A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (Part 3 of 5)

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (1)

A Chair Burning, and an Unfortunately Outspoken Girl (2)

Frod Pollericks just gave the introductory speech, as he is wont to do. A few years ago (I suppose it really has been that long) there was a healthy, heterogeneous pool of MC’s for chair burnings and I toyed with my parameters depending on who started things off.

However, there is something about politicking positions like these that attracts the most officious and unfortunate of our species. Just as bad money drives out good, Loud Frod Pollericks has installed himself as sole king of chair burnings.

If he ever relents in his daily expressions of scorn for all other sorts of burnings their invasion will be a forgone conclusion.

He had a new spiel on symbolism today which was a trifle less putrid than usual. I gave my customary blank stare and nod of approval whenever he glanced my way, for he was keenly conscious of his audience and sometimes pretended interest in my cosine functions. Namely, the ones which were plotted based off of his burnings. Because he really just wanted to talk about himself, and I remain deeply disturbed that we once snogged for upwards of two minutes.

Thanks to that misadventure of my youth I would have let these burnings fall to the wayside, if only my predecessor hadn’t made a point of documenting them¹. Now, years of the practice have bestowed upon me an amazingly good stomach.

Loud Frod pontificated with the silly gestures and stern face that betrayed his innermost happiness, leading me to picture the gut that would have swayed upon his portly frame were not our Lifestyle Aesthetics System (LAS) too kind to allow it. He seesawed and fist-smashed and bowed his head. Then predictably, ever so rousingly, his voice rose to a crescendo and he threw the first grenade.

The chairs in the nearer portion of the tensor-dome exploded in a shower of dirt and synthetic materials, bouncing off the inside of the dome, and everyone else quickly joined in.

This is the only place in the city where there is bare ground, as the plebs had an original thought during its planning and voted to leave the most likely place for burnings without paving, stones, or bouncy-turf. Their legacy is a little plaque for ingenuity in the mayor’s office, and the Municipal Crew’s thanks for not having to repair any materials shattered under the periodic detonations.

Nota Bene: I do not mean to give the impression that explosions are the crux of burnings – they aren’t.

The reason why burnings need some time to get going, and also why they capture the interest of the crowd, is that things don’t catch fire very easily under the tensor-domes. There is true strategy involved in producing the first flames, and when the telltale glow pokes forth I need to pay attention to my Patented Liliolophus Object Counter (PLOC) as participants start throwing more pieces into the pile.

In this easygoing confusion no one else (especially not Loud Frod) had noticed the girl waving her hands and protesting shrilly. This was about to change.

I returned my eyebrows to their usual position with a groan, and steeled myself for public notice of the girl’s unwanted display. I would have to factor this into my function- and head office would be delighted. Because I had never attended and charted a burning that was disturbed before. Even the youngest of children would know that such a stunt was a bad idea, but she was even on tiptoes, for Nebula’s sake.

Why was she here? Clearly still in the “omigosh now we’re biologically tuned to do —ual things together!” phase of life, she ought to be sequestered in some learning facility with plenty of free time for exploration on her hands. Here, she was just an unwanted reminded of her elders’ passage through that very phase. Something hot, and associated with more than the Loud Frod escapade alone, crept up the back of my neck.

The muted bangs and rumbles of explosions, coupled with the participants’ eager calls about where to throw the next grenade, only provided cover until a tongue of flame leapt up in the middle of the pile. Then the first sight of fire galvanized a third of the crowd into rushing for more chairs, but in the rest it induced a contented hush.

In this relative quiet the girl’s voice soared high enough that she visibly startled herself.

~

1 It is hellishly difficult to discontinue collection and/or provision of a dataset – even if it is something as obscure as the course of chair burnings in a single city. If you try to cut back on dead weight in the data department someone, somewhere, is going to freak out and insist that you can’t kill their extremely important source of information. That’s why I’m waiting for the remaining users of the —- District Chair Burning Data to die before I quietly stop collecting it.