A regular evening. The sun was still out, but beginning to sink towards the horizon, causing the light being strewn over the town and the surroundings to be of a deep golden color which very slowly started turning to orange. Sounds of traffic mixed with the sounds of the breeze in the background. Streetlights not yet on. Birds still chirping, though they were settling down for the evening. It gave a very calm and quiet background for the two female felines standing by a collection of large buildings.
One of them was holding a handheld, but professional camera, her back towards the large buildings so she could film the other feline who was talking into the camera. There was quite a difference between them; the feline being filmed was a regular, slender 5'10" tall female with sleek brown fur sporting a few circular markings along her shoulders and upper arms and back, along her hips and upper legs, and along the length of her tail. A pair of beige ears perked up from a slightly messy mop of short, brownish red hair, a pair of grey-ish blue eyes were fixed upon the camera being held by the other feline.
That one was pretty simple in looks as well; for one, she stood shorter at only 5'5", and she was a whole lot fluffier as well as she was a Maine Coon. Her fur was bi-color; white on the lower half of her face, the tips of her ears, her arms from the elbows down and her paws, her feet from slightly above the ankles down, her throat, chest and stomach and the tip of her very fluffy tail, the rest of her fur was a light, almost baby-pink-like color, which was also the color of her long, slightly unruly whiskers and the thick mop of hair on her head, which hung down in thick locks from between her ears and over her forehead. A large pink ribbon tied in a bow at her right ear held the hair away from her deep pink eyes, which in turn were sheltered by a pair of thick-rimmed, round blue glasses which gave her a slightly nerdy look, but a very cute look at the same time. Around her neck she was wearing a blue collar adorned with small silver hearts and with a silver bell hanging from the front, and a very small heart-shaped mole was visible on the right side of her muzzle, just behind her long pink whiskers.
The brown feline was speaking brightly, standing in place but every now and then gesticulating quite a lot with her paws as she spoke to the camera.
"Well hello, all you car nuts out there! It has been quite a while, hasn't it? No doubt y'all noticed that my videos had stopped for a couple of weeks, and I'm sure y'all been wondering what happened to Chryssy's Classics, since so much already happened shortly before my videos stopped. But in this video I will explain all that's been going on! First off, y'all are immediately noticing I'm not holding any handycams or selfie sticks with a gopro on them, but I'm standing here with my paws completely free. And I'm not using a tripod either; I have myself a very lovely camera woman. A little ways over there..." she motioned towards the camera, "...is Mimi Farlan, who is holding a pretty darn professional camera as she is a pretty darn experienced camera woman and editor. We became good friends, and she will from now on be filming me when I do my work and make my videos, and she'll be helping me with the editing as well." Cheerfully, she stepped up to the fluffy cat with the camera and took the camera herself to point it at the fluffy feline. "Look at that, y'all! Ain't she just the cutest floofball y'all ever seen? And she's all mine now to follow me around and film everything I do! Well, so long as it's anything to do with cars, anyway," she giggled cheerily.
"Yeesh, Holley!" the fluffy cat protested with a blush, holding one paw over her muzzle and waving her other paw, reaching for the camera. "Don't be silly, gimme that back and let me do my work, okay?"
The brown feline, whose full name was Holley Chrystine - hence why she referred to herself as Chryssy while the fluffy cat called her Holley - laughed again and pointed the camera at herself for a moment, like she was used to doing, and winked.
"Whattaya think, folks? Shall I give her back the camera? Hmmm... actually, no I won't, because wait till y'all see this1 You thought I drove awesome cars; well, wait till you see what an expensive, exotic taste miss floofball here has! We drove here in her car since mine is actually still at the old place, I was gonna pick it up today to drive home, but just look at Mimi's wheels!"
She turned the camera and walked away from the large buildings, to a square of parking spaces a bit aside the start of a broad, concrete roadway full of cracks and potholes, followed at the heels by a feebly protesting Mimi. Parked way at the front was a car that was very much classic, and very much exotic. A low-slung, sleek silhouette, broad low front fenders holding a dual headlamp unit with chrome bezels at the end, a hood valance protruding far between the front fenders in an aggressive pointy shape, holding a chrome-bezeled and -grated grille sporting a large chrome trident. Small narrow-whitewall tires around rims with smooth chrome hubcaps sporting a blue center cap with the same trident logo. Thin horizontal taillights wrapping around the sides of the low-slung rear with large, flat trunk. One large, pillar-less door on either side, with narrow chrome pushbutton door handles. And everything coated in a finish of gleaming, deep dark burgundy purplish-red paint.
"Check this out, y'all!" Holley said as she stepped around the car with the camera, with just as much enthusiasm as when she was talking about her own cars. "What y'all see here is a genuine Maserati Sebring! From 1966, so a series 2. Only 247 of this series were ever made! Talk about rare! This one has the three-point-seven engine in it, and can you believe Mimi uses this as her daily driver? Is that nuts or what? This thing belongs in a freaking museum! But she drives it around like it's any ol' run of the mill shopping cart!"
"Yeah yeah yeah, that's enough now, Holley! Yeesh!" Mimi said with a light grunt, making a lunge for the camera. "Gimme back my camera now! I didn't come here with you to be put on the spot, I came here to film you giving an explanation of recent events."
Holley chuckled softly and handed the camera back to Mimi, walking back to the large buildings and turning so she could be properly filmed again.
"Alright then, I'll behave myself. So, yeah! There ya have it, y'all, my own cute fluffy camera girl! Who drives an insanely rare car to boot! So that's one big thing that changed about the way my videos will be made from now on. Secondly..." She pulled out a paper and held it up. "Remember that eviction notice they gave me? Because there'd been so many complaints about the noise starting so early and going on so late? Well, they withdrew it. No doubt they realized just how much work and traffic my company was bringing to the place. But it's too little too late for them. For one, they don't pull a stunt like that on me and get away with it, and second of all, they sent the withdrawal while I was in the middle of packing up everything. So yeah, Chryssy's Classics is still totally gone from that ungrateful place, and I took all my traffic and revenue with me." She stuffed the paper into a pocket of her jean shorts. "So now I can hear y'all asking; but Chryssy, such a big garage, so much equipment, all those cars, where the heck could you bring all that?" A grin bared her teeth as she pulled a second folded paper from the breast pocket of her shirt and unfolded it. "Well now, that was the pendulum swinging the other way after I got an eviction notice from the place where I've been doing business for a couple of years already. Such a negative blow warranted a positive push in return, and that was this notice I got two weeks before I got the withdrawal notice. My grandfather's brother, my great-uncle, had a tinning factory - basically, an old-fashioned cannery where they processed several kinds of food into tinned food. Or canned food, just as you like. The place went bankrupt once they stopped using tin cans; he upgraded a few of the machines to process regular metal cans but it was too expensive to upgrade the whole place, and he was getting old, so he filed for bankruptcy, way back in the early seventies already. However, he always held onto the factory, that place has been his life and he couldn't get rid of it. Do y'all remember my videos where I restored his old Dodge trucks? Yeah, those were from the factory. Now, a few weeks ago he passed away, and he left the place to me." She carefully folded up the paper again and stuck it back into her breast pocket. "That means, the factory building and the warehouses behind it, plus of course the ground they're standing on. So that is the main reason for my videos drying up; I've been working my butt off the past weeks to assess the pace and move everything over. It's gonna take a couple weeks more, since the power grid of the place will need to be checked over and at least repaired where needed, and probably upgraded as well. Plus, I will need to lay out a floor plan to see where all my heavy stuff is gonna go, like the car lifts and the big machinery and whatnot. But since I needed to get out of that old place - like I said, this was before I got the letter telling me they had withdrawn the eviction - I have moved all of my stuff out to here and put it in one of the warehouses for the time being." Again there was that teeth-baring grin. "And now that y'all heard this, I can almost hear you dying to see the place. Well, I won't keep y'all in suspense much longer, folks! I will give you a tour right now!"
She motioned at the fluffy feline holding the camera while she started stepping towards the buildings behind Mimi.
"C'mon Meems, let's give all them car nuts a good view, alright?" She slowly walked to the front of the factory building, which was an old-fashioned rectangle built from weathered bricks with a part sticking out the front on each end, and a main entrance in the middle, behind a broad, cracked concrete roadway with two openings in it where a very large conifer tree was planted in. There were low barriers around them, but the trees were so overgrown those barriers could not be seen anymore. The building clearly had two stories, as there were windows flanking the main entrance, and a row of five windows above it. On the insides of the two parts sticking out were two windows at the bottom and a row of three windows above those, while there were two rows of three windows on the front sides. The brickwork was rough, made of brown-ish red brick that was weathered all over, while around the door and all windows was a line of black bricks. Most of the windows were broken of course, but that was pretty much the only damage.
Almost remarkably, the lighting was still in place. Flanking the broad cracked concrete roadway in front of the building were four very tall pole lamps with a large, slightly convex saucer at the very top, in a strange mix of a light brown-ish color and a strange green-ish sheen. The same color showed on the row of lamps that were affixed to the wall of the building; four on the front of the middle part, two on the insides of the parts of the building that stuck out and two on the front of each of those parts. These lamps also ended in a sort of flying saucer, with weather-troubled glass spheres encircled by a flat disk. Chrystine, also known as Holley, pointed out those lamps with quite some enthusiasm. "So this is the main factory building. As y'all can see, it's built in the typical style of the thirties, forties and fifties, and just look at those funky fifties-style flying saucer wall lamps and streetlamps! It's actually amazing those are still all on there and standing around the place, because as y'all can see from that strange color, they're made of copper. Or possibly copper-plated, but in anyway the outsides of them are copper, which is why they've turned green over time. But just look at those things! I just totally love the look of them!" She pointed at two tarmac paths running from the concrete roadway to the sides, in front of the two parts of the building sticking out. "Those narrower roads lead around the main building to the warehouses behind it. Let's go and have a look at those now."
Leading the way for the fluffy cat holding the camera, she followed one of the tarmac paths around the left side of the building, pointing at the buildings behind it. Four more of the tall copper light poles with the flying saucer top flanked the path that led to three identical buildings. The sides of them were as long as the main building while the fronts were very narrow, sporting a very large wide door in the middle and a row of three windows above it, while a long row of windows also ran along the long sides at second floor height. All three buildings were built out of the same rough weathered brickwork, topped with three triangle-shaped lines of smaller brickwork which was straight on one end and covered with rusty corrugated steel plating slanting down on the other ends, forming the so characteristic 'sawtooth' roofs on all three of the buildings.
"That's the warehouses," Chrystine pointed at the buildings. "As y'all can see, there's three of'em, and I been putting all my stuff in the first one for now. They have them funky lamps as well, and them weird rows of half pointy roofs. I ain't got no clue why they ever built those kinda roofs, but y'all gotta admit it has character in a way." She turned a bit and pointed at the back of the main building, which had long rows of windows at both floors, as well as several very large doors at the back. "Them big doors are sort of the loading docks, they got metal and food delivered to the warehouses by trucks of course, and they used pretty large vehicles to transport that into the main factory where it was processed, and from there back to the warehouses from where it was picked up again by trucks that would distribute it to stores and all. Them warehouses were pretty much empty inside when I assessed them earlier, save from bunches of left-over pallets and racks and that kinda stuff. Most of it was rusted into the ground, but some are salvageable, and I may fix them up since the racks can come in quite handy to store my parts and boxes and all in. And of course..." She walked towards the middle warehouse and opened the large door, motioning inside. Even with the low lighting, Mimi's camera easily picked up several heavy duty trucks; a pickup or two, a couple of box trucks and several big rigs - all of them Dodges. "The factory's trucks I restored for my great-uncle were included in the deal as well. So all those pickups and big rigs y'all seen me restore in earlier videos are now my property as well. And best of all..." She pointed at one of the big rigs, "...the CNT800 takes an eight-car transport trailer, y'all can see there's one behind it now; I used that to transport my cars to this place. So now I can transport up to eight cars in one haul! That will sure save me bundles of time, I already found how much time it saved me when I brought all of my things over to this place." She closed and locked the door of the middle warehouse and walked up to the large folding door of the first warehouse to open it and let Mimi peek inside with the camera, giving a view of a mass of equipment, dismantled car lifts, boxes, crates, as well as a number of cars - most of them Mopars, some of them regular passenger cars, but all of them from brands of the Chrysler Corporation. Some were fully restored, some were rusty wrecks, several were in various stages of restoration - all of them were classics. "As y'all see, that's all my stuff right there; it's gonna take a while before I will have it all set up and organized again." She closed and locked the door and led the way back to the front of the main factory building. "It's all gonna go in here, the main building will be my main garage, but I will have to figure out where I will put everything. And as I said, the whole place will need a fluff-up and there's a lot of fixing that needs to be done as well. Y'all can see all them broken windows, so that's one of the first things that need to be fixed, and it's very likely a lot of the ground floor windows will be bricked up as well. But which ones will also depend on where my equipment will be set up. And of course, the very first thing that needs to be done is getting the entire electrical system of the place checked out, fixed and upgraded in places - I need to have juice to run the lights so we can see what we're doing in there when we start fixing things up, and for a bunch of my equipment like the car lifts, the spray booth and some of the large machinery I will need high voltage. This place does have high voltage since it used to run pretty darn heavy machinery as well of course, but as far as we could tell from our first walk-through, it's all over the place and will definitely need to be all checked out and fixed before I can even get the electricity reinstated to this place." She let out a soft chuckle as she motioned her paws along the building and at the lights, the light poles, and ended at the overgrown conifers. "And those things need a good trim soon too, so they won't be in the way when we go in and out through that door all the time." She leaned a paw against one of the long copper light poles. "So! That's pretty much what's been going on the past weeks, why my videos have dried up for a while, and why my new videos will still be slow for the coming few weeks. However, I will be making new videos with the help of Mimi here now, and we will be making videos of all the work we'll spend on making this place operational again and convert it to the new home of Chryssy's Classics! So for those of y'all who are interested in that kind of work, there will be plenty of construction work videos coming in the next few weeks, and after that, my regular car restoring videos will resume again." She let out a chortle. "And now even better than before, with the very good and professional help of darling Mimi there behind the camera. So keep y'all's eyes pealed for that!" That grin again. "So there y'all go. Miss Holley Chrystine Wite has left her home grounds and has relocated her restoration garage to the industrial park on the outskirts of Pine Corner, and it will be even bigger and better than before! Not to mention that there'll be none of that silly complaining about noise or anything, since in its heyday this factory produced a hell of a lot more noise than I can ever make, and we're at the back of an industrial park here so there's no noise abatement regulations anyways. And no one can throw me out of this place either because it's my own property." Her grin widened even further. "Just goes to show, folks; ya don't mess with Holley Chrystine Wite, because I sure as hell come back better and stronger, hell yeah!" She pushed herself of from the light pole and chuckled, motioning with a paw. "Oh, also also also! This is something I been dying to tell y'all; I made the awesomest friend ever! During the time I was packing up everything, I got a call from someone who asked me about doing work on her '71 Challenger. I told her it was gonna take some time before I could take on new customers due to everything going on, but we met up anyways to have a talk and so I could check out her car. Turns out she's a retired race car driver! She's a feline too, getting on a bit in years as she used to race in the 1970's and 80's, and get this; her race car is a Panther Pink '70 Dodge Superbee! I seen that thing, and it looks gorgeous! Still looks like new! I showed her pics of my own '70 Panther Pink Dart, and we became very good friends as well! So y'all may just see her popping up in my future videos, and in any way y'all be sure to see one of her cars popping up in some of my future videos as I will be working on her Challenger in any way, once I got this whole deal here set up. And the best part is, she lives in Fillamy, that's only a couple dozen miles or so away from here, just across the river! So I'm pretty darn sure we will be seeing a lot of each other from now on, too!" She let out a short, cheery laugh. "So yeah! Things mighta taken a weird turn with that eviction and all, but it's definitely been looking up a whole darn lot for me after that!"
Truer words. They had never been spoken. And it seemed like there was going to be a whole lot to look forward to - both for Holley herself, as well as for her slew of followers on YouTube and her customers.
