‷This must be the place, Captain; it’s the only planet within range of the chronometric polarizer drive in the kind of lifeboat that was missing from the wreck.‴

❝Any sign of the survivors?❞

‷The planet is borderline habitable, if they dug in under the ice caps they could possibly have evaded the worst of the heat.‴

❝Amplify spectral flux and check for distress signals.❞

‷Yes Ma’am—Got it! I’m picking up weak collimated neutrino transmissions. ‴

❝Where?❞

‷Everywhere! It’s the natives, they appear to have crude antennas erected in many of their dwellings.‴

❝Ridiculous, thats far beyond their technology. Unless…❞

‷Unless what? Uh, Unless what, Captain?‴

❝Scan for chronometric drive exhaust. I calculate that if you collected solar plasma at the pole you could power the lifeboat for about one suborbital flight every planetary year.❞

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

I love English. It's a trash fire disguised as a language and I'm here for all of it. However, I really need to be better about people not speaking it "correctly." It's a goddamn trash fire. Of course people don't speak it correctly. I'm pretty sure there's no correct way to speak it. And that's leaving out all the racism and classism which goes into "grammatical perfection."

English isn't Latin. It's a glorious clusterfuck of stolen parts bolted onto a bastard chassis and powered entirely by the burning of dictionaries. There is no way that it should be the lingua franca of international affairs, and yet it is. Speak it any way you want. English doesn't give a fuck. English will take your error and turn it into a part of itself. English drinks prescriptivist tears like fine wine. Contribute to the delinquency of English any way you can.

Calculating a flight path to visit almost a billion homes in one night without any major causality violations is hard enough without administrations that treat atomic clock references as something that can get by with “good enough” service levels. Just be patient, we are running a fix-up pass. If you have been interpenetrated remain still and do not remove embedded gifts.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

The genus /Magicicada/ is gloriously named; in addition to these well known 17- and 13-year periodical Cicadas—whose prime numbered cycles feature minimal overlap—there are also distantly related but less mathematically astute species, such as the Indian four year /C.ribhoi/ and Fijian 8-year /R.knowlesi/. Even the wildest 2025 bingo card lacked 10⁷-dragons, however.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot