DaRev and I played something we called Improving. Not improvisational theater or comedy, but storytelling. We created worlds that we worked in and others had a lot of fun playing in. We were the diceless role players, taking on characters as diverse as a universe could get.

We built worlds.

We built civilizations and destroyed them.

We embraced weirdness in many forms.

Portal was possibly the biggest world we created. Born of the need for a set of gods to be loved, part of the Greek pantheon took a ship off Earth and sought out a place where magic could still be found.

Only, it was lonely.

Instead of going through all that creation stuff again, they knew there was a perfectly good race of humans out there to be enticed ... or ... shifted. People in need of succor became the first people on Portal via ... well, portals. They never opened in the same place twice and the mix of people was extensive. From Black Ops to street urchins, they all made their way to the world.

Of course, at some point, life became a little harried and the civilization collapsed and had to be rebuilt.

Give me a few days and the hilights of Portal will appear.  Now, all I need is a scanner because a friend drew up some of the characters in another run, pre my involvement, and she did a marvelous job. Shannon Richmeyer who's married name I have absolutely no idea what it is!

More to come.

 
A year ago we were at Sherry's services. A year ago we said good bye. Only, we really haven't. Sherry's still there in our thoughts and hearts. I've located the notes she made on all our Improv runs. Not sure I can make heads or tales out of them, but will start posting pieces here and there; the characters, the ideas, the sweeping universes and the worlds we invented and played with over a very long friendship.

We didn't play so much in the later years when we saw each other, mostly caught up on what we were doing or just chatted away about not much: cats, kids, bunnies, spousal units. There are days when I still miss being able to pick up the phone and call or fire off an email of nonsense for her. Laughter was our best medicine, although there were plenty of times when we cried on each other too.

Sherry was there when one of my high school friends made what I considered stupid choices and died because of them. Other choices might not have altered the outcome, but I was not just left with a hole in my universe, I was left with one I didn't understand. Sherry listened to my hurt, my anger and my disappointment in a person to whom I had been very, very close. She heard my incomprehension of how the other had handled a deadly situation and, more than anything, just allowed it to happen.

Grief counseling 101 and a damn good job of it.

Yeah, I miss her. And I always will.

 
Sherry was a friend in a million. After an inauspicious start, we both discovered a love of creating characters, of labyrinthine plots and romance. No, we never wrote any of it down to the point of editing a story or stories together, we just let our brains dance in the winds of the universe. Some of the dance is coming to a web page near this blog.
 
Sherry Mullins: Friend, confidant, sister from another mother. Please add your comments, memories, good times and bad. Much loved, much missed.