Historians have never paid attention to one fact: our history was written by our parents before we were born.

Their actions, just like ours for our children, set the stage for their direct descendants.

You must have a clear understanding of that solid principle, that unwritten immutable law of the universe, before going on with this story.

For you see, before they were born, two famous aviators met Lewis Carroll’s inspiration for a memorable fictional character whilst Queen Victoria reigned.

While the middle-class prudes proved their noble worth, the threesome of Earhart, Lindbergh and the Mad Hatter went off on an adventure.

Ever had a three-wheeled vehicle in which all three wheels steered independently?  Most likely not.  Either one wheel turns and the other two point permanently in one direction, or two wheels turn in synch with each other and the third wheel points permanently in one direction.

So it was with our flyers and their eccentric co-conspirator who set out on an unpublished expedition.

Unpublished until now, that is.

Ground into a pulp and turned into a felt hat were the notes, diaries and maps used by the explorers.  It wasn’t until a new computer deciphering program was invented by a retired secret agent to ferret out the hidden codes in the city maps of foreign countries that the threads and fibers of the felt hat were pulled apart and reassembled in their original form.

The hat sat in a hat box as hats are wont to do, taking up space in the attic of one Hegrapevinucus Forvell, the famous daguerreotypist who had documented the lives of both the famous and notorious across two centuries.

M. H. Forvell died and left his fortune to a geographic feature named Pilot Knob in middle Tennessee, not far from Readyville, where his belongings were carted and stored in caves carved out of the rock.

Using an aeroplane-engined dirigible, Earhart navigated her two companions over the knob, spotting the secret caves one early dawn morning.

They tethered their lighter-than-air craft to an old pine tree and descended a rope ladder to the caves.

Stored in giant clay jars sealed with impenetrable tar and humongous glass jars sealed with water-resistant wax were the life’s work of Forvell.

Much of the information was repetitious — farm harvest records and stock market buys/sales/trades, for instance.

But one container held a series of inventions, some patented and some stamped “For My Eyes Only,” including one for converting printed paper or paper covered with handwriting into articles of clothing, wallpaper glue or, to the interest of M. Hatter, a felt top hat.

From then on, when one of the three had finished a logbook or diary, the Hatter would use Forvell’s secret formula to reconstitute the water-dissolved and shredded logbook or diary pages, forming hat shapes.

None of them was a more prolific writer than the other.  However, multiplying their output by three meant quite a few journals were filling up on a weekly basis, driving the Hatter mad with desire to create as many new styles of hats as he could — tall, skinny, fat, short, see-through, invisible, and everything in-between.

Eventually the Hatter ran out of ideas for new hats and the two pilots realised they needed to return to public life.

Before they did, their records show they had more fun in a short period of time than should be legal (and some of it wasn’t!).

While they were tethered to Pilot Knob, they overheard some old-timey mountain music, the good stuff, hypnotic, said to turn you inside out, stop the motion of the planets and move you and the world around you over to the parallel train track of alternate universes.

Little did they know that they had changed their timeline.

They also had inadvertently invented a new social period called Steampunk.

The song they heard that changed history?  Well, you already know what it is: “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy,” written so far back up in the hills, no one had heard of sheet music or sound recording devices, so no one knows exactly when the song was first created or by whom.

And by changing history, Lindbergh, Earhart and the Hatter changed everything, including the style of dancing the local people performed to their mountain music.

No longer did they buck or clog dance.  They started a new craze, a dance sensation called the Lindy Hop and their clothing style became the name of the new era — Steampunk.

To get back to that time, Guin and Lee adopted the Steampunk clothing style and started learning a Lindy Hop dance routine that would induce a hypnotic trance and send them out of one spacetime continuum into another.

They had also found some of Forvell’s writings and wanted to create their own electromechanical wonders based on Forvell’s notes scribbled on incomplete inventions.

But which would you rather read about — how Guin and Lee invented a new form of space travel or what Earhart, Lindbergh and the Mad Hatter discovered but had told no one because it was so earth-shakingly stupendous?

Don’t answer flippantly.

The answer you receive will shift history again, maybe by only the slightest change but also maybe by large changes all jumbled up together.

Be willing to accept the changes your answer causes.

Alice may never return from Wonderland and you don’t want that, I can tell you!