Forums → Art, Music, and Writing → The Way of Moderation has ended (page 566)
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ehmagawd, an update! Today!
So I've had trouble with work, and illness. Now that the end of the year is coming, I better get my skates on otherwise there will be trouble!
To recap, now that most of the trouble wrought by the improperly handled Way of Moderation Tournament is on the mend, the task of putting everything back together is well underway. Most recently, Strop and Zophia went to test the newly completed F-Bomb antidote (see Round 5 for more about the F-bomb itself), on one of the few who hadn't already been cured, Nill, formerly the moderator Nemo (that dude who wears a wolfskin). It was quite a spectacular success, though Nemo himself was less than impressed at the lack of consent or apparent thought to contingency...
Nonetheless, with Nemo restored, the three turn their attention to a much more ambiguous matter...
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Ladies & Gentlemen & Everyone In Between
Several heads craned over the top of a multitude of tubes and wires attached to the brain in a jar. First was a pair of pointed ears, flattened under messy hair crammed under a cap, then another pair of pointed ears poking through black cloth, then finally a third pair of tatty pointed ears belonging to a wolf head. The trio stood still and stared at the brain, almost lost in the midst of flashing lights, squiggly lines and incessant beeping.
"Has he said anything at all?" Zophia asked.
"No as far as I know," Strop replied. But as far as even brains went, Moe's was relatively inscrutable, so it was difficult to say what was really going on.
"What about all these squiggly lines?" Nemo poked one of the many monitors that cast the meager light in the cramped "intensive care unit", which was to say the broom cupboard of the "hospital".
"That's, uh..." Strop scratched his chin as he tried to read all the symbols and acronyms on the screen. "I think that's his heartrate. Or his respiration."
Nemo stared at him. "You do realise that Moe doesn't have a heart or lungs, right."
Strop, diligent trainee doctor that he was, whinnied in equal parts shock and embarrassment, then started flailing and shoved the screens to the side. "Shut up! I don't have intensivist training!" He cleared his throat and quickly changed the subject. "Anyway we should assess his consciousness before doing an- hey what are you doing!?"
The flushing waves of embarrassment were quickly washed away by the tides of rising panic as, unsystematically and indiscriminately, Nemo and Zophia started fiddling with every machine that had a tube connected to Moe's brain in a jar. "Don't touch that, it's dangerous!"
Nemo fixed him with a dry glare. "Well Doctor Horse, evidently you know just as much as we do about where to put this antidote stuff, so we might as well not waste any more time, right?"
"Really?" Zophia emerged with several loops of tube wrapped around her nose and ears. "I was just playing with all shiny colours!"
"Nnngh, guh, ddddnn, mmmmmrrrg!" Strop went through the exasperated noises of Homer and Mr Burns combined in rapid succession. "But do you have any idea just how grave the implications of fiddling with the wrong machine is?"
Nemo's glare dropped several degrees temperature. "You didn't seem to mind those when you dropped the antidote in my bath."
"Well that's because!" Strop stopped short of finishing his sentence, before trying again. "Because!"
Nemo brandished the ball of antidote, hovering it near any number of the various pipes and bags as if to threaten Strop. "Oh? Please, do go on."
"This is Moe we're talking about here!" Strop tried to match Nemo's glare, and then wildly lunged for the antidote. Nemo whisked it out of his reach. "You can't be so careless with a brain like that!"
"So just because you think I'm not a genius like Moe, I can be your expendable experiment, is that it?"
"It's not that!" Strop lunged again, tripped on Zophia, and came closer to toppling a whole rack of monitors.
"I'm pretty sure it is that", Zophia interjected, at precisely the wrong time, as was her special talent. "I mean, it's pretty obvious that Nemo isn't a genius like Moe, so why wouldn't you think that Strop?"
"I, uh, HEY!" Strop righted himself indignantly. "Just give me the antidote!" He held his hand out expectedly, but his demand was met with resolute denial.
"Look," Nemo said, standing his distance. "I know how you're the ninja horse hero and everybody loves you and everything, and how you're the best qualified here to figure out what to do with this antidote, but it's pretty obvious that you don't know anyway. And I don't think anybody would know since Zophia made this what, like yesterday? And yet you keep on doing things and trying to control things even when it's not entirely certain what needs to be done. Can't you think about what we've just been through, why we're standing here in the first place, and let other people take care of things that you couldn't?"
Strop almost pondered the truth of this for a moment, but then he doubletaked. "That almost makes sense except you're in a HOSPITAL! I'm sure UpToDate or PubMed has something that will help me out here, so just give me the antidote!"
Nemo eyed Strop. Then grudgingly, he held out the ball of antidote. "Thanks," Strop said, reaching across to take it. "I knew you'd be reasonable about it."
"Psyche," Nemo said, and dropped the ball of antidote into Moe's jar.
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" Strop screamed. Or that was would he would have liked to do. "Oh god that's a ban," and "OH NO YOU DIN'T" also came to mind. But all those exclamations froze somewhere in his throat, along with the rest of him, as he stood horrified, watching the effervescent ball fizz and bubble and turn Moe's nutrient solution into an odd hue of lavender.
"Oooooooooh," was all anybody had to say, which happened to be Zophia. "Pretty."
In the background, the machines kept on beeping as they always had. The sqiggly lines traversed across the monitors, and Strop wondered whether there was a little blip, or a shift in their morphology... but he couldn't tell. After all, he had no idea what any of the lines meant.
For all that was observable and understandable to them, nothing happened. In that way they stood, hunched in front of the inanimate brain for an indeterminate period of time, counted only by the polyphony beeps, as they went into their hundreds and thousands.
Suddenly aware of what felt disconcertingly like a cold sweat, Strop finally broke the silence of the noise. "Moe?"
Several seconds passed, in which nobody's heart beat, least of all Moe's.
"What do you want?" a familiar mechanical voice suddenly droned.
"Moe!" Everybody lurched forward, before realising that he didn't have a body to embrace, and they all shuffled back awkwardly. "You're awake!"
"Yes, I suppose I am," Moe remarked, characteristically dry.
"We were beginning to worry, you see," Strop poked his fingers together. "You seemed to be unconscious for a long time."
"I wonder," Moe mused. "Certainly I feel tired. More than tired. I can barely remember what happened for the past while. It's as if I, as you might put it Doctor, had run out of serotonin."
Nemo and Zophia were staring blankly, so Strop went on. "That may very well be the case. But, uh... how do you feel now? Do you feel, uh, different?"
"It's hard to say, with such an open-ended question. Perhaps you should specify some parameters." Strop wasn't sure if this was part of his imagination, or whether Moe was back to his technical hifalutin self. Dare he call it a male self?
"Well, what we theorised was that you had been affected by the F-bomb that Zophia dropped on us several months ago. And while most people were cured a few days afterward, two people that we know of were not present at that event. That would be yourself, and Nemo."
"Interesting. Do go on," Moe said.
"As you can see..." Strop took a moment to scratch his head. How did Moe know these things? Was that relevant information? After all, he also seemed to lack eyes... he shook his head rapidly. "As you can see, Nemo has been returned to his former self, courtesy of Zophia's antidote. The same antidote that Nemo dropped in your jar."
"Perhaps it has had some effect, then," Moe stated, as unaffected as ever, and yet Strop had the sneaking suspicion he was being coy.
"Well, do you feel any more male?" Strop finally blurted.
"You're asking me to comment on a topic you know is too controversial for even you to establish a clear principle on. Seeing as I don't have any secondary characteristics, you can imagine how difficult it is to come to any immediate conclusion on what to infer from my observable attributes."
Strop sighed, knowing full well that was what he was already thinking.
"What did he say?" Nemo and Zophia prodded him from behind. Strop chewed his lip before coming up with a suitable translation.
"He's saying that he doesn't have boobs. And science can't tell us whether his brain is male or female because because it's not PC."
"Blast!" Nemo shouted, throwing his staff on the ground dramatically. "And I placed so much faith in the power of science!"
"The process of coming up with the antidote didn't feel all that scientific to me," Zophia said, in an attempt to placate Nemo.
"Perhaps the parameters may be difficult to define, but the process itself presumably involved some degree of trial and error, and some measurable outcomes that required some degree of reproducability?" Moe quizzed Zophia.
"Well, arw," Zophia mussed her hair as she remembered the countless days spent in the company of the now missing Ubertuna, reproducing many a tentacle (oh, poor Ubertuna) in error. "Yes. Yes that would be right."
"Most of the great discoveries in science are accidental, a great deal many more of them not realised until well after the fact." Now Strop could have sworn that Moe was being smug, but he was speaking through a mechanical voicebox, so how that was possible was beyond him.
"Yeah, I'll be sure to write you up in a case study and presumably get laughed outta the medical community when I submit it to the Lancet," Strop snorted. "Come on guys, I think he's gonna be okay." With that he waved Nemo and Zophia out. They couldn't help but peer quizzically at him as they left the ICU.
"Do you think he's really back to normal?"
It was only as they left, that Moe left them a parting note: "If it does mean anything to you, I do feel much better now. Thank you all kindly."
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Also it has come to my attention that many of the images hosted on photobucket broke when PB released its new system. I don't know why and I don't know if they'll be back. A good thing I keep the lot on my HDD and it's backed up, so if we have to I can just upload them anew. Though that would take a while since there's like 300+ images.