Don't Fuck With Physics

Do not try this in-game

A full year before the very first Tech Infantry game began, pretty much the same batch of players were playing a game of Vampire: The Masquerade. Martin was trying to play against type, so he was playing a pot-smoking Gangrel eco-terrorist, and very much playing him for comic relief. The other players were playing their usual sort of (forgettable) badass characters.

One session, only Martin and Marcus showed up to play. The two of them got sent by their Vampire Master on a mission to infiltrate the headquarters of a mysterious supervillan CEO. The duo managed to get all the way into the reception area right outside the CEO's office before being attacked by a Mage Secretary working for said CEO. Martin's vampire was armed with a large-caliber handgun, Marcus' character with a submachine gun. The first round of combat, the Mage used a Forces effect to cause the bullet in Martin's gun to stay perfectly still, while all the energy of recoil was instead transferred into throwing the gun backwards at Martin's face. This worked, and actually did some damage to Martin's character in addition to making him drop his gun. Mages can only do one magical action per round, however, and Marcus rolled well on his firing of a submachine gun burst into the Mage, and the Mage was knocked clear into unconsciousness by a belly full of lead.

At that moment, the door to the inner office opened...and horror-movie smoke came out of it. Suddenly deciding that just the two of them could probably not handle the major villain of the story on their own, Martin and Marcus decdied to flee. As they left, Martin's character made sure to step into the bleeding, torn-open, intestines-exposed abdomen of the unconscious Mage. As he ran out the door, Martin's character called back over his shoulder, "Don't Fuck With Physics!"

A meme was born.

Flash forward to a year and a half later. It's the final session of the first season of Tech Infantry. The 86th Platoon is on the bridge of the EFS Nightmare, facing a powerful vampire named Xavier, who may or may not have been a Childe of Mordred for all we can remember this far back. Someone shoots open an airlock. Adam Selene, Martin's character, tackles the vampire out the airlock. The Vampire grabs hold of the rim of the airlock and stops himself from being pulled out into the vacuum of space. Adam Selene grabs the Vampire's ankles and Fleshcrafts his hands to the vamp's legs to hold on securely. Adam Selene starts flailing around, and successfully breaks the vamp's grip on the rim of the airlock, and both get sucked into space. With the last breath of air in his lungs, Selene shouts into the blackness at the Vamp: "Don't...Fuck...With...Physics!" before spinning off to his own death in the inky darkness of the infinite void.

Unfortunately, a pair of wraith servants show up and take the Vamp to an escape pod and he gets away. So the sacrifice was almost in vain. Not entirely in vain, as it also meant the rest of his platoon could escape once they got the airlock closed again. Still, it was a fun and fitting end to the first season. And the meme was solidified as part of the shared experiences of the players, and it became an in-joke amongst them forever more. It would frequently turn up as a mythology gag in later seasons.

For instance, in Season 4.3, when Andrea Treschi is being shown around Samuel Wall's lair built into the bottom of a steep-sided crater bored all the way through the crust of Avalon to the upper Mantle, with a waterfall flowing down and steam rising up from where the hot magma at the bottom vapoorizes the falling water, he protests that such a thing should not be possible under the laws of physics: "But you can't fuck with physics!"

"Of course you can", he is told by the mysterious Woman in Red. "We do worse things to Physics every day!"