“In war, you win or lose, live or die, and the difference is just an eyelash.” – Ela Patrick
“Remember in the Lord of the Rings when Aragon leads the forces of good into Mordor to distract them from Fordo and Sam? This will be just like that, only instead the army will be accomplishing something at the same time.”
I sighed at Martialla’s constant buffoonery “You know that I don’t know anything about the Lord of the Rings Martialla, why do you ask me questions like that?”
She cocked her head like a parrot “You know, if they ever make the Lord of the Rings into a movie you’d actually be the perfect person to be in it because they break into ten page long songs at least once in every chapter. There aren’t any female characters really but you could play Legolas, elfs and tall comely human ladies look pretty much the same. Except for the boobs, luckily yours are small enough they could just strap you down and you could play an elf.”
I held up a finger “First of all my juggs are huge and everyone knows it. Second of all they already made a lord of the rings movie you nitwit, it comes out in December. December a hundred years ago I mean. You know what I mean.”
“They did?” she asked in surprise “Well, I would have liked to have seen that. Now I’m really upset that we were cryogenically frozen for a century. Who plays Legolas?”
“I don’t fucking know who Legolas is! I know the kid from Rudy is in it, maybe he’s Legolas.”
That seemed to upset her more than anything we’ve seen so far here in the dead world “Sean Astin?! No way he could be Legolas, he must be playing Gimli the dwarf. I bet they did cast a woman as Legolas, I can’t envision any man in that role, no man is that willowy. I wonder who would make a good Gandalf. Gene Hackman? He’s kind of wizardy.”
“Shut up about lord of the rings or I will kick you in the twat!”
She snorted “I mean you might try I guess.”
The distraction/not distraction she was talking about was something I came up with. Once Martialla and I got to talking I realized that chasing the Invincible out of Antolpe wouldn’t mean anything as long as they control the passage through the rough terrain that used to be the Rocky Mountains, which as far as we can tell is exactly where we were wandering around in our first days out of the cryo-tubes. Paul called it the Valley of the Brain Collectors because he was insane.
My thought was that seizing control of that passage was more important than Antolpe in reality because it would cut off their supplies and reinforcements. Plus if we could liberate Paradise we could deploy their fleet of old school gas fueled vehicles. She said that no one had reported the Invincible utilizing them so they must not have seized the place yet. Martialla said that as far as she could tell they were blockading that valley rather than attacking. Why? Who the hell knows?
My suggestion was to send our “armor” and infantry to seize the valley while the ships head up river to attack the Invincible there while the railroad people come up from the south. Leaving the Invincible forces with nowhere to retreat but north, which we don’t care about, and leaving us in control of the access route to connect with what’s left of our Cali crew. It might even be a good plan if we had any idea how many of the Invincible there are or what they’re doing. If they’re smart they have the passage through the mountains sealed up on both ends tighter than Abby Heart in Naughty Nurses Nine. But we have no intel on that. One piece of intel we do that is that Martialla knows the Invincible have seized the golf course in the hills so they control the high ground.
Anyway, the suggestion is while all of that is going on Martialla and I take an elite squad of some of the best fighters, and a couple of the worst ones as well just for laughs, to the Invincible secret base, the real one, not the two other secret bases we thought were the secret base to try and capture it. Assuming that Madcat told us the truth, isn’t wrong, and it isn’t guarded by a million dudes with machineguns.
If you haven’t picked up on it yet the entire plan is basically we don’t know shit so let’s just try and hope for the best, which, and I’m no military genius, is about the worst plan you can get. But I heard a guy in a fancy suit say once that a bad plan is better than no plan and he probably went to business school and based on the number of business douchebags who have a copy of the Art of War displayed on their desks I can only assume that business and war are the same thing.
We were debating all this sitting on the roof of the Invincible truck we captured, and which I thumped with my heel “What we need is to upgrade our wheels. This thing is a piece of crap.”
She raised an eyebrow “King Hollywood still won’t give back J-Lo Two? You want me to kill him and claim it as spoils of war?”
I leaned back on my elbows “Yes, but don’t, murdering the leader of a third of our forces doesn’t seem like a good way to kick things off for the Alliance.”
“Well, we’re probably all going to die anyway so it kind of doesn’t matter.”
I nodded “I believe that’s what Washington said at Valley Forge.”
Rocket Cat 