Hello, I am an avid bookworm, crazed cinephile and casual RPGer. It isn't unusual for me to have three or four books on the go at any one time. My current reading list is : A Study in Scarlet ; A.N. Wilsons, The Victorians ; The Odyssey. I drift between the books in a nonlinear fashion that has been known to irritate linear, one-book-at-a-time readers. My car is a rolling, if chaotic, library. On rare occasion--rare as in Nessie sightings--I might be seen without a book in hand. A partial list of books that rock my literary world : Heart of Darkness, The Forever War, I am Legend, The Haunting of Hill House, The War of the Worlds, Brave New World.
The movies I'm fondest of are distinctly bipolar. It's either masterpieces & muddlepieces : Apocalypse Now & Starcrash (The Italian Star Wars!) Many of my favourite movies are micro-budget beasts : Dawn of the Dead, Dark Star, Return of the Living Dead, Six-String Samurai. I'm not anti-blockbuster : Close Encounters, Jaws, Raiders are all fantastic. Recent films that I really dig : Kill Bill, Inglorius Basterds, Iron Man, Lost in Translation, The Crazies, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Life Aquatic. 
Role Playing games would be awesome if it weren't for their often super-convoluted rule-sets. My preference runs towards simple systems like Fudge. AD&D is too much like a PHD course in minutiae. Besides, I'd rather form a rock and roll band or build a relationship arc than swing magic swords and loot dungeons. Perhaps I'm a pacifistic gamer.  

Note too sure about this. It might be a little too cut down... or creepy. Just an idea I had, considering what the VOOMER core is.

Quote: Ford sheaved through the papers.

"Hey Jet"

"Yeah"

"Where did this come from?"

"Where did what come from?"

"Drawings. A load of attractive women in some pretty fancy lingerie."

Some of home she even recognised.

"Mackie probaby printed them off, you know what he's like."

"No. These're done in pencils."

There was no answer.

"Jet?" Ford turned around, papers still in hand. "Jet?"

There was no sign she'd ever been in the room.
------------------

The engine shuddered as it died.

"It's fine at low RPM, but it starts getting choppy at high speeds," Daryl explained

"I thought you hated bikes," said Ford, giving it a quick glance to make sure there was nothing obviously wrong with it.

"I didn't, that's the funny part. But then with the motoroids and once I started it was just...." She stopped, giving an embarrased smile. "It sort of felt right."

Something was wrong, and Ford just couldn' put her finger on it.

"It might be.... leave it with me and I'll take a look when I get the chance."

Daryl dismounted from the machine, stretching in her jacket. "Thanks. I own you one."

"No problem."

The firecracker-red Ninja tink-tinked to itself as it cooled.

----------------------

"Oh this?" Kotono pointed at her new headband 'It helps keep the hair out of my eyes when I'm...." hs was interrupted by her chirping wrist-com. She glanced at it, a gleeful smile illuminating her face. "Gotta run. Later Ford."

"Later."

Ford sighed. Back to work.

-----------------------

"It arrived, it arrived It ARRIVED!"

Anika was in full-blown Frankenstein mode.

"What did?

"My new uniform of course. I thought since I did such an important job." She unfurled it from its packing. Pink braids fell on the floor.

"It looks like the police one from Bubblegum Crisis," said Ford. "Did you copy it or something?"

She pouted "I designed it myself from scratch." Anika glanced at it. "Now that you think of it, it does sort of look the same. Funny that."

------------------------

The lights in the hardsuit bay punched on, illuminating the equipment inside. The motoroid were parked up in their bike forms beneath tarpaulins to keep the dust off. The computer terminal all the wall showed only a blank screen.

Her footsteps echoed on the tiled floor.

In the back of the room, the Four hardsuits stood. Meticulously maintained and polished to a deep shine. Ford held one of the pencile drawings up to the Blue hardsuit.... comparing them by sight. That confirmed the first part of her theory....

The same hand had drawn them. They both showed the same eye for the female form with the way they seemed to flow with the body's natural curves. It began to make her slightly uneasy, a bubbling nausea rising in the pit of her stomach.

She stepped over to the hardsuit checking it over but not really expecting an answer. The metal was cold and dead to the touch. She took the helmet in her hands, heavy and smelling faintly of that coconut shampoo Daryl insisted of importing. Inside, the metal spots that formed the neural induction gear.

Maybe...

She checked the backpack of the hardsuit. Printed on a label on a small access flap beside the computer interface ports: VOOMER core Image "Priss".

"Hey Ford, what's up?"

She nearly jumped out of her skin. Mackie was standing in the doorway with a shit-eating I-just-saw-sister's-puppet-naked grin on his face.

"Just checking something is all."

"Well, just letting you know I finished the Falcon. It's running pretty good now."

"We'll make a real mechanic out of you yet. Now clean the shop before I get back and you can test drive it."

"Can I? Sweet!" He almost made a sonic boom as he left.

Ford sat herself back on the workbench behind the hardsuits. It creaked under her weight. She turned the helmet over in her hands, as she turned the possibilities over in her mind. It might just be a consequence of playing the part... that wouldn't be too unusual would it?

Then again...

Mackie Stingray to Mackie 'Jaguar'

"It can't be that. Can it?"

Alone in the SilkyDoll Ford hoped above all else that it really was just a case of actors internalising the role.

The raven wing of sable hair--it’s really black!--cascaded dynamically back from the triumphant features of the jade-skinned beauty standing atop a wind-whipped precipice. Her gleeful laughter, upthrust arms, laughing mouth,  splayed fingers suggested, fairly shouted, sentai-villainess but with an oddly apt dosage of...was there a pedagogic gleam in those dark eyes that both blazed and appraised? A further change happened to the lovely eyes ; the fire doused as if it were never there albeit a fractional grin, almost a smirk, remained, a fractal feature of the face that would never fade. She snapped precisely manicured fingers that were the same shade of jade as the rest of the girl that projected from a black & green leather outfit suggestive somewhat of a gallows-harlequin ; an unseen stagehand shut off the wind-machine.  
“Your turn...” She considered a clipboard that lay by her feet atop her papier mâché  perch, “...Raven’s Shadow.” The permanent micro-beam curled minutely into the world’s smallest cheshire-cat grin as the eyes attached to the mouth watched the sullen, black-laced teenager drag her almost mine-made-up pout stage-wards. The four other similarly outfitted & pancaked-pretties watched, gloomily, from the well tush-buffed leather seats of the pilot’s briefing auditorium. In the far-back row, an enigmatic grin sketched across a blue face.
***
The green woman sat at a scarred, steel mess table with the less scarred blue man.
“Maybe we don’t want them to ever be that happy, Wandblume.”  
“They’ll never be that happy, Van Loan.” She considered her cyan colleague with a dry grin. “You have to squeeze goth oranges extra hard to extract any sunshine at all.”
Van Loan, about to quaff the very liquid of Wandblume’s visually unpleasant analogy, put his glass back, untouched.
“ Ugh!” He waved bye-bye to the Florida Sunshine--it was actually L-5 Sunshine. “ Please, Shego, stop the food metaphors before you put me off bacon!”
Wandblume grinned a true, full-fledged, ripened-banana grin ; quaffed her partner’s abandoned OJ.
“I love it when you call me that, Dr. D : it means I fit the part!” She leant quickly across the dimpled steel tabletop, and planted a quick, citrus smack on slightly startled blue lips. There were sniggers, not very loud as Shego was scary, from the off-duty crew members busily ingesting cubes of red & green--it was Classic Sci-Fi lunch day. Vandblume, the gossipy name for the couple, was the choice shipboard entertainment : they made soap opera couples look downright mundane by comparison.
Van Loan attempted what he thought of as his Patented M. Bison Grin of Manly Charm. As usual it came off as Infectious Goofball Charisma. It made the ‘wavium-altered Wandblume--first name Ramona--always feel the oddest combination of seventy percent infatuation and thirty percent scorn for her endlessly-buoyant-yet-hardly-ever-actually-brilliant-but-usually-very-mad scientist beau.  Still, she lost herself in minor-reverie as she considered his two actual brilliant contributions to extra-terrestrial well-being :Flow-Grow, the super high-potency hydroponics nutrient that had made manifold lesser settlements capable of being self-sustaining, and the grey-water reclaimant algae, Blue Goo.
“I know that dreamy expression : Marveling at my brilliance!” Van Loan’s only slightly smug words brought her out of her chin propped in both hands daydream. She reached back across the surface of the table, this time to deliver a cuff. More barely stifled sniggers chuffed about the chamber. “Yeah, I love your pacifistic smart-bomb ; the invisible, lost super-computer, and, let’s not forget the day-glo breakfast cereal!”
“Hey, I’ll have you know Twenty plays a great game of Go ; the Space-Cray isn’t  lost, just misplaced ; and I’ll find a buyer for Shining Wheat, or my name isn’t Doctor Drakken!” By the final four syllables he had worked himself up into the index finger raised, happily-driven blue-bundle of energy that she found so damn maddeningly endearing.
Raucous applause broke out from all corners of the room. Van Loan made ostentatious bows to the four cardinal compass points. It was not an uncommon occurrence aboard the station.
Wandblume gave him the requisite exasperated glare. The rest of the room got the equally requisite once over that was faultlessly engineered to engender the continuation of respect & entertainment. Within the green-gorgeousness of her ‘Wavium shell, the once plain-- she had actually been as pretty but without the self-confidence she had come across as a Plain-Jane-- Ramona Wandblume continued to marvel at how cosplay had actually improved her life.
She stole Van Loan’s last bacon strip. “look, someone wants an all-goth-girl sentai-team : someone with enough pull to make that thing I did vanish, poof!” She punctuated her point by making the bacon vanish into the ingress point of her GI tract. “I will be a good girl for people that can make things go ‘Poof!’  “ She gave Van Loan an almost enigmatic look. “You don’t want me to go ‘Poof!’, right?”
“Not the real you.” He looked pointedly at the mess’ black & green festooned Wandblume’s fan-club ‘table’ populated by a happily chattering array of amateur Shego enthusiasts. Fan-girl & boy squeals and waves erupted as they noticed being noticed. Returning the waves, Van Loan thought two thoughts. One he expressed to his lunch partner : “But we do have an annoying surplus of you!”  The other he kept firmly within his skull : ‘Where’s my fan-table?’

Just wanted to mention a small bug I noticed regarding the Most Ever part of the Active Users line at the top of each forum.  On several (all?) subforums, the Most Ever users happened on 0, rather than an actual date.  The top level forum shows the date correctly though.  Is anyone else seeing this, or is there some glitch on my end?

I used to like American-style commercial "golden" beers like Budweiser...
But I just had one for the first time in years and it seems so... bland.  It doesn't even smell like beer to me.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

"Aargh! I think I need some Meta-muse-il. I keep sitting here at the keyboard straining, but nothing's coming out!"

Thank you, thank you, try the watress and tip the veal, I'm here all week.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

. . . but how about fixing them?

Question to everyone:  Is there a song out there Doug can use that can REPAIR any wrecked thing close to him?

Just to tide you all over until the 31st...

...Chapter 2 is now in preread.  Unless something absolutely horrendous comes up unexpectedly, I'm planning on releasing it two weeks from now, on 31 August.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Alias: Bootleg, The Sneaker

Powers/Gadget: extradimensional pocket space, usable on any small object in LOS

Signature Racket: smuggling, petty theft

Typical takedown: caught when fence or buyer turned out to be under surveillance, or tossed to the capes as a distraction by a doublecrossing A-lister.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows