One pure fractal in Apophysis 2.09, layered upon itself to reveal the "army"
Cmdr. Helmut Allemande was as calm as they came, his composure equal to his massive height and girth and basso profundo voice. So when he was rattling the interior bulkheads of the Amainirenas just gone laughing, and he was going to the same dinner I was because my admiral uncle was hosting one for the command staff and others involved with us in the same project, I knew that said uncle had done something.
All my first officer was able to hand me was a tablet with a Stone Braid War Golem on it, and my third-in-command, Lt. Cmdr. Doohan, had to explain while wiping his eyes from having laughed so hard.
“Captain, we had to come all the way down here because Cmdr. Allemande's voice carries so far – we couldn't let that person on the other end of the line with your uncle know we were laughing so hard at him, because that was at least another admiral, about to get an entire divorce over what he is going to send his wife into! Admiral Banneker-Jackson gave him a good warning, though! 'Look, sir, what I need you to understand is that I'm married, and I know what you think you are going to do. You think you are going to have the women around you influence the women around me, and then my wife is going to catch wind of what you are doing, and you are going to be in worse trouble than the last person who talked back to a Stone Braid War Golem and found out about the army in its mouth. I'm warning you: you do not need the problems you are about to create for yourself!”
“Everybody knows Captain Jackson!” Cmdr. Allemande said as he tried to pull himself together. “Why is the warning even necessary at this point?”
“Human nature,” I said. “Everybody thinks 'it won't happen to me' – but like 20th century athlete Mike Tyson used to say, 'Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth.' ”
Stone Braid War Golems are native to Kanakadur, where Captain Jackson and her first husband had spent most of their life and marriage. They are actually a hive of social creatures with hard, colorful bodies like gemstones, linking together to bivouac in colonies that can have hundreds of thousands of individuals in them. When they are disturbed, they open up the bivouac and release the soldier-workers within them – which is why it is said: never talk back to a Stone Braid War Golem, because that grinding sound that the entire bivouac makes in warning can be the last thing you will ever hear if the colony is big enough.
And, indeed, since people needed to mess around and find out, this was the conversation going on a few days later between Aunt Almira and some very unfortunate person who did not catch that “Hold on just a minute – I'mma call you back” was their last chance to not get the whole treatment.
“Now listen here, Mrs. Karen Becky Sampson Duvier – and since your mama didn't teach you how to mind your business, you're going to learn today. What you need to do is understand that in the time it took me to put you on hold, I already made known what I needed to make known – how do you even know enough to be talking to me 'woman to woman' about this when you weren't in the briefing, and it was classified? I was in the briefing, as a captain. You aren't anything but a socialite who is going to have to figure out how to keep up her wardrobe without her husband's salary or pension because he is out here leaking classified information, and if he doesn't have sense enough not to tell his wife, he probably has told his younger, cuter mistress – yeah, I know you didn't know about that, but it'll come out in the court martial discovery – but you're going to call over here and try to mess with manipulating my marriage so your husband can get my husband to do stuff my husband isn't about to do? You gon' learn in the next 20 minutes why you don't do that – and when you are done dealing with how your whole life is going to be messed up, tell your little circle of meddlers to speak not unto me, Mrs. Karen Becky Sampson Duvier, because if you don't understand how much your mama missed in not teaching you to mind your business, you are about to know so you can teach all your friends.”
It was a whole situation … and why did Aunt Almira make it her business to be walking past the venue of Admiral Duvier's court martial in one of the finest outfits and sets of jewelry Uncle Benjamin had bought her, holding a jumbo bag of popcorn as poor Mrs. Duvier came out for the day? The news cameras just caught her at the periphery on the sidewalk at the press conference, and we all just watched Mrs. Duvier's eyes just following and her face just falling and falling … when my bridge crew of those days has a reunion, this incident is still one of the 'Action Jackson's Greatest Hits' collection that we love to watch with Uncle Benjamin and Aunt Almira so he can get thoroughly into his loving chagrin and Aunt Almira can laugh right along with us!