* LOCUST FART HELL posted: | one time on ass day haine made half the station birds and the other half traitor staff assistants, long story short i was a cockatiel that stunned a guy with a flash and stole his c-saber and led him on a merry chase round the station Ooh, I have a story related to this! Up until recently, players couldn't be animals: due to limitations on how they were coded, any critters we had could only be controlled by AI, not players (with some very specific edge cases that were basically admin-only). For a while we had code in place for playable critters, but very little had been ported to it yet. Then MBC set up playable mice one day, and I kinda latched on to that base and went hog wild and ported a bunch more animals, like cats, dogs, possums, etc. (And birds, yes.) In celebration of all the new things players could be, I joined a round just about to restart, and told everyone that next round they should latejoin because there were going to be a lot of !!!fun new job choices!!! for that round. So the new round begins, and a few people have readied up. It's nuke. The ops are immediately worried because they can hear the announcement computer rattling off a slew of new crewmembers joining up, all of whom are cats, or birds, or mice. They comment that they're sure they're going to die to all the animals. I scoff at the idea in asay, since the animals are all extremely fragile. A couple punches and any of them are dead, let alone a couple bullets. I should have lowered my expectations, it turns out. So the station is rapidly filling with various animals, some of whom are fighting with one another, some of whom are dying to doors or the few people on the ship punching them. Most are just wandering about and discovering what it's like to play as a tiny animal. The ops are making their way to Medbay, where they're supposed to set up the nuke. One of them nearly suffocates while getting out of the pod due to forgetting to turn on his oxygen, then they nearly lose or forget the nuke, as ops are want to do. They manage to get into Medbay with minimal fuss and no alarm raised. They heal up and begin setting up the area - they build tables to block off people's access to their corner of Medbay, and more tables around the nuke (which they've tucked into one of the beds.) Somewhere around when they were nearly done with the tables, someone wanders by, sees what they're up to, and screams over the radio as they run off. The ops have a brief minute to realize they've tabled off the nuke without starting the timer, so they quickly have to deconstruct one and start it up. Now, this was the very first round since these playable critters were added. I'm sure most regular players have encountered a wizard that knows Baleful Polymorph before, but this was the first time these ops had ever encountered the new animals, so they had no way to know something very important to their plan to block off Medbay with tables: Small animals can move over them, and hide under them. The ops barely have time to get their table back up before animals are pouring into the room. Cats, mice, dogs, and a rainbow of parrots, from every possible direction, scoot right over the poor ops' tables. The ops are in chaos for a minute as they wildly fire at the animals - very few shots land, most sailing over their heads. One of the ops is struck by some of the stray bullets, the others get bitten by the animals as they dart around the tables. Blood flies everywhere. Some of the animals get to the nuke and begin hitting it with whatever they can. The ops quickly realize that guns aren't going to work, and they switch to melee. Most of the critters fall quickly. There was a problem, though. See, cats have nine lives. When they would normally die, they would check to see if they should ignore that death and use a life. Due to a bug in how this was coded for the new playable cats, they'd forget to actually die, regardless. Essentially, the cats were all immortal. The ops stood no chance, in the end. The cats would get up every time the ops managed to strike them down, and whittled away at the ops and the nuke until both were gone. That was The Day The Station Was Saved By Cats. (please note that my recollection of this event is a bit foggy so some details may have gotten mixed up with other goofy nuke rounds I've observed)