Dream: Alisgray's Amazonian Revolutionaries
Sunday, January 21st:
As we watched a Medieval fantasy battle, someone asked who was firing occasional streams of arrows.
"It's Zook," I suddenly realized. "In my second draft, he was all ranged attacks instead of the lance."
I followed a younger gunn into a huge sandy room with slopes and terraces where adults ran, tumbled, and played. A modernist design of criss-crossing walkways stood above the edge of the sand pit, which turned out to be roofless. I climbed up to the log level and sat with other peaceful people. White gulls cried overhead. Outside the room, the ocean rolled just a foot below the walkways, close enough that some of them were always damp. Milky froth and flotsam covered the water, and someone commented that this must be the barrier between the unprocessed waste and the open sea.
I arrived for a tabletop RPG with some people I didn't know very well; Genevieve and Chris were around somewhere, but the rest were mostly strangers. We had twice as many people as the last time I'd played, and a different person seemed to be in charge, like they were running a few overlapping games. He asked me what I did and I got nervous, but a girl from last time explained that I was the scout, or the archer, or... something.
The gathering changed... it was mostly the same people, but half of them had to arrive again and the room was bigger. Neon-bright colors fluoresced under unseen black lights in a loft full of strange platforms. star5 reclined on a ledge in her crimson battle gear. spacebug arrived in something black and bright orange with steel rings sewn across it, and birdfigment nodded a hello. A girl I knew from high school showed up in a bright peacock halter-top covered in chain mail. I felt distinctly under-dressed in my street clothes.
alisgray made an announcement from the upper balcony; she'd just returned with good news from her most recent bout of espionage. She held up the graphite skeleton of a strange long-arm. By drilling a single 1" hole near the front grip of the frame, we'd be able to produce our own assault rifles and arm ourselves for the revolution. She'd already found a friendly shop to do the conversion work; we had only to steal a few shipments of rifle frames from the manufacturer.
I snuck out nervously. The massive hooves of a demon lordpresumably one of the lot that alisgray and company intended to overthrowechoed behind me. It laughed at "my" rebellion, which even now it was poised to crush. I looked for somewhere to run as it loomed and fell upon me. The huge, horned devil swelled as it grew closer and became a giant parade-balloon version of itself. Half-deflated, it draped over me and everything else. I shoved my way through the folds of vinyl looking for a way out, but I couldn't find the door. Then I looked down and realized I was inside the balloon.
A half-dozen revolutionaries leapt from a bridge and swung down on hundred-meter cables. The human pendulums nearly grazed the highway below them, but they swung smoothly past and released the cables, landing adroitly atop a double-wide semi stacked high with weapon crates.
As we watched a Medieval fantasy battle, someone asked who was firing occasional streams of arrows.
"It's Zook," I suddenly realized. "In my second draft, he was all ranged attacks instead of the lance."
I followed a younger gunn into a huge sandy room with slopes and terraces where adults ran, tumbled, and played. A modernist design of criss-crossing walkways stood above the edge of the sand pit, which turned out to be roofless. I climbed up to the log level and sat with other peaceful people. White gulls cried overhead. Outside the room, the ocean rolled just a foot below the walkways, close enough that some of them were always damp. Milky froth and flotsam covered the water, and someone commented that this must be the barrier between the unprocessed waste and the open sea.
I arrived for a tabletop RPG with some people I didn't know very well; Genevieve and Chris were around somewhere, but the rest were mostly strangers. We had twice as many people as the last time I'd played, and a different person seemed to be in charge, like they were running a few overlapping games. He asked me what I did and I got nervous, but a girl from last time explained that I was the scout, or the archer, or... something.
The gathering changed... it was mostly the same people, but half of them had to arrive again and the room was bigger. Neon-bright colors fluoresced under unseen black lights in a loft full of strange platforms. star5 reclined on a ledge in her crimson battle gear. spacebug arrived in something black and bright orange with steel rings sewn across it, and birdfigment nodded a hello. A girl I knew from high school showed up in a bright peacock halter-top covered in chain mail. I felt distinctly under-dressed in my street clothes.
alisgray made an announcement from the upper balcony; she'd just returned with good news from her most recent bout of espionage. She held up the graphite skeleton of a strange long-arm. By drilling a single 1" hole near the front grip of the frame, we'd be able to produce our own assault rifles and arm ourselves for the revolution. She'd already found a friendly shop to do the conversion work; we had only to steal a few shipments of rifle frames from the manufacturer.
I snuck out nervously. The massive hooves of a demon lordpresumably one of the lot that alisgray and company intended to overthrowechoed behind me. It laughed at "my" rebellion, which even now it was poised to crush. I looked for somewhere to run as it loomed and fell upon me. The huge, horned devil swelled as it grew closer and became a giant parade-balloon version of itself. Half-deflated, it draped over me and everything else. I shoved my way through the folds of vinyl looking for a way out, but I couldn't find the door. Then I looked down and realized I was inside the balloon.
A half-dozen revolutionaries leapt from a bridge and swung down on hundred-meter cables. The human pendulums nearly grazed the highway below them, but they swung smoothly past and released the cables, landing adroitly atop a double-wide semi stacked high with weapon crates.