Mission failed, The Man separates from the Ant again, probably becoming The Mann with that extra “n” in the process. He finds himself on the east coast of Pickle 02, the green one, staring out at the sea. He wonders why he’s here, then spots it. Humpback whale sighting.
“This must be New York,” he says about the Pickle he’s on, but also probably the other one too, since they are opposite sides of the same thing most likely.
He looks and looks but only the one sighting. And a brief, happy song.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0407, Bellisaria, New York, Pickle 02
“In looking at them, Hucka D., it seems the green one is the only pickle. One Pickle, then, not two.”
“No, both are Pickles. Both have the Squishy Pickle restaurants. The sand colored one in fact has two, which makes up for the (flimsy) shape in my humble estimation.”
“Takes two to know,” ventures Baker Bloch.
“Suppose. (pause) Let’s get this over with, then.”
Baker merges the pictures before them.
“A jumbled mess,” offers Baker. “And probably a copyright infringement as well.”
“From the future.”
Baker Bloch stares. “Adam and Eve, pheh.” He sighs. “The Mann was right in stepping away from all this. Where is The Mann anyway?”
“Maybe that’s next.”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0406, Bellisaria, Black Ice, NWES Island, Pickle 01, Pickle 02
“Two pickles,” she explained later. “One yellow or sand colored: here. Then the one over there that’s more green.”
“Like my apples!” exclaimed listening and looking Harrison Ford Jett to her side in Spunky’s cafe down on the docks. Charlene’s home away from home, now that she’s in the thick of her dissertation. Detailed description of Knob Noster coming up next! Charlene looks over at her good friend Harrison, then down at his apples. Still in place. Still hasn’t been sold to the highest bidder.
“I suppose so,” she realized, and turned back to the girl holding the pickles in the doctored picture on her computer screen (she wants to be a doctor, after all). “But: sand. Sandman. The sandy pickle. That came first, although it was formed second.”
“What does that mean?” Harrison F. Jett instinctively held one of his apples then the other, as if testing they were the same. Then he turned red as a winesap as he realized Charlene noticed what he was doing. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Force of habit — I’ve been thinking a lot about them later. What it would be to be without them.”
“Well… maybe that fits into this as well.” She puts hand to chin while activating deep thinking mode. She scrolls to the next picture, undoctored this time. She’s losing vision of the future. Detailed description of “Knobby” will be difficult, nay impossible to achieve. She faces the prospect that it could be a stumbling block on her way to fame and glory.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0405, Bellisaria, Black Ice, NWES Island, Pickle 01, Pickle 02
“Let’s get this over with, Sandman.”
“What. Are you going to try to *eat* me again? Ant-man. Man who thinks he is an Ant.”
“I might,” the man who thinks he is an ant threatened.
“You know what will happen.”
“I do.” Ant-man knows he can’t go through with it. The pictures of the merged mess simply wouldn’t show up in the blog. Copyright infringement from the future. Santman cannot be born.
“Well… what then?”
“*You’re* the one who came all the way out here to find *me*. You tell me.”
“Right… forgot. Umm, we can merge in a different, um, way.”
“I don’t swing that way, Sandman,” Ant-man says with a slight chuckle.
“No not that.” But Sandman here contemplates it might be just that. He imagines himself leaning into Ant-man for a kiss, a sweet one and not using any tongue atall. Because there’s no telling what kind of tongue that ant-head holds. He doesn’t want to know! No, no lovers in this picture. Instead:
“Ant. Man. Man of Ant.”
“Yes?” Ant-man was waiting for *something*, but he knew a big thing was about to be revealed. Bigfoot big perhaps.
“My real name… is Pickle.” A rainbow butterfly flutters by at this point. Wonder where that came from. Perhaps the Wonder Years. Before the Fire Tree.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0404, Bellisaria, Pickle 01
“More Bigfoot art,” Harrison Ford Jett whispers in the waning light to no one except himself. “It’s all here.”
“A cave! Marked with green again. Pickle. Pickle Too. Let’s go!”
The underwater rock cavern was pretty long; about 200 meters.
More of that type of art? Harrison F. Jett found these identical, half filled bottles of unknown alcoholic content wedged together in a rock opening and was unable to move them.
The rocks holding the stash penetrated the roof of the cave, making a distinguished marker. Watch out passing Bellisarian ships!
The rocks even appear to have feet.
The man who was also an ant back at the Hideout said I knew Bigfoot. Something about my shirt… should be getting back to NWES City and meeting up with Charlene. Maybe she would have some ideas about what the odd superhero or supervillian or whatever he is, was talking about. He recalls she studies these type of things, and her dissertation she’s hard at work on late into the night is about a somewhat similar creature called the Loch Ness Monster. And she talks of another “monster” called Knobby (actually: Knob Noster, *not* Knob Monster!) — maybe that’s what her paper is about instead (he intuits in the cave, staring up at a rainbow hued crystal cluster in the ceiling).
At any rate, she certainly lives in the land of Paperville. Hmm, odd thought — where’d that come from?
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0403, Bellisaria, Pickle 01, Pickle 02
She watched him walk away after they freed him from the Bigfoot picture in the soon-to-be but not yet present consignment store with the old clothes and such. No explanation, no thanks. Just walking. He had to see someone *immediately*. A man posing as an ant, the big hypocrite. Sticking me in that photo with that hairy, stinky… *monster*! He needed to be dealt with. No love here.
He kept walking, right out of Black Ice and into the Great Beyond.
—-
“Harrison Ford Jett,” he spat out. “I sense the force is strong with you, buh huh huh (*sip*), buh huh huh huh (*sip*), buh (*sip*, *sip*), huh.”
“How much for the apples?” He wasn’t in the mood to beat about the bush. He wanted to get rid of the chafing, gnawing things asap; let someone else get gnawed on for a while. He takes another drag off his Chesterton Lite, waiting for an answer that never came.
Instead: “You know Bigfoot.” The half wine colored half ant, half man paused, taking in the surprised expression re his statement seemingly out of left field, or thrown back over a left field fence or something. In truth, he was the shirt she wore, but that will take a bit of explanation. Another night it is!
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0402, Bellisaria, Black Ice, NWES Island, Pickle 01
“I remember you, girl. From Paperville!”
“Right, right. The Little Cafe on the Way!” Both open their mouths further in surprise but never get to the heart of the oddity. Rabbit 02 in the corner of the fake flowery field worships on. Fertility. Much fertility.
“I remember you too, Birmingham.”
“Shut up Muff,” the fellow red fox hissed over. “I did what I had to do.”
“Yeah right, hmph.”
Rabbit 02 has a new husband. Rabbit M4, who lives just off the freeway. He usually stays over at Rabbit 02’s place because of the noise. He has a lot of patience and ironically he is a doctor too (optometrist), so more patients. When Rabbit 02’s family got together at Thanksgiving, he and Dr. Rabbid Baumbeer, Rabbit 02’s son from husband no. 3 — Rabbit 01 we’ve called him in this here blog — got along swimmingly, being fellow doctors (and swimmers) and all. Now in the last couple of weeks she’s had 3 more from M4: Uffcott, Hinton, and Winterbourne, because he was, since his birth came the first of December and the other two, slightly older triplets came out a little before midnight. They usually keep them over at the “highway house” with housekeeper Sarah because, again, of the noise. M4 is patient, but he needs a lot of quiet because of all the research he’s doing into creating a super eye capable of perpetual self healing — alien science we’re talking about here, top secret hush hush stuff. He can’t discuss it with anyone. All his friends and relatives think he’s just selfish separating himself from his children, not knowing he has very good reasons, very good indeed.
The wife finishes her worshiping and walks back over through the fake flowery field between the two girls who had turned their backs on each other, and between the two foxes who had also grown apart.
“I hear the town has a temple, dearest. I wonder if we could fit in a visit between your shops.”
“Maybe,” shot back Rabbit 02, irritated that he would ask. “Consignment store next door, or so that’s what the map says: Odds & Ends. I need to pick out some outfits for Christmas for the big ta-do at Ben the Parrot’s.”
“That foul mouth bird brain!” Rabbit M4 wanted to yell with his tongue at the top of his lungs but of course bit it. They should never have started selling those animal talkie toys, he laments.
They move next door. No consignment store there. Yet.
Instead: “Come here dear. There’s a man stuck in this picture!
Dear?”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0401, Black Ice, NWES Island
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0023, 0317, 0400, 0401, Bellisaria, Bogota, collages 2d, Picturetown
“I am glad we finally get to meet face to face, er, Other Sandy.”
“Sure ‘nuf! Have you read the fairy tale book yet. Allll this turns into a big fat pumpkin in the end, or in my case, an acorn!”
“Yes, I picked up a copy of ‘Fairy Tales’ from one of these zzz houses but it then disappeared from my hands after I read that particular page.” Dream selves, Sandy thinks to himself here. Synchronicity in action.
“Yeah, this is where it allll goes down, Mr. Other Sandy.” Southern drawled Sandy Chic with acorn wide cheeks was glad that Sandy Beech didn’t pee in front of her at the lake, although the bear, being less self conscious because of the wild animal thing and all, couldn’t resist. He put down the rod and pulled out his rod, hehe. Wait. She stared over. She was thinking the thoughts of both of ’em. Gosh darn shoot!
“I hear you are from Texas, Sandy Chic,” Sandy Beech speaks over, perhaps unaware of the total synchronicity between them in the moment while looking at maps in his head. “That’s a big state for a, um…”
“Big squirrel? Were you going to say big…”
“I didn’t mean–”
“Hiiiii YA!” Sandy Beech’s head was detached from his body by Sandy Chic’s mighty karate chop across the dining booth. Spongebub would be proud.
Yet Sandy’s bodiless noggin still thought. He realized he had really always been in this form. A talking head.
——
“Annnnnd CUT! That was great, Sandy. BOTH of you! I smell an Emmy the size of TEXAS awaiting us!”
“Umm. Is he alright?” Sandy Chic had assumed the body.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0022, 0416, HANA LEI
Investigation of Diamondfyre’s Planet X parcel coinkydinkally led me to a sim called zzz, which I assume is last in an alphabetized list of such. I sit across a small lake from a dream version of myself we’ve seen once before in this here photo-novel (22 of 20), white rabbits on her side and a bear and a red capped snowman on mine. The bear is not pissing into the lake although it may appear that way from this angle, and he will probably be pissing in it soon enough given all the beer he’s been drinking with me. I might be too if it weren’t for the female cartoon squirrel Sandy soberly staring toward us on the opposite side.
Here let’s turn the camera a bit for the next photo so you can clearly see Francis (bear) is fishing just like me, and also view the roaring waterfall marking the source of the stream that flows into the lake. Source and Lake, then, just like in that game at the temple with all the tiles, starting with The River (here).
So we sit at the beginning of TILE in effect, or the end of the beginning. We have equated this River with the Amazon, and in at least one other post, the Mighty Mississippi of our US of A. But what we are building, in toto, is obviously the Earth around The River, perhaps square shaped like the box the game Carcassonne comes in but also perhaps not. Depends on if we’re happy or unhappy maybe.
I didn’t really notice how much Sandy Chic’s head is shaped like an acorn until I photographed her remotely from behind. Good one Spongebub Squaredpants creators. And good one MAPS creators, because we have this in KY.
Squib next to Sandy Gap next to Acorn also obviously represents another Spongebub character Squibward, because the expression “damp squid” is sometimes mistakenly phrased “damp squib,” like with some in the IT profession who are smart on technology but not as sharp with words. And we already know that SS’s Spore plays an important role in photo-novel 22. In fact, there he is again at a (non-horseshoe) curve in The River representing the Amazon and/or the Mississippi (or the Nile or the Yangtze or the fill in the blank). What could he be pondering with his computer wife Karen Y.?
Of course. Plan Z!
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0022, 0415, HANA LEI
Sunklands 