Nov 26, 2020 00:01
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quote:Skullton lifted his sheet covered arm in a wide arc in the mayor's office, indicating to him the breadth of the entire town. reignofevil fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Nov 26, 2020 |
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Nov 26, 2020 02:04
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Here lies the corrupt king. He shat himself to death.
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Nov 30, 2020 01:29
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Who What Now posted:HEAT RAY As shakespeare once said brevity is the soul of wit.
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Nov 30, 2020 01:57
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 05:09 |
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Really I have no sympathies for Heat Ray. He and everyone else knew Adrian was oblivious, she's famed for it! He should have kept better company because these kinds of things happen to people every day.
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Nov 30, 2020 02:49
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