red over blue (Democracy continues)
It’s a very blue place, she thinks. 10:01 AM. Yet she stares.
Wonder why Myrtle doesn’t like linden plants? she ponders. I’ve *always* liked linden plants. Maybe the only one she respects, the branchy winter tree with no leaves, is my *least* favorite, hmph.
Someone else should be with me here in this lonely spot, she ruminates. Someone else blue.
She suddenly has the urge to get up and dance. Must be the costume. And the place.
—–
“I see plumeria over there,” she spoke later to rail sitting Edward, her chosen beau for the day. She’d changed into something safer, something non-dancey, urge abated. “I see palm tree no. 1, palm tree no. 2. And then a cypress tree 1 just up the hill. What’s not to love?”
“Different strokes for different folks,” Edward offered to Shelley’s continued rant. She just couldn’t get the logic of Myrtle’s opinion.
“Very regimented. *No* chaos. No mention of mainlands. What a mess! she might exclaim. Yet… she’s there. On Constance.”
“*You* put her there. Even gave her that weird belly button, the on and off thing.”
“The Abyss must be a key. That’s where we meet, her and me. That’s where I can tell her off if she doesn’t friend me.”
“Drop it,” urges Edward to the girl, perhaps the love of his life. If Wanda doesn’t enter the picture again. “Let it go.”
“The *island* is all about that merger.” But as she spoke this, she began to doubt her words. It was more than just that.
(to be continued)
00390102
He’d gotten use to Tigger but this was another type of beast entirely. More teeth, more everything! He decided to purchase that handy wearable tent beside him for zero lindens and sleep in the yard. Good choice. Then tomorrow he’ll head down to the beach to hopefully pick up more gossip on where to find Bart. Both (the sims of) Carumba and Cowabunga seem to be misdirections but he’d find out soon enough. The famous yellow ragamuffin didn’t originate the term Cowabunga, which instead came from the Newton Jasper Turtles, he now knew. And Carumba is actually (a corruption of) Caramba, as in “Ay Caramba!”, so also an error there, as in between the legs. He checked down there while he was thinking of it. Still kind of itchy, but he resisted the urge to scratchy. With this condition and the heat coming up, he knew this could be a long novel 39 to take him to the end of August or so. A bit cooler here on the brown ridge. Beach would be a tad warmer. And stickier. Not a Snowball’s chance he could get out of it, though. Information was there; he could sense it with his tingly higher psychic senses.
—–
Lots of stray cats and dogs outside, big and small, but certainly better than what’s inside. A tiny calico cat enters the tent and falls asleep purring atop his stretched out body. He soon does likewise after pondering Tom, the renegade treatises, and how he got to this time, this place. Vacation, he told the big boss, tired of following around disobeying Shelley, watching her build a thought-to-be secret underwater room here, a presumed clandestine skybox there. Doesn’t she realize they can *see*? So he decided to get to the heart of the matter. Tomorrow he’s going to find one of those turtles.
(to be continued)
carnivore
“Halt! Who goes there?”
Damn. Caught! she thinks, still struggling to get free. Damn f-ing big udder, she curses. If only she were born a bull, she laments not for the first time atall.
“I was… *hungry*!” she protests. Please don’t shoot me please don’t shoot me please don’t shoot me, she thinks.
“There is plenty of grass outside my trailer… *cow*,” he points out with his strict military voice. Veteran of the Big War he is. Seen a lot of scenes like this in his day. People were hungry. But *cows*? “I haven’t… mowed in several weeks,” he continued. “Been away. Guess that’s why *you’re* here. Been checking out the place for a while, eh?” he figures with his warrior logic. “Like what you see, huh? Vacant trailer… beside a stream where you can get your water… close to the mountains and the beach… *well*, I’ve thought of these things too!”
“Please. If you just free me from this stuck window I’ll explain.” Her voice was pretty ordinary for a bovine creature. Her father’s father was an Italian shepherd, explaining her anthropomorphic look. Gets lonely out in the fields sometime. Warrior Kurt is not a total stranger to these urges either.
“Okay, I will free you,” he relents. “But you *must* be pastured. You cannot stay in the trailer with me. Under any circumstances!”
Wow, she thinks. Easy request. Does he have? No… couldn’t be. But then she recalls her heritage.
“What kind of food do you desire? Cow.” Yes, a cow, he thinks. Nothing more. A fat, stinky cow dotted all over with flies. Unsanitary! But here he was thinking of his childhood instead of the present, his uncle’s dairy farm, the mud and the heat. He’s superimposing the past upon the present for a specific purpose, yes, more benefits of wartime military training. He’s even contemplating shooting her in the rear end again, just to get food for *himself*. He feels the pistol underneath his half cape, as if heating up. Should he? She has no defenses. She is like the Durexians on Battle Hill #7 that late April June morning in the May of ’78. The Trojan flag was planted atop it by noon, with only 1 or 2 loses, which unfortunately numbered his chum Chet.
Chet was a vegetarian. Chet would never shoot a defenseless cow. He couldn’t even kill a Durexian threatening to slice his head in two like it was a cantaloupe or watermelon. He puts down the urge to kill. He’ll feed the poor creature. He’ll, yes, let her into his house. If she wishes — her choice.
“Here. I will help you.” She ended up staying in the vacant yellow camper parked beside his trailer, as if waiting for her, expecting her. Meat was always on the table.
Minnesota to Louisiana, the mighty river rolls on
He visited the residence nearest the center of Chum and found another tiger laying on a couch. The more things change the more they stay the same, he contemplated, also looking across the deck at a dancing bear.
If I said he wasn’t perturbed at this new development I would be Lion.
Yes, there I am below, a Batta-lion to be specific. Ready for battal. But it was all a dream about the war again and the loss of Chet. They poured into the sea looking for the real me. I wake up.
—–
Later, much later, I revisited the scene and found 3 girls, probably sisters, all peering round the corner of a neighboring houseboat down the pier at… me again I assume. Wondering what went wrong. Their lives had unfolded perfectly: 3 beautiful children spaced about 2 1/2 to 3 years apart. The golden family. “Golly gee,” the pigtailed middle one said to the others. “Do you think he’ll *ever* make anything of his life?” “Yes,” agreed the younger also coming around like the others before her, also watching me flounder around the end like a lost seal puppy. She was my junior by close to 15 years but was already enrolled in special classes for the gifted and damned, although I just added the second word in jest. This must have been before I enlisted and made something of myself. Finally. My family would beam down smiles instead of rain frowns. The war was the best thing that could have happened. The girls grew up to be successful women in their fields of archeology, anthropology, and astronology from top to bottom, although the youngest had a tough time choosing between astronomy and astrology in her junior year of college and decided to combine them into one to create something new. Since she was special, perhaps special special, the instructors granted this wish. She became the most interesting one to me later, after the war, after all the death and destruction was over. Because she had the most insight into herself, being a kind of split being like myself, although obviously not as fractured. I sat down with her one day and talked away, although this was not part of the dream. This was reality. I told her about TILE. I told her about the renegade treatises by two other children, without a third this time. I was looking for them. I wanted to find out… what they knew. How they channeled such important documents at such a young age. And why that milk for that bread, that (peanut) butter? Was it really needed to make the whole thing palatable to others at least in part?
—–
She still wasn’t allowed to eat with him, despite the changes. “Dear, why don’t you take off your mask. *I* have.”
That is just a wig you put on to give the appearance of a beauty and not a beast, he thinks. You’re still a white faced cow. He stared over, looked at her black vacant eyes. Yes, cow. Nothing to be desired at all. He imagines the heat again, the flies again. He remembers the military.
“I wear this, *cow*,” he answered aloud, “because I don’t want to forget who I am, how I got here. If it wasn’t for Chet–”
“Oh Chet Chet Chet,” she cut in, tired of the name. “Watermelons and cantaloupes. You have to get *over* it dear.”
“Stop saying that,” he protested. “Stop calling me that.”
“*Dear*,” she insisted. “Just take off the helmet — not the cape. Let me take a peek. It’s only fair.”
If he took off the helmet he would no longer be one with Chet. He refused, adding another “cow” or two to rub it in. We are different still, you over there and me over here, he thinks. He will not succumb.
(to be continued)
psychic daydream
He was nursing his 5th Blue William and nibbling on his 3rd sailboat sandwich of the day when the cry came from the waves. “CowaBUN-GAAA!!” followed directly by, in a much higher, nasal voice, “Don’t eat my SHORTS MANN!!”
From this vividly imagined exchange down at the beach, Al fairly quickly deduced that the famous expression of amazement, enthusiasm, or joy commonly uttered by surfers — a “short” if you will — was *stolen* (eaten) from the young, yellow ragamuffin by the turtles. The sim of Cowabunga in the mountains to the west was still relevant after all, along with nearby Carumba, also a historic revision, he figured. Al knew where to head next.
the scene of the anomaly
As expected, the multicolored cubes weren’t there any longer at the Cowabunga trailer site. Nor the red headed, black cone hat topped witch I believe named Alysha at the time. Or so she said. After saying hello in a quite ordinary voice for a superior being, she explained the scene, the anomaly. 25 or 26 cubes, all the colors of the alphabet, she said, except perhaps minus one, she added. Maybe the I, she guessed, she indicated. If so, that I might be me, I realized, in the here, in the now. I stood before the now vacated trailer plot, ready for the next step. Northwest, I decided. Into the foothills of the mountains. Toward Carumba.
It was actually a pretty big leap instead of a small step to begin. Up we go!
Mountain Man 01 (giving someone a ring)
He paused at the first top to make an important phone call. “Tom? Hi, it’s me. Change of plans — I’m heading into Carumba again.”
Reply.
“Skirt?” he heard. “Yeah, I’m wearing my skirt I guess you could say.”
Reply.
“Oh. *Skirt.* Yeah, I’m just going along the edge of the sim basically. No worries there.”
Reply.
“Don’t be sucked into another anomaly, right. I understand.”
Reply.
“Okay, left — got it. Stick to the ridge.”
Reply.
“I have no food.”
And he has no stick, he realized after hanging up and continuing to walk toward higher parts of the range. He’ll soon solve one if not the other.
TOM — Top Of Mountain — revisited/ ring found
00390109
At the first mountain pond, low but discernible as such, he spotted one of those famous angle fish he’d heard about. But angle only mirrors angle as it turns out, as in the corner of the sim of Carumba just beyond where it meets up with Tickle Ridge, Beaver Lagoon, and Westvale. With his lower draw to reduce lag, Al could only see flatter ground from here on up. What was there to skirt? It all seemed like a trap. He rang up Tom again.
“Get out, abort,” came the suggestion, nay, order from his superior being. “We’ll start again in this direction soon. Regroup at the Bellissaria Homeless Union. There are other people there, I’m sensing now, that you need to interact with. Try to find the turtle for real this time. Maybe even Bart,” even though Tom knew this would be more illusive and the equivalent of finding the goose that laid the golden egg. Could he, can he? There was a reason the ridge dwindled to nothing past Cowabunga. Tom didn’t remember that. Space and perhaps time were being altered.
Never mind that Al was wrong and that the ridge continued a little west of where he was looking, low but discernible again if you remove the hiding trees from his angle. Fate dictated he return to the coast. And he forgot to take care of procuring that stick, which he took as an omen too.
(to be continued)
00390110
She had walked much further today than normal, all the way to Permaglow on Pickle 02 to see the famous 3 eyed fish.
And then she spotted the forgotten nuclear fuel rods at the bottom of it all, obvious source of this aberration. Springfeld came to mind, the home of the boy. Stuff of legends. Also: skateboarder from Tull, but last she heard he was surfing.
After counting them, one two three, same as the eyes, same as the rods, she felt a chill pass through her and looked around. She’d felt this before. Something had happened. Parallel world.
Later, when she returned home and was hanging out the wash, she just missed him passing by on the street on his way back to the Homeless Union, mission in the western mountains scuttled, at least for now. Both had information the other needed. And much much more.
But first there was the little matter of Cowboy. “Are my chaps dry yet!?” he called from the house. “I need my chaps! Woman.”
(to be continued)
eleven
“… closed for installation,” she reads just outside the property lines. And she was so looking forward to viewing art in one of the few “original” Bellissaria galleries left. She checks parcel details. Owned by Emerald, an alt of Diamond, so still the same as before. The avatar also owns property in Blung, oddly enough, which could be a past verb of bling if it were such, as in jewelry, as in, often, diamonds. You have to pay attention to synchy stuff like this, especially in synch friendly Our Second Lyfe. She remembers first visiting this gallery in July 2019 when it was presenting an exhibition celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11’s moon landing.
https://modemworld.me/2019/07/16/celebrating-apollo-11-in-second-life-and-sansar/
Prism decides to explore around the area a bit since she’s here, hating to waste such a long trip, and automatically heads toward the mountains instead of the coast, as is her wont. Let’s follow her there…
Cool! she thinks, going further in and up. Bucolic!
Winding around, she doesn’t want to go back to pavement and thus turns right on this ridge that eventually leads her to a mountain where a man called Tom. We’ve been here before.
Permaglow
She went back the next day to meet him. She knew to sit far apart and she also wore a mask for extra protection. Many said he didn’t exist but she knew better. She felt the chills of reality pass through her almost daily.
“I can’t… stop glowing,” he said to her across the patio holding the 3 Meter Monument. “I *can’t*… stop *glowing*.”
But what to do for him? Marg was dead. Homer had lost his head. Lisa, yes. She must contact the sister, the author of the other, lesser treatise on the controversial “perhaps sentence”. Not the channeler/psychic Bart was but still the only hope, she knew. And, chance has it, they had a mutual friend, even though she still didn’t know that fact.
Back home:
“Tarnation, woman! TV dinners again?! Where you been all day girl!?” She, of course, couldn’t tell him, except that she’d been walking per usual. Cowboys never see the other side. “I’m going to stake you down with a rope,” he warned. “Just like a big, fat cow I am.” He was close to her face now, rage in his eyes, nose, mouth, everything. Her window of opportunity to help the boy was closing. She’d need allies, at least one. And he was very close as fortune would have it. Now to somehow bring them together, hmm.
00390113
He listened over as best he could while pretending to stare at the pickle holding couple in front of him. Was this a gay couple instead? He’d just been with his own “chum” (as they were talking about), but that was different. A 3rd was involved. How about here?
Ant-man, he heard. Man of Ant. And the other: one of Sand; Sandman. Like one pickle is sandy colored and one pickle is the more normal green colored. Combine them and you have a green, sandy mess. He gathered all this from their talk. The Pickles, 01 and 02, were like themselves. But something had happened, something had gone wrong. They *contemplated* a gay relationship, or at least the Sandman did. He talked about different tongues…
—–
As kind of planned, he was now under the bone at the entrance to the Verdant Falls Dog Park, the exact same coordinates on Pickle 02 as the Squishy Pickle bench he’d just been on was for Pickle 01. He spotted a couple sitting on the exact same kind of bench, even down to the green and blue pillows. A merger had failed because of something that had happened before with Ant-man and Sandman. The Mann had separated from Ant, and was now interacting with Wo-mann.
“Come on boy!” he heard The Mann call. “And… boy!”
But there was only one dog from Edward’s angle. More mergers. We can move on.
Happy 4th!
A letter was slid under the door while he was watching TV with the dogs. *Squirrel!*, they all thought as one passed by on the highlighted limb, all tails at alert for a moment. Al might take it for a sign but a squirrel was entering the picture every 10 seconds or so. Too frequent to be useful for synchronicity studies. He moves toward the door, picks up the envelope on the floor. Addressed to Resident. Well, *he’s* a resident of the Homeless Union. At least currently: day to day, night to night he’s taking it. Not meeting anyone here since Groover passed through a couple of days back, another “traveler”, he picks up and opens the thing. “Madame Ruby: Psychic,” he reads aloud, perhaps to the dogs but most likely only to himself. “Hmm,” he says while spotting the meat of the missive beneath the card with the 3rd eye underneath the lettering.
—–
Just down the block, Sarah reads her own slid-under-the-door invitation aloud and then her beau/husband reacts. “Tarnation, woman. A *reading*?! What the blue william is a *reading*!?”
—–
He was talking to Gloria and Wanda a little later who came up from the beach for a visit when the door opened and she walked right in, instantly making herself at home on the remaining seat in the room. “Is Groover here yet?” she uttered. Then: “I usually sleep on the car couch. Where’s the car couch? Did they move it upstairs? Is Groover upstairs? Taking a leak? He’s always taking a leak. Must come with being so blue and all. Vet of the Trojan-Durexian War he is. Never takes off his helmet.” She stops with this, perhaps to catch her breath. Al stares over, thinking: so this is the infamous Olive Olystick Groover mentioned, seeing the scowl, feeling the powerful psychic presence all the way over from his own seat. Gloria and Wanda stopped chatting, as if frozen in place. Olive was only talking to Al. They had a mutual friend.
Village
She manifested two pills in her mouth and swallowed, one red and one blue. That way her size stayed the same. Phyllis began to speak.
“Red yellow green blue. NO purple. NO orange. NO nothing else. We have our 4. I am Phyllis. Let’s begin.”
This was a test run with her old pal and sometimes comfy pillow Groover but she was taking it very seriously. She wanted to make sure she hadn’t forgotten how to do this, and that Phyllis would still come through clear and strong. Strong enough to answer questions. Ruby had taught her well.
Meanwhile, just next door…
“Tarnation, woman. You’re not really thinking about *going* to this thing, are you?”
“You can come too,” she offered only 1/2 heartedly at best. She could also feel the future, telling it didn’t include her Cowboy, the thought-to-be love of her life. But that was long ago. Before the 1st lassoing.
“I’ll hogtie you I will,” he continued in that fashion. “I’ll *make* you stay one way or another.”
“I’m going,” she said firmly from the couch that was the same color as her dress. She was one with it. Cowboy had to get up and leave. “Well then tarnation galdarnit I am too!” he said in a huff before slamming the front door, intending to head to the beach for a Blue William or three or five. Boat Bar’s Gloria and Wanda would listen to him there, especially Wanda. But that would give him a lot of trouble later, perhaps the final nail in the coffin that had become their relationship.
“I wish Sarah was as good a listener as you… Wanda.”
Ashton
As fate would have it, they met at the front door of the place. “After you,” Sarah spoke to green clad Al opposite her. “No, after *you*,” he returned, like the gentleman he is, unlike a certain other person in her life we won’t speak about just yet for fear of him show… oh darn. There he is. Straight from the beach and drunk off his tits.
“Ah, *there* you are, *hiccup* love of my liffe, appfle of *burrp* myyyy…” He falls down. Sarah doesn’t move toward him to help. Al picks up on the worst. She turns toward the sober man here again. “Let’s go inside together,” and she holds his hand while they walk within. She feels warm, Al thinks. She feels… good.
00390117
The actual seance in Ruby’s Bellissaria home in Ashton Village, or “reading” as the invitation called it, was kind of anticlimactic to what just happened outside. Psychic Olive Olystick knew instantly upon seeing green clad Al and blue clad Sarah sit down opposite each other at the prepared table that they were destined for each other, *made* for each other in effect (manufactured). Groover filled in the needed 6th spot for absent, sick Cowboy, taking the “yellow” seat opposite Olive’s red. “We have our 6,” she said in the introduction, amended up from 4 to include mutual friends Gloria and Wanda from down on the beach. But Olive knew they didn’t really count. There was still only red, green, yellow and blue around the table. A true TILE, yes, modified for the moment. She had manufactured Groover as much as Al had manufactured Sarah, and visa versa as well. Round and round and round.
Al, of course, asked about Bart and the renegade treatises, both his and Lisa’s, although the boy’s higher channeling effort took top priority in his mind. The reason for him being here in the 1st place. Olive looked deep into her mind, produced an image of a cow that was also a human. “Someone lives on this continent who has your answers. Not the 2nd continent (of Bellissaria), not the 3rd, nor 4th, nor 5th. Here. Not far away to the north — Northern Hills, I’m seeing. Groover knows a person involved.” All eyes at the table turned to the Trojan-Durexian war vet, who just sat there was his mouth agape per usual, like he was as surprised about this information as anyone else. He wasn’t. “Grooover,” urged still-in-trance Olive, seeing that gleam in his eyes. “You *know* something. Spill.”
“This must be about Chet,” he replied in his goofy, high voice, knowing he couldn’t hide anything from Olive.
Sunklands 