“Ok, tanks Merlin… What clockwise?“
— Robin
Heorot, the Maze (Covenant Operational HQ), south-west France.
Merlin enters the bar and nods to Ffred the barman, who proceeds to lift an enormous drinking horn down from the brackets up behind the bar and set it under Pilsner tap. Nobody else drinks the Pilsner. Everybody else knows who brews it.
“Did Karl go back to the States?” he asks Ffred.
Ffred shrugs noncommittally. “I’m not his mother, Merlin,” he says in his strong Welsh accent.
“Well, if you see anyone from the team that was in Abersky, tell them Emily found something interesting in the paperwork the Cleaners brought back with them, will you? Ooooh, lovely. That’s going to hit the spot.”
“Aberscasbethau, was it?” Ffred asks casually.
“That’s right,” Merlin says happily, his beard made even more enormous by a ring of froth around his mouth.
“Right you are, Merlin.” Ffred returns to polishing the bar.
As he leaves the bar, Merlin spots Robin in the corridor, and breaks into a grin as huge as Brian Blessed’s is when he’s in a Hawkman suit making pew pew noises. Merlin hands over a cylindrical object. It is black, shiny, and has three rings of different kinds of metallic substance Robin has never seen before. Probably no-one has ever seen before.
“Twist the front ring clockwise — clockwise from the back, that is, don’t look into the lens, never look into the lens — to turn on the light. Turn it anti-clockwise to turn it off. Has a bit of an odd cast to it, but it’ll do for seeing by, if you’ve got nothing else. You didn’t really want a torch, though, did you? Turn the front and second rings clockwise and it might light up invisible things. Like ghosts. Maybe. Look, Egbert said he saw invisible things when he used both front rings, but then he also said he’d dropped a tab with his coffee this morning to help him focus, so who knows? That’s not really the fun part, though.” He pauses, almost too excited to speak. “What you… What you do… What you do, right, is make sure all the rings are fully anticlockwise.” He forces himself to be stern for a moment. “This is VERY IMPORTANT. Then you agitate it, like this” — he holds it in both hands and shakes it vigorously, like a winning Formula 1 driver with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label — “then twist the second ring clockwise and the back ring three notches anticlockwise. Understand? I shan’t do it right now, because C will have my head. She just had the place redecorated. For gods’ sakes, man, don’t be looking at it when you do. It’ll melt your face off.” He clutches his ribs, so pleased he might explode. “It’s a MASER. Magma Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Not sure how long you can run it for before it melts, and Egbert said something about adding additional features to do with what rings you twist in what direction, but I’m not convinced it was only one tab he dropped this morning, so gods know what else it does. Have fun anyway. Let me know how you get on with it.”
Robin examines the object with some befuddlement. “Ok, tanks Merlin… What clockwise?”
Merlin strides off without hearing Robin’s question, too lost in thought of all the exciting things Robin might use it for out in the field.
Robin turns the magma-lite this way and that. “Ok, me figure out. Merlin say Robin twist bits then point, but me no look where point. Robin no forget shakey-shake bit. Was shakey-shake when look or no look?”
Oh dear.