So, I got  Nicnak044 to draw me this blast from the past, that I know at least a couple of people on FA may remember.

Way back in the 1980s and continuing into the early 1990s, there was a collection of computer bulletin boards that did store-and-forward message processing called FIDOnet. And there were a subset of Furry boards on FIDOnet (unimaginatively called FurNet) that got passed around as well. Toronto previously had a BBS called 'The Trap Line', when that shut down I created a replacement I called 'The Cat's Meow', which ran for a couple of years until a combination of my upstream network connection shutting down and the death of the hard drive containing the entire database shut things down permanently.

One of the boards back in those days, though, was 'The Past and Future Inn'. A classic sort of nexus point bar, in this case in a bubble in orbit around a black hole, where people from various times and universes could all show up to have a drink. Jenora was there for a while, and then a big adventure happened and she left with the adventuring party... and so I brought in a new character to chat in the Inn proper while that was going on. Having seen several people show up either by teleporting in or parking spaceships outside, I thought to myself, "Now, why would anybody coming here for the first time actually know where it was?" And so I wrote a description of this spaceship seeming to get spit out of the black hole, scattering material off around it... but facing in the wrong direction and flying away from the Inn until he got his bearings and looped around to come in for a landing.

One of the other people there (I think maybe  marmelmm?) jokingly commented 'Wrong Way Corrigan lives!'

And with that one comment, Felix Corrigan was born.

Felix is English (mostly), from a world in which the British Empire is still around into the Space Age, in part thanks to a few mad scientists of various sorts. He descends from a minor noble family, and is a nice enough guy, if a bit of the classic 'upper class twit'. He thinks he's brave and dashing, but at least some of that is a combination of not thinking things through enough to realize how stupid what he's about to do is, being quite confident in his ignorance, and having enough luck that he's survived all the stupid things he's done so far. Which includes getting on this ship in the first place.

The ship was officially designated the BHX-1 (Black Hole eXplorer), but Felix got some paint and dubbed it the Rocinante after the ship in the Rush song Cygnus X-1. (Which, unbeknownst to him but known to a lot of the other people on the project, was also the name of Don Quixote's horse. Which people thought was rather appropriate for a fool's errand like this. This was before The Expanse also created a ship called the Rocinante.) The ship basically created a shell of negative matter around itself to reduce its effective mass to zero so it could safely transit the black hole, and then cast off the negative matter when it got out the other side. Needless to say, this was a drive you didn't want to turn on anywhere near anything you wanted to keep safe.

Felix was quite startled to find a force field and a magical Inn on the other side of the black hole he went through, but he insisted on being as unflappable as possible when settling in and getting to know people so he could report back on everything he had found.

Artist's posting at /view/41538756/ so go say 'hi' there, too!