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friend… we hope

Gee Cat had doubts at first but then realized he was exactly where he was suppose to be. At this spot.

He waits patiently for someone to emerge from that tunnel, perhaps a friend but also perhaps a… fiend. Time will shortly tell.

A painter soon arrives. “I was just — Soap Lake,” he started with the broken sentences to add to the plot confusion. “Suds — Bubbles — took care…” He collapses at Gee Cat’s feet. Lordy, the big orange feline thought, have to drag him over to The Asylum for more rehabilitation. The body is back but the mind is still, let’s say, lacking. Dr. Mouse will fix him up, but he won’t be happy to see me.

Better get to work.

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0027, 0601, Paper, Paper Soap+, Soap

tables turned

He was on a tightrope above the city, higher than ever. If he fell this time he may never make it, Yellow Family below absorbed by Black Mouse by this point up in space. Sacrifice. A menace revealed. To the left: death. To the right: death. Only center is safe, and that’s a narrow line indeed to navigate.

All Hidi can think to do to help is jump into the next section, the next book. Alice in Wonderland is done and over with. Time to head through the Looking Glass.

“Don’t worry,” he says below, waiting for her. “I’ll catch you.”

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0027, 0518, Nautilus, New York, Retirement Islands, Wild West, Wonderland

00270517

“Whooo … are … you?”

“Well, I’m *not* Alice if that’s what you’re thinking. I mean, we kind of look the same I guess — and since I’m *here*, in Wonderland…”

“*Whooo* … are … you?” he repeated from his mushroom, exactly three inches tall to perhaps Alice’s two now. Kolya would be a *real* big boy to her in her current size. “I’m just a girl, another girl — but not Alice, like I already said, already stated.”

“**Whooo**…”

“Wendy,” she decided to interrupt him instead of visa versa. “Like the hamburger girl. You know, ‘Where’s the beef?’ That’s (a franchise catchphrase) from the 70’s.” She looked up at the caterpillar, trying to gauge his age. Impossible, she decided, in this land full of paradoxes and riddles. Could be one day. Or one century.

“Whaat … are … you?” He was satisfied with the Whooo part for now. Time to change the question. “Whyyy” could be next, maybe even “howww” to cover all the bases. He takes another inhale from his hookah pipe, ready to emit new (smoke) letters.

“What am I?” she said, half to him and half to herself. She hadn’t thought of it before (!). “I am a…” Witch? she pondered saying next. Mermaid? Or just a clever girl playing hide and seek with damaged goods. “Just a girl. With a schweet secret smile,” she decided to tack on.

“Shooow … me.”

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0027, 0517, Nautilus, Retirement Islands, Wild West, Wonderland

Missing

“Beckett?” she wondered.

“Paul.”

“No. The sim. Missing Beckett.”

“Oh. Correct.”

—–

“Muse is a key word here,” she mused aloud later, perhaps for me but also others listening in, the prescient, the psychic. Like our damaged friend Kolya. There he is. Listening in.

“Hi big boy. I’m over here now.”

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0027, 0516, Europe, Lower Austra, Nautilus, Retirement Islands, Upper Austra, Wild West, Wonderland

Art Box

He wanted to scream but couldn’t open his mouth to do it. Stuck. Just like in life.

Realities were shifting around for him more rapidly than ever, almost at a blur’s pace now. Time to calm the hell down. Where’s that green phone and D Flat ring when you need it?

Lunchtime now. He wondered if any of these other dudes he was sitting with on this beam in the sky had any packets of mustard for his sandwich. He hated bologna without mustard. But with it: best thing ever. “Wanda forgot the mustard again,” he said to Fred beside him, lifting the top slice of bread to show the non-yellowness within.

Yellow yellow yellow. He was remembering something. Tumbling, he fell into a different reality, different universe really.

Wanda was with him, now called Hidi, true face hidden beneath towering blue hair. They had kids between them. Yellow ones, all beaming smiles at the camera. “Cheese!”

He tried to reach for the ringing phone but it remained just out of his grasp. Blue anyway; probably wasn’t for him, and neither was Wanda-now-Hidi and the in-between kids.  And now he’s checking, the key is D, not D Flat. Too far away from Middle C to matter. Oh well. On to the next!

“Let me try!” Hidi exuded, poseball whisked away as she selected the next.

“Get it?!” she shouted down to Kolya far below after assuming the new pose. “I’m a banana!” Kolya didn’t get it, the one within not yet ready to be peeled. “Very appealing!” he shouted up, trying to be funny despite the confusion. The holes in his head began to hurt. He forgot to eat his sandwich before he left that one reality, but there was the problem with the mustard. Then, with the vertigo induced by hunger apparently, he fell off the beam into a family centered by beaming yellow kids. Well, except for the middle one, who was too small to smile and just sucked on her pacifier to indicate being please in the moment. The camera’s eye moved onward…

Kolya selected one but it turned out to be Hidi’s pose again. “Whaddaya think? Giant tigers!” He’d seen this before. But where?

Then he remembered (again). Picturetown. Must – get – back.

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0027, 0515, Canada/Picturetown, Nautilus, New York, Retirement Islands, Springfeld, Wild West

switchers 02

Randy reads captioned synopses of potential shows to watch while eating his dinner (pizza). “Mystery Theatre, ‘House on the Hill’. Estranged sheriff’s niece summons nervous deputy back from the grave to help solve his own murder, no no no (*click*);  Self Help Channel: ‘Taming the Banana Within’, nope (*click*);  ‘Attack of the 50 Foot Man’: that might be good. Hmm, stars the same guy as the first. Oh well, here goes!” (captions off)

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0027, 0514, Nautilus, Paper Soap+, Retirement Islands, Soap, Wild West

Mr. Chicken

“You cannot see me yet properly, *can* you… *Can*. Kolya, if you wish. I am both gray and brown to you. Thus: Gray Brown. That is my name. I am both black and white and colored. I am one tv swapped with another. I am your childhood, Can… Kolya. And I can be your adulthood.” She tried another pose.

“How about now?” she gurglingly asked, neck broken, facing the ceiling. “Does this ring a bell, spark a memory? Do you (she moved into a different pose; voice returned to normal) recall *killing* me? Hmmmm?”

“I don’t want to (sniff), I don’t — want…”

She was relentless. “I’m going to summon someone now, Can, someone who wants to talk to you. Someone: nervous.”

“Okay let’s CUT there for tonight; start fresh in the morning. Thanks everyone!”

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0027, 0513, HANA LEI

missing marbles

“Hi old man. What you got there (in the basket)?”

“STAY AWAY FROM MY CANDY!”

“Okay, okay.” He took a minute to let the scene reset to “normal”. “Let’s start again. I *promise* not to eat anything — there you go *again* (he waited for another reset). Now, I’m not going to take anything; just want to look.

Thaat’s better.” The demon inside the man didn’t return. Kolya was quite hungry but certainly wasn’t going to steal any of *this* food. Besides, sugar is bad for you. It will rot your head out given second chances. “Is it Halloween, old man? Or the day after?” Calm this time. He could hear the swamp bugs recede into day. He thought of Alysha, how she did the same. He was tempted to ask the old man if he knew her but decided he didn’t in his prescient ways. He looked for a door into the shack; didn’t see it at first because it blended into the drab gray-brown of the rest of the structure.

Did the person or persons within give this man candy? And candy is usually given to children on Halloween, hmm. Better just head inside.

Okay *this* is different.

“Arrr-kan-sawwww,” the eyes hissed in their mouth-less ways all around them. Or was it “Jerrrrry”? Let’s go with the former.

He remembered something: “Marble Falls, Marbles Fall,” he recited spontaneously. Nowhere to sit his own “I”. He’d have to leave the way he came in.

“GOOD LUCK FELLOW!” they said in unison as he made his way back out of the swamp and onto drier land.

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0027, 0511, HANA LEI

more Paper…

The description just said “Shadow Girl”.

“Alysha?” he called up.

Then she was there with him, staring into what appeared to be the heart of the swamp taking up a big chunk of the sim. Chunkey was its name; perhaps a Chuckey within, without the “n” this time. Alysha would know. He asked her.

“Yellow fellow,” she replied, noting the sun was coming up. Soon safe to move.

“Yellow?” He looked over at Alysha, noted her race.

She took the note and ran with it. “Not that kind of yellow. Say you had a soda, you shook it up. What would happen?”

Kolya imagined an explosion. He said this.

“Correct. Imagine this explosion *inside* someone.”

—–

She turned shadowy again. Kolya followed her out into the swamp itself, from whence she came.

He understood she was receding. Only armed with a minimal amount of info (probably enough, though), he was on his own again. In this Paper-y sim that this time wasn’t either Paperweight or Paper itself. A different Paper.

On to the sim rim swamp shack.

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0027, 0510, HANA LEI

switchers

He stayed close to the green phone on the bar the rest of the evening. Just in case. Smoking hot Trudy Trickster was studying the back of his head, wondering how the holes got in. Toby Tangerine was mixing up another drink, perhaps a martini, but if so, doing it wrongly. Trudy was definitely not having any of that. Although a brilliant neurosurgeon, currently out on bail from Prison Hospital, Tobias, as his friends call him, was a botch of a bartender and had trouble making cornbread milk for his oldest and least complaining customer, nonagenarian Margret Thatch, due to turn 100 in June. “I’ll get a proper bartender to make your birthday drink that day,” he promised, thinking back to mentor Ted Bruiser and his prediction that he’d save as many lives as a doctor as he took away with the drink. “Balance, my pupil,” he spoke into his eyes, deep as pools, taking it all in. “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. *You* are The Lord.” He took his alternately skillful and skill-less hands from his side and held them up to his receptive face. “With these.”

Tobias Tangerine knew he wasn’t the Lord, but gosh darnit, if Margret didn’t enjoy that drink. At the same time, patient Gail Gordon died in Prison Hospital, operated on by the proper bartender who couldn’t make it.

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Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0027, 0509, Paper Soap+, Soap