Portable mad-scientist equipment: play tricks on your friends!
Unending BE - episode 246013
Rick gazed at the collection of conveniently-portable strange-looking
gadgets that filled the smallish room: they all looked like gear out
of a mad scientist's lab in a bad movie...well, not quite. There was
a strange, well, authenticity to them, each seeming to have a
unity of purpose, a lack of superfluities...most were not elegant in
design, but all seemed real somehow, not the products of movie
prop designers on tight budgets. All had thin instruction manuals on
standard office paper; some of the manuals were mimeographed, some
printed out on old daisywheel printers, some photocopied. They were
in binders or simply stapled together. Rick went from machine to machine,
reading the titles on the instruction manuals and looking very skeptical.
"Well, Rick?" said Jim, at length, in her pleasant female voice.
"These are just gag items!" said Rick.
"Isn't that what you wanted?" asked Jim, all innocent.
"Uh, not exactly," said Rick. "I mean, if any of these things happened
to be for real, I'd want to have it, and I could play some incredible
practical jokes with it -- and probably a lot more than just that! But
they've all got to be fakes: what each one purports to do is impossible!"
Jim drew herself up to her full (rather short) height and tried to look
all huffy and indignant. "Rick, everything we sell is just what we
claim it is, and we will refund your money if it isn't. It's as simple
as that!"
Rick was still skeptical, but showed some interest in buying:
- the mind-swapping (or should that be body-swapping?) machine.
- the gender-bender machine.
- the Universal Copy Machine (with plenty of Universal Toner).
- *the Photograph-Guided Body Resculpting Machine.
- the Mind Canner.
- some other machine...
Go back - Go to the parent episode.
Fri Aug 23 12:29:18 2002