How to Make an Entrance
by Chrone Osphere
a shot of the Hindenburg tragedy, with what we now know was TS1
I just had the most terrifying experience of my life.
I think I just blew up a blimp and killed a bunch of people.
I'm still making sense of it all.
It was just 2006.
Then it was supposed to be 1963- but it was 1937.
Sorry- I'm still trying to put the peices together.
My day was supposed to consist of becoming the world's first time traveler and determining who killed President Kennedy.
So, naturally, I was hammered.
It started at the launch of Time Ship 1 in June of 2006.It was a miserable ceremony filled with people I'd be glad to never see again (including my first girlfriend- thanks, JMG).
Eager to leave, I started the pre-launch sequence.
"Sir, have you been drinking?"
"Who's there?"
"Sir, this is CompuCore 1, Time Ship 1's onboard computer. You appear too intoxicated to proceed with the launch.""Who are you, my mother? I'm fine. And we're on a schedule."
"Then, sir, we can proceed on auto-pilot. I'll take us out."
TS1's engines began to hum as a temporal vortex appeared above it.
"I didn't spend three weeks in the simulator for you to drive," I said.
I grabbed the controls and unlocked the auto-pilot icon.
TS1 lurched noticably off the pad toward the spacial aperature over Jones Tower.
"Sir, I must insist," said the computer as it took back over and locked me out.
My head was splitting.
My first mission hadn't even begun and my own computer was fucking with me.
"I can already tell you're going to be a pain in the ass. Give me back manual control right now!"
The sun was in my eyes as CompuCore 1 punched the throttle, flying up into the vortex hanging over the Manhattan skyline, and then-
I was flying straight down, at night, in the rain.
"Manual control restored."
Shit.
"Auto-pilot! Auto-pilot!"
I pulled back on the controls and started to gain altitude.
I was no longer barreling toward the ground.
Now I was barreling toward a metal tower.
"Computer!"
"I've got this!"
Auto-pilot banked us starboard, only to barrel toward the aft section of the biggest blimp I've ever seen.
It was way bigger than any of the airships I rode as a kid.
"Hell no!" I may have yelled as I took back control.
I banked to port, and was about to fly into one of the blimp's turbine engines.
I calmed myself and called on all of my training- all three weeks of it.
I rolled backward and missed the turbine, but not the blimp itself.
TS1 shook as its dorsal nacelle tore through the blimp's hull.
I'm not sure why that caused an explosion- but it did.
A big one.
The blast hurled TS1 across the night sky.
never
wore that
helmet
again
the polyphasic hull helps
TS1 cloak and slip through
space-time, but it also
throws off a wicked static
charge, which probably
ignited the Hindenburg
I frantically pushed all the buttons I could, trying to activate a stabilizer, or an inertial dampener, or a retro-rocket or any fucking thing that might stop me from tumbling through the air uncontrollably.
"Sir, I've got it."
The ship froze in place and hovered in the air, about 20 feet off the ground.
buttons, Chrone
took the cloak
off the start-up
list, which has a
major impact on
his next mission
The shock of surviving was replaced with the sight of the horror on the other side of my translucent canopy.
The gas giant was burning mid-air in front of me, falling, almost in slow motion.
That's when I started looking for that bottle I stashed.
What went wrong?
Why was I in the wrong year?
And what the Hell was I doing in New Jersey?
I also started a ship-wide diagnostic.
CompuCore 1 claimed there was a logistical paradox in the Temporal Inversion Chamber, whatever the fuck that means.
It guarentees that the anomaly was purged, but that doesn't explain how it got there.
Or why I didn't end up in the middle ages- or the middle of the sun, for that matter.
I'm still really shaken up over that blimp.
I gotta tell you- I love blimps. Always have.
I was in the Model Zephyr Club as a boy.
I take the Eastern Seaboard Blimps on all my weekend getaways.
The first time I saw TS1 I thought, It kind of looks like a blimp. I'm a blimp pilot. Cool.
America is a blimp society.
I'd hate to do anything to screw that up.
I'll be more careful from now on.
Time to get back to work.
And, if I'm not mistaken, I still have a first mission to tackle:
The Kennedy Assasination.
And this time, my new readers, nothing will go wrong. 
