For tonight’s story I will be using Rory’s Storycubes in conjunction with the word of the day. I’ll bold the concepts that came from the story cubes. The word of the day is: Vulcanize, which means to treat crude or synthetic rubber or similar plastic material with chemicals to give it useful properties (such as elasticity, strength, and stability)
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By all accounts it was a sheep that heralded the future of sports in America. Normally such experimentation would be performed on a pig or something more genetically similar to the human species, but a sheep was the first to be cloned, and that kind of made it the breakthrough creature for a whole host of strange experimentation. The experimentor, a casual scientist by the name of Harrison Farr had been thinking about sports at the time. He’d also been watching a ton of Star Trek Discovery, so Tardigrades were at the front of his mind. he thought, what if we could harden a sheep–not just the skin but the fur. What if that fur could be genetically modified to serve as a type of armored covering. Imagine the profit that would come in from it. He called the process Vulcanization, forgetting in the moment that the term pertained solely to plastics and rubber and wanting to coin a phrase that paid at least a little homage to his fellow trekkies.
The experiment worked. However, the first sheep expired quickly, which made Harry quite sad. There was no real sense of value to creating something that died before it could really sprout the fur that was needed. He thought it was at least partially due to the gestation period. Perhaps if the sheep were more like a Turtle in it’s birth cycle it might have a better chance for the Vulcanization to settle in.
He was, miraculously, correct.
How then did he bridge the space between wacko genetics geek (who watches too much TV) to the eyes of the sports world upon him? It wasn’t anything alien or a flowery romantic scenario in which his true love led him down a path of moral understanding. No, He put up a video of two vulcanized sheep fighting on youtube.
That video got all the hits.
Picture this: Two sheep, one brown and one a dusty black, stride into a closed pen. Sheep are not normally aggressive (or very independent, apparently). The black one stares ahead at it’s opponent. It makes a sound like a screech and charges ahead. These are not the big horn sheep. We are talking about the docile stuff you use for 100% cotton tees. Only, they are not so docile. They are tearing and scratching at each other and the two are going C R A Z Y. Still, no damage. That’s when it gets really weird.
Dude throws an alligator in the ring. Full Grown. It slithers around on it’s fat belly and the two sheep stop fighting to stare at it. They turn in unison and rush the poor thing. I say poor, because it doesn’t last more than a few seconds. It tries to bite them, but they are Vulcanized. They are tough as heck and kick a whole ton of ass. 30 seconds. It’s like a Jon Jones fight.
Normally PETA would be screaming, but they aren’t. Something about sheep being able to handle business appeals to them. They still look cute as hell too. You can imagine what happened next…