How
to
Make
an
Entrance
by
Chrone
Osphere
I'm lying in the belly of Time-Ship 1, chain-smoking and drinking scotch from the bottle, and trying to find ways to drink while I'm smoking and vice-versa.
I just had the most terrifying experience of my life- even worse than when I was six and the plane I was on lost power.
I'm still making sense of it all.
It was just 2006.
It still feels like 2006.
Then it was supposed to be 1963. But it was 1937.
I'm rambling.
I'll try to put the peices together.
It started at the launch of Time Ship 1 in June of 2006.
It was a miserable ceremony filled with people I'd be glad to never see again (including my first exgirlfriend- thanks, JMG).
Eager to leave, I started the pre-launch sequence.
Take-off was shakey, or at least my hands were, as I initiated the temporal vortex over Jones Tower.
The sun was in my eyes as I punched the throttle toward the spacial aperature hanging over the Manhattan skyline, and then-
I was flying straight down, at night, in the rain.
You blacked out! I thought, sure I was about to die an excruciating death I had inflicted upon myself.
Proximity alarms inferred that they, and I, were about to become one with the ground directly ahead.
I pulled back on the controls and started to gain altitude.
I was no longer barreling toward
Now I was barreling toward a metal tower.
I banked to starboard, only to barrel toward the aft section of the biggest blimp I've ever seen.
Okay, it wasn't as big as the zepplin I used to take to Chicago every summer as a kid, but it was way bigger than the JP blimp.
I banked to port, and it looked like I was about to fly into one of the blimp's turbine engines.
I calmed myself and called on all of my training-
All two weeks of it.
You can do this, I lied to myself.
never
wore that
helmet
again
the polyphasic hull helps
TS1 cloak and slip through
space-time, but it also
throws off a wicked static
charge, which probably
ignited the Hindenburg
I rolled the controls and got to where I had been twenty seconds before- flying straight up into the air.
But I didn't miss the blimp.
TS1 shook as my dorsal nacelle tore through the blimp's hull.
Now I'm not entirely sure why that caused an explosion- but it did.
A big one.
The blast hurdled TS1 across the night sky.
I must've hit something right because the ship froze in place and hovered in the air, about 13 feet off the ground, give or take.
whilest pushing
buttons, Chrone
took the cloak
off the start-up
list, which has a
major impact on
his next mission
The shock of my success was quickly replaced with the sight of the horror on the other side of my translucent canopy.
The gas giant was burning mid-air in front of me, falling, almost in slow motion.
That's when I started looking for that bottle I stashed.
I also started a ship-wide diagnostic.
What went wrong?
Why was I in the wrong year?
And what the Hell was I doing in
The computer, which I've come to call PITA, or Pain In The Ass, found an anomaly in the Temporal Inversion Chamber that scrambled my space-time coordinates.
It guarentees that the anomaly was quarentined and purged, but that doesn't explain how it got there.
Or why I didn't end up in the middle ages- or the middle of the sun, for that matter.
I gotta tell you- I love blimps. Always have.
I was in the Model Zephyr Club as a boy.
I take the Eastern Seaboard Blimps on all my weekend getaways.
The first time I saw TS1 I thought, It kind of looks like a blimp. I'm a blimp pilot. Cool.
America is a blimp society.
I'd hate to do anything to screw that up.
I'll be more careful from now on.
Time to get back to work.
And, if I'm not mistaken, I still have a first mission to tackle:
The Kennedy Assasination.
And this time, my new readers, nothing will go wrong.
