Aetherium et Soforthia

[Seymour Landnau]

Lew is sent off to an aetherial abyss, to the west.  Fellow called Merle,
for obvious enough reasons, being, as it'll shake out, quite the alchemist,
who was snapping aetheric photos about the balloonists, takes up the
thread.  Spins him and his daughter roundabout the aether-red midwest for
something like a lot of years, searching for a runawayed woman, learning
along the way all-things-chemical and photographic.

I am gathering here, to do this, it may be wise *not* to wait a week after
you've read it, to summarize it.  Why did Merle go to Ohio?  Right before
going, he's back east picnicking with professor Vanderjuice, he has read an
article about an experiment at some Institute 'pon the Aether, so forth.

Right, yes, blame it on the Aether.  Someone has developed the notion that
light, all things light, may as well call this book against the light, is
helped along its journey cross town, cross country, cross cosmos, by this
rather elusive substance.  The Author once has a character raise the
possibility that the Aether is god, and at another section such things as
the certain forms of light obtaining consciousness, but the Au(e)ther never
mentions the obvious thing being the case, that the Aether is simply
consciousness, and the Aether is the substance in which all that is, is,
so, all is consciousness.  So forth.

In Ohio there is a fellow trading in stolen furs, and the journalists
covering the conference of the experience of the light through aether, the
experiment, along with the aetherists driven mad by all things aether,
everyone gets thrown into a local asylum, one of whom Merle helps escape,
who then teaches Merle all about photography.

Father and daughter roam the plains, the inner American sea, seeking lost
love, and a lost mother, and they gather the chemical secrets of the plants
and the herbs as they gather lost and never-had memories, counterparts in
the high hills a-lighting them with magic and grace, and have for a while
anyway a ball of light as a chummy companion.

The wizard is setting up shop in a burned and abandoned Colorado farm,
stupefied by the adorning sashwork of the spiders in the morning light,
when in walks Webb Traverse, who, being a blaster, an alchemist in his own
parts, almost an anti-alchemist, is curious about the possibility of an
anti-philosopher's stone, ripping apart the aetherial, eternal tethering of
land and spirit, or land and the owners of industry..
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