Tahnan
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 2460
Registered: 11-14-2005
IP: Logged
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Re: Briar riddle (mime defense) (+6)
Searchable text: mime defense (mrimer)
There is a story that is, some claim, older than the Empire itself. (But what nonsense! How can anything be older than the Empire?)
In these early, distant times, the Eighth was a sprawling world, only partially explored and mapped. And so it was that 37th Explorer came running to civilization with dire news. (Or if indeed, the story predates the Empire, then it was merely "an explorer". Imagine--people having jobs but no sense of their position!)
It seems that he had been traveling with 3rd Botanist, and they had discovered a semi-sentient sort of plant, with a "plant mother" at its heart. It would regularly and occasionally grow; not too fast, but fast enough, and indestructably. 3rd Botanist, who had just been going on at length about how she never liked "3rd Botanist" as a name and would prefer something like "Briana", didn't that just roll off the tongue, sure, it's uninformative, but so much more melodious, and--at any rate, 3rd Botanist approached the plant and declared, "How lovely! I shall call this plant Bri--aaaarrgh!" 37th Explorer, reporting the story, speculated that she intended to call the plant "Briana", but 1st Botanist steadfastly refused to accept that, showing the bylaws which stated that a name given is a name determined, and that the plant would be known as "Briar".
Its name, however, was not the primary concern. The primary concern was that, as the plant was fond of growing but not so fond of dying, it would soon encompass the entirety of the Eighth. Engineers abandoned trapdoor research to focus on the possibility of some sort of explosive, and in time that research would prove fruitful...but that would be much, much later.
And so a plot was hatched in secret, behind closed doors and master walls. A plot that was daring, clever, dangerous, perhaps even desperate. A plot that would forever be known as the Last Stand of the Mime Brigade.
1st Mime gathered the rest of her guild together and explained the task. It would be voluntary, she said (or, rather, mimed); there was a good chance none of them would be coming back. And yet, every mime in the Empire volunteered. And, under the direction of 5th Explorer, they marched forth towards the Briar.
Plant mothers had a rudimentary form of intelligence, but it was quite limited. And so, as platoons of the Mime Brigade came into view of each plant mother, the mothers turned their vegetable senses to this new life form. Most creatures, 1st Botanist had speculated, had learned to run from the Briar, and thus the plant mothers would always be watching for the approach of new, naive creatures it could encompass and draw nutrients from. And so it happened: the Briar began to grow towards the mimes.
And then the genius of the plan became clear. Each mime retreated a little, but stopped at the edges of a large rectangle around each mother. Then, in a final tragic performance, they began to mime Trapped in a Box. They beat against the walls of the rectangle, they tried to leave, they mimed screaming. And at last, as the Briar approached, they flattened themselves against the invisible walls.
No mime survived. But the plan worked: the none-too-bright mothers decided that there must be invisible boundaries they could not cross, and this thought pattern became so fundamental a part of the Briar that even after the plants lost all sentience and grew by instinct and chlorophyll, they never grew beyond the confines of their invisible boxes.
In the lobby of the Imperial Theatre, a plaque displays the final words of the last 1st Mime. The plaque is blank. Visitors find it quite moving. And while there are rumors that the briar would have stopped growing on its own, and that the Last Stand of the Mime Brigade was engineered by a singularly irritable patron of the arts to get rid of a theatrical form he just plain hated, no one believes them. The story is simply too powerful.
[Last edited by mrimer at 05-03-2012 05:50 PM]
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