Good fishing in Black Lake, she’d always heard. At least before the Big Split, as some people ’round these parts call it.
Why was Ruby here? I thought she was heading to Wally in Wallytown, I can hear the reader express. Confusing enough! But we decided to place her here in Newt, in Annaberg taking up the whole sim of Newt, because the wall had been sort of torn down in Wallytown, formerly interior trees exposed to the harsh light of reality, spirits within perhaps removed to some more spiritual plane of existence. The Wall has been demystified, and the town had changed along with it. No more California over there, Nevada over here. No more Green Monsters to worry about, stashed away in a dark inside ready to pounce on unsuspected passerbys. All that was in the past. Capitalism, the worrying about bits and baubles, was front and center now. So Ruby felt the place worthless to her and her own peculiar dilemmas and issues and moved on. Black vs. Clear represented a more updated version of all that. So we slotted her into the Newt history, which is kind of overlapped with Osse-motor’s history now, thanks to Jimmy Dieselengine, or so she understood. Help me! I heard Ruby cry. Help us! I cried in turn. Bring your ice cream outfit and ice cream eyes over here! Set yourself down at a convenient place, use your observing eyes to *see*.