I posted another piece of Mister Po's story tonight for those of you interested at http://writejohn.blogspot.com/. I know your children will enjoy these light-hearted and sweet tales.


BACK to War of the Worlds which nears the end of Volume One.

Now that his own mother had crossed to wherever it was souls ultimately disappeared to, he had not felt quite the same, but it was a different kind of weight, as if a kind of bated breath, awaiting something terrible to befall. The news of the War had triggered it. All the uncertainty. The unknowns. He had no idea of what these invaders looked like. Were they human? Did they even have human feelings of any kind?

What little his father spoke of, was veiled with nuances that his mind could carry to places that perhaps it shouldn’t.

So yes, Jules was lost and confused in many ways. He was fighting a war he had no clear conception of, and it was really getting to him in major ways.

He sighed, and then went to a deep mahogany desk that lay sprawled against the right wall, next to tubes marked dia1, 2, etc.
Each were dated, and the first began almost two  years ago, which is when he first hatched his idea for the inevitable confrontation that loomed between man and invader.

Stretched across the top of the desk, which looked pretty bruised from being banged around multiple times, was a wrinkled diagram with tea and coffee stains, as well as milk and juice. For many hours this desk had been his source of freedom and a form of solitude for him as he worked out in his extremely agile mind all the ramifications of what he sought to achieve, and how it all must be done step by step.

 Jules was strong, but lugging the desk into the warehouse had been a major task for him and he had scraped and scratched it many times. The desk had one broken leg, so he had to be careful when he leaned against it, or else everything on top would spill onto the filthy floor, which was littered with scraps of metal, cloth, wood, and patches of grease and another substance that resembled orange slime.

He called the slime the Forcepellet, as it was the driving device behind the vehicle he had assembled. The sketch, over which he had labored so long and so hard, was of a huge cigar shaped device with twin shafts at the fore and aft of it, as well as midsection.

The Forcepellets were a unifed form of reactant made from oil and a rare earth substance found by the brilliant female scientist, Madame Curie. She had been exposed to it for quite some time, and as a result gained the ability to repulse anything she desired for a certain amount of time when she released a burst of emotion. Which is also why he said force…because unless the emotions were of great force, the pellets didn’t work.

So Forcepellets they became with Curie’s blessings. And with her help Jules had learned how to form and mold the energy release so that it could be used to propel anything….anything at all, further and faster than anything known to man at that time.

While not the reason for his diagram, it was integral to the device laid therein, because the device would be using the forcepellet, not only to propel the device, but also to arm it.

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE FIRST BATTLE

Wells was so horrorfied by the sight before him that he quite literally froze in his tracks, though one would think such a rational being would burst into flight before doing such a useless thing.