Post by Dunwik on Aug 3, 2021 22:45:10 GMT
Oscar Wright was a typical Dunwikki middle-class man. Ambitious, driven, relatively impatient, and doing things simply because he had a gut feeling to, because he thought it would make him money, because someone had told him it was impossible. An owner of a fireworks company, he was well-versed in explosives and the manufacture of them, but his true dreams lay elsewhere - to soar over the heads of his detractors, to laugh in the face of the great shipping magnates, and to seize the stars and drag them down to be encased in glass for the amusement of the Dunwikki.
Thus, he got to work, quietly, in a shed behind his business, seizing dead birds and painstakingly making charts of their wing structures, believing that flapping would give him enough lift to succeed in his aims. Many, many crashes later, he realized that mere flapping of the arms would not keep him aloft, and so his mind began to wander. What of his fireworks? Perhaps, perhaps if a man was on a big enough firework, and the firework did not explode, it would give him the lift needed to fly, and flapping was the means of regulating motion through the air. When struck with this inspiration, he worked feverishly day and night, avoiding sleep, and leaving his business in the hands of his associates as he toiled unseen.
The loans he took out to bribe the newspapers into reporting on him were immense - but they were worth it, as the Minister Of Research And Development himself, Isaac Arthur, was in attendance as Wright began the final preparations for his machine. Strapping himself into the wood-and-fabric contraption, he lit the fuse, and soon the thrust sent him rocketing down the paved lane. An experimental flap of his wings and he would...
Something went wrong. Perhaps it was how his wings were, perhaps it was an error in timing, perhaps it was a rock in the road, but Oscar Wright and his contraption lurched suddenly to the left, rolled over fully, then vanished in a tremendous explosion.
Thus, he got to work, quietly, in a shed behind his business, seizing dead birds and painstakingly making charts of their wing structures, believing that flapping would give him enough lift to succeed in his aims. Many, many crashes later, he realized that mere flapping of the arms would not keep him aloft, and so his mind began to wander. What of his fireworks? Perhaps, perhaps if a man was on a big enough firework, and the firework did not explode, it would give him the lift needed to fly, and flapping was the means of regulating motion through the air. When struck with this inspiration, he worked feverishly day and night, avoiding sleep, and leaving his business in the hands of his associates as he toiled unseen.
The loans he took out to bribe the newspapers into reporting on him were immense - but they were worth it, as the Minister Of Research And Development himself, Isaac Arthur, was in attendance as Wright began the final preparations for his machine. Strapping himself into the wood-and-fabric contraption, he lit the fuse, and soon the thrust sent him rocketing down the paved lane. An experimental flap of his wings and he would...
Something went wrong. Perhaps it was how his wings were, perhaps it was an error in timing, perhaps it was a rock in the road, but Oscar Wright and his contraption lurched suddenly to the left, rolled over fully, then vanished in a tremendous explosion.