section 02 01
So I’ve killed Arthur Kill, ruminates Marty at his home in Urqhart while watching the full moon revolve atop Urqhart Hill. No extra “u” you’ll notice this time. But someone will have to fill his timeline over in Kraken Storybrook, hmm, he ponders further. I better get over there and set the stage.
But first, someone else has to “die”, hehe. Dye their hair that is.
—–
If only I had a bathroom with a mirror, hrmph.
Better get down to the local bar; see what changes I’ve wrought with the death of my former top assassin. Maybe even (murdered) Cathy Love Peace Hippie Child has returned? That would be kind of cool.
—–
No Cathy, just Linda, the old ball and chain. Oh well, at least she can dye my hair for me.
“Your place or mine?” she slurred, half talking into her 4th Corona-V tall stout of the night.
“Yours.”
section 02 02
Marty never got that dye, at least this night. Linda had moved into the treehouse next to the bar to save money — couldn’t afford even the one bedroom house across the road now due to sinking her money into all those Corona-V’s. The lush. Plus it was a shorter walk to the bar and a shorter stagger back home, she explained to hubbie Marty the next morning. I should also add that she used the bar’s bathroom for her business. “Maybe we should just move in together (again),” she suggested during her morning martini, temporarily forgetting about the deficiencies of Marty’s own bathroom. “Where’s *Marty’s* martini?” she started asking irritatingly after a couple of deep draws, which didn’t set the stage well.
Marty didn’t want this. He had the freedom now to do what he wanted, see who he wanted to see. He was still married true, but…
—–
Barry X. Vampire paused here in his writing. So Marty is still married to Linda, he thought, but they’re kind of estranged, even though they live in the same sim. And Marty is pining for former bar employee Cathy Love Peace Hippie Child, the one who stepped in the doo out back and is also unable to give Marty his old doo (hair) back. He tapped the No. 2 Kendal pencil lightly against the two manuscript pages he had typed tonight. And where was he? we must ask (to continue setting the stage). In the Centre of It All? But that’s where we’ve seen Olive of “Olive Green Pink” fame. Is Barry’s book *that* book? Oh… something is happening in the present in Urqhart as Marty and Linda begin stirring about. She’s in place for the Big Reveal — better head back.
—–
“Just over there,” she explains further while pointing through the slats of the upper deck’s fence.
“A ball park?” exclaimed Marty in disbelieve. “Out in the middle of *nowhere*?” So this is the big change he was warned about. By Barry (Barry?).
section 02 03
Linda Halsey finds a mirror in the Garden of the Goddess across the street from the bar, about equidistant from both her new and old Urqhart abodes. “Oh I look *hideous*,” she exclaims, not having seen her reflection in several weeks — since the move from old to new. “No *wonder* Marty doesn’t want to live with me any more. *I* don’t want to live with me.”
“Rhiannon!” she calls into the sky, hoping the Great White Witch would come down and save her from this condition. Like she did once before. “Rhiannon. I need you more than ever!”
A golden figure descended from the sky. Rhiannon.
section 02 04
“The peaks giveth and the peaks taketh away,” recites golden being Rhiannon after the transformation of Linda Halsey back to Cathy Love Peace Hippie Child on the Urqhart Hill behind them, topped with circling rocks. “You always serve them now, just like you did before. Now use your transformation wisely my child. My Love Peace Hippie Child.” She smiled over at the standing, barefoot woman from her log, a kind gesture but with slight overtones of sinister. Rhiannon knew there was a good chance this would not turn out well — again.
Cathy L.P.H.C. glanced back at the hill where it all happened.
Later that night, a special tree came over to Urqhart to see what all the commotion over here was about. Ball parks? Out in the middle of nowhere? He/she had to see for him/herself!
strange satellite
Illuminatus eyed the bluebird who’d just flown in on the window seal suspiciously with his most closed of 4 eyes.
“Harrison,” he muttered. “Harry.” He got up off the 256th most crazy thing in the sim and walked toward Centre again.
the blue jay’s way
“A Queer Creek is also a Strange Creek, Hucka Doobie.”
“Indeed.” How many more times would the bee-person appear to Baker Bloch, like the Gazoo to the Flintstones? As many times as he needed, Hucka realized. *She* was the one in error for wanting to have a relationship. She should have put that behind her long ago, when she was a man. But: here we are. *She’d* fight the urges.
Hucka Doobie then suggested they go down the Rabbit Hole again…
Buildings. Not fitting perfectly together unlike me — the perfection. I must make all this right.
I remove my perfection to attempt to fit in better with this strange, queer place but feel I am only a shell of what I was. I disappear.
q is for weird
I reappear. I attempt to get more information about this place from a computer terminal.
A man comes out of a blue box wearing a blue rose when I press the letter “q”. A doppleganger.
He kills me. I have not been the first to attempt to understand.
Luckily my true head remains to reconstruct me after the murder. Perfection makes up for failure. I kill in turn, decisively this time. The threat has ended for now.
God?
Stranger Creek was a total cock-up, ruminated David A. while staring at the blue jay feather in front of him and away from the cockamamie plans.
Set aside, but then Baker Bloch, searching for All Things Corsica, found it and started making stories. He emits a sigh. “Oh well, what’s done is done.” He looks at the next interviewee below him from his perch in the skies. “Better change into more properly dressed David B. before heading down…”
—–
“So — what are your qualifications for this job, Mr., um…”
“Perch,” came the answer in a boyish, nasal voice. “Well, I can walk in any direction, forwards, backwards, side-to-side. Even diagonally if needed.”
“That may be needed,” David B. quickly followed. Right off the Corsica map.
back in Storybrook…
“What is this place?” SEAN asked after accepting the teleportation offer from Marsha “Pink” Krakow. What *is* that girl up to now, hum? he asked himself before clicking the button. One way to find out.
“It’s the center. *The* center. Now look at where we are. The old Perch residence. Moved away, though, like so many others. Heard he’s over in Heaven’s Gate now.”
“*I* may be next, hmph,” responds SEAN “Green” Penn. “I’m *tired* of being moved all around town. First I’m down at Southside Bay in a teal cottage. Then I’m up in town again at a *green* one. Like my name — it all builds around that house now. Trouble is, I have memories of *both*. When I, er, went out to that island in the bay. You know the one.”
Marsha “Pink” Krakow didn’t know the one and said so.
“Oh, you know, with the kind of robotic lady with the different colored eyes. Like David Bowie.”
“David Whoie?”
“Bowie.”
“Oh, you mean Buie.”
“I meant what I said, girl. So, anyway, erm, she was there. On the island. I just row row rowed my boat over there.”
“Where did you get a *boat*?” Marsha responds.
“It was just there. Underneath the teal house. Or in the boathouse I suppose. *Inside* it. Downstairs inside… ohh.”
“Anyway — can we get to why I brought you here?” Her voice was reduced almost to a whisper now.
SEAN looked around. “Where’s, um, *Olive*. She hasn’t been –”
“She’s up in the monastery for a while. Because, you know, that thing with the giraffe.”
“That’s just something she made up. She doesn’t want to hang around us any more. Thinks us *juvenile*.”
“Not true.” But was it true? “*Anyway*, speaking of Olive — glad you brought her up — because she showed me a *trick* before she left.”
“Another one?” SEAN responded, use to such things.
“Yeah. So you’ve got your advanced menu on your viewer we told you to show a while back. Don’t you?” She stared at SEAN until he nodded. “Uh huh.” He then checked and breathed a sigh of relief that he’d actually done something they requested for a change, the crazy gals.
“Well, pull that down. Go to, um, *render*, then uncheck ‘volume’.”
“Okay. Trying to follow.”
“Ho. What is *that*?”
“That, my green friend, is Kraken Hill. And *that’s* what this town is trying to cover up — *has* covered up. That’s why everyone is moving away. It’s all baloney on the surface. Hogwash.”
“Watch your mouth, girl.” But then SEAN “Green” Penn kept staring around with volume unrendered, trying to take it all in. It made sense! This was truth she spoke.
realities
NOMAD // Love Meter
whispers: Welcome Marsha Krakow! Now, let me see what your sex appeal is…
[00:27] NOMAD // Love Meter whispers: Innocent
“Innocent, huh? I’ll show this stupid machine *innocent*.” She turns.
“And where is SEAN ‘Green’ Penn today? Why won’t he come out of his house? It’s as if no one *lives* there, hrmph.”
She moves toward the dock binoculars and uses them again. “And *where*, pray tell, are these *islands* you went on about so much? Nothing.”
—–
“Oh well. 10 more minutes, SEAN. *10*.”
But then she fell asleep for 2 hours on the bench beside the NOMAD Love Meter, woke up, and waited 20 instead. Nothing.
—–
“Wonder where Pink is?” SEAN pondered while staring out at the islands in Southside Bay.
one red
Especially before the introduction of Corona-V tall stouts into the local bar, the red topped town church at 56 Rose Lane was a way for people to set aside their different realities and gather together to pray toward a unifying deity most often called God. But, as we know, David A. B. was his “real” name, and he worked somewhere in the aether above Corsica Prime, making sure the right people got placed in the right spots on this continent, the other mainland masses be damned. We also know that Stranger Creek sim just off the northern coast was not one of his best works — a cock-up he called it on this here blog for all to witness. A cockamamie plan I added just afterwards, having been to the spot through the avatar known as Illuminatus, and also Arthur Kill. Yes, I, baker b., played both roles, as I always do on these nightly excursions in the virtual reality most often called Our Second Lyfe. Or, individually, Your Second Lyfe or My Second Lyfe. Because, you see, we are all experiencing different (virtual) realities when we come here. And that, I think, is what I’m trying to illustrate with Marsha and SEAN here. They exist in *similar* realities, sharing, for example, a church to go to in town. But — yes — reality is breaking down now due to the, ahem, beer. The local bar is also open on Sunday mornings for some inexplicable reason, but everything is to go these days, including the beer. In short, people are drinking at home this delicious but highly intoxicating brew and forgetting all about the gathering, the worshiping, the unity. They are all separated in their individual spheres, Marsha’s Second Lyfe over here and SEAN’s over there and “3rd wheel” Olive’s even different from either. Same with Mr. Fix It artist Gene Kelley, same with Lester the police car mechanic, and anyone else we’ll run into in Storybrook during our present story. The brook flows rapidly but with different currents. Currents. Each is row row rowing their boat to a different set of islands in the bay. And that boat, those islands, keep shifting around.
Inside the church, the lone occupant feels pleased at his work. Marty is a kind of God as well, one that wants to replace the starless black Bible with something red. And so it will come to pass, he declares. However, the real God has allowed this placement as well. “‘Starless and Bible Black’,” he deems, “will still reside inside ‘Red’, hidden like the ‘Lark’s Tongue in Aspic.'” But David A. B. was probably drunk when he spouted all this nonsense. We’ll see.
ABCD
A new danger lurks out in the wild whites of Stranger Creek. Certain Death, who prefers to go by C.D.
Many other things exist there in the cockamamie cock-up created by our God and Lord David A.B., better known for his benign creations such as Jesus Christ of Nazareth and Spongebob Squarepants of Bikini Bottom. But A.B. especially had no control over C.D., who followed from him and was not part of him at the present. In the Current.
If he can make it out of Whitewash Village we’ll all be in trouble. Stay tuned!
—–
And while we’re there snapping pictures, let’s open the draw distance and take a better look at God’s great cock-up known as Stranger Creek, formerly known as and followed up from Strange Creek. Before it got even weirder.
A jumbled mess isn’t it? And a perfect breeding ground for the unknown to come. The Corona-V brew infesting Storybrook and perhaps the rest of Corisca Prime and maybe beyond was just a *taste* of what’s lurking just around the corner.
XQWS
“If C.D. ever gets out of that whitewashed village over there, we’re *all* in trouble.”
“So I’ve heard, Messed Up,” responded Kind Of Messed Up 02 across from her, also staring at it from the Messed Up Cafe. *Her* cafe (oh).
She turned toward her cat again, her tenuous tether to the world of sanity created before the day of last Wednesday’s Monday. “Game of chesskers while we wait?” she bubbled.
Knowing there was no such game (tether!), Kind Of went in back to retrieve the board and pieces.
—–
On his way back, he paused to stare at the picture again, a thing he’d done a thousand times now. “The Man Upstairs had such great plans for this place,” he said once more, a ritual litany.
trip
Kind Of Messed Up 02 often went further up into New York to hear Prof. Young Harris speak. His arch-rival Dr. Young Kane was not in attendance today in Oswego Hall, much to the professor’s relief. He knew Dr. Kane, quite old now and not young atall anymore, much like himself (they’ve been rivals since The Beginning) would interrupt the lecture at various points to call out what *he* felt were fallacies. “There’s no such thing as Certain Death,” he might scold, for example. “Young Harris (no ‘Professor’ at the beginning, you’ll notice), me thinks you doth not understand what you speaketh of,” knowing his broken Shakespeare would always get a laugh from the audience, and perhaps make Young Harris turn bright beet red again, like that time in the summer of 1919. The Summer of Red they called it after that. Anyway, today he was talking about Certain Death again, and contagions luring in the shadows, perhaps whitewashed by what he called not pseudo-science but *non*-science or even *anti*-science. “There’s a difference between the two,” he explains. “Pseudo-science *strives* to be science, and perhaps it will one day. Take crop circles –” and here he has a handy paragraph or two to deliver about the “supernatural” reality of what most think are man-made phenomenon, very scientific in scope. He might also invoke here telekinesis, mind reading, tarot cards, dice, I Ching, phrenology, as fields that are not viewed as kosher amongst the scientific elite — those in power to make important decisions and then package and disseminate them to the common public as they wish — but what could be found out to have actual value down the road somewhere. Then he brings up contagions and the blinders we, as a society and also as an elite lurking within, put on in regards to being “in the dark” soon. “The lights,” — and here in his lecture he instructs one of his Young assistants to actually turn off the lights in the auditorium — “*will* go out, and we will *all* — be blinded.” The lights come back on. He takes his bows. No one here today — not that one dissenter in the crowd — to take the spotlight off his success. One even throws a rose at him but it turns out to be blue.
As the crowd dissipates, Kind Of moves down to the lower level to attempt to make contact.
“Professor? Professor, could I have a word?”
Youngs’ town
Axis felt it should be *him* sitting there, talking to Kind Of. Not this Prof. *Young* Harris. Young, indeed. Gone around the South Bend if you ask him, far far from the North, pheh. But it is what it is at this point. Let’s focus in on the conversation.
“I haven’t been to Strange Creek in a long long time, Mr. Messed Up 02.”
“*Kind Of* Messed Up 02,” Kind Of corrects, knowing he wasn’t — yet — on the nutty level of his master actually named Messed Up. He kind of explains this to Prof. Young Harris, then, who nods in semi-understanding.
“I had a mother once, who was kind and then messed up. I think I understand.”
Kind Of moved on. He said things were even weirder in Strange Creek these days, thus the furthering of the name. “It’s *Stranger*,” he punctuates.
Prof. Young Harris then has an idea, and points up in a Eureka moment. “Cyan!” he exclaims quite loudly, pricking Axis’ ears even more.
He imagines his wife standing before him. “What have I done?” he asks. “*I* had to be Young Kane instead. The transgressions.” He shakes his head while she stares steady. He thinks he should probably get back to her…
names
Professor Young Harris, son of Elder Harris, also a professor at the university, hated when his prize pupil turned her back on him, no matter how cute she looked laying over there. He continued his urgings.
“You’ll get on with your studies, dear. What is it? Astrophysics?”
“Astro*mystics*,” she corrected. “It’s *your* major. That’s the only reason I *came* to this crappy school, hmph.” She pawed at the floor below her.
“Oh. Right.” He couldn’t even remember what he taught at this upper central virtual New York university. *Mystics* not physics. How could he have forgotten — that? Yet another sign it was time to go. Aries probably, or a fire sign anyway.
“I must leave, Astrid. For Stranger Island. The sim skipper that will whisk me there from this location is due to arrive at dusk.” He looked out the window at the ever-calm bay, even though dusk was several hours away still. They had time for one more “study session,” he calculated. “I think we should go over that final chapter before I leave. ‘Departure’.”
Joan rolled over and faced him, a good sign (Sagittarius). “Only if you call me by my right name.” He had only one shot at it.
He was reaching a peak. He remembered. “Joooooaaann!” And then he was done — outta here. Leo had arrived.
“Goodbye Astrid!” he waved from behind.
matched
Kind Of Messed Up 02 stared at the picture, knowing this had all happened before. A negotiation.
He turned…
“$50,000 for the lot of it,” Messed Up offered for her cafe, her house on the water, heck the whole kitten caboodle, along with her not quite as messed up kitty kat who Prof. Young Harris had nicknamed Leo for some reason. Perhaps the effect of the 4 Corona-V brewskies he downed before leaving Joan/Astrid back at the New York university sim-island to the northwest, another in the cluster of Weird-o Islands as history will call them. Like Stranger Creek here. Like Abbey up in the air where David A.B. lives, who seems to be the same as God in our current story or a close approximate. And then the NY isle to finish, upper state style. No Arthur Kill involved here, nor his Staten Island. He has been eliminated from this region by another local named Illuminatus, who we’ll revisit with later. Because, yes, Prof. Young Harris was charged with buying the island for upwards of 50,000 linden dollars, which Messed Up just offered. He couldn’t talk her down for some reason despite his savvy salesmanship — perhaps, he reasons, she was secretly in on the deal all along as well, and had forewarning of his visit. Or maybe they were just in total sync with each other. Because they also found themselves married 5 years down the road, after Messed Up had been basically cured of her confused look status and come into proper focus. Kind of Messed Up 02, renamed Leo from this point on, was with them until the last. A Happy Ending.
David A.B. reads Young Harris’ report up in Abbey and sees it is good. He can rest for a while.
Sunklands 