The Black Charlotte - Prelude

Like most of Carter Whyle's undertakings, the Black Charlotte airship was built to impress a girl. Hovering above the ground, lifted by a trio of ebony balloons, the Black Charlotte was a work of art: beautiful dark oak trimmed with polished gold and equipped with a small army's worth of intricately ornate cannons. It was Carter's most successful ploy to date, and it captured, quite handily, the attentions of his desired target, a Miss Ryla Thir.

Ryla was a reformed Siren, a former temptress once employed luring men to a watery demise. She took little joy in the act, however, always feeling immeasurable guilt for the needless sailor slaughter, so she just up and quit. She found a job in a suburban copy shop and began singing at kareoke nights at small bars around town. And it was on a Friday night at the Pitch & Shaker Pub that Carter Whyle first saw Ryla Thir singing "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" to a crowd of rowdy drunks. Almost instantly, he fell in love.

Carter had tried, on several occassions, to speak to Miss Thir. Each time, he found himself uncharacteristically tongue tied and nervous. Her responses varied from disinterest to annoyance, and Carter found himself growing more obsessed and more disheartened with every failed encounter. Carter Whyle, a man for whom charm and seduction were practically second nature, had fallen madly in love with a woman who didn't seem to care that he existed. He went a bit mad and decided he needed to do something a bit out of the ordinary to garner her affection.

So Carter enlisted the aid of a friend and engineer and ancient Egyptian feline, Methistes. Methistes was born roughly two thousand years before Christ and he quickly realized that he had the ability to project his ideas into the minds of people. This was quite a boon for the creature, as the dire lack of opposable thumbs in his own species made it very difficult for them to progress, technologically, at the same pace as their psuedo-primate overlords. By forcing his ideas into the brain of an unsuspecting human, Methistes could practically enslave the poor fellow, driving a typical man to create spectacular devices that no human being could ever dare to dream of on their own. And yes, Methiste's slave would always receive the credit for the cat's inventions, but that mattered little as long as Methiste's inventions were called into being. Eventually, Methistes had one of his mind-slaves develop a sort of reed and mud skeleton for the cat, and his reliance on the feeble human mind was greatly reduced. With his newfound thumbs, Methistes was able to conjure up all manner of fantastic creations. This, however, sat poorly with the humans he had ensorceled and the other cats that he refused to help. And so Methistes was driven from Egypt and exiled from his people. He rarely showed his true nature again.

The adventures of the cat engineer are too voluminous to list, here, but suffice it to say, it didn't take long before the secretive creature had stumbled upon the keys to immortality. He has yet to share that tidbit with anyone, even his closest friends like Carter Whyle, whom Methistes met in Paris in 1984. Sensing something decent in the handsome human, Methistes projected the notion of his own intelligence and remarkable ability into Carter's brain, prompting a friendship that now seems forged of the strongest steel.

So Carter and Methistes drafted a plan to woo the fair Miss Ryla Thir. They would offer to sail her, in a newly minted and state-of-the-art balloon powered airship, to the moon. Neither Carter nor Methistes could think of anything more romantic than a leisurely cruise over the Sea of Tranquility in one of the cat's gorgeous and magical airships. It was bound to impress the mythical lady.

And it did.

When Carter presented the Black Charlotte to Miss Ryla, she nearly swooned. She couldn't possibly turn the offer to sail off to the moon. And so she planted a sweet kiss on Carter's cheek. He took her hand, led her into the Black Charlotte and began the trip, upward, to the glowing, full moon.

They did not notice the small black cat that tagged along.