Search Results for 'pop'

Newer developments

POP-IN THREAD (Maeve, Lucinda, Shawn-Paul, Jerk, [Granola])

Granola is popping in and out of the stories, exploring interacting more physically with her friends through Tiku, a bush lady focus of hers.
Luckily (not so coincidentally) Maeve and Shawn-Paul were given coupons to travel from their rural Canada town to the middle of Australia. Maeve is suspicious of being followed by a strange man, and tags along with Shawn-Paul to keep a cover of a young couple. Maeve is trying to find the key to the doll that she made in her secret mission for Uncle Fergus, which has suddenly reappeared at her friend Lucinda’s place. She’ll probably is going to have to check on the other dolls that she made as well.
Jerk continues to administrate some forum where among other things, special dolls are found and exchanged, and he moderates some strange messages.
Lucinda is enjoying Fabio’s company, Maeve’s dog, that she has in her care while Maeve is travelling.

FLYING FISH INN THREAD (Mater/Finly, Idle/Coriander/Clove, Devan, Prune, [Tiku])

The mysteries of the Flying Fish Inn seem to unravel slowly, like Idle’s wits.
Long time family member are being drawn inexplicably, such as Prune and brother Devan. The local bush lady Tiku is helping Finly with the catering, although Finly would rather do everything by herself. The totemic Fish was revealed to be a talisman placed here against bad luck – “for all the good it did” (Mater).
Bert, thought to be an old flame of Mater, who’s acted for the longest time as gardener, handyman and the likes, is revealed to be the father of Prune, Devan, Coriander and Clove’s mother. Mater knew of course and kept him around. He was trained in codes during his time with the military, and has a stash of potentially dangerous books. He may be the key to the mystery of the underground tunnels leading to the mines, and hidden chests of gold. Devan is onto a mystery that a guy on a motorbike (thought to be Uncle Fergus of Maeve’s story) told him about.

DOLINE THREAD (Arona, Sanso/Lottie, Ugo, Albie)

Mandrake & Albie after a trip in the bayou, and looking for the dragon Leormn’s pearls and the sabulmantium, have finally found Arona after they have emerged from the interdimentional water network from the Doline, to the coast of Australia in our reality, where cats don’t usually talk.
Albie is expecting a quest, while the others are just following Arona’s lead, as she is in possession of a mysterious key with 3 words engraved.
After some traveling in hot air balloon, and with a local jeep, they have arrived at a local Inn in the bush, with a rather peculiar family of owners, and quite colorful roster of guests. That’s not even counting the all-you-can-eat lizard meat buffet. What joy.

NEWSREEL THREAD (Ms Bossy, Hilda/Connie, Sophie, Ricardo)

Ms Bossy is looking to uncover the Doctor’s surely nefarious plans while her newspaper business isn’t doing so well. She’s got some help from Ricardo the intern. They have found out that the elderly temp worker who’s fascinated by the future, Sophie (aka Sweet Sophie) had been the first subject of the Doctor’s experiments. Sophie has been trying to uncover clues in the dreams, but it’s just likely she is still a sleeper agent of the Doctor.
Despite all common sense and SMS threats, Hilda & Connie have gone in Australia to chase a trail (from a flimsy tip-off from Superjerk that may have gone to Lucinda to her friend journalist). They are in touch with Lucinda, and post their updates on social media, flirting with the risk of being uncovered and having trouble come at their door.
Sha, Glo and Mavis are considering reaching out for a vacation of the nursing home to get new free beauty treatments.
In his secret lair, the Doctor is reviving his team of brazen teafing operatives: the magpies.

LIZ THREAD (Finnley, Liz, Roberto, Godfrey)

Not much happened as usual, mostly an entertaining night with Inspector Melon who is quizzing Liz’ about her last novel about mysterious messages hidden in dolls with secret keys, which may be her best novel yet…

DRAGON 💚 WOOD THREAD (Glynnis, Eleri, Fox/Gorrash, Rukshan)

Before Rukshan goes to the underworld land of Giants, he’s going to the cottage to gather some of his team of friends, Fox, Ollie etc. Glynis is taking care of Tak during Margoritt’s winter time in the city. Margoritt’s sister, Muriel is an uninvited and unpleasant guest at the cottage.
Tak is making friends with a young girl who may have special powers (Nesy).
The biggest mystery now is… is the loo going to get fixed in time?

Granola suddenly popped back in the real world — the one with her friends she meant. Oh, this was all rather confusing. Looking around, she was feeling quite corporeal.

“That can’t be right!”

She looked around, feeling herself. That wasn’t her body, it was Tiku’s. Yet, if she was corporeal, did it mean she was in the mental space with the story characters? Boundaries seemed to blur. She took a spin around to get a feel of the space, and fell on her bum with an infectious laughter.
Tiku was quite pliant and surprisingly accommodating of her in-that-body visits. It was as though they could converse, but it felt like a familiar voice of her own, not someone’s else.

“I’m in the magical thread of their story, am I not? It’s all in their head…” She thought. She could feel Tiku’s mind there, laughing and answering back something about the Dreamtime, that it was all the same and connected anyway.
“But it’s confusing as hell!” She liked a bit of order, and explanations in big bold letters.

A jeep coming out from the horizon followed by dark billowing smoke braked noisily in front of her.

“Hello there!” A girl was driving, wearing a sort of loose grey hijab, smiling at her.
Tiku-Granola waved as her, still sitting on her butt.

“Are you in trouble? No? Great. Listen, we’re looking for an Inn, it shouldn’t be very far from here. Our GPS is a piece of rubbish and is making us turn in rounds… Could you point us there, I’m afraid I took a wrong turn at the last fork in the road.”

Granola left Tiku to reply, as she seemed to know exactly what to answer.
“No Miss, you’re on the right road, it’s just a little ahead, you’ll find the old washed-out sign that points to the mines. Follow the sign until you reach the little brook, cross it and it’s on the left, 2 miles, then right, then…”

Arona stopped the lady.

“It seems a bit complicated, and my copilot here isn’t that good with memory riddles” she added pointing at Sanso. “Would you care to join us for that last mile.”

“Sure, of course, I was planning to go back there anyways. Never seen such activity in a while. Seems they’ll need a bit of help there, with all the guests coming.”

An unexpected shaman tart witch was looking and had spotted them coming from afar.

“Head Shaman Tart Witch, if you please.” She muttered in her breath, happy to break the fourth wall and all.

The sun was already high and the air was sizzling ready to burst out like buttered pop corn.

“A rather lame metaphor. You’ve done better.”

The Head Shtart Witch, as we will call her later for brevity’s sake, was as tart as a sour lemon dipped in vinegar, and prone to talking to spirits, when not cackling in tittering fits of laughter, as shamans are wont to do.
She was surprisingly in tune with the narrator’s voice this late in the day, considering it wasn’t her first bottle of… medicine she ingested today.

“Voices are rather quiet, yes. I was expecting a bit more… quantity if you know what I mean.”

The narrator had absolutely no idea of what she meant, not discontent with the quantity per se.

Three in quantity, they came, looking for her. A girl, visibly in charge, although a bit hard to tell either, buried into the baggy hood and all.

“The star-studded stockings under the striped red and white trousers were a bit of a give-away though… she was a she, and a bossy pants to boot.” the Head Schwtich replied.

“And don’t take advantage to maim my full name… Jeeze, they’re so lazy these days. Can’t even spell right.”

Ignoring the rude comments, the narrator continued.
Then, a man, a bit namby-pamby with the gait of a devil-may-care goat at that.
And a boy, on the threshold of manhood, with lots of red hair and freckles he could have put the bush on fire.

“You have forgotten the gecko… and the cat.”

The cat wasn’t forgotten of course, but was it technically a cat, with the talking and all? Poor thing had ill-fitted boots (probably a clearance sale from the Jiborium’s), so that it wouldn’t burn its pads on the red hot trail. It seemed stubborn enough to refuse being carried, although not confident enough about the surrounding life in the bush to stop checking every minute for all that crawled and crept around.

“That’s why they’re here. The protective charms. That, and the jeep of course.”

The Twitch seemed to know everything so the narrator felt it would probably best to let her finish the comment.

“Oh, don’t you start. That passive aggressive attitude isn’t going to get your story done, is it. And it’s not like I’m going to follow them in their dangerous and futile quest. It’s your job, better get to it.”

Indeed, she was only just a sour, old, decrepit…
“You stop that!”

“Is that her hut?” Albie pointed at the horizon.
“Yes, I think we’re there.” Arona looked at the compass she’d put around Albie’s neck. “Yes, that’s it.”

Sanso yawned and stretched lazily “I hope they have a hot shower now, I feel so dirty.”

Arona chose to ignore Sanso and let him gesticulate. They’d only walked for less than 15 minutes, and the perspective of few more hours of driving with him breathing down her neck started to give her murderous thoughts.

She turned to the team. “Listen, whatever happens, don’t make rude remarks, even if she seems a bit… unhinged.”

“Are you talking about the crazy lady with the chameleon on her head, who talks to herself and looks like she hadn’t got a bath in a century?”

“That’s what I meant Sanso.” Arona rolled her eyes in a secret signature move she owned the secret of. “Listen, it would be better for everyone if you’d stay here and stop talking until we get the keys to the jeep, alright.”

Luckily for all of them, a little sage smudging and a bakchich in kind sealed the deal with the HEAD Shaman Tart Witch, and less than an hour later, with the mountain at their back, they were all barreling at breakneck speed down the lone road towards the Old Mine Town.

That’s where the Inn was, now starting to crawl with unexpected guests and long lost family members.

Granola, with all the expounding of new information felt a bit dizzy and in need of a quiet recap.
The squishy giraffe was a place as good as any for a bit of rest, but to be perfectly honest, the pets around the place didn’t make the greatest conversationists. And she didn’t want to look like she didn’t do her homework and get admonished by her bleu friend.

“Think,” she said “by now, you can go about any place in their expansively creative stories.” —which was actually, like travelling inside her friends’ memories, considering the time they all spent in these universes, they were almost real, quite tangible.
“Think about one of their character, one who always seems to hold answers…”

Bam swoosh

“It didn’t take long.”

She could squint in the dark and see a faint glow. “Wait… Don’t tell me I’m in one of these… kluknish… what’s these bat things with the impossible name…”

It’s glükenitch actually the voice was coming from below, but speaking directly in her head. And you don’t have to hide in one, really. Don’t you have some better character to be?

She recognized the dragon. “Shit,” she muttered, “that’s not the one I was thinking about; always answering in riddles, that much I remember; don’t need to add more confusion! As if speaking through the whale last time wasn’t messy enough.”

True, but you got a glimpse of one of the keys, haven’t you?

She froze in her tracks. “What do you know about these keys?”

Not much, I’m loath to say. Besides, what should I know about it, I’m not from this world, am I now?

“Damn riddles,” she said. But the dragon had a point. She wasn’t in the right world to check on her friends.

“Can you tell me something useful at least?” she asked the dragon before deciding to pop-out.

Maybe, yes… See, you pop-in naturally where the action is. It’s only natural that the bigger the action, the stronger the pull…

Granola hadn’t thought of that. She had been a bit too focused in getting more physical and interacting outside. But the last week (in her friends’ time continuity), there has been more targeted jumps, less chaotic, and more frequent. It’s like she could tune in.
And for now, the pull was in Australia.
Come to think of it, she may have had a concurrent focus there. She only had to believe she could be there, right place, right time, right person… An Aboriginal woman, what was her name?

Tiku…

Despite the underground currents, following the trail of blue glow from the glukenitches’ droppings was easy; far less subtle than old fashioned glow worms starmap reading…
Mandrake was alerted to a sudden drop when the trail started to disappear abruptly, indicating the strong possibility of a chute of some kind.
He only managed to catch Albie’s pants before he fell right in, and pulled both of them back to the shore. He had to be sure.

“Good thing, that slimey dragon managed to power back the sabulmantium, we may get a hint of where we’re headed to.”
“There’s no other way than the waterfall, is there Mr Mandrake?”
“Shht. Let me concentrate, this thing is sensitive.”

Under the paws of the cat, the sand inside the clear sphere started to move in shapes and describe a living story.

“Mmm. Seems he wasn’t joking, never seen this thing behave so strangely before.”
“What is this?”
“It looks like something that I have seen a long time ago, but that wasn’t in this dimension… I guess we won’t know for sure until we get there. Ready boy for the dive of your life?”

Albie didn’t have time to answer, as the cat wasn’t waiting for him.

The fall seemed to last forever. But then a light appeared, and they started to float up, up, up.

When they emerged, they were clearly out of swamp waters. Salty water was all they could see for miles around.

“A blessing you had an inflatable zodiac in your purse, Sir.” the boy said to the cat once they were up on the boat, waiting for a sign as to where next.

“Whales! Whales!” the boy shouted excitedly, pointing to the shapes moving under their boat.

“Ah, finally, someone with some wits about that can tell us some valuable information.”
It didn’t take long to Mandrake to grab the attention of one of the belugas and engage the conversation; it didn’t seem particularly long to Albie, but it seemed like a lot was exchanged.

“We’re on the Gold Coast of Australia” Mandrake said. “That dimension is a bit tricky for my species, humans here take us for lazy playthings and don’t really understand us, so I may have to rely on you for some of the talking, boy.”
“For sure, Mr Mandrake. Did you get any news as to where Ms Arona might be?”
“Might be. That whale started to babble thing about granola cookies and dolls. I have no idea what she meant, she might have been popped in by some alien force. Luckily whales are used to manage multiple personalities well, so I managed to get the rest of the navigational hints once she got her channels back in order.”
“So where to now?”
“Starboard, son, starboard!”

Jerk looked puzzled at the screen.
As his side job, he was managing the maintenance of a popular website findmystuff.com where people where posting lost&found items, which had turned into a joyful playground at times for groups of pranksters as well as good samaritans leaving stuff for people to find. Monitoring and curating the content was mostly done by an AI these days, but now and then the flagging seemed to require a human analysis, to check if it was a false positive or not.
Right off, there were some odd blinks on his screen, but if that hadn’t caught his attention, the details of this case certainly would have.
It was a particular group, not specially overactive, the quiet under the radar group catering to less than a few hundred people at the time, but picking up strongly over the past few days. The group was called “findmydolls” and there was a comment which had been flagged as “fake news”.
He had to decide to “moderate” (read “delete”) the comment or not, but he couldn’t decide about it.

Have found one of your dolls, Ms M. Brilliant hiding! During the last Aya trip, I was teleported to some place that looked like Australia’s dream time, and there was your doll. I’m sure it’s there in Australia, a remote place in the middle of the bush, there’s an inn with a flashy fish neon sign over it. Your doll was there, and there was a message. PM for details.

He shrugged. The rules of the board didn’t explicitly forbid “remove viewing” as a source of clues, nor an astral view was any less flimsy than a vague visual report from the streets.

He clicked on “approved”.

Recap of Pop-in thread

After an untimely death, Granola (B) decides to stay under the tutelage of Ailill (E) in transition space, and learn to pop-in, so she can help people, and also reconnect with friends. She also finds out it’s more difficult than she thought, and can only have limited control or access to people. She also discovers she keeps popping in mental spaces such as the story playground, which is on a drone mode since her friends have stopped writing evolving stories. Her new mission is to reawaken their story, learning she can also interact with them in the mental space while they are inhabiting their characters…

For a moment, Granola felt in a dream world. It wasn’t the first time it happened, so she relaxed, and let her consciousness focus despite the distraction from the shimmering and vibrating around the objects and people.

She was in another mental space, but this one was more solid, not just a diversion born from a single thought or a single mind. It was built in layers of cooperation, alignment, and pyramid energy. A shared vision, although at times, a confused one.

The first time she’d visited, she thought it was a fun fantasy, like a dream, quickly enjoyed and discarded. But then she would come back at times, and the fantasy world continued to expand and feel lively.

It slowly dawned on her that this was a projection of an old project of her friends. The more striking was how people in the place looked a bit like Maeve’s dolls, but she could see the other’s imprints —Shaw-Paul’s, Lucinda’s and Jerk’s—, subtle energy currents driving the characters and animating everything.

It felt like a primordial fount of creativity, and she basked in the glorious feeling of it.

Once, she got trapped long enough to start exploring the “place” in and out, and it all became curiouser when she found out that the places and the stories they told were all connected through a central underground stream.
Granola had been an artist most of her life, so she understood how creativity worked. Before she died, she had been intrigued the first time her online friends had mentioned this collaboration game, creating that mindspace filled with their barmy stories. She didn’t believe such pure mental creation could be called real at all.
Maybe that was the kind of comments that let her friends forget it.
If only she could tell them now!

“You could, if you’d hone your pop-in skills, dear”, a random character suddenly turned to her and spoke in the voice of Ailill, her blue mentor.
“But how can you see me? I’ve tried and the characters of these stories don’t ever see me!”
“That’s what popping in is all about, justly so!” Ailill had this way of making her mind race for a spin.
“Now, will you stop hijacking this person, and tell me why you’re interrupting my present mission?” Granola turned burgundy red, increased her typeface a few notches, and pushed her ghost leg vigorously at the story character.
“Oh, you are right about that. It is a mission.” he smiled, “I think you’d want to go find certain characters, or avatars. Your friends personae are always shifting into new characters, but they hide themselves and don’t progress. Actually, some of them are trapped in loops, and those loops are not happily ever after. You can help free them, so they can recover their trapped creativity.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound like an impossibly vague mission at all!”

She was about to continue ranting, but the pop-in effect was gone, and the character was back to his routine, unperturbed by her ghostly agitation.

Next on her list was Shawn-Paul. Or at least, she liked to think she had a neat ordered list and a method to her travels, but truth was she would often be propelled to the oddest places by random idea associations and would then pop-in to less than savory spots.

Not that she didn’t like to see through the eyes of an hideous little teddy-troll made of orgone. Granola had always hated orgone with its trapped garbage in clear resin, sold a million bucks for silly woowoo purposes. It didn’t prevent her projecting into it for one. She was actually wondering if it wasn’t actually working and enhancing her capacity to get irate.

When she started to feel everything vibrate, she forced herself to slow her thoughts down, and tell the particles trapped in the resin of the orgone teddy-troll to also slow down and breathe with her.

Now. She had a good view on Shawn-Paul who was strolling along the aisles of the oddest of minerals in the crystal & fossils market. The heat was making the asphalt sizzle at place, and the warm air was making her view blurry in waves of mirages. She tried to send some pop-in energy to get him to notice, but either he was too stoned by the heat, or lost in his thoughts as usual… Of course, there was so little chance that he was simply appalled by the orgone display on the shelves.

“Focus” she thought, trying to channel her giant essence into the tip of the figurine, she pushed her energy towards SP’s direction.

The orgone teddy-troll started to wobble and dance precariously above the ledge of the shelve, starting its slow motion fall to the ground.

The excitement made Granola’s consciousness suddenly untethered and leave for another mental space. She moaned as she couldn’t see if the figurine had landed and successfully drawn the attention of SP…

Fabio, Maeve’s pekingese, didn’t seem startled when Granola popped into the squishy giraffe toy. It wasn’t the first time it’d seen ghostly apparitions around Maeve. Quite the contrary in fact, Fabio explained to the squishy giraffe after spitting it out on the kitchen floor, where Maeve was finishing her cleaning duties.

She couldn’t help but pick up the toy and give it a good clean. Most of the colors had already faded, but she couldn’t part with it. It was the favourite toy of her first dog, and it was bringing up many memories.

“Thanks for the bath, darling” she squished the toy making it talk.

She looked at the dog “it’s time for your walk, isn’t it? Let me change, and we’ll go to the store, I think we’re short of butter for the cookies.”

“Funny how time goes or seem to not exist at all, when you are popping in and out” mused Granola.
It felt a few seconds since she’d left the sheen of Ferrore wrappings, but with her mind racing in all sorts of places, she’d somehow would appear in another tranche of life months apart from the last sequence she was in.
Truth be told, she had almost forgotten about the past circumstances, or how the story was unfolding, like waking up from a dream, and barely remembering the threads of the night’s activity all the while knowing you were totally absorbed by them a few blips of consciousness ago.
If she’d learnt something, that was to go with the flow, and start from where she was. Clues would light the way…

Since they’d moved him (promoted, they said) to the new store in the posh suburbs, Jerk’s job had taken a turn for the worse. One thing was clear, they put him in charge because they had clearly no idea who to put there.
He’d liked enough that the thing basically was running itself, and he didn’t have much pressure to perform for now. But honestly, these parts of the city were much less exotic to say the least. More drones consumers, bored mums, noisy kids, all day long…

With the new schedules and the commute, it wasn’t as easy to have a social life; not that he cared too much, but he’d started to bond a bit with the funny neighbors some time ago. With the return of summer, he was thinking of having a rooftop party at their appartment’s building, but for some mysterious reason, time was passing without having even set a day for the event.

“Less planning, more doing”, something said in his ear, or so he thought.

“Couldn’t agree more” he said, taking his bag discreetly as he made an early exit for the day.

“There it is” he pointed at the worn-out dusty book he’d found after turning around the whole library. “Techromancers appear at the seams between realities. They possess technologies to divine outcomes beyond conventional means of the place in which they appear — in a word, they are from the futures, always, whenever the period they were found in — a reason for which scholars have surmised they come from a unique convergence point of the infinite lines of time in a real projective space of time, hinting at the nature of an all-connected roundabout timeline. Although them popping in existence at awkward places is not unheard of, they tend to stay discrete for fear of the Timeline Riots Impeachment Police.

“T’isn’t that helpful now, is it” he said dusting a peanut from the floor before cracking the shell open. “And doesn’t tell us why Finnley is so emotional now. Or where is Roberto. If I were to worry, that would worry me more…”