Rattling Cages: Part 10

“Well,” I said, “it turned out that you could find uranium on Amazon, but they sold it in such small amounts that if you wanted to do anything interesting you’d have to buy a lot of it and I don’t think we really have the facilities for working with it anyway.”

I started to tell her exactly what sort of things I’d need to buy, but then I stopped, because sometimes I do notice when I’m telling people more than they’ll ever want to know.
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Rattling Cages: Part 9

Christmas day. In any other year, getting out of the house would have been a challenge. When Grandpa Vander Sloot was alive, we always seemed to have one of Mom’s brothers’ families at our house for Christmas. This year everyone had done their own thing. I suppose we could have gone to visit Dad’s family, but we’d visited Grandpa and Grandma Klein in Wyoming last year.

Wyoming is a long drive from Michigan and it doesn’t get any better in the winter.

We stayed home.

On Christmas day it turned out to be just the four of us. After we’d opened presents, gone to church, had dinner, and hung around the house for a while, visiting Haley’s family cottage sounded like a good idea.
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Rattling Cages: Part 8

Sorry about the lateness of this one… I’ve been pretty bad on the consistency front lately. For better or for worse though, I found that my posts have also been growing longer. I may have to think about how I’m doing this and try for more consistency there. The current installment verges on a size more typical of Tales of MU.
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Rattling Cages: Part 7

After supper, I sat on my bed and started to read “The Ringworld Engineers.” I’d intended to read it earlier in the fall, but I’d been too busy to get much reading in. With Daniel generally busy on Friday nights and Haley scheduled to work, tonight looked like I had a good chance of getting somewhere in the book — provided I could concentrate on it.

“Nick, do you mind if I come in?” Rachel stepped through the doorway.

So much for reading.
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Rattling Cages: Part 6

You would think after all that that we were on the edge of some sort of attack, that the Executioner would just start killing people, but you would be wrong. Nothing happened.

December continued its steady march toward Christmas.

I finished off reviving Cassie’s dad’s normal motorcycle (even though she wasn’t going to do much with it during the winter), worked on the prototype for the guitar, and logged a few hours on the flight simulator that Isaac assured me would be a close match to the Heroes League jet.
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Rattling Cages: Part 5

Two police cars came roaring up the street soon after that. The FBI came with them. Two of them came in a nondescript white van followed by two more in a separate car.

The men in the van started collecting pieces of the destroyed robot.

The police and FBI agents started another round of questioning while Solar Flare stepped up to the counter and ordered a latte.
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Rattling Cages: Part 4

So the first rule of pretending to be normal was “pretend you’re grateful for being saved” instead of being annoyed that some overly powerful idiot just blew up a machine you were hoping to reverse engineer.

The second rule probably went something like, “Don’t stuff your pockets full of burning debris.”

I narrowly managed to do the first and avoid the second.
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Rattling Cages: Part 3

I couldn’t argue with her. Every injury that sent me to the emergency room before the age of ten happened while playing with Cassie — the broken arm, more than forty stitches worth of cuts, and the time she stapled my foot.

When push came to shove, I probably came out with less damage when we fought the Grey Giant than I did most times when we played together as kids.
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The Legion of Nothing: A Series of Online Superhero Novels (Updates Monday and Thursday)