Mission failed, The Man separates from the Ant again, probably becoming The Mann with that extra “n” in the process. He finds himself on the east coast of Pickle 02, the green one, staring out at the sea. He wonders why he’s here, then spots it. Humpback whale sighting.
“This must be New York,” he says about the Pickle he’s on, but also probably the other one too, since they are opposite sides of the same thing most likely.
He looks and looks but only the one sighting. And a brief, happy song.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0407, Bellisaria, New York, Pickle 02
“In looking at them, Hucka D., it seems the green one is the only pickle. One Pickle, then, not two.”
“No, both are Pickles. Both have the Squishy Pickle restaurants. The sand colored one in fact has two, which makes up for the (flimsy) shape in my humble estimation.”
“Takes two to know,” ventures Baker Bloch.
“Suppose. (pause) Let’s get this over with, then.”
Baker merges the pictures before them.
“A jumbled mess,” offers Baker. “And probably a copyright infringement as well.”
“From the future.”
Baker Bloch stares. “Adam and Eve, pheh.” He sighs. “The Mann was right in stepping away from all this. Where is The Mann anyway?”
“Maybe that’s next.”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0406, Bellisaria, Black Ice, NWES Island, Pickle 01, Pickle 02
“Two pickles,” she explained later. “One yellow or sand colored: here. Then the one over there that’s more green.”
“Like my apples!” exclaimed listening and looking Harrison Ford Jett to her side in Spunky’s cafe down on the docks. Charlene’s home away from home, now that she’s in the thick of her dissertation. Detailed description of Knob Noster coming up next! Charlene looks over at her good friend Harrison, then down at his apples. Still in place. Still hasn’t been sold to the highest bidder.
“I suppose so,” she realized, and turned back to the girl holding the pickles in the doctored picture on her computer screen (she wants to be a doctor, after all). “But: sand. Sandman. The sandy pickle. That came first, although it was formed second.”
“What does that mean?” Harrison F. Jett instinctively held one of his apples then the other, as if testing they were the same. Then he turned red as a winesap as he realized Charlene noticed what he was doing. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Force of habit — I’ve been thinking a lot about them later. What it would be to be without them.”
“Well… maybe that fits into this as well.” She puts hand to chin while activating deep thinking mode. She scrolls to the next picture, undoctored this time. She’s losing vision of the future. Detailed description of “Knobby” will be difficult, nay impossible to achieve. She faces the prospect that it could be a stumbling block on her way to fame and glory.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0405, Bellisaria, Black Ice, NWES Island, Pickle 01, Pickle 02
“Let’s get this over with, Sandman.”
“What. Are you going to try to *eat* me again? Ant-man. Man who thinks he is an Ant.”
“I might,” the man who thinks he is an ant threatened.
“You know what will happen.”
“I do.” Ant-man knows he can’t go through with it. The pictures of the merged mess simply wouldn’t show up in the blog. Copyright infringement from the future. Santman cannot be born.
“Well… what then?”
“*You’re* the one who came all the way out here to find *me*. You tell me.”
“Right… forgot. Umm, we can merge in a different, um, way.”
“I don’t swing that way, Sandman,” Ant-man says with a slight chuckle.
“No not that.” But Sandman here contemplates it might be just that. He imagines himself leaning into Ant-man for a kiss, a sweet one and not using any tongue atall. Because there’s no telling what kind of tongue that ant-head holds. He doesn’t want to know! No, no lovers in this picture. Instead:
“Ant. Man. Man of Ant.”
“Yes?” Ant-man was waiting for *something*, but he knew a big thing was about to be revealed. Bigfoot big perhaps.
“My real name… is Pickle.” A rainbow butterfly flutters by at this point. Wonder where that came from. Perhaps the Wonder Years. Before the Fire Tree.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0404, Bellisaria, Pickle 01
“More Bigfoot art,” Harrison Ford Jett whispers in the waning light to no one except himself. “It’s all here.”
“A cave! Marked with green again. Pickle. Pickle Too. Let’s go!”
The underwater rock cavern was pretty long; about 200 meters.
More of that type of art? Harrison F. Jett found these identical, half filled bottles of unknown alcoholic content wedged together in a rock opening and was unable to move them.
The rocks holding the stash penetrated the roof of the cave, making a distinguished marker. Watch out passing Bellisarian ships!
The rocks even appear to have feet.
The man who was also an ant back at the Hideout said I knew Bigfoot. Something about my shirt… should be getting back to NWES City and meeting up with Charlene. Maybe she would have some ideas about what the odd superhero or supervillian or whatever he is, was talking about. He recalls she studies these type of things, and her dissertation she’s hard at work on late into the night is about a somewhat similar creature called the Loch Ness Monster. And she talks of another “monster” called Knobby (actually: Knob Noster, *not* Knob Monster!) — maybe that’s what her paper is about instead (he intuits in the cave, staring up at a rainbow hued crystal cluster in the ceiling).
At any rate, she certainly lives in the land of Paperville. Hmm, odd thought — where’d that come from?
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0403, Bellisaria, Pickle 01, Pickle 02
She watched him walk away after they freed him from the Bigfoot picture in the soon-to-be but not yet present consignment store with the old clothes and such. No explanation, no thanks. Just walking. He had to see someone *immediately*. A man posing as an ant, the big hypocrite. Sticking me in that photo with that hairy, stinky… *monster*! He needed to be dealt with. No love here.
He kept walking, right out of Black Ice and into the Great Beyond.
—-
“Harrison Ford Jett,” he spat out. “I sense the force is strong with you, buh huh huh (*sip*), buh huh huh huh (*sip*), buh (*sip*, *sip*), huh.”
“How much for the apples?” He wasn’t in the mood to beat about the bush. He wanted to get rid of the chafing, gnawing things asap; let someone else get gnawed on for a while. He takes another drag off his Chesterton Lite, waiting for an answer that never came.
Instead: “You know Bigfoot.” The half wine colored half ant, half man paused, taking in the surprised expression re his statement seemingly out of left field, or thrown back over a left field fence or something. In truth, he was the shirt she wore, but that will take a bit of explanation. Another night it is!
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0402, Bellisaria, Black Ice, NWES Island, Pickle 01
“I remember you, girl. From Paperville!”
“Right, right. The Little Cafe on the Way!” Both open their mouths further in surprise but never get to the heart of the oddity. Rabbit 02 in the corner of the fake flowery field worships on. Fertility. Much fertility.
“I remember you too, Birmingham.”
“Shut up Muff,” the fellow red fox hissed over. “I did what I had to do.”
“Yeah right, hmph.”
Rabbit 02 has a new husband. Rabbit M4, who lives just off the freeway. He usually stays over at Rabbit 02’s place because of the noise. He has a lot of patience and ironically he is a doctor too (optometrist), so more patients. When Rabbit 02’s family got together at Thanksgiving, he and Dr. Rabbid Baumbeer, Rabbit 02’s son from husband no. 3 — Rabbit 01 we’ve called him in this here blog — got along swimmingly, being fellow doctors (and swimmers) and all. Now in the last couple of weeks she’s had 3 more from M4: Uffcott, Hinton, and Winterbourne, because he was, since his birth came the first of December and the other two, slightly older triplets came out a little before midnight. They usually keep them over at the “highway house” with housekeeper Sarah because, again, of the noise. M4 is patient, but he needs a lot of quiet because of all the research he’s doing into creating a super eye capable of perpetual self healing — alien science we’re talking about here, top secret hush hush stuff. He can’t discuss it with anyone. All his friends and relatives think he’s just selfish separating himself from his children, not knowing he has very good reasons, very good indeed.
The wife finishes her worshiping and walks back over through the fake flowery field between the two girls who had turned their backs on each other, and between the two foxes who had also grown apart.
“I hear the town has a temple, dearest. I wonder if we could fit in a visit between your shops.”
“Maybe,” shot back Rabbit 02, irritated that he would ask. “Consignment store next door, or so that’s what the map says: Odds & Ends. I need to pick out some outfits for Christmas for the big ta-do at Ben the Parrot’s.”
“That foul mouth bird brain!” Rabbit M4 wanted to yell with his tongue at the top of his lungs but of course bit it. They should never have started selling those animal talkie toys, he laments.
They move next door. No consignment store there. Yet.
Instead: “Come here dear. There’s a man stuck in this picture!
Dear?”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0401, Black Ice, NWES Island
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0317, 0400, 0401, Bellisaria, Bogota, collages 2d, Picturetown
Okay so they were the same avatar at the core: Wheeler Wilson. This black haired Fern Stalin, this yellow or blonde haired Lichen Roosevelt, the ditzy one — the “Yellow Kid” — and then the red dooed Wendy, closer to Wheeler than any of the others in the moment because she was being read. It was a newspaper situation, then, black and white — well, yellow — and then the thing being scrutinized, the alien, the intruder onto their lands. One Wendy Wilson from Arkansaw, Kansas, they determined. Yellow journalism all around, because this was not as advertised. They made it into a way bigger deal than what it was, or at least Lichen did.
“Tell me more about this nephew Stumpy,” requested Fern later at the interrogation, 3rd of the day (Friday) and 15 minutes after she ate her last supper (chicken). She was ready to end it all. She hadn’t talked but she knew they would break her down. Pain wasn’t her ace in the hole. Instead: pleasure; hole in one. If the year 1898 gave us the first silent Oz movie (Star Wars Negative 10), then 1948 ended it all. “Tell me about TILE, about how you came about getting *here*. We’ve been here for almost 10 years. Why *now*?”
The pills manifested in her mouth, 1/2 red and 1/2 blue. Purple, then: dare she go through with it? Her sentence was almost over. And so on the 5th day (swallow) she…
—–
“We were so close, Lichen,” expressed Fern afterwards, staring at the bovine remains. “This explains a lot. I’m ready to start studying that manifesto with you in earnest. Let’s go to this Stumpy’s next meeting; tell him about his loss and what we saw.”
“As much as we can.”
“Right. And get Herbert to clean up all this mess.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0316, HANA LEI, Voyageurs+
Carrcassonnee looked over at the spot she had just been. Sepisexton she was now, both the 7 and the 6. It was time to move on from the great olive being and the great olive body. It just wasn’t working. Not right now anyway. Syd was a way out. And TILE.
She walks away from the new spot into the future.
—–
“Hey Roosevelt. Remember when we use to be black and yellow clowns over in NWES City? Funny times. That’s where you started your stand up comedy isn’t it.”
“No.”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0315, Apple's Orchard, Black Ice, NWES Island
Sunklands 