Sweep The Floor

The Toba, although an alien race, live in the same physical universe as humans, and so encountered all of the same small challenges as they advanced from hunter gatherers to farmers, through their industrial age, and into their space age. Like humans, they needed to carry water, and so invented buckets. Like humans, they needed to cut up larger pieces of food into smaller ones, so they invented knives. …and like humans, they needed to clean up around their huts, and so they invented brooms. Also, like humans, once they discovered electricity and invented electric motors, they invented vacuum cleaners. …and yet Toba have always hung onto the tradition of sweeping with a broom, finding it some sort of cultural touchstone, and some sort of standing in-group joke (it’s unclear if, even if this was explained to humans someday, we’d find it funny or not.)

It’s from this cultural background that the Sweep the Floor trap springs. The Sweep the Floor is a mechanized broom, self-powered and self-directed, that will calmly lurk, unmoving, next to a Rocket Dog race path, and then - when a Rocket Dog approaches - lunge out into the path, attempting to trip up the Rocket Dog. If the Rocket Dog avoids getting tripped, the Sweep the Floor returns to its lurking …but if it does manage to trip a Rocket Dog, send it sprawling, and perhaps break some of the Rocket Dog’s equipment in the process, the Sweep the Floor will, of course, clean up after itself!