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
“Well, he makes a good point,” she tries to joke.
“He’s *pointing*… to his *name*,” said Marilyn to this, a what you see is what you get kind of gal. Unlike Sep here, who’s complicated. Marilyn was also reading her book upside down, which Sep didn’t bring up. No more pointing out anything. She needed to get to why she was here.
“I have a new gal in my life, Marilyn. I think… I’m in love. Yet she’s married.”
“*Married*?” Marilyn exclaims. “More like *buried*. I’ve been married 7 times and that’s just because I’m only 42.” She looks over, satisfied smirk on her face. “Okay, 56,” she relents. “Go on, change your expression to shocked. I’ll wait.”
Sep sits there for a second, then obligingly lets her jaw drop. “*Fifty*-*six*?” she meters out, knowing what Marilyn wants to have said to her. If she had to guess, Sep would have said 49, which is splitting the difference.
“Yes, shocking I know. Now go ahead and do the same for the 7.”
So Sep feigns the second shock as well. “*Seven*?” The information she has about the Heart Line here better be good. If only the duck were truly alive instead of just a dummy he could help instead or at least chip in. She makes a mental note to search out the real Professor Duck after this was over.
The alarm goes off. Sep wakes up. No Shelley beside her. Unlike last night. Must have taken a walk, she rationalized, not hearing anyone downstairs. Then she realized the obvious: she walked home. Back to Arthur. One night stand she just had here. Better write down the Heart Line dream before she forgets, what good it did her. “*One* *night* *stand*,” she imagines telling still couch sitting Marilyn, giving her back a dose of her own medicine.
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0036, 0410, Corsica, Heterocera, Northwest^
Did you know a faceless, objectless Void begins at 4000 meters elevation in Our Second Life?
And physics starts to get a little wonky even as you approach. Eels can appear, for example, but not the kind you might expect.
Someone is pregnant. Someone shouldn’t be here. The bus down there is the way out. Take it.
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?
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0031, 0507, Collagesity Fordham, Lands End, Lower Austra^, Metropolis, Nautilus, Perch-Mistletoe, Southwestern, Upper Austra^, Wild West
Siamese twins Archie and Ed Bunker with surrogate mom Rose Wells, telescoped to the past in this here photo and known colloquially as Eyela, about 14 years old at the time of the snapping. She made sure the picture was public domain and available for later decoding. Smart girl!
But such condensings do have consequences. Hence: a 3 eyed woman who lives in a very similar house but in a neighboring village. One hand goes in, the other comes out. Karma.
The condition is now known as Winona Ryder Eye, after the famous actress whose 3rd was unlocked, like a door, during the filming of “Edward Scissorhands” on location in Lutz, Florida when actor Johnny Depp accidentally opened it up with his scissorhands prop while pretending to cut her hair with them. She was rushed to the hospital but the forehead wound had already healed, advantage gained. Winona developed second sight, and was able to see the Upside Down, which gave her a leg up in winning key roles down the road in her then fledgling career.
Could be that the one eyed woman above is named Ylem, or that’s the technical (slang?) term for her medical condition of singular ocularity. I’ll have to ask Rose more about it when I get the chance.
The handle on the library’s door flickering in and out, indicating irreality.
He knew what needed to be done. Alysha had already left, having to start her shift in the castle’s “core”. Rumor has it she was also a dancer in disguise, going by the name of Francis Wagner. If so, she twirled on yin-yang and did it well, or so they say.
He’d met her (in disguise himself) over on one of the levels below the club, selling sushi. “Two please,” he said, trying to blend in. She saw through it, being a masquerader herself. “Brend,” she said in return. “I didn’t recognize you without my hat on.”
The second “Two”, was strangely different from the first, as if foreign text had just floated in from the sky to roost on the various pages.
He felt his world turn upside down.
It was about time to play the piano to let off steam.
It was raining when he got back to Collagesity and it made his depression worse. He decided to go to Vivian Blue Hair, the new girl — or one of ’em — for advice. She was a fire scryer, using candles for the most part, like here. He asked what was foremost in his mind. “Which… one?”
Vivian could have been selfish and said she was the one, but almost immediately upon staring into the flame saw black and white patterns all around. She slips deeper into trance, closing her eyes. “I see two countries — or counties — one black and the other white, but both named Austra.”
“Austra, yes,” Phillip replies. “There’s a Lower and an Upper — everyone knows that–” Phillip stops here, understanding that Vivian Blue Hair arrived off continent just day before last week. She was a friend of… he can’t remember. Maybe Man About Time, wherever the heck he is these days. Phillip is already itching to leave his Collagesity but has nowhere left to go, he doesn’t think. Not after Wendy.
Vivian Blue Hair changed into someone else, chessboard patterns moved to the face. “A promise made, a promise lost.”
It was the cards (!), heart upside down being a spade.
Jeffrie Phillips wakes up from the rabbit hole as the lot of ’em fall to the chessboard floor in a disheveled mess, like roses. He’s received his clue.
“Charlene,” he says to the woman beside him, the usual one, but probably not *the* one. This also stirs her.
“Yes, Mr. Jeffrie Phillips, sir,” she dutifully and groggily recites, automatically reaching for his red tie hung on the bed post but then realizing it was still the middle of the night. She returns her hand to his bare chest.
“That new girl in town…”
“Right… see where *this* is going.” She yawns and looks at her nails.
“No, no, I don’t fancy her or anything.” Jeffrey Phillips definitely fancies her as he does most women, but that wasn’t the point here. “She has black hair, correct? Not blue or anything crazy like that.”
“First off, blue *isn’t* crazy. My Aunt Zelda had blue, red, and green in a row before her death in the early 80’s.”
“She lived that long, huh,” Jeffrey replied, starting to contemplate time and the colors that one can change into at the end. “But to my point…”
“In a certain light,” Charlene said in answer, “yes, it could be considered blue. But the light has to shine upon her hair in a very particular setting, I’ve noticed. Early morning or late day perhaps: hafta check.”
“So: blue.” Jeffrey decides to lay the cards on the table, this time in an orderly manner. “I dreamed about her just now.”
“I bet you did.”
“Not that kind of dream. A dream of this whole continent, which (he then realized) broke down into a series of black and white squares — *sims*.”
“Fascinating,” she deadpanned, and put on her babydoll and got up to get some water. “Want anything to drink or eat while I’m in the kitchen?” He watched her move away from him in a satisfying manner. Nice to have compensation when he returned home. Charlene is a swell mate as well as lover. He’ll keep her around for sure; a short leash. Strange way to think about it, he realized. I don’t *own* her. Or maybe… maybe I do in a way. I pay her bills, I give her a place to stay here at the Blue Feather (building). She was rummaging around the kitchen now. “Are you going to answer me?” she called, hoping he could hear her over the static this time. “I’ll get you something anyway.” More noises, and then about 5 minutes later she returned with some milk and a plate of choco chip cookies. She lay down beside him, put the plate on his partially bare belly, and picked up the top one for herself, studying it. “Cow chips, they’re called. Saw them advertised on TV. Big beaver holds one up in his paws.” She extends her arms here and holds the cookie between them like a small steering wheel toward the static filled TV on a table just beyond the bed. “Like this.” In the snow, she imagined the big beaver mirroring this back to her.
He studies her, then he follows her arms to the cookie, realizing what this meant. “That’s disgusting.” He picks one up himself using just the one arm. Oversized and heavy on choco chunks, he sees, but otherwise just an ordinary cookie.
—–
In another dream that night, the cookie Charlene holds expands and turns into a whirling vortex, sucking up everything in the room including his milk. “And so on the 5th day…” he heard her say beside him as they fell and fell, blobs of white and chunks of brown all around. The rabbit hole seemed endless this time.
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0027, 0208, Collagesity Fordham, GTA, Lower Austra^, Nautilus, Upper Austra^
Cassandra City still holds promise but probably not for this here current photo-novel. Baker Bloch must take his leave, rented apartment in town unused. Big Dick, a Phil actually, waits patiently in the corner of his hotel lobby, looking forward to more communication through the aether.
—–
Story possibilities in Heartsdale, a major driver early on in photo-novel 20, have most likely been exhausted as well. Let’s return there for a similar, final shot: Baker Bloch in front of Small Wood posing with Teddy, a black and white horse owned by an avatar named Zero.
Both glimpse Philip Strevor through a broken gate to the sidewalk. Strangely, the duplicate Yoko Ona that also walked around this particular Heartsdale block is gone now. Yoko as a whole has probably moved on from this sim.
—–
There seems to be more in Iris, a place to be focused on still. For example, there’s a kind of, um, inexplicable “hole” in the center of the 4-5 sim region owned by [delete name], who may actually, in Real Life, be [delete word]. If so, *Crooked* seems to be a link. The prominence of the Moth Temple seen in the background here, the “eye” of the whole Heterocera continent, could play a role in the hypothetical overshadowing of this mystery spot.
—–
Toppsity? I’m not sure what took place in the trial of Yoko Ona. We *know* that she spat on Baker Bloch when he tried to turn her right-side up from upside down while both were fishing in Heartsdale Bay, the last Heartsdale related post in this here photo-novel actually. You don’t spit on the chief avatar of a blog, the one the owner most identifies with, and get away with it — at least in the blog itself, where we still are last time I checked. (pause) Yes, I just checked. We are still in the blog.
But the witches of her coven eliminated original judge Tronesisia: drowned, with a possible saving ship arriving too late in the early afternoon after the late morning accident. Then the several witnesses we know of — Miss Raincoat (aka Sammy Whatammy), Uncle Stinky, and probably Crayola as well (aka Tammy Whatammy?) — have all been linked to maleficent forces too. Wait, let me check that again. (pause) Uncle Stinky has *not* been associated with such forces. He still can be used by the prosecutor George A., who we’ve not talked about since that particular post either. So we should return to Toppsity and finish the trial. Defendant Yoko Ona may be called to the stand herself. *That* could be interesting.
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0020, 0614, Cassandra City^, Heartsdale^^, Heterocera, Iris^^==, Maebaleia/Satori, Toppsity^
“Come on and jump in with me, Molly,” he implored in his squeaky voice. “The water’s just fine today!” The chicken beside Mick remained doubtful. Not as stupid as some people think, those creatures are. They’ve seen these Florida kind of tricks before. Could be bottomless, Molly ponders. Could be a black hole.
Besides, something is already there, stuck it seems. Plugging a hole perhaps, she ruminates further. All Blue — no, wait, the *hair* isn’t blue. And Cloe, sitting on this very cement porch yesterday, *lost* her blue hair, along, ultimately, with her hat, hands, and the rest of her body. The rest of the h’.s, including heart and, finally, health. Molly came to a logical conclusion: This *is* Cloe, but an Anti-Cloe, someone reborn that perhaps shouldn’t be reborn. An abomination. Let’s just call her “H” as in capital “H”, she decides, thinking of how to present this new town development to the chickens of the local coop later on.
Mick, tired of waiting, dives without Molly into the center of the watering hole, unconcerned about the presence of another being there. He doesn’t see “H”; she doesn’t see him. They exist in different dimensions, as if turned upside down from each other.
BLAM-O!!
—-
Anti-Cloe is freed from her spherical blue encapsulation, able to leave the pool now.
Having served its function, the watery hole then withers away into the nothingness whence it came. When will you learn, Mick, that it truly does take two to know?
—–
“Soup, miss?”
“Get the f-ck out of here little demon,” she waves him off. “Oh, and fetch me some clothes from the dresser beside the bed. Anything but blue.
Well, just don’t stand there staring. Do it!”
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0016, 0309, Collagesity Fordham, Lower Austra^, Nautilus
It was as if the world turned upside down on her. Witchery in Cassandra City. She knew it had to come from Toppsity slightly north, where the elements were all f-ed up thanks to the battles. *She* was a witch. But what did it all mean? She couldn’t remember that crucial bit yet.
Triangle: the triangle must be signed and sealed. That’s where it all starts. One hand on top of another on top of another on top of another…
Filed under **VIRTUAL, 0014, 0514, Cassandra City^, Maebaleia/Satori, Toppsity^
Sunklands 
