Headed For the Clouds

Authors' Note

When we initially did the research for this story, we thought that The Night Witches were a group for the American Air Force. We began to write with this information, but after further research we found out that The Night Witches were a Soviet group. Please understand that, though we tried to make the story as realistic as possible, some of the information given in the story is only based on a realistic event, person, object, etc. that was a part of WWII.

We would also like to note that we gave a lot of thought to the names of each of our characters. Tommy Popova, our main character, got her name from a mixture of the names of two people: Gertrude Tompkins and Nadezhda Popova. Gertrude "Tommy" Tompkins was an american soldier who disappeared during WWII, hence the first name "Tommy". Nadezhda Popova was one of the best pilots of the Night Witches, hence the last name "Popova".

Charon Styx was meant to be perceived as the mentor. "Charon" was the name of the ferryman who guided souls through the river of Styx into the underworld. The name of the ferry he used was "Mesktet", hence the license plate "Mesktet70". The numbers "7" and "0" were added because of their symbolic meaning,

Joey Tribistone was obviously our jester. His name came from the name Joey Tribbiani and Joey Gladstone. Both of these are the names of famous jester characters in popular TV shows.

Lucy Gale was meant to be our child-like character. She is the person that our protagonist cares about the most. Her name came from famous movie characters. The name "Lucy" came from Lucy Pevensie, the little girl from The Chronicles of Narnia. The last name "Gale" came from the protagonist in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy Gale.