Mysterious, blood red sky…
… continued…
… and then a “dandelion” of all things.
—–
“What are these mysterious *seeds* floating in front of me. And… who *am* I??”
Category Archives: 05
00460508 (The Burg)
Downtown.
Uptown.
Midtown. Center Core. Between two highways, raised and ground level. Busy both. Much noise to drown out things like gun shots, knife wounds, screams in the night. Perfect place to crawl in and die.
Wheeler watches while James practices his graffiti once more, his final testimony. She still doesn’t know his name. Maybe never will now. Will again, as in his.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0046, 0508, Jeogeot, The Burg
00460507
*Done* with the folding and done for the day, she thinks, sweat beading on her forehead from all the humidity around here because of the, well, *water* — over her 2 feet and up to 3-4 feet, pheh. *Now* what? she wonders. Back to *his* place?
“TOILET,” he calls from over the intercom, making her realize she had one more chore to accomplish before she could get paid. Orders of the big boss.
“Wolvie, closing up for the day!” Emily said in synchronicity with the video from somewhere beyond the cracked door, trying not to look in. She’s learned to deal with it.
“Just visiting the bathroom again and done!” he called back.
—–
“Cleaning, of course,” said Wheeler about same bathroom. “Not the other stuff. But still quite nasty, one could say. I believe you could put the big boss firmly in the sadist category. It all just got… out of control.”
“Nah, you’re okay, you’re good,” opined James Smoker, sitting across the bum camp fire from her, still holding and puffing on two cigarettes at once — while he could. “No need to crucify yourself over the matter,” he says, watching her “burn” through the fire. Like a witch. Or maybe a witcher, hmm. “This so-called Big Boss (*cough*): sounds like he’s just a butthead, a butt *period*,” he continued in his gravelly voice growing deeper and more gravelly by the year, the week. He hadn’t told her about the terminal thing. And he hadn’t revealed his true name. Not yet. So she just kept imagining him as James Smoker.
“Nice of you to say so,” says Wheeler. “But I’m afraid the whole town knows, the whole town looks down on me.” Still burning away inside a fire of her own devising.
“Those *Uptowners* might,” said James Smoker to this. “But us Downtowners… we stick together through thick and thin. Like bounded sticks.” He puts his two cigarettes together with his two hands to emphasize his point. Burny sticks, she understands — local nomenclature. If she burns, he burns; nice gesture from him.
So James S. considered her a Downtowner, she thought. Interesting. Even though she worked Uptown, lived Uptown. Maybe Willa Brown Halter is on the wrong side of the issue.
“What about *Mid*town?” she decided to ask, curious about the so-called neutral zone between the divisions, upper and lower. Where she was floored by Charlene that day of the town meeting and so had to pick herself up off the slanted pavement in order to attend.
“Center Core?” he responded, thinking of his primary reason for coming here to this Burg in the first place. To find a place where he could crawl into and die.
He decides to just blurt it out, the reason, the end point. Only crackles from the fire for a while after that.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0046, 0507, Jeogeot, Nautilus, The Burg, Upper Austra^
00460506
“Investigating a murder, ma’am. Blue Moon Kentucky. Know anything? A-bout it?”
“My Son!” she cried upon seeing him beam in on a ray of light. “Come back to me.”
“No ma’am. Not your Son. Or your Sun for that matter if that’s what you meant. Despite the beam and ray thing going on here beneath me.” But then he thought again. Clue!
Barry De Boy wakes up, immediately googles “Elvis Esley”. Or was it Isley?
(to be continued)
00460505 (Siri + Gerald Too)
“You and Merry. Never expected it to be honest.”
“Life’s full of surprises.”
“So how did the two of you–”
“End up together?” Gerald finished Siri’s question. “Hmm, with Jennifer it was fight after fight, lots of arguments, drama… not saying it was bad, but…”
“But what?”
“Got to be exhausting. With Merry, it’s not. I finally feel… harmony. A calm. Feel like things are the way they’re suppose to be.”
—–
“Show me what you found,” she said without turning away from the ball holding, 4 armed, magenta and amber tinted statue.
Filed under **VIRTUAL OT, 0046, 0505, C2077, Small China, Witcher
00460504 (Lady of Space and Time)
“I fled through many worlds, many times… They came very close to catching me once. It was then that Avallac’h appeared, out of nowhere. He found a portal and took us to a world where Eredin couldn’t find us for… oh, perhaps half a year…”
“The world where Eredin couldn’t find you. What was that like?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
“People there had metal in their heads, waged war from a distance, using things similar to megascopes. And there were no horses, everyone had their own flying ship instead.”
“Siri, stop fooling around.”
“Told you you wouldn’t believe me.
“Ah, we should’ve stayed there.”
—–
“And so *that*, dear lady, is how we all came here, you, me, Gerald, others. One by one by one, we all got sucked into the portal, with Siri on the other side, desiring us to join her after she returned to this strange but hopefully safe land — safe from the Wild Hunt of course. And I’ve… adapted. As you can see.” He waves his arm around the small but busy cocktails bar he runs with Zoltar, another that came through the portal. His old tavern partner who had become his new bar partner.
Merry Gouldbusk’s brain gears were spinning fast with excitement. “So… Siri is here as well?”
“Of course,” answered the colorful, dandy Dandelion with confidence. “She’s at the center of it all. A game within a game. Trapped. But for a reason. Found her in a drawer in my office out back. ‘Hmph,’ I say at the time. ‘Wonder how someone that looks like Siri got on the cover of that magazine?’ Later I learned that *was* Siri. Literally. Siri and the game had become one.”
“Fascinating,” is all dumbfounded Merry Gouldbusk could think of saying. Portals, she ponders. She’s beginning to understand why Gerald hates them so. Trapped! Just like all the rest. What would she do here? Streetwalker? Would it get that bad? Surely it wouldn’t get that bad.
“So… Dandelion.”
“Yes, my lady?”
“Do you, ahem, need a dishwasher here by chance?” she only 1/2 joked.
“I… have something better. Siri has been preparing for this moment. Come with me. Back to my office. Another part of the magic of this world. A talking book. Just as Siri linked up with me, I was suppose to link up with you. Gerald… not really sure about yet,” he admits with a shake of his head. “We’ll cross that bridge later. Here… come.”
And they get up and go to his office out back for further instructions from Center Control.
(to be continued)
00460503 (Vista (Del Rey))
“Interesting place you have here, Dandelion.” She’d caught up with the owner of the cocktails bar. Indeed a dandy, a playboy, but of the loyalest kind. “But… I must ask, of course. How did *you* get here?”
“Interesting question in turn, my lady, interesting indeed. And the crux of the issue — you’re good at getting to those as I’m recalling. Our many adventures.” He shakes his head with the flood of memories, takes a second to absorb and then recalibrate the discussion. In truth, he didn’t think his great great friend Gerald, the former witcher recently retired to the Touisant vineyard he inherited after killing that, well… red headed *monster*, would choose Merry here over Jennifer. He considers the red head before him, looming large and bright. That must be it. Gerald was always a sucker for bright colors. Like those painters who only paint red yellow blue all over Beauchamp. Abstracters, they’re sometimes called. His other great great friend Princess Anna of Lea who ruled that land had explained it all. Abstraction’s the rage of Beauchamp, she said while pointing an artist out, busy away at it on one of the many town terraces. If you paint or draw realistically you are considered mundane, run of the mill; *anyone* can do realism, she said at the time, which he thought was odd. He preferred landscape paintings himself. And portraits, especially of himself. Which gets him to the point.
“It all had to do with a painting, Merry. A painting of me.”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0046, 0503, C2077, Heyworth, Maebaleia/Satori, Witcher, X-City^
00460502 (lost & found)
I know, I’ll ask that pedestrian up ahead for directions, she thinks.
“Dandelion!?” she shouted over the cycle’s roar while pulling up beside him and slowing to his pace. “Know where to find!?”
But he kept on trudging along in his stumbly bumbly way, not answering. “Well *fine*!” she said and motored on, only to encounter him *again* just ahead. NPC, she realized. Not real. And no dialog assigned to it apparently since she got the same non-response from the second one. Meet him in another district of town and he could be a Chatty Kathy, though, she theorized while pulling away once more.
“Dandelion?!” they said after she finally flagged down someone real about 3 blocks away, a native to Night City named Dave. “Different part of town!” he answered over her still raging motor. “You’re in Watson! You *need* Heywood, Vista Del Rey to be specific…!”
“… Dandelion to exactly pinpoint!” she finished for him. And he told her.
But when she arrived at the indicated location, she finds that she *herself* is already there. As another Redd. She gets up off the bench to its side and heads within…
00460501
“I’m going to rub than d-mn coffin right out of the painting, that’s what I’m going to do, hmm-mm-mm.”
“Paw?”
Andy twirls away from the flawed painting Uncle Herbert gave him as a wedding gift for his first marriage and toward his son from that marriage, trying to block his vision of what he was doing to it with his body as best as possible.
“Opie, what’re you doing out of bed?” Andy says in a harsher tone than normal, which of course Opie, being the sensitive child he is, picks up on. Something’s wrong, he senses.
“I-I just wanted some milk. And maybe cookies (!)” Should have been a laugh track there, Barry De Boy thinks from the couch, also understanding something’s wrong.
“Milk milk milk, okay okay okay,” Andy says while rushing over to corral his son and herd him toward the kitchen. “And then right straight back to bed. Do you realize what time it is?”
—–
After making sure Opie is good and tucked in again, Andy returns to the painting. But his rubbing has made the child’s coffin even *more* visible to his complete exasperation, uncovering additional layers of paint. “What the–” he says while staring at it, and then instinctively glances over his shoulder to make sure Opie didn’t come back down again. “That’s it that’s it, wedding gift or no, this painting’s got to *go*,” and he grabs it with both hands, intending to take it out to the squad car parked in the driveway and dispose of it in the dumpster behind Floyd’s first thing in the morning, before he even goes into the office. He’s just that determined — suddenly — to be done with the thing. Uncle Herbert hadn’t visited in months after all. But Aunt Bee, he thinks. Herbert was her favorite brother. She’ll notice, she’ll be upset; won’t let off until he puts the painting he gave us back up above the mantelpiece, pheh.
There’s another way, he realizes. Who can change a painting but a *painter*. “Barry De Boy,” he says aloud, probably to the camera.
“Barry De Boy??” Barry utters too. He looks down at the red tie, wakes up.
(to be continued)
00450516
“Quick, driver. To Vaalserberg. And hurry!”
—–
It was just a glimpse of green through the trees, but for the first time in his long journey across The Netherlands he found he had a legitimate rise in front of him.
The about 15 minutes later he climbed a rock face to get a much better view. Marvelous!
Yes, he was wise to jump off that bridge into the canal back there to avoid going home, he thinks while surveying the countryside before him, Lester and Mikie’s hard efforts be damned. And soon afterwards, he’d found that little fire in the road that couldn’t logically be there, also a first in his journey, and potentially much more important. He felt like a modern day Prometheus bringing humanity a gift from the beyond, proof of its existence and his own sojourn there.
Passing another kind of impossibility in this world, he imagines it riding on his shoulder to his final destination, the place of triple and perhaps even quadruple contact. And so it came to be.
Sunklands 