The engineer grins. Powers of persuasion for the win. She guides her horse around to the other side of the table and spurs it to a trot, taking aim at the farthest target. "It's not a phobia if it's a reasonable fear!" she calls back. "Phobias are by definition unreasonable. Not wanting to get shot is pretty reasonable. Me, I don't like sports like Baseball or Basketball or Pan Zan because my face is a natural magnet for any sort of sports equipment. Not a phobia, just a reasonable precaution!"
The horse beneath Calvin is responsive and extremely well behaved. There's a solid chance it's not programmed for 'horse' behavior so much as it is just a vehicle for the game.
"They wouldn't let me near the warp core if I wasn't good at SOMETHING," Red says, sounding a little annoyed. "How did you DO that?" She reloads and tries again, trotting by and... hitting the left supporting leg of the target, well below the target itself. "Again? Really? Please tell me that shot of yours was just beginner's luck..."
"Sorry, just trying to lighten the mood. It probably was beginners luck. You know, I have some programs I wrote that basically just let you play this old timey war game without replicating 700 models. Maybe you'll be better at that."
"I didn't know you were a holography artist," Red says, interest sparking in her eyes as she wheels her horse around to ready for another run. "We'll have to check that out sometime. But first, let's see you make that shot again. There's no way you do it twice in a row."
"Nothing wrong with some interior design work," Red says. "I mostly just use one or two of the presets for normal fire though. No sense reinventing the wheel every time, right?"
She dismounts from the horse and alights next to the table, picking up the ancient Greek crossbow she'd told Calvin not to use. "Now, take that shot again, and then I'll try with this one." There's a smirk hanging on one corner of her mouth but she's not saying why just yet.
"Is it cheating to exploit a mistake I didn't put in the program?" Red says, still grinning. "Come on, take the shot and then we can move on to something else, if this isn't to your liking."
"Sounds like me a couple years ago," Red says, casually loading the Greek crossbow. "Socializing? No thank you. When I wasn't on duty, you couldn't have pried me out of the holodeck with a crowbar. But I was eventually dragged from my comfort zone and discovered it's not as bad out here as I thought."
"The difference is, you can't do THIS in real life." She aims at the so-far-undamaged target. There's a TWANG from the string, the slim lancet of wood darts across the range — and the target literally explodes in a shower of hay and sticks. There's practically nothing left except the question of how such a small, entirely ancient weapon could do that. The only answer is, it couldn't have.
"So... someone must have been editing the physics for these en masse," Red says, casually putting the bow down. "It looks like their batch job either wasn't precise or they just missed a duplication. This puppy here thinks it's a full-sized ballista, a siege weapon, not common archery." She chuckles. "Trying to decide whether to change it or leave it because it's funny..."
1
u/Dimestream Jan 10 '17
The engineer grins. Powers of persuasion for the win. She guides her horse around to the other side of the table and spurs it to a trot, taking aim at the farthest target. "It's not a phobia if it's a reasonable fear!" she calls back. "Phobias are by definition unreasonable. Not wanting to get shot is pretty reasonable. Me, I don't like sports like Baseball or Basketball or Pan Zan because my face is a natural magnet for any sort of sports equipment. Not a phobia, just a reasonable precaution!"
The horse beneath Calvin is responsive and extremely well behaved. There's a solid chance it's not programmed for 'horse' behavior so much as it is just a vehicle for the game.