I found an old ray gun.

Still works too, but of course it's one of the original LAB focus guns, so, not much there to break, really.

Never mind where I found it, or how I 'inherited' an antique Elfstrom Crystal Bitonal LAB gun, though I may go into that story at some time in the future. Needless to say, this thing is worth a fortune, and that fact is turning out to be quite a burden, but I'd rather not go over that right now either. I have a plan.

New Neighbor

We have a new neighbor, a few domes over. Nice lady, I guess, even though she quacks a lot. Seriously, just like a duck, she quacks-- it's quite odd. Anyway, she's decided to activate her old sonic hedge trimmer system around her dome, instead of spending the money on a decent time garden that she could easily program to mould and shape her boxwoods and level every blade of grass with no trouble. No, she wants to turn on those crappy sonic trimmers.

Nostalgia and thrift, I get it, but there's one major problem; her outdated hedge trimmers are putting out a tone that's interfering with everyone else's elevators, and no matter how many times the neighbors and I have tried to explain to her how modern bitonal elevators tend to malfunction in the vicinity of the frequencies emitted by her old jalopy gardening system and its trimming tones, she doesn't seem to get it.

She's even become a little bit belligerent to her neighbors when it's mentioned, and the last time I brought it up I was silenced with a sharp quack, why can't you just use the stairs?

Hmm...

So, I was telling you about the ray gun that I found.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

My neighbor Hank, he gets furious, and says he wants to strangle the lady. Face reddened, squaallk! he holds his hands around an imaginary neck, but I have a better, neater idea.

That's right, you guessed it. The lady has shown no intention of working with us on this frequency clash, and the standing waves that she is causing in our lifts seem to matter none to her. She doesn't know it, and Hank doesn't know it, but I have an authentic Elfstrom Crystal Bitonal LAB focus gun, and I'm not afraid to use it!

As Easy as Do, Re, Mi

The lady, she was asking for it. This was better than Hank's idea by far, and I giggled like a little kid as I climbed atop my dome and took aim. It only took one shot. One little note-- 're', was all it took.

The standard sonic hedge trimming system of our grandparent's houses all worked on a series of notes, like tiny violins, which dictated the shape of a containment field around each individual shrubbery in those old gardens.

All I had to do was introduce a big fat G flat to the chord that her machine was emitting, and her Sonic Badger trimming system instantly entrained itself to the new note from my LAB gun, and whatever diminished chord was created in that instant, whatever dissonance found a way to shiver its way through that hedge-trimming gizmo's innards, her bushes and gladiolas shook sympathetically, for just a second.

As I watched, the foliage suddenly fell apart, as if made of shaving cream, blops and drippy crumbs of boxwood spilled onto the walkways. Watching still, I marveled as clumps of gladiolas-- not looking near as glad as before-- boiled and tumbled into themselves, and in seconds, every single plant around her dome vanished, as if they were never there.

I Apologize to Those Plants That I Melted

This was why they quit making Sonic Badger trimming systems in the first place, as some of you may recall. Add one wrong note to the chord that the trimmer is playing, and it could cause all kinds of strange acoustical phenomena. I simply pointed the Elfstrom at the old box that housed her system, and that innocent gardening tool became a plant-melting monster.

I feel bad for the plants, but I really didn't know they were going to melt into foamy piles like that. I thought maybe the hedges would get trimmed into hilarious cartoon animals or something, but it was total devastation. Her lawn is a wasteland of mush.

On the brighter side of things, my elevator lift system is working again. Cool.

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the above is fiction, I don't know what happened to that lady's garden. Image is provided thanks to Wikimedia Commons

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