So this is a bit interesting. It's an old, old collaborative story. It was a post a paragraph at a time thing. Looking back, there were two people helping me with it:
[link]
and
[link]
So give them thanks and comments, too.
You'll notice that I put a (1) next to the title; that's because this story is just too long to post at once, I think. So I'll break it up and give it to you a few thousand words at a time.