This was our mistake. Instead of trying to gear up the allied forces of good with weapons in the way we think of them, you know stuff from our time (err, the past-future?) we should have been trying to find a way to get our forces quipped with the crappy junk-rifles of the day. That would have been more achievable. We aimed too high. Two shotguns and three pistols from the before times is a miraculous find by the current standards, but it’s not really that helpful at scale. You know?
When you’re making Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell if pin your financing on pitching Sandra Bullock as your lead your movie is not going to get made because that’s too much to ask, you’re shooting for the moon. Instead you just need to find some Canadian with a good rack and go from there. Life is all about managing expectations and I should have known that.
Even though we had only been gone for a couple of days I expected that when Lucien and I got back timber-town would be nothing but burnt ashes and everyone would be dead and slaughtered horrible on the ground. Because usually if I turn my back for a single solitary second everyone gets murdered and everything gets burned down. It’s like I have kids or something, if you don’t keep an eye out ALL THE TIME there’s an instant disaster and crying and blood and eyes gouged out. It’s exhausting.
Miraculously though everything was fine this time. Not fine, fine, the place was abandoned and mildly ransacked but Martialla left me a note saying they had fled and where they were so we caught up with them. Good thing about the future, most people are illiterate so you can leave notes laying abouy without worrying about anyone else reading them. Lying? Laying.
While we were tomb raiding (I was supposed to be in that movie you know, but you know what happened with me and Tele München Group and the United Council of Churches) the Invincible had indeed come looking for their lost patrol. Martialla and company hid and the timber-towners tried to pull the wool over the eyes of the bad guys but when they left everyone agreed that it hadn’t really worked and the Invincible were going to come back with more killers so they scurried off to logging camp number two.
They were debating how long they could pull off the logging camp shell game when we turned up with our FIVE guns. The plan we came up with was simple, Shwrym and I take the bulk of the people to logging camp number three and fortify the place with Ewok traps and improvised land mines from the Trollbridge bombs, then park the Invincible truck out front as if to say “yeah, we killed your dudes and stole your truck, what are you going to do about it?”. Meanwhile Martialla, Paul & Lucien would take a smaller force of people with our handful actual guns to sneak around on foot and hang out to attack the hydro-plant when the Invincible send out their marauders to attack the camp.
Then whoever’s still alive, if anyone, regroups and we go from there.
When we didn’t come back from the future city from the past with hundreds of Alien Colonial Marine rifles and stinger missiles and force field generators and super-strength granting nano-robots and Starship Trooper power armor our plan instead probably should have been “we know where the secret Invincible Base is now, let’s leave and come back when we have a better plan” but we didn’t do that.
You can blame me for being impetuous if you want, but it was all of us this time. It’s that kind of madness that infects people where you just want to do SOMETHING, anything. For a role once I read about this guy who was a school teacher that became a commander in the US Civil War. He had no military training but he figured out a tactic that worked every time, slowly each time they did the thing he came up with they’d take a little bite out of the enemy. Every time. It never failed.
But it was SLOW. Like chipping away at a stone. After a few months the teacher couldn’t stand it anymore and he tried something else, something bold and daring that could make a big splash and win the battle right away. And a bunch of people died and it didn’t really work, so he went back to his other thing and eventually they won the hill or the fort of whatever. He felt horrible about all the men that he got killed because he lost his patience. There’s no way for us to know how he really dealt with it, but modern historians make it sound like that wrecked him forever and he never got over it.
Winning the right way can be a tough pill to swallow. You want to take your shot. You want to swing for the fences. It’s hard to be disciplined.
It’s like when your manager comes to you with a surefire money making investment in a dry cleaning chemical transactional holding company where you’re the middleman between dry cleaners and the companies that sell chemicals and it’s a can’t miss idea but you invest govWorks instead because even though you don’t know what a web portal is it sounds interesting and who cares about dry cleaning bullshit?
It’s exactly like that, only with a bunch of people getting killed.
