The last one, belligerent as he was on the surface, was actually the most helpful. He suddenly remembered where he came from. And how he got here. Space.
Last stop today: the theatre to meet the others and tell them what he knows.
But he couldn’t get inside and he had no money. Only one thing to do. Backtrack; make a new “friend”.
“One please.”
And he did that levitating trick again and handed him the coins.
He was dozing in the office per usual when the phone jarred him from his dream about hot tubs. Wanda? he thinks about the girl there. Who’s Wanda? He cuts off the rings by answering, assuming it was a wrong number. 5:30 in the morning. Who would be calling him now?
A dame named Wanda, that’s who. Or so she said. Probably the psychic police again, he thinks, hounding me until the end.
“Sykes,” she said about a last name when he asked her, poised for retribution.
“Is that with an i… or a y?”
“W-why (nervous laugh)… do you ask?”
“Because I was just dreaming about a dame named Wanda,” private dick Wendell “Biff” Carter admitted but cockily, “and I wanted to know how to spell her last name for the next time we meet up.”
“How odd,” the woman also claiming to be Wanda said on the other side of the line in a tone that Carter identified as sincerely surprised. Maybe not the psychic police after all, he pondered. Maybe one of those what you call *synchronicities*. He tested further. He realized she seemed to be talking to someone with the receiver’s mouthpiece covered. The detective was good at detecting that — had to be to survive, he said to himself as he honed his craft by trying out one muffled voice after another with his girl Friday secretary Berta. What kind of cloth or hanky or whatever was used for the muffling? Could be important. In this case he was thinking: cashmere. Slight bit of scratching against the receiver (wool) coupled with a Cape Cod accent. Rich dame, he surmised. He needed money. He’ll overlook the oddities to proceed forward.
“What can I do you for?” He tried to wake up as much as possible to absorb the stream of information he assumed was coming his way.
“I *was* looking… for a mirror.” That was it. Mirror. The dream, he knew. She found it. Click went the receiver. Took a long time to return to sleep after that. Wanda in reality, he thought, glancing over at the phone again. Wanda in the dream. Maybe if I return to the same dream I can get more info from the dame who lives, ahem, *inside*. He leaned back, hands behind his head just like we started with. “Wanda Wanda Wanda,” he muttered as Newton slid back into Jasper. “Wanda Wanda (snore) Wanda…”
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0041, 0205, Cass City^, Maebaleia/Satori
He was back in the apartment after work was over, staring at Ginger cooking again. Or was it Wanda? — so bad on names. Cow outfit was still on. Ginger or Wanda or whoever wouldn’t be helping him with an actual name either, then.
“How was work today?” Dare she call him dear?
“Okay. Had an interesting lunch break.” He didn’t stop staring, was riveted on the black and white.
“Oh? What happened?” Another egg flipped over. Expertly he noticed. She’d been doing this for some time.
“I went to a psychic,” he imagined himself saying, then changed it when spoken out loud to, “I went to a physician. I’ve been meaning to go for some time.”
“Physician? Doctor? What’s wrong, dear?” There. She said it. She must… no, she can’t go there yet. The love part. A term of endearment is not a declaration of love.
What to say? Ankle? Knee? Yes, the knee. “Oh it’s my knee, the one I pulled when I got stuck on that stick in the woods about a week back. ”
“Yes, I recall you telling me that. But you said you were okay.”
“I thought it was time to check it out. Never happened before (like that).”
“What did the doctor say?”
“Oh, he said I was okay and to stay out of the deep woods for a while. With a smile of course.”
“Can you do that?”
“I… don’t know. Anyway, um, I was just wondering…”
“Yes?” Now a flapjack, expertly poured before and now deftly flipped, tanned just right on the first side.
“Where did you learn to cook?” He was looking for a magic location and he got one.
“Well, I’ve always cooked because of my Mama,” the implication being that someone had to do it in the household. “And then I did it professionally for a while for that rock band who came along back in the 70s. Just came up to the door and asked me to do it.”
“Ozark Mountain something.” Bingo, he thought. He recalled his three, and also a 4th to go along with the rest. Red green blue… but don’t forget the yellow. Gold. Inside the ship now. Harvested.
(to be continued)
Thomasina said that whenever I need to refocus to come back to the FILE, so I’m here. In Tomasina — the center of it; without the “h” but obviously related — staring at what appears to be the ruins of a temple, and beside a shell representing Nautilus itself, my home continent for good it seems.
The beacon shows me how to walk the diagonal of the sim. Here I go!
Another oversized Nautilus shell encountered at 197/197 near the middle of this temple thing. By Shelley, mind you, once again, it appears, our heroine for the novel, especially since promising character Sarah from section 01 seems to be dead and gone from us. And also keep in mind she writes novels herself, and apparently is on the same number *I* am. We differ in content if not frequency. She’s found a pattern for writing, a system, and I have too. She is writing a different sentence as I am writing *this* sentence, for example. Parallel. Actually, in checking, she was writing the exact same sentence back there but it usually doesn’t happen that way. Moving on…
Unrendering water to look around better, we understand that that one temple, albeit the largest perhaps, is part of a complex of ruined structures spanning several sims east to west. I also found this among the ruins, although I’m not sure what happened here. Certainly makes for some interesting speculation, though.
We will probably return here.
exposed part of the ruins in Macavity
duplicate statues found just below and beneath
unrendering water again: all together now
She opened the red doors. She came down the stairs to face him. He looked at the different hair.
“I– I thought you went… away,” he rasped.
“No.”
“But–”
“It’s the future, right? *I’m* from the future. Not the present. I’m not a present to be opened any longer.”
“Buut–”
She knew he wanted to see. So she showed him. His “boys”. “Do you understand? Now?”
He wilted at the sight. “Y-yes.”
“I’m DJ-ing at Kedas Klub tonight. I want you to come. I want you to *see*.”
“Kedas?” he mimicked.
“Yeah. Another one owned by the Horns. The Nightsity location shut down.”
“I–.”
“Just *come*.”
—–
“And bring Pat if you wish,” she thought to add while walking back up the stairs to go outside again.
“So you see, the railroad came through *here* instead of Lordsburg. The village thrived — in the ways it could. You have saloons, you have hotels, a mercantile store, a brothel of course. And actual *residences*, not just tents thrown up on a hillside. A living, breathing town, like it should be. All powered by The Void over there, tucked safely away in a barn with a big sign warning everyone away like a nuclear accident. Better outside than inside — right Barry?” She laughed, remembered his dream of her arrival before it actually happened. The bed was a bathroom.
“Yeah, right,” he said, somewhat irritated that was brought up but also still in awe of what Hucka D. had achieved. Bringing a whole ghost town back to life. She was indeed a spiritual warrior.
“And here, my dear friend, my dear *lover*, is *our* residence. I hope it’s to your liking.
Calm before the storm we have here, because bikers would arrive soon. And amongst them, disguised as one of their kind but definitely not: Johnny Cage again. He’d tracked them down, thanks to the voidometer he knew would come in handy one day despite the prohibitive cost, bankrupting him at the time, even. He decided he wouldn’t eat for the next year, and, voila, in the black again by March April’s May. And then he’d been bought out by a bigger and crookeder outfit because of its presence upon him, implanted in his neck as it were so no one could get at it without death. He’d booby trapped his whole body to make sure that didn’t happen. If he went, so did the surgeon trying to slice it out of him, so did the *device*, more importantly, which was growing in value by the weeks, days, months. Enough of that… back to the story.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0037, 0205, New Mexico
“I really like it here, Eddy. The motel, the view of the Ichelus Volcano over there. Look! It seems to be erupting again.”
This made Edward, her Eddy, think of another eruption earlier. Couldn’t wait. “Hmm,” he said, also looking, also pretty impressed.
“Have you had a chance to crack the book yet, Eddy? I know we’ve been awfully busy,” and she winks here, “but I did go to a lot of trouble to get it for you.”
“Tessa,” he replied, starting to think of his cousin, 1 in a set of 3. The other…
“Yes.”
“I started reading the first chapter,” he said, which was truth, or at least he checked the title of the chapter to make sure it was the right book. ‘Marbles Fall, Marble Falls.’ He could have swore it was the other way around, but probably just a faulty memory. Close enough — it was the same, he determined.
“Newton,” she said, recalling her own reading of the cursed thing. “Physical world, mechanics. *No* dreams. Right there in the first chapter, stating it all plain and simple up front. We *live*… in Newton.”
“But we need Jasper,” he completed her thought. He tried to recall his dreams from last night, after all the frantic activity was over, like a volcano shutting down. Took some time. He remembers the lava turning cool and changing colors from orange to blue. Ichelus in reality, but in the dream it was something different. Itchy? No that wasn’t it.
“Be careful of the marble rolling off. We’ve already lost one.” I was just kidding about the cracking, she wanted to say but didn’t have the chance. Open *gently*.
We? Edward thought on his part. Why did she say that? “Right, I will.”
“Miss Ouri has it.”
“Yes. I recall.”
“We don’t want Miss Ouri to be involved again. Cactus doll.”
“Yes,” he replied. That ravenous, mutant cactus doll. Brought to life by library voodoo. No, we don’t want that (again). Stick with Nauty if you want pincushions. *Under* the library — around it but not inside.
“I would really like to see the volcano today,” Jem requested. “I mean, up close and personal,” she clarified while looking out the window again. “Not like this — from a distance.”
“I understand,” and then another memory locked into place. He was tubing in the lava that wasn’t lava any longer.
(to be continued)
They’ve rebuilt the destroyed Moray Docks Town but as a Halloween tableau, appropriate for the season.
I sense the spiders had a strong involvement in the decision, mutated after the blast and obviously more threatening than ever.
Radiation didn’t do anyone no good.
As reported earlier, found this little 8″ or so f-er 4/5ths the way up a local 750 foot mountain about a week and a 1/2 back and thought: someone made quite the effort to get this gnome here and perch it for all to see on this rock visible from a primarily biking trail. Went back today specifically for a revisit and, after quite a search, found him instead peering at me from behind a tree across the trail from the rock. Funny thing: that mote or speck of dirt in his eye formerly seen…
… was now gone. I could almost hear him laughing.
Gnomes, pheh; bastards know too much.
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0034, 0205, Blue Mountain, County Park
Some say he looked like Jimmy Stewart, sitting behind his desk with the guns in back as they entered. But they were just for show: R.V. never toted a pistol himself. He believed in the basic decency of man, and that issues, however dire on the surface, can be reasoned through and ended without mayhem or bloodshed. Perhaps his reward for this positive viewpoint was the finding of Helen, our Mayan Marauder, our Publius Enigma, close to public nudity but not quite there, not quite breaking the law either, then, despite the continuing opinion of deputy Andy. “We agree to disagree about the matter,” he settled the matter with his sidekick, his buffoonish underling who *always* carried a gun albeit one without bullets. Sheriff R.V. saw to that.
Skeleton outside and perched vulture — just another show, mainly for the tourists to this here retro town of One Pink, also known as Lips, or that’s what the post office wants to retain as the official name. But the dispute, some say, is just part of the antique feel of the village, as things often happened like that in the Wild West of olden days, often settled — again — with mayhem and bloodshed before a single name could be selected. If a settlement wanted to call itself Bradshaw and others disputed it, just kill off all the ones who want Bradshaw. Sheriff R.V. is versed in the olden ways; he’s a student of law enforcement in the past. He studies to *escape* it, though, unlike some who want a return to the wildness, the wilderness.
Aunt Beatrice is about to get out of church, and R.V. needs to pick her up since she doesn’t like walking home in the sun. Ruins her complexion, she says about our nearest star; a flaming ball of poop, she sometimes calls it, especially when a new wrinkle develops on her 60-ish skin. No one really knows her age, and all that use to are dead, some say: killed — by Beatrice herself in her extreme vanity. Sheriff R.V., an actual nephew and not just a namesake one, knows differently. “That’s just her rough exterior,” he defends to others. “She fights the elements all around her, people, place, things. *Circumstances.* But inside, deep inside — somewhere — there’s a decent, wholesome person that loves the world, that loves her relatives — the few that remain — and, above all — and I think this is very important even though we don’t share the same faith — loves God.”
The police department’s steam carriage stalls out on the railroad tracks. Looks like R.V. is in a heap of trouble again, especially since Beatrice will have to walk about 100 feet from the front door of the church in the scorching sun to get here. R.V. figures he might actually need a loaded gun this afternoon to fend her off.
(to be continued?)
Sunklands 