Inky Secret Weapon

Part of the benefits of being in Academic Decathlon, even if your team didn't even come close to living up to the previous years and its city's prowess, was that you got a free Academic Decathlon pen and pencil.

They came in a blue plastic pen case, which was made of plastic and broke quite easily when dropped.

The pencil, a mechanical one, had a rather bad design. In order to insert more lead, you had to pull out the cap at the back, like most other pencils. However, in the process of pulling out the cap, the entire lead tube came out with in. This left you with two options. First, you could put the lead in the tube and then attempt to secure the tube back in its socket. This would seem easier than the second, which was to take the entire thing apart and put it back together, but apparently the tube wasn't prone to sticking into socket easily nor accurately. When writing, the pencil also had a tendency to begin to unscrew itself from the head.

But the pen was a whole different story.

At first, the pen worked just fine. It wasn't great, but the ink was smooth. Like the pencil, it also had a slight disposition to begin to seperate the body from the head. One day, I decided to attempt to solve the problem once and for all. I screwed the contraption as tight as I could, and then even tighter. Under the stress unfortunately, the thing was about as durable as its case. It cracked and now wouldn't stay shut.

So it wouldn't exactly stay shut, but I could live with that, or so I thought. During history sixth period, I was performing my usual idiosyncrasy of rapidly protracting and retracting my pen. Then the teacher called on me, and when I dropped the pen to answer, the pen exploded. Like literally. Part of it went about a eight feet away. It was quite the experience.

I thought that the incident was an isolated one and wouldn't happen again anytime soon. Again, I was mistaken. The self-destruct sequence kept auto-initiating, and pretty soon I was picking the pieces together every five minutes.

Armed with this potential weapon of mass destruction, I began to research ways of making it more lethal and stable. After some experimentation, I found that if you clicked it rapidly enough times, it would blow up. Following more tweaking, it was discovered that if you unscrewed the pen slightly, the pen would spontaneously combust after one or two clicks.

I showed off my newfound secret weapon, shooting them at friends and such. However, I soon found that putting it back together every time it decided to fly apart, whether unintentionally or otherwise, was too much trouble, and I feared losing the spring. The pen is currently holding a place of honor in my collection of used up pens that are either nonrefillable or are awaiting replacement ink tubes.