I come across Plarvolia who is sitting in a clear box for her art project. I can see her getting mildly harassed by children tapping on the glass among other things. Though I feel moved to intervene, I understand that I shouldn’t be the one to try. After her shift inside is up, I inspect café baked goods where she had been stationed. She was promoting/selling a new line of rainbow spectrum lights from General Electric — one of which, interestingly, is a strong bright black. Also notable is that I now know she actually does make money from her art (at least sometimes).
There is a unique cyberpunk setting that feels somehow European, old world. Inside a building are haphazard beds in a place seemingly used as a squat. I break through multiple walls of the interior in what feels like a sequence puzzle. Beyond, a darkened (but daytime) town square is buzzing with various activities.
I steal an invisible scooter-skateboard from a man riding it in the square. It’s broken in the process and gluing it back together proves problematic. Not only is this invisible kind a special color, the connections are finicky. It’s a specific brand that others feel is reputable called “Eaver” or “Matric” or something. I later go with someone who encourages me to try to buy one. The store has the feel of a cyber-renovated luxury 19th-century “Robber Baron” era place — dark wood columns and sophisticated electronic monitoring. I find a new board for $35 up on a shelf inside a bag, but decide it’s too expensive and I don’t want to try stealing it.
At the checkout area for this town square zone, I encounter my Homepie friends Juicy and Coco lounging having drinks. They’ve already paid for theirs, and when I look to pay they’ve already paid for mine too — though confusingly I don’t see them on the check. Perhaps they were omitted, which is all the same. Juicy notices he has to have a charge corrected before he goes, as the pipe he picked out was supposed to be on sale. He went to that same Robber Baron store as I did earlier.
There is a complex sorting-out of the timeline of interactions with Plarvolia. Time travel seems at play, nonlinearity, acausality. I put on a colorful fur-trimmed vest before I talk to her. I’m preparing for her timeline which is about to finish, and finally her timeline happens to line up with my own.
I revisit these narratives of Plarvolia for two hours. Retelling the story out of order; I can’t play out the events. I perceive parts where I saw perfectly from her perspective. But when did we talk? Wasn’t there more scenes with her? At some point I was explicitly instructed (or conclude?) that I need to write this one down. But now it hardly seems profound or important. But this dream feels different than other Plarvolia ones… I admit I even have a hard time thinking of her as Plarvolia, but instead think of her as her real self, as something outside her relation to me and what happened. I think of her with her real name and her real life.