Posted by Gremlin [24.8.14.102 - c-24-8-14-102.client.comcast.net] on 14 January 2004 at 13.17.55 ZuluTime:

In Reply to: Survival Horror updates posted by Jurassosaurus on 14 January 2004 at 01.08.19 ZuluTime:

I suppose you could try to put that in Pandemic, but other than being filled with helium, I'm not sure how one could make it very plausible.

Oh wow. I actually have the answer for that one ready to go. And it's eleven years old.
     Back in January 1993, when Monty the V.niloticus still fit in a cage measuring 4*2*2 feet, I got him a sixpack of rats. One of the rats was too big for him--probably over a pound. Monty, at the time, was only a couple of feet long. So he ate the other five rats, and merely hunted the sixth down and killed it. To date, outside of hominids, Monty was the only animal I've ever seen kill things purely for sport. Even my ill-advised C.siamensis never learned that little trick.
     Anyway: now I've got this dead rat in a cage, in DuhMoines, in a thousand percent humidity, in January. It didn't take long for the thing to bloat.
     That, of course, put Monty into a strange sort of frenzy. He still wouldn't eat the damned rat, but getting the rat out of the cage without tranqulising this lizard was going to be impossible.
     By coincidence, I happened to have a friend over at the time. So now it's about three in the morning, and we've both been awake for thirty-six hours or so. And we're trying to figure out how to get this damned rat out of here. Then we concluded that, eventually, the problem was going to resolve itself. Because the rat, while having the mass of a pound, was quickly bloating to the volume of a poodle. We worked out--somehow or other--that the thing would eventually bloat to the point that it would simply float out on its own, expanding in size, dwarfing a dolphin, and probably chasing us about like Scrooge's Marley: 'You fed me to a lizard...it didn't eat me...I want my cake....'
     Which, uh...accounts for the floating zombies, of course. It's a methane buildup. Basic thermodynamics. Hot air balloons.
     Of course, we never proved our theory of floating zombierats. Monty eventually crawled into the ten-gallon thermos I gave him as a waterdish and I screwed the lid on to secure him while I spatulaed this horrid fucking rodent out of the cage. If you've never smelled a rat after three days in ninety degrees and enough moisture to cause drizzle on the insides of the windows, take my word for it that you're happier than you otherwise could be.

Maybe zombies with jetpacks? It could certainly make for some fun shooting scenarios.