He watches from afar, noting that she may have Winona Ryder eye. Didn’t she just visit a local hair stylist several days before? He knows she did, although not with the results she wanted. The results *they* wanted? It was a question he had to be asking at this juncture in our story.
—–
Back up to “normalcy”.
—–
“Where you been?”
“Oh just riding around the sand.”
“Hmm.”
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0037, 0307, Hana Lei^^, Sand Springs
Baker Bloch hiding behind a big potted plant at the rental plaza, just trying to get an idea of who passes through these here parts. None spotted in the time he was there.
Just dummies around.
He’d missed the appearance of Ruby — Alien version — by a country mile, let’s say. Despite the lack of pavement where the Black Lake Bunch usually hang out in the Chicken Pen, Jen had covered her dusty, dirty tracks well, with lady of the night Nancy Pantsy doing her part 02. I recall little Alysha listening to it all from her own hiding place in The Burro, another alley across from the first. And Dogg… who could forget Dogg? I didn’t.
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0031, 0116, Nautilus, New Mexico, North, Slaashsides
“You must love me exactly as I love you!”
And so we’ve returned to Black Lake in a very unexpected way through Misty and her partially submerged beau, soon to be husband (??); circled back around. We have similar choices that we did before here, then. Return to Paper Soap from Paperweight using the resonant keyword Paper? A painter paints, a complainer complains. I’m no painter and I’m no complainer. I can go with the flow, even if it doesn’t involve oiling it up and applying to canvas. Joey Avatar knows how comfortable canvas feels now (!). I don’t need to break a couple of nails to understand, but I do need to hammer a couple. In our fence. I’m looking out our Real Life window now. So many people outside, though. If only they would go away for at least that one special day of the year. Hmm.
And I still have a foothold in Paper-Soap, with transfigured Moes’ pink welcome mat seen here back in the sewer tunnels behind sitting old Keith B. I always seem to have to brighten up the place considerably with “Phototools – Lo Gun Light” sky to snap a proper enough picture. But the dark, conjoined sims seems very important still — moving down the road. Photo-novel 31 should start just after Christmas or around the New Year. Omicron’s moving in from the north west east south too. Soon we’ll be surrounded on all sides, blocked in. I need to keep my options open. I’ve had a good run at my job. I’m saying goodbye to the school as a whole, wrapping things up. I know where my mentors are, the painterly ones, the ones that draw as well, were able to bridge the gap between the two disciplines, like Paul Clay. I was relaying to a student I was working with the other day about not liking clay, as in pottery. Foundation classes were cool, but when I moved on to the specialty courses, like pottery, like *weaving* — not a weaver — I lost interest. I dropped out. I returned 6 years later under the good graces of the college, completed my art degree. But, as stated, I’m not a painter, even thought that was my declared emphasis. Never was. I’m not a Warren. I’m not a Dennis.
But what do I have instead? A canvas true, if a map can be considered as such. It’s the world as a whole but it’s very focused in on our US of A. And within that US of A: Iowa. Ringgold County, even — just one county. And at the center of that county: a hypercube; there can be no doubt. You look inside the translucent layers, like paper, and see the bottom writing on the walls. Everywhere.
We continue…
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0030, 0416, Crisp Sea, Iowa, Lower Austra^, Nautilus, Paper Soap, Soap, Wild West
“I must ask Horace Wise how we got here when we go back. We must be dreaming — perhaps this fits into his post-R.B. Hayes theories of alternate US realities somewhere. Wake up, I say to this witchery of yours. Wake up!”
“Oh shut your gob,” Misty spat out to her thought-to-be future husband Septimius Felton, not worried at all that they were back at the painter’s place. A painter paints, a collagist collages. Paperweight is both. But here… *here*.
“Time to jump back in the lake,” she commanded.
“Again?” Wake up, he said in his head this time. Wake up! Down they go.
But he must admit it was pretty good fun for irreality.
There were all kinds of environments he could paint in. This one was just regular Midday, a default setting, actually one of his favorites and always easy to “reach”. Time was controllable in this land of two, initially in a fourfold way (Sunrise, Midday, Sunset, Midnight), and, with some additional quick adjustments, any time atall could be produced. Then, going beyond defaults, there were the customized environments, many in number. I’m sure all seasoned Second Lyfers have a set of their favorites that they regularly use. Mine include Fairy dark blue, Cornfield, Cromac, and Lo Gun Light. But Midday is certainly handy for initially brightening up any scene. So here we are.
He knows this is not Black Lake, where the monster came from or identified with at least. So a positive situation. He must paint this body of water before him over and over again for healing, for purification. He must drink the water — boil it first, of course. Take it into his body. Eventually he must — become this body (of water). 2n1. 4n1 to 2n1 to 1n1. There. He is TILE.
Kolya also claimed the larger bamboo house at the very center of the sim owned by the same rental company. 128/128, he thought, standing upon it. This will be *my* center as well. I can finally find myself, see who I am. He looks around.
“Shells? No no no no no. I’m through with shells.” Alysha manifested in the chair below the indicated art, helping him out again.
“You need to focus on the *monster*, Kolya. *Can* — you do this?”
Kolya remembers the name friends call him: Can. This was a friend. They, together, were looking for not necessarily a foe but indeed a fiend, removing one important letter from the equation. He(-she) had been here a long long time; Kolya was picking up on that as well. Black Lake. Circle of 4. He knew that the lakes would attract him, tiny to not so tiny. He must make a map.
“You must make a map,” Alysha spoke back, in his head as well but also with her mouth.
—–
He soon determined that this was the Black Lake in question, not the other more rounded water body just to the west. And it was more symbolic than anything. But he was not in his actual form any longer. He had turned into a painter. Oil me up, I suppose.
He sat at the table outside the bamboo hut he’d rented several days back and thought about All Orange and what he’d lost. The phone rang (D Flat). The phone never rang.
“Hallo?” He was expecting someone jovial, not saturnine. He was surprised. He stared at the missing blue eye on the Book of Monsters before him as she continued to chatter. He dare not crack the cover lest the other one roll off. Especially now. Would he get a word in edgewise?
—–
She hung up the phone. “We’ve got to keep an eye out on him,” spoke Jeffrie Phillips, glancing over at his bamboo hut across the water. “He may even try to off himself, say.”
“No he won’t.”
Her hair was now the green of seaweed but she was no monster, or at least Jeffrey thought. Was she?
“What next?” he queried about her appearance. “Your skin turns green?”
“Maybe,” she shot back quickly. Both knew that if this happened she was lost for good to him. Maybe even the mohawk would reappear.
Something was happening on this sim. A painter paints. A complainer complains. ART appears. A perfect circle. Pooh with his honey pot moves away from the scene with little to no impact now.
A perfect circle, eh? I thought, yellow included. I knew what this meant.
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0027, 0414, collages 2d, Crisp Sea, Lower Austra^, Nautilus, Wild West
“See? I can do this *too* (!).”
“Wonderful, child. We’ll make sure that nasty bug doesn’t return tonight so you can perform more.”
Heidi absorbed what this meant. “The… stage? The *big* stage?” She glanced over, seeing the empty platform — except for the wee Lost Angels all lined up in a row of course, flashing on and off as they do. This was their club. They could do as they wish. Soon they would combine again into one giant statue and move in a diagonal across Lower Austra to that other place, their other spot. Diagonals are powerful in this realm. So much so they have spread to other realms, namely Earth: Our US of A; Our Iowa; Our Ringgold County of Our Iowa of Our US of A. I remain pretty amazed: Fife in the middle of it all. And “Dune” famous Frank Herbert was a resident of Fife in another state. We found him in the dunes.
Now we find him onstage? No, it’s Frezied Fred instead, a different collage element performing solo again while the rest of his Purple Bunch band is in drug rehab. FF is frantic enough already. He doesn’t need speed, coke, or any other enhancement for his body. He’s a natural at his act.
But what’s this? (“HOW BIG WAS IT?” the crowd chants back, setting up the punch line) A *comedy* routine??
“When they finally stop laughing, you can go on, kid,” off-camera Todd A. states. “But it could take a while.”
Sometimes — just to mix it up again — Mr. Babyface and his nephew Peter dine in the old, abandoned spaceship. Today the topic of discussion is the Peopleeater of their new hometown directly below (skybox 02) and his hatred of its stick people residents. Assisted by Big Baby Jane, he’s declared war on them in essence.
“He hides out in that purple building in the smallest block of town, which *isn’t* purple when he’s out and about.”
“Must be the same as the building, then,” speculates Mr. Babyface alongside his nephew, hearing their voices echo in the big empty chamber, a full half of a sim from front to back. Big enough to carry a town the size of Collagesity to a new location if needed. If it were finished. Perhaps it is: maybe it’s just suppose to be an empty hull until utilized.
“Heidi’s gone again,” Mr. Babyface then ventured. “Said something about the North. She said she’s sorry she didn’t make your rant rave.”
“‘Tis okay. *You* were there. You are the important one.”
Mr. Babyface stopped eating, took in his nephew seated across from him. Subtract the freakish babyface, a medical condition, and he’s kind of the spitting image of himself at that age, down to the Hawaiian trunks and sunburned skin. Always in the sun he was. “You’ll turn into a prune or raisin you’re sitting out there in that sunlounge so much!” he recalls his Mom yelling at him from the window of her cool, dark kitchen. He can’t imagine how it was at his birth with that big, fat head of his. She complained about it not at all all the time. “You’ll never imagine,” she described the pain in no uncertain terms.
Peter was different, thank the Gods. Escaped the head gigantism that cursed himself, his father before him, and his father and so on — a male trait of the family. “Maybe it ends with me,” he remembers telling his Mom after Peter popped out with an ordinary nogg’n, easy as pie. You don’t know how relieved Marsha (sister) was at the time; she’d taken enough drugs in preparation for the birth to paralyze a small elephant. But here he was: Mr. Ordinary. Not Mr. Babyface or any other nickname that would stick with him through time. Just plain Peter. Peter Ladd. He continued with the Heidi discussion.
“Where’s (*bite*)… her partner?”
A good question indeed. Skybox 02 was created as a tribute to the golden hued, mechanical dominatrix but he never learned her name — Heidi, I mean, Billie never spoke it, saying it needed to be kept a secret. “Just keep calling her Golden One,” she requested. “Or Goldie — whatever — just something with Gold in it.”
Some say she’s the same as the big golden robot statue in the center of the town itself, ready to spring into action when needed. Perhaps her presence will spell the end of the Peopleeater-People War, or at least before it switches from blue (not very serious atall) to red (quite serious and worth looking into for solutions).
“Dunno,” he remembers to answer. “Maybe — you should make it part of your act. The not knowing anything much about her.”
“Tie it into the statue.”
“Exactly.” They were on parallel frequencies for sure. If only he could get the comedy.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0027, 0409, Collagesity Fordham, Lower Austra^, Nautilus
Mr. Babyface loads his pipe down with Red Dragon.
As he then happily puffs away he continues talking to the Kidd.
“I’m glad you brought me back, Heidi.”
“Billie here. In this location in this novel.”
“Okay, Billie, sure. But I promise I’ll take care of the city while you’re away on your journeys.”
“Big Baby will help you. She can patrol the streets; keep the various citizens and denizens at bay and under control. Along with the Peopleeater.”
“Cool.” More puffs. So satisfying. “Listen, are you going to stick around to hear my nephew rant and rave on his soap box over at the Arena tonight? He’ll be accompanied by the interpretive dance group Suds and Bubbles. In fact, I see they’re already warming up over there.
“Sure I will.” But Billie Jean Kidd knew she had another date and couldn’t make it. No need to let him down right now, though; dampen his enthusiasm for the new town and ruin his enjoyable pipe smoking. Next time she’ll buy him Blue Pennant. Billie then thinks Mr. Babyface is kind of like a cat: keep feeding him (tobacco) and he’ll always return. But you must mix it up because, also like cats, he’s a bit persnickety.
7 more puffs and Mr. Babyface is done, already tired of the flavor. Billie Jean Kidd ends up smoking the rest of the bowl herself; no need for waste.
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0027, 0407, Collagesity Fordham, Lower Austra^, Nautilus
Sunklands 