Let's All Go to the Diorama Arcade

After work I drive into the city and meet Lauren at LuDio, the Diorama Arcade next to the park with the fountain with the statue of Emma Stone as Hannibal Lecter's niece Hypatia Lecter in the center. In the statue, she's bald and hanging upside down from tethers that trail off into nothingness, but in the movie were attached to the ceiling. Her character has some sort of medical disorder where the things that happen to someone when they spend too long upside down happen to her when she spends too long right side up.

LuDio was built in a repurposed movie theater, with the seating cleared out and replaced with various miniature landscapes on special tables built with eight inch walls. Short enough to see over, tall enough that the figurines don't accidentally fall off the edge. Here is an incomplete short list to give you an idea of the variety of fields of play available:

A few modern city blocks, with shops and apartment buildings.

A cyberpunk city, like a futuristic Chinatown with shadowed alleyways and holographic billboards.

A rural Italian villa next to a grassy hill dotted with tiny marble sculptures.

A national park, featuring a few opulent lodges and cabins made from real wood.

An Antarctic ice field, complete with a research base.

We fold up the roof of the apartment building in the modern playfield and set our figurines inside. I use my controller to walk my figurine over to the toy-remote control and turn on the apartments TV, which plays public domain movies on its tiny screen. The toy remote control only has one big button on it, which makes sense since the figurines don't have much in the way of finger dexterity. I can change the channels on the mini-TV with my actual fingers, but there's also a cool feature where my figurine knows it's holding the remote control in its hand and sends a message to my controller, which maps the context sensitive buttons on my controller to send a message not to my figurine, but directly to the TV to change channels. This feature is useful when your figurine is on an adventure and you need to simulate doing something the figurines don't have enough dexterity to do for real, like typing a password onto a tiny keyboard to unlock a bank vault, or finding the click of the tumblers aligning on a safe while moving the dial ever-so-slowly.

Lauren likes it when my figurine uses her figurine as a footstool, so that's what we're doing today. I don't really get the appeal of the footstool thing as a form of play, but I'm enjoying myself nonetheless. I like LuDioramas, and it's nice to have a hobby that so many girls are into. I guess if it was up to me we'd be doing figurine parkour or figurine treasure hunting instead of this unstructured make-believe stuff. But this is nice too. It's more meditative than fun, but meditative is good.

For those who don't know, the footstool thing is part of a loose conglomeration of "Dominance & Submission"-themed activities (DnS, for short) that some people like to do with their figurines sometimes.

After a little while Hannah joins me and Lauren. Hannah's a young woman who likes to dress her figurine up in a cat costume. Cat ears poking off the top of the head like devil horns, whiskers, a tail, and paws. The context-sensitive buttons on her controller let her wag the tail, or puff it up like cats do when they're scared. Her figurine arches it's back, and then curls up on my lap while my legs are still up on Lauren's figurine's back. There's not really any other way for all three of our figurines to interact at once while Lauren's figurine is being a footstool. Hannah makes a purring noise.

Then we go to the ice field playspace. First we outfit our figurines with penguin costumes. Then we place our figurines on the edge of the ice field and slowly waddle them towards the nearest ice cave. Are the others imagining our figurines experiencing the cold air the way I am? Probably, but I decide to make sure.

"Chilly out today, isn't it?" says I.

"Yes! And windy!" says Hannah.

"Definitely." says Lauren.

Now I know they're imagining it as cold and windy, and they know I know, and I know they know they know, and so on. This helps the play experience.

When we get to the ice cave, we get our figurines to all huddle together for imagined warmth. We need more imagined warmth, so we ask Claire if her figurine would like to join our figurines. Claire's figurine was watching other figurines in penguin outfits slide down the ice-covered slopes on their bellies, which was one of the more structured forms of play available at the Diorama Arcade, similar in nature to downhill skiing. Claire obliged us, and we got a good four-person huddle going.

At one point a guy named Rob came over with his penguin figurine and me and him pretended our penguins were fighting over mates and had a little flipper fight between the two of us. It was inconclusive, since penguin flippers are ill-suited to slapping. Imagine two bowling pins hitting each other with folding fans and you've got the general idea.

Eventually the girls got tired of penguin play, and Rob went back to the slopes while me and the girls returned to the apartment. Claire took her penguin outfit off her figurine, revealing a punk grrl underneath. Suggested mental image: blond mohawk, tattoo sleeves, and leather jacket.

"Go away kid, ya bother me. If I haven't solved this case by tomorrow, I'll fuck you. Nothing helps me put the pieces together better than a nice hard dick."

Apparently, Claire's punk grrl was also a grizzled 1940s private eye whose detective skills were supercharged by sex. The four of us quickly sketched out a scene, the details of which I can't precisely remember. Let us say that the P.I. was working on the theft of the Hope Diamond, and discussing the details of the case with us, her assistants.

Suddenly, Lauren and Hannah's figurines grabbed onto the punk grrl.

"Hey, what the hell do you two jokers think you're doing?!"

The punk grrl outfit was quickly removed, replaced with a pink billowy princess dress.

Then, my figurine drew Claire's across his lap, hefted up the flowing dress to expose her rear, and began to spank.

"Oh, for the love of..." Claire muttered.

SLAP!

Claire did make a vocalization of some sort each time her figurine's butt was spanked, but this happened so long ago that I don't remember it well enough to transliterate it properly. I guess it's my fault for not taking careful notes. Feel free to mentally replace the following noises with something else.

"Nnh!"

SLAP!

"Nnh!"

SLAP!

"Mmmm..."

SLAP!

A moan.

SLAP! SLAP! SLAP!

"Alright fine, I'll be your pretty pink princess, just lay off me, will ya?"

Then our figurines all sat down together and had a little fake tea party. Margaret saw that we were having a tea party, and asked if she could be our server. Her figurine was wearing a french maid outfit, so everything fit together nicely.

Then, Hannah's figurine got a call on her phone. There was some debate about whether it would be a breach of politeness to answer it, but I think the debate was feigned for the sake of having something to act out. Really, we all wanted to see where this was going.

The figurine put the phone to her ear.

"Hello?"

A look of concern shot through Hannah's face, and the face of her figurine.

"Oh god..."

Claire asked what happened, and Hannah said that it was Erica on the phone, and Annabelle had been found dead.

We walked over to the diorama where the adventure was happening. Annabelle's figurine was lying on the floor. Its eyes were open, and not blinking. Her arms were splayed dramatically, like a frozen dance move. Erica was there, with her figurine wearing a policewoman's uniform. Christine was also there, with her figurine wearing a 1940s detective outfit. Not to be confused with Claire's figurine, who talked like a private eye but was wearing a "rocker" outfit.

It is worth mentioning that at this point I didn't know if my figurine was the perpetrator, or supposedly the perpetrator, or what. We had done this before, but my memory was not sharp, and the rules, if there were any, escaped me. It is not unheard of, in fiction, for someone to be the killer and not realize it.

I've decided I don't want to continue the story the way it really happened. It didn't feel good to write it, and it probably wouldn't be much fun to read either. The old ending did have a point to it, but it was the sort of point that most people have either already internalized or decided to reject. The less said about it the better.

Now I need to think of a replacement. Let's see.

Fat chicks. The sort of women you would want to be stuck on a lifeboat with. We solved the mystery easily enough, but Annabelle's figurine was still "dead". Apparently it had broke down. I told Annabelle that it could be repaired, but she didn't want to. Instead, we had a memorial service and she threw it into the bay. I have always had a distaste for litter. Some time after that I heard that an old acquaintance who I hadn't seen in years died unexpectedly in his sleep, and I started to think about death, and the way belief in an afterlife has been replaced in our society by preposterously lazy rationalizations. Sour grapes sorts of things. Or the reverse. Grapes that you can't avoid eating, so we insist that they are sweet. I looked into the practice of cryonic preservation as a way to fight against death, and I found it to be plausible enough.

A few months later I got a job at a cryonics storage facility. And there were a lot of fat women that worked there who were around my age, and they invited me to their own eclectic recreational hobby. Laser-rifle sniper duels. On weekends we'd go deep, deep into the woods. And we would hunt each other. Full gillie. Elbows as red as strawberries. Laying still for hours on end, looking for movement, for light glinting off of scopes, for an exhale in cold weather. The goggles we wore to protect our eyes were absorptive, not reflective, so they didn't glint. It's a game of deep focus. Meditative. There is no joy or exaltation of victory. Only appreciation and contemplation. Of natural beauty, of long periods of stillness punctuated by occasional bursts of action, of the mindstates that these things produce in us. Soft feelings. I am, temporarily, at peace.

Two decades pass. I'm older now. I am walking on a trail, bracketed by meadow on either side. The meadow is bracketed by forest. The sun is shining. There's a rumbling sound in the distance. I feel a sharp pain in my heart, like a knife. Seconds pass. The rumbling fades. The chest pain fades. The rumbling was just a sound, not the world ending. The pain was just pain, not a heart attack. I keep walking.

I didn't think I would live this long. I don't do drugs, nor am I suicidal, nor do I lead a daredevil lifestyle. I just didn't think there was this much time left. If I had known, I would have procrastinated more.