Henry Pacer (bass/vox)

While generally considered the most well-rounded of the group, Henry Pacer’s biggest contribution consisted of his two magnificent and veiny hands, which he delicately and aptly named Mussolini and Casanova. He was very good-looking and heterosexual, though he enjoyed cross-dressing from time to time. He spoke very seldom unless he was jogging, a time he reserved for himself to banter aloud with the conflicting mysticisms and equations pinging back and forth in his brain. But perhaps as a result of this, Henry is the most prolific diarist from the time and, I hope, the most reliable as well.

Most of the other group members attributed Henry's various quirks to an upbringing filled with a passion for electrical engineering and an unquenchable desire to beat the Turing Test. While this very well may have inclined him towards eccentricity, it also endowed him with a skill for inventing robots that was invaluable for the Quests (and for supporting the group financially). On the other hand, he was solely responsible for the Chillbot/Killbot fiasco, something for which he never really forgave himself.

Tavon Underwood (keys/vox)

A dark and serious character by the name of Tavon Underwood complemented the jams with his unequaled talents on the keys. In “dark and serious” one should be particularly careful not to read “sinister,” for he was anything but. Only his eyebrows carried the traits, but they covered much of his face. Once when he was a boy, Tavon was struck by lightning in the middle of a dense forest. He had been practicing the esoteric art of Tai Chi, and as he was hugging a scrawny tree, the storm shifted toward his center. As a result, he became very high-strung and refused, later in life, to touch any potentially addictive substances or chemicals, with the very notable exception of chocolate. Tavon seems to be the only member of the group that bothered to write down lyrics that he cared for. He even took the extra precaution of writing them down on the sides of styrofoam cups so they wouldn't disintegrate in less than 4,000 years; he was also careful to leave these fragments wherever he happened to be sitting at the time.

Alma Diggory (drums/vox)

The solitary female member of the ensemble went by the name of Alma Diggory. She wore ruby slippers whenever she played and had a mole in the corner of each eyebrow. No one was absolutely certain where she came from, or even what her real identity was, as she’d casually dropped into conversation one night in 1967 (Henry's journal [11.27.67]) that if anyone was to somehow fumble upon her birth certificate (a document which she inexplicably carried on her person), they would subsequently be ousted from the troupe and sent to live with the unidentified tribe of Álvaro Fe’s ancestry. Being the sole female, she chose to exercise the absolute power that invariably accompanied that role. Occassionally, and against her best efforts, this would spill over into the sessions; recordings documenting this phenomenon resemble a very primitive form of hip-hop.

Álvaro Fe (charango/vox)

Álvaro Fe offered to this assembly two areas of absolute expertise: his voice as pure instinct and the charango as pure passion. His voice he manipulated like silk, but he did so with the fervor of a skin disease. The true splendor of his musicality was enveloped almost entirely in the charango. Indeed, as the story goes, Álvaro often refused to sing unless he was able also to play his charango. Álvaro’s main obsession was comic books. Besides collecting whatever he could get his hands on, he also penned his own serial about a young Latino man with a goatee and a widow’s peak named Stealth Magnum who charangoed women into bed.

Frederick Anholts (guitar/vox)

The mournful resonance of the acoustic guitar was captured eloquently by the middle-aged Frederick Anholts. He found himself among this group of young folk purely by the chance of a midlife crisis. He was a philosopher in the dark and glorious tradition of Nietzsche, and believed that if one died of purely natural causes aside from old age then they did so in the absolute pinnacle of possible personal happiness. This theory was introduced to him as a boy when his mother passed away of a brain anheurism with a smile on her face, and was cemented later when his sister died in childbirth clutching her heart in a peaceful slumber. When he turned 35, his health took a turn for the worse in the form of high blood pressure, and he subsequently quit his job, divorced his wife, and began wearing cowboy boots. He initially used his free time to search for more evidence to prove his hypothesis, but soon discovered what a task it was to seek out someone ready to die a natural death at a young age. It was during this time that he heard about the Pietrus Scrolls, and the Pietrus Blocks...

BLOCK: some selected definitions

Noun

1. a solid mass of wood, stone, etc., usually with one or more flat or approximately flat faces.


2. a stump or wooden structure on which a condemned person is beheaded.


3. an obstacle, obstruction, or hindrance.


4. a quantity, portion, or section taken as a unit or dealt with at one time.


5. a small section of a city, town, etc., enclosed by neighboring and intersecting streets.


6. a section of storage locations in a computer allocated to a particular set of instructions or data.


7. a person's head.


8. an obstruction or stoppage in mental processes or speech, esp. when related to stress, emotional conflict, etc.


9. any large, angular mass of solid rock.


10. (in Canada) a wild or remote area of land that has not yet been surveyed.

Verb

1. to join by fastening to a block of wood.


2. to plan or work out the movement of performers in a play, pageant, etc.