The club had struggled on a bit of theatrical special effects. While the blood-craft was fairly easy and well-studied, they'd focused too hard on replicating the exact choreography of the original scene. Considering that it was animated, and tuned to the mass and momentum of giant robots, some issues had presented themselves. Most were solved by Greg, the secretary of the current club, and Sharon, with their twin love of Jackie Chan movies, substituting impossible moves with some of the more compelling, and more importantly, easy moves of their favorite films. However, a bit of prop-work still vexed them.
Specifically, the two-handed glaives, the double-ended swords of the Mass Production Evangelions, were, in the original scene, able to stick into the ground. This allowed them to be thrown away, and still be reliably available for use in later parts of the scene. But this did not work, at all, when the glaives didn't weigh several tons, nor were sharp as razors. It was fairly obvious that no matter what they did, the foam-rubber glaives would not stick into the ground, regardless of the stage they were performing on.
This was, at its core, an engineering problem.
Alan could, on one timeline, have been an engineer. Back in the very early 2000s, there had been a show by the name of Junkyard Wars – on it, teams attempted amateur engineering, making machines to accomplish a predetermined goal out of whatever trash they could find. Whatever part of his brain that had engaged with, Mythbusters had amplified. Again, it was a show that used seat-of-the-pants engineering to answer pertinent questions.
But that wasn't who Alan turned out to be.
Thankfully, Henry had some bite-marks of it on him, and Kevin, the treasurer of the current Anime Club, was majoring in Engineering – and thankfully wasn't specializing into civil engineering or any of that guff. So they'd worked the problem. Alan had wanted to hear that phrase all his life, or at least for the past ten years of it – as a kid, he'd watched Apollo 13, where members of NASA faced an engineering problem down, figured out the tools they had available to them, and figured out a way to solve it with the materials available to them. In their case, “working the problem” was specific to their needs. Cinematically, they needed the glaives to land one end down predictably – so, they made a cavity in the foam rubber, and filled it with sand until it'd reliably land the same end down, each and every time. But that was only half of the desired effect. They needed to stay that way, like their edges had been driven into the dirt. Jeff had proposed, along with Bill and Clive, a mechanism for sensing the floor – use an Arduino unit, calculate the vertical displacement, and then flip out feet to hold the structure fast, but only when the correct altitude was reached.
This would, possibly, have worked.
Sharon had proposed balloons full of sand. While they were in use, the sand could fall into the blades, but when they were discarded, the sand would seek the ground, inflate the balloons, and create a “foot” that the glaives could rest on.
That, as Alan watched another glaive pirouette through the air and then land, sticking end up on the stage, worked.