00410401
“Who’s your house singer these days? Stacey.”
“Oh, some Irish lass named Rew…, um, Reem… oh I can’t remember her name. Anyway she’s from Cork. Plays some kind of cork instrument as a novelty act. A trom… a trum… oh I can’t remember the name of the thing. Anyway, she’s from Cork.”
“Right right.” Bots, Newt thinks here. Seems like she can pour beer well enough at least. “Cork, huh,” he says to egg her on again.
“She’s from Cork, right. Plays…”
“Never mind,” he waves her off. “I’m just going to take my beer over there. I’ll be back.” He didn’t plan to come back. No real information to be found here.
—–
From his new vantage point in Shenanigan’s, he looks over at the place in the street he watched her fall last night. And then vanish — after the message had been delivered.
Biff sitting along the side wall of the establishment was thinking along the same lines. Stood up on an arranged third date. Marsha “Pink” Krakow nowhere to be found in town apparently in any shape or form, Pinkie Brainerd or Berta Brainard or otherwise. Vanished.
Being the author of this whole mess, Newt understood he had to go over and explain the situation to him as much as possible. Best he knows he’s losing a secretary as well as a girlfriend so he can set the hiring process in motion (etc.).
(to be continued)
Black Ice
Just not rezzing in. Instead: a white spirit. Probable reality not realized. Dr. White.
“Not showing up tonight, not rabbit, not rab-bat,” spoke High Atlantis Priestess to Mouse over in the corner of the room, still not transfigured to a younger form of himself despite his best efforts. “We’ll just have to do without him.”
And I have a name for her. Bermuda. A triangle of utter non-coloredness, no TILE hues involved. Let’s make this shit *not* happen, I suppose.
“Fine,” he finally said in response. “I’ll begin.” And he followed with mundane statements aplenty, making her yawn and, I believe, fall asleep. She dreamed about past glories.
(to be continued)
Raccoonsity
“Billie’s filling in for me at the bar while I make this call. She’s a doll, really.”
(reply)
“No. I mean she’s really a doll — mechanical.”
(reply)
“Yeah, they make them in this world too. This *Humansville.*”
(reply)
“Of course not.”
(reply (reiteration))
“I’m pretty much fully disguised now. I have a job. I have new, human clothes.”
(reply)
“Oh it’s what they decided to call an iron and red number, a retro dress.”
(reply)
“Oh I’m blending in.”
(reply)
“Eddie? He’s taking it in stride. He says, get this, it’s better than the cow outfit, haha.”
(reply (laugh as well))
“Listen I gotta run. Billie’s glancing over at me. Don’t want to make her suspicious. You know mechanoids. Takes them a while to get the scent but once they do they sniff and sniff–”
(reply)
“No, I have enough money, thanks. I’ll call you later.”
And with this she hangs up the retro phone into its retro receiver and moves toward the bar again, ready to resume her shift.
Just in the nick of time, phew! Suddenly busy.
Christmas Eve
He was playing Schubert’s 14th piano sonata he’d bought the score for about a week back when it flew in from his set up portal, the 1st of 3 as it turns out. It clanked and rolled on the floor almost to the opposite wall, freezing his hands mid chord progression with the sound. He knew instantly what it was of course. He’d been here before.
It was minimally damaged in the transition thankfully. He brought it over to his work table, moving his trusty steampunk computer aside for the moment; automatically started to take notes on the thing. “Quasi-vintage Coko Cola can circa 1990s, lid unpopped with pop still inside,” he wrote, unable to resist a ready pun. “12 fluid ounces; bar code 490690.”
Understanding the fractal nature of his universe, Newt brought the computer front and center again, googling the number. Through it he learned the product was manufactured in New York with a can manufacturer called Crown. Approx. date of creation: 1983.
https://www.cokecollection.com/index.php?lang=en&pageid=50&canID=11453
Those are the mundane facts. In digging deeper with the number, he soon found another New York connection here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_90_in_New_York
Within New York, I-90 has a complete set of auxiliary Interstates, which means that there are Interstates numbered I-190 through I-990 in the state, with no gaps in between.
Splitting 490690 in two and averaging the 2 resulting numbers gives us 590, which is exactly between 190 and 990 or exactly in the symbolic center of New York somewhere moving west to east, he determined.
Right about… here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_of_Worms_(interchange)
Can front and center once more, he figures the fizz inside has settled down enough to safely pop the top. But dare he?
Another can comes flying through the portal. Saved by the bell, er, *clank*.
00410405
By Christmas morning he had collected 3 cans in total. The second that soon followed the first through the portal, some kind of product called Mount and Dwu (?), turned out to be pretty nondescript in his estimation outside the queer name — just a “can” if you will. The 3rd, arriving only a handful of minutes ago after a wait of hours, was more interesting; it was now front and center before his eyes. A soda filled aluminum cylinder labelled 12939 — no ambiguity here that the number was the most important element — with a descriptive line underneath: “on reflection, a better cola”. He’s stared and stared but can find no rhyme nor reason to it. If only he’d played an early, open world game from the 1980s called Mercenary he might have the opening he needs by popping the figurative tab off the top.
Newt’s literal creator Dr. Mouse showed up later in the morning with a present of Old Spice Showering Gel. He’d played the open world game Mercenary in the 80s and a bit in the 90s even. While in Spain in the 2010s he’d also seen a commercial playing on the reversing trick.
“*But*,” he said to his “son” Newt after revealing it, “the number translated through this can is not actually 12939.”
“It isn’t?” Newt said, staring at the central one with renewed interest. The overall meaning was starting to dawn on him as well.
“No. It’s 1939. The same year as…”
“… the year coming up,” Newt finished for him, suddenly wondering what he was going to do with his tree after New Year’s.
Mouse pointed his cane at the can. “This is (your predecessor) Pepi. My guess is that he’s indicating, from the Great Beyond let’s say, he wants to come back… in the best way he *can* currently, I’m assuming. Pepi ‘Can’ Kolya.” Here he points to the 3rd again, then the 2nd then the 1st. The order of the words in the person-in-question’s full name.
Newt reflexively stares out the window toward the crossroads he’d envisioned Pepi standing in the middle of just the other day. And then Mouse was about in the same spot last Tuesday’s Wednesday when he was flagging down that streetcar named Desire which goes all over town, uptown downtown sidetown (etc.). Could he have known even then?
Or was it merely another of one of those what you call coincidences? Couldn’t be, he thought on the spot. Couldn’t be.
On cue, they both hear the streetcar rumbling into downtown down the hill from midtown. “Gotta run and catch a ride, Newt. You know how scared I am of midtown, Chinaville and all. Merry Christmas and thanks for the slippers!” And with that Mouse was gone, moving quickly out of the apartment building Newt lived in beside Shenanigans and onto the street once more.
“Wait, wait, I want a ride!” he called.
00410406
I teleport to what I understood to be a skybox, high above my Cass City apartment somehow. Heaven of sorts, or at least Reality. I almost walk in front of a car which, at the same time, is shooting at me.
“Watch it cork for brains!” the driver barked through the right side window as he passed, face screwed up like a walnut. “Can’t you see I’m trying to work here?!” Street View camera person, I realized later, probably stressed out from navigating all these narrow Santa Cruz streets and alleyways. Also noticed later that the job certainly seemed incomplete, and that the largest and most important Flores island town here was only minimally covered. I wondered how he slept at night in his various hotels across the world. Probably pretty soundly.
His incompetency would make my *own* work that much more difficult. To find a reason for the Cass City Town Council to spare this real and actual Santa Cruz and not replace it with their own alternate history version. For I was married to the Cass City Mayor. And, in an obvious, surface conflict of interest, I was the head of the council too. So I had to convince myself first before Tom, Dick and Harry would go along with the proposal. Two separate worlds. Two separate realities, virtual down there and real up here. Separate but equal. Didn’t work in post-WWII Jim Crow America, but here in 1939 Cass City it might have a chance.
gaining a higher perspective on Flores’ Santa Cruz with neighboring island Corvo in the background
00410407
“You don’t understand, Madam Mayor,” he spoke formally to his wife of 27 years. “I was soo tempted just to walk into those green green hills and never come back. I envisioned myself doing so. Still can.”
“So (the Our Second Life continent of) Maebaleia doesn’t stand a chance. If people here found out.”
“No,” he said plainly, bluntly. “Look at the depopulation of the once vaunted Hills of Bill in the central part of our continent here. Probably no actual spiritual energy left there by now. I’ve popped around there recently.”
“What of Horns of Hatton? Possibility still, you said earlier (in the week).”
“I-I don’t think so.”
Wheeler, presently playing the role of Mayor of this here Our Second Lyfe community that now calls itself Cass City, finally gives in. “Then we’ll have to block the whole area off. Our Second Life must be quarantined from Their Real Life. The link with the actual Azores will have to go away, like a beanstalk to Heaven being chopped down.”
“Suppose,” hubby Newt said back. They were in his downtown apartment at the moment, studying the corkboard Newt brought over earlier from her office in uptown where she usually stayed. More separate but equal stuff going on there. If possible, we’ll try to clarify the living arrangements — and the corkboard — soon.
“Another idea is to allow select members of our community to visit there, experience first hand the temptation just to chuck virtual in favor of real.”
“Keep the conduit open; don’t get rid of the, er, skybox. Heaven. Make it a religion instead.”
“Right right. Tell them they can go *visit* Paradise. But they also have to come back. They can’t stay there permanently. Or else–”
“They *die*, he he.” Newt was digging all this. Like a deep, dark grave.
00410408
Newt called his wife with the exciting news. “Listen honey I know we’re kind of stuck in the moment but I’ve stumbled upon an important lead.”
(reply)
“We’ll right now I’m *physically* stuck — in some rocks it seems. Anyway it’s in a place owned by Pan… actually shortened her name to that from a longer form beginning with those same letters a couple of years back. I made a note to ‘STUDY Pan’ in the Real World — thinking here more of Peter Pan and Neverland and such — and then lo and behold when Baker logged me in tonight, seconds later, I was standing on land owned by this virtual Pan. It’s a way we can go — *potentially* go — from Flores back to Our Second Life. Through Amiable.”
(reply)
“It’s a long story. But Baker and his *own* wife are headed to Charleston, South Carolina tomorrow. Obviously I’m talking about Baker B. and not the components Baker Bloch and Baker Blink–”
(reply)
“It’s a triangle. We enter the real world but there’s only one spot there we can get back — theoretically again.”
(reply)
“I will.” And with this he hung up. Now to get himself unstuck. He has a path to follow. He stares into icy water and sees it is so. Here he also makes a mental note to drink more water to prepare his avatar body better. Because something is coming up. Something big.
Flashback Friday: “Polly Beach”…
… from exactly 8 years ago.
Rat Island, SC near
Folly MollyPolly Beach and Charleston. Present centerpoint of budding, new mythology, bourne in the midst of unprecedented winter heat. This is where I hiked Sunday. This is where I doddled. Sand dunes.
Pirate
BluebeardBluebird involved.Blackbird RookCrow involved. We will see.
Other Rat Islands…
New York:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Island,_New_York
Alaska:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawadax_Island
I was just reading about the latter the same morning I found the name Rat I., SC, through researching earthquakes in connection with fracking. Rat. I., Alaska is site of one of the largest earthquakes in US history. Charleston, SC is the location of the largest US earthquake east of the Mississippi River in the last 200 years.
Triangle, thus:
the return of googly eyes
Happy New Years everyone! Hope yours will be starting off fantastically.
Tomorrow I plan to begin renting 10,725 square meters of land on the continent of Jeogeot, Gods willing. I think my earmarked parcel is safe until then because of this…
… an “intrusive” aisle of palms on an elongated 512 parcel in the middle of the thing. In fact, that’s a tentative name for the town I want to construct here, a rehash of Constantynople which is a rehash of Fordham’s Collagesity and so on and so on down the line.
Just like 8 years ago, the wife and I have returned from a vacation in Charleston SC and also nearby Folly Beach, the latter becoming more and more the center of focus during our almost yearly sojourns to the world famous metropolis around Christmastime.
It all seems to fit together seamlessly *because of* and not despite the invasive palms.
And then there’s also the London Tower Bridge nearby, which, in this virtual version, just lost 1/2 of itself. Wonder why? Maybe I’ll be able to find out from my new neighbors.
I must keep my eyes peeled for more synchronicities, ha.
And I plan to recreate the dead parrot statue as well in some fashion. Blackbeard’s? (Bluebeard’s?) To be seen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbeard#Blockade_of_Charles_Town
Aisle of Palms…
… is a go!
More details very soon.
00410412
Shaping up!
00410413
He knew he shouldn’t do it but once he got the idea in his head it was stuck there. Paint — watercolors of course — this red headed bathing beauty in front of him as an abstraction, red all over and with a round head instead of natural. Chroma, he knew. His former existence. “Okay, keep still,” he requested to his paid model for the day. “I’m about to start.”
Wannabe boyfriend but way-too-plain, way-out-of-his-depths Butchie Hawkins looks on very interested from the other side of pool dipping Carrcassonnee (she’s back!). What he lacks in looks he makes up in mind powers, namely psychic abilities. He’s going to ask her out after all this is over. He’ll be more on her level then. Because this wasn’t just a painting. This was *real*.
—–
Later:
“What have you *done*?” she cried, no longer the person she knew and loved and admired inside the finished product. “Where *am* I?”
“Just follow the yellow ball,” he said from his side, also part of the art work now. “Follow it all the way to the grave.”
She backed out of that death scene as fast as possible but she was indeed the ball now. Stuck.
“Thanks for *nothing*,” she said as she bounced away, cash in hand but wanting a lot more for what he did to her image. Greg Ogden had made a breakthrough today at the Aisle of Palms Pool. He didn’t have to paint pretty all the time. He could paint ugly.
Jack
The “ball” inverted and bounced out the other side…
… and although not a Dodge Darty still darting toward the head of a smoking hot man positioned at the base of (a beaut of a) Washington state butte called Steptoe.
Honing in on its target…
Bullsear BAMM! The end result wasn’t pretty indeed. Not hot atall now.
Mission accomplished.
00410415
He paused in his magical spinning to admire the ocean view. Back on Jeogeot, he thought with satisfaction. It seems we just left.
A knock at the door. “Dear,” spoke over interwebs watching April Mae Flowers, the wife of many years, “are you expecting someone?”
Actually, he was. She’d caught up with him, just as he’d planned. He said to his wife: “Yes. It’s an acquaintance from Corvo. She’s cool with the gold. Go ahead and let her in.”
“Albert, if you would,” requested April Mae to their Selenite butler behind her, always at ready by the fireplace with whatever the elderly couple needed, mainly tea but occasionally other tasks. Like now. “Certainly, mum,” he said in that trilling, alien voice of his, laying down the tea tray on the, let’s see, fireplace mantel and proceeding to the door.
“Welcome,” he issued to the stranger outside. “Mssr. Gold said he’s expecting you.”
“Indeed he is,” she said.
“Hi Supergal Ruby!” he called over in the waning light after opening the other door remotely. Time to turn the lights on in this interesting new development.
Humanvillians no more
“So tell me more about this young girl you met. Corvo, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, well you *know* her name. Supergal Ruby. And you know she’s engaged… or reengaged to be more exact,” he tried to reassure his wife. “She and Greg Ogden had been married before. But…” Herbert Glenn Gold wasn’t sure he wanted to bring up the death of Greg’s interim lover Mr. Babyface in that Korean Channel water funnel. Simply because he wasn’t sure he was really dead.
“But what, dear?” April Mae said in the gap. “Is… is there a problem in paradise?” This was what she sometimes said when she sensed trouble in a relationship. And this one, she felt, threatened hers. She had been quite insecure — and understandably so — since the Merry Goldbusk debacle over in NWES City. And now they’ve returned to the same continent of the indiscretion — probably adds to the paranoia a bit.
“I don’t think so. Anyway, that’s why I invited them both here,” he followed up on earlier conversation. “Greg is happy painting so I provided him with models.”
“Models, hmph. Is that what you call them?” She was usually more tolerant of Herbert’s eye wanderings but her biorhythms were on the downswing today. Perhaps too much tea lately. But Albert makes such a fine pot!
“Now now, April Mae. They’re only cheap mesh statues really. Like all those ones standing outside Baker has lined up for potential use later on.” They were on the wrong side of the house to look at all that mess so April Mae didn’t try. Flesh and mesh, she thought here. Unreal but still tempting, she felt.
“Soo… she was just here to pick up the 2 coins and then leave. And you said she knows what to do with them.”
“She knows. But she just has to remember. There’s 2 directions here,” he says as he cuts another piece of pizza and gobbles it down. “She can pawn off the golden coins for quite a small fortune actually.”
Unwise, April Mae thinks here about his earlier actions. Risky and unwise.
“*Or*,” he continues, “she can use them as *evidence*.”
“Atlantis, right.” She cut her own piece, she accomplished her own gobble. “And what about Bermuda?; you mentioned a Bermuda. From the way you described it it sounded more like a person than a place.”
Thinking of her newest dress with all the parrots, Herbert Glenn Gold decided to deflect here again. “No, it’s a place. A triangle, actually.”
Another funnel, he then realized.
—–
“I’ll take everything you have,” she said shortly after entering the store and the introductory chit chat was over with Hector Big Parrot Bird Guy. “Including these 3. Including *you* if you wish, she thought but didn’t say out loud. There had to be limits to all this silliness.
“Molly, Polly and Folly are *not* for sale,” he returned in a haughty voice more human than bird. “They’re my friends. They keep me company. I can’t be entertained by reading all the time.” He finally looks up from the book about non-parroty things, stares into her eyes. “But the rest are yours. Take them, I don’t care. I’m just an unpaid employee minding the shop while the owner is away. I don’t know when he’ll be back. He’s been gone for days, maybe years even. I don’t care,” Hector reiterates.
“Free?” she said.
“Free.” I can replenish the stock in a blink of an eye. *Those* parrots aren’t real; mere 2d replicas. Only these three here are real. My friends, as I said.”
Molly emitted, “You’re darn tootin,” to this.
Polly squawked loudly as if in agreement.
But, without chatter herself, Folly just looked around from her own perch at everyone involved. She personally had her doubts that *any* of this is real, pet shop and all. And where was Victor Ratt the owner? Rumor has it that he’d been kidnapped by pirates.
Only the unreal parrots in back knew for sure and they weren’t talking either.
(to be continued)
00410417
Hector put on his pirate outfit so as not to spook the poor little flattie birds with their quite limited two dimensional brains, different from Polly, Molly and Folly in the other room. He wasn’t one of us, he was one of them (!), they collectively thought. Because they didn’t want to be free. But Hector was offering them to customer Atlantis High Priestess (Bermuda) for just that. A chance to be out of their cages and gone away from here. No More Imprisonment.
He opened the first of 4 cages in the room, intending to shoo the 4 colorful birds within out the door. An alarm unexpectedly sounds when he does. Victor had set a trap! he thought. “Those birds will never be sold,” were the last words he said as he slammed the front door, never actually intending to come back to the cursed place as he called it. Inherited from his father nicknamed Birdbrain for buying the shop in the first place, all he wanted to do was make a little money off of it so he could turn into a woman, his true dream and ambition. And that woman — money acquired in other ways — had been standing before Hector in the front room, unrecognized because of the workings of the various hormones he/she had taken and was still taking in smaller measures. A Victor to Victoria transition; ‘nother one.
While she was out of sight in the back room, Victor-now-Victoria also took the opportunity to change. She emerged beside him, sirens blaring in the distance, likewise dressed as a pirate. The dress makes the woman, the way you dress is who you are, and so on. “I’ll take it from here,” she said. “You should hightail it out of here while you can.”
And so that’s the appearance she had later down at the police station located underneath Starbuccaneer’s Coffee Shop, so full of beans that they had to open the back door to release pressure several times a day.
Victor had indeed been kidnapped by pirates, but the pirate currently sitting in the holding room with all the warning signs was also him. But, really, outside the skull and bones decorated outfit you could never tell.
Sunklands 