Dream: Dehydrated Mouse Guts (Weekend Edition)
Sunday, September 17th:
An airwhale swam through a summer sky, playfully turning loops until she noticed another gray cetacean surfacing in the ocean below. It had been a while since she met a new boy, flying or otherwise, and this one looked to have that square jaw that always made her tummy flutter. She swooped down to say hello, bobbing just above the water.
Communists'>
The blue male sung an oblique reply to her greeting. As she waited for him to continue, the gray airwhale noticed it wasn't just his jaw, but his entire head was squarish, as if some unnatural quadrilateral lived beneath his skin. She backed away nervously. The blue's mouth hinged open, and a squadron of robotic dragonfly-jets launched from the cyborg's tongue. He's one of them, she thought.
Later, the gray airwhale changed into her other super-form: a lithe, six-armed heroine clad in charcoal spandex. She wore matching pink boots and gauntlets, and the hem of her v-neck reminded me of fangs. She climbed through the city with a spider-like grace, destroying the robots she so loathed.
I was joking with friends when gunn playfully suggested that we spar. She transformed into her spider-heroine alter-ego and leapt atop a set of steel & log playground equipment. She advanced casually along the narrow beam from which the sloping ladders and the tire swing were suspended.
'Sure!' I replied. Few could match her in hand-to-hand, and I certainly wasn't a contender.
I slid my hands into gizmos that looked like the bottom halves of tin cans. A pair of crude electrodes tipped each device. I was a bit worried about giving up so much manual dexteritymy electrodes were hooked, but they were only half and inch long. I hopped onto a ladder and electricity crackled in each of my claws, magnetically anchoring them to the steel bars.
"Have you tried these yet?" I asked, clambering quickly up the ladder. gunn's confident smile melted into uncertainty.
We maneuvered nearly into striking range, a wide ladder between us screening me from her grappling submission holds. I feinted left, then jabbed my right hand through a gap in the ladder, hoping to drag my stun-talons across her abdomen. She lurched at the same time, and I zapped her across the breast instead. gunn shrieked, and her body jerked off the ladder. People rushed around her where she'd fallen. She didn't seem to be injured, just hurt. I felt terrible.
When I returned to camp (which was inside several rooms of an old building), a bunch of camp folk were lounging in the common room. (A mix of vaguely real people and strangers; I wasn't sure how they'd joined our camp this year. Some of them made me nervous.) gunn sat among them, sporting an acid scar across her left cheek. (Someone had been careless, but I'd missed the full explanation.)
gunn told us that, because someone had been stealing our food, she'd sprinkled tiny pellets all over it. (We'd stacked our box-food in a big pile; gray-brown spheres the size of BB's lay scattered across it, as if someone had torn open a bag and hadn't bothered to clean them up.)
"They look like candy," she said, "but they're dehydrated mouse guts. They'll make you very sick."
Entire camps had dumped their trash and gray water when they left, and a thin wash of grime had spilled across everything. It looked like normal mud, but it carried particles of old soap, half-rotten food, and other things I didn't want to think about. gunn said it had gotten her acid scar infected.
While I was out, the stranger half of my camp held an orgy. (That's not quite right. They got busy with their own partners, but they were all in the common area at the same time. (Which is not okay.)) cloudscudding and elfdope panned the event. gunn said she knew it would be like that, so she hadn't shown up. Dan (Julia's Dan) wondered at gunn's reticence.
"She won't join an orgy or dance naked," he said, "but she plays Strip Birthright with the rest of us."
Mr. With (who pronounced his name "Whit") told his employees he wanted the museum run as if it were still the 1970's in Italy.
Pedestrians crossed the plaza outside the museum entrance. A black couple pulling a set of wheeled luggage walked by, heading away from the museum. A British cop by the door rushed the departing couple and dropped his nightstick on the rolling suitcase. The cop gave him a glance that said give me back my nightstick. I ran over a told him not to pick it up. (The second cop, still hidden, was waiting for that, so both could claim the black man was armed when they beat him up.) I picked up the baton and handed it to the first cop, who looked disappointed.
Reenacting racial prejudice hadn't been Mr. With's intention, but he was an aloof administrator and didn't seem to notice.
Several of us approached the With building, which had replaced Janet-Wallace on the Macalester College campus. The mausoleum-turned-art museum still stood in Milan (despite also being in Saint Paul), even though archaeological evidence suggested it was actually meant to be in Paris. discoflamingo and malcubed commented on the building as we passed through the foyer.
We climbed a long metal stairway to the outdoor swimming pool. Faint moonlight outlined the central campus buildings around us. Everyone looked preternaturally healthy in the warm glow of orange safety lights on the stairs and reflected blues and yellows from the pool. Most of the class knew that the pool sat atop three basement levels of science labs, but the Japanese swimming instructor was new. The walk along the far side of the pool overlooked a twenty foot drop to a decorative lagoon and the gardens beyond. The instructor asked us if the lagoon should be so green, and we assured him that was because the underground lab used it as a heat exchanger.
The Japanese man lead the class in stretches before anyone got in the water. A handsome Latino bent one leg backwards until his heel neared the back of his head. beltramgregor said he didn't think malcubed was so flexible. I told him it was Alberto, not malcubed, and they looked nothing alike anyhow.
Sometime later, a couple classmates from Swimming dropped by and wanted to borrow both of our pots. richandfamous scowled, afraid they'd come back rusted, if at all. Alberto offered to cook dinner. A girl whispered in awe to another beside her: "And he can cook?" An academic adviser "accidentally" let slip that Alberto was Che Guevara's son, which explained everything; he'd grown up with enough money to learn to be good at anything he fancied.
An airwhale swam through a summer sky, playfully turning loops until she noticed another gray cetacean surfacing in the ocean below. It had been a while since she met a new boy, flying or otherwise, and this one looked to have that square jaw that always made her tummy flutter. She swooped down to say hello, bobbing just above the water.
Communists'>
The blue male sung an oblique reply to her greeting. As she waited for him to continue, the gray airwhale noticed it wasn't just his jaw, but his entire head was squarish, as if some unnatural quadrilateral lived beneath his skin. She backed away nervously. The blue's mouth hinged open, and a squadron of robotic dragonfly-jets launched from the cyborg's tongue. He's one of them, she thought.
Later, the gray airwhale changed into her other super-form: a lithe, six-armed heroine clad in charcoal spandex. She wore matching pink boots and gauntlets, and the hem of her v-neck reminded me of fangs. She climbed through the city with a spider-like grace, destroying the robots she so loathed.
I was joking with friends when gunn playfully suggested that we spar. She transformed into her spider-heroine alter-ego and leapt atop a set of steel & log playground equipment. She advanced casually along the narrow beam from which the sloping ladders and the tire swing were suspended.
'Sure!' I replied. Few could match her in hand-to-hand, and I certainly wasn't a contender.
I slid my hands into gizmos that looked like the bottom halves of tin cans. A pair of crude electrodes tipped each device. I was a bit worried about giving up so much manual dexteritymy electrodes were hooked, but they were only half and inch long. I hopped onto a ladder and electricity crackled in each of my claws, magnetically anchoring them to the steel bars.
"Have you tried these yet?" I asked, clambering quickly up the ladder. gunn's confident smile melted into uncertainty.
We maneuvered nearly into striking range, a wide ladder between us screening me from her grappling submission holds. I feinted left, then jabbed my right hand through a gap in the ladder, hoping to drag my stun-talons across her abdomen. She lurched at the same time, and I zapped her across the breast instead. gunn shrieked, and her body jerked off the ladder. People rushed around her where she'd fallen. She didn't seem to be injured, just hurt. I felt terrible.
When I returned to camp (which was inside several rooms of an old building), a bunch of camp folk were lounging in the common room. (A mix of vaguely real people and strangers; I wasn't sure how they'd joined our camp this year. Some of them made me nervous.) gunn sat among them, sporting an acid scar across her left cheek. (Someone had been careless, but I'd missed the full explanation.)
gunn told us that, because someone had been stealing our food, she'd sprinkled tiny pellets all over it. (We'd stacked our box-food in a big pile; gray-brown spheres the size of BB's lay scattered across it, as if someone had torn open a bag and hadn't bothered to clean them up.)
"They look like candy," she said, "but they're dehydrated mouse guts. They'll make you very sick."
Entire camps had dumped their trash and gray water when they left, and a thin wash of grime had spilled across everything. It looked like normal mud, but it carried particles of old soap, half-rotten food, and other things I didn't want to think about. gunn said it had gotten her acid scar infected.
While I was out, the stranger half of my camp held an orgy. (That's not quite right. They got busy with their own partners, but they were all in the common area at the same time. (Which is not okay.)) cloudscudding and elfdope panned the event. gunn said she knew it would be like that, so she hadn't shown up. Dan (Julia's Dan) wondered at gunn's reticence.
"She won't join an orgy or dance naked," he said, "but she plays Strip Birthright with the rest of us."
Mr. With (who pronounced his name "Whit") told his employees he wanted the museum run as if it were still the 1970's in Italy.
Pedestrians crossed the plaza outside the museum entrance. A black couple pulling a set of wheeled luggage walked by, heading away from the museum. A British cop by the door rushed the departing couple and dropped his nightstick on the rolling suitcase. The cop gave him a glance that said give me back my nightstick. I ran over a told him not to pick it up. (The second cop, still hidden, was waiting for that, so both could claim the black man was armed when they beat him up.) I picked up the baton and handed it to the first cop, who looked disappointed.
Reenacting racial prejudice hadn't been Mr. With's intention, but he was an aloof administrator and didn't seem to notice.
Several of us approached the With building, which had replaced Janet-Wallace on the Macalester College campus. The mausoleum-turned-art museum still stood in Milan (despite also being in Saint Paul), even though archaeological evidence suggested it was actually meant to be in Paris. discoflamingo and malcubed commented on the building as we passed through the foyer.
We climbed a long metal stairway to the outdoor swimming pool. Faint moonlight outlined the central campus buildings around us. Everyone looked preternaturally healthy in the warm glow of orange safety lights on the stairs and reflected blues and yellows from the pool. Most of the class knew that the pool sat atop three basement levels of science labs, but the Japanese swimming instructor was new. The walk along the far side of the pool overlooked a twenty foot drop to a decorative lagoon and the gardens beyond. The instructor asked us if the lagoon should be so green, and we assured him that was because the underground lab used it as a heat exchanger.
The Japanese man lead the class in stretches before anyone got in the water. A handsome Latino bent one leg backwards until his heel neared the back of his head. beltramgregor said he didn't think malcubed was so flexible. I told him it was Alberto, not malcubed, and they looked nothing alike anyhow.
Sometime later, a couple classmates from Swimming dropped by and wanted to borrow both of our pots. richandfamous scowled, afraid they'd come back rusted, if at all. Alberto offered to cook dinner. A girl whispered in awe to another beside her: "And he can cook?" An academic adviser "accidentally" let slip that Alberto was Che Guevara's son, which explained everything; he'd grown up with enough money to learn to be good at anything he fancied.