The Extended Steam Salon

[Miss Cheshire Cat]

I think it looks pretty good. It's simple enough for just about anyone to read it, but still looks nice.

I'm afraid I'm in the same boat regarding Spain though. 

[OldProfessorBear]

I think it looks pretty good. It's simple enough for just about anyone to read it, but still looks nice.

I'm afraid I'm in the same boat regarding Spain though. 

I guess we have the weekend off, then!

Did more tweaking, think I'm basically done: http://retrofuturist.org/serendipity/

[Reni Valentine]

sidebar: good morrow all. figured i seem to be spending a fair bit of time here in the meta-clubs part of town, and anything where my dearest Abi is involved is pretty much meant for me. still catching up on the last thirty-two pages though...

[MWBailey]

Sidebar: Welcome, Reni.

[The Abiliegh]

sidebar: Well, I'm back, folks. I hope my week away didn't make anyone lose any steam!

The Blog looks good, but I don't really think you need to be worrying about post format. I'm transfering everything to a Word document, and it's already starting to read more like a novel than a forum, as I combine things and get everything flowing smoothly. Posts that deliniate actions that happed before a post prior are getting moved, and everyone's words are being moved into cohesive order (and my dearest brother is being edited into 3rd person, heh).

I'll post the next chapter in a bit. Still playing catch up!

[MWBailey]

sidebar: in regards to spain, we could just google it and see what pops up; I'm thinking brantley's going to go to the University (one of the oldest in the world) and visit their library, and sneak (i.e., wall-walk) into their closed stacks for Chaucer's little-known "other" treatise on the astrolabe (it doesn't really exist, but hey), as well as other pre-19th-century thinly-veiled works on Time Travel. Maybe we could have th eDoctor show up and shoo him out or point him in the "right" direction...

[The Abiliegh]

sidebar: Seeing as Spain didn't happen, we'll get right back into the main story, as soon as I get my brain working again

[Reni Valentine]

sidebar (and editing my previous post as such as well): i think i'll pick up once we reach Spain. i'm often confused for a native anyhow! 

[The Abiliegh]

sidebar:Spain wasn't part of the current story whatsoever. It was something on the side to give people an opportunity to continue playing their characters while I was away. We're not neccessarily *going* to spain, in this story, or any, seeing as the time-passer didn't take off. Reni, I'd suggest giving a thurough reading to the rest of the stopry and picking up once we come back to earth.

[OldProfessorBear]

sidebar: Well, I'm back, folks. I hope my week away didn't make anyone lose any steam!

The Blog looks good, but I don't really think you need to be worrying about post format. I'm transfering everything to a Word document, and it's already starting to read more like a novel than a forum, as I combine things and get everything flowing smoothly. Posts that deliniate actions that happed before a post prior are getting moved, and everyone's words are being moved into cohesive order (and my dearest brother is being edited into 3rd person, heh).

I'll post the next chapter in a bit. Still playing catch up!

I am pretty happy with how the blog looks. I'm not sure what happens when a Word doc is imported (I may be able to find out), but I imagine some of the formatting info is likely to be lost ... or not. It took a lot of cut and try to get the appearance of the blog just so.

Inserting pictures so the wordwrap works properly has to be done within the blog editing software. There is an editor (in fact, there are potentially 4 editors, but I have kept the simplest for now) that has some formatting buttons (some of which I added, and can add others as needed). The insertion of pictures is done semiautomagically in the editor. It does mean that the pictures need to be hosted on my server, which is not a real big deal (give me the URL and I can download it quickly). The editor works quite similarly to the BG forum editor, but with fewer options.

I am glad to hear of the reshuffling of events, and the change to all third-person. I should also mention tense, since some of the stuff is in present, or even mixed tense (viz the placeholder of Chapter One). Also, I used "Heroes of Earth" for a working title, but we might want something different, no? It's relatively easy for me to typeset the logo in Gimp and associate it with what is called the "Category", which corresponds to the story. When we add new stories, I'll create new Categories for them (or someone else can, once they learn the ins and outs of the system).

I had to make some changes to CSS to get it looking "right", and I will be the first to admit I know almost nothing about CSS -- more than I did last week, though, so figuring out where to make all the modifications, and how, was ... interesting.

[Miss Cheshire Cat]

I know CSS, had to make a website for my final in my technology class, but I don't know how much it would help. If I have a bit of a starting point, I might be able to work it out. I had a hell of a time myself, and the guy who sat next to me showed me a lot.

As for tense, I know I'm guilty of using several during the posts.

[OldProfessorBear]

I used to actually teach a course in web design/HTML, but that was in the good ole pre-CSS days!

Anyhow, I will be sure to ask you if any more massaging needs to be done!

And, as I kinda guessed, a lot of the formatting gets lost when I copy and paste a Word doc into the blog. However, I am looking deeper into this.

[MWBailey]

sidebar:No Spain? I guess Brantley will just take a nap, then. Darn.

[The Abiliegh]

I used to actually teach a course in web design/HTML, but that was in the good ole pre-CSS days!

Anyhow, I will be sure to ask you if any more massaging needs to be done!

And, as I kinda guessed, a lot of the formatting gets lost when I copy and paste a Word doc into the blog. However, I am looking deeper into this.

If you can enable html (or if it already is) I can edit all formating code into the document, or i can upload and edit myself

[OldProfessorBear]

I used to actually teach a course in web design/HTML, but that was in the good ole pre-CSS days!

Anyhow, I will be sure to ask you if any more massaging needs to be done!

And, as I kinda guessed, a lot of the formatting gets lost when I copy and paste a Word doc into the blog. However, I am looking deeper into this.

If you can enable html (or if it already is) I can edit all formating code into the document, or i can upload and edit myself

It might well be possible. I'm also checking out one of the wysiwyg editors to see what it can handle.

I did dump some HTML into a test posting, and it appears to work ... but the example I used wasn't very good.

[The Abiliegh]

~*Chapter 3*~

A new Martian race is in control of the Red Planet, the emperor has been defeated, and the rest of the hive mind is now in Abiliegh's control! What problems will our heroes face as they prepare to return to earth? What has happened there in their absence?

[MWBailey]

In a surprisingly well-built and well-appointed office, deep within a slightly-dilapidated old warehouse, deep in the waterfront/warehouse district of a Chicago not very far removed from our own, Aunt Sally herself was talking to several different people on several different phones, in regard to several different conversations; the sign on the bay windows of the second-floor office in that warehouse read Aunt Sally's Customs and Shipping, and while the sign and the building in which its window was set were innocuous-looking, unprepossessing items in and of themselves, the organization that they fronted was anything but, and in fact had its thumbs (all three thousand, three hundred and sixty-two of them -- not including the in-house private armed forces) on top of myriad cases of customs, shipping, business & export law violations, torts, copyright infringements, and yes, issues developed and yet developing in the fields of time travel and transtempodimensional transduction.

Right at the moment, ninety-nine percent of the traffic on the Phones of the Dept of Alien and Unknown Nonhuman Transgressions: Security, Analysis, Litigation, Liaison, Interdiction and Explanation (A.U.N.T. S.A.L.L.I.E.) concerned a certain Captain Malcolm W. Brantley, US Customs (Retired), his companions, and a certain airship that until just recently no one thought of as any real threat to anything other than the appearance of the area in which it was parked...

"Yes, sir," Sally said into the third receiver to the right of her chair in her large, plush hellhol-- er, office, that is -- "Sir, may I point out that the Beau Rosin is just an airship; a blimp, in fact, and thus unable to carry much more that the two deck guns and electric Gatling that Brantley normally keeps on board. Yes, sir," she said as patiently as she could manage, "he is one of our field investigators/ enforcers; we list them as "retired," for deniability purposes. Yes, sir. You're welcome, Mr. President. Good day to you as well."

She punched the LINE TWO button on that same phone, and got into another conversation, "Mr. Premier, pardon me for saying so, but your information is faulty. At no time whilst within the Earth's .2256 light-year limit did the Beau Rosin cross over into Russian Airspace. No Sir. Yes, it did attack that warehouse, and by the way, you still have not answered my query of that evening; what were your soldiers doing in Chicago that night? Hold a moment, please." She looked up to see her office aide poking his head in, nodded, and heard him say, "Ma'am, we can't seem to raise Brantley on the Malcontentii Trans-Dee Radio. He must have his call circuit disabled."

Meanwhile, on Board the Beau Rosin, Brantley was fixing a cup of coffee while a persistent beeping issued from his coat pocket...

Sidebar: I hope this does not offend. I was just getting a bad case of itchy typefingers... Seriously, I'll change or replace this however required.

[Miss Cheshire Cat]

Evie was looking down at her hands when she heard the beeping.

"Shouldn't you, umm, do something about that?" she stared suspiciously. "That doen't mean we're going to blow up or something, does it? That's really not part of my agenda for at least-" she pretended to inspect her clock. "At least thirty-two years."

[MWBailey]

"Yeah, I should, but ten to one it's Aunt Sally, wanting to chew me up one side and down the other for not allowing our troops to be in on it, or maybe we crossed the wrong airspace..." He was interrupted, suddenly, by a woman's voice, speaking loudly through his coat fabric, fairly screaming, "BRANTLEY! BRANTLEY? PICK UP, DAMMIT, I KNOW YOU HAVE THAT THING TURNED ON!"

"Aw, Cripes, here we go," Brantley said morosely, and took his pocket device from his coat's left breast pocket...

[The Abiliegh]

Abiliegh distanced a part of her mind to listen to the conversation between Brantley and "Aunt Sally." She left a small part to relish the feel of Tommy's hand in hers, and with the rest, she searched the Martian presence. It was disconcerting, to say the least, but she needed to find a solution. She couldn't control the Martians, she just couldn't. She probed what little of the individual she could find, but past the concept of "body" there wasn't much there to go on. She needed to find one that could learn.

And when she did, she would need to teach.

[MWBailey]

Brantley opened the brass, gold and chrome cigarette case and as usual revealed not cigarettes, but a bewildering array of miniature slider and toggle switches, dials, tiny typewriter-like buttons, and a pair of speakers which were actually the receiver and speaker of the beautifully miniaturized Malcontentii trans-dimensional  communicator. He pressed a switch, and the harangue and beeping stopped, and Brantley said to the thin air, in a loud voice, "Hang on a minute, let me get the ear speaker in the right place," and pulled the speaker out of the case.

The speaker was attached to the unit by a long, almost-hair-thin cord, and placed it in hisa ear, nbot unlike one of those new-fangle earphone speakers that were cropping on new radios just before the current mission began."Okay, Brantley her--!" he said, and snatched the earphone speaker out of his ear, as yet another stream of screamed invective poured forth...

[Sgt.Major Thistlewaite]

Tommy grins at MW's predicament and squeezes Abiliegh's hand. Sometimes being a P.I. is a good thing...no higher-ups to answer to, no regulations to follow...a fella could 'bend' a lot of laws as a private citizen that would get him hauled in front of a hearing board if he was in uniform. Of course, the other side of that coin is that sometimes a fella got hung out to dry all by his lonesome..no back-up. All things considered, Gunn is happy. He takes a drag off his smoke, a sip of bourbon, and squeezes Abi's hand again. Life is good. For now.

[Miss Cheshire Cat]

Evie frowned slightly.

"If she's so intent on screaming at you, would you make it quite clear that we just saved the Earth from a lot of pain and heartache? I would tend to be appreciative, no matter how many rules said group of people broke..." she looked curiously at the ear piece. The strange technology didn't interest her so much as the voice coming out of it. It sounded familiar, but she couldn't place it.

[MWBailey]

"it's best, usually, to jusr let her wind down," Brantley said, sotto voce, his voice barely more than a whisper. He turned back and spoke into the receiver, " oh, you heard her, did you...name's Evie, has an interdimensional clock device...yeah, I was hip-deep again....Well, you see, Baron Thistlewaite--yeah, the one who got in that fight with a priest or whatever...You guessed it, they basically remade the Beau Rosin. The PRESIDENT asked what kind of craft she is?

Now, she's sort of like a wooden hovertank, if you can get your mind around that idea, more guns than a Centauri gunship, though...well, originally she was a blimp with nothing but a registration number, and before that, she was a cargo scow that Pulcifer's uncle left him when he died from a wound acquired in a poker game." Snapping Turtle, I think it was called, had a really high-powered triple-expansion steam engine in her at the time; but Pulcifer switched it over to an alcohol-burning one-lunger, and fitted one of the first Helium gasbags shortly thereafter. Then he had a very early model of four-lung Diesel put in -- Listen, I can talk about this provenance any time, but the others, Evie especialy, want me to tell you we saved the Earth -- oh, you knew already..." his voice, waxing sarcastic, faded as he walked out on deck...

[Miss Cheshire Cat]

Evie sat down on an a small box, pulling her knees up. She didn't what she would do once they got back to Earth. She really had no place in her own world, but she didn't know how the device would hold up, as well as her own person.

"Now, this little clock," her father told her, one day long ago in the workshop. "This clock will do many beautiful things, and one day I will teach you how to make your own. I haven't worked out all the kinks, all the little problems. We'll fix them though, it will work."

She overheard the kinks. It disintegrated people, people disappeared completely except for the device and their left shoe. They had worked out most of those, but they never managed long-term interdimensional.

A thread seemed to attach them to their world, a lifeline to their own time and dimension. Over time, it would deteriorate. She had to fix that clock.