Good Manners Go Without Saying
Premise—After a night of getting drunk to celebrate the completion of a device with the ability to alter reality, Belle wakes to discover that the device has been activated and the controller is missing. Belle could just have her onsite assistant destroy the device, but decides instead to race to the lab to disable it personally in such a way that will keep it in tact. Unfortunately her trip is repeatedly slowed down by situations that necessitate good manners, and it goes with out saying that a reality isn’t worth existing if its participants don’t have good manners.
What is a Pavlov’s Lost Tale—Any of my stories that have a Pavlov’s Lost Tale Preface are stories I wrote previously (perhaps even many years ago), didn’t care for, and thus either didn’t finish, didn’t edit, or just generally abandoned. These are “stories” of suspect quality but are being released because of a combination of my own hope that at least one reader out there will enjoy some small part of them, and do to the request of some very kind members of this community. Releasing stories, especially ones as poorly written as these are, is extremely stressful to me, and the ONLY payment I get are the kind words (if any) I receive via emails from readers, so if you enjoyed even a single line of this story, it would mean the world to me if you could let me know. You can reach me at PavlovsBelle@outlook.com
Pavlov’s Lost Tale’s Preface: Let me start by saying the one and only reason this story is being posted is because of the numerous, wonderful, members of our community who emailed me with their support after the last story. A bit concerning was the fact that the vast majority of the emails were something to the effect of “I didn’t care for this story, but I liked so and so story you wrote a decade ago” since the whole concern with these lost tales is that, while I don’t think any of my old stories were anything special, these stories were not even up to that level, thus why they became “lost”, so if your hoping for something on par with one of my previously published tales, you may be continually disappointed. Regardless, the support and requests for me to release more of these stories meant the world to me, so despite some hate I also received for that last story, you all are getting at least one more of these lost tales.
So why the delay then? That’s a long story with multiple parts, the first of which is that shortly after I posted that last story, my computer died. Incidentally, I try to respond to every email I receive, you took the time to email me so its the least I can do, but after my computer stopped working I could not access my email account, which, probably do to my lack of technical knowledge, seems to put every email I receive into a spam folder that gets deleted if I don’t mark it as non-spam it within a week, so there’s a good chance if you emailed me and never got a response, that I simply never got to see it because my computer died and then my email provider devoured it before I got a working computer again.
The other reason for the delay, which was far more devastating to me personally, involved the fact that just as I’d gotten a new computer up and running, my spouse of several years decided to be unfaithful to their wedding vows. This would spiral into a huge mess ultimately resulting in a very messy divorce. Most of my friends were happy with this, as my spouse may or may not have had a history of abusing me and a tendency to spend their nights out getting drunk with barely legal (in some cases not even...) members of the opposite sex. But the reality was that I didn’t (and still don’t) want a divorce, I didn’t (don’t) care what my spouse did to me while we were together, I’d made my own vow at our wedding which I had every intention of honoring and was content to continue to cook my spouse meals every night, clean house, and spread my legs on demand for them, in addition to working 6 days a week to pay the bills while they were unemployed, heck I was even fine with having the far too frequent privilege of cleaning up their puke after they were up all night drinking, including when they would use my personal belonging in lieu of a toilet or bucket as a vomit receptacle, but apparently they had decided I wasn’t “fun” enough anymore, that I was/am boring and had become nothing more then a hindrance to their enjoying life to their fullest, and thus they were actually the one to initiate the divorce...
But I digress, my point is, life got in the way, so I truly apologize to those who were so kind to me and expressed a true desire to see my stories, then probably felt let down when I disappeared for another 6 months.
Okay, enough preface about myself, these were originally supposed to be used to talk about the story that was to follow, so... this a random story from my collection. It’s from a collection of many stories I have specifically on reality changing premises, likely inspired by Alei’s master piece The Reality Machine which remains one of my all time favorite stories to this day despite the fact that, as my ex-spouse can attest, I am not a lesbian. If it was, that does kind of date it since that story came out in what, 2005, but then I still write those kind of stories to this day (and still re-read that story to this day) so I guess that doesn’t really mean anything.
Oh, one last thing, as with stories I’ve posted, this story is not edited, so be aware that its likely filled with typos, poor grammar, and frazzled half thoughts, but as several people requested to help edit for me, if any one wishes to edit any posted story I have on the site, including this one, please just email me to let me know which story your going to do, and then when your done email the edited version to me, and I will review and submit your edited version with editor credits. I ultimately decided I don’t think any of these stories are strong enough to warrant editing pre-release, but I’ll let you all be the judge if you decide, upon reading any of these, that they are worth editing.
Chapter 1 — Rude Awakening
I awoke, my head pounding from a hang over, to the sound of my cell phone ringing. My initial reaction was nearly to launch the phone and its painfully loud beeping across the room, to get as much distance between it and myself as possible, but then thought better of it and answered.
“Hello?” I said groggily. I hadn’t drank that much since college, and now I was remembering why, even the normally unnoticeable static of my phone felt like nails on a chalk board.
“Belle, you’ve gotta get here quick! It’s missing!!!” came the voice of my assistant Lily at a volume level that would have been painful even with out a hang over.
“Wha? Calm down and take it down a notch Lil, what’s going on? What’s missing?” I said whilst rubbing my temple and letting out a yawn.
“The controller, when I came into the lab this morning it wasn’t where we left it last night,” exclaimed Lily, still talking much too loudly.
“So you misplaced the controller, I’m sure its gotta be around their some where,” I said, doing my best to not let my annoyance at her show through while also doing my best to shake the fog out of my head. Lily was brilliant in her own right, but when something got misplaced she had a tendency to over react and act like a helpless infant. One way or another I had a feeling I was going to need to wake up and head over to help her out.
“No, I’m sure of where it was when we left last night! Some one had to have taken it! And... oh gosh, the Reality Modifier is booting up on its own! Whoever has the device is activating it remotely!” came the panicked reply of Lily. For a moment my hung over, half asleep, brain didn’t fully process what I’d just heard. When everything finally snapped into place for me, however, panic gripped me as well.
“What!? But how! Not even my husband knows the details of what we’re working on, why would anyone even...” but even as I said it hazy memories of last night came flooding back. I couldn’t remember specifics, but I recalled getting the message from Earl, my husband, that he’d be working late, and I remembered how that had led to me celebrating the first successful test run of my device, not at a fancy restraunt with Earl as I’d planned, but by getting blitzed at a bar alone. From there things got extra hazy, but I distinctively remembered at some point in the night having offered to buy drinks for everyone. I couldn’t quite recall if I’d actually told everyone why I was celebrating, but I did seem to recall the creepy scientist, Harry from the lab down the hall, being among those present and that he’d started up a conversation with me at some point. Even drunk out of my mind I wouldn’t have given into his advances, even if I wasn’t married he was the sort of perverted male chauvinist that I’d have shipped to the north pole if I could have, but could I have told him about the RM, or worse, what it was capable of? In the hands of a deranged pervert like him, who knows what sort of depravities he would unleash upon the world.
“What is it Belle, did you think of something, do you know who might have stolen the controller?” said Lily, still sounding panicked, but also a little hopeful, probably because she’d heard me mumbling to myself as I often did when in deep thought.
“Maybe, but first... wait... shit! You don’t know how to manually over ride the RM do you?” I said as another wave of panic hit me. I heard a muffled confirmation from Lily. “OK, if you haven’t already make sure you put on one of the protective suits, then just wait right there, I’m going to head over as quickly as I can, I’ll disable the RM, and then we’ll go about finding the controller.”
The confirmation I got from Lily suggested she wasn’t too thrilled with the prospect of waiting for me to arrive, and I couldn’t blame her, but the RM was not easily manually shut off, let alone over ridden, it would take me more time trying to explain it to her over the phone then to just get down there and do it myself. Part of me wondered if I shouldn’t have just told her to yank all the power cords out of the wall, but aside from the fact I had no idea how dangerous that might be for Lily, what I was sure of was that doing so would damage the device beyond repair, and having gone over budget months ago I absolutely HAD to have a working prototype to show to the board on Monday or the entire project was going to get shut down. And if the project was shut down and the device destroyed, I’d never be able to actually use it for what I’d created for in the first place...
Besides, even if I had stupidly blabbed about the device in my drunken stupor, the controls weren’t exactly very user friendly, the odds were still high that whoever had stolen the controls had simply turned the RM on by chance, they likely wouldn’t be able to figure out how to input commands to it. Further, if they did, Lily was still on site, so the moment I noticed a change in reality I could call her back and have her break the RM... all though that did hinge on the assumption that I actually would notice a change in reality created by the RM. During all our tests we’d always been wearing our protective suits made specifically to reflect the reality altering particles the device generating, if I was hit by the particles with out the suit... but no, I couldn’t allow myself to dwell on possibility. I was going to get there, over ride the RM, and then we were going to get the controller back, and nothing was going to go wrong. Or so I desperately tried to convince myself...