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In the year of our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Ninety One This September Fith Rúa Pai Crespo, 30 36800 Redondela Pontevedra, Spain It is with great sadness that I record these events, not because I have lost someone dear to me, but because I have lost many dear ones to me. Yes. I say this because I, Jules Verne, son of a proud attorney, must look out across my beloved city. Must look out and see death and destruction of a kind this world has never known. To such a magnitude that I fear for further incursions of the Invaders and what harm they might bring. As my daughter, Julyanna, has already alluded the Invaders, the might brained slug beats from Mars, Martians as some call them, were ruthless and cared naught for the results of their horrid weapons. We were merely a testing ground for their true war, which was yet to come. I say this now with the benefit of hindsight and not foresight. But I shall continue this story in the chronological order it was conceived, so that you understand how it was played out and the reasons for so much loss that perhaps are lost in time and with time. After the destruction of our beloved Eiffel Tower my Parisian friends and neighbors felt they had nothing left to live for. The Invader had struck the one blow against which there was no protection, against which there was no stopping of its advance. Wells and I, well traveled through time and space, had prepared for such an event, not truly believing it could take this direction. For our own earlier adventures had set off a series of chain reactions throughout time and space, which did not end with the restoration of our current time and the saving of mankind from a fate worse than death. No, we had not foreseen this turn of events. Time is like a stream of infinite rivers. You can dam and shore up one flow, but that only causes it to overlap and flow into a new channel. For every movement that we make to change the destiny of our lives, the Creator has foreseen and created another action and reaction to account for it. I do not blame God upon our plight, but rather our lack of wisdom to perceive that our own vanity could lead us down these dark roads. It is easy to ignore the signs of self decay and civilization's decay when we are placated with so many new toys and inventions, luxuries and delicacies. These events soften our vision and blindsite us to the path we truly walk. For man can not rule the universe alone. He must have guidance. Our failure as inventors, and as human beings was not our goal of understanding time and space, but of selfishly using it to meet our own ends. The Creator gave us freewill, and so when we change the course of destiny, we must be prepared to meet those endrun changes we precipitate. So after the fall of Paris Wells and I took our families to Redondela, a small town in the province of Pontevedra, Galicia, northwestern Spain. Redonela is nicknamed the "Village of the viaducts." because of two major intersecting railway viaducts built there. One day they shall build a statue of one of my story heroes and shall honor me greatly, but that is another tale for another time. We flew the Master of the World away from Paris. There was nothing further for us to do at that time, but to go where we could study what was going on safely, so as to come up with some kind of protection, armor against the advance we were sure was coming. For we did the unthinkable yet again and flew further into the future. Now, I wish we had not, for once again we precipitated a change in the course of the flow of time that once we returned to our time and settled into Redonela, served as the source of further troubles yet to come. Of which I shall now deliberate to your eager ears. "Father!" Julyanna said, weeping. Our tower is gone." I took Julyanna against my chest and felt her heart trembling violently. No child should have to witness the horror we had. High as we were, it did not shield us from the obvious loss of lives and the great void left by the melting of the Eiffel Tower. We knew as the mushroom cloud cleared that little would be left of Paris as it had been and the future of our once proud nation was in serious doubt. "I'd better let our brotherhood know what has happened." Wells suggested as I pondered the ramifications of the horror that had happened. Our beam did not destroy the Invader ship. Quite the contrary. It had only given them the excuse to try their next weapon of destruction. The release of the atoms that bind life together. Wells and I had seen the atomic bomb being developed in Germany and America in earlier adventures, and we had striven to remove those time streams from happening, but in doing so we had triggered the knowledge to show up elsewhere, not on earth, but on Mars, in the tentacles of beings with such gigantic minds that they could grasp its use without a second thought about it. And now we were involved in a second War of the Worlds, this one much more vicious and evil. I couldn't understand how trying to do good could have such an evil outcome, but then I am not the Creator, am I? And perhaps that is the exact conceit that the Creator is trying to show me, perhaps us, that we can not possibily know all outcomes, and to presume to know what's best is at best a shot in the dark. So we settled our craft on the shores of that lovely city, where we were greeted as friends and with great amazement. I allowed my daughter Valentine and Wells' daughter Julyanna to guide tourists through the ship for a time, with myself and Wells in the background watching, and calculating our next steps. Our good wives used the opportunity to find a flat in the city where we could live for a time. As luck would have it my good friend in London found us with his pigeon messenger and we were able to keep abreast of the news of that invasion as well. Wells and I sank into a kind of stupor for a time, I will admit. Both of us were getting too old to be doing these kinds of wars. I was twenty five and he twenty eight. I had married quite young, but Wells was a grown man when he married. It isn't that we felt old. We did not. It's just that we had been through so much, seen so much and the weight of all the pain and suffering we had lived through had left an indelible mark on our spirits. Frankly, the well wishes of Willian in England did much to alleviate our fears and our doubts. He reminded us of the Rosy Cross and within a day, we had sent for our good friend a cheerful reply and encouragement. We even offered to fly him and his family to join us, but he insisted that he had to stay and help his countrymen, which is exactly what I would have expected him to do. A good friend of ours from Italy was visiting the lovely town we were visiting at the same time. I found this out only because he had a viewing in the local art gallery, where Wells and I loved to visit to view the work of up and coming artists. He was a very brilliant man, a genius, born before his times. I will let him tell his own story later on, but for now it's enough for you to know that he was not only a great artist, but a genius when it comes to engineering. We had our first family meal that night in a lovely flat with four bedrooms. One for Wells and I and our wives, and one for our children, and one for us to do our research in. We spent the better part of the day bringing things forth from the Master of the World. It took another day for us to string up the wiring so that we could get the juice we needed. Our friend in America, Ben, sent us a diagram that he had worked out for creating electricity from the sunlight. He hadn't been able to actually engineer it because of a war going on there at the time, but he sent us enough information to continue on our own. The next day we had the wiring complete and got ready to set it up. Julyanna and Valentine helped us rig the roof for the solar panel as Ben called it. It was a simple sheet of beaten metal which we had coated with black tar, then wired to our electrical conduits. The energy was stored in special batteries we had brought from the Master of the World. We had learned a long time ago had to store electricity for very long periods of time. "Father. What are we building?" Julyanna asked, her curiosity peeked by the strange box that Wells and I had put together in our home made laboratory. "This device will allow us to create a way of communicating with all our friends around the world." I told her. "What's it called?" She asked. "The Telepathic Box." I answered. Wells laughed. "More like the fool's box, no mind in its right mind would want someone intruding inside of them." I laughed. It was an inside joke. Valentine poked a finger at a dial we had specially made for the box. "What does that do?" "It tracks the signals and tunes them for reception. It's called a receiver." Wells explained. Our wives entered the room and Wells and I sighed wearily. "Here goes nothing." I said. "Julyanna, you want to do the honor of turning that dial on the bottom right." She did. The box sat there. Nothing appeared to happen. I felt the box. "Is something wrong?" My wife asked. "I don't think so." I said cautiously. Then as I peered closer at the receiver, it suddenly jerked a full one hundred and eight degrees. Our minds became filled with this monstrous vision of a creature so horrid and demonic looking that I thought we had opened the gateway to hell. "You shall all die!" It spoke. Then I heard no more. Saw no more. |
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