Category Archives: 0406

00410406

I teleport to what I understood to be a skybox, high above my Cass City apartment somehow. Heaven of sorts, or at least Reality. I almost walk in front of a car which, at the same time, is shooting at me.

“Watch it cork for brains!” the driver barked through the right side window as he passed, face screwed up like a walnut. “Can’t you see I’m trying to work here?!” Street View camera person, I realized later, probably stressed out from navigating all these narrow Santa Cruz streets and alleyways. Also noticed later that the job certainly seemed incomplete, and that the largest and most important Flores island town here was only minimally covered. I wondered how he slept at night in his various hotels across the world. Probably pretty soundly.

His incompetency would make my *own* work that much more difficult. To find a reason for the Cass City Town Council to spare this real and actual Santa Cruz and not replace it with their own alternate history version. For I was married to the Cass City Mayor. And, in an obvious, surface conflict of interest, I was the head of the council too. So I had to convince myself first before Tom, Dick and Harry would go along with the proposal. Two separate worlds. Two separate realities, virtual down there and real up here. Separate but equal. Didn’t work in post-WWII Jim Crow America, but here in 1939 Cass City it might have a chance.


gaining a higher perspective on Flores’ Santa Cruz with neighboring island Corvo in the background

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0041, 0406, Cass City+, Europe, Google Street View, Maebaleia/Satori

new gal

She just remembers bits and pieces of her existence there. Like this entrance to what she understood as Pipewold, a concept first encountered on New Island not far west south of here. It has moved, she understood. Part of the same continent but in a different location. She always liked pipes. Until she came here. On the far end: a doll, she knew.

She remembers Billy. Or Billie. Soon she would take her place. She had the key.

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0040, 0406, New Island, Omega, Urbane Blue/Fishers Island

And so on the 5th day…

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0039, 0406, Black Ice, Jeogeot, NWES Island

Annaberg Annabell

He barely looked up from the paper to acknowledge her presence. Artung with him ignored her completely, pretending to be absorbed in his own words. He was instead thinking. Back in the day this girl was *poison*. Yet she stood her ground before them defiantly, daring them to speak or act in some way. Jimmy Dieselengine finally rattled his paper loudly, which we know now is a sign of agitation and/or disapproval, and then rolled his eyes upward over the top, cooly meeting hers. “If we have to speak let’s do it in the cemetery where no one else can see us. 3:19 this afternoon.” And then he was back to reading, or at least pretend reading. Because he too was spacing out about the past now. The dancing. The playing of cards. Or so they heard.

—–

She had to pay 250 just to get him to sit down with her. He knew she had lots of cash because of the wall between the states. The tree beings she allied herself with back in the former era horded away beaucoup green within their narrow, dark confines, ready to burst forth at the Freeing Day, as they called it, and spend it hither and thither on overpriced trinkets and baubles, the opposition said of the impulse. The same considered her one of those trinkets or baubles, depending on what faction you asked. She was capitalism embodied, em*boldened*.

—–

She was a weed to be removed, she remembered a senior councilmember saying about her as she stared down at one of her kind, according to them, growing from a crack in the pavement. The meeting with Dieselengine was over. Someone was approaching with a ho. Better amscray before I am recognized again, she thought, and moved back into the shadows of the place.

—-

“The Monolith,” he summarized earlier at the bench in the far part of the cemetery, giving her what she wanted, what she could handle. The cold breath kept flowing out of her body like an expulsion of good from evil. “They had to push you out,” he said, watching it.

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0038, 0406, Jeogeot, Newtown+

00370406 (party 06)

“Soo *Edward*,” half giggled Penny Mart at the table. The salad Benjamin Bright tossed was about to be served again, like it had 16 times before in his short life as an animesh cook from Drakaina. “What’ve you been doing with yourself lately?” Obviously Penny had a crush on the handsome boy with his rugged features. Housemate Sandy Hook on the other side of him too. Across-from-him Shelley wasn’t jealous of the attention paid to her escort to the party by what she thought were prettier girls than herself. Not really. And, anyway, she could make this part of her romance novel. She was almost 1/4th into her 5th. Hubby Arthur didn’t know about all those things yet.

“Oh, this and that, here and there,” he vaguely answered with a smile, soaking in the admiration. He was also still basking in the victory over Sandman down at the docks. Shelley, with her ultra sharp Umbrella Club funded eyes, saw it all from her chair at the house. Edward didn’t know about those things yet — couldn’t see them from his angles of observation; hadn’t hit the right light yet. Starless. Bible black.

Shelley reviewed it in her mind as Edward kept talking about recent frivolities: the face to face confrontation, the lack of presents in the boat, and then, from even a further distance, this Amos T. Sandman, as he called him afterwards, opening the final present to find a box within the box. Lavender. This was foreshadowing pure and simple.

Edward was finished. He looked over, suspicion in his own eyes, although he didn’t know what of yet. Just a hunch. That girl is up to something, he knew.

(to be continued)

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0037, 0406, Lower Austra, Nautilus, Wild West

Pack

“In-depth; I don’t know the meaning of that. Is that the same as in deep?”

“Oooooooo. Looks like Alice is in *trouble* again.”

“I don’t like the looks of him, Richard.”

“Noo,” he agreed, daring to move his shoulders a bit in the recognition. “Looks like my mother.”

“Another coat check, over.” Reply.

“Check. Checking the overcoat.”

But Agent Orangetang found that he too could not hardly move a muscle in this place and had to send in his partner Boris who was a spider and undetected and perhaps undetectable in the Big Freeze. The coat check would take all night, and by that time Miss In-depth and her accomplice Mrs. Ordinary had long fled the scene, taking the goodies with them.

“Get my gum,” spoke Sarah only 1/2 to Rosalyn. “I’m going in.”

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0036, 0406, Maebaleia/Satori

00350406

So she went back to another place in the Morgan sim, still intact, and spoke with the dog, or spoke *toward* the dog because it was a one way affair this time, no mysterious chanting of magic numbers, no nutt’n. Because the deed had already been done.

“What *are* you?” would be redundant, so she added to it. “I *know*,” she started, “that you did all this, the creation of the treasure down there (because they indeed were way up in the air here, about 1/2way to The Void at the 4000 meter level).  You just wanted me to *see*.”

Stares from the dog, but, like I said, no real replies. Shelley thought the sombrero atop his head disappeared at one point but wasn’t certain. Could be a trick of the eyes in this rather dark place, this Tesseract Tavern in the skies. But we happen to know it wasn’t.

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0035, 0406, Mountain Lake, Omega

256/256 = 0/0.

We had to go through Gold City and Barry and Stinkerfoot to get back to Zapppa and the Big Woods cemetery. He dug up the truth about Franklin. It wasn’t pretty.

There was no body; there was nobody.

—–

“Black Jack,” psychic Donald said in a related scene from Towerboro.

“Black Jack.”

The TV went to snow.

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0034, 0406, Big Woods, Gold City-, Jeogeot, Towerboro

00330406 (gammy rays)

Hucka Doobie looks up into the Blue Feather Cube and imagines seeing Mr. Tom “Spilly” Bean emerge from the center of a triangle of 3 white stars, falling or perhaps even plummeting to Earth in a beam of white. Must be white.

Now to bring him actually to life.

—–

She recalls the day she gave up her blackness, all ears now. In the opposite direction: red. She became the Controller after that, some say Morgan the Hagg returned from a watery grave, even. She picked up the phone. She gave him a call. Pepi “Can” Kolya was no more in her life. Until now, which was actually then.

“Herbert, it’s me,” she remembered saying into the screen, waiting with baited breath for a reply. Was that even his correct name?

—–

“Herbert. I mean, *Newt* (sigh). Can I take off the ears now?”

“Not yet, babydoll.” He reaches over.

“Again?”

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0033, 0406, Blue Feather Sea+, Maebaleia/Satori, Nautilus, Rim Isles, Yaya Land+

special

He’s done as much work on the library in the skies as he needs to tonight. Now to crack the back of the book before him while Swanie’s on lunch break.

Chapter 1: “Marbles Fall, Marble Falls”. So much to learn. Oops. There goes the other marble, rolling away almost through the wall. Swanie will not be pleased; have to try to stick it back on before she returns.

Maybe I can just use one of my own eyes, he thought crazily, but then did just that. He stuck the blue eye marble in the now empty socket and started to see the future, the North beyond the South. Miss Ouri! This must be kept top secret.

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0032, 0406, Collagesity Fordham-, Lower Austra, Nautilus