2023.05.06 "It was a funny moment."

"It was a funny moment."

I know that the nanoscopic robots will eventually clean all my fangs completely, but it's easy to get impatient.

"But I can't help but notice that you're not laughing."

My talon is hooked on a particularly stubborn gobbet of something near the gum line. My voice is broken and hard to understand normally, so it seems somewhat futile to respond while my hand jammed in my gape. So I just squint my little pink eyes through the bars. Obviously I could just send response via comms, but I know better than to open up in that way in my current predicament.

"What I'm most surprised by is how you managed to find time to father children."

My reflexive response is to do a "slow blink", but undoubtedly my tiny peepers can't pull it off so I probably just look stunned. Which isn't far wrong, because I'm utterly baffled by that wildly wrong leap of logic. Unhappy with this circumstance, I slowly pull my hand out of my mouth and stop gaping like a teenager at their first true glimpse of the vast disappointment of their impending adulthood.

My captor used this mounting awkwardness as an opportunity to transform from an eerie grey humanoid into an actual human. But not just any human - male presenting as past-prime age and with a somewhat magnificent mustache. And, for no readily obvious reason, bright white shoes. This would make my hackles raise, except that he settles into a demeanour of deep trustworthiness support. Which is it's own bizarre flavour of wrongness.

"See? I did a dad joke like your meta dad joke."

I used to hang around a human quite a lot, and I seem to recall that they classically referred to some subset of puns as "dad jokes". But as I stare at the shapeshifting nightmare of active metal, I must admit that I have no idea what it is babbling about. Is it insane?

The profound benevolence aura sours into annoyance. "Because he did a meme, and you used it to do a dad joke!" The dad-missionary points insistently at the corpse in this cell with me. A corpse I should confess which is largely my responsibility directly, but perhaps a miscalculation on my part.

Aw hell. Might as well poke the thing, since being subtle has backfired entirely so far. I delicately run my tongue over my fangs, a nervous habit, and choose my words carefully. "What is it that you think is going on here?"

Now it's the monster-dad's turn to stare uncomfortably, and holy fuck is it better at it than I am. Then it tilts its head back and cackles while its mouth fills with perfectly wrong fangs that make me both envious and deeply uncomfortable. "Oh, my fine new toy, what an unexpected facet to find in a fiend of your kind. Tell ME: what do you think is going on?"

Well fuck. It's not like I can exactly lie to it - not with the number of stages of mathematician it must be bringing to bear on reading me. So now the trick is to not let it get away, and even better to not kill me before it gets away. "I think..."

...ran out of time again tonight.  More to come...