[PI] A Demon From Earth (Ch 44)
Author's note: Oof. Working for 14 hours and then sleeping for 10 and then working again doesn't leave much time for writing…
ADFE is going biweekly for a bit. I don't seem to be able to generate story as fast this month as a few months ago. Maybe once I get settled into the new job a bit better, I can go back to weekly or even semiweekly.
In San Francisco at this point. On the same couch as the last time I was posting from there. Sitting next to the same [lavender haired sorceress](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/kk402l/pi_a_demon_from_earth_meta_dec_25_equals_oct_31/). ;-)
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[CMV "Cry Little Sister"](https://imgur.com/gallery/4EiQcta) with crane parts at a wind farm in central New Mexico.
[Really big air conditioner pieces](https://imgur.com/gallery/k6n8XhQ) and your humble narrator.
Also, holy fuckballs, my (ex) trainee is terrible.
"You might want to throw your hazards on and get over."
"Where are they?"
I lean over and push the big, red, glowing triangular button for him.
"Oh! I didn't see *that* guy!"
I was unable to successfully keep the incredulity out of my voice when I asked, "You... didn't *see* that guy?"
"That guy" was a **GIANT FUCKING EXCAVATOR ROLLING DOWN THE SIDE OF THE ROAD ON ITS TANK TRACKS.**
His response was that he was looking at the truck following the excavator.
But seriously, it was as big as we are and **BRIGHT FUCKING YELLOW.** It had flashing lights.
You all hate him too, because if I die, the story goes unfinished. ;-)
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Ha ha ha, I wrote that on (now *last*) Tuesday, before we got stuck in the snow thanks to his inability to pay attention to anything, turning a one hour early delivery into a two hour late one, and my texting the boss to say that I was done. So, if I die, it's all *my* fault now. ;-)
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A (fortunately thus far hypothetical) physics class word problem.
An asshole with a room temperature IQ is driving a Toyota Prius massing 1200 kg on a two lane road on a cloudy, moonless night in the middle of the desert on a heading of 090 at a velocity of 30 m/s. (And remember, this is physics class, so temperatures are celsius scale…)
A heroic, brilliant, and devilishly handsome truck driver is stalwartly piloting his tractor trailer, massing 36,000 kg, on a heading of 270 at a velocity of 30 m/s on the other side of that two lane highway.
Despite valiant efforts to signal in several ways, the Prius refuses to turn off his high beams.
What acceleration does the moron experience when the now blind trucker drifts across the double yellow line, running straight into the oncoming vehicle and punting the hybrid tin can straight into its next incarnation, without passing Go and without collecting $200?
What slight acceleration does the intrepid warrior of the blacktop undergo as he smashes the idiot's body into paste?
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[First](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/d9fumh/pi_a_demon_from_earth_a_youve_been_summoned/) / [Previous](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/kcajgt/pi_a_demon_from_earth_ch_43/) / [Next](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/kocj3h/pi_a_demon_from_earth_ch_45/)
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"Oh, you don't know what you got 'til it's gone…"
Damnit, I'd spent hours trying to convince her to go before, and now that she had, I missed the munchkin. Heh, too bad she was from Berlin, because "the MĂĽnchen Munchkin" was kinda fun to say. Uh, right. Anyway. Where was I?
Oh yeah. I was thinking that I shouldn't have kissed Anneke, because now I couldn't stop thinking about her. On the other hand, at least I'd waited until she was light years away to start obsessing over her, because it's way better than if she was still *here*.
On the gripping hand, I did have plenty of stuff to distract myself with. The napalm test had been, frankly, fucking awesome. 350 yards, a spray of flaming sticky crap that fanned out about 10 yards past that making a huge fireball on impact, and then burned with a heavy black smoke for about three minutes. Yeah, that was going to ruin someone's day.
The trebuchet was a success as well. The winding mechanism was gear reduced, with a long rope that got hooked up to a team of moose. They'd take off running, and it was pretty easy to get the arm started, because it was at its point of highest tangency at the rest position. By the time the weight was rising, the moose were moving pretty fast, and the arm weight had some momentum to help it carry on up. At the top of the arc, a really big sear mechanism caught it and locked it in place.
Once it was loaded, the arm was released, and it was allowed to roll along a set of tracks, so that the weight fell straight down, instead of transferring force into trying to push the base around. Conservation of momentum and all that. This also had the effect of giving the "whip end" more forward motion.
We tried a couple of different loadings. The first, a single rock weighing about 50 lbs, which ended up almost 500 yards away. The second, which had been a basket full of five pound rocks, had been somewhat more haphazard. Like, we'd probably want to not try firing it over our own troops. A couple of them had gone nearly 650 yards. A couple of them had gone about 50 yards. So much for grape shot, at least for now. Maybe someone could come up with a way to make that more reliable.
And, of course, there was Sisme. I had to admit, as distractions went, that was a solid gold one. I dunno if it was just because she was personally inexperienced, or because the elves in general were uncreative on the subject, but I was getting to teach her a lot of interesting new things. \*ahem\*
Drill with the elven army was less entertaining. I had them broken down into platoons of 64. Four four by four squads of sixteen, one of whom was a squad leader, with an overall senior platoon leader for the four squads. That let them maneuver as a group, with one guy in control, but also break apart into groups of sixteen if they needed to move in smaller pieces for some reason. But the general idea was that they'd be arranged in an eight by eight square, moving in formation, able to stop and present spears in all directions. I was working on getting them to the point where they could aim their pikes backwards and sideways on the move as well, but that hadn't really gelled as of yet. And even when broken out into the squad of sixteen, they could make a fairly unpleasant nest of pointy bits to try and get at.
The other elves who were going to be joining us had finally all shown up, though, so at least I wasn't still waiting for that. Of course, a whole host of integration issues ensued. Because nothing can ever just be easy. \*sigh\*
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Another bit of fancy tech wizardry we had going on involved using what was basically a CNC driven telescope that I had parked next to Mercury, cataloguing various stars. The nine day circumstellar orbit was very useful for giving me a relative movement baseline for calculating parallax, and therefore distance and magnitude. I had a database of stellar observations from Earth, so I was hoping to be able to find at least a couple of the same stars, and figure out where the fuck we actually *were.*
I could see Andromeda and Triangulum were in roughly the right place, and just looking at the sky seemed to suggest that we were still in the good old Milky Way, although I don't know enough about astronomy off the top of my head to say for certain *where* in the galaxy we might be. Thus the search program. Maybe there was something I could do with the relative distances of the two easily visible galaxies to get a rough idea, and if I was lucky, I'd find enough really bright and obvious stars in our own to figure out what direction "home" was in.
I don't know what I thought I'd actually accomplish with the information, but dangit, sometimes a fellow just likes to know where he stands in relation to the world. In this case, where the fuck my planet was.
Man, I mean, I've lost my keys before, but this takes the cake.
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"Godsdamnit, why do the fucking paper towels always tear in the middle, instead of on the actual fucking perforations?"
"The perforations are actually made in the shape of a series of interlocked middle fingers all flipping you off," Corwin replied.
"Oh. Ok. I can buy that."
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I was working with Andy and Oz to make a little notebook of useful elven phrases for combat purposes. Each page had the phrase written down in english and elven, in their respective scripts. It also had the opposite transliteration, as best we could come up with. The idea was that if one of us three musketeers needed to tell someone something in the middle of a fight, we could at least look up the correct thing. Worst case scenario, we could show them the page, or Andy could show us.
It wasn't the ideal solution, but the best one we could come up with so far. It had actually been Ivy's idea. We were working on practicing just speaking the phrases, but it *really* wasn't a language designed for native English speakers.