Improvio’s siblings Chroma and Earie knew they were being betrayed, and summoned a Fire Ickle to aid them.
He promptly began working at Rocky’s bar after former bartender Bean went missing under mysterious circumstances.
Handsome devil, thinks Rocky. Olde Lapara Towne better lock up all their women for this one.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0005, 0604, Heterocera, Lapara
Something appeared today in Grasslands. Sand… dunes to be more precise.
And a castle on top of perhaps the highest and sandiest one.
It has a ring to it.
“Twisted”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0005, 0515, Bogota, Bogota Proper, collages 2d, Heterocera, Lapara, MAPS, North Carolina
“What happened to your mushroom house in this spot, Rocky?”
“I don’t know. I have my market now. What happened to your Bettie?”
“She’s still around. I think.” Nancy pauses, looks across the street. “Who lives in that house over there, Rocky? The one with the rams in front.”
“Dunno. I’ve seen people.”
“People?” Nancy parrots.
“People.”
Nancy looks down at her white hand. “People people? Or, you know, animal people. Like you.”
“People people,” Rocky responds.
“Normal sized?”
“Pretty normal, probably. A man and a woman one time. Then another time: two men. Then another time: two women, a man, and another woman. And another man.” He puts his paw to mouth. “Let’s see, I think that’s it.”
“Let’s go take a look.”
“I don’t like to pry in other people’s lives,” replies the raccoon.
“Oh sure you do,” Nancy says, and gets up to cross the road. Rocky follows.
—–
“Hopscotch, Rocky. Go ahead and try it out.”
“Alright.”
“Baaaad,” the closest ram opined. “Rocky stepped off the hopscotch animation and moved toward the creature.
“Baaaad?” he asked back. The ram stared at him. The matching sheep kept grazing on what little grass was left in the yard.
“Bettie told me once that Ram dies with Lamb,” the anime girl says. “I found it curiously puzzling. Have you heard that (expression)?”
“Nope. We might as well go inside while we’re here.” A chill filled the air. Something was different in Olde Lapara Town today. And it wasn’t just the new fall foliage. Something else was fallen here. Rocky opened the front door. They entered.
—–
“I don’t really feel comfortable being here now, Nancy. This may be the home of the town owner, Levi Clownski.”
“Check the files on this computer, Rocky.”
“I’m not doing that Nancy.”
She walked toward the kitchen in the back. “Suit yourself. I wonder if they have any meat here? Or if they’re vegetarians like me?”
“You like fish, though. I think that makes you a, what do they call it, a Pisces something.”
“Pesetarian,” Nancy offers.
“That could be it.”
“It is it.”
—–
“Come here, Rocky. Bread. I made two more slices for us. Nom nom nom — pretty good. Hands free eating.”
“I see. But we better leave. I need to get down to the market and open back up. Night shift — until I hire someone else. I’m trying it out.”
“Oh. Can I come?”
“Oh why not.”
Then Nancy spotted it. She indicated the formica table between them. “What is that over there?”
“Um, that’s cookies, my dear. But you’ve given up sweets.”
“No. The green and gold thing behind it.”
Rockky saw the object too. “Looks like a ring from my angle.”
Nancy then made the unfortunate mistake of putting it on her hand. She shows Rocky. “Pretty?” she asked.
“Pretty weird.”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0005, 0504, Heterocera, Lapara
“I’m so glad you brought the dart board back to Audrey’s, Rocky. Play another game? My turn to start this time. Rocky? Are you listening to me?”
Now absorbed in the bar’s computer card game, Rocky saw his strategy for getting a full house to win would not work. “Yes, Jackson Nova,” he answered in irritation.
“Jackson *Super*nova,” the man-shark proclaims proudly. He’d not make the error of his clone siblings and erase the true prefix!
Rocky ignored Jackson and talked to Mary instead. “How long do you think it’ll take Paul to get back to your Malone Central *this* time?”
“Days,” she answered, transfixed by the label on her beer. “Days and confused.”
—–
He’d been standing there for the longest time, trying to make the next decision. Town lawyer Teebestia Heartthrob walked up. “Can I help you sir? Are you lost?”
“No,” Paul replied. “I’m just a bit stoned,” he admitted. “Wait. You’re not the fuzz? Copper? Because I didn’t mean that if so. I meant I was stone cold tired. Stone cold tired, yeah.”
She laughed liltingly. “No, I’m not a copper. Nor bronze, nor lead nor any other metal.” She was playing with his mind now. His little weak mind. “My name is Teebestia, but everyone calls me Teeb. Now brace yourself when you turn around. My sight is not for the faint of heart.”
Paul turned his head ever so slowly. Would this be the big reveal?
“Holey moley!”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0005, 0410, Heterocera, Lapara
Great, Rocky thinks. My first customer! Hope the store doesn’t disappear again. Stupid root prims.
“Howdy over there,” the now white Paul says. No clothes again except the underwear, to mitigate his demon nature as much as possible. “I’m going to clean you out today, hehe. I have a whole city to feed for a couple of days. Malone Central.” Paul tested the walking raccoon. “You’ve probably heard of it,” but he almost said that as a question.
“Nope,” states Rocky plainly. ‘But I’m glad of the business. I’m a novel writer myself, but the second book is going slow, and my original tome isn’t selling as well as I planned. Long story. So have *you* ever heard of ‘Bible Truth’? That’s my town, I guess you could say.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t. But I’d like to spend more time in The Above. I’m from around here but not from around here. This store is new. I heard about it through The Grapevine. We get hungry down there in Malone Central, but have just existed on what grows on the almost barren Grassland for a long time. It’s the grass itself. We’re… well, we’re all pot heads I suppose you could say. There’s a robot… but that’s a long story as well.”
The anthropomorphic animal and almost naked man share a smile. “Well, help yourself. Munchies all around. If you’re into the healthier stuff, there’s a cooler with meat and cheese products in the back. Maybe some yogurt — yeah, yogurt. We don’t specialize in vegetables, sorry. There’s a garden around here you can loot for carrots, however. I don’t recommend it, though.” Rocky looks over at his gun, thinking back to the day he had to use it to chase off the clowns. Those dratted clowns.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0005, 0409, Heterocera, Lapara
He doesn’t exactly know how, but Rocky is very pleased that Hucka Doobie’s gift of a media player (“tivi screen”) from Collagesity works in Baker Bloch’s Olde Lapara Towne apartment as well. He can’t stop staring into it…
Hucka has returned to Collagesity, but The Librarian remains, similarly absorbed in “Floydodo”.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0005, 0313, Heterocera, Lapara
“It’s a magic book,” states Hucka Doobie to the visiting Librarian, who stopped by for the day. “Just open it to any page and start reading.”
The Librarian does so and reads aloud.
“‘Martha: Our son does not have blue hair… or blue eyes, for that matter. He has green eyes… like me. George: He has blue eyes Martha.'” He looks up.
“See?” explains Hucka Doobie. “There, George and Martha, our Washingtons, our first couple — Adam and Eve — use the illusion of their son as a battlefield for dominance. Ickles.”
“Sonny-Jim?” asks The Librarian, reading further.
“Yeah. I think that’s the name. Unifying factor. Blue-green.”
The Librarian looks on the opposite page. “Who’s Audrey?”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0005, 0312, Heterocera, Lapara
“You waiting on your worse half too?”
“Sure am.”
“Whaddaya say me’s and you’s go for a drink while we’re biding our time?”
“Sure am!”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0005, 0308, Heterocera, Lapara
“Where *am* I??”
—–
“There, that’s better. Hi Rocky!”
“We found an Ickle,” the raccoon mumbles, half asleep.
“What’s that Rocky?”
His eyes open. “Two of them, Bettie. A blue one, then a green one. East and west. Directly.” He turns into the walking version of himself and goes to her. “Down there. Just in the other sim.”
“What are we waiting for?” she asks rhetorically.
—–
“What now?”
“We wait,” states the raccoon.
“Oh my.”
“Rocky?”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0005, 0306, Heterocera, Lapara, MAPS, New York
“Trust me,” Rocky says. “You won’t be able to get through that narrow opening to the main street, Danny. We’ll have to go around the back of this building to reach the hotel.”
“Oh all right. Stupid anti-superhero powers.”
On the way, Rocky watches yet another person jump off one of those so-called suicide platforms to their death on the rails below. “Third one this week,” he says to himself.
“Hmm, this one won’t make it either. Come on Danny! Over here!”
“Hmph. Could have swore this was an alleyway just the other day. Go ahead and try it anyway Danny, hehe.”
“What a Fool. Okay, let’s move on boy. Man-boy.”
“*This* is Main Street, Danny. But the hotel’s now 2 blocks down. I’m famished. Let’s see if we can find some place to eat, eh?”
“Doughnut,” Danny answers. “Doughnuts and pig.”
—–
“What’s this, then?” Rocky disables camera constraints.
“A trapped little peoploid!”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0005, 0304, Heterocera, Lapara
Sunklands 