Llost and Found

So there’s this llama…

(This is challenging to explain if you’re never been in Second Life, but bear with me.)

The llama is a virtual construct.  An object, more or less, purchased from a store (also virtual) that specializes in such animals.  It is made out of a number of primitive 3-D shapes that have been sculpted to look less primitive, then textured with…  llama texture.  It is not sentient, or under anyone’s control.  It is not under your control, except to the extent that you can slide it around your particular virtual space and place it where you want, sort of like lawn furniture, and in the respect that it contains within it pieces of computer code that will cause it to perform very small actions if you desire, actions you turn on and off by “touching” it.

The llamas come from the store in packs of three.  Two of the three llamas in each pack have within their repertoire the capacity to blink, and to turn their heads from side to side slightly, as if they’re looking about.  The third llama…  bounces.  He will, at random intervals, launch himself slightly into the air, an eighth of his body height or less, then clatter to the ground again.  Since this movement is not directly up and down, it results in him wandering off slightly from where you put him, which is the desired effect–  it creates the impression that he’s grazing, or what have you.

Now, back in late May or early June, I purchased a pack of these llamas, and distributed them within the Bunny Bowl, which is our nickname for that portion of our work-in-progress skybase which contains all the plants and animals:  a floating, bowl shaped rock about 30m across.  And they looked pretty good.  I like llamas, after all.  I like them in real life.  They’re groovy.  But we’re only allowed to put so many objects in our virtual space (as evaluated by the complexity of those objects, as evaluated by the number of primitive shapes or “prims” they contain), and the virtual llamas are fairly primmy for their size, so even though I liked them, I got into the habit of keeping an eye on them, evaluating their total versus the total we had left to play with, and pondering whether or not they might be better stored away in favor of something else.

At some point during this process, however, I discovered that I was only pondering two llamas, instead of three.

“Hey,” I shouted up to Dragonia, at the house.  “Did you take one of the llamas?”

“No,” she shouted back down to me.

“Did you move the llamas?”  I asked her, poking around behind the pine trees and shrubs.

“No,” she shouted.  There was a whump noise as she free-fell the 50 m down from the zeppelin walkway and landed next to me.  “Why?”

“One of em’s gone,” I replied.  “The little one.  The one that bounces.”  I jumped up to the top of the rocks surrounding the bowl and stared down over the edge, first to the massive metal curve of the skybase beneath, and then to the empty sky and clouds below that.  “He can’t have gone over the side,” I said, scratching my head.  “He doesn’t jump that high.  There’s no way he could have gotten over the edge.”

“Check your folders,” she suggested.

Mr. Llama was not in his original folder within my Inventory, that place where things go when you don’t have them “out”.  Neither was he in the Lost and Found folder, that place where things go when they don’t know where else to go, or when someone returns them to you.

“This is crazy,” I said.  “I didn’t take him or move him.  You didn’t take him or move him.  Neither one of us deleted him.  No one else has been here, and they wouldn’t have the permissions to mess with him even if they could get here, which they can’t.  And he’s not in the folders.  Ergo, he must be here.  So where is he?”

We searched inside the polygons of the Bunny Bowl, in case he had somehow fallen partway through it.  We searched the curve of the metal arch beneath the Bunny Bowl, in case my supposition that he couldn’t get over the edge of the rock was somehow wrong.  Eventually, we searched everything:  I flew the 2500 plus meters of altitude down from the skybase to the ground myself, just in case he had somehow fallen all THAT way, and then the two of us searched the entire lot at sea level, including inside of all the landscape features, and underneath the surface of the ocean.  And the periphery of the surrounding lots.  Nothing.

Eventually we got other people involved.  The owners of the sim (the larger plot of land within which our smaller plot is contained), theoretically capable of seeing the identity, position and ownership of every object on their property, reported that there was no sign of him.  People knowledgeable about the ways of Second Life conjectured that he had somehow gotten rendered immaterial by a restart (in which case he might reappear in a day or so), or just eaten by the grid (in which case he was gone, and that was that.)  I got a blip on my radar showing an object I owned sitting immobile in an adjoining sim, a distance theoretically impossible for the llama to have covered;  we descended on it from the air, using the zeppelin, but it turned out to be an artifact, as there was nothing there belonging to me, llama or otherwise.  And we put up a poster (the poster at the beginning of this story), primarily for the humor value. In the end, though, we had to concede defeat.  Roblem, the sim owner, made the unexpected and very nice gesture of contacting the llama purveyor, with whom he apparently had some sort of business dealings, and telling him about it, whereupon the llama purveyor mailed me a fresh pack of three brand-new llamas.  I put two of them out to keep the old two company.  I kept the third one, the bouncy one, in his folder.  And that was the end of that.

Except…

A couple of days ago, Dragonia, doing the same prim cost-benefit analysis I had been doing, pinged me from in-world through Skype.  How many llamas do you have out?

Um…  four? I typed, thinking it over.  Should be four.

Did you have any down on the ground? she asked.

No, I replied, I don’t think so. Unless I put one down there and forgot about him.  Why?

Pause. I’m showing five, came the reply. And the fifth one is down here on the ground.

Noooooooooo waaaaaaaaay… I’ll be right there.

It was him.  All of the other llamas were right where I’d placed them, and the “new” bouncy llama was still in his folder.   He’s smaller than the others, in any event, and has a longer object name, which makes him easy to tell apart.

“Where did you find him?”  I asked her.

“On the ground,” she said, laughing.  “He was just bouncing happily up and down, right on the edge of the property line.”

“Crazy,” I said, shaking my head, and laughing too.

Now, it is a fact that just prior to this dramatic reappearance, Dragonia had pulled up the waterfall structure that was occupying the ground-level island in favor of replacing it with a single tree, in order to save prims.  So I will concede the possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, Mr. Llama somehow bounced over the edge of the rock bowl in the sky, missed landing on the metal arch beneath it, fell through the mile plus of airspace between it and the earth, and then somehow became imbedded in the ground there, in such a way that he was invisible or intangible.  And that he remained there for the better part of three months, until the withdrawal of the waterfalls released him.  Which is certainly dramatic enough.  But that’s not what I want to believe.  I want to believe that he had some sort of Llama Adventure;  that between the time we noticed he was gone and the time we noticed he was back, there was an entire story, filled with epic feats and storied realms and things unseen by man, and the desperate quest to come home.

But he can’t talk.  So I guess we’ll never know.  :)