LOL Gals. Sorry but I've had a busy week. I wanted some pics for the next ep and got a little bogged down playing a couple of families to get the right interactions to snap in what free time I have had. What is worse from a creative standpoint is that I mostly write best on my laptop but since winter arrived I find that my cat demands pole position on my lap. (I've tried balancing the laptop on top of the cat -- who doesn't seem to mind ... extra heat is never minded by a cat -- but the elevated position of the keyboard plays havoc with my shoulder muscles.) Anyway the next ep is ready in my head and will appear soon ...
Roxie Sharp had never aspired to more than a simple sort of life. The sort of life where Sunday afternoon walks formed the neatly pleasant points of ellipsis between a satisfyingly indulgent breakfast taken with the most lurid of the Sunday tabloids and the weekends twilight when the looming week casts a shadow over all but the most determined attempts to maintain a holiday feeling. Her heart was racing alarmingly against her ribs as she raced carelessly down the slippery steps toward the street where more strangeness awaited her arrival. The path was steep and twisting as it hair-pinned down the hill; the shallow steps were slippery with a rank mossy growth that threatened to force her to slip and fall with a sickening, bone-breaking crash, at every step. At the last turn she raised her eyes toward the black iron gates and her muscles froze into place causing her to slide into the retaining wall with a bone-crunching jar. The baby in her arms stirred into a furious flurry of that particularly pathetic sort of wail that only much younger babies normally produce. Instinctively she hugged it closer and more protectively to her breast, unaware that she was shushing and soothing into the childs ear, unaware that the soft maternal susurration was, in spite of reason, calming the child. Below her, on the street, a macabre sort of tableau was in progress.
PS - hey folks in case you're wonderin' ... this is scaring the bejayzuz outa me too And I know where it's going ....
put in pictures, that gives the story extra detail. and it makes in more enjoyable. (my point of view) But GREAT STORY
I felt that way when I got inside my vampire Quinn's head and crawled through the house to Dalila's bedroom, close to the floor, like a snake. The hair stood up on my head as I snapped the pictures. My fingers were ice cold. You don't need any pictures, though, IMHO. It's the writing style. In one sentence you've drawn a picture of all my Sundays for the past 10 years.
Jonah Powers was wondering how the hell his pleasant Sunday afternoon visit with the girl he intended to make his wife could have so drastically changed into a nightmare. One moment they were strolling, hand in hand, along the leafy by ways of the leafy little suburb where they were hoping to set up home and the next thing he knew they were caught up in the most bizarre domestic fracas imaginable. High Oak seemed like a nice neighbourhood; the sort of place an honours graduate couple might reasonably be expected to aspire to; the sort where the residents did not engage in kerb-side marital disputes; the sort of area where folks took the occasional bath whether they needed one or not. The woman whom he was doing his best to placate or console, he wasnt at all sure which, was dirty and disheveled. Her face was strained and tired looking, the eyes red-rimmed in smudged black pans of mascara. There were no tears in her eyes. Perhaps she is all cried out, Jonah thought, more or less accurately. He looked up toward the castle and hoped that Roxie would not be long. He wanted to be away from here. He tried to place his arm across the womans shoulders in what he felt was a non-threatening way, but she jumped at his touch, effectively shrugging him off. She continued to mutter: my baby over and over like a mantra. Feeling helpless, Jonah reached out and touched her elbow, look here, love, he said gently. Why dont we sit down for a bit? He gestured toward the kerb. Sayina Teapot seemed suddenly to notice Jonah as though he had materialized out of thin air. She stared at him, her eyes screwed up in a mixture of doubt, confusion and fear. After a moment her mouth opened and began to work silently as her lips tried to frame words to which her throat seemed reluctant to give voice. Its OK, love, said Jonah. Dont try to talk yet a while, just sit down here for a little while. Im sure itll all get sorted out. Against his better wishes he glanced over his shoulder again at the castle. In a very vague sense he had a feeling that someone was approaching and with more hope than was practical he focused his wishes on the idea that Roxie had left the castle. It was not his pretty blonde fiance whom he saw beyond the rust-clotted bars of the castle gates. At least he hoped with all his might it was not she he saw. In rising dismay and disbelief that rapidly turned to a heart-stopping alarm, Jonah watched as a hazy shape moved towards them. It shimmered and flickered, seeming to pulse with the beat of his own heart its strident rhythm was hammering in his ears as it passed through the intricate wrought ironwork, taking upon itself a greater solidity in the process. Once it was clear of the gates it paused and seemed, almost, to shudder, casting tendrils of grey smoke from its ragged edges. Jonah noticed that the grass shrivelled and died where the smoky threads had touched. He was still staring at it, doing his best to believe in what he was seeing, having an endless and irresolvable argument with himself, when it gave a final shudder and solidified into a recognisable shape. The look of utter terror in Jonahs face caused Sayina to twist around, to look over her shoulder. Standing before the castle gates was her husband, Clancy; only it was not really the same Clancy whom she had married barely two years before. Only weeks before, she had been a young wife and mother, a part of a happy and carefree family that was rather well off financially. Clancy Teapot had been a poor man from the wrong side of the tracks when his luck changed one night in the back room of Dads Throat Emporium. Dads was High Oaks general store, but they also served up some potent cocktails and it was known for miles around for its gourmet chef. Not so well known were the regular high-stakes poker games that took place in the joints dingy back room. Somehow Clancy had gotten together the stake money and after a marathon eighteen-hour game he had won almost half a million simoleons. The next day he bought the swankiest house in High Oak and three months later he married a pretty but uncomplicated sophomore called Sayina Trotter. High Oak College had a policy against students marrying, so Sayina dropped out of school and instead took up a life of ease. But her idyll had been shattered last month when Clancy had returned home from a night out. He had seemed pale and listless when she tried to persuade him to get up for some breakfast but when she pressed him, he had reacted with a feral snarl. Sod you, then! She said as she spun on her heels and snatched open the curtains admitting a blinding blast of mid-morning summer sunlight. Stop there all day, for all I care! Clancy had groaned as though he was in real pain and dragged the covers up over his head to escape the light. Clancy had not risen until after the sun had fully set. He had continued in the same way over the following days before announcing that he sold their house and that they were moving to the Castle. What he neglected to mention was the castles other resident.
LOL Everyone. Sorry to bump my own tale ... but ... erm, I've been busy over the holiday Besides. I am moving into the territory of Clancy's story and, frankly, I wanted some pics. I had, what I thought of as, lots of pics. But they were all, well ... crap. There weren't suitable because they were not taken with publication in mind. I never intended to write this story ... I was having fun just playing it out But since I took up the challenge I have no regrets. I have been over and through my families with a fine tooth comb and then back through again with an even finer toothed comb. I agree with whoever it was who said that pictures aren't needed (was it SBW or Lynet? sorry dears, I forget) but, given the medium I like -- need, even -- to see some of the story's crucial watersheds depicted in graphic detail, the better to assist my febrile imagination. However there was one event that I failed to capture. I have spent the last few days engineering circumstances without a single cheat so that I may repeat the hitherto unrecorded event and so, at last, in the next day or three, I will be able to bring forth the unlovely climax of Clancy Teapot's Story ....
Hmmm. I took lots and lots of pics of Sophia, and they didn't show up in any folders, except fot 2 which were both exactly the same and really boring. Don't want to hijack, so if you have any ideas, please PM me. Thanks.
Don't know how to PM, so I'll just say it here ... check the main Storytelling folder, under Neighborhoods. There's one for your neighborhood and then a general one where pix sometimes end up, especially from Community lots ... Oh, you meant email. I thought you meant IM, which I haven't figured out on this site ... well, at any rate, look there.
Thanks! Actually, I meant IM (or Personal Message) me over the site. Got there in the end. Very pleased now - lots of pics that I'd thought were gone forever. Eternally in your debt, yada-yada-yada.
I should make a note to save reading this particular thread after I get up in the morning; so, I don't have any nightmares!
Any news from Clancy Teapot? Or from the investigation of Mouldy and Sulky. I made a little slide show once called the Moldy Files, featuring Sox Moldy and Ima Smelly. My daughter had two of those six-inch dolls that toy companies produce mimicing TV and movie characters. So, of course, I had to play with my new digital camera and have a wild doll-sized adventure. Try to picture me crawling around on the floor to get eye-level with a six-inch doll. No, maybe you'd better not picture that.
Yeah sorry guys. I got sidetracked big time and I need to be in the mood to write coherent stuff (well stuff that bears a passing resemblance to coherence ). I'm having too many senior moments these days. I went out in the back yard this moring at 5am to see what was driving my cat crazy and retired immediately after finding that some scatterbrained moron had left my Mag-lite stood on its lens with the light on thereby making the Duracells inside of no more value than burglar-bashing ballast which is of scant use if you can't see the dirty rotten scoundrel ... darn cat'll have to learn to fight off Amorous Tom on her own ... wonders what happened to my large stock of D cells ... oh yeah, some moron keeps leaving the light on That and the fact that my 2006 diary was on a million Post-Its, utility bill envelopes and other unlikely papery items ... and er ... within the now dead and innaccessible recesses of the mostly coherent Outlook diary files on my laptop. Mein Fuhrer, a nice gal called Janet, sent me a diary along with a list of appointments I didn't know I had. Thanks for that sarky little snipe, Janet I had to get out of bed on Saturday for that cos the postman couldn't get it thru the slot.
LOL, Mirelly. If you ever get over here to Baltimore I'd like to buy you a pint and just listen to you talk. H***, I'll buy you dinner, too. Based on that post above I know it'd be worth it.
Clancy Teapot Clancy Teapot could not understand how his whole life had so dramatically skidded out of control. He felt as though he had slid off an impossibly high cliff and he was now in a terrible freefall, dropping endlessly into a fog that concealed what, he was sure, was a definitely unpleasant ending. Just a few weeks ago, it had seemed that nothing could possibly be better for Mr and Mrs Clancy’s only son. With no living relatives, Clancy’s existence had been a lonely one. He was a plump fellow with podgy features that were not especially distinguished, either to make him cutely baby-faced or else simply to render his appearance jovially healthful. A somewhat lazy man, Clancy’s idea of heaven was to lounge on a sofa, watch TV and to munch pizza. He also liked to gamble; when he had the cash …. It was only two years since that amazing poker game. When he’d drawn a queen of hearts to fill a royal flush it was his fleshily pallid face that helped to conceal his surprise and excitement. Such luck – and only luck can fill an inside straight -- comes rarely and even less often does it follow on the heels of another stroke of luck. Clancy was sitting on a pot of winnings from an earlier hand. It was a substantial sum of money and although he had so far resisted the urge to count it like the parvenu that he was, he had anyway sized up the pile of chips in his mind’s eye. There was probably around one hundred thousand simoleons in the pile by Clancy’s left hand; the improbable harvest of a round in which two flushes and two full houses clashed in an endless cycle of betting which saw the winning full house – fives on jacks --fold leaving Clancy’s threes on twos to clean up. Suddenly he had an unbeatable hand and a substantial pot with which to back it. Silently he’d offered up a prayer to his own personal Goddess: Dear Mirelly, please let everyone else have good hands too! Clancy was not penniless. He lived a frugal life; he’d not paid for food since he left home. If he could not secure an invite to dinner from a neighbour he was always ready to walk over to High Oak College where he knew which dorms were good for a bowl of macaroni cheese. Before the game started Clancy Teapot had been worth at least a hundred thousand, had he ever stopped to work it out. Of course he’d more than doubled that with his previous good luck but the royal flush was something else. The next half an hour was tense and Clancy was forced to put his house and car on the table before the sensational showdown. Three hands remained and the first to reveal was an ace high straight; the player, a stranger from out of town, had bet on Clancy bluffing. He went home broke. The next reveal showed a full house, kings on aces – which is pretty close to being an unbeatable hand … if all the suits are covered and, of course, they were not. Clancy held the five top hearts and he left the joint with almost two and half million. Soon he was living the comfortable life and he had a beautiful wife and an even bonnier baby daughter and then he had met someone. If only he had not. If only he had met another woman and had an affaire. That would have been something he could have handled, would have understood, been comfortable with himself in, been equipped to navigate safely though. If only he had not gone out that night. If only he had not argued with his beloved Sayina and left her at home with baby Gella so that he could go downtown to play cards …. If only he had actually played cards when he got there …. But he had not. Instead he had sat on a bench sourly measuring his worth as a husband and finding little to place in the merit column. He was probably about ready to get up and go in search of a florist when the stranger sat down beside him. Clancy possessed few social graces but something stayed his decision to leave the bench. The stranger had an odd smell about him, a dry, earthy smell that was neither pleasing nor revolting; it was just vaguely unattractive. Exhibiting a rare sense of social delicacy, Clancy postponed rising from the seat. Clancy imagined that the stranger probably experienced a lot of people rising suddenly and departing whenever the stranger sat next to another person. So Clancy held his place and stared fixedly at the still branches of an oak tree across the path where they criss-crossed the starry sky. He tried to quell a feeling of alarm that began to rise within him as he heard the stranger’s low, guttural and bubbly breathing as though the man had the worst case of emphysema known to medical science. Worse the bad smell around the park bench seemed be to thickening the air in the same way that cornstarch thickens a sauce; it was also getting stronger and more foul and fuller of corruption and decay. Clancy felt he had served his duty and that it was time he moved on. The guy was obviously some sort of itinerant, tramp or hobo, a bum to be pitied. Not, however, the sort one invites home for a bath and a hot meal. God no! I’d probably have to incinerate everything afterwards, he thought. Even the wallpaper! He was never quite sure how much time passed after he made the decision to leave the park. It seemed as though mere seconds elapsed before he realised he was watching a half moon setting while the eastern sky was already bright enough to cast his shadow halfway across the park. He found was alone on the bench and he had little to remember except vague unsettling dream-like rags of events and memories. He remembered waiting to get up. He was trying to decide if he should, out of politeness and charity, offer the bum some money … the idea seemed absurd somehow; he just could not imagine the stranger getting near enough most traders to actually seal a deal … then he dreamed he was flying … or was it maybe dancing? Never had he felt so light. He remembered that quite clearly. So light, so … carefree? Yes. Careless, carefree, without a care in the world. He felt strong and resolute and powerful in the arms of … the master? Not “master”: Master, Clancy had been taught that distinction. Yes, he felt that strongly. He had been taught that lesson. Master: it was a term of love and respect and … submission. ‘Bear your breast to me,’ the Master had commanded, and Clancy had complied. Remembering flooded back as dawn broke around him, he looked down at his torn shirt and at two bloody marks just below his collarbone. Was that a hickey? What they call a ‘love bite’? Suddenly he felt ill. A horrid cramp of nausea gripped his belly in a vicious clamp and almost before he had time to bend forward his mouth opened and he vomited clear across the path. Afterwards he shambled home and slept through the remains of the day. In his sleep he was haunted and taunted by dreams and when he woke he rose immediately and dressed hurriedly and carelessly in the clothes he had cast off that morning. They were still stained with mud and sweat and vomit and, of course, they smelled terribly. Clancy returned to the park and waited on the bench determined to “have it out” with the malodorous mendicant. He returned again and again over the ensuing days and each morning he found himself alone and confused and dishevelled with a head full of tangled memories and poorly understood experiences. As time passed he felt himself growing in strength and power; he also grew increasingly fearful of the sun, which now seemed hateful and threatening to him. Of the Master there was no sign, except in Clancy’s dreams. In them the Master was a kind and lovable man, the sort who is described best as grandfatherly. In his dreams Clancy yearned for a father figure. It was inevitable then that Clancy should accept the Master’s invitation to come and live with him at his castle. Sayina was not so easily convinced, but she had little choice in the matter when Clancy told her that he’d sold their home. This last action was just a few days ago … maybe a few weeks. Clancy’s grasp on time’s passage had grown increasingly unreliable of late. Now, though, he was preternaturally aware of a great peril. One that he was sure involved Sayina, whom – in spite of everything – he still loved with a passionate devotion. Without knowing how he had achieved the feat, he found himself standing at the castle gates in broad daylight. The sun was fierce and hot. Too hot, it burned more hatefully than acid. He stood trapped between the desire for flight to the cellar’s cold, safe darkness and his concern for his wailing wife who was being pawed over by a coarse-featured man with hair the colour of the mud that gets washed off the hills in the spring. The two conflicting needs had him rooted to the spot like a broken automaton.
Couple Of Pics Roxie Sharp and Jonah Powers meet Sayina outside the Castle When Justin called on Lily
