I’d like to think this is my family. Father mother son.
And over there where the mother is staring? Baederwood. I have that much.
Now to find Dr. Tom who has information about the 2 Hills. Maybe a gardener too?
Let’s start here.
Category Archives: 0106
00480106 (pets pet)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0048, 0106, Arkansas, Dokken Hollow, Jeogeot, Twin Peaks
00470106 (red = dead)
My old haunt NWES City: devolving and most likely soon ceasing to be.
For example, the interesting trailer park across the road from Moe’s old bar: gone. Moe’s former building with the red square now in front: empty. Probably has been for a while, rent due who knows when.
The 4 (red yellow green blue) into 5 butterflies (add: orange) weren’t fulfilled, pheh. Could they have ever been? I think in a probable reality this is so. Everything Collagesity went into everything NWES City, smaller to larger, and made a new whole. Subways were completed. The, ahem, downtown elements of the burg were better balanced by the cleaner uptown ones. A clearer core center was established.
Hehehe.
But I haven’t given up on it quite yet. Or at the very least Wheeler hasn’t.
(to be continued?)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0047, 0106, Apple's Orchard, Jeogeot, NWES Island^
00460106 (Tin at ten)
“Shelley?” Wheeler started to answer Lexi’s question. “I don’t know. Wandered off into the prison surrounding us; lost in the maze that’s suppose to be a labyrinth, one way in and out. Time to make a switch; free myself from *that* kind of cage. Do you realize, Lexi, that she hasn’t changed her hair style since she was a kid? And those shoes. Kids as well. Keds!”
“I don’t care,” says Lexi back, stopped from dancing for a second. She’ll resume soon enough. “I love her still.”
“You can’t have her, Lexi. She’s… not in your league. She’s in the American, you’re in the National. If the Cincinnati Reds could play the New York Mets in the World Series then you might have a shot. But no sin in Cincinnati, if you catch my, um, lob. Out at home before the game even starts. Back in the pocket with the Bakers badge and all. You’re Mary Anne,” Wheeler summarized before her, still still. “Panama’s Ginger. But Shelley’s different — *I’m* different. And I set the rules. I’m tired of being the mother to a child that never grows up from top and bottom. You notice the change in *my* hair — I’m ready to dive back into the fire from the frying pan just above. Back to the dance. But first…
“… I have to let the butterflies free to do their work. Starting with the midriff, mind you. All Orange.”
Without further words, Lexi begins again.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0046, 0106, Omega^^, Urbane Blue/Fishers Island^
00450106
I see the Wall the Wall sees me.
—–
“Find anything?!”
“Gold!”
“Yeah, it’s out here!” the silhouetted man calls back from the distance.
“Just laying around! Like rocks!”
“Yuup!”
“So why aren’t there…?! I mean…!”
“Why aren’t there more people around, then?!”
“Yeah!”
“Because it’s fool’s gold you fool! fool’s gold you fool! fool’s gold you fool!”
—–
Fern wakes up under the umbrella the color of TILE. Desert dreams. Badlands. There’s actually only her out here… and Billy, who doesn’t really count since he’s a 3-4 foot, chrome plated mechanoid. He observes with bright, electric blue, pupil-less eyes her awakening not 3 feet away, out of the shade and into the sun. If he stretched out in place, he could almost prop his shadowed, robotic feet up on her torso. “Hi” he metes out as is his duty, and adds a little glinty morning salute to his sunny smile. “Cereal and milk has already been poured in that order. Just like you like.” He winks and his smile also appears to glint like his arm did before. Fern checks her watch (not on her arm?). 9 o’clock. She overslept by an hour and Billy was ready at 8. Can’t blame him for the sogginess then, pheh. Just following orders. She makes a mental note, to add to those orders, to rouse her at the appointed time and not let her sleep late. But for this morning, limp Toasty-O’s Snakes and Ladders pepper and mint flavored breakfast in heavily colored red and green milk to make gray it is.
He washed Fern’s bowl without water, using the sandpaper hand attachment #4 to do the job. Ceramic would hold up under this finer abrasion, he knew. But what happened to all the water? He had produced soo much of it with his endless waterfall toward the end of photo-novel 44, the last installment in our series and also perhaps perpetual it seems. At least I don’t see an end anywhere in sight using my future vision. I’ll switch it off now; back to the present.
After being unable to sand out a particularly persistent stain in the required time according to his inner clockwork, Billy cusses in his peculiar robot vernacular (“Nuts and Bolts!” I believe it was) and throws the bowl into the gorge next to them and proceeds to fashion another from the local clay. Will take him all morning, Fern reckons. Time for her to explore the hills around here without being followed everywhere. She’ll enjoy the isolation.
In the middle of the desert which was also its edge, she soon comes across this military grade helicopter, not so much landed here as crashed — both at once. Philip Stevor was working on one of the broken landing wheels presently. She approached, recognizing the figure. But why was he *here*? In the desert? Outside Nightsity?
“Cpt.,” she said about 10 feet away, unnoticed in approaching the chopper and addressing him the way she always did. He drew his gun as he stood up and spun around. Not drunk this morning, it appears, Fern thought. Impressive! Must have done a required stint in rehab.
“Oh,” he said, relaxing and putting the gun away. “It’s you, phew! So many bad things out here in the Badlands. Guess you came here through the portal — don’t mind if I keep working on the chopper while we talk, I hope. Gotta get out of here asap. I can take you with me. If you’re also stuck out here in the middle of nowhere for reasons still unknown to me.” He turned only his head now while the hands were still busy with the wheel. “Are you?… stuck?”
Was she?
Was I?
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL OT, 0045, 0106, Badlands, C2077, South Dakota
00440106 (noclip)
She watched it from afar…
… and then found herself inside…
*POP* (manifestation noise).
“Wendy?”
“Why are you dressed like that?” is the first thing she said to me.
“I was told” — she looked over at Wendy, wondering about her own blank attire — “it was cold down here.”
“Well you were wrong!” She changed into who she really was.
00430106
“A word for each letter of the alphabet,” Wayne Bruce continued about his company, the famed Asylum Inc. started in the 70s on the west coast in a town that time had forgotten. He didn’t, and he’d drag others into his alternate reality as well. With the lists. He separated the top paper from the rest of the short stack and put it on the other side of the opened manila folder. “Second list now,” he said, staring at the new page front and center. “Black for the 1st’s white. Asylum revealed for what it truly is. Shadow government to the world everyone assumed ran from A to Z in an orderly fashion. This was only facade.”
“Here’s where he gets to the part about the Green and the Gray,” Fern directed to likewise watching Lichen, returned from her trip down the river to hunt for opposite shore sea shells. She’d come back home to Mama.
“… the Green… and the Gray.”
“Told ya,” said Fern with some satisfaction. She paused the film she’d found in an obscured archive in a hidden data farm — took a lot of digging to find this gem of a dangling carrot. She assumed Lichen had questions. *Should* have a lot but she’ll see about the total. Will help her determine how far Lichen has come along with her soil studies and overall brain development. She’s *funny*, Fern reminded herself. Funny as all get out at times. But she needs to develop the other side. Fern also reminded herself that she needs to work on the opposite side and find her own funny bone with which to work from. She told what she felt were two legitimate jokes yesterday that Lichen seemed to smile at or at least acknowledge the humor in. Advancement.
“How…?”
“How does Blue fit in?” Fern guessed about Lichen’s question. “With the Black, the Green, the Gray? Dark spectrum colors all I’m sure you noticed.”
“So… Red,” said Lichen, thinking back to the first list. “And…”
“Yellow, yes. And Golden and White. Light spectrum. Dark and light, Lichen. Dark and light.” She looked over at the light that had gone out of Lichen’s eyes. “Daark…” she said slower, trying to reignite. “And liight.”
Bulb went off.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0043, 0106, Castle Town, Omega^^, RDR2
Parasol
“Every time I think about Level 02 and the testing that goes on there, my heart grows cold. Military cyborgs we’re developing there. Cold blooded killers.” She wondered again if Shelley’s old husband Arthur Kill (“Old Arthur”) was possibly part of these experiments.
“Let’s just get this visit over,” The Mann said back, concentrating on navigating the tricky staircase down to the basement of the manor, which will become The Mannor soon if he has his ways.
—–
“See?” he said at the cell’s door. “There’s the old hag of a witch. You’re *not* Mid-Hazel or Hazel Wood or whatever she calls herself these days. You’re different.”
“I just remember the–”
“You remember nothing. Dreams, I say. Dreams of a parallel existence perhaps, but… there she is and here you are. Separate but definitely not equal. You are good–”
“I have a red eye,” she quickly countered. “Some call me Red because of it.”
“AND… you have a blue one. Balance. You are not her,” he doubled down.
She decided now was a good time to test the sentence again. “How’s your *girl* today?”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0042, 0106, Maebaleia/Satori, Redsland
00410106
The identification is obvious here at the start and all up and down the line of Google Street View shots of the village. Good work re-creators of Amiable in Our Second Lyfe (I’ve got a name!)!
Panning just right in the virtual world version where Google Street View can’t, we spot Marsha “Pink” Krakow at her table, still studying the accordion.
Eddie, her Edward, has split the scene, saying he prefers the hustle and bustle of Meat City as opposed to the boring, backwards life here. He’s read the attached note procured from the woman standing near the start of the weedy lane leading to their table. He has no desire at all to help the few villagers, mostly older like her, with upcoming Thanksgiving festivities, primarily focusing on corn shucking it appears. Marsha is left alone in the village. Lacking any other meaningful contacts, she decides to go back and visit Andrew “Biff” Carter.
But the tractor was gone at the farmhouse…
… in both real and virtual worlds.
Andrew’s split the scene as well. More on that story coming up.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0041, 0106, Google Street View, Teepot^^
Flashback Friday: RB Mountain (likewise 0106 post from novel 11)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0040, 0106, Mountain Lake^, Omega^^
the scene of the anomaly
As expected, the multicolored cubes weren’t there any longer at the Cowabunga trailer site. Nor the red headed, black cone hat topped witch I believe named Alysha at the time. Or so she said. After saying hello in a quite ordinary voice for a superior being, she explained the scene, the anomaly. 25 or 26 cubes, all the colors of the alphabet, she said, except perhaps minus one, she added. Maybe the I, she guessed, she indicated. If so, that I might be me, I realized, in the here, in the now. I stood before the now vacated trailer plot, ready for the next step. Northwest, I decided. Into the foothills of the mountains. Toward Carumba.
It was actually a pretty big leap instead of a small step to begin. Up we go!
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0039, 0106, Bellisaria, Western Hills
Sunklands 