Laying the Moral Groundwork

Posted on July 13, 2005 by Jenna

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It is bad to badger witnesses. It is worse to badger witnesses with weasels. It is worst of all to badger witnesses with sharks, unless the witness can turn into a shark and fight back. Then it’s entertaining!

You can’t badger people with lasers. For one thing, you use lasers to zap people, not to badger them. For another, the lasers are the wrong color.

Some lasers are red. These lasers are made with red crystals.

Some lasers are blue. These lasers are made with blue crystals.

Some lasers are weasel-colored. There are no weasel crystals so these are made with non-crystalline weasels.

The cool thing about using a weasel-colored laser is that weasels are highly resistant to the energetic impact. If your target is standing in front of a weasel and you want to use a red or blue laser, then you must wait until the target moves. Otherwise you might hurt the weasel. With a weasel-colored laser this is not true. You can fire straight through your target and the weasel will remain unharmed.

This also has benefit in medical situations where you need to operate on someone who is laying on a bed of weasels. You can carve gently and surgically through such a person’s body and rely on the underlying weasels to squeak in mild discomfort when the laser touches them.

The reason this works is that weasels inherently reflect the color of weasels. If they didn’t then they would be invisible—all of the weasel-colored light that hit them would be absorbed and you would be unable to see the weasel. It is very very rude to shoot an invisible weasel with a weasel-colored laser, since this will highlight its deformity while simultaneously inflicting a terrible weasel-colored burn.

Perry Mason was the first lawyer to use a weasel-colored laser to solve crimes. (He was not the first detective to do so; that, of course, was Sherlock Holmes, who made detection into a science and could use weasel lasers to highlight even the smallest non-invisible-weasel clues. As he put it, ‘the weasel reveals the game.’ However, given the rising use of weasel-colored lasers in important court cases, Perry Mason’s contribution remains significant.)

Perry Mason first used the weasel-colored laser in his classic clash with prosecutor Hammerhead Durgan. Hammerhead Durgan’s reign of terror relied on his use of a shark-colored laser to reveal the various defendants’ moral flaws. Perry’s weasel-colored laser cancelled out the shark-colored laser, since sharks are a totally different color than weasels, allowing Perry to see through to the facts of the case. Durgan went into a blood frenzy, murdering everyone in the courtroom but the quick-witted Perry and his client. This left the courtroom permanently cursed. Anyone whose trial the justice system holds there transforms into a shark or a weasel when badgered, reverting only when asked a leading question. Some of these witnesses are never asked a leading question—they stay a badger or a shark forever, just like people who win third prize in a “turn into a dangerous animal” lotto!

Lotto makes the state a lot of money, which it can use to build roads and pay police officers. Turning witnesses into weasels is not as good—it’s illegal to sell the weasels or the witness chair, so the whole process is actually terribly expensive! That’s why it’s so important not to badger witnesses. It costs the state money it could otherwise use for fixing potholes, manufacturing parents for needy orphans, or for graft.

Don’t badger witnesses! A balanced budget depends on you!

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