00400501
When Marsha “Pink” Krakow returned to what she knew was her true home now, Big Sandy on the oldest Bellissaria continent, her Mother was waiting. With a big surprise. “I bought this for you,” she said to her shocked daughter after she arrived, indicating the trailer. “Pink, you see, or as close as I could get to that hot variation you prefer.” Edward, her Eddie, was already blackening his patented vegetable stew dogs on what Wheeler told him was his new grill. He was already sold.
“Oh. And that pink scooter you’re standing beside! What do you think?”
Marsha was thinking of *price*, not necessarily money price but emotional price. And here it comes.
“I can see you’re speechless, dearest. Come sit beside me and we’ll talk.” Wheeler patted the lounging couch across from her and then pulled out an apple to eat. “Price?” Marsha wanted to ask her so bad. “Price price price?” And here it comes.
“Have you talked to Serenity since you’ve been here (chomp, chew chew chew)? Never mind, dear, I know you have. You told her about Shelley, my *actual* daughter.”
“*I’m* your daughter,” she wanted to protest at this point, but knew it technically wasn’t true — in a way. Shelley provided the body and added a lot to the personality as well. But Brown was also there inside. Conscience? Mere gestures? She wasn’t quite sure yet about the so-called 3rd component, the last of a trilogy. And then herself up front and on top of course, resurrected from what happened in photo-novel 19 that she doesn’t like to think about a lot. Cook for the Ozmo Devils. Dead in the head in bed like Jed. “Why didn’t you tell me about Serenity?” she actually said aloud. “That she wasn’t her cousin but her *wife*?”
“Oh it’s just one of those things that slips the mind (chomp; chew, chew, chew). Lots of important stuff going on up there,” and here she pauses in her apple eating to tap on her forehead. “I’m still the mayor of that damn Meat City and its dominant male energy. *I’m* more male than them, despite the body, the femininity,” she decided to put it. Marsha understood. Her mother had to put the town council (etc.) in their place or they’d gain the upper hand again, the blame misogynists. Dominant sex, *pheh*. Marsha had to do the same with her Eddie in a lesser way. It’s just how men are raised in our society in part, she figured. So she didn’t blame him *all* that much for his own, lesser brand of the disease of the mind.
Marsha had to ask this next”: “W-why, then, oh why… did you put me in prison? Turn me into a *doll* Feed me those drugs through my head to think that I *wasn’t* in prison but next door, singing karaoke until the wee hours of the night? With the fake doll looking on?”
“Rockaway Beach?” Wheeler started her answer, citing the name of the first place which was also its location. “Kenzie’s Korner in Kuradov?” she said the same about the second. Now the circumstances.
(to be continued)
blog post now
“It was a naval kiss but not that kind of kiss. From River — you remember. You almost put it in a blog post back then. Novel 39 I believe. Jack Benny the comedian-violinist would not be proud that you have moved into 40. He wished to remain (in) 39 all of his life!”
Once again Marsha started to ponder All Orange, thinking back to the research she did in her old room over in Meat City on the Omega continent, Mother feeding her free sandwiches and whatnot throughout it all. Probably drugged as well, she concludes as she’s thinking of it, reviewing it. Distracted by the computer, she knew she wouldn’t notice. Mother. *Mother*.
She bounced up out of the lounger. Mother put down her second apple she was working on, having thrown away the core of the first in the beach grass or bushes just over there. 1st green, this one red. She had progressed from better to best by the taste of it. Or worse to worst, depending on which way you’re looking at the situation.
“Stew dogs’ ready!” called Eddie from the red hot grill. “WELLL. I hope you’re still hungry after all that fruit,” spoke pseudo-daughter Marsha down to Wheeler with this. Wheeler, on her part, was going to see eating the latest apple through to the bitter end. She intended to eat the core this time. She was going to finish it all.
But not until after the dogs. Dogg walks up. “Rat you reating Reeler?”
“None of your business mutt,” she dismissed him out of hand.
“Rogg, actually,” spoke Dogg, thinking she just misstated his actual name. Moving on…
blackness and light
She was just finishing hanging up the sheets when the music started next door. “Darn tiny restaurant,” she cussed at first, then began involuntarily dancing in place when she realized it was Ozzie Osbourne’s old group Black Sabbath, and her favorite album of theirs, “Master of Reality”, ta boot. Oh what the heck, she thought. Time to meet some of the neighbors anyway, make some new friends potentially. But I’ll also gently remind whoever is in charge over there that the music must stop at 11 — she needs her beauty rest. And if they started with the country… well, that’s it. She’ll ring up the mayor of Big Sandy who is a good friend. Dolores something, she recalls, if not quite grasping a last name to go with the familiar first. Just across Big Channel she lives — probably can hear the music a bit from her place as well, she figures.
But by the time “Into the Void” rolled around, last track on the famed heavy metal album, everyone was pooped out except herself and Alice over there, still dancing up a storm too. She may have made one friend tonight. They had a common interest. Finding family in the Land of Sand.
(to be continued)
00400504
Laura (black woman dancing to Black Sabbath in that last post) use to live next door to where she is now in a trailer with more colorful decoration. She left it behind for yet another Alice, Farrowheart in this case, who by chance was *also* looking for family here. “What a coincidence!” she cried over “Into the Void” when Alice Tart relayed to her the same. The 2 Alices must be looking for each other!
But, turns out, the name synchronicity was meaningless. Alice Tart was searching for her sisters Gloria and Wanda, who were indeed last seen in a Bellissaria sandy spot but further north and west on the old continent. We’ll see if they turn up anyway. Then Alice Farrowheart, the replacement neighbor in her former trailer (old woman, she thinks when accepting her application; *she* won’t be too much trouble surely!) was looking for a child, a granddaughter to be more specific. “Smart as a whip,” she described her when signing the agreement, adding in the alliterative phrase “precious precocious” a couple of times, she recalled. Last Alice F. heard: taken by pirates, rumored to be associated with USS Galaxy sitting big and fat and loong out in the Big Sandy harbour over there.
“Well, did you go on the ship, look around?” queried Laura after signing the contract herself as owner. 1 year lease. She liked the neighborhood but the neighbor’s trailer to the east was just a bit too close for rocky comfort. And also he (Tom) liked to spy on her during various moments of the day, like shower time, exercise time, times when her boyfriend Ted came over — you get the picture. Let Tom get a gander of old, wrinkled up Alice F. instead! she thought while the ink dried in front of her.
“I got in touch with a ship steward who verified she was there,” answered Alice F. “Last seen hanging out with 2 men, one of whom was two toned in hue.”
“How did she get there in the first place?”
“Well. Let’s just say Toddles has a penchant for *wandering*.”
(to be continued)
no humbug
“You don’t understand the corruption of Butterfingers. He and his big ol’ parachute came down from the sky and cast a dark shadow over the whole mountaintop, likewise yellow Brick Road, *everything*.” Spoken from the heart. Laura knew a lot about the Land of Oz. She, after all, use to live there. Right before they turned off the lights.
“*Money*,” she followed, looming over them and casting her own black shadow. “Money ruined it then and money’s ruining it again. Cheapskatedness,” she made up a word about the issue.
Earlier:
“2000 linden dollars,” he said in his nasal, boyish way about the price to custom spray paint her dune buggy, careful not to cross the southeast corner of the property else the spell might be broken. Or so the Wizard told him.
“Oh that’ll be fine,” she said dreamily. After she saw the finished product and received the exorbitant bill she kept asking why why why?? Magic was afoot here, she then thought correctly. And not the white variety.
Mrs. Ordinary felt the need to go over and tell new bestie Pink all about the latest Big Sandy mystery/sorcery. What better way to do it than to show her the revamped bug up close and personal. But the reaction was unexpected.
“I *love* it — except for the price of course. Let’s take it for a spin — say, the tiny restaurant again?”
When Marsha watched Mrs. Ordinary — Ginger (Ginger?) — pay the bill once more, including another bottle of expensive liquor, she got an idea. “Here’s a theory — do you suppose that word has gotten around Big Sandy about how much money you spend? Attracting the scheming boy?”
And this is when overhearing Laura at the next table came over and did her spiel.
“*Wait*,” exclaimed Pink afterwards. “Did you just say he was *yellow*?”
“Wobbly…
“… she was in the head, just having finished her stiff drink. But she knew.”
Laura was reporting back to Dolores, the Big Boss of Big Sandy. Just across Big Channel she was. Somewhere. Laura had her phone number at least. She continued speaking into her cell after receiving message after message earlier. “Call me”, “Call me”, “Call me”, they read. “We need to talk,” was the implication, “we need to catch up. I’m here to help.”
She was on my council, perhaps as a counsel.
—–
“I had a dream there was not one giant bug but many, weaving a grid so regular it acted as a prison. I was back in Meat City, the Utah part after Broadwater and Rockaway Beach and the Osbournes and Kuradov but before the big bend away from all that at Rhodenwald. The part that’s *locked up* with (Utah’s) Kamas in other words.”
Kamas reduced to Kama was too close to Karma, she knew. And Laura also from a defunct place called Strong Karma — resonance.
“You must focus on Big Sandy right now as best as you can,” she advised. Until the end of section 05 of this here present photo-novel was the hidden meaning. I think.
—–
I knew the Silver King Grill was a stand in for Strong Karma (SK). And although defunct, I knew where its spirit lived on, then. New Eden.
00400507 (Flashback Friday)
Walking through the arch once more, [Tropp] traveled far from Braynard’s Place to a 4 sim land some call Eden itself.
Whilst sitting against a log beside a grove of nice, pink trees, he is inspired to write a song about New Island’s Pipewold and being X-ed out.
But he was not alone. For the Alices were there.
And the Rabbits.
And some others.
All in all, a Grand Old Time was had of it.
Mention of Tropp passing through the past-future arch again, you’ll notice. And 2 Alices here, although yet different again from the 2 Alices in Big Sandy now, Tart and Farrowheart for the latter pair. The 2 earlier ones: no surname that I recall; undifferentiated in that way.
The mentioned “some others” didn’t matter. Or… did they?
Madam Mexico
00400508
In her mind, the 3 within settled down and organized themselves, Marsha “Pink” Krakow on top and up front again. As such, she approaches the effigy of the crocogator in the southeast corner of Sirens Isle.
“I was wrong to seek the treasure in the sea, Carrcassonnee (she says her true name). Nothing but pyrite here.”
But then she spied the handy teleporter next to the false treasure chest and was lured away again.
MEANWHILE…
The crocogator takes to the land and moves inside a different southeast corner to give Bart the news.
00400509
She changes into her true form to better convince the youth.
“Carrcassonnee,” he said, still looking her over, noticing the lack of “junk”, for instance. “I can’t believe it’s really you. After all these years!” But then he remembers he’s not his father. He’s just having memories of his father — happens sometimes. This is what you get for being estranged. Confusion at times. Who is who and such. “I mean, after all this time about my *father* talking about you, heh heh.” Nervous laughter to end. He gazes up at the single eye. What did it see, what did it read? His soul?
“Iiiiiiii…,” she said. “Iiiiiiiiiiiii…”. She tries to start again. “Iiiiiiii–”
Bart cuts her short. “Yes, I *heard* that you’re having problems starting again. Like an old car that’s been sitting in a field for a while or something. I believe that’s how my father once described you. But at one time–”
“Iiiiiiii…” she said again. “haaaaaaavee…” she continued. “Newwwws,” she said better.
Silence for a while as the boy absorbed this. Carrcassonnee speaks! “Welll… go ahead,” he encourages, thinking of his father once more. The Tin Woodsman, he picked up on in his psychic way. My father’s old friend; he’s returned!
“Iiiiiiii…” started Carrcassonnee again, understanding the message had been received, “… can take youuuu… to himm.”
“Cool!” And so they set off, across the land and then across the sea. Out of the southeast corners and into the real world.
“Whoa whoa there, Carrcassonnee. Slow down boy, er, girl.”
00400510
He’d killed 2 witches defending the city gates and was ready for a 3rd if needed. His moral chip had malfunctioned, rendering him unable to tell the difference between Good and Bad. He’d have to be reassigned, at least until the city council cooled down about the murder of their beloved Glinda. Ozma, the true and lawful queen overseeing all, wasn’t too keen on the self righteous goody two shoes so no big loss in her eyes. Still: Tinsman had to go. The Lost Path of Oz seemed about right. Out of the way, but not too far so that the queen couldn’t pass through at times and see how he’s doing over there. When he was invited to one of her balls he’d know all was well again and that he could return. The moment would come soon, he felt. He’d served several years in the Lost Forest already.
Then chaos ensued — again. He misplaced his oil can, then just after finding it the queen passed through. He’s invited! But a quick shower came, and since the Tinsman hadn’t been able to oil himself for a while, he froze up — the famous legend based on Ozian facts got that part right at least.
Then, much much later, Toddles walked up with her new friends Rock Ramby and Vain and Artery Boyy. “Look!” the latter exclaimed in his husky voice, made for the sea. “A man. A man made out of tin!”
“It’s called a robot,” mildly corrected Toddles, who then started looking around the immediate area for a lubricant container.
00400511
“Your orange-ish hair… so pretty.” He couldn’t help but run his fingers through the semi-transparent ponytail to test its texture.
“Well thanks I guess Al Orange,” she replied, regretting that she sat so close to him now. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Before she realized this was just another one of those mannequins — they all were. No information here to retrieve. And she needed info. So she could get the heck out of Dodge.
“Yes, you’re so pretty overall,” spoke over Dafney Duck, a quack at the doctoring business. Two kneecap replacements just last week. And only none of them needed it. “Why don’t you put on a bathing suit and really, truly join in with us. I have an extra back in the boat, I believe.”
“I *don’t* *do* bathing suits,” she spoke firmly, leaning back and edging away from creepy Al, short for Alvin she assumed. “Not since…” She cut herself off. Couldn’t talk about Mountain Lake yet. Or her actual mother still mayor back in Meat City. But she certainly wasn’t ready to go back to prison. Thus: here.
The host of the party sitting directly behind her — Sandy Hook — then said something. Bitterly. “I wonder if *Edward*… would like to see you in one of those.” Who was this really? Marsha “Pink” Krakow still? Or…
“Coke is real,” uttered the last person at the hot tub, the 6th of 6. Friends? Not really. But the appellation still applied.
00400512
He had returned but he found himself more and more excluded from Ozma’s inner circle after a lukewarm reentry. “It’s *temporary*, dear,” she kept repeating to him. “I brought you back after all. You’re *here*; back in Oz, back to patrolling the Yellow Brick Road. And boy dear howdy that took some smooth talking to the inner council to get done,” she often reminded him. “So be *grateful*. You’re not out *there*.”
But it’s been months again, maybe years. When would his so called probation end here in the cornfield far away from a central power he was use to? Contemplation like this naturally led him to check the clock that always beats the times in his chest. 7:15 in Quadlingland, 3:15 in Munchkinland. And in the center, the middle, well: heartbreak.
He watched her slip away in the stalks, reminding him of that old Oklahoma song about a quirky little alien who comes to Earth and can’t get enough of corn, all types. He involuntarily begins to sing it in his head.
I like cornflakes, corndogs
I like corn bread and cornstarch
I like the band Korn and popcorn, I like all kinds of corn
ALL KINDS OF CORN!
He can’t recall the rest and, anyway, Ozma had already disappeared down the rows. Their meetings were almost as brief as in the Lost Forest when he was truly exiled. Now it’s still a false exile, an ostracizing by the rest. Scarecrow barely talked to him, feigning being constantly tied up with businesses of the mind. Lion similarly excused himself when encountering the famed metal being, saying he had to face down or have a tangle with this or that adversary who still lived some distance from wherever they were standing at the time. And Dorothy… he doesn’t even like to think of Dorothy.
—–
“I thought we were going to replace Dorothy with *me*,” spoke up the precious precocious child listening in on Marsha “Pink” Krakow’s latest version of her novel with a working title of “Lost Path of Oz,” changed from the earlier “Forgotten Road of Oz.” “After all, L. Frank Baum’s greatest goal was to please a child. And what better way to carry on that tradition than to cast me, a child as child can be, in the leading role of your book. Similarly, Vain and Artery Boyy replaces Lion, and Rock” — she looks over at him, dumbly counting the fingers on both hands over and over to make sure they’re the same on each — “well, we’ll work on him,” she admitted, sharing a smile with Pink about the irony.
“Maybe,” gleaned Pink, “maybe *you* should replace the Scarecrow, Toddles. And Rock can play Dorothy — you know what I mean.”
Toddles as the brains of the operation. She instantly likes! She automatically sees it is the right change to affect.
“No one is going to play ANYTHING until I get some ANSWERS!” Toddle’s grandma Alice Farrowheart had shown up at the reading in the so called Center Hole of Big Sandy. With a loaded shotgun.
Marsha quickly checked to see if this was in the book as well.
00400513
Turns out it was all a misunderstanding mostly created by Toddles herself. Vain and Artery Boyy and, especially, Rock didn’t have the sense to think that a legal guardian must be found for Toddles, due to the fact that she acted so *independent* around them, we’ll say. Toddles insisted they celebrate the reunion and work out the kinks of the intertwined connections later on after visiting the Millgate Halloween Festival — located to the north and west of Big Sandy on the old Bellissaria continent — before it was too late and her 2nd favorite holiday after Arbor Day was done and over with.
—–
They’d left Rock to play in a haunted sandbox outside with an object provided plastic zombie pail and ghost shovel. He would be happy for hours if needed. And Alice F., wore out from the tour already, was upstairs taking a power nap, as she described it. The bad dreams began almost instantly, like back in the Belt Days.
Which left Toddles and Vain and Artery Boyy (aka Gill) downstairs, trying to figure out a mystery. “The thing that interests me most,” spoke the precocious child, obviously precious as well, “is *not* the 2 darts through the eyes — that’s more a distraction I’m thinking. It’s the presence of that blue ball at the foot of the body. Blue, Vain and Artery Boyy. Like your better half.”
He thought of Blue Berry Girl here and the life that could have been. But too late now. She was off to the Pleiades or Andromeda or some other starry paradise high in the nighttime sky. Seeing herself seeing herself seeing herself…
“What do you mean?” he prompted, staring at it now as well.
“Well, I mean, it just doesn’t *fit*. Let’s continue thinking out loud together — why did the Lindens, or Moles whoever, put it there?”
After V&AB didn’t answer for a spell, Toddles went on. “Blue ball begets yellow ball begets red green begets green red. We’ve already been through that. The prison bowling alley. Exactly 2 sections back.”
“I–” Vain started, then stopped. He had nothing really to say. He just decided to listen to genius unfurled in front of him. Yes, he’d try to stick with the child. He’d fight for her, even, at this point. Grandmas are challengeable legal guardians he figured. Not like a mama and a papa, which apparently Toddles didn’t have. He wondered why — he’d ask the grandma as soon as she finished her nap. He’d battle on the grounds that she had a 37 year old brain inside a 3 year old’s body, ready to be released on the world.
Alice woke up in a different bed, but the shadow figure was still there, go figure. And then someone else. Not a leprechaun but similarly sized. Maybe it is some kind of leprechaun given what comes afterwards. “Hell-o!” he or she or it says innocently in a child-like voice. “Hell-ooo!”
interpreter
“Let’s recreate the crime scene, Grandmama,” she recalls him saying in the dream she just woke up from, relayed to her psychic granddaughter Toddles a little later to complete the loop. “We have Bart jiggling on his skateboard in the southeast corner again, waiting to be freed so he can go back to Oz and the lucrative Butterfingers business he’d set up there. Roadrunner is running circles around him, representing constraint of freedom. He is stuck for now. Then Twitty Bird darts right by him in the picture, chased by Sylvester the Cat per usual.
“Conway Twitty threw *darts* at a map of the United States to come up with his stage name, one hitting Conway, Arkansas and the other Twitty, Texas near Magic City, Abra, and perhaps some other meaningful names. Kellersville next to Heald obviously, referring to the water healing of deaf blind mute Helen over in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Bart’s sister Lisa just ran into this same Sylvester in NWES City — which we need to get back to by the way.”
“The two darts represent drugs,” Toddles interrupted her grandmother’s dream review with an insight.
SHADOW: (says something)
PEANUT: Ah, what? I don’t understand… a thing you’re saying, man. Do you have any idea what you sound like? Bluh, bluh, bluh, bluh. That’s what you sound like in my head.
SHADOW: (says something)
https://12ozmouse.fandom.com/wiki/The_Shadowy_Figure
00400515
The weight of the past…
… finally collapses the present into a hellscape sinkhole of no return.
Over and over…
… and over.
—–
“As you can clearly see, Dr. Mouse, the darts weren’t the cause of the death.”
“As I suspected,” he said in his superior, haughty way. “What did the extracted bodily fluids reveal?”
“Dr. Rabbid over at the lab is still working on the results,” answered Dr. Brown. Dr. Mouse was thinking he’d have the results already, would *cane* them out of a subordinate if needed for such an important case. All Millbank is depending on a correct diagnosis. For its own survival.
Sensing the tension, Dr. Brown put forth another option, since he didn’t have much faith in science to figure it out by this point. He acted as if it was his own idea instead of Dr. Rabbid’s but would quickly point the blame finger at the non-present doctor if Mouse didn’t like the proposal.
“Seance?!” Dr. Mouse responded to it, initially seeing only the negative of the thing. “Here? In Millbank?? Are you mad??”
Well, a little, Dr. Brown thought, but then answered: “It could be elsewhere. The other doctors wouldn’t have to know about it. You could be a hero, sir, swooping in from the outside to save the day.”
“All Hallows Day,” he specified. “All this,” and he looks around the room that represents the entire sim in the moment, “wouldn’t have to go back into storage. It could be perpetual, a permanent fixture. *If*…”
“… we could just figure out how to affix the past to the present; make it stable and unfluctuating,” finished Brown for the higher up doctor.
The phone in Dr. Brown’s pocket rings in an ancient way. He answers; he acknowledges; he hangs up. “Dr. Rabbid’s results indicate formaldehyde, 37 percent.”
“Formaldehyde?!” shouted the superior doctor even slightly louder. “Then this *is* about preservation.” The seance was a go, at least in the eyes of Brown.
00400516
“One more haunted house and we’ll be done with Millbank for another year, troupe,” spoke their obvious leader, front and center and gazing inward to begin gauging the spookiness of the place. Toddles. Ready to explain to them what’s actually going on with their now intertwined relationships. Just after this — she’s curious about the final twist here, which she knows is coming but hides the details from her higher, psychic self in order to be surprised. What’s the point of existing if you know *everything*, she reasons with it.
“Doesn’t look too scary,” offered Vain and Artery Boyy beside her. “Not like some of the others.”
“The mortuary, yeah,” said Rock on her other side, and stifled an urge to barf again at the mere thought of the gruesome scenes and things found within. The others knew it was a mistake to take him in but there were no distractions outside like a sandbox or something. He could wander off and get lost if left by himself in that way. But still: the damage was done to the 46 year old man from Nantucket, the opposite of Toddles in many ways since he has a child’s brain inside a grownup’s body.
Toddles looked around the yard: no distractions again. “Are you going to be okay, Rock? We don’t have to go in. We can end our tour here, go back to Big Sandy with the satisfaction that we visited everything except this last building, the most central one still but, like VA Boyy said, not that impressive on the outside. We can basically say we saw it all, we finished it all off.”
“I — want to be complete,” he said, wiping sweat from this forehead. “I — want to go in.”
“Okay,” said Toddles. “If you’re *sure*.”
And here comes the twist. When they all went inside, seats seem to be arranged for them as if in a play, include Rock’s at an old upright piano. It was here he discovered a middle name: Roll. Rockabilly star R.R. Ramby was born. After brushing away the cobwebs he played beautifully, even though he only took a few lessons in childhood before being written off by his parents as useless and not worth throwing money away on. With this different form of music he automatically found himself banging away at to alleviate the fear aspect, he would have the last say.
All this was set up by the rock star that came before him, shrine remaining upstairs. Roll over Beethoven. Here comes a new one.
Sunklands 