A new page has been published in the story Ben Bowman in the Vault of Terror, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
Monthly Archives: November 2016
A new page has been published in the story Ben Bowman in the Vault of Terror, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
What do you do after you’ve dropped a building on your boss’ head? Well, in many cases, you rethink your life. There are also those who dance around the building, singing about it. But we pretend we don’t know those people.
Even at the Retropolis Registry of Patents there are several approaches to this kind of trauma. Violet, the Registrar’s secretary, is in the “rethink your life” camp; Investigator Bowman is off on a tangent of his own. He’d just really rather not have to spend any time down in the Registry Vault (the “Patent Registry Models and Samples Repository”).
Nobody likes to go down there. It’s full of the working models and prototypes for every invention that’s ever come out of Retropolis’ Experimental Research District. If you get posted down in the Vault, you can’t help knowing that at any time something really dangerous and irreversible is likely to happen. And when it doesn’t happen? Well, there’s a statistically identical chance that it’s going to happen now. That sort of thing can wear you down.
Really dangerous and irreversible things almost never happen, of course. Almost never.
Meanwhile the Registry is expecting its new Registrar (again) and so that’s what’s on Violet’s mind. She’s made a resolution not to do anything to this one.
We’ll see how that goes, starting on Wednesday, in Ben Bowman in the Vault of Terror.
A new page has been published in the story Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
A new page has been published in the story Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
Deliveries seem simple, don’t they? Pick up Thing A from Place B, then take it over to Place C. But it gets surprisingly complicated if Place B is clear on the other side of the City of Tomorrow, hundreds of miles away;
and if Thing A turns out to be a Cardiophilic Moisture Eliminator, well. Boy Howdy! You’ve got all kinds of trouble.
That’s why we leave package deliveries to the valiant, well-trained delivery persons of the Retropolis Courier Service.
We’ve all admired their splendid livery, and we’ve envied them their compact, high-flying scooters; we’ve gratefully handed them our (usually non-Cardiophilic) packages, and we’ve taken their speedy deliveries from faraway parts.
Very few of us have sent anything into – or out of – the Experimental Research District. But if we have, or if we do, it will be a specially trained Route X Courier who makes sure that package arrives at its destination with a low, low incidence of unpleasant side effects. Special rates apply.
So here we see Grace Keaton, a Route X Courier herself. She seem to be the poster person for the Courier Service.
And of course this is a poster, over at Retropolis; it’s also an archival print, and a coffee mug.
Grace is a character I invented for a sequel to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. She’s now had a cameo in Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory and she’ll probably return in the sixth Retropolis Registry of Patents story. That’s something I need to get to work on right about now.
By which I mean I don’t really know, myself. Oh, and if you missed it, you can click on the first image to see it way, way bigger. Or you could just click here.
A new page has been published in the story Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
A new page has been published in the story Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.You can read it here.
If there was a single cause – an inciting incident – for some of my recent changes at Retropolis, it was probably the loss of one of the vendors I use to make the merchandise I sell there.
But one thing led to another thing, and then there was this thing that popped up after that, and before I knew it I’d reworked some of the existing Retropolis pages. Is it over? Hard to say.
But I started with the home page, and then moved on to the bookstore page (a big improvement!) and just now I finished reworking the “About Retropolis” page, too. I made some minor changes to product images in the Retropolis Travel Bureau section. Some necessary surgery to the menus led to other changes. Like I said, one thing led to another.
“About Retropolis” really did need an update, once I thought about it. Now it’s got newer art and a slightly different and more interesting, and, frankly, laborious layout that no one but me may really appreciate.
There’s some lingering weirdness in the site’s overall layout (which dates from The Days of Browsers We Will Not Speak Of) and I could handle things in a far more sensible way today. But I don’t think I will. Even I am not that crazy. Not this morning, anyhow.
