At what moment is all my hope lost?
When is the right time to pull the pin?
Will there be enough time for me to watch it unravel?

Private Tom Holman gripped a ball of Salted Yarn in one hand, his teeth on the unraveling pin, ready to yank and lob. It was a new device. one handed out just the other day. “Don’t let your cat play with it” the weapons specialist had joked, “or your pussy will be fried”.

Once the pin was pulled, he had as long as it took to say the devices name three times to throw it. The yarn was made of modified flexible surgical wire. The wire was barbed. The barbed tips were poisoned too. It was the first handheld nuclear ala bio-germ device ever made. Never mind that the germ was nuclear salt, and its target, a Millislug.

Tom’s other arm was gone, bitten off by one of these slugs; the eight foot creature lay next to him leaking slime.

O.K., here goes nothing!

He yanks the pin with his brittle teeth.

One Rumpelstiltskin, two Rumpelstiltskin, three Rumpelstiltskin!-