Halitosis

(by Saproneth)

"How about this design?" Colin asked.

"That looks like an improvement," Dragon agreed, then watched with interest as Colin saved it to a folder on his computer. "That doesn't seem like you..."

Colin frowned, puzzled.

"Normally you'd be implementing a new design as soon as you were sure it was an efficiency improvement," Dragon explained. "I don't think the different behaviour is a bad thing, I'm just curious about it."

"I realized there was a more effective way to test multiple designs of my motorbike's aerodynamics," Colin explained. "I plan to devise several new configurations, then use the omnivehicle to test them all out at low, medium and high speeds to see which is the most overall efficient."

Dragon nodded. "That is a good point, yes, that will make prototyping much more-"

She paused. "It looks like the Family are firing up the WCC again. They're headed for the location we identified for high power weapons tests."

A map came up on one of the monitors, showing the two portal waypoints - one of them in Brockton Bay, as normal, and the other on the northeastern coast of Labrador. The waterfall display by the side of the screen showed that the wormhole was being run at maximum aperture size, which gave them both a clue as to who the target was.

"I'm bringing up the feed from the monitoring drone now," Dragon added, and another screen showed the brightly coloured wormhole letting Kaiju through. "I wonder what she's going to try this time? Perhaps it's going to be the same thing we think they used on Saint - if that was the Family, of course."

Colin nodded, wincing slightly, and they both watched as Kaiju straightened up, inhaled-

-and the drone's camera feed went dead.

"What just-" Colin asked, looking over at his friend.

"Burnout on the camera," Dragon replied. "I'm still getting some of the telemetry, though - it seems to have been blasted backwards and flipped over. It's reading a spike in radiation - and now the spike's gone."

They exchanged glances, unsure about what the crazy lizards had done this time.

'Oops,' Taylor thought, blinking to try and get the flash out of her eyes. 'I didn't think it would be that bright.'

Maybe she would have to give up the attempt to create proper Atomic Breath. Exhaling a long cone of graphite-laced water with a little hole in the middle, and filling the middle with a few hundred pounds of Californium-252, had seemed like a good idea at the time - but the resultant fission explosion had been somewhat bigger than she'd expected, and thrown superheated radioactive steam everywhere as well as produced a flash bright enough to make her eyes water a little.

Fortunately everything that got irradiated would time out in a few seconds, but even so breathing a nuclear explosion out of her mouth had been a little unpleasant.

"At least we know for later," the Varga pointed out. "Perhaps using a different isotope might produce better results? It occurs to me that your scientists have not tested some of the ones with the shorter half lives, perhaps Francium might produce the desired result without requiring a true critical mass."

Taylor thought that over for a moment. The decay of Francium would happen so quickly that it would be like an atomic explosion, true, but since it would happen at any mass it would be much more controllable.

'Let's give that a go, then,' she decided.

"She's doing it again," Dragon said, as the telemetry went crazy for a second time. "Do we ask her to stop, or ask her to record it?"

"A good question," Colin admitted. "There is undoubtedly some novel science being done... I just wish it were being done somewhere else. Like Venus - there isn't much they could do to make Venus worse."

Dragon smiled at Colin's joke, wondering if he knew he'd made one.

Around here, you more or less had to be able to laugh at the Family - it was the least stressful thing to do.