Whenever Seraphim visits an ‘event’, if there is one, she always checks out the surrounding area, ever the explorer… she visited the ‘Flourish’ event, this morning, then checked it’s surrounding landscape… which was a beautiful gem called ‘Cooper River’. The uplands were quite lush, in a dry, desert-palette way…
… but the lowlands were just plain empty…
… in a beautiful, desolate kind of way that spoke of dead-end stories…
… and meaningless liaisons…
… in a place everyone would rather forget.
Seraphim took Zoey to see Tee’s new project, today. It’s a deliciously creepy, Twilight Zone-like ‘museum’, dedicated to the ‘statuefication’ of, apparently, hapless victims…
… there is a suspicious purple mist outside, that seems responsible for immobilising several innocent bystanders, and turning them into plastic mannequins… Zoey was very nervous, but Seraphim is basically fearless, and promised to protect her kitten, which helped calm Zoey a bit…
… inside there were many lovely dolls and mannequins…
… all very shiny and freshly-moulded looking… Zoey stayed very close to Seraphim…
… out the back, there was a lovely garden… Zoey relaxed a bit, when Seraphim pointed out that all these ones actually were just innocent statues…
… they both agreed the place was creepy with fairly obvious sexual overtones… just like most horror stories.
Seraphim has her baby back…
… all she wants to do, is kiss her, and cuddle her…
… gently stroke her soft ears, and listen to her purr.
Yesterday, Seraphim went to the little house she built for her and Zoey, to water the plants. She’s not spent much time there, since Zoey vanished, and since she moved all Zoey’s stuff into the shed…
… she noticed the lights were on, and was just thinking she must have forgotten to turn them off, when she heard a familiar purring…
… she turned in dis-belief to the pink pod-chair, just inside the door, and there, curled up and purring in her sleep…
… was an exhausted, but very happy, Zoey. Seraphim just about burst out crying… instead, she said ‘Hello, sleeping beauty’, which instantly woke Zoey, who sprang out of the chair to hug her Mistress… ‘Where the fuck have you been, baby?’ asked Seraphim, standing back to look at her lost girl…
… Zoey explained that, due to her human’s router being faulty, she had been stuck outside the cyber-door to SL, scratching and yowling for nearly two months, trying to get back to Seraphim, and she was sooo sorry she’d caused her Mistress such hurt…
… the two of them talked for a long time, Seri saying she knew it must have been just as hard for Zoey, being shut out in cyberspace all that time, but that it would take a while for Seraphim to come right, having gone so long not knowing where her kitten had gone, or why, or if she’d ever see her again. Zoey said she totally understood that, and was fine with it, as long as she got kisses to make up for the ones she’d missed out on for the last two months. Seraphim said that sounded ok to her, and kissed her baby.
Seraphim knows she is ancient, she is immortal, she is from another planet. But she doesn’t know where. She was only a child of 1000 years, when she was accidentally transported here… because of her physiology, that meant her mind was barely active, so she didn’t really think beyond killing to eat, and certainly not about her origins, or very existence, or about why there was always only her. That was a long time ago, now. She doesn’t know where she came from, but her body does. Things like the sky at Erebus Harbour get trapped in her body’s memory, and her body throws them up as the canvas of dreams when she sleeps, and she dreams about distant galaxies and spiral nebula… and a sentient planet, calling to her, across the vast distance of time and space.
Seraphim explored Erebos Harbour today. Starting at an eerily deserted harbour, under an uneasy, leaden sky, she walked through the main gate…
… into the equally deserted village. On the hill, she could see an old observatory, with birds wheeling in circles above it… she decided to see what was there…
… she made her way up muddy paths, and over-grown steps, through an old garden of animal statues… the whole place had a disquieting aura of decaying eccentricity…
… at last, she came to the observatory, which was atop a planetarium… both had long fallen into ruin…
… like most ruins, there wasn’t much to see, inside, apart from the signs of time’s passage on the works of men…
… but, from a dangerously unstable deck, beside which hung a ludicrously unlikely bed platform…
… she had a good view of the gate she’d initially come through.
Seraphim decided to go back to the Tokyo-WindHill City/Rieri-Town/Mopire City sim, and deliberately map it’s boundaries, something she’s never actually done, before. When she got there, she made her way down to the shore, and headed in the opposite direction to the one she took, yesterday. One of the first new sights was these two little guys. Once, she saw a whole boatload of them in a canal, but she’s never seen these two, sitting here, before… they seemed pretty happy…
… she made her way to the tennis courts, which were as far as she’d gone, this way, before…
… but, when she tried to walk along the embankment in front of them, to get past them, she discovered this was another, impassable, edge of the sim… coming back past the courts, she found another hedgehog, happily fishing from a dingy…
… she made her way up the edge of the sim from the tennis courts, back toward the city…
… where she encountered this cutie who, though obviously running through photographic poses, so, obviously not afk, chose to totally ignore Seraphim’s friendly greeting, something that isn’t uncommon in SL…
… by now, Seraphim was kind of lost… this place does that. At least she now knows where another boundary is. She continued to explore and, looking across a canal…
… she saw these two guys, taking tea in a cardboard box, under a bridge. Seraphim made her way down to them, to say hello. She told them her human has mugs just like theirs, and they both hastened to assure her that these were their own mugs, and that they had not stolen them from her human. Seraphim laughed, and told them she had not, for one moment, thought that was the case. She said goodbye, and continued to explore…
… in a game arcade, she found yet more of these little guys, they were taking turns at being picked up by the mechanical claw in the game booth…
… Seraphim told them to be careful not to hurt their little feet, and they promised not to hurt themselves. She’s never seen so many hedgehogs, here!
As much as Seraphim loves Hangars Liquides, she probably loves Tokyo-WindHill City/Reiri-Town/Mopire City more…
… the whole place must be at least the size of Hangars Liquides, but it’s far more open… of course, there’s hardly any comparison, other than that they are both works of stunning quality…
… when Seraphim first started coming here, she never used to see anyone else, but lately, she usually sees at least a few people. This time, she saw several, including this couple and their dogs, relaxing by the shore…
… Seraphim played her camera drone lovingly over the luscious curves of the woman…
… before moving on. As always, she found new places… she discovered that this forest area is an impassable illusion, just like the unattainable distant city across the water, so she now knows where one corner of this whole world is…
… she made her way back onto a familiar path…
… and then, once more, found somewhere she’d never been before…
… which led her to another familiar area… this whole collection of sims is all no-fly… to get onto the overpasses, you have to find the on-ramps, which are in Mopire City… or… as Seri has done in the past, you can rez a flying vehicle, which will stay rezzed as long as you stay in it. Seeing the place from the sky is equally as impressive as seeing it from the ground…
… Seraphim knows she will come here many more times… she’s thinking she might take her flying truck for a spin, next time.
Yesterday, Seraphim received an update from Djehan Kidd, the creator of Hangars Liquides, that the Indiegogo campaign, set up to raise the money to pay LL labs so they won’t delete it from their servers, has reached 57%, thus allowing Hangars Liquides to pay a 3000 Euro payment, forestalling that deletion for the time being…
… Seraphim is delighted that this fabulous place isn’t going to vanish any time soon, the loss of it would leave only a few equally unique, stunning works of environmental genius in SL, especially on this scale…
… Seraphim zapped over, today, to inhale the industrial smells, and listen to the cyberpunk ambience…
… she is proud of herself for making what was, for her, a fairly significant donation, one she thought about for several days, in the end deciding she had to put her money where her heart was… she would never have forgiven herself if she’d sat by, hoping other, wealthier people, would save one of her favourite places in SL…
… standing here, today, she’s very pleased she didn’t do nothing.
One of the many unique things Seraphim can do, due to her alien physiology, is release, from glands in her body, a secretion which causes her to experience mild euphoria…
… and causes her already superior senses to become even more receptive to light and colour…
… it’s a stress response, she can’t deliberately do it, but she can control it when it happens, either quickly causing the effect to dissipate, or choosing how strongly it effects her, and how long…
… obviously it wouldn’t help in the middle of a fight to the death with 1000 Knights Templar, but, this evening, in the wake of several stress-inducing weeks…
… it felt wonderful.
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