Grrl Power #564 – It’s time to play Beat. That. Deathtrap!

This whole time the Black Reliquary thinks it's alerting the Council's authorities there's a party going on. I guess no one had invented parity checking when they built the vault. Not that it would have done any good in this case, other than the Vault knowing the alarms weren't going through.

Ancient death traps always make me wonder how they tested ancient death traps. Really I guess the only way is to trigger them, clean up the carnage afterward and reset everything. Indiana Jones and the Goonies and other 80's movies made those a big plot element, but so many of them weren't just a trap door, they were shit that brought down the house. One Eyed Willy set up a Rube Goldberg that caused the wall of a cave to collapse and his pirate ship to set sail. That would be a real pain in the ass to test. And presumably One Eyed Willy was the Einstein of Engineering to set all that up in the first place without access to a laptop. (Let's all ignore the fact that the hemp rope or twine and wooden gears he used to pull all that off would probably have rotted beyond usefulness in that wet cave.)

In fact any base or tomb or prison or whatever that self destructs at the end of a movie (that doesn't just involve a bomb or a reactor melting down) somebody rigged that to happen, and in almost every instance they did it without computer aided engineering, and probably couldn't test it because they'd have to rebuild the whole base if they did. That's putting a lot of faith in your masons. Also, wouldn't it make you nervous walking around in a base where the whole thing was rigged to could come down at a moment's notice and the self destruct mechanism was a bunch of ropes and gears that a rat or termites could fuck up without any warning? Evil Overlords aren't probably super in to hazard pay, but man, henchmen should really unionize.

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