Of course I know a few vampires in Second Life, who doesn´t? Vampires, ogres, demons and all kinds of scary creatures are rampant in SL, along with some angels and furries too. But tonight was the night I was going to take part in my first festive event among the creatures of darkness, rather than just visiting a vampire sim.
The dress code
I had been thinking of this function ever since
Orchid Arado and
Yannis Martynov sent me the invitation to their wedding. The bride and groom asked for goth clothing in the invitation, but both of them told me to turn up in my family tartans anyway. They both know me well, and are accustomed to my tartan fetisch.
As a good guest always should, I wanted to follow the guidelines anyway and had thought out a brilliant plan to accommodate both the asked for attire and my fetisch. I was going to buy the beautiful Balmoral tartan at my favourite tartan store in SL,
Bellissima. The Bellissima store is owned and operated by the supreme tartan maker
Elle74 Zaftig. She has been a friend of mine ever since I first custom ordered my family tartan, The McMillan.
The Balmoral tartan is black, white,red and grey and would fit the goth theme nicely I thought. Unfortunately when I went to the store I found that Elle had moved it and had not yet set up all her tartans at the new location. What a blunder on my part, I should of course have talked to her when I got the idea instead of waiting til the last hours before the ceremony! Anyhow I ended up going to the function in my family rags.
The gift
I thought long and hard on this issue also. What was a good gift that both of them could enjoy? Then I remembered the "TenderLove 3.0 Animator" by Kizmet Kidd. (Uhmmmm no, she is not a friend of mine - yet!). This was the perfect gift I thought.
My heterosexual friends, both women and men, praise it highly and tell me it is the most realistic, thoughtful, intimate sexual experience.
I found it on Xstreet, yes I am shopping there again altho I swore never to do so when they decided about the new rules, but I am simply to lazy sometimes.
Now I encountered a new obstacle! The damn thing was no transfer, which meant I just couldn´t simply buy it and wrap it up and give it to one of them. Instead I had to wait for one of them to come online before sending it. But to whom should I send it, Orchid or Yannis?
I called for a crisis conference in the swedish group chat "Swedish People in SL", the people there are awesome and have always come to my aid whenever I needed it. After some discussion I was told by the girls it would be best to send it to Yannis, as the guy needs to get on the HUD first anyway.
So when Yannis came online about two hours prior to the ceremony I sent the gift to him. I also made two gift boxes to give to each of them after the ceremony. The gift boxes only contained a congratulatory message and informed both of them about the gift I had already sent to Yannis. The message ended with the three rules I think should guide every relationship in SL, or RL for that matter.
1. Respect yourself
2. Respect your partner
3. Respect the love you have for each other.
There! All preparations were done and I was finally ready for the event.
The ceremony
I arrived to the venue of the ceremony about 20 minutes early, which was lucky because the lag was terrible from the start and didn´t get better as more guests came into the sim. I was at the venue in total about 120 minutes and still after all that time some of the textures and avatars hadn´t loaded.
I had to pull down the drawdistance for fear of crashing, which had an adverse effect on the quality of the pictures I took but I will post them anyhow.
Entering the church I met the largest assembly of vampires, ogres, demons and other monsters that I have ever encountered. They all looked amazingly beautiful with some of the most creative avatars I have seen. I felt a bit like "fresh meat" or "fresh blood" but they were all in non-combative mode and very nice to me. There were a few others in human avatars, but all of them had the vampire-titler over their heads giving their health status so I guess I was the only non-vampire present.
The master of ceremonies (above)
The ceremony was rather traditional, albeit with a few minor deviations. Not unlike many other similar events in SL, the guests found the need to constantly interrupt the ceremony with "emotions", speach or sounds, even if they had been asked to shut up already at the beginning.
Still it was a very beautiful and touching ceremony! Orchid and Yannis looked stunning, as they always do. I was happy and relieved to see my hero finally taken into safe harbor in the loving arms of Orchid!
Love you both, guys!
Have a long and happy partnership for many, many years to come!
