Dave, brandishing his shiny new light machine gun like Moses descending Mount Sinai with a Gatling attachment, declared:
“Don’t go near the water!!”
The rest of us, parched and sand-crusted, did the only sensible thing—begged like supplicants at a mirage.
Myles (that’d be me, forever cast as Responsible Uncle in this desert daycare): “But we are thirsty, please let us drink.”
Dave, glaring as though I’d suggested baptizing in his sacred coolant tank: “Supplies are low—we are down to 1.7 million ml’s of water, we can’t spare any.”
For reference, that’s 1,700 litres. Apparently, when supplies dip below the “local swimming pool” threshold, Dave initiates rationing protocols.
Craig, ever the diplomat, offered: “What if we promised to help you do some harvesting?”
Dave relented—but with the usual mafia-esque caveat: no brushing teeth, or into the juicer you go.
The Great Slaver Purée
Zaph had the night off (lucky sod), so the rest of us hit every unexplored slaver outpost east and north. We even poked into the Rift. By the time we returned, Dave was whistling merrily while installing extra coolers to store the liquified essence of roughly one hundred slavers. Fremen might call them Deathstills, but we—being plain-spoken colonials—call them “juicers.”
There is something profoundly unsettling about watching Dave beam with pride while feeding “plump slaver bodies” into the machines like fruit at a summer market.
Enter Craig, Stage Left, Sandworm Bait
Lest history forget, it has been almost 25 years since the Gold Dragon Incident, and Craig apparently felt the group had grown complacent. His solution? Attempting to lure a sandworm into flattening our base.
Craig planted a thumper, fully intending to give Shai-Hulud our home address. But Dave—ever the opportunist prankster—charged across the dunes, flipped on his Holtzman field right behind Craig, and bolted for my thopter. The worm sign went wild.
Craig scrambled into the rocks just in time to watch a gargantuan worm erupt from the sands and devour his thumper whole.
“Curses, foiled again,” muttered Craig, like Wile E. Coyote realizing the ACME rocket wasn’t OSHA-compliant.
Assault Thopter Mutiny
Undeterred, Craig decided to cheer himself up by rocketing our base into rubble. Except… Dave had quietly revoked his Assault Thopter privileges. Cue Craig, frantically turning keys and muttering spells to no avail:
“Hey Dave, why am I locked out of the Assault Thopter’s controls?”
Dave, with all the gravity of a judge handing down a life sentence, walked over to Juicer #3 and scrawled Craig’s name on its side.
And Then, The Song
Because why wouldn’t this night end in a musical number? Dave, channeling equal parts Sesame Street and Saw, broke into song while ceremonially juicing another corpse:
Don’t go near my water
To do it any wrong
To be cool with the water
Is the message of this song
Let’s all help the water
Do what we can and ought to
Let’s start juicing today
The juicer hummed, the tanks dripped, and somewhere in the distance, Shai-Hulud sighed in despair at our group’s continued survival.
Addendum: The Great Peak Fiasco
As if sandworm baiting and juicer karaoke weren’t enough, Dave also decided Myles needed a character-building exercise. His idea of “character-building”?
“Climb the highest peak north of our base. There’s loot up there.”
Simple words, devastating consequences.
With some creative aeronautics, Dave wedged the Assault Thopter onto a precarious ledge 800 meters up. From there, I had to grapple the rest of the way to the summit, dangling like a nervous spider in the Arrakeen breeze. Somewhere between prayer and profanity, I finally hauled myself up.
Craig, observing from below, later described it thus:
“With Myles it was like a Titanic situation. Except instead of yelling ‘I’m on top of the world,’ it was more ‘Oh shit, oh shit, argh—I’m falling off the top of the world!’ The only bad thing was that he didn’t.”
(Thanks, Craig. Always rooting for me.)
To everyone’s disappointment, I did not plummet to my doom, but instead successfully used my grapple hook—after only two months of fumbling practice. Craig insists my next life skill should be “learning how to use a sword.” Baby steps.
A Sunburnt Summit
Naturally, we chose to scale the peak at the worst possible time: midday. The desert sun blazed down, water rations evaporated faster than Craig’s good intentions, and I could practically hear our storage tanks sobbing in sympathy.
By the time Dave swung the Thopter around for pickup, the engines were wheezing and the fuel gauge looked like a countdown timer. He casually mentioned:
“Hope you brought extra fuel. We might need some to get back.”Translation: he’d burned through every last reserve to prove a point about verticality.
So there we were—sunburnt, parched, clinging to loot, and relying on a chopper that was only marginally more functional than Craig’s Assault Thopter license.
A typical fiasco, really.
