it's the hard-knock life

Whilst waiting impatiently for the chair to cycle around to E for an especially vibrant J-pop styled Black Maria hair, Miss Linda Poplin dropped by.



She is bruised, bloody, battered, there are skinned knees and bruised hips you don't see in this pic, she's got a bullet between her eyes, two black eyes and a split lip, and yes, those are drywall nails through her arms.

Her store--called, unsurprisingly, Blood & Scars--is listed in her pics. I had to check it out.



This place is...something. Stores in Second Life that contain things that creep me out are rare, and this place has a few. Miss Neome and I couldn't decide if the scalpel-version tic-tac-toe backwork or the words carved into bellies were more disturbing; but also, they have things which are just prime to own for my zombie collection of, err...bits and pieces. Like the stitched-all-over set, or the stitched finger gloves, or the eye scar...

Useful. Creepy, undeniably, but...useful.

There's a lot of these places, in various little post-apocalyptic corners of the grid. Bloody Hell, for instance:



which was my former wounds-and-claw-marks store of choice, a while back. They used to be the only one in existence (barring Ropeworx, which really always has been more about tie marks and shibari). Or Bloodline--not to be confused with the game of vampiric idiocy--whose specialty seems to be really disturbing eyes:



and very real-appearing welts, scrapes and rope burns:



In contrast, Bruised & Bloodied only has one vendor:



but it's in the middle of the Junkyard, a post-apocalyptic, damage-enabled, freeform wandering wasteland that is, all things considered, kinda neat.

If you're into the whole, post-apocalyptic, civilization-tottering-past-collapse motif for your woundplay, Aunty Entity--and oh, how I love that name--is really the place to go. But they're so much more than just wounds. They're really two hangers full of everything.



Plus? She has a razor-wicked sense of humor.

Finally, that brings us to Cruelful Cosmetics:



Cruelful is more expensive than any two of the others combined, but they do gunshots really, really well. Getting shot is not now, and never has been, my thing, but I can definitely envision certain settings where such might be of use. If so, that's your place to go, hands down.

We're still picking up things from Hallows, so our parcel is still all foggy and spooky in Morgaine--but I did have a moment of shocked confusion coming home a couple days back.



I admit, it was very much the "OMG WE'RE DROWWWNING" reaction, but on reflection, I calmed down, and asked quietly in ISC chat if they knew why we had rising water in Morgaine. Turns out, Duchess Edwina Heron bought the bulk of Morgaine that Miss Uni Ninetails owned, as she had to quickly sell parcels to reinforce land stability elsewhere. (I think of this as yet more fallout from the OpenSpace sim debacle.) So, she sold the parcels to Eds, and took everything she owned back, which pretty much dropped the center of Morgaine back to water for a bit, until Eds gets set up.

So, glad there's explanation, but still. Unnerving as hell at first.