Saying goodbye, and a brief trip out

Today's a bit of an odd day for me. Today I said goodbye to Mistress for (almost) a week. Somehow I have to manage without her until next Monday. Something that won't be easy.

Before I had to say goodbye to her though we took a little trip out to look at another place we'd recently become aware of and wanted to drop in on called The Slave Storage Facility.

The place seems like a really neat build and, while the land details say "Materials enabled viewer required" I can't say that I noticed a lack of advanced lighting was a real problem.

While there we bumped into someone who was a stark example of why the new mesh avatars that are provided by the Lab to new residents are likely more of a hindrance than a help. The poor girl, who was only 3 days old and very obviously a genuine noob, was trying her best to get dressed. The problem was she was wearing a mesh body and had no clue what it actually was and what significance it had in regards to her (in)ability to wear various kinds of clothes,

Eventually we got her sorted as far as a "traditional" avatar and talked her through how to wear and unwear clothing and add/remove attachments -- although that was a struggle for her too and she never did seem to manage to get the whole of the dress on she was trying to wear.

It's easy to forget just how confusing the viewer can be when you've never used it before, and how difficult it can be to get to grips with the idea of your inventory and what all the things inside it are. This, to be, is made all the worse with the new mesh bodies as they're utterly useless when it comes to dealing with free clothing (which most noobs will be looking to use first).

Eventually though we had to head back to Raven Park. We wanted to have a bit of a wander around the Mansion before Mistress disappeared. We're currently toying with the idea of rebuilding it (it's just over 2 years old now) so we wanted to have a bit of a chat about what would stay, what would go and what would be where. Mostly our view is that it works as it is and what we'd really like to do is just "3D" it up a bit. While texture-only windows were fine back when we built it (the main aim was to make something low-prim that gave plenty of play spaces) it would be nice to give it proper windows and sprinkle some materials work around the place too.

With vague plans made we relaxed in the pamper room for a short while...

...but all too soon it was time for Mistress to head off. Her final act, before logging off, was to turn off my sub-allowance. This means that, for this week, I'm free to walk, talk, fly and TP as much as I like. I'm actually really not liking that at all, it feels odd, unnatural, too free.

And I'll probably have got used to it just in time for Mistress to take full control again on Monday.