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Lo, there do I see before me my father.
Lo, there do I see before me my mother, brothers, and sisters.
Lo, there do I see the line of my people back to the beginning.
They bid me come join my ancestors in the Halls of Valhalla,
where the brave shall live forever.

he demise of the celebrated "Bon-Vivant Professor," Phineas T. Flywheel, in the accident which destroyed much of the Southern Polar Region of Venus, was mourned on three planets. The Circum- Venusian Airship Company honoured him by flying black streamers from their airships for one full year, and the Aethyric Ships Union decreed black armbands for all its members for six months.
is fellow scientists mourned him, and ladies of three planets were inconsolable.

ven the Corsairs of the Asteroid Belt were prostrate with grief.
ho was the man who could command such respect? Why was he such a giant in this, the latter half of the 19th Century; a century when giant Aethyric ships ply the space lanes between Earth, the steaming jungles of Venus, and the arid Red Planet of Mars?
ittle concrete evidence of Phineas's childhood has come to light over the years despite painstaking investigations by devotees, acolytes, and the criminal investigation branches of the governmental agencies of three planets.
he earliest confirmed mention of the professor's presence on this plane of existence was his emergence at the age of eleven from the vast Martian Cannabis plantations with a scholarship to the Transylvanian Polygnostic Institute in the Balkan region of Earth Primus. Several unauthorized biographies and at least two grand jury reports cite this prestigious scholarship as a recognition of Phineas's precocious genius in matters both arcane and scientific, but one dramatization of the professor's early life, unimaginatively titled "Young Phin Flywheel" (and rumored to have been co-written by the professor himself) claimed the windfall was the means by which a family of wealthy Martian planters arranged for a bastard son to escape off-planet ahead of the vengeance of several outraged fathers, as Phineas was precocious in matters other than science.
o, much in the manner of the Remittance Men of the British Empire who are to this day shuffled off to the Venusian Miffle-Fur farms, young Phineas found himself aboard an Aether Steam Packet plying the Mars-Earth-Venus Triangle, leaving his home and family (and a rumored three illegitimate children) behind him.
he next confirmed reports of Phineas's activities as a young man (beyond rumors of the destruction of a pirate fleet that attempted to waylay the Steam Packet on which the young Msr. Flywheel was traveling to his new school) revolve around the construction and demonstration of several autoanimatronic marvels, their intricate methods of construction only surpassed by the somewhat macabre forms they assumed. The most magnificent of these was named by the young genius the Sheem Spider, a ten-foot-long mechanical arachnid that was described as being covered in brown, spiky fur with a row of eight small, glowing red eyes arranged above a pair of black, chitinous mandibles.
espite their fearsome appearance Apprentice Flywheel assured all who viewed his creations that they were nothing more than extremely elaborate clockwork toys, and in fact amused onlookers by having the spider perform a convoluted, eight-legged soft-shoe dance.
t was not until several years later that a connection was suggested betwen Phineas' creations and the robberies of a number of supposedly impregnable businesses, storehouses and banks that occured at around the same time as the animatronics' unveilings, but by that time both the machines and Phineas Flywheel were long gone from sight.
The invention that made Professor Flywheel's name almost a household word was the "Lightning Gun."
This was a fiendishly clever arrangement of several miniaturized Wimshurst Machines in the body of the pistol, with the rearmost started in its rotation by clockwork. The power thus generated was stepped up (and stored) using several "capacitrons" set around the main body, giving a level of power heretofore undreamed of.
The use of clockwork to start the Wimshursts effectively obviated the need to reload or recharge for at least fifty discharges.

or was Mr. Flywheel's genius restricted to the construction of unique autoanimatronic devices (a class of machines colloquially known by the somewhat derogatory term of 'Clanks'); his interests ran from the Alpha to the Omega, with particular attention placed on the Alchemical and Technomantic crafts, both as pure arts and as their applied forms, with particular attention to Weaponology and Methods of Propulsion. His graduation thesis paper, "Alchemy To Technomancy: Applying The Medieval In The Modern World" is still considered *the* seminal work on the enhancement of Black Powder Weapons with Technomantic Arts.
ollowing his escape / graduation from Transylvania Polygnostic, Phineas fled a torch-wielding mob and transferred to Miskatonic University in Arkham , Massachusetts, where he hoped to continue his explorations of Alchemy and Technomancy under the august tutelage of Nicholas Flamel, the pre-eminent alchemist of this age. Fortunately for Phineas, the 600-year-old alchemist had already been impressed by the young scientist's work, and readily accepted him as his pupil.
he arrangement that began as Master-to-Apprentice gradually transformed into one between equals, with Nicholas and Phineas becoming close friends despite the vast difference in their ages. This relationship lasted for several productive years that resulted in unprecedented breakthroughs in the combination of Alchemy and Technology, and no doubt would have continued to this day had an as-yet undisclosed dispute driven the friends apart on the most acrimonious of terms. Most believe it to have been a dispute over Flamel's refusal to teach Phineas the final secrets necessary to create his own Philosopher's Stone, but a source close enough to the Flamels to claim intimate knowledge of the events has hinted that the dispute had more to do with Nicholas's wife Perenelle.
ost biographers have scoffed at the notion that someone as callow as the young Mr. Flywheel could be even remotely of interest to the worldly, regal ice-queen beauty that is Madame Perenelle Flamel, but there have been other indications of Phineas's talents in the Battlefields of L'amour. Though confirmable facts are few and far between, several tell-all posthumous biographies of the Great Man have included interviews with as many as a dozen different Martian matrons with claims to the distinction of being the young Mr. Flywheel's 'first love'. And while the cynical nature of this biographer is forced to point out that it would require a veritable Armada of punts to supply all the vessels upon which the Flower of Martian Womanhood supposedly offered up their purity to the advances of the precocious young scientist, still there is a commonality in their descriptions of the events to lend some credence to the tales. It is, after all, not every day that a well-brought up young lady from a good Martian family comments on a young gentleman's ability to "flutter his tongue like a Martian hummingbird's wing".
e that as it may, whether Candidate for Sainthood or Damnation-bound Rake, Phineas T. Flywheel outgrew the confines of Miskatonic University just as surely as he had the Gadolinium-encrusted halls of Transylvania Polygnostic and, with the Spidergoatskin scroll declaring his Mastery of the Arcane Discipline of Technomancy clutched firmly in his Adamantium-sheathed hand, he departed for the next step in his education, a period of post-graduate work under the auspices of that most gentle and caring of taskmasters, Doktor Nicola Tesla. It would be under the Herr Doktor's tutelage that Phinea's true genius blossomed, and never moreso than when helping Doktor Tesla undermine the malevolent machinations of his lifelong nemesis, the gifted but warped Dr. Halo Siva Madstone.
hough a number of Nom De Guerre have been attributed to the Professor's chequered career at one time or another, the only one that has been confirmed with any certainty is that of Roderick The Sly, one of the infamous captains of the Jovian Corsairs. How Professor Flywheel initially found himself in the company of those desperate cutthroats who render any venture into the Outer Solar System a 'Journey Fraught With Peril' is not known with any certainty, but one of the less fantastic rumors has him catching the eye of the eldest daughter of Pasha Barbarossa, Commodore of the Jovian Brotherhood. Serafina Barbarossa made her interest known, and in a typically Corsair burst of exuberance bound, gagged and carried the worthy professor off aboard the Aethyr Barquentine "Harpy's Nest", where he became the only male crewmember aboard a ship that previously had prided itself on its all-female complement.
ot much is known of Phineas/Roderick's sojourn aboard Seraphina's ship, beyond the fact that both she and her crew were seen to smile more and get into far fewer tavern brawls during the good professor's stay. Not coincidentally, the deadliness of the Harpy's Nest's armament and consequentially the size of the prizes she took also went up exponentially while Phineas was aboard, though at the time this was attributed to 'Roderick's' skills.
For more of the Life And Adventures of Professor Flywheel, go here !
(As a side note, close to the end of the Twentieth Century The Professor, under the nom-de-guerre of "Roderick the Sly," founded a group within the SCA known as the "Corsairs," recruiting many henchmen from the Corsairs' ranks. Baby Bunny Fur Bikinis on cute girls helped in these efforts.)
It must be said that, even though the Great Professor Flywheel died, he may indeed be only "mostly dead," (many esteemed scholars believe this as absolute fact) and Somewhere Out There he still plots and plans.
Some point to curious runes engraved on standing stones and tattooed on cats that, translated, read "In Valhalla the Professor lays and lies, wenching and drinking."
Others remark on his many years of managing the incredible Nerf Sisters in their travels and adventures.
Also to be considered are his later experiments involving Thiotimoline and airships.
NOTES
As those who are acquainted with the Great Art are aware, Spidergoatskin is prized and used for only the most important of documents, both because Spidergoats represent one of the best documented applications of Technomancy to the arcane processes of Recombinant DNA, and because of the possibility of having a Spidergoat Broodmother liquefy one's internal organs as provender for her ravenous young.