In his eighty-third year, Osgood Finnegan set out on a journey.
Gone were the days of carts and horses. Finnegan had failed to keep up with the times while he was engrossed in his Great Work; if pressed, he could not have described the current age's automobiles and trains. But he was still Osgood Finnegan, and that meant he had an airship.
It was the work of a week, though, to tunnel upward from his secret laboratory to get that airship above ground. He devised a clever mechanism that would open up from below and allow his ascent, but then collapse to seal the opening beneath him.
So as he had done once before at the beginning of his career, Osgood rose above the rooftops from obscurity and sailed along the winds to... something else.