00310501
The massive ego of the artist, the painter.
A whole village is taken over, becoming a canvas itself.
We must question the need, not to criticize but to understand.
And then return to Collagesity with new applications.
one of a kind
MAT understands the current photo-novel, 31 in a series of what-ever, is weighed heavily to the western side of the continent. So following leads he slides over to the east — Sliderule to be specific — and finds these colored letters, which seem to indicate the next step in the development of newly rented land in Collagesity. TILE, obviously, he thinks at the time. The heart speaks; the star listens. 31 began around New Years or just after. Now we’re almost at Valentines, Christmas and its star studded trees behind a window in the past. Gone but not forgotten, because we still have a tree. Let’s switch the colored lights to white and take away the Santas and called it Winter. 3/1: Winter over? First things first, though…
Next he boogies with new friends in neighboring Kryophelis and decides that Boogie will be his new nickname for a few, maybe for more than a few. He counts 7 friends he’d like to explain the theory to. Naive, I say. Overcount. Go down to 4, like the 4 colors he should be focusing on instead of just dancing away the night. 7 to 4. You know what needs to be done.
*Town*, Boogie (ha). Man About *Town*. Not Time.
—–
Myrtle flies out of the Valentine Garden of Love and Fairies to tell the Moss Queen where he is. They’re always keeping track.
Turns out she wanted to see him this time.
(to be continued)
sameness
“4 *more* friends, MAT,” she says from her position of power. “What do you recall? What is dealt in the cards tonight?”
MAT studies the playing cards in front of him He sees a heart, he sees a spade. He sees a diamond and a club. He sees All Cards. He knows he is safe.
Actually he sees this…
“Tell me what are in the cards,” she requests again, hoping to keep him focused for at least 5 seconds, pheh.
—–
She said she had to run and turned him over to what she called the 2nd Moss, one with blonde hair instead of black.
They found themselves at an emerald green table (which brought out her eyes), away from the others. 1st Moss decided 2nd Moss might have better luck, and, besides, she needed to get back to her equations. Blonde Moss sipped her wine, watching Man About Time roll his neck round and round, trying to stretch it out. “You’re tired of typing tonight,” she gathered. The light in her eyes was equal to the first. They were one.
“Hold on a little longer,” she requested, understanding what needed to be done. Besides, The Comedy Club called.
—–
“Moss 03” arrived. Perfect!
Balance round the center. Alysha and Man About Time’s 1st date. His *Valentine*.
00310504
While he was waiting for her, this Moss 03 who goes by Alysha, he decides to prepare a Valentine letter to her professing his new found feelings. ‘I looov…’; ‘I luvvv…’ Strangely he can’t get himself to write the word ‘you’ after a drawn out version of ‘I love’ or ‘I luv’. He looks around at the beige landscape instead, and the objects scattered all about the place. Crypto, he thinks. And this is where they live, all three of the Mosses, Alysha and the 2 others, the black and the blonde haired ones. Alysha: pure red. Red itself. ‘Redd,’ he thinks here, and then writes that down instead. It works!
Alysha Redd comes up from the main house, finished with her shopping. She couldn’t find the new tattoo she wanted inworld. Disappointment, but it may have distracted from the ones she already had, the tree, the orange and the violet. Sometimes she dreams about them: they are as much as part of her as her fingers or her knees. Not overdone but not underdone. To add to them at this point may be stretching it; and tough to top the tree. She’s heard tattoos don’t age well with the stretch marks that inevitably come. Nervous about meeting MAT again, she gently nibbles at at the silver metal ring in her lip. When to tell him she’s actually married, if separated? Probably best to do it sooner than later. And I suppose I’ll have to wake him up at some point as well, she tacks on.
She reaches the table. “Okay, I’m ready for our second date.” This one should be a doozy if all goes well, she thinks to herself. The apartment above the citrus fruit shop is all prepared, including another writing desk. He can pen all the love letters he wants after we’re through. MAT keeps on writing. ‘Reddd, Reddd.’ “Ahem, *now*? This evening sometime?” MAT wakes up.
How about 65.
Looks like it’s official! Alysha and Man About Time are a legitimate couple, synchronized with each other at 112 posts apiece. Axis isn’t happy, but he has Wheeler according to this list, whoever the heck that happens to be at the moment, ha (it’s Alysha).
And then on the very next page of this largest to smallest character ordering we have another couple, two men this time, also mysteriously traveling through time and space as a harmonized pair. Our Marty and our Roger Pine Ridge with 64 apiece. If we didn’t know that Marty is actually short for McCartney we know that now. And Pine Ridge is a similar “advancement” over Waters. Both are rock stars extraordinaire, and as such they have the right to examine The Rock in Real Life. First things first, though.
Hopefully Alysha and MAT are as happy together (like Turtles) when they’re 64, but I kind of doubt it. The relationship could end any month, day, hour, minute, second. I’ll have to recheck when I finish this post.
Seems like our old bloodied vampire friend Pitch Darkly also has 64, but we’ll take care of that quick-smart.
There.
Monroe 04
“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.
pin 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?
Kryophelis (to each his own)
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.
peppery
“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.
Collagesity
Still relevant!
More soon…
102
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.
where’s the point?
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.
where’s the point? 02
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 otherwise, 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.
00310514
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.
front and back (covered)
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).
Alysha
She’d transformed, just like he did earlier. “Okay, you can open your eyes,” she bids.
He sees the stunning blueness of the thing. He sees the roses. He knows what’s going on. “But… *I’m* the Blue Rose,” he sputters, sitting up more in an effort to directly confront the thing. “That’s *my* angle.”
“Not any more,” she shot back. Indeed once a thing has been done and done successfully, it’s hard to walk back. Besides, we need to double up the Blue Power in order to keep West Virginia viable as a northern balance to Virginia. It’s just that damn important.
Time to unwrap the present, as she promised earlier. Jeffrey Phillips will come around, probably sooner than later. She just needs to pick a time to tell him about MAT. The new relationship is real enough, despite it also being a dream.
Later she showed him 5 more transformations directly related to the first. It was a revealing night.
“And *this* is how we had the black child,” she explained at the beginning of the 4th.
By the time of the 5th, Jeffrey Phillips had determined he would definitely be the Blue Thorn from now on and give up the Rose part. He didn’t deserve this woman. But she definitely deserved him and considerably more, she might think here on her own behalf.
retirement
It’s time to lay under the blue and white umbrella again.
Ahh. This is the life!
Sunklands 
