“Well? How did you like it?”
Toothpick turned on the bar stool. “Who are you?”
She rubbed her big red horns seductively. “An Aries, why?”
Toothpick adjusted. “*What* are you?”
“They call me Wanda,” she said in a bass voice for a woman. “Big Wanda. Because of the, ahem, horns but maybe not. 1/2 –.” She stopped here, saving some grace. “I’m what you became absorbed in,” she goes again. “Just a moment ago. Just over there.” She points to the nearby black couch. “Like the one in the Bigfoot Bar, except that one’s gone now. There are others.”
Toothpick thinks back to Bigfoot. Yes, he remembers now. This was his sister in another guise. She has horns. They’re still testing couches and realities both. Yes he had been absorbed. It was nice. Too nice. He thought back to the pleasantries. A belt was involved. The Great Belt of Marwood or thereabouts, purchased in oppositely directioned and colored Black Ice down south at its Black Diamond market square, or at least as a demo. Near where they were born, actually, in the Deep South (of the Black Ice sim). The original one broke; all he has now is the one with the attached squares that say demo and follow him wherever he moves with it. Like the Gone Fishing square from before, prior to the horned one taking over. He takes another gander.
“Are you Satan?” He thinks back to well known Aries and settles on the idea of batting champ Peet Rose, red as a. Why Peet Rose? Why not Jonny Bench or some other bench player, like Leeroy “Steamboat” Kelly who filled in for the Browns when Cleveland Jim Brown became a star on Hollywood Boulevard?
—–
In a related scene, Big Wanda’s sometimes, gun toting partner Little Oakley Annie, a Leo, was visiting her own grave but having trouble remembering the name of her own star. She only recalls (with a shudder) the wide, yawning abyss just beyond, the Great Black Swamp devoid of such. Her star was the first out. Polar came to mind but that wasn’t quite it. Pole star?
