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rheasilvia
Aeryn Sun, of Farscape - with or without John Crichton.
“How can it create a different effect each time it’s fired?” Aeryn demanded, not at all unreasonably. She was glaring at him as if the Lazy Gun’s oddness was his, human, fault, which in John’s opinion was somewhat less reasonable, given that the being from whom he’d acquired it had looked far more like a flounder than a human.
He sighed and rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I don’t know, okay? I thought wormholes were weird, but this—” He stopped, equations twisting in his head, echoes of what the Ancients left behind, snail-trails written in binary. “It could take advantage of the same infinite possibilities, somehow selecting an outcome in which the target gets—well, whatever happens to the target, smushed, exploded, eaten by a werewolf, whatever. All I know is, no way am I opening it up to figure out how it works.”
Aeryn gave him the Sebacean hairy eyeball, which was remarkably like the human hairy eyeball, except also communicated that she had no idea what a werewolf was but suspected that it was far inferior to the beasts the Peacekeepers told their horror stories about. “I don’t care how it works. Can it be mounted on my prowler?”
“Aeryn, I can’t guarantee that whatever happens will work fast enough to be of any use in a fight.”
She shook her head impatiently, in the way that meant that once again he’d missed something that was as ordinary to her as zippers and ice cream to him. “I didn’t ask for a guarantee. When you have a weapon, you don’t refrain from using it because it has its limitations. The question is, does it make victory the more likely, or will using it interfere with some other strategy with a greater chance of success?”
John blinked. Those weren’t questions he would have asked, but she said them as if explaining how the dentyks worked. And he had to admit, it made a hell of a lot more sense than the dentyks. “That’s what they teach you as a Peacekeeper?”
She did the thing where she smiled with her eyes and the rest of her face remained impassive. “It is what the best Peacekeepers discover, over time.”
And she strode down the corridors with a really distracting smug sway in her hips after she fired the Gun at the tangle of Kessler-Syndrome orbiting debris that was preventing them from going down to the surface of a once-bustling commerce planet to get at the stores there. The debris shivered a little, then burst into billions of microfragments and dove downwards, into the atmosphere where the drag started to burn it up. The skies were on fire for arns. Aeryn stayed by the window and watched the entire time, the light playing across her face.
“It was exactly what we needed,” D’Argo told her, which only made her frown, and then D’Argo grumbled something about Peacekeepers who wouldn’t ever be at peace.
“What’s wrong?” John asked from where he’d been spending his time watching—okay, gazing at—Aeryn.
Aeryn didn’t look away from the window. “I feel as if I’m being—lured, somehow. You said that the Gun was unpredictable—”
“Way I heard it, sounded like it has a nasty sense of humor,” John confirmed.
“But this was perfect. How much in our life is perfect?”
“I’m not gonna deny that you have a point.”
So when, not three weekens later, the Lazy Gun decided to get rid of the pirates chasing them by causing a nearby sun to go nova, nearly blinding/frying Moya in the process, Aeryn concurred with the general sentiment that the thing needed to be left behind. And she yelled at him for insufficiently specifying the variety of ways in which the Gun might decide to get rid of its target.
All things considered, John decided, he got off pretty easy. It was easy to forget that Aeryn did rely on him, once in a while. He very much wanted to be something other than her unpredictable weapon.
(ETA, forgot: the Lazy Gun is from Iain Banks. I like it a lot.)
rheasilvia Aeryn Sun, of Farscape - with or without John Crichton.
“How can it create a different effect each time it’s fired?” Aeryn demanded, not at all unreasonably. She was glaring at him as if the Lazy Gun’s oddness was his, human, fault, which in John’s opinion was somewhat less reasonable, given that the being from whom he’d acquired it had looked far more like a flounder than a human.
He sighed and rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I don’t know, okay? I thought wormholes were weird, but this—” He stopped, equations twisting in his head, echoes of what the Ancients left behind, snail-trails written in binary. “It could take advantage of the same infinite possibilities, somehow selecting an outcome in which the target gets—well, whatever happens to the target, smushed, exploded, eaten by a werewolf, whatever. All I know is, no way am I opening it up to figure out how it works.”
Aeryn gave him the Sebacean hairy eyeball, which was remarkably like the human hairy eyeball, except also communicated that she had no idea what a werewolf was but suspected that it was far inferior to the beasts the Peacekeepers told their horror stories about. “I don’t care how it works. Can it be mounted on my prowler?”
“Aeryn, I can’t guarantee that whatever happens will work fast enough to be of any use in a fight.”
She shook her head impatiently, in the way that meant that once again he’d missed something that was as ordinary to her as zippers and ice cream to him. “I didn’t ask for a guarantee. When you have a weapon, you don’t refrain from using it because it has its limitations. The question is, does it make victory the more likely, or will using it interfere with some other strategy with a greater chance of success?”
John blinked. Those weren’t questions he would have asked, but she said them as if explaining how the dentyks worked. And he had to admit, it made a hell of a lot more sense than the dentyks. “That’s what they teach you as a Peacekeeper?”
She did the thing where she smiled with her eyes and the rest of her face remained impassive. “It is what the best Peacekeepers discover, over time.”
And she strode down the corridors with a really distracting smug sway in her hips after she fired the Gun at the tangle of Kessler-Syndrome orbiting debris that was preventing them from going down to the surface of a once-bustling commerce planet to get at the stores there. The debris shivered a little, then burst into billions of microfragments and dove downwards, into the atmosphere where the drag started to burn it up. The skies were on fire for arns. Aeryn stayed by the window and watched the entire time, the light playing across her face.
“It was exactly what we needed,” D’Argo told her, which only made her frown, and then D’Argo grumbled something about Peacekeepers who wouldn’t ever be at peace.
“What’s wrong?” John asked from where he’d been spending his time watching—okay, gazing at—Aeryn.
Aeryn didn’t look away from the window. “I feel as if I’m being—lured, somehow. You said that the Gun was unpredictable—”
“Way I heard it, sounded like it has a nasty sense of humor,” John confirmed.
“But this was perfect. How much in our life is perfect?”
“I’m not gonna deny that you have a point.”
So when, not three weekens later, the Lazy Gun decided to get rid of the pirates chasing them by causing a nearby sun to go nova, nearly blinding/frying Moya in the process, Aeryn concurred with the general sentiment that the thing needed to be left behind. And she yelled at him for insufficiently specifying the variety of ways in which the Gun might decide to get rid of its target.
All things considered, John decided, he got off pretty easy. It was easy to forget that Aeryn did rely on him, once in a while. He very much wanted to be something other than her unpredictable weapon.
(ETA, forgot: the Lazy Gun is from Iain Banks. I like it a lot.)
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*pats D'Argo*
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But that's what fanfic is for! :)