A second corridor greeted us when we stepped through, and our guide led us to the first door on our left. He pushed the door open and held it, bowing with a mocking grin as we entered. The small room he had ushered us into had two, two person bunks, a small bathroom with a door, and a corner shower with an opaque curtain. He let the door close behind us then dramatically gestured at the door. “Note if you will, the security measures”, he said in a deep theatrical voice. “Note the bars here, and here, the levers here and here activate the bars, which then slide into slots in the door jamb. These are guaranteed to hold against small arms fire, battering rams, and grenades. This black switch here on the wall to the left of the door activates your lights, the red button on the right summons security, should it be needed. The red switch next to the black switch operates the halon system in the venting, good for fires and the occasional ninja in the walls.” He bowed deeply, then hooked the door open with his foot and cartwheeled out the door, which closed on it's own. “Dibs on the shower”, Vi said and stripped down immediately. Java Juggernaut chuckled, then went into the bathroom, leaving me to claim my bunk first. After a few minutes Java cam back out, then looked at the bunks. He lifted the top bunk off the one I hadn't gotten into and set it on the floor beside the lower bed, and pushed it close. Vi finished showering and I could hear her shake herself free of the water. She stepped out and the smell of Jasmine and wet fur reached me. “Don't go to sleep, we're going to be active soon”, Vi said as I stretched out on the bed. “How do you fi..”, and I jumped as the door rattled. “I heard them”, said Vi. “You are requested to be present at the briefing in 10 minutes. Please ready yourselves.”

I looked around at the activity. Except for the garish costumes of the Masters, this could be any lab or tech floor in business. White-coated people gathered around terminals discussing one thing or another. Others were gathered around a few pieces of equipment that looked like antennas to me. They were busy taking them apart and hooking up some meters to the pieces with metal clips, and peering intently at the displays. Still other groups were inside a glassed off section of the floor, and working with surgeon masks and gloves on their hands, and with a belt around their waist that had a long copper wire attached to it that dragged its end along the metal floor, electrically grounding the person. The smell of oil and ozone was in the air, and the air itself was an antiseptic dry that you might find in such a place. “We are proceeding with many avenues of approach to this situation, and as you can see, we have not trivialized our response to the threat. You may be our enemy, but this is the enemy of us all.” Elitist finished speaking and turned his attention to Vi, who was licking her shoulder and glancing about nervously at all the activity. She caught Elitist's eyes looking at her. The two locked gazes and I watched Vi's ears flatten and her pupil's widen as Elitist looked back unflinching. Java put his hand on his wife's shoulder and leveled his gaze at Elitist, who smiled sardonically at the two, then turned to Smashing Pumpkin. “Show them their room and make certain they know about the security measures. They are our allies and it would be poor form to not to be open and honest.” Smashing Pumpkin led us out of the lab into a long, metal corridor that took us a full minute to walk to the end. There were no doors, only recessed fluorescent lights with a heavy plastic covering them. “Kill zone”, Java said to no one in particular. The door at the end looked like a pressure door in a submarine, with large arms radiating out from a center spoke. To the right of the door was a keypad, which Smashing Pumpkin shielded with an exaggerated stare and grin. He didn't look at the keypad but punched in a series of numbers, and the center spoke spun slowly, retracting the posts enough to pull the door open.

Boy has it been a while. I didn't think I'd ever find this again. Suffice to say this will be open once more for activity, and I hope whoever is still out there has fun viewing the things that go on here.

LUNA

Let me lie upon a cool patch of ground,
with the sun upon me and a cool breeze to caress
my body.

Allow me the shade of a tree,
and to play with the shadows
as the branches dance with the wind

Let leaves be overhead,
to trickle water from rains
and protect from storms
and shelter
my body.

Let my claws sharpen on the wood of the tree
and stretch, enjoying the power of life
course joyously through me

Let the sun set upon me,
and let my eyes close
give me a small patch of
cool ground to curl upon and rest
my body
and cradle me
until I pass to new meadows.

Lloyd Thorndyke ( 15 March 2010 )


Luna 1993 - 2010

Epic Phail?

Flarelight drew back around the corner of the hallway and deactivated her invisibility device. the fragile-looking hodge-podge of small pieces and button batteries sputtered and sparked, then went quiescent, the slight background hum disappearing with Flarelight's reappearance. “I've not seen dem before, and someone yelling “Nemesis”? You think dese guys what they talkin' 'bout?” Her english was a confusing flow from Spanish to German to Portugese accenting seemingly at random. The other three women waiting for her though, had enough experience talking with the hot-tempered hero to understand what the was talking about.

One woman took a longstep to the edge of the corner, and did a quick pee-and-back around the corner. Her red hair fluttering in the wind raised by her large angelic-looking wings as she used them to balance her movements. Her Katana and Wakizashi held at the ready she spun to face the corner in case there she had been spotted, then relaxed as no cries of warning were raised. They were still undiscovered. “They look like a marching band from hayall” she said quietly to the others behind her. Atlas Angel smiled at the giggles her description brought from the other women, but never relaxed her vigilance. She had found out early that the more ridiculous and fantastic something looked, the more it was likely to be dangerous, and these men looked VERY ridiculous in their red uniforms and gold marching band hats. The large, odd-shaped rifles that were carried seemed archaic and menacing at the same time.

“Y'all ready?” Atlas Angel glanced over her shoulder at the other three women. Flarelight nodded tersely and there was a slight pop and hint of ozone, then the object on her waist began emitting a low hum, and she disappeared from sight. The tall woman next to the now-invisible Flarelight nodded her head and said quietly, “Ready.” The last woman pulled a Katana similar to Atlas Angel's own, but gripped it in a balanced two-handed style the spoke of powerful cuts. Morgnan Keira nodded and stepped around the corner and started to charge.

Unfortunately, the opponents were alert and the girls quiet talk had been heard, so instead of rushing into a group of surprised men unaware of their presence, the quartet stepped into a hail of lead and gas. Flarelight coughed and saw the red soldiers had formed two ranks, front kneeling, rear standing. The hellish fusillade drove the women back around the corner confused and choking from the caustic gas grenades that had been thrown their direction. Flarelight turned to drop a trip mine, and had just placed it prior to arming it, when a foo came down on top of the mine. She looked up at a rifle butt that smashed her in the face.

The dim hum of the emergency transporter whisked her away to the hospital, along with the others. A few minutes later, all four had been revived and healed by the emergency room meta-healers. Atlas sat down on the bench outside, being the first one revived. As the red-haired white-winged woman waited for the others, she tried to figure out what she could do to close ground on an enemy waiting for them. Flarelight came out next and stood next to Atlas Angel for a moment, her dark black and white suit a close match and proclaimed both members of Next Gen, Inc. “Those locos blew holes in my uniform Heaths, now I gotta get another one? I think I want take der Koste offa diesen hides.” “Wayall, ya wanna do that sis, ya have ta catch 'em first”, Atlas said with a smile. The two women waited for the other two and then sped off in a group back the office building in Perez Park.

Once inside the women carefully sped to the location where the “marching band from hell”, as Atlas Angel had so succinctly put it, had devastated them. Flarelight turned on her invisibility device, which sputtered momentarily before settling into a slight hum, and she disappeared from view. A quick step around the corner brought her a fusillade from the archaic weapons, and the strange ammunition spread a choking, acidic gas which shorted out her device's light-bending capability. The battle was immediately joined as the three women rushed to aid their fourth. Screams and the metallic clash of metal-on-metal echoed in the hallway, and a final volley dropped the heroes, and the emergency teleporter once again deposited them in the immediate emergency room for meta-humans.

“Next tahm sis, make sure'n they cain't hear you either” Atlas Angel said to Flarelight with a touch of dry humor. Morgana Keira, nodded, and added “we should also maybe study them more before taking them out?” “Yeah right, like I'm gonna study anyone when they shoot at me” said Flarelight irritably. “I'm serious about that” said the white-skinned black-haired woman. “We need to know what they are and why they are here.” “I'm agreeing with Morgana, we should be checking things out before going in” said Dark-Stryke. “We check out as we shoot... recon by fire” said Flarelight, who was clearly angry about being shot.

To Be Continued....

EEEEEEEKK!

We are having LOTS of rain, and if you look at the weather satellite, you can see it is a part of hurricane Ike, which is down in the gulf right now and appearing to be drawing a bullseye on Houston, Texas. The people that owned the house before us put in all sorts of small gardens around the house, and a small cement retaining wall to border the gardens. This landscaping was done without any effort at all to make sure water flows away from the house, nor were any of the downspouts extended beyond the wall. The result is that water drains towards the house and we have 4-6" of water standing against the foundation. The sump pump is working overtime to drain, flipping on every 30 seconds or so. Lloyd is beside himself trying to move furniture to 'high ground' in case the pump gives out. He is frustrated too, that he didn't recognize these problems sooner. The thing is, we haven't had rain like this ever before, so I can't say either of us were cognizant of the problems until they became apparent with this heavy, heavy rain. I'm crossing my fingers the sump pump holds out, that's the only thing between us and a waist-high flood in the lower port of this split-level place.

Mocha

The beginnings

Equilibrium? In nature? Forget it. The only “thing” that ever is in equilibrium is nothing. I can't point definitively to our world heating up due to anthropomorphic changes, changes like this have happened in the past. But to give you a feel of how things “happened”, we have to look at global warming, and we have to look off-planet for the reason.



The following are excerpts from a hand-printed manuscript found thirty years ago, and what were written approximately fifty years ago, just prior to the upheaval that changed our world....

A word of warning people, I am not a straight thinker, I am shotgun and all over, so bear that in mind as you follow this. We have a number of interlocking causes, and while you may be comfortable trying to delineate one cause and then the next in nice neat descriptions and chapters, it ain't a gonna happen here. Each reinforces the other and we'll be bouncing back and for hither and yon as we look at them and the causes of our society's crash. Nothing ever happens in a straight line. So hang onto your butts, let's ride.


- According to our government, there was one cause for all our problems, global wamring caused by man spewing millions of tons of Carbon into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a 'greenhouse gas', one that traps energy radiating from the earth and doesn't allow it to dissipate into space. So the earth warmed up, and the ice caps melted and we flooded ourselves out of house and home. But that's only part of the story.

Global warming did happen, and we did flood out of house and home anything that was below two hundred feet or less above mean sea level of 1980. We lost a LOT of land, approximately 4% of our land surface, that doesn't sound like much, but most of that was prime farming grounds and major seaports. We lost two states too, Louisiana and Florida, both are now mostly one hundred feet under water, with only a bare section of each still dry.... relatively. The coasts moved inland up to two hundred miles in the case of the Mississippi river, and Dallas is now a near-coastal town.

Everything happened a lot faster than people thought, and that's because of positive feedback. Watch an ice cube melt some time. At first it barely looks to be affected, but as the ice melts there is less of it to maintain itself and it falls apart ever faster until it finally disappears. Same thing happened to the ice caps, once they reach a certain point, that was all she wrote and in twenty years they were gone.

Temperature at this time rose about ten degrees on the average in the area beyond sixty degrees north and south latitude. Temperature increases were lower closer to the equator, about three to four degrees celsius, but that's simply because they were already warm, and heat affects the coldest spots the most. This change created the huge superstorms that devastated much of Europe and Asia, causing food shortages in a world already populated beyond what the earth could sustain.

Wars broke out over food, and the world population thinned itself some that way. This disruption in people caused further troubles as it gave disease a foothold, and we had a tremendous series of pandemics that swept over the world, illnesses that did not respond to the antibiotics available. The first pandemic, “Milton's plague”, killed four percent of the world population in eight months, a testament to the virulent airborne pathogen. It's extreme mutability was mankind's savior, as it disappeared as quickly as it appeared, evolving back into a virus that affected only birds. However the high death rate in some areas allowed 'old friends' like cholera to reappear and rage in pockets of humanity.