The present had been opened, plain lavender box inside the first, soon to have a big red button attached to it which also meant nothing. No Thing. The toys, having done their part, could move back from end to beginning. Aloha (we’re not finished with it (!)).
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0037, 0405, Blue Mountain, City Park
With all the going back and forth in time it’s always good to remember the present, the gift that keeps on giving.
Merry Christmas from all the toys at “Hello I Must Be Going” Aloha! (it’s still there!)
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0036, 0211, Blue Mountain, Carrcass-06, City Park
“Here it is, Wheeler. Another portal of some sort.”
“Looks like butterflies. Rainbow colored!”
“It’s not rainbow colored, I mean, butterflies. I checked (the description). Wisps instead. Wisp spirits to be precise.”
“Hmmm,” replied Wheeler. “I’m going to call them butterflies anyway.”
“As you wish,” conceded Newt, knowing Wheeler’s ways and her stubbornness. Besides, he’s bound to serve what with the new name and the recently revived Table at the Lebettu Castle and all. “Go ahead. Go through it.”
“*You* go through it. I’ll watch. You know I like to watch.”
Newt shakes his head slightly. Poor Wheeler. She won’t realize she’s being controlled from the other side until it’s too late. Thinks she has ultimate power now.
“Sure.” And then he walks into the multi-colored swarm, emerging on the other side about 10 meters west. Wheeler then follows him.
She turns in her purple sock hop dress. “Fascinating. I feel revived, reinvigorated.” Then she realized the secret of the Other Side. Her brain is not the boss!
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0034, 0201, Blue Mountain, City Park, Wendy-Ontario
“You again (!).”
“Yeah? What’ll it be?”
“What’ll what be?”
“Red or blue, bud. Good or evil I suppose. Dunno, don’t care. But you gotta choose to play,” he insisted.
“No,” said Newt. “You don’t understand. I’m just here to talk about Squared Root City with someone. Why this place — Ontario — and that place don’t get along, see.”
The fellow I’ve already seen several times in Ontario, including the groundside gun store where Arthur Kill was killed with a bullet to the heart by grown up Tessa at the end of the last photo-novel, just scratches his head. “Dunno anything about that. You might have to see the Mayor. Or even higher.”
“Mayor?” Newt parroted. “Higher?”
“Yeah, the King of course. I don’t know anything about this Root Squared City,” he insisted.
“Squared Root City,” Newt quickly corrected, but then thought about it. 3.16 x 3.16 is essentially 10, which is perfection (to us Pythagorean related TILERs). But then 3.16 is also pretty close to the circumference of a circle with a diameter of 1, and, in the case of City Park, County Park, Country Park, even closer. 3.14 to 3.15, maybe even 3.16 again. They are coded as All Ears because if Mickey Mouse’s face was turned into a matching circular ear it would exactly fit between all 3, copyright issues forever solved.
“I know this is space,” he continued, seeing the thoughtful look on Newt’s face, “but you can’t space out here. You gotta play or you gotta go. Orders.”
“Of who?”
“Dunno. Just came with the instructions.”
“Who do you work for?” The gun shop employee now space game arcade employee scratches his head again. “You gotta leave,” he insisted, and pointed to the lightsaber sign.
“I know I know,” said Newt, preparing to explore the rest of this space station. But first he had to ask permission to look out the window for a moment at all those glorious stars, perhaps some galaxies mixed in.
“Sure I suppose. 5 minutes. But then…”
“Gotta go, I get it.”
He walked toward the nearest window, stared out. Many of the illuminated dots were moving. Could these be spaceships? Newt pondered. And the colors (!). Not just white, but pink blue yellow. He could stare at it for days but he only had minutes, seconds now.
“Time’s up, bud,” he says oh too soon. But surely there will be other windows around the station with just as good a view, maybe better.
“Can I ask your name?” he said before leaving.
“Jack,” came the answer back. “Now… please.” He indicated the door.
“Goodbye Jack,” Newt said while walking out, knowing there was something to that name. Because, in some circles, perhaps the ones we just talked about, Jack was code for clone.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0034, 0108, Blue Mountain, City Park, Country Park, County Park, Wendy-Ontario
The woods speak once more. A gnome appears high on a local mountain in a place I generically term County Park, a more eastward counterbalance (or countybalance, ha) to our City Park and its Aloha village of toy avatars tucked under a thought-to-be sheltering rock on Mt. Tom. This is a taller mountain by about 500 feet: 4038 to around 3525. Name? Um, let’s leave that for now. Okay, let’s say The Knob. Anyway, the gnome appears off a trail quite a ways up it. Someone would have had to make a pretty good effort to get it there — the figure is a foot tall or close to it. A backpack would have been needed.
Salazar Jack or Jacob Gnome; Harry or Harold the Gnome; another child gnome who we know grows up to be Barry DeBoy; and now this, in a way the most miraculous of all. Is it an indication I should move all my toys from Mt. Tom over to this nearby location? Especially given the presence of a bee hole right on the edge of Aloha, and also mud dauber wasps threatening from above? Something to think about.
If only I could figure out a way to talk to the newly discovered toy avatar. Maybe through Barry? So many questions (as usual).
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0034, 0102, Blue Mountain, City Park, Country Park, County Park
He came down in a beam of white light from the sky.
Mr. Bean, but not that one. That’s just a stand-in, basically a cardboard cutout of a 3D person.
The real one had blue eyes. At birth. Now…
But who’s that over there sitting at the visiting scholars table?
—–
The dead man in the teepee-tent doesn’t bother me any more.
I pick up my blue feather pen again and begin to write.
Dearest Greenleaf,
I know it was you in the woods today, sending me a message. Thank you. With the rolling orange mushroom head you were telling me about the path and the correct way to go through your precious ferns (kind of). You are protective! Very.
I will attempt to construct a Circle of Peace at Aloha. I know now that you would want that (yes). Guide me in choosing the rocks I need.
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0033, 0614, Blue Mountain, City Park, Jeogeot, Nautilus, North, Rooster's Peninsula, Towerboro
The bees attacked from below. A mud dauber threatened from above. The toys agreed to stay perfectly still until I returned to keep down damage, but what could have been an event so special and wondrous turned out to be quite disastrous. Aloha (village name) seems to mean goodbye as quickly as it does hello. Looks like we’ll have to regroup and move again, pheh. Unless… no, can’t do that. Must respect the woods and the denizens already there. Like spoon snake. Like *hisser*. But the day was not without its casualties. Eye for an eye? NO… can’t go down that road. Just no.
Lisa Smipson the Vegetarian front and center…
… certainly a bright spot of the day.
Casualties.
Casualties too.
What could have been. A town centre. Silver Surfer reclaiming the glory of a Blue Mountain thought to be over and done with.
Joker is wrongly imprisoned for the deeds. Bees! he cried behind the bars. Wasps! And it turns out he was right.
Aloha: the whole shebang.
Rock that was thought to be sheltering, pheh. PHEH.
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0033, 0610, Blue Mountain, City Park
“You saw me today, Baker Bloch. No mistake.”
Baker looked across the table at Wheeler, whose face then changed. “Am Iiiii nothiinngggg?”
—–
This was in a collage called “Moon Landing”, of course deleted now from virtual reality since Collagesity is gone.
And then in a nearby collage of the former Power Tower gallery called “Victory”.
And, in fact, another one from the same series (Lis), facing backwards this time (“Cereal Characters”).
https://bakerbloch.com/collages/gilatona-lis-03/
Wheeler, herself now facing the other way, changed back. “Just so you’ll know I’m around,” she explained the transformation. “Now (slow turn). About that hissing…”
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0033, 0511, Blue Mountain, City Park, collages 2d, Nautilus, North, Rooster's Peninsula
Empty throne. Note the also newly placed female green Mmmmmm to its right, controversial in the news recently for so-called “reverse sassification.”
Who lives here?
Remarkably, I saw a garter snake sunning itself between these 2 spoons in the dirt today at nearby what-I-call Lineboro (photo from about 2 weeks ago).
I know this fellow!
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0033, 0510, Blue Mountain, City Park, Mmmmmm's, Toy Avatars
A new Red — or is it the same as the old Red — offers Grassy Noll a tempting present (*the* present?) to lure him back across the tracks and into the village proper. If only he could get his dad gum car turned around (wrestle, tussle).
Cpt. Americus at a junction is saying, “Peace for all. Today is a special day. Make up. Rejoin the flock that is your tribe, Grassy Fitzgerald Noll.” When Americus uses the middle names, you know he’s totally serial about something. Special day it is. He’s all about beginnings, middles, ends. Because the latter is coming and he well knows it. “Celebrate while we can!” he could also say this day in a month beyond May. “Soon there will be no crossing the line, crossing the tracks. We will be where we’re suppose to be in time and that is that.”
More drama on my Mt. Tom. Apparently this camp site was burned badly enough to be evacuated. A rug appears to have caught on fire. Whether accident or on purpose is a larger question. Are there nefarious agents working on this high hill on the edge of the town I live in, maybe the actual owners of the land? Because this site is well across the line from legal into illegal. “No trespassing!” the perpetrator might have shouted as the flames did their dastardly deed.
Another camp site further down the same ridge with rather elaborate stone work. Suspiciously so, perhaps. Rock can’t be burned, you’ll note.
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0033, 0506, Blue Mountain, City Park, Mmmmmm's, Toy Avatars
Sunklands 