Olivia Plymouth, Internal Traveler and Fashion Consultant:
Story #1: Joyous Living with the Wrong Suitcase
Book #1: Brazilian Quest (Soon)
Book #2: Misadventures in Boston (Soon)
Book #3 The Year Fashion Changed (Future)
More details at https://sites.google.com/site/hallettgermanfiction/
[In the Amazi Chronicles, you see both Romy (later called Tammy) as a clumsy and as an accomplished female inventor in the late 19th century. But how she made the transformation is not covered… until decribed below.]
Humans are such an unhappy lot. We are always waiting for something – a mate, a child, a check, a house, a dance request, sleep, and other such things. At 17, I wanted none of those items. I just wanted to be an inventor like my dead Poppa. He taught me so much before losing his spirit while working on an invention for the University of Vienna. My mother died of a broken heart shortly after Poppa passed away. Then my sister Katharina and myself (Romy) were sent to live in faraway Klagenfurt with my Aunt. It was so different from my dear Vienna. There were forests, mountains, and the routines of a smaller city. Many people here spoke Slovene which was new to me. My Aunt loved my mother and was kind to us. I had a little workshop in the back of the house where I worked on my inventions. How I loved to build things or at least to try to build things. Sadly, none of my creations ever worked. Poppa said that I did not spend enough time on the research and design phase. I don’t see why that should matter. It is better to just start creating and see what works.
There were only two companions that I could ever share my intimate thoughts about this creation process with. One is Poppa and he’s gone. And the other is my dear cousin Joseph and he was somewhere in Russia. Even though we spent one summer together, I felt that he connected with me in a way that Momma and my sister never could when it came to inventions. Although he had not made anything creative to date, somehow I still knew he was one of us. However, I also greatly hated him since he spent a good deal of time with Poppa during that last summer. Precious time that rightly should have been mine.
I went to classes and spent time with my sister whose mood alternated between hate and shock. She wanted a boyfriend badly but was too different from the local girls for that to happen. The local boys saw her as a rich Viennese snob and sought nothing but to humiliate her. She cried in her room so often. My aunt tried to console her but to no avail.
I heard about a country-wide contest open to inventors of all ages. The prize was worth 20,000 Heller. This sounded perfect for me even though I hadn’t created anything yet. I decided that I would enter using an alias. There was an entry fee. So I took a job in a flower shop. I enjoyed the work. But once I saved enough for the entrance fee, travel expenses, and a large amount of extra funds for the unexpected, I quit.
I was in such a quandary – I could not decide which of my unfinished works I should complete for submission. I decided to combine two experiments. One was a suit that would allow you to go through walls. The other, at the push of a button, converted steam into a thick black or white fog which in effect made one undetectable. And if you wore my special oculars, you could see and walk through the fog. I felt it was so close but it just wasn’t working.
I had three months to go before the final day to submit an entry. And I had spent a lot of time trying various combinations of gears and materials which always ended up in a half-hour of unlady-like cursing in newly learned Slovene and my birth language German.
I reached my breaking point and started to cry. The tears wouldn’t help the situation but felt darn good. I was throwing in the towel – giving up. I had been working non-stop for so long and didn’t realize how tired I was. I went to sleep and had a dream that I was in a field of grass gently swaying in the breeze. And in the distance there was a large oak tree. Under the tree stood Poppa and dear Joseph. Somehow though I was there and they couldn’t see me. This was a good thing because they were talking about ME. I was so surprised and just sat there listening to every word.
“Oh, My cherished daughter, Romy. Joseph, she has so much potential. But she is stubborn like my wife. Has to do things a certain way even if they are wrong.”
“My dear uncle, if only she listened to you. Then she would do more planning and designing. And we both know that’s how the whole thing starts.”
Together they said like a Greek chorus, “Question everything. Question your obstacles. Question your assumptions. Observe from nature. Observe from books. Find analogies in other fields. Learn from your dreams. Challenge yourself. See it in your mind first, then write up the design and the alternatives. Determine the need — your invention’s function. All else will follow.”
It ended with both of them staring at me like they knew I was there the whole time. Yet they did not have a look of anger, but one of kindness.
I woke up filled with determination and could see in a new light. As I scribbled down the words of the dream, I started to see my missteps. I went outside, stared at the clouds and observed how they interacted with each other. At first I thought that I needed to make the suit turn fluid and seep through the walls and become solid again once on the other side. But while doing that, I had to retain the suit wearer’s entity. Then I realized another approach: change the wall temporarily into a fluid while keeping the solidity of the suit and of the person. Scientists were just discovering these various types of rays that did all sorts of things.
Time passed and it was one month until the final day to submit. Still I did not have a working prototype. But I was closer than I had ever been to completing an invention. I could feel it.
I had designed the JL Ray (from my parents initials -- Jorg and Lotte) to “melt” any solid substance. But I needed a way to restore the wall afterwards. So I created a “substance 3-D imager” that created an image of the wall. Placing the JL Ray in Reverse mode, I was able to restore the object. The Ray and imager were completed with the working out of some final kinks. So the hard part was done. I needed to create the fog machine. I observed how fog was created in nature and soon designed a compact steam to fog converter.
That fantastic dream had converted me. I now began to love the planning and design phase and if I ever had any doubts on where to go, I looked at my notes that I had written down after waking up from the dream. Soon inventing became far easier to me and I felt that I could build darn near anything.
One evening later that week, I completed my prototype and using a pair of artificial machine legs that I built just to propel the invention forward, the suit went through a 6 inch wall intact and the wall looked like it had remained unchanged afterwards. Success!
After a couple more tests on thicker and thicker objects, I had to try this with myself in the suit. I knew the dangers but felt confident since the suit had made it through multiple tests without incident. And time was running out. I had to finalize this soon.
I picked my target, the walls of our local bank. I waited for late evening. After sneaking into the workshop, I put on the suit. It was not as bulky as I had thought. I headed down the street. I saw some men coming. After putting on the special glasses, I pressed the fog button. In addition to spurting fog, it knocked the men out – a nice
unexpected side benefit. I made it to the bank door. I pressed the melt button on the JL Ray “gun” and the door melted. I passed through and pressed the restore button and the door reappeared. But there was a sizable hole in it. Oh well, I had to work on the restore capability. There I went to the thickest of all doors to date – the door behind which the money was kept. This was the REAL test of the invention. Once again, I pressed the correct button and made it through!
A weaker person may have tried to steal the money and precious possessions but that was not the goal of tonight. I gathered my energy and made it back through the two doors and out into the street. I felt a little dizzy but otherwise was intact. The doors were not so lucky and had some holes in them. Oh well – all in the name of creativity! I used the night as my guardian and headed back to the workshop.
The next day I looked at the local newspaper. I saw the following:
STRANGE HAPPENINGS AT NIGHT
Was it a crime or not? Several of our finest council members mysteriously passed out near the bank after seeing some unusual creature from a distance and being surrounded by a black fog. A short time later, our local bank is apparently broken into based on the massive damage to the doors. Some citizens thought it was the work of an