Homecoming

[MWBailey]

Author's Note:

An explanation for my recent sudden hiatus and absence is forthcoming, as well as more chapters, however short time constraints force me to make them!

[MWBailey]

Author's Note:

An explanation for my recent sudden hiatus and absence is forthcoming, as well as more chapters, however short time constraints force me to make them!

My Story.

It's not finished yet, and I intend to keep it going.
Somehow.
When I can.

Sorry bout promising an explanation and then going pitch black dark.

Long story made short, Dad came home from rehab after a long stay  therein, in two consecutive facilities. He came back home almost a week to the day after I posted the above. He had injured himself, you may recall, in an attempt to use his walker to kill a roach in his bedroom. His fall in that attempt fractured his hip to such an extent that some joint replacement was necessary. That, plus his advanced age, required extensive rehabilitation.

He is now, after a very long time, almost able to care for himself - but not quite. He still needs extensive help from myself and my mother. Giving that care, and the time and exertion it requires so to do, are what has made it nearly impossible for me to make any headway until now (hopefully I can start doing that now, at any rate) with this serial.

I can't promise much, but I will endeavor to start adding entries again soon. I owe it to anyone who is still interested.

Thank you for your continued interest,

MWBailey

[MWBailey]

"Broadly speaking, yes," Black answered laconically, smirking slightly as he added, "and also, to try and find your counterpart in this dimension; they seem to have gone missing, though there have been a few disturbing rumors of late that smack of piracy..."
                         ——————x—————
To be continued...

[MWBailey]

In Another Part Of The World At Roughly The Same Time...
Bang!Bang!Bang!Bang!Bang! a jangling of a large nut falling from a rod and falling through an engine, then a salty, blasphemous curse as the nut rolled across the deck and out through the bilge-pump drain to fall into the canyon hundreds of feet below. Cobbled together from a windsailer's gasbag and an armed Naval sailing scow, the Beau Rosin retained much of the former vessel's accoutrements.

John (Or Mad Jack, as some called him) Pulcifer straightened from where he had crouched over the hulking diesel engine that powered the electrical generators that in turn powered both the Beau Rosin's electrics in general and its high-performance electrical propulsion fans in particular, and stomped over to the wheelhouse door and down the gangway stairs to the makeshift machine shop in one corner of the hold. He picked his way past a half-ground camshaft and a broken fan prop, to the scrapbox which held miscellaneous fasteners and small used, found, purloined and otherwise-acquired bits and bobs, and found another nut that looked like it might suffice.

The red-blue flash he'd seen on the horizon that morning a month hence had been a bit of a shock to Pulsifer. As far as he knew, his ship was the only one in the Far east (or in fact anywhere) that carried any kind of time-travelling device, or caused any kind of aurora on entry into the "real" world. He remembered what had happened the last time he'd seen Dreyf's St. Elmo. So He wants me to come find 'm, eh? Ha!

Could that ship be here now? he wondered. He spat into the cuspidor at  the corner of the shop and made his way back topside.

"Damn 'is eyes anyhow," he muttered sourly, as he went back to work on the recalcitrant Engine. No use trying to  find that wayward winged  do-gooder until he could get this engine fixed anyhow...

[MWBailey]

(AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have been having some serious issues with my computer; it's one of those which will supposedly stop working after this coming February, so things are slowing down, and other things are becoming difficult to operate. For that reason, this serial (?) will be updated much more slowly than I would prefer. Sorry about that, but at least I'm not yet cut off completely, so perhaps I can still update in due course. I'm working on a new installment now. Not sure when I can upload it, but hopefully it will happen soon.

Thank You All for your patience!
MWBailey

[MWBailey]

Author's note: I'm not dead yet, contrary to popular speculation(lol). Sorry for the long wait. Taking care of the folks, in addition to everything else, tends to put things like this on the back burner whether i like it or not.

kind of a truncated installment, but more's to follow soon. I think Mad Jack will turn up in teh same space sooner than late...

-------------------------------------------
It was about three days later; Dreyfuss and his crew had escaped the clutches of the latter-day Aether League's security squadron with the help of the Black Suits, and taken up the assignment to take care of the ersatz St. Elmo Doppleganger. There had been general consternation  among officers and crews of the Aether League's corvettes when the St, Elmo suddenly charged up and disappeared, the sonic boom accompanying it's sudden absence from the air that it had theretofore been located in deafening both airship crews and groundspeople as a few stray blue arcs played about the empty air, as if trying in vain to follow their previous owner.

The transition to "between" space was no smoother than it had ever been, but the commodore and his students and crew were used to it all by now. Dreyfuss listened to the Dr.s report on the status of his convalescents and the rest of the current population of Sickbay.

"Very Well, Doc," he said as the Dr. concluded his report over the squawkbox. "Keep the patients moinitored and let me know if any start to exhibit signs of prescience or portal-sense."

Until the scantanks on the bridge had been modified to shoiw portal formations, "disconnect" patients, in addition to the travel  behaviors of the air krakens, had been their only way iof tracking the formation of interdimensional portals (and the Krakens were still the preferred method, as they generally only showd up when the ambient electrical fields would support such anomalies as dimnsional portals). The St. Elmo's Dhopper Drive could make its own portals, but the natural ones the patients often sensed and that the krakens used tended to save huge amounts of energy from and wear and tear on the Dhopper machinery and circuits.

Now, where was this "doppelganger," and how should they go about finding her...

--XX^^XX--

[MWBailey]

Threading the Needle[/u]
"Consarn it!" Jack Pulcifer swore as the beau Rosin suffered anothger buffet by the electromagnetic chaos in the cloudtops. He, too, had discovered sonmetime back that tracking aor kraken often led to the discovery of convenient portals - but his ship, which was much smaller thaqn the St. Elmo, lacked sufficient mass to achieve the same relative smoothness of passage that The larger battlewagon enjoyed.

He resisted switching over to the Beau Rosin's Chronojammer drive.  it was more convenient and smoother, but the results tended to be more rndon without Brantley's pocket device to influence teh Temporal flow.

All the same, he was both relieved and annoyed to "pop out" just about the St. Elmo as the portal spat him out.

"DREYFUSS!" He bellowed into the aetherphone on the frequency that he knew the commodore preferred,

"WHEN ARE YA GONNA TEACH THEM KIDS HOWDA FLY  THAT DURN' THANG?"