Shireroth

Andreas was in the Dutchal Palace at Blackrock, inspecting a parcel which was to be shown there. He took out of the box an ancient laser gun, probably of Jasonian design. Why it had been delivered in a cardboard box, he had no idea. He looked at it for a few moments, turning it over in his hand. Nothing seemed to odd. He handed it to one of the assembled, who also wanted to see the artefact. "Looks safe enough," he said.
One of the people took it excitedly and pulled the trigger. Andreas hadn't expected that. But what he really hadn't expected was for their to be a sudden ... glooping sensation in space-time, a ripple seemed to run through everything, and then there was a scream. The person holding the gun disappeared, though the gun stayed in mid air, hovering. As it distorted space-time around it, there was a sucking noise and it began to pull everything around it slowly towards it, like a slow black hole. A little girl disappeared, and several women. Andreas was rooted to the spot. He didn't know what to do, or how to stop what seemed like such an improbable scenario. And then suddenly, as quickly as it had started, it stopped, the gun fell back into the box, and everything seemed right. But the people were gone.

Another woman took the gun out of the box and began looking at it. "Don't!" Andreas cried, but she just looked at him, strangely.
"Why, what's wrong with it?" she said.
Andreas was dumbstruck. Hadn't they all just seen it ... consume people? "The glooping ..." he murmured.
"What are you talking about?" the lady said, disgusted, looking at him as if he were mad and clearly not recognising him as a Baron. He decided to leave the matter and walked down the hall.

A little while later, he came across one of the people who had been there (a man), and, to his surprise, the little girl who had been sucked in by the gun. She was moving around in a strange manner ... almost as if she was frozen in one pose but hovering quickly in a path that made it appear as if she was walking. The man was trying to catch her. "She keeps jumping!" he said.
"You head her off that way," Andreas said, nodding and making his way swiftly towards her. He managed to get his hands around her shoulders, but as the man said, she .... jumped. It jarred his fingers, and suddenly she was ahead of him again. She did this several times, a smaller distance each one, until they finally caught her. She stopped, then, still, and they laid her down. They watched her for a about thirty seconds, and then her eyes flickered, and she got up, normally.
"Thankyou," the man said. "I didn't know if I'd ever see her again."
"So you'll help me tell the Dutch about this?" Andreas asked.
"Of course," the man promised.

Andreas went forth, and on his way, found two more people. Each of them jumped less than the first girl, and upon being caught, spent about thirty seconds laying down, and then were fine. Some of these people he recognised as ones who had angrily told him he was mad just after the gun stopped, and didn't seem to remember it then. They remembered it now. But now he came across another lady, trying to chase an older one (probably her mother) in a yellow dress. He helped her catch the lady - she didn't jump, not even once, and laid her down on a sofa (for some reason they were in one of the lounge rooms in the Dutchal Palace). He began to turn away, knowing she'd be up and about in about thirty seconds, but almost immediately upon being laid down the women got up, with a demonic grin, said, "That'll do me," and dashed off down the corridor with inhuman speed. Andreas looked down the corridor - the gun, in its cardboard box was there, sitting innocently on a desk, and she was about to grab it. He yelled out, helpless, "Stop. No! Fake! FAKE!"

Then he woke up in a cold sweat, in his bed in Sakatra. It had only been a dream, which turned, at late, into a nightmare. But it seemed so foreboding ...