idiosyncreant | all the old salts laughing at them

Guess who is mighty? And hath finished Silas Escapes?

You are so very clever. You deserve a prize.

A not-so-Poisson snippet: (The Not-Batman project, which is not going anywhere for a while yet, right, Not-Batman?)

Port O'Conner is a town on the Merrimac. If you need the sociological landscape, every house has a half-finished basement, a mown lawn, and a compact car parked out front. Unless ordering pizza, everyone shops in Town (which is not Port O'Connor, in case you missed that) and feels bad, but not bad enough, about not supporting the local economy. The young people go by train, pretty much the only 'burb kids who do that anymore, since it's a straight shot and they can go in mobs rather than posses of five, six, or even eight if someon's mom had a minivan.

Port O'Connor was therefore the end of a pipeline for mischief fromTown. It's one of the places where those who don't want to live in the city settle, and out around the actual village area, out in the country people who keep horses and B'Mers build ugly big houses. It was often the kids from these houses who instigated trouble, but not always.

If you came to Town looking for a nice place to shake down or a rich man to PWN, you'd be disappointed. It wasn't The Big Delicious. But if you only ventured down north a bit...

This is how Port O'Connor got its own caped crusader.

Some said it was a rich-kid making good, or a making up for maybe burning down the library--such a cute little historical building it had been, and no one caught for ruining it. Sara Tell, though, was sure it was one of the bored dot-com billionaires, not a kid, and definitely not someone trying to make good.

Not that she thought there was some sinister side to the guy, but she though it odd no one else did. It was not like a middle-class neighborhood on The Coast to accept something like a man taking law into his own hands so easily.

Though it was interesting to live in times when vigilante justice was returning to acceptability. The history geek in Sara could dissect that all day...

I don't have a final word-count for The First Sequel, yet, since I haven't yet mustered my might to finish typing it. But there will be that eventually. After all, A Charade By Sheridan is going to be adding onto it's wordiness. Go Sherry!

This one will be like so:

*Charade by Sheridan* picks up at the end of *The Carnie's Conspiracy*, when Molly's younger brother is introduced to his magician tutor to start his education as one. Just as he's growing accustomed to frustrating work and being quiet in the big, dusty townhouse, Sheridan finds out the master is being pressured into work against Mr. Poisson--whoever he's pretending to be at the moment. Sheridan knows his master doesn't want to succeed in the sabotage, and so begins a long interchange of pretense. Master Mandrake teaches Sherry how to counter each move he make,s while speaking as if to say the opposite--and Sherry struggles to put it to practice and have his work attributed to Mr. Poisson. Can a boy long out of pick-pocket form sneak such magic and parse out what's under everything his tutor says?