"A grenade is a weapon that you throw and it explodes. It can do a lotta damage, cover a lotta area. If the Marshal makes one fulla holy water and sticky sunlight, maybe that'll be good for fightin' you know...certain kinda things," he said, as usual feeling pretty confident handing out partial bits of knowledge.

This occasions a bit more ticking, then the clank sort of starts, trying to see Evans again to be sure he's not going to explode. "Ambrose! Critical logic error!"

Reassured once it can see the Marshal, it adds: "Holy grenades should be minus sticky: sticky is hard to throw."

[it's ahead of its time with that thought... cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_bomb]

There's an exasperated sigh. "The sticky is on the inside, Alouette. When the primer explodes, it will spread the concoction around in an area. Then the elixir will ignite when exposed to air, and we'll have a glow as bright as daylight for as long as it burns...hopefully. If everything goes according to plan. If I make the mixture right. So I would very much appreciate it if you did not break my concentration further while I'm mixing this stuff...it's unfortunately rather volatile."

"That all sounds lovely. How do you plan on making sure that this will only affect the bad guys?"

The clank pauses at this, then goes to bother Adrian. "What is primer, concoction, ignite, volatile? Can self help?"

"Ambrose will not throw grenades at good guys, Pierce William Pierce," it reassures William with confidence.

"He better not, Alouette, but grenades have a tendency to be picked up and thrown back or bump against obstacles and roll back to the thrower or just be thrown badly or be dropped..."

He shrugs.
"I rode with Danny 'Dynamite' Johnson for a while, until he managed to blow himself up by cutting the fuse too short. Didn't find enough of him to bury, afterwards."

Not that we would've had time, with the Pinkertons on our trails.

"I don't." Evans says. "These devices will be crude enough as it is. You will have to live with the uncertainty, I'm afraid."

"You should be."

"Are you threatening me, you abominable blood-sucking bastard?" Evans growls from inside the wagon. "If that's a threat, then so help me I will douse you in this shit right now to test if I've got the mixture right! If you want me to honor our truce and let you live long enough to get your revenge and then flee across the plains, then I would kindly suggest you shut the hell up!"
This message was last edited by the player at 08:48, Mon 06 May 2013.

Pierce's tone is mild.
"You're the one doing the threatening, Marshal. Just pointing out that you shouldn't be too sure of going into battle with a weapon that may decimate your own posse while staring down some nasty creatures. Being afraid might just serve to keep you alive. Just try not to panic. That wouldn't serve you - or us - at all."

He turns to Vega again.
"How many of you have been in larger gun fights before? And how many people will we have to face at the ranch?"

"Alouette, I don't think your help is necessarily needed. Best we can do is not distract the Marshal too much while he's whipping up his grenades," he said.

"I just got back in town not long before you did, so I can't say rightly what kinda man power Ward's got up at the ranch. As for large gunfights, I think we been in a few. I know I have. Alouette, do you know what Ward has up at the ranch?"

"Larger than what, Pierce William Pierce?" Alouette asks, then is entirely distracted by Adrian's question.

"Doctor Ward has lots of buildings and a barn where he talks to his snake friend and a barn with cows...and some horses and a house and a carriage which is broken and a Chinese and a cat and a pit where the bodies are buried and 34 spoons...also My Man Abraham, who is a Creature of Habit, and Percy who shot the damned Yankee when it was there, and ghost rock and plus plus ants and 7,824 grains of rice and Dave who is a Bad Man and sheets and a machine like God that lives in his kitchen."

The machine appears to consider whether it's left anything out that Adrian might want to know about. "Doctor Ward also has a green table that has balls in his house and sometimes he has fire there, too, but the fire has to stay in the lamps or it damages property, and if you damage Doctor Ward's property he will shoot you from ten paces away."

Jake sat quietly listening to the others talk about the current situation. His mind was working over it as well as little tidbits of the others conversation seeped in. As he thought his right hand worked the rosary in it with a well practiced motion. The sound of serpents hissing and crows' cawing echoed in huckster's mind causing him to look about with a start.

"Unstable weapons are all we have. It's the only reason I'm working with you, after all." Evans says from the wagon. He fills in some of the bits that Alouette's ramble left out. "Aside from the ranch house, the two barns, and a tool shed, Ward also has a barracks where the rest of the Dust Adders stay when they work on the ranch. I'm guessing Alouette didn't visit that in her tour of the place. Ward employs upwards of thirty people, half of whom were in town when the Comanche attacked. I don't know how many are at the ranch, but I would assume at least the Mayor, that prat Arthur, and perhaps that Mrs. Bradshaw woman the minutes talked about. There might be members of the Enlightened Society that we don't know about. There would also be Ward himself. I suspect there to be about fifteen Dust Adders there, all told."

Fifteen doesn't sound too bad.

"Alouette, can you draw a map of the ranch?"
The something clicks as he replays the clank's speech in his head.
"Wait, what snake friend?"
This message was last edited by the player at 19:30, Mon 06 May 2013.

Adrian found Alouette's summation of things partially helpful, but mostly confusing. It all seemed to make more sense when Evans filled in the gaps.

"So fifteen Dust Adders, Abraham, Percy, a prat called Arthur, a Chinaman, Dr. Ward, a bad man called Dave, and maybe a bad man that calls himself the Seven of Spades. And that's if we're underestimating things. On our side, there's just the five of us? And two of us aren't supposed to use our tricks cause that's apparently makin' everything worse. Odds sure don't look good in a fight."

He turned to Alouette. "Are Abraham, Percy, Arthur, the Chinaman, and Dr. Ward also bad men?"

"You're forgetting Marina. She's a wildcard and might prey on Ward's folks if she gets the chance."
He shrugs.
"Forget about the 15 Adders. Who's their leader? I take him down, the rest might falter. You saw what happened after Shaw went down. But seriously: What snake friend?

"Nathanial Frost was their leader." Evans says. "He's dead now. I think leadership passed to Carl Allans, who was captured by the Comanche. I don't know what happened to him. Next in line seemed to be Gus, who's dead for now. I have no idea who'd be calling the shots at the ranch. But it's a sure bet they won't remain leaderless for long."

"My Man Abraham is a Creature of Habit," the clank states what it knows, calculating, "-he was broken when we all had a legal dispute with the Pure Blooded Comanches but John John Smith fixed him. He is hostile to ants, but he gives folks food if they sleep in the house."

"Percy is good at shooting...self has not spoken to him, but he has not shot at self, so he is probably a very good man," it decides.

"Arthur is a Bad Man, he put a lady in a box when she didn't want to be in a box and buried her when she was alive until she wasn't. That was a Bad Thing to do. Self has not seen the Chinese do anything or spoken to him - we all dug him out of the ground and he was sick so Doctor Ward and AUG-US-TUS with a trumpet and God were making him better. Doctor Ward is a Man of Genius and Complicated," it summarises, apparently now on firmer ground.

"A spirit snake friend-" Alouette's words momentarily falter under a furious hiss of static. "False god, belly-writher, this, Foe, Tezcatl- *tzzap* -from another plane and eats the chickens and people in the ghost rock. It is plus plus big."

Pierce strokes his beard.

"Next time, you might want to lead with that. And if that thing eats people, I'm not so sure I'd call his friends for the 'good guys'. I think we can forget about the 15 guys for now and focus on the fucking snake friend. Do you know how to kill it?"

"Is the snake friend inside him? Like my...crow friend?" One thing he had learned from the Ranger was that sometimes he just had to suck it up and start using animal metaphors if proper communication was to be achieved, even if he didn't quite like it. It seemed that the same kinda thing worked with Alouette.

"I have absolutely no idea." Evans says. He exists the wagons, carrying what looked like three whiskey bottles with some sort of gadgetry on top with him. "Nor do I have any idea how to remove it if it is, or stop it if it isn't. But Ward might. The serpent is probably the source of the town's troubles, and the only ones who have put any study into it would be the Enlightened Society members. They're the ones who opened the bottle of this particular genie...we need to get in contact with them to figure out how to get it back in. Speaking of bottles..."

He offered the whiskey bottles up for inspection. "They're done."

The bottles are half full of some clear liquid solution, and half full of a mix of powders separated from the fluid by what looks like a cardboard divider. The top of the contraption has what looks like a gun hammer, a small-caliber bullet, a trigger mechanism, and gum to keep everything in place.

"Now, the basic principle is this." Evans says. "Cock the hammer, then pull the trigger. That will fire the round. If I've calculated everything right, that will cause the bullet to hit the divider and not break the glass, mixing the solids and the liquids. With it broken, shake the mixture until it starts to glow, and then toss like you've never tossed anything in your life. The sodium metal shavings will react with the holy water, causing an explosion, at which point the mixture with be in contact with the air. Everything touched by the mixture will glow as white hot as the sun for a second or two as the secondary components I've added burn off, creating intense heat and light. Theoretically."

"So it's not just dangerous to Marina and the likes of me? You could burn your arm off as well? I think I'll stick to my pistols. Maybe pick up a nice stake somewhere."

"I might want to point out that you tried that once, and look where it got you." Evans replies. "The vampires implied that aside from being staked, sunlight was the only way to kill a vampire. Your guns will quite likely be as worthless against Marina as they were against the others. This is sunlight in a bottle. If you want to be the one to kill Marina, this is going to be your best weapon."

"Those are Bad Words, Pierce William Pierce, and should not be used in polite company," the clank chides. "Doctor Ward's snake friend does not live in him like the little snake friend of Gus Shaw: it is big, like a mountain, or the the Archangel Sky Coyote, and it does not live on this plane."

It ticks a bit. "If the Snake was on this plane, medium possibility y'all could explode it with plus plus dynamites and holy grenades if y'all got plus close...but if the Snake was on this plane high probability of apocalypse being triggered from Blackthorn, Texas, result: many other things to fight. Self was going to tell Doctor Ward to stop feeding it ghost rock in case it got fat and fell into the world, but then Ranger Hawkins said to help people not be alarmed by the Pure Blooded Comanches so self stayed because self is a Person or Thing of Interest to the Confederated States of America, which means self should do what Ranger Hawkins says."

"Ramps help," it adds to Evans' commentary. "-or possibly onions."