Not the arm as in the arm from the last chapter, no. I mean the robotic arm attached to my body. As we discovered soon after Dave and I arrived at the great flying pickle jar, my arm’s functions were limited.
The more cool stuff consisted of a large static shock, a super magnet, a skeleton key and lock picking set, and a limited stretch which allowed my arm to stretch out to three feet. The less cool stuff consisted of an airbag (I mean who needs an airbag in a hand?). That’s it. The kind of neat stuff consisted of an automatic rock, paper, scissors microchip that could sense what the other player was going to do, (I didn’t use it much because I consider it cheating) also a candy dispenser, used for firing tiny lead pellets but I assumed it could also be used for candy. Unfortunately I never got to test out my assumption because there are no M & Ms in outer space.
Plittereeg and I spent hours hunting down these various functions. Our deal was that I would let Plittereeg help me discover the functions and Plittereeg would teach me some new tricks I had never learned. When we finished discovering the various functions of the arm, Plittereeg did something I would never have expected of him. He shut his eyes, concentrated really hard, and the bulb on the end of his antenae lit up and started glowing with a tiny pulsating throb. The more he concentrated, the brighter the glow got. Eventually it got about as bright as an average light bulb. After a while it got so bright I couldn’t look at it directly, then the brightness went back down to a steady, glowing pulsating throb and the bulb began to swell until it was about the size of an exercise ball.
Then Plittereeg began to nod and shake his head at the same time. The glowing exercise-ball-sized-bulb began to swing in circles until it detached itself, flew across the room and hit the wall, exploding with a band and sending green flecks everywhere. I conveyed my amazement as best as I could without clapping and hurting my left hand a lot. Plittereeg did another trick. He concentrated very hard and spread out his fingers. His long dexterous digits became even longer. The bulbs on the tips of his fingers and thumbs shrank until his fingertips and thumb tips became wickedly sharp. His fingers coiled up into a spring shape and his long thumbs curled slightly and slid inside the cage of fingers. Then he flicked open his fingers and thumbs and tiny green razor-sharp needles shot from the tips of his fingers and embedded themselves in the wall.
The bulbs on the tips of his fingers grew back and his fingers shrank back to normal size. Very vaguely, Plittereeg attempted to explain.
“Most of my species’ tricks of self-defense and attack are possible because evolution has made most of our body parts detachable.” He displayed this concept by detaching one of his arms and dropping it on the floor. He shut his eyes and began to concentrate again. The fingers on his detached arm fell off and the stub of his wrist flattened out into a hammer-like shape, which he picked up with his remaining arm by the stub that used to connect to the shoulder. The elbow in his hammer-arm bent and he threw it with his remaining arm with all his strength. The elbow of the hammer-arm remained bent until it was about half-way from Plittereeg to the opposite wall. Then it straightened out and spun wildly out of control so fast it blurred in a way I had never seen before, looking more like a flying ball than a flying hammer. It hit the wall with such force that it almost dented it, and would have dented it if it had been made of any normal metal.
Plittereeg was lucky it hadn’t dented it or Dave would have made him rebuild the wall from scratch. Plittereeg’s missing arm grew back slowly, but completed its growth cycle in a matter of minutes. Plittereeg was about to display even more tricks when Alabaster called him to get to work on the terra-buggy we were building to help explore the planet we had landed on.
I watched as Plittereeg bounced over to the entrance to the maze in his usual energetic fashion and imagined what his next trick might be. With that, Dave called me to work on figuring out a power source for our buggy and figure out what we would use as protection. I grinned at the thought of how many possibilities there could be for self-defense.