I was back to the beginning point. They were staring at each other across a space I knew represented 2. The missing letter! Now to divide it in 2 and make two one’s about it.
The protective stone that is also an eye magically appeared in the middle. Everything was going to be all right (secret kept).
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0031, 0515, Iowa, Long Islands, Nautilus, Wild West
She practiced her melting exercise atop a magazine vending machine in seedier Eastside, as she’s started to call it, still pondering the missing letter. It wasn’t 3 days ago from now. Yet.
She thought of the barrier between here and Far or Furtherer East, another one or two of her concocted terms. Even more seedier, she’s gathered. Seed itself.
Indeed this is where she’d find the missing letter.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0031, 0514, Long Islands, Nautilus, Wild West
The water system of the town was *barely* serviceable — toilets slow to flush, water flow weak overall — but *someone* kept up all this infrastructure to a degree. She wondered about the 10! on the door of the stall she just exited, and how it could be connected to this 102 group she was assigned to investigate, linkable through 101 (10! > 101 > 102). Or perhaps the exclamation point stands for 2 somehow instead of 1, bypassing the needed link. She’d heard things in the middle of the night, scurrying from below, from the other side of the walls, even from above. Although the place appeared totally empty and deserted, someone was here. Her witch training gave her more clues. A *soul* was present: intelligent, secretive, perhaps ultraly so, and, finally, *powerful*. It could be Mid-Hazel disguising herself for one of those lessons, Esmerelda pondered here for not the first time. That might fit — why she can’t penetrate the soul further and read its thoughts, etc.
She was also told 102 represents a missing letter, which she’d narrowed down, again using her witchy powers, to either S, E, or W. If W, we’re all in a heap full of trouble. But I, the omniscient author in the moment, happen to know it’s S. Esmerelda would find out the same day before tomorrow before tomorrow.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0031, 0513, Long Islands, Nautilus, Wild West
She waited in an Alley, knowing this was the place. If only she could remove her hat but knew she couldn’t. Coven rules. *Especially* in a town like this. She must also avoid the facelight — green: she is green, like another famous witch from the Wicked West. Where she was, in fact, the opposite of the Mild or at least Milder East. Wicked Wild West.
Back home:
She wanted to buy a black cat but there wasn’t any around. Ruffles, a tuxedo, would have to do, pheh. *Pheh*.
She tossed and turned all night on her small and uncomfortable bed in her tiny apartment, worrying about the new assignment.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0031, 0512, Long Islands, Nautilus, Wild West
After “Mr. Body and Man” closed on Tuesday, the theatre’s marquee was changed, heightening debate about the monument becoming the priority for the town, this Mountain in the Air. Because a new option had been added to the first two: Cyclone Stone, spelled wrongly in the marquee due to, at least in part, the hastiness of the switch. Bradley Pitt said: get it out there asap, let the town decide, not 2 wankers playing chesskers in a cornfield. He closed shop for the night and left his assistant Stu to remove the old letters and put up the new, working overtime again but of course not getting due pay for it. Bradley would pay for his stinginess. Stu did this on *purpose*, he realized in the morning, still holding his resignation letter in his non-fist pumping hand before it. And he *knows* I have arthritis and can’t do the job myself. Bradley decides then and there that Stu would never hold a proper job again in town, and would have to move elsewhere. In truth he’d already packed his bags and was heading through Diagonal as Pitt thought this, soon to pass the northwest corner of the county. So many lost down through the years now. The glory days were, I guess, around a Century ago by now. Which makes the monument, the rock *or* stone, even more important, a new *beacon* of hope for the seat and the county as a whole.
Which brings us to Roger Pine Ridge again, still waiting under the Rock or Stone (You Choose), still hoping. “Marty. Where *are* you,” he mutters between white stick tokes, watching a beat up old Chevy move away to the northwest beyond the square.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0031, 0511, Iowa
Still relevant!
More soon…
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0031, 0510, Collagesity Fordham-, Lower Austra, Nautilus
“Hey loverboy,” she said, spying him spying through the limbs at the limbs. “Tree’s over *here*.” Marty moves his eyes from what Lichen called her sister to the now Santa-less tree. “Now all we have to do is change the lights out and we’re done, Christmas Tree to Winter Tree completed.” Marty kept thinking about the sisters, one black haired, one blonde, the one that less interests him strangely enough now his hair had been dyed. Ditsy was her name, she said. Didn’t sound like a real name to him, didn’t ring true. Yet they just showed up and got down on the floor and started talking to each other, giggling, whispering. The other one’s name was Zizzy; just as improbable. They said they were twins.
“Now you’re just looking in the air at something,” she said, still spying. “Come over here and help me take the colored lights off and put the white lights on. Say goodbye to Christmas.”
It was Valentine’s Day and indeed the traditional end of the X-mas season, just like Halloween was the beginning. It now stretched to almost a third of the year, Labor Day and St. Patrick’s Day soon to be threatened at each end if he was reading the signs correctly, which said “Happy Holidays” reduced to one. It was like the Nazis. It was like Attila the Hun. Soon it might be just Christmas and its polar opposite, 4th of Juli, standing. And then…
“*Dearest*,” she said more sharply. “Over here. *Now*.”
——
Soon they would reach the star at the top and have an important decision to make.
Niece Amanda kept carrying around her new uncle’s crappy Valentine’s bear present around, contemplating pushing him into the tree from this angle and ending the ruse. Might be what tips the balance in her favor, she thinks, sensing the building tension between the two. Zizzy, pheh. It was always going to be something new.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0031, 0509, Nautilus, Upper Austra
Despite the overall color, the bar was dominated by blondes tonight, much to Marty’s disappointment. He had traveled so far… He decides to roll with the punches and chats up a friendlier one named Lichen, who said she use to be a Moss. Then, surprising him, she moved behind the bar and asked if he wanted a drink. “Break,” she explained. “Men don’t like to pick up their bartenders usually. Want to have more freedom with their time.”
“What time do you get off?” he ventured, having nothing to do but kill the same himself. There must be *something* here. The Pointer almost always indicates, he reinforces in his mind.
—–
She tried the emerald green table again because of the eyes and all. Maybe she’d have more luck with this… Redd, *bleh*. Perhaps she could talk him into letting her dye his hair beforehand.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0031, 0508, Nautilus, Upper Austra
Returned to Our Second Lyfe, Marty stares at The Rock from his small sea green isle, wondering what it means. Owned by a Blackbyrds group. The Other Rock is in the southwest part of the square, *this* Rock is too — Nautilus continent that is, and its 32 x 32 grid of 256 x 256 meter sims, the focus of the last 6 photo-novels if you include the current one.
For some reason he doesn’t remember the giant Iris growing in the middle of this isle — its only vegetation — but upon checking later, sees it is on old photos from the area, this so called Owl Island which use to have two blue pools that acted as the upside-down night bird’s peepers. No more — Second Lyfe is soo mutable. But the association still stands in hypertime, which is also what this is all about. Marty stands, the pin beside him, as red as his hair, suddenly glowing brightly. Time to go inside again. He ponders the possible directions: north, northeast, east.
How about Diagonal?
“Alright we’re just passing Ray Ray Ray on our left, which has taken over Monroe. The Pointer (he points). It must be around here somewhere (he follows the point). There!”
“Well park the car!” Marty demanded to Roger. “Let’s get out.”
“10-4,” Roger said, rogering that, and pulled into the next available space on the town square.
Stepping up on the curb in approaching the stone, Roger saw something different, something he couldn’t explain. Marty couldn’t see it from his angle, and there was a reason for that. Absorption.
He came closer, still barely believing his eyes. “Marty, come quick! Your name! The rock –” sputtered Roger, ” — has *your* name on it. Marty?”
Roger searched in every direction from his position at the SW corner of town square. But Marty was nowhere to be found. One Strange Rock indeed.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0031, 0506, Iowa
Sunklands 
