[ti]Ep 3[/ti]Ready, Maim, Firepower! [Sparky n Pip]

[Pipette]

Episode 3, Week 4, Day 5. Midday
Chemistry lab and Ural Mine

It had been a while. Possibly too long but such a fact was unverifiable. Pipette had dedicated one of her far too many free time slots to the task of stripping down her gun, performing maintenance, and reassembly. While the weapon was part of her, it was entirely non living metal and sundry components.

The chemist was happy with the idea of weapon maintenance, she was happy to busy her hands, she was not happy because she inevitably dropped a tiny spring or screw, or misaligned some delicate mechanism.

It was the latter that causing embarrassed aggravation today. She needed help. She wanted an expert. She knew of someone who was in theory a weapon expert and enthusiast and very good friends with Vega-chan. It looked like Pipette might have to be social once again.

She shuffled over to the comm set in her lab and punched in a few number.
||Good day. This is Pipette speaking. Have I correctly reached Weapons Engineer Sparkplug? I am in need of expertise. Please.||

[Sparkplug]

Sparkplug was as busy as ever. Music from one of the native’s radio stations blasted through the lab, ringing off the rough rock walls as she calibrated a large, smooth-bore cannon’s systems. It was a slightly tricky weapon, designed to detonate a shell at a selected range, and the detonation system still needed some calibration work.

Currently, the weapon was mounted to a crude trolley to spare her trying to lug the heavy thing around. Nodding to herself, Sparkplug rolled it back down to the shooting range, a long alcove in the natural rock, one side fenced off from the lab with Maersk shipping containers full of rocks. Locking the trolley brakes, the engineer hummed cheerily along with the music as she attached spring-loaded reels to the sides of it to absorb the recoil.

Ducking around the shipping containers into their relative shelter, she declared, “O-kay. Test firing – again – in three, two, one-“

The cannon thumped. A fat explosive shell flashed from the muzzle, snapping down the range, only to thump into the rock at the far end with a crash and fall, flattened, to the floor. A fraction of a second too late, the laser riding sidecar down the cannon barrel snapped on, trying to detonate the shell.

“...Primus’s perfectly polished afthole,” Sparkplug muttered to herself. Clearly something had gone wrong again, but without high-speed cameras and monitoring gear, it was a real pain to figure out what.

The chime of the comm system rang out, half-drowned by the music. Crossing the lab, Sparkplug flicked the music off, even as Pipette’s neat, precise voice rang out.

“Sure, this is Sparkplug,” she replied cheerfully. Her interest rising rapidly, she added, “In need of weapons expertise? I’m your femme. Are you able to bridge over to the Urals?”

[Pipette]

Excellent Pipette thought. Sparkplug replied promptly, and seemed to be in a cheerful mood too. Pip was not a good judge but all the circumstantial evidence pointed at that theory.

||I can be there in approximately thirty seconds.|| Pipette had timed the journey to and from her lab to the ground bridge. She’d done so exactly for the reason of providing accurate replies, like she had just done. This would be her first visitation to Urals Mine, but the ground bridge cared not for the trivial distances between A’s and B’s on this small planet.

As an afterthought, Pipette added ||see you soon||. The chemist was asking for help. Ergo it was appropriate for her to supply a friendly manner. That’s what she thought. Picking up her weapon, carrying it carefully in both hands, and pointing it always at the floor like she was trained, Pip left her lab and proceeded to the bridge controls in the tiny corner of the universe she shared with another mad scientist.

The bridge controls actually consisted of an intercom in a large alcove. The bridge proper, all its ancillary equipment, and vehicon attendant were back at Blackridge. This was just a dedicated location for the spatial interface where it wouldn’t trigger anything delicate in her lab or Shockwave’s. Pip pressed a button on the intercom and said very simply “Urals Mine”. Pipette had previously learned that the vehicon ground bridge operator preferred their direction and concise and accurate as possible with no extraneous conversation or pleasantries. The chemist could appreciate the desire for precise data and nothing else.

Three seconds later, a shimmering portal of esoteric energies bored a hole through three dimensional space. With absolute faith in the technomagical artifact, Pipette stepped through and into Urals Mine.