Dream: An Odd Trip to Hazard County (Weekend Edition)
Saturday, Mar 25th:
A short, attractive French girl with exaggerated features worked in the kitchen. She always wore a red bandanna, and she was always chasing Tracy.
(Tracy's a Carleton friend, recently from Vermont after a youth in rural Montana. Broad shoulders, six-foot-three; came to school with a rattlesnake skin he'd acquired the day before, and the hunting knife with which he'd removed it from the snake. He got an internship tagging and tracking timber wolves in Michigan over the summer, which helped him get similar work for a semester abroad in Namibia, where he tracked cheetahs. I'm sure they use radio collars and tranquilizers, but if he told me he just sniffed out their footprints in the savanna and crept up on the cheetahs real quiet-like, I'd have to believe him.)
Anyhow, one afternoon while Tracy was around with some of the guys, she walked out to harangue some of us. She said Tracy was clearly the hottest of the delivery drivers, so obviously she couldn't date anyone else. She strutted out swaying a posterior at the large end of "shapely."
"Look at that ass," she said, pointing to her own. "And keep in mind China is the right size for the Earth, you know what I'm saying?"
In celebration of the French girl's birthday, the cast of Saturday Night Live organized an infomercial-skit in which she played the unwitting customer. They gave her a 2D-aquarium, something like a thin ant farm. Instead of soil and ants, the panes held a cutaway view of sea caves filled with a viscous, royal blue fluid. The liquid rolled and splashed like water in slow-motion, and its unusual optical characteristics made everything seem even more two-dimensional than it really was. Silhouettes of small objects cut from black foam core stood or floated in the caves, lamps and fire hydrants and barstools.
They gave her a fishing rod and told her they'd hidden a surprise somewhere in the caves. She found it almost immediately, not in the tricky recesses near the bottom, but disguised among the footstools and lampshades near the top. She hooked the round object with the fishing line and hauled out a small black shirt button with too many holes. A thin black wire trailed from the back, ending in a small black lump; I recognized it as a microphone bug with a transmitter. Once she pulled it from the blue liquid, a dot of red shone from an LED behind one of the button's holes.
Their second game took place in a small spare room. A pool of murky water dominated the room, leaving only a ledge of floor near the entrance. The French girl's second glowing dot was somewhere in the water. She reached in to start looking, and almost immediately Dana Carvey leapt out in a shark costume, his growling face framed in toothy jaws. Carvey roared briefly, but the girl was unphased, and he disappeared back into the pool. A moment later he tossed out the second dot without surfacing; I figured he had SCUBA gear concealed under the dorsal fin. The girl caught the dot, a stringy orange mass of sponge rubber.
She'd won both games, so she'd earned the prizea night with Tracy. The SNL producers worried I'd get involved somehow.... Maybe they thought I'd try to intervene? But it didn't matter to me.
I walked downstairs in our house to answer the door. xcorvis had just arrived to watch the Halo movie. My father arrived 20 minutes later to join us for the movie.
Afterwards, clad in my Saturday morning PJ's, I was ready to play video games. I noticed a pair of games on my bookshelf that I'd rented months ago and never played. They were probably overdue, but the place was closed on weekends. I put one in the Xbox to try it out before I had to return it. The generic sports car on the cover suggested an unremarkable racing game. The intro flashed stills of Boss Hog and his cronies in succession.
I chose between two deputy cars (one was boxy beyond all reason, like an incinerator and smokestack tipped sideways) and looked for criminals to pursue. The camera gave me a three-quarter view of the whole town. My squad car handled like oatmeal (well, maybe like fufu), and all the "stationary" objects (trees, buildings, lamp posts) shrunk and elongated in unison, shimmying left and right like... some game I can't remember. (An early Mario, maybe?) I ran into things a lot, but the buildings just shuddered like giant gummi candies and I rebounded back into my lane.
I took a left turn, and my character's voice called dispatch to say they were headed for the bridge. I hit a few passing cars and spun them out to block the roads running over the train tracks in case my quarry tried to double back. I drove over a bridge and through a tunnel. I discovered a strange vehicle parked near a trench in a factory with large openings at either end. It looked like a giant tank tread bent into a pair of stair-step corners, with both the risers angled gently down the slope. Huge interlocking wheels filled the space beneath the tread's angles. A driver's seat compartment and a barrel-shaped turret (like something from a WW-II amphibious landing craft) hovered over the tread near the front end. Three more turrets were spread out towards the top, and all of them mounted a pair of five-inch cannons. Some local criminal gang planned to buy or sell this "Death Roller," but none of them were around, so I destroyed it with impunity.
I drove out, my car disappeared, and I fell through the air, landing in a large woven basket (shaped like a teacup) a hundred feet from the ground. A row of chromatic trolls in miniature hot-air balloons floated around me. Their overalls and balloons matched the color of their hair, and they seemed irritated despite their constant smirks. The green and blue trolls bobbed near the back of the row. The red troll beside me flourished and produced an improbably big object from its pocket, which was either a large red fish or a huge red croquet mallet. Either way, it wound up and knocked me from the basket-cup.
As I fell, Rainbow Brite watched from high above on her cloud-treading horse, Starlite. She shook her head while saying something disparaging about my technique. (I had the impression she waved her wand and moved something to catch me.)
I landed in a tiny courtyard hanging in space. I saw stars in every direction beyond the brick wall that ringed the gray cobblestones. Some sort of orange mountain poked its summit up near the locked gate, but it was only close enough to taunt me; I couldn't possible jump that far.
I cast around the courtyard; nothing but scrub grass and pebbles. I yanked up a suspicious weed, and it changed in my hands to became a flask filled with bubbling blue potion. I wonder where the blue doors go. I threw it down, the puff of smoke cleared, and a dark blue door stood in its place. I was mildly disappointed when I stepped through the door into the subspace courtyard. Without a portal (like an urn, maybe) I was trapped there anyhow, so I pulled up the rest of the grass to get the coins. The door opened again, popped me back into the real courtyard, and disappeared. I thought about what those potions would add to a d20 game, and debated how best to balance them.
I searched again and nudged a loose paving stone, revealing a keyhole in the ground beneath. I think I worked the lock somehow, because I heard the "secret" music from Zelda and several walls slid up around the courtyard. They got taller closer to the outside, and I realized they were very narrow steps. I climbed up and peered over the edge into a lush forest on the other side, hanging in space.
A short, attractive French girl with exaggerated features worked in the kitchen. She always wore a red bandanna, and she was always chasing Tracy.
(Tracy's a Carleton friend, recently from Vermont after a youth in rural Montana. Broad shoulders, six-foot-three; came to school with a rattlesnake skin he'd acquired the day before, and the hunting knife with which he'd removed it from the snake. He got an internship tagging and tracking timber wolves in Michigan over the summer, which helped him get similar work for a semester abroad in Namibia, where he tracked cheetahs. I'm sure they use radio collars and tranquilizers, but if he told me he just sniffed out their footprints in the savanna and crept up on the cheetahs real quiet-like, I'd have to believe him.)
Anyhow, one afternoon while Tracy was around with some of the guys, she walked out to harangue some of us. She said Tracy was clearly the hottest of the delivery drivers, so obviously she couldn't date anyone else. She strutted out swaying a posterior at the large end of "shapely."
"Look at that ass," she said, pointing to her own. "And keep in mind China is the right size for the Earth, you know what I'm saying?"
In celebration of the French girl's birthday, the cast of Saturday Night Live organized an infomercial-skit in which she played the unwitting customer. They gave her a 2D-aquarium, something like a thin ant farm. Instead of soil and ants, the panes held a cutaway view of sea caves filled with a viscous, royal blue fluid. The liquid rolled and splashed like water in slow-motion, and its unusual optical characteristics made everything seem even more two-dimensional than it really was. Silhouettes of small objects cut from black foam core stood or floated in the caves, lamps and fire hydrants and barstools.
They gave her a fishing rod and told her they'd hidden a surprise somewhere in the caves. She found it almost immediately, not in the tricky recesses near the bottom, but disguised among the footstools and lampshades near the top. She hooked the round object with the fishing line and hauled out a small black shirt button with too many holes. A thin black wire trailed from the back, ending in a small black lump; I recognized it as a microphone bug with a transmitter. Once she pulled it from the blue liquid, a dot of red shone from an LED behind one of the button's holes.
Their second game took place in a small spare room. A pool of murky water dominated the room, leaving only a ledge of floor near the entrance. The French girl's second glowing dot was somewhere in the water. She reached in to start looking, and almost immediately Dana Carvey leapt out in a shark costume, his growling face framed in toothy jaws. Carvey roared briefly, but the girl was unphased, and he disappeared back into the pool. A moment later he tossed out the second dot without surfacing; I figured he had SCUBA gear concealed under the dorsal fin. The girl caught the dot, a stringy orange mass of sponge rubber.
She'd won both games, so she'd earned the prizea night with Tracy. The SNL producers worried I'd get involved somehow.... Maybe they thought I'd try to intervene? But it didn't matter to me.
I walked downstairs in our house to answer the door. xcorvis had just arrived to watch the Halo movie. My father arrived 20 minutes later to join us for the movie.
Afterwards, clad in my Saturday morning PJ's, I was ready to play video games. I noticed a pair of games on my bookshelf that I'd rented months ago and never played. They were probably overdue, but the place was closed on weekends. I put one in the Xbox to try it out before I had to return it. The generic sports car on the cover suggested an unremarkable racing game. The intro flashed stills of Boss Hog and his cronies in succession.
I chose between two deputy cars (one was boxy beyond all reason, like an incinerator and smokestack tipped sideways) and looked for criminals to pursue. The camera gave me a three-quarter view of the whole town. My squad car handled like oatmeal (well, maybe like fufu), and all the "stationary" objects (trees, buildings, lamp posts) shrunk and elongated in unison, shimmying left and right like... some game I can't remember. (An early Mario, maybe?) I ran into things a lot, but the buildings just shuddered like giant gummi candies and I rebounded back into my lane.
I took a left turn, and my character's voice called dispatch to say they were headed for the bridge. I hit a few passing cars and spun them out to block the roads running over the train tracks in case my quarry tried to double back. I drove over a bridge and through a tunnel. I discovered a strange vehicle parked near a trench in a factory with large openings at either end. It looked like a giant tank tread bent into a pair of stair-step corners, with both the risers angled gently down the slope. Huge interlocking wheels filled the space beneath the tread's angles. A driver's seat compartment and a barrel-shaped turret (like something from a WW-II amphibious landing craft) hovered over the tread near the front end. Three more turrets were spread out towards the top, and all of them mounted a pair of five-inch cannons. Some local criminal gang planned to buy or sell this "Death Roller," but none of them were around, so I destroyed it with impunity.
I drove out, my car disappeared, and I fell through the air, landing in a large woven basket (shaped like a teacup) a hundred feet from the ground. A row of chromatic trolls in miniature hot-air balloons floated around me. Their overalls and balloons matched the color of their hair, and they seemed irritated despite their constant smirks. The green and blue trolls bobbed near the back of the row. The red troll beside me flourished and produced an improbably big object from its pocket, which was either a large red fish or a huge red croquet mallet. Either way, it wound up and knocked me from the basket-cup.
As I fell, Rainbow Brite watched from high above on her cloud-treading horse, Starlite. She shook her head while saying something disparaging about my technique. (I had the impression she waved her wand and moved something to catch me.)
I landed in a tiny courtyard hanging in space. I saw stars in every direction beyond the brick wall that ringed the gray cobblestones. Some sort of orange mountain poked its summit up near the locked gate, but it was only close enough to taunt me; I couldn't possible jump that far.
I cast around the courtyard; nothing but scrub grass and pebbles. I yanked up a suspicious weed, and it changed in my hands to became a flask filled with bubbling blue potion. I wonder where the blue doors go. I threw it down, the puff of smoke cleared, and a dark blue door stood in its place. I was mildly disappointed when I stepped through the door into the subspace courtyard. Without a portal (like an urn, maybe) I was trapped there anyhow, so I pulled up the rest of the grass to get the coins. The door opened again, popped me back into the real courtyard, and disappeared. I thought about what those potions would add to a d20 game, and debated how best to balance them.
I searched again and nudged a loose paving stone, revealing a keyhole in the ground beneath. I think I worked the lock somehow, because I heard the "secret" music from Zelda and several walls slid up around the courtyard. They got taller closer to the outside, and I realized they were very narrow steps. I climbed up and peered over the edge into a lush forest on the other side, hanging in space.