Comments from the archivist:

                This is "Disappearances Can Be Deceiving" and is a sequel
                to "Return of the Villain"

    I have set all messages to a common paragraph indentation, and converted
any all-caps messages to upper and lower case, as well as converting things in
present tense to past tense.  I have also corrected spelling mistakes and bad
punctuation.
    While the messages originally all had titles, most of the titles were
random-titles.  For clarity, I have left only the titles that were NOT random.
The message headings, as they appear in this archive, are not actually as they
originally appeared.  I have simply placed the username in brackets, followed
by the title of the message when appropriate.  This was to leave things less
cluttered.
    Occasionally, there is a notation "post production" on a message.  These
were written after the fact to fix continuity errors or to clarify something.
    Very occasionally, I have had to add something inside another person's
message.  These additions are marked off in brackets.
    Excluding one or two examples, any modifications to an individual message
-- except ones involving punctuation or grammar -- were very minor and are
purely for continuity.  For instance, once or twice someone put the wrong word
in place. (Example: "He felt he needed to research more about the wand, too,
but it was getting late..." But it was supposed to be a staff, not a wand.)
    Other times, a poster may have misread the intent of an earlier message,
and later posters failed to notice the aberation and, having read that earlier
message RIGHT, continued the plot thread as that earlier message's writer
intended it be taken.
    I have modified any messages only as far as was necessary to correct such
mistakes.  But once, though, I actually had to change more than just a few
words in one message.  In the story, at one point, we had a sort of dome in
the desert, with an auto-targetting gun that aimed at anything that moved, if
what moved happened to be organic.  A poster got the impression, though, that
we had, instead, a "shell" which prevented someone from getting inside the
dome, a shell you couldn't walk through unless you were inorganic.  The
characters were trying to blast through this "shell" around the dome with an
ion cannon. I changed it to shooting holes in the dome, and to damaging the
defensive force-field. I marked this particular message with the notation
"modified."
    (As an aside, the "shell" business above was actually a reference to joke
someone had pulled once.  A very few users had access to the Unix shell, a kind
of command line interface that let you run programs independant of the BBS.
Someone had announced, either in a message, or at least by random title,
"Type 'Owl' at Main Menu to use Unix," and giving the impression that *anyone*
could call up the shell now. Trouble is, it *didn't* drop them to the shell.
You see, the first letter of "Owl," it so happened, was also the first letter
of "Off," the command to log you off from the BBS!  Lotsa people fell for that
one!  $^#~`>Click<  NO CARRIER)
    There were also a handful of messages deleted from the story, they had
no bearing on the tale, though, being simple user-bashing and user-killing.

                                       Nomad of Norad, September 1993


Contents of this archive:

    Comments        This file
    Staff1          \
    Staff2           |
    Staff3           | The story
    Staff4          /
    Storylst.txt     List of the other Intrepid Group stories, in sequence