[Witches' Horses] Chevalier de Grammont
Title: not quite a watch stopping
'Verse/characters: le Chevalier de Grammont; Grammont, Sinclair
Prompt: 38A "flesh wounds"
Word Count: 500
Notes: around the same time as planning and humans are weird.
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He was physically inside her when it happened, which might have contributed to the original problem but also gave her the ability to play back what had happened a half-frame at a time so she could analyze it.
In real time, she'd registered a flash, a pop, and then he'd started cursing in a language she didn't understand, clawing at his face before he ripped the eye-covering free of his skin and threw it down the hall.
She stepped on the urge to demand what had happened, grabbing information from the nearest eye instead. The second-nearest eye told her that the skin around his eye was reddened and wet-looking in one spot along the lower edge of where the covering normally rested, touching the raw line where he'd torn skin in his haste.
Flipping on the mirror in his peripheral vision on the normal side, she projected a recording of a woman leaning forward in concern as she asked "Are you all right?"
"Fine," he growled, yanking insulated gloves on before he leaned down to pick up the covering from the floor. "Just grounded something with my damned eye."
Examination of her eye's recording mostly agreed with him, showing her a tiny curl of lightning arcing from the covering into the metal of the wall he'd been working on, a following set of crackles and then the bright flash she'd first seen as the wall arced back into the patch.
"That wall shouldn't be that hot," she remarked as the recording finished, "let me try to trace it."
"You do that. I have some repairs to make."
She did her best to leave him alone as he splashed sealant on the raw spots, very carefully rubbed some kind of cream on the wet-looking spot--a new-forming blister, she tentatively diagnosed--and then took solvent to the skin he'd left on the patch, started taking it apart, talking to himself in a mix of Russian and something less musical on the ear. She recorded it to add to her store of words, but paid his words little other attention--he obviously wasn't talking to her.
Which was of course when he said "How much control do you have over your fabrication output?"
She jerked more attention back to him, started to answer, then amended herself to "Why?"
"This is shot," he held up the opalescent outer shell of the covering, which was crazed through with cracks and looked ready to shatter if the pressure in the room shifted at all. "I need to know if I'm buying a replacement or if you can make one."
"Can I eat it to see what it's made of?"
"Have at." He tossed the piece towards a wall without standing up. She snagged it with manipulation of her coils, dropped it into a mouth and then chewed over the problem thoughtfully.
Then spat out five prototypes for him to play with, next time he asked her a question, arranged in a neat gradient from matte to nearly actively reflective.
'Verse/characters: le Chevalier de Grammont; Grammont, Sinclair
Prompt: 38A "flesh wounds"
Word Count: 500
Notes: around the same time as planning and humans are weird.
---------
He was physically inside her when it happened, which might have contributed to the original problem but also gave her the ability to play back what had happened a half-frame at a time so she could analyze it.
In real time, she'd registered a flash, a pop, and then he'd started cursing in a language she didn't understand, clawing at his face before he ripped the eye-covering free of his skin and threw it down the hall.
She stepped on the urge to demand what had happened, grabbing information from the nearest eye instead. The second-nearest eye told her that the skin around his eye was reddened and wet-looking in one spot along the lower edge of where the covering normally rested, touching the raw line where he'd torn skin in his haste.
Flipping on the mirror in his peripheral vision on the normal side, she projected a recording of a woman leaning forward in concern as she asked "Are you all right?"
"Fine," he growled, yanking insulated gloves on before he leaned down to pick up the covering from the floor. "Just grounded something with my damned eye."
Examination of her eye's recording mostly agreed with him, showing her a tiny curl of lightning arcing from the covering into the metal of the wall he'd been working on, a following set of crackles and then the bright flash she'd first seen as the wall arced back into the patch.
"That wall shouldn't be that hot," she remarked as the recording finished, "let me try to trace it."
"You do that. I have some repairs to make."
She did her best to leave him alone as he splashed sealant on the raw spots, very carefully rubbed some kind of cream on the wet-looking spot--a new-forming blister, she tentatively diagnosed--and then took solvent to the skin he'd left on the patch, started taking it apart, talking to himself in a mix of Russian and something less musical on the ear. She recorded it to add to her store of words, but paid his words little other attention--he obviously wasn't talking to her.
Which was of course when he said "How much control do you have over your fabrication output?"
She jerked more attention back to him, started to answer, then amended herself to "Why?"
"This is shot," he held up the opalescent outer shell of the covering, which was crazed through with cracks and looked ready to shatter if the pressure in the room shifted at all. "I need to know if I'm buying a replacement or if you can make one."
"Can I eat it to see what it's made of?"
"Have at." He tossed the piece towards a wall without standing up. She snagged it with manipulation of her coils, dropped it into a mouth and then chewed over the problem thoughtfully.
Then spat out five prototypes for him to play with, next time he asked her a question, arranged in a neat gradient from matte to nearly actively reflective.