While Doc and I were busy investigating the strange portal and collecting the artifact, Mr Muffin had been busy digging his way through the remains of an old alien subway station, collecting materials that may aid us in our mission later on. As we made our way back to our ship I thought back to our first training session.
At Serenity, new recruits have to go through the arduous, repetitive effort of digging their way through a reinforced bunker left deep underground centuries earlier. Each trainee designs and maintains their own pair of gloves custom fit to their body. That's how our Space Trooper became known for his signature Gnome Gemfinder™ muffin mitts, earning his title as The Muffin Man, or Mr Muffin for short. Able to cut through steel like butter and withstand extreme heat levels, they were perfect for both digging and baking! Well, perfect as long as you didn't mind a few extra slashes through your dough.
After engineering those muffin mitts, the next task was to dig alongside Graboids, Nature's best digging machines. As Mr Muffin descended onto the asteroid which housed the artifact he readied himself for the ancient Graboid burrow technique of head-butting through topsoil. The Gnome Gemfinder™ mitts can meld together, mimicking the Graboid's head to burrow through with relative ease without any need for wasted time slashing through. That's under normal conditions, at least. It becomes immediately apparent that these are
not normal conditions as Mr Muffin finds it nigh impossible to cut through this asteroid's surface with the normal technique. Perhaps the artifact hidden inside is enhancing the strength of this asteroid? Separating the mittens for dedicated slashing proves much more effective, as he manages to make swift progress cutting through similar to Graboids that clawed through layers of diamonds and disgusting quicksand. Making some real progress down there -
fweeeee-THUMP - Huh? What was that noise?
