Today I spent most of the day coloring in a picture of a fair scene for Justin’s magazine. It’s not very realistic (something that doesn’t really matter in this case, but it always bugs me a little anyway) and doesn’t have perfectly correct perspective, but it’s fun-looking.
In the description of what we were supposed to draw (each magazine has a picture description that he writes, a challenge for us. Usually Owen, Caleb, Deirdre and sometimes Justin himself draw the pictures from the description–this is the first time I did) it said there was supposed to be a man selling balloons, an eating contest and a cooking contest and some kids causing mischief, so I drew in all those things. I also drew other people in the scene, and lots of–hmm, don’t know the word for it. Not quite a tent–but similar; there’s a piece of cloth on top, and it’s held up by poles. (Again, not necessarily realistic for what a fair would really have.) To make it more festive and fill up the blank space, I also drew a ferris wheel and roller coaster in the distance. Quite a fancy fair, I guess!
It was fun the way when I drew the characters in the scene, they stopped seeming like drawings and seemed like actual people in the scene–some of them, at least. It wasn’t that I drew them that great (i.e. that realistically), but some of them had enough character that they started seeming like actual people in a scene instead of stereotyped drawings.
Justin’s magazine comes out on alternate Monday’s, and I was hurrying to finish it today before he produced the magazine. (Well, working steadily at least–hurry doesn’t come natural to me in artistic things. When he knocked on the door and said time was running out, then I hurried.) Justin was finishing up the rest of it on the computer today, while I was finishing up coloring in my picture. As it turned out, Justin didn’t finish the magazine today either, so I should be able to finish up the last little bit of coloring tomorrow.
Dad said he should fire me for being late. I (who always have to take everything seriously) said I hadn’t been commissioned to do the drawing, and I wasn’t part of Justin’s staff, either. “Yes you ARE!” Justin contradicted.
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Completely switching subjects, Caleb just walked past in his PJ’s with his swimming suit on over his PJ’s. It looked pretty funny, and when I asked why he was wearing them he said “These are all the PJ’s I have left!” and “The swimming suit was in the same place as the PJ’s, so I just put them on too.” Eventually I understood that the swimming suit was added for extra warmth. But he wasn’t cold enough to want to take any more blankets from the cabinet. In fact, I don’t know if he’s cold at all. It’s just the principle of the thing: “These meager PJ’s are all I have left,” (he used to have more than one pair of PJ’s), “and winter is coming on, so I might as well put on my swimming suit too!” (That’s me putting words in his mouth, not something he actually said.)
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Caleb and Deirdre both were doing their paper games with me this evening. Caleb had forgotten about the paper game he made quite a while ago (a make-it-up-as-you-go-along one, but with a detailed map he had drawn) and when he saw Deirdre starting hers, it made him remember his.
“Deirdre, don’t you already have a paper game started?” he asked, seeing her starting afresh on blank paper.
He didn’t know that Deirdre retires her old ones and starts new ones all the time. So far my character has been named Jane, Polly, Sally Ferguson, Davy, Sarah, and several others I can’t remember. (She has me make up the names.)
“Didn’t you know Deirdre starts a new paper game every two weeks?” I asked.
“Every two weeks?” he said in surprise. Since he has a tendency to take things literally, I explained not exactly every two weeks, but pretty often.
In Deirdre’s paper game today, my character was Burt Bitrell who wears a cowboy hat and lives in the desert (although areas with trees and rivers are close by.) She carefully wrote his first, middle and last name, and age, and “A Boy” at the top of the page.Then she quickly drew out the little map, and then it was time to draw my house. She asked me if my house was going to be Wide or Tall, and how many rooms it would have. I said Wide–a log cabin–and 4 rooms.
She drew each of the rooms on a different level, “because it’s easier that way.” Meanwhile, Caleb had asked me where I wanted to go to on his paper game map, and since I had pointed to a nearby forest beside a river, he was drawing the river and the grasses near it. He stopped every now and again to glance at what Deirdre had drawn in her game. He laughed (not in a mean way) at the fact that Deirdre had drawn two toilets in the bathroom in the house she was drawing. She also drew three beds. I said, “Guess that’s in case I get a family?” and she replied, “No, it’s for if people sleep over at your house.”
After my character had woken up from the bed I had chosen, and eaten breakfast, he read the newspaper. Then there was a long pause while she wrote what the newspaper said. It said:
“The best dueler found guilty! Nobody can believe it!! He escaped! Catch him! President Forward sent 10 troops and they never came back! Sent on mission to find the golden coin!!!” (although she wrote it, “The best dualer found gilty! Nobody can belive it!! He exschapt! Cech him! Presiait Frowrd 10 choops sent from him and Never came back! Sent on mishin TO FIND THE GOLDEN COIN!!!” 
)
There was a little picture of the guilty man, “Billy”.
Meanwhile, in Caleb’s game I was supposed to say where I wanted to look, and what I wanted to do. When I said what direction I wanted to look, he would draw more detail on that part of the page. I tested the water in the river to make sure it didn’t have a strong current, and swam across.
I thought I was swimming across the river, but apparently Caleb made it so that I swam downstream till I got to the forest. When my character (in his game I am Jane Sharpe) got to the forest, he drew her head above the water, and on the other side a huge tree, and a big pile of rocks. The tree had a little hole in it, and when my character looked closer “you see a little flash of movement and think you see a bit of something.” When my character looked closer at the rock pile, I didn’t see anything but a few cracks.
I suspected the little hole with some sort of creature inside of it indicated there was some sort of passageway inside the tree. I said I’d look closer at the base of the tree, and when I did I saw “a hole big enough for you to fit through” Caleb said. But he pointed out that my character was very tired (he had made a Hungry status bar, Health Points status bar and Tired status bar which keep track of how my character is doing), and he made the “Tired” bar almost completely filled up. “When it gets all the way filled up, you’ll just conk out asleep no matter what you’re doing,” he said.
So I said I’d stop for the night and make camp. I ate my beef jerky sticks, like Caleb advised me, instead of the small roast chicken. (“I thought the chicken might go bad first,” I said. “No, none of the food that you have to start out with in the game can go bad,” he said.) Caleb made my character make a fire, and a stick shelter, which she plastered over with leaves and mud.
Caleb pointed out to me how the sticks were leaning against another stick that was pounded into the tree, and that the shelter had smaller sections added onto the larger main part. (“What does it have those smaller sections for?” I asked. “I don’t know, I guess just to make it fancy!”) He noticed that we had made my character very “Wise”, so she was able to make a good shelter. But since she wasn’t very “Strong”, she couldn’t pound in the supporting branch very well.
After the sun came up, my character went exploring in the hole at the base of the tree.
In Deirdre’s game, after she had drawn my horses and asked me what their names were, my character went to town to sell his garden vegetables. When he got to the store, there was an “eye peeping through a hole in the door”, and “You notice that the eye is lower down than usual,” Deirdre said. The guy behind it said in a very nervous, quavery voice “‘Who-o-o is the-e-ere?’”
So I said, “It’s just me, Burt Bitrell.”
“I sti-i-ll don’t know who-o you a-are,” the voice said.
“Why are you so scared? Does this have anything to do with what was in the newspaper this morning?” I asked.
“N-no,” Deirdre made him reply.
Finally, I was able to enter the store and discovered why the voice had been so nervous and quavery. It was the owner’s son, and “I’m in charge and I’ve never done it before and I don’t know what to do-o,” the boy said.
My character (since he was a man aged 37, I could pretend that he knew) told him what to do. Deirdre erased all that she had drawn of the store (mostly labels saying what things were), and when I asked her why she was erasing it she said “Because, the boy re-organized it all.”
The next thing I did, after getting the mail, weeding my garden and tending the horses, was to go exploring. (Deirdre skipped straight to the exploring part because “The other things are boring,” she said.)
In Caleb’s game, meanwhile, my character was entering the hole under the tree. He drew my eyes very wide, because I was scared. As I continued to crawl into cave, more things became visible, and my characters’ eyes grew humongous. (“Does my character not have much Bravery?” I asked. “No, there’s no ‘Bravery’, it just depends on you. Whether or not you think it’s going to be a trap!” he replied.)
There didn’t seem to be anything scary in the cave, though, so I thought Caleb was just drawing my character like that because the real me was saying, “I continue cautiously,” indicating I was hesitant.
I was attending to Deirdre’s game at that moment, and not paying enough attention to Caleb’s page, so in Caleb’s game a rock which was attached to the ceiling (which had crack marks in it warning me that it was going to fall) fell on my head, and my health went almost all the way down.
“You do have to pay attention in the game,” Caleb informed me. (“I had to pay attention to Deirdre’s game too!” I said. “I know, I know,” he replied. “I just mean that if there’s a rock about to fall, it will fall, or if there’s a guy pulling back a bow and arrow, he’ll shoot it.”)
There was nothing I could do to heal myself, and although my health points went down quite far, I didn’t seem to be about to die, so I just continued exploring the cave.
There was a big flat rock with “strange markings” on it blocking the way. Above it was a flat place I could crawl onto, presumably. I asked Caleb if there was any clay in the cave, and he said no.
I said, “Rats. I was hoping I could put clay onto the rock, and then when it dried there would be the impressions of the marks on the clay, and I could keep it.”
“Well, you could just spit on the dirt on the ground, and use that,” he said.
“No, that wouldn’t work . . . ” I said, but he said, “No, you can do that,” so I did it. Then I climbed up onto the platform above the rock, and explored there.
I was paying attention to Deirdre’s game again, so I didn’t notice the huge lizard-like monster that was in the room with me in Caleb’s game at first. It was a fire-breathing (or spitting) one, apparently, and it had already spat fire at me (although my health points must have gone up again, because I didn’t die.)
While I was observing the patches Caleb had drawn on the ground–patches of sand, with the lizard hopping from one patch to the next–the lizard was still spitting fire at me. I “woke up” finally and said, “Ah, ah, what weapon do I have!” (Caleb grinned at my reaction.)
I said, “I get my knife! Now I wish I hadn’t changed it!” (I had changed it from a “Small knife” to a jacknife-style knife. Then again, since Caleb told me the first one was a kitchen knife, it probably was no better. )
I threw the knife at the lizard, and it disappeared into the sand. “And there goes my knife,” I said. “But that’s life.” But somehow, the lizard had been killed with one throw, and “You can get your knife back,” Caleb told me. So I did. “Now do you want to scram back to home?” he asked, and I said yes. I decided I wouldn’t go exploring in any more creepy passageways.
Meanwhile, even Caleb had been stopping to listen to Deirdre’s game. In Deirdre’s game, my character was about to walk across a bridge over shallow water. (“How do I know it’s shallow?” I asked her. “Because, you can see that it’s shallow,” she replied.)
There was sand in the water too, and when my character ve-e-ery carefully tested it, he found that it was sinking sand. Just like I suspected; she wouldn’t have mentioned the sand if it wasn’t sinking sand.
(This made Caleb remember something he had read somewhere about some types of sinking sand, that “sometimes they have something in them that’s like that corn-starch mixture I made for my birthday. [A corn-starch and water mixture creates a substance that is hard when you hit it forcefully, but soft if you touch it slowly.] So if you get into sinking sand, you should swim out of it slowly, or it will turn hard!”)
My character walked carefully across the bridge, and at the next one there were “hands sticking up out of the bridge.” (Probably she meant that they were gripping the sides of the bridge.) My character could hear, “Help, help!”
“Can I pull the person up?” I asked (thinking that it would be rather hard to pull a whole body up when just the hands are sticking out of a bridge, like it looked like she drew it) and naturally, she said yes.
When I had pulled the person up, I found it to be a boy. (Almost everyone in Deirdre’s paper games are little boys.) I asked him if he was okay and he said yes, with coughing and gagging noises.
The boy told me how he fell in (which I forget), and after asking Deirdre if there was technology like phones in her games, my character “Bert” phoned the boys’ parents to tell him where he was. “So they can decide if they want you to keep going, or if they want to come with you the rest of the way, or if I should come with you.” He had been on his way to his aunt and uncle’s house. The parents said that I should go with him.
(I shouldn’t keep rotating between saying “I” and “my character”, but sometimes it seems more awkward to say it one way or the other.)
The next bridge we went across was very creaky. “Creak, creak, creak!” Deirdre kept saying. Somehow, the bridge did not bust when we walked across it. She said I heard guys saying (either at this bridge or the next) “There they are! When we see them, we’ll shoot.”
“Uh-oh,” I said. I could pretend well enough that it seemed mildly horrifying that someone was about to shoot us as we continued on our route in this happy-go-lucky paper game. “Do I have binoculars?” I asked. “So I can see where the guys are hiding.”
Deirdre grinned broadly at my “horrified” expression. In response to my question, she told me, “The noise sounds like it’s coming from under the bridge.”
Yikes–somebody waiting under the bridge to shoot me and my companion. I wanted to run away, but since I was a man in the game that didn’t seem very proper. “You could go across it really fast,” Deirdre suggested. Since someone had already noticed us, that wouldn’t really work–but obviously since Deirdre suggested it, it would work.
“Okay, I’ll go across it really fast and try to go really quietly,” I said. “And then I’ll call the police.” (A sissy thing to do, but the character Bert has a sissy person controlling him.)
“Or the president,” Deirdre suggested. Obviously, that was what I was supposed to do. (After all, President Forward had sent troops to try to capture the out-law Billy.) “Okay, the president,” I said, laughing a little.
“You go across the bridge really fast. You hear one of the guys under the bridge saying, when they see you at the telephone place, ‘Uh-oh, Billy, we’d better get out of here!’” she said.
“Ah, it was Billy!” I said. (Why am I so thick?) “I watch to see what direction they go, so I can tell the trackers later.”
“You see bubbles going off, toward the direction of a different bridge–South,” she said. So I told the trackers they went south.
After that, Deirdre had to go to bed, and Caleb was done with his game for the night as well. And now I also should stop writing for the night . . .
Every now and then I provide comic relief for some people, which is good, even if it’s unintentional on my part.
