The
Retrofuturist
Chronicles

12-yo Miranda decides to become a social media influencer. This prompts Aunt Natalie to tell how the secret sisterhood to which she belongs once spearheaded a rescue mission to Antarctica to find a group of researchers who got lost looking for the lost city of the Elder Things. The rescuers included a waddle of 300 penguins.

Miranda is upset with a group robotics project that's in jeopardy due to an apparent lack of teamwork. Miranda’s struggles trigger Aunt Natalie’s memories of how her secret sisterhood were called in to help two villages, one in Bavaria and the other in Bohemia, that had an ongoing, centuries-long battle about which made the best pretzels.

Miranda informs her Aunt Natalie that she’s trying to make bombs, but she’s stressed because it’s not going very well. To Aunt Natalie’s relief, they’re bath bombs made with essential oils. This triggers one of Aunt Natalie’s outrageous memories of trying to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen in an attempt to build a water engine as part of Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive.

Miranda panics when she loses her private journal. Aunt Natalie finds it ironic that her niece can’t recall where she put a journal of thoughts she’s written down so that she won’t forget them and tutors her niece on the “disappearing object phenomenon.” She relates a tale of when she helped find a crude oil tanker that had vanished in the Bermuda Triangle.

Miranda is overwhelmed by an upcoming dance competition. Aunt Natalie steps into a spare pair of tap shoes to help her master the Double Maxi Ford Toe with a Pullback while distracting her with a memory of her secret sisterhood who were called in to help when an evil man once infected an entire town with choreomania, or “the dancing plague.”

After a 15-km hike, a dehydrated Miranda fears using the water fountain that's surely been infected with E. coli, histoplasmosis, salmonella, and viral encephalitis from raccoons and pigeons. Aunt Natalie attempts to distract her with a fantastic tale of the secret sisterhood who once helped a tiny country reinvent itself after the death of a corrupt dictator.

Miranda accidently destroys a reel for a microfilm reader and foresees a bleak future as the entire world learns she’s completely obliterated a part of history. Aunt Natalie tries to distract her by relating an account of her time at Poland’s “Flying University” when future Nobel laureate Marie Curie was her lab partner.

Aunt Natalie devises a random crisis-generator app connected to Miranda's phone via IoT, thus ensuring that she can keep her niece safe and prepared. She claims she got the idea from a troupe of legendary South African jazz musicians who used their improvisational skills to help the different departments of a university collaborate more effectively to manage crises.

Miranda decides to play a small prank on Aunt Natalie, and fortunately her aunt has a great sense of humor about it. However, Aunt Natalie takes the opportunity to advise her young niece about the distinction between constructive and destructive behavior by relating a story about an innocent prank phone call that went terribly wrong.

Miranda has a panic attack after allowing her neighbor’s Great Dane to escape. Fortunately, Aunt Natalie keeps her head and regales her niece with another extraordinary tale, this one about a dog that foiled his own dognapper via a smart speaker attached to a dog vest. The dog had been trained to make certain sounds that the vest's chatbot had been programmed to interpret. Much to the dognapper's dismay, the speaker even had a GPS associated with it.

Aunt Natalie implores Miranda to give back to the world by volunteering for a research study on ice cream headaches and the adolescent brain. Already cranky by having to complete a detailed intake form, Miranda is less-than-pleased to learn that she's expected to eat fish-flavored ice cream before being strapped to a table with her head in a restraint. Miranda declares she has limits to how giving she can be.

As the season concludes, Miranda reveals her project to help her friend who suffers from Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. Aunt Natalie is so moved that she suggests her young niece pledge to join the Cosmopolitan Retrofuturistic Innovators’ Secret Investigative Sisterhood. But Miranda's excitement is short-lived when she learns that her beloved aunt is leaving.