2014-02-19

Wandering the streets of Kama

As suggested at the end of the post I made yesterday, photos of my time in the bane suit were taken. The whole album can be seen over on imgur, and what follows is a few highlights with some explanations of what happened on the way.

After Miss Vila left me I decided the obvious thing to do was to head in the direction I was more or less facing. So, quite simply, I followed the road to see where it would take me, stopping to pay attention to any sights I found on the way.


While I wasn't sure at the time, not knowing where I was other than "somewhere on Zindra", it turned out I was somewhere on the edge of Kama, the city in the north west part of the continent. Other than to drop in on a shop when out shopping, or on a hunt, I've never actually visited it. Especially not to walk around and see what's there. Even when I've dropped into a shop there (on my walk I saw two I recognise and have been to before) I've never really known where I am, I've never paid attention to where on the grid I am.

With no real sense of direction, but a vague feeling that I was heading north, I kept going. Soon I found a bridge over a river which gave me some clue as to where I was if I decided to go looking for a map (keep in mind I was denied my world map and mini-map so I actually made a point of not running to the Wiki or somewhere to work it out).


After a while I stumbled on a second bridge over a river (I'm still not sure if it was over another river or if I'd doubled back on myself and it was a different bridge over the same river) and saw this next to it:


That made it pretty obvious whereabouts I was on Zindra.

My walkabout had a couple of rough moments. The first came within the first hour when I fell through a bit of phantom road.


Try as I might I couldn't get out of the hole I'd fallen into and there were walls on three sides (and the bit of road that formed the "roof" of the hole, that I could walk up to by walking up the land surface, wasn't phantom). I spent a good 5 minutes trying to find some way out (keep in mind that fly was denied) before resigning myself to the fate of spending the next 3+ hours stuck in this hole.

Until I realised that Mistress had left me with the ability to sit. I could only sit on objects within 1.5m of me, but it was something. So I made a dash up the bit of land there was and tried to sit on the prim above me and.... it worked! I stood up again and was back on the road!


This is one thing I did notice about a lot of the roads in Kama City: they're very unfriendly to pedestrians. Lots of phantom sections that I kept falling into (thankfully without the holes below them).

I kept going, snapping pictures of fun or interesting things, until I hit the edge of the continent. I think it was the northern edge.


At this point I decided to head back to RL for a while and continue my journey later. By this point I was about 1/2 way through my time and had managed to not get any time added. However, I did notice one possible problem. I'd started out with just over 12,000m of walk allowance on my Sub-Allowance and, at this point, I had 7433m left. While that suggested that, at my current pace, I wouldn't run out, it did suggest that I'd be cutting it fine and I'd finish with very little remaining.

I was going to have to be careful!

When I logged back in, a couple of hours later, I decided to take a look at this monorail I kept seeing around. Given that I had some ability to sit I wondered if it might be a way to see the sights without using up a lot of my walk allowance. I managed to track down a station and.... it was closed!


I carried on walking and did find other transport. It was a little static though:



Eventually I did find a working monorail station. By this point I had about 40 minutes left on the timelock on the helmet. Walk allowance was getting fairly low so I decided that I'd have a blast around the city in this, seeing as much as I could, with no walk cost to me!


Sadly, the plan backfired. Most region crossings worked okay but, eventually, I hit a region that either wasn't there or my viewer thought wasn't there and I got stuck on a region boundary. Nothing would work, I couldn't stand or move or anything. This was going to take a relog. Which was bad news. A relog very likely meant that the timer in the helmet would roll back to the time of last login. Worried, I relogged...


...back to where I'd logged in earlier. Sure enough the timer on the helmet was showing 2 hours left rather than 40 minutes. On the other hand at least my walk allowance had also rolled back to the same value. So, annoyed, and a little dejected, I headed off again, knowing that I'd get no sympathy from Mistress as it was my own stupid fault that this happened (take a vehicle without relogging first so as to save the script state of any attachments?... that's the height of stupid)

Eventually, after much more exploring, I found a map on the floor, which also showed exactly where I was!


For the first time in this little adventure I knew exactly where I was and had some idea about where I'd been. By the looks of things I was at the very north western edge of the continent.


From there I turned round and started making my way south and east. I was planning on heading mostly south, trying to retrace by steps, to get back to the bridge I'd crossed earlier on. By the next time I found a map with a marker it became clear I'd taken a wrong turn somewhere (something about the helmet is very disorienting, which is cool):


By this point I was almost done, I'd almost made up the rolled back time. All I had to do was take it easy and not do anything silly, while answering the helmet's recurring question that checks I'm here and not goofing off afk (if you fail to answer you get time added).


Walking slowly, I kept answering the question, and before I knew it...


...the helmet unlocked and popped open. I took it off, took a few moments to get used to the world being so colourful again, and then headed home for a shower.



At which point I was ready for bed, both in SL and RL.

Aside from the couple of issues along the way I really enjoyed the whole experience. It's a long time since I'd been locked into anything like that, made to concentrate on the world around me in-world, denied any chance of fiddling with builds and scripts. It was a good reminder of what what the RLV-enforced side of D/s in SL can be all about. And, really, it was a great change of pace.

All that was left was to get ready to ask for more walk allowance from Miss Vila, and hope that this punishment didn't come up again when I paid for the extra walk! :D

PS: Don't forget that the whole album of all the images I took can be found over on imgur.

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