Without hesitation, you swing down one of the heavy bags on your shoulder so it slides along your arm, letting you catch the strap with your hand. As this happens, the bag flails around in front of you, and you twist sharply at the waist, letting your whole body become counterbalance to the bludgeoning weapon you've formed.
The satchel filled with cans of carbonated drinks smacks squarely into the jaw of the vole creature, and a wrenching pop noise is followed by a crack, as the alien flies away from you, lifted off its feet momentarily before falling prone onto the floor.
A pool of brownish-red liquid forms around the creature, which you immediately assume to be blood. Until the creature sits upright, shocked but very much alive. It pushes its jaw back into place, setting it firmly as it looks at you with horror.
The liquid came from the bag that hit it. It was QuarrixCola. One of the cans has breached.
As a few stray cans shake their way loose of the satchel in your hand, you see the writing emblazoned clearly along the length of one of them for the first time. "Now even fizzier! Warning! Dangerously carbonated! Do not shake!"
The bag you're holding is vibrating violently, and you instinctively throw it as far away from you as you can manage! Mere seconds later, the bag still flying through the air, the cans within rupture under the pressure, and there is an ear-shatteringly loud explosion of cola which showers down on the aliens nearest it. You exchange glances of relief with the vole creature, both of you having narrowly avoided a sticky end.
But why can you still feel the cans vibrating?
Oh, yeah. You had two bags. One's still strapped around your body.
That's right, you've died. Seems to me like violence led only to your undoing. There's probably a moral hidden in that somewhere.
No other path leads to you being killed by several litres of dangerously fizzy soft drinks. If you'd like to find one of them, pop back to
page 1.