A couple years back, not long after I acquired my fifth gen Volt Xoccula Module, one of my graduate students came in during office hours to ask how I was fixing up the plasmon regulator on an old VX2.7.1. We both had some free time that day, and I knew his thesis involved the second generation modules and their overwhelming predisposition to acquire an aperiodic thump when Delta exceeds .35 with a Vector of 6 at 246 Fankels. I told him he could stay after class each day and work alongside me on the adjustments I was making- an unofficial apprenticeship. I like to think Yalgeth would have approved of this kid's enthusiasm and my willingness to include him in my work, but not even Fahrer could have anticipated what happened next.

Being unfamiliar with the newer hardware, the kid reached into the chassis and popped the A6 catch (which naturally resulted in a total detachment of the coil array, shunting Tea-Tree oil directly into the Flux Capacitor). Unbeknownst to me at the time, my student had recently been tinkering with a gen 1 VX, and he still had some of the residual Mornington Solvent on his working gloves- a perfectly reasonable precautionary measure with such early models, but in an up-to-date model like mine, a gross oversight which caused rapid deterioration of the silicone forensic disruptor chip and its primary stabilization field. Since the kid was attentive in class and knew his Hans-Rodenheim law of vectoral momentum, he knew that this error was going to generate sigma range fluctuations approaching Yalgeth's Constant at a tetrational rate. Here is where he earned his A in the class, along with my unceasing admiration for his quick thinking.

He dove into the supply closet next to my office's ensuite lavatory, and he found an aftermarket flux capacitor from a broken-down VX1.2.2.5, and he swapped it in for the VX5's entire fuse box, using binder clips, zip ties, and Gorilla Tape to hold it in place while I dashed across the room to power down the module. In an eyeblink, the flux capacitor discharged its load, creating a rapidly-collapsing pocket of inverted causality around the ferrocores, negating what could have been a truly catastrophic invocation of Dormison's Paradox.

I would have loved to get some pictures, but the EMP and the flux discharge caused all the film in my camera to degrade to a consistency of warm butter. To this day, I still haven't regrown all of my left eyebrow.

Iron Noder 2013, 10/30