June 9, 2004

He waited for a few more moments, looking around at the scenery. There wasn’t much to see. A thin strip of blue sky peeked out above the buildings around them. The buildings themsevles looked like warehouses or converted office space, just like a thousand other buildings in the city. Which might be why Doodlehopper’s stopped here, he thought. Perfectly anonymous cover.

“TK421,” Doodlehopper murmured, loud enough for Thomas to hear. He looked at her, debating whether to ask what she meant, and saw that her head was turned towards him but she was staring down the street. He looked in that direction; nobody was there.

“The color of television, tuned to a dead channel,” she said, still looking at nobody. He must have given her a weird look, because she flashed a grin at him and made a motion with her hand to ignore her.

“Home seems about right,” she said, then arched her back, levering herself off the concrete and standing upright without using her arms.

“What…” Thomas began. Doodlehopper grinned at him again, then turned 180 degrees and bowed, gesturing at the wall. “Welcome to Safe House,” she said.

The concrete wall which she’d been leaning against promptly melted away, revealing an entrance as black as a monolith. No light penetrated. He realized—late enough to make himself feel like a fool—that Doodlehopper had been reciting passphrases to the door.

Doodlehopper sauntered into the light-swallowing doorway. Thomas hesitated, then followed. As he stepped through the doorway, his eyes were assaulted by a sparkling array of lights, some distant and some close, most blinking or shifting in the electric life of a psychedelic dream. The lights barely illuminated a few feet of wall, so he felt rather than saw the high ceiling and figured that the entire building was one big warehouse.

But once his dazzled eyes had a second to adjust, his attention was immediately draw to the large streaks of light hovering in front of him, and a second later he realized they were the ends of shockers. Each had been modified to glow a bright color, one candy-cane red, another banana yellow, and the third a hideous neon lime green.

He gulped and halted, straining his eyes to see beyond the shockers at the people wielding them, but the lights were too low and his eyes couldn’t yet adjust from the morning sunlight outside.

And if you e-mail me with the correct source of all three passphrases, I’ll e-mail you back with a sneak preview of an upcoming VR story snippet. Here’s a hint: They’re all from science fiction.

Also, the VR story will be getting back into VR eventually. I’ve written it. We just need to get Thomas into real safety.

Okay. So. I’m meeting with three potential animators this Saturday morning.

This makes me feel…weird. Oddly elated. Tingly.

Arg, I’m not communicating this well at all. I feel joyful. Energized. I’m actually doing it.

A small voice in the back of my mind wonders if I won’t be just as tired of this animation business in a few years as I am with technical writing now. But somehow, I can’t make myself believe it. This is exciting in a way that programming or tech writing never was.

Now that I’ll be meeting with them, I suddenly realize I should have some sample artwork for them to look at, so I need to print out a sample booklet. All of a sudden, there’s stuff to do.