Quote: What if in order to make their disappearance complete the key members were placed into a hibernation state? It's possible that the party responsible forAKA Sakura Rogers In The Late Half Of The Twentieth Century!
hiding the site was too good at what they did, died at some point in time, leaving it to be discovered again sometime in the sixties or seventies.
I was about to suggest something similar myself. Of course, it must be steam-powered suspended animation, and the hibernacula opened back up when the system
finally ran out of coal...
ETA: It seems to me that the suggestion to have a late-1960s reawakening covers all the options people would like to see -- the Hanagumi wouldn't be too
old to be useful, but they would still be grandparently -- exactly how old depends on when they went into hibernation, but it shouldn't be hard to set them
up so that the youngest of them (Iris) is physically in her late 50s or early 60s, at the time of the story.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.