The 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. His fellow scientists mourned him, and ladies of three planets were inconsolable. Even the Corsairs of the Asteroid Belt were prostrate with grief. Who 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?

Little 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.

The 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.

So, 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.

The University of Texas at Mars City is the possessor of Professor Flywheel's collection of pressed ballerinas. It can be viewed by the public Monday thru Friday in the University Library.

The 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.

Despite 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.

It 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.

Nor 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.

Following 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.

The 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.

Most 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".

Be 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 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.

Though 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.

Not 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.

Though his time aboard the Harpy's Nest was both Pleasurable and Profitable, Professor Flywheel eventually moved on, seeking new challenges for his astounding (if somewhat twisted) intellect. The fact that both Seraphina and her father were becoming increasingly impatient with Phineas's inability to put aside his wandering ways in favor of a long-term commitment had, by most accounts, little to do with the matter, nor should it have, for the Professor was well-documented throughout his life as saying that, having been committed on numerous occasions while growing up he had no desire to experience the same again as an adult.

Thus it was that the Professor greeted an AetherGram from his old Mentor, Doktor Tesla, as a Moment of Profoundest Serendipity, and resolved to embrace the invitation enclosed therein forthwith. Realizing however that the delightfully homicidal Seraphina might not view the proferred opportunity with the same delight Phineas did, Professor Flywheel wisely chose to depart on that rarest occasion, Jovian Moon Dark, when all the satellites orbiting Jupiter were in the gas giant's shadow. Plotting an Inverted Haversham Corkscrew that took full advantage of the gravitational effects of the aligned moons enabled Phineas's small sloop to achieve an escape velocity that even the swiftest frigate in Pasha Barbarossa's fleet could not match, allowing the Professor to wave a fond farewell to the Brotherhood, and the nuptials with which Seraphina planned to ensnare him.

Upon arriving at the Innermost Planet**, Professor Flywheel joined forces with Doktor Tesla, adding his own uniquely warped genius to the Herr Doktor's greatest project to date, one that would either secure forever his place of honor in the Akashic Record's Hall of Invention, or else an equally prominent but far less prestigious place in the Hall of Crackpots. Its inspiration drawn from a structure viewed at Queen Victoria's Silver Jubilee, Doktor Tesla planned to construct a Crystal Palace encompassing the Innermost Planet's** Solar equatorial zone, built from Adamantium steel and transparent Aluminium to hold up to the hurricane-force storms that constantly buffeted the region where the Light Side met the Dark.

As any student with even a primary school's education as to the nature of the other planets of the solar system will tell you, the Innermost Planet** is virtually uninhabitable. With one side always facing the Sun and the other the frozen reaches of space, the surface tempreatures range from a furnace heat capable of boiling lead to a frozen wasteland decorated with lakes of liquid oxygen. The only place where the temperature approaches a range considered habitible by subjects of the British Empire (as well as other humans)is in the area of False Dawn, the narrow band (no more than 30 kilometers wide at most) circumferencing the planet where the Light Side bled into the Dark. There the temperature averaged a balmy 80 degrees Farenheit -- or would if not for the cyclones, tornados and typhoons that were engendered by the superheated atmosphere coming into contact with the super-cooled.

Doktor Tesla's solution to the problem was what eventually became known as the Eighth Wonder of the Solar System (it would have qualified for seventh place, but was narrowly edged out by the Gravity-Defying Bosoms of the Neptunian Houris), the Crystal Oasis, a crystoplast-protected resort, getaway, and hideout measuring an average of 30km wide and 15,330km long. Doktor Tesla designed the Cavorite-cored Adamantium superstructure, basing it on plans and Arithmantic formulae cross-temporally acquired from Richard 'Bucky' Fuller***, while Professor Flywheel developed the process whereby transparent aluminium could be produced en masse from metallic lichen that grew within the Innermost Planet's** vast, sub-Mercurian cavern system. Doktor Tesla and Professor Flywheel also collaborated on the creation of the Behemoth Steam-Powered Nanobots that were programmed to actually assemble the Adamantium-and-Aluminium structure. Once the shell of the Crystal Oasis was in place, a robotically piloted Aether Flyer with a payload of Genesis Area Effect Bomblets (each one capable of transmogrifying an area with a radius of 10km from point of impact) was set to circumnavigate the Innermost Planet**. By the time it returned a viable environment had been established and the first tenants had begun to arrive -- each with their rather large down payments in the form of gold, jewels, or other precious commodities.

It was at this point that the Serpent in the Garden of Tesla and Flywheel revealed himself. Unbeknownst at that time to anyone in the Solar System other than his own minions, the Dark Side of the Innermost Planet** played host to one of the most vicious, ruthless, and otherwise unpleasant airship pirates ever to plague the Aether -- the Dread Pirate Freddie. Flying the Jolly Johnny (a bandanna-wearing, dreadlocked-and-beaded skull over two crossed cutlasses), the Dread Pirate Freddie was suspected of having committed some of the most heinous crimes of the space lanes -- I say 'suspected', because the Dread Pirate Freddie never left survivors to testify. The only reason any name or description was known at all was because while there were no witnesses to speak up, there was always at least one member of Freddie's crew who could not resist getting liquored up and bragging to all and sundry. Some authorities insisted that this showed a flaw in the Dread Pirate's otherwise daunting skills, the inability to choose reliable crewmembers, while other wags declared it was actually a very clever means of terrorism and propaganda.

Unfortunately for Tesla's and Flywheel's guests, Freddie was almost as intelligent as he was vicious. Fortunately for those same guests, 'almost' was the operative word, and as for the rest of Freddie's crew, 'Not Even Close on a Good Day' was the measuring stick. The Dread Pirate Freddie was quite smart enough to plan simultaneous strikes at multiple targets scattered across the entire circumference of the Oasis, making it virtually impossible for the reaction teams to respond in a timely manner. The lieutenants in charge of those attacks, however, mostly fell into the category of 'not smart enough to pour piss out of a boot', and plotted straight line courses from each strike back to Freddie's lair. They'd never had to take an evsaive course while plying their trade between planets, they saw no reason they should need to start now. So while the first round of assaults were indeed tremendously successful insofar as Pillaging, Rapine and Murder were concerned, Evading Retribution and Spending the Swag left much to be desired, though observers on the promenade decks of those Aether Liners in a position to view the Dark Side of the Innermost Planet** remarked favorably on the multi-colored light show that erupted on roughly the centermost point of that region and lasted for several hours.