“Well it certainly sounds like a dangerous place. I’m not sure I want to move there now, despite the advantages.”
“I mean, look at your wine. It’s still gray,” Jeffrie Phillips pointed out. “Sooo laggy.” He looks around, as if he can see the whole, huge city from his vantage point. NWES City, which once, not very long ago, almost decided to become a town and let its several suburbs handle all the city problems. Not any longer. But… what if.
Charlene takes a sip of gray wine, which tastes perfectly fine despite the color. She looks again: red now. But it took a while. And it also took a while, albeit a shorter time, for her shirt to rezz in. She thinks of, for example, omelettes. It would probably take half the time to cook them in Collagesity if she decides to move there. But what is the night life? As Jeffrie Phillips is describing it to her: none. Except for crime — maybe the criminals are just *bored*. She says this aloud to Phillips.
“We think it was just one person committing the actual homicides if that helps, one April Mae Flowers, a widow. She has a history of crime in the town — notice I use town there, not village, but not city.” He was trying to paint a contrast between Collagesity and NWES City for Charlene to help lure her back.
“How big again?” she queries about the size of the town.
“8192, with room to grow. Approximately 500 prims worth of room. That’s a lot of omelettes.”
Charlene was wondering how Jeffrie Phillips knew she was thinking about omelettes earlier but then dismissed the mind reading possibility. But was he? She knew they were separate cores, so no symbiosis there for psychic sharing. He was, at the core, Baker Bloch. She: Wheeler Wilson. Baker Blinker, Karoz Blogger, Hucka Doobie, and most of the others seemed to have faded away in the distance. It was only us two left, she thought. She says this out loud to Jeffrie Phillips.
“Then we should be king and queen of Collagesity. I know you are Fern Stalin in the future.”
“In the *past*,” Charlene the Punk counters about the time relativity.
“See there? We’re a great balance. You look at something one way, I another. We are Janus headed, looking in both the past and future directions. Can’t you see?” He manifests a glass of gray wine in his own hand and adjusts his position appropriately. “Fate.” He takes a sip, the sip of victory. He reaches the wine glass out to clink with her own. Dare she?
She could have asked about veracity advantaged Bad Kitten/Zado, she could have asked about Elsie at the kissing booth and nimble Darlene down at the bay and “Hot Shot” Cloris over in the Rat Village bar and grill. Had she known about them.
Sunklands 