“I know how to beat Mouse’s high score and get away from the fire of Little Hell for good, Frank. Red car!”
“And *I* know how to beat the difficult score before me too, Philip my oft times housemate. Red note to also constantly remind me of middle!”
PLAY.
And hoped for, 2nd, even more oft times housemate Daisy makes 3. Er, make that *5*.
END OF “SUNKLANDS 2025 LATER”!
“I- don’t know where I am!!”
“Wait a minute. Yes… yes I this I *do* know where this must be,” Mouse rectifies as his head stops spinning around an unknown center and the earth moves up to meet his feet, giving him balance on the perch atop the trees. True earth, and not that fake crud up down sideways in Our Second Lyfe. “Bill,” he says, looking down. “This must be Bill again, a, um, reduction from the mountain in Maine. As, yes, mass turns into energy for locomotion… across the landscape. I *remember*.”
—–
“I forgot to tell you — I got a postcard from Mouse today,” Frank says after he puts his hands on the planchette to begin. “Turns outs he’s in Vermont, not New Hampshire.”
“Interesting. Okay… back to the game.” Philip also touches the planchette from his side, which then rather quickly spells out OLD ZIRCON. The self described phased-out Byzantine devil ends up giving them the answers they both need and desire. tbc
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0048, 0615, Jeogeot, Maine, Nawt Vaya, New Hampshire, NVFS, Vermont
Afterwards she provided more details about her father. Finally. “He lived on top of a mountain but not that one, the one we talked about before.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking of my own mountain, my own castle here. I don’t live on top — not yet anyway; working my way up there with the positioning of this bed behind the eyes at the top of the spiral staircase; just for more privacy on this special special occasion (!) But instead more in the middle where the great majority of my things are still, like my notebooks, like my piano. Just behind the mouth and that gall darn big tongue sticking out from within. The one Philip likes to take his wee-wee’s off of between games of High Speed, ha. Hmm, wee-wee again. Pee pee, I restated in my mind, to match Daisy’s progression of the phrase in moving from real to virtual back in ’12, she revealed.
“They torn down his *house*, Frank,” she just blurted out. “It was awful. Just because he was a rich white man in a poor black country-state working on stuff they couldn’t understand.”
“I’m sorry about that,” I decided to say.
“So am I. He built a much smaller, much more modest house to live in after that but they just torn that one down too, the ‘stuff’ being the problem and not the money he made off of it. Not really… at the core. He had no choice but to leave. Off this world, actually, to a second one initially thought to be far far away indeed, unobtainable to reach in distance of space. He sank all the remainder of his money into the endeavor.”
“Off – world?” I didn’t know where this was going. Was she insinuating that her father was an astronaut? Actually flew into space on a rocket ship? “What could he have… I mean, what did he do to–”
“–incite the people to such anger, such destruction?” she finished his fumbling question. “He was head of a startup company developing AI.”
“Artificial – intelligence?”
“Yes. And they, the townspeople surrounding him on all sides east west north south, believed it to be an evil spirit, a rare, *dark* orisha they called it. Because it threated the whole world, the survival of the human species itself. Or so they were told.”
She became silent here, like a mute button was automatically activated on her flat top head. And so it was. tbc
Harlequin moves from the darkened corner of the courtyard into the house with Columbine, Pierrot having shuffled off below the event horizon like a dying orbital sun. The oldest extant animation ends here with the created black hole, paint applied gelatin finishing its run.
—–
“Now let’s get to the other one, Daisy. Father you say?”
“Father I say.”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0048, 0613, animation, collages 2d, Jeogeot, Michigan, Nawt Vaya, NVFS
Citrus fruit loving Philip was pleased the lemonade stand was still there on Infinity Lane but had no time today to stop. Must hurry! “Sorry, Bart!” he calls over while sprinting by. “Maybe next time!” he shouts back, already a blur in the distance to the boy colored the same as the product he sells and who still couldn’t sit while he works because of the broken chair that came with the stand. Where’s tireless former robot co-worker Billy Clockwork when you need him? he always frets around the 4 hour mark on any full shift these days. But it was off to the big city for him when he graduated local Nawt Vaya State University with a degree in economic ergonomics, a bunch of real life experience piled up by working with Bartholomew before, between and after classes. He’d learned a lot in both, enough to get him a 6 figure salary right off the bat. We probably don’t have time or space to get into his story in this here photo-novel, rapidly coming to a close (I hope!), but I believe he lives up in the middle of the Nautilus continent. Or was that Nautilus Island? Anyway, back to Philip. With all that writing I just did he’s now had enough time in space to make his way up to Sep Felton’s haircutting establishment more in the northern part of Juho city. He stops at the door, bent over because of lack of oxygen and unable to speak at first, then straightens up and manages: “Nada New Year? (pant pant) Know? (pant) anything about? (pant pant pant) her?”
“Whereabouts?” Sep completes Philip’s assumed sentence. “Here,” and she pivots the barbershop chair she stands behind 90 degrees to reveal the worst for Philip. “Pink? PINK?” But then he realizes he must back pedal the insensitive utterance. Fast! “LOVE IT!”
“*Wait,” mischievously smiling Sep says playfully. “My mistake. This is *Lexi*. Nada is over *there*.” And an at first relieved Philip stares into the darkened corner of the stylist shop she indicated only to see… but just then my computer crashes ARRRRGH. (TBC?)
Perspective has changed at De House. Mann has lost wo-Mann in a way, in a manner. A hole has been formed in the middle. Witches. Which witch is which? What is good and what is baad?
“Interesting art you have there up above the bar now, Daisy. Another Corona Non while I have your attention, thanks.”
“The art?” She turns and looks up. “Yeah, it’s the alcoholic sea monster there in the middle, obviously. And the pool it’s in: the Nawt Vaya Sea. I found it in the user’s inventory. He indicated the association.”
“User?”
“Yeah, baker b. The user who controls us all, or at least while we’re on his land I suppose, this Nawt Vaya Free State on the shores of same.”
Biker Mann takes another drag off his cigarette, attempts to take all that in. He decides to focus on the art, the meaning. “Soo… is that a painting or what? Looks more like a photo.”
“It’s a collage, silly. You know that.” Daisy Flathead looked flatly at him, anticipating more. Hopefully the discussion will get seriouser from this point on. She decides she needs to add some information here and does so. “It’s… not a part of any series that I know of — not really.”
“The houses,” Biker kind of interrupts. “The same?” making her turn around to stare again. “90 degrees?” he furthers. “3 years?”
—–
“Oh, and the central figure, er, figures. The brown statues that grow shorter with time.”
“Do they?” It was Daisy who was trying to catch up now, mann overtaking wo-mann once more. In this certain situation in this certain time in space.
“Yeah. The acorn topped head.” He pointed to Daisy’s flat one. “It’s Pierrot again. Did you get that?”
She didn’t. But then she makes a decision after continuing to gaze. “I — don’t think they’re the same.”
“Aren’t they?” he pressed.
She checks again. “No,” she judges firmly.
“Okay, okay,” he gives in, seeing the pretty different designs on the, er, helmets of each. Head tops. “Then let’s shift to the hole in the middle.”
“Nawt Vaya? Sea?” she added.
“Kind of I guess. But (moreover) the hole made by the line figure collapsing inside his own clothes that obviously overlaps the brown statues. Where, um, does that hole go?”
She notices the hole, she notices what is highlighted. Thinking of Grant’s Hill again in Missouri and nearby Siloam, she says the word in her mind.
Just then, Philip Strevor pops his head in the door, asks about Nada. “Seen her?” he finishes his introductory paragraph.
“Nada? Yes, she came in here earlier with Lexi,” Daisy provided him. “Said they were headed up to Juho. Said something about a haircut.”
“Oh no,” says Philip. “Oh *no*. WITCHES?” And he ran away from the bar to the North as fast as he could, hoping to catch Nada before she made a big BIG mistake. TBC
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0048, 0611, collages 2d, Jeogeot, Juho, Michigan, Missouri, Nawt Vaya, NVFS
“You see? You SEE?? Columbine. Revealing strangely bright lit Edward Pierrot coming from the North. He doesn’t know what will backstab him in a minute. Or back *stick* him as in a stab. This is important. This is *crucial*. She should have never opened that door in the wall and neither should we.”
“Simmer down, Mouse,” said Philip Strevor to his oft times housemate, still unable to beat his high score at his best game, NUMBER not to be taken down yet. 28064212. “Just start over at the beginning, pal,” he said while also looking up at the castle’s video feed he just walked in on. Mouse: always jabbering, always theorizing. Until it ends.
“How about the middle,” said Mouse, and then went there.
“The banana moon hangs low in the blue night-sky, yellow-ish or maybe even green-ish, sun nowhere to be shone now,” he describes. “In the shadow made by the walls the stick keeps poking, keeps jabbing, turning him ’round and ’round and eventually gone. Leaving Columbine for…
“…. Harlequin. This is the tragic tale of our Edward, Philip.”
“Edward… Philip?” TBC
Sunklands 