And this is where we came in.
Category Archives: HANA LEI
gone bye bye
In this “Amazing Digital Circus” teaser, ringmaster Caine directly references Kane (Pixels) and his famed Back Room bacteria creature. Knew it.
And then there’s the abstracted Kaufmo clown character from the pilot, who some spell as Cofmo. Including me here. Poor Cofmo. But good guy (?) Caine takes care of the immediate danger for himself and his still intact circus employees by banishing the poor transmogrified creature to an underworld, underwater realm.
“Honey? Honey? Snap out of it again. Look at me look at me. Honey?”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0042, 0215, ADC, Back Rooms, HANA LEI
00420213
“King Rodney,” the Shadow spoke. He turned, confronted it.
“Me? I’m no king. I’m just a ruler of a country, democratic in nature. Now, anyways.”
“The Country of Morrow. Otherwise: Cofmo.”
“Well, yeah. That’s it. A country, not a kingdom.”
“But you train ants. I mean, you have ant warriors. In your fort — make that: forts.”
“Use to. When I was a kid I suppose. Now I’m they’re grown up. I have adult games to play.”
“So I’ve heard,” the Shadow spoke. A pause, then: “What year is it, ruler of Cofmo? I mean, can you sit in a diner with a white girl or even an Asian girl and get away with it? Can you listen to the Everly Brothers blaring from a jukebox? Or do you have to settle for Fats Domino?”
“I… don’t know. 1984 I guess. Last I checked. What time do *you* think it is? Shadow. My Shadow I’m supposing.”
“Correct. You are just confronting yourself. Because this is a dream. I know something that you need to know. About the abstracting.”
“The what?” And he woke up.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0042, 0213, HANA LEI
Old Hen
Newt looked down after he’d finished, deep in thought. “Amazing,” he finally spoke. “What in blue blazes did I just eat?”
Wendy beamed a smile at him, just like on the logo. “It’s called a *hot dog*.”
“A *what* dog?”
“A hot dog. Made from the freshest ingredients. No pig anuses if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I wasn’t thinking that at all (!).”
“Nor snouts, nor hooves. Only mechanically separated meat byproducts — I’ve been told to call it muscle trimming.”
“It’s humans,” Newt deadpanned. “Isn’t it?”
“*No*. Ridiculous man.”
“Okay,” he said, standing up and wiping his mouth with a napkin. “I’m going to have to do my research before we make a deal.”
—–
They were back at the Pink Hippo, name slightly changed to hide the innocent involved. “I did my research,” Newt started after he made his introduction. “I had to brainwash you into thinking our meeting never happened. Bottom line: *don’t* sell those things to the general public any more. I was right about the humans (!).”
Several people dancing nearby overheard the conversation. Soon it was all about town. Kangerootown would never have a Wendy’s in its midst, the name of the red topped establishment being sullied beyond repair. March turned out to be a really bad month of the year for the likewise red topped gal before him.
“Dance?” he said, trying to ease the pain. No smile now. Turn that upside down into a full out cry, which the dancers also recorded. Where’s the beef, Wendy? Where’s the beef?
Not in this reality as it turned out. *This* Wendy’s franchise was basically over before it started. Soon, quite soon, she would turn into a vegetarian and change the course of her life. But first we have to get her to Castle Town in the South.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0042, 0208, Castle Town+, HANA LEI, Kangerootown+, Omega, The Cross
00410604
“Not too bad for a one handed one legged pirate of the sea,” opined Libra Neptune, watching the ball fly far indeed. “Now do you see why I wanted you to play? The golf here is solid, it’s real.”
“You’re just ready to give it up, you say. Go back to St. Dennis.”
“Right, Black Pearl,” she spoke to the fellow golfer on her right, just out of camera shot above. “I think I can make a big difference now. Heck I might even open a course there if I can muster up the energy. The swamp surrounding the town could use some draining in my opinion. Just full of red neck hicks and alligators and snakes and so on. Useless, otherwise.”
“Hmm,” said Black Pearl to this, sensing a flaw in her morality chip, perhaps a carryover from those harsh harsh days of having to be a prostitute and all the difficulties it presents. Screws with your body, screws with your brains. She mentioned syphilis, and how it cleared up but took a while. Maybe this is some kind of lasting effect of that. Maybe… hmm, maybe that’s why she sold me the ship in the first place, Black Pearl thought, even though she revealed it was damaged later. Damaged like her…
“You’re next up Pearl… should I call you just Pearl?”
“Black Pearl is fine,” Black Pearl said back, always wanting to attach the color to the name lest she forget her own hardships. Both were driving the ball further than Libra by this point, even though they were relative novices. In truth, she was considerably older than she looked, with her son Scorpio Pluto now in his early 40s himself. So age played a part here, along with just sheer repetitiveness of the game. You lose your edge sometimes when you do something over and over and over. It was that way with sex for her, and now it was that way with golf for her. Time to try something else; did she have another chapter in her life?
Black Pearl drove her ball about 10 yards beyond Red Dead Beardy Head, inducing whistles of appreciation from the other 2. She was a natural.
—–
On a break between front and back 9’s, Black Pearl and Libra Neptune talked more while Red Dead washed his balls and theirs along with them. Libra unveiled her replacement plan to get back.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0041, 0604, HANA LEI, RDR2
00410512
“I found the ship at a golf course sim which was closing up — got a cheap deal on it for that reason. Plus it was a mess, all cracked up on those rocks over there as you can see from the photo.” Black Pearl provided a photo to Red Dead Beardy Head much like the one below where she is finagling the deal with a woman named Libra Neptune who, of all places, had ties to Saint Dennis. So it seems like she has the power to manifest such realities. I, the writer of this here blog and attached current photo-novel, had no idea the Black Pearl ship would be here too. A gift, we can call it, ‘nother one.
“How ’bout Davy Jones?” said Red Dead still beside her in bed, although it was a different night than before. Plans had advanced. The restored Black Pearl, ready for space as it would ever be, parked in the vacant lot in back of downtown. They were staying in the captain’s cabin, testing it out. Well stocked with Caribbean White Rum — good start.
“Not needed in this story,” she replied plainly about Jones, knowing what he was referring to. *Her* Black Pearl was different from Sparrow’s. This was from a woman’s perspective.
—–
They were walking into town for a morning drink and a bit of breakfast when Black Pearl spotted her walking below Parrots for Pirates.
“Libra??”
00410314
Supergal Ruby had given up fishing but mate Greg Ogden hadn’t. He’d been lucky enough at the sport to distract them from the golden coins and other Corvo mysteries, sucked up inside the mundane for a while. “2 sharks, a mantra ray, and a swordfish in one day!” he exclaimed to Ruby over a fish highlighted supper, perch salmon or cod (another reader’s choice). It was only afterwards that Ruby recalled the coins, and the fact that they had missed the last ship out of Corvo until Munday. Oh well. At least *Greg’s* happy, she consoled herself. And it will give her time to talk to Mr. Gold.
But she never saw him again, nor his spinning wheel nor the big ball of yarn down the beach from him he was supposedly working on. Dare I say he was a figment of her imagination? Eventually the coins became that too, we can follow. As the island had planned all along. In the immortal words of famous philosopher and, later, box company worker John Locke: “It’s not an island.”
Supergal’s second album, “Atlantis Forgotten,” was fittingly titled. There were more things to dwell on than lost civilizations now, like growing fame, more immediate and materially tangible. The Portuguese government working through the music industry had a hand in that as well; suggested “safe” words to use in her lyrics to downplay the supernatural, “lost knowledge” aspects found on the first. The oh too commonplace selling of the soul.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0041, 0314, HANA LEI
00410306
With part of the money she made off her successful debut album “Atlantis Rising”, she decided to take an extended trip to the Azores themselves, starting with Corvo, the smallest and least populated of the 9 island group and known for a huge stone statue of a pointing man on a horse perched atop one of its high ridges, supposedly dismantled and moved to Lisbon by the Portuguese government around the start of the 16th Century and then lost. Or so the legends go.
She tried to get into fishing while there… and failed. She’d settle for fishing out mysteries. She asked around about the equestrian statue, but tales were numerous and often varied wildly from each other. Some say the Portuguese themselves erected the horseman shortly after they discovered the island in the 1400s. They say the supposed inscription on the base of the statue, “Jesus, go ahead”, proves this, although it was originally claimed to be illegible. Some credit the Carthaginians who may have been in the area during the first millennium AD. Some dare to go even further back, before men as we know them began sailing the seas of the world. Pre-men known as Atlanteans. This is what she wanted to mine.
Another popular Corvo legend has it that a stash of coins was found in the cornerstone of a washed out house during the 1700s that predate the Portuguese, including many that were gold. No one on the island seemed to be an expert on this, but several directed her to a pawn shop on the neighboring island of Flores — in the City of Cass that we know pretty well now through these blog novels. But more appears to be there to explore and contemplate. One local even hinted to Supergal Ruby that the pawn shop owner *herself* had two of these gold coins stashed away on the premesis, but he seemed pretty mad to her, furiously producing thread on his oddly placed spinning wheel at Crow Beach in order, he said, to add to a giant ball of yarn she then found located about 100 meters further down the same Corvo beach. Guy who had the curious name of Gold himself, she noted, always paying attention to name synchronicities. We will return to him.
spinner…
… and ball
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0041, 0306, Cass City+, HANA LEI, Maebaleia/Satori
super-cape
With her relatively newfound fame, it seems that our Ruby Supergal was always traveling these days, living out of her suitcase as it were. She was on a mission: to spread love and peace and joy throughout the whole of Portugal and maybe even the western parts of Spain, depending on how much she can grow her fame. She felt she was a light of the world, showing the way to a brighter future out of the dimmer past. And the Atlantis revelation was one step along that path, perhaps a pretty important one, up there with any musical decisions she might make.
She let one of the colorful butterflies circling around her shimmy through her outstretched hand, enjoying the sensation.
She knew the butterfly enjoyed it too. Hope, she decided to name it. Hope for the future.
“Soundcheck on the set in 10 minutes!” her manager barked up some nearby stairs. “Goodby Hope and the other 2,” she said as she moved away from them and back into reality.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0041, 0303, HANA LEI
Sunklands 