Chapter 118: A Look In The Past 3. Start The Presses!

"Well now... What do we have, ladies?" - MeeMee demanded, as she violently corked the bottle of ink and threw herself back into the chair, shaking her tired fingers.

DeeDee hummed, as she leafed through the assorted notes. "I believe that weekly is our best option." - she proffered thoughtfully - "Until the Club really spreads across the kingdom, we probably will not mass up enough of the news to justify more frequent issues. Not to mention that our efforts might prove to be insufficient."

LeeLee walked into the room, her arms laden with blank printing matrices. The daisy in her lapel pulsated with gentle light, giving a clear indication of how she managed to carry that weight all by herself. The table groaned under the weight as she set the stack down and shook her arms in the air. "Phew, that's intense." - she muttered, shaking her head ruefully - "Remind me to be extra nice to dear Alistair for teaching us all how to do the strength charm. For what's it worth, I concur with DeeDee here. The weekly issue is how I vote we handle it. Between the three of us and the humdrum of Parsee, we gain the bobs and tidbits far too often to fit it all in once a month issue, unless we want to make it far too heavy for pigeons to carry, but more than once per week is just too much work for only three of us."

MeeMee scowled. "Might I remind you two that we do not have enough to fill out this week's issue properly?" - she demanded acerbically - "I have padded the articles with everything good, and there's still a space for a good story left."

LeeLee started to unstack the matrices, laying them out on the table side to side. "Let's piece what we have." - she proffered absentmindedly, as she slotted the first one into the abominably clever machine that Alyssa called linotype. The set of buttons with the letters and numbers, attached through the levers to the hellishly intricate half-mechanism half-enchantment within that drew the letters in iron sand within the viewing window, and once the whole line was made and verified, etching it into a block of lead, which then clunked down heavily into the matrix in the slot. She was the dedicated text imprinter of them three. MeeMee did most of the editing and preparation of text, while DeeDee handled the layout and wrote letters to their assorted correspondents, which had greatly increased in number ever since they made the first newspaper. This was the second printing, and the stakes were high. Would they be able to keep up to the high expectations set by their very first issue, or not?

Minutes passed as she clacked away at the machine, her fingers finding the letters quickly. Truth to tell, she was more than a little surprised by the apparent mish-mash of letters on the keyboard when they just received the machine. It made no sense to her at all. Why not just arrange them in proper alphabetic order? But Alyssa had assured them that this layout was actually well-suited to the task at hand and was produced by careful consideration of which letters of the language were used the most, concentrating them in the middle of the keyboard. That certainly had some seed of truth to it, as MeeMee definitely saw her fingers hovering over the middle of the keyboard more often than the edges. And she had to agree that typing with all ten fingers should be quite fast. She, unfortunately, was not quite at that level yet, using indexes and middle fingers as well as her thumb, but even that was very much an improvement over pecking one letter at a time. As she practiced more, by necessity as much as anything else, she caught herself looking on the keyboard less and less, as she grew used to the position of letters by habit. This was the time when she took over the task full-time, as she proved herself to be markedly better at it than her sisters.

Before long, the first page was done, and LeeLee stood up to ratchet in a row of heavy wedges to clamp the etched lines into the matrix. Mirrored text on the blocks looked very odd to her in the beginning, but after everything else Alyssa had been right about, none of them had felt the need to point out the oddness, and it borne out just fine. She dared a peek over the notes her sisters were still sorting and frowned. Indeed, they were scraping the bottom of the barrel, here. Plenty of oddments that were still bread and butter of any socialite, but nothing that was worth telling the whole of Parsee about. Wealthy commoners, who proved themselves to be avid perusers, much to their surprise, couldn't care less that viscountess This had acne or that baroness That was seeing a stableman on the sly.

"I... think I have an idea." - she mused slowly - "Or, rather, I recalled something Alyssa had mentioned. Remember, when we were talking about what goes into the newspaper and how? She mentioned something offhand in the end."

MeeMee looked up hopefully. "Well, don't keep us waiting, sister. What do you think we should do?" - she demanded.

"Well... She said that if there is a little space left, it might be better to put in something amusing for the readers, rather than try to force in more rumors..." - LeeLee hedged - "Could we not just... you know... Print a few riddles and give the answers in the next issue for people to check themselves against?"

"GENIUS!" - DeeDee thundered suddenly, hopping up and kissing flabbergasted LeeLee on both cheeks - "This is exactly what we do! Print some riddles for the children! That way, the parents have a little something something to distract their children with, while they read in peace, and children themselves will learn to anticipate the next issue! LeeLee, you absolute evil genius, you..."

"But what shall we print?" - MeeMee piped up suddenly - "How much pintes are there in the velte?"

DeeDee snorted - "Not that kind of riddles, silly. The good ones! Like... Like... What is it that stands on four legs in the morning, on two at noon and on three on sunset?"

"...There's an animal that loses and gains their feet?" - MeeMee drawled... then swatted her own cheeks, shaking her head - "Gah, my mind must be leaking out from all that editing! A human, of course! Newborns crawl, adults walk and the elderly hobble with the cane!"

She stared at the notes with loathing, then resolutely swiped them off to the side. "Mary! Bring us the wine! And those nice little cakes with tea, too!" - she shouted down the corridor for their maid, - "A break, ladies! A break to clear our minds, lest we all become as dimwitted as de Breges."

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