Steampunk Supervillain
I’m going to take a moment to talk about a friend of mine, who we’ll call Johnny (because his parents did)
Johnny’s at university now, so neither I nor my York-bound buddies see much of him, but even before he went off he was the kind of guy who’d drop off everyone’s social radar for months at a time, only to re-emerge for a week or so with some terrifying new device to show off. You see, Johnny likes building machines, and Johnny likes to see what kind of trouble he can cause with household or otherwise easily obtained materials, so Johnny builds a lot of weapons. In his shed. Just for laughs.
His personal armoury, to the best of my recollection, includes: three air cannons, one of which is capable of driving a carrot through a wooden fence at a distance of several feet; a flamethrower that he built for a mutual friend; a jet engine (“it doesn’t get a lot of thrust but it is quite pretty,” he says) and, terrifyingly, a microwave cannon. I saw him down the pub on Saturday after finishing my shift (he was back in York for the Easter holidays; I think he’s probably gone back now) and he told me that he’s banned from one of the labs at university after a professor caught him amidst some potentially terrifying experiments with lasers (I’d had an amount to drink, but he was saying something about using electromagenetic fields to somehow intensify commercially-available laser pointers? I forget). He said something about modifying a nailgun at one point, I think, to increase its range and accuracy.
He’s a laugh and a half and generally polite and friendly but holy shit I am glad we are not enemies.
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I’m going to want details on this microwave cannon, dogg
Comment by Jon — April 10, 2007 @ 1:02 pm
Can he melt/expand peeps from a distance? Blow up hotdogs you forgot to fork?
Comment by Nate — April 10, 2007 @ 1:27 pm
I never saw that particular device in action, but Aluin tells me it’s capable of vaporising tin foil at a distance. I’m pretty sure it was constructed from scavenged parts from a couple of old microwave ovens; I think he might’ve just got a handful of emitters and rigged them up in a manner that allows for directed projection of terror-beams and then built a crude radiation shield to stop him developing Immediate Hand Cancer. It sounded like an enormously dangerous device when it was first described to me; I don’t think it was used more than a couple of times, and it may have been dismantled since.
I’ll get Aluin on the blower and quiz him about it when I can, he knows more about that one than I do.
Comment by Luke — April 10, 2007 @ 1:36 pm
Dude I’m going to go ahead and say, when I saw the title I was like “this is too good of a title. I better prepare myself to be disappointed.” and it just NEVER STOPPED BEING AWESOME from there on out. It’s like, there are very few non-famous people that you put on your list of “people I have to fucking try to meet someday” but that dude is one of them.
Comment by Jesse Henderson — April 12, 2007 @ 9:08 pm