Wet scaly doom
So, I dreamt I was living on a sparsely populated planet of oceans and jungles. Sparsely populated because the planet was also occupied by three titanic "Storm Fish" (which look sort of like angelfish) roaming the oceans. The sweeping of their fins causes tsunamis and once, long ago, all three of them met face to face to face and they wiped out civilization. The remnants of humanity huddle their settlements around these monolithic green pylons from a lost age, arranged in vast lines crossing the planet. They provide electricity, and the result is a society combining ancient and futuristic technologies. I am out hiking over the tropical hills with a female friend to meet up with another friend who lives by the beach. There's a lot of rocky, cloud-nestled vistas overlooking lush, tropical valleys rolling towards the glittering sea and bathed in the warm hues of sunset and all that shit, and as per usual I take out my camera to commemorate visuals which will fail to be commemorated once I wake up and remember I cannot transfer dream-photos into actual data.
We make it to our friend's house, a dark wooden cabin on stilts above the sand, and catch her staring wistfully at the sky. She has short white hair, and like all white-haired people around the age of 20 she's magic or something. I turn upward to catch what she's looking at and the sky is full of sea turtles, all paddling through the clouds in the same direction. (You might've thought that sea turtles live in the sea and have flippers in order to move through water, but that's because you're stupid.) Our white-haired friend sadly sighs that the migration of the sky-sea-turtles prophesizes the convergence of the Storm Fish to once again purge civilization. Bummer. Let's go down to beach to get our minds off it.
We walk along the beach, encountering an encampment of goblin-crickets. They live in a series of small mud-huts adhered to the sides of what look like BBQ skewers sticking out of the sand. Goblin-crickets are highly aggressive and territorial, but also very tiny, so you don't really need to worry about their attacks but it's polite not to rile them up. They look like black little cricket-men wielding spears, but there appears to be only one of them outside in the entire encampment. He haughtily proclaims that their culture demands outsiders passing through their lands first announce their presence by shattering one of the tiny bottles hanging from the Welcoming Pole in the center of the encampment. Which my other friend does. And then does again. And again. What are you doing? She doesn't know. She doesn't remember what she's doing or how she got here. Hmm! Oh yeah, did I mention? My other friend is also part of some magical bullshit elf race or something, and one of their attributes is that they are psychically attuned to the Convergence of the Storm Fish and begin losing all their memories when that happens. Also, they're shapeshifters. What do they shapeshift into? Screws. Yes, screws. Seriously. She shapeshifts into a 3-inch wood screw on the spot and disappears into one of the waves lapping up on the shore. I root around frantically in the surf trying to find her, finding other types of screws... machine screws... sheet-metal screws... but no 3-inch wood screws. It's all very emotional.
OK, time out dream, what the fuck are you doing? What is this? This is not how you conduct a story. Get your shit together.
I beat it back to the settlement to warn everyone that fishy doom is upon us all. I will take this information to the highest authority in the land - the innkeeper. He's our leader for some reason. He's an old beardy dude working the bar in the medieval tavern downstairs by the docks (but with big cables and computer screens and techno doo-dads lying around, because reasons). This is grave news indeed. He remarks that he will gather his innkeepingest army against the fish, and we just might stand a chance from being forewarned - although legend recalls that the previous, much more technologically coherent civilization marshaled their mightiest steel battleships against just one fish and their efforts were "as throwing stones against smoke," and were all wiped out in a single fin-swipe, but y'know. It's fine. In the meantime, I must travel the world and spread news of the coming threat to all the lands and yadda yadda to unite against icthyo-tyranny. Of course, few people even believe in the fish anymore so good luck with that.
I travel by night across an enormous suspension bridge to one of the neighboring, more militant and more oppressive islands. The bridge is ancient and in disrepair, so I have to creep along the pipes on its underbelly. Also I don't want to get spotted by the searchlights of the patrols guarding the other side of the bridge, due to their militancy and oppressiveness. I get a vaguely North Korean vibe from them, but they do know how to throw colorful luaus. North Korean luaus. I end up at one of them and try to blend in with the festivities. My friend is there too, apparently. (The same friend(s)? I don't know, the dream isn't clear on that.) Important people are at this gathering, so together we have to recon the situation without arousing suspicion. But there's a problem: Cameron Diaz's character from The Counselor is here.
OK, let me take another time out to explain The Counselor. The main point of this movie that Cameron Diaz is a cheetah. In fact, that should have been the title of the movie: "Ridley Scott Presents Cameron Diaz is a Psycho Cheetah Woman." Technically, there's something about drug cartels and the titular counselor who is also in the movie somewhere, but really the plot is that Cameron Diaz is a cheetah furry lifestyler and she has to wreck everyone's shit and cause necrophilic rape-decapitations of bystanders while having sex with your car because that's what cheetahs do, amiright? There are like 3 decapitations and a hundred instances of incredibly blunt cheetah symbolism as a metaphor for Cameron Diaz, who is herself a metaphor for the primal car-fucking nature of the Mexican drug war or something I don't know.
So, Cameron Diaz is here and that's bad. In fact, she is somehow aligned with the pro-fishpocalypse front working clandestinely to screw everybody because that's what a cheetah would do. (WWCD?) And there's money, because there's always money. So, our mission becomes breaking into Cameron Diaz's safe in her trailer and retrieving her documents to prove to the island officials at the luau that they are catspaws in her fishy cheetah schemes. And we're also stealing her money. We sneak in, break into her safe and take her everything, but she catches us halfway through and furiously cheetahs after us through the luau as we try to stop her with fire and poison, until the dream completely loses cohesion and I wake up without any satisfactory conclusion to the fish story. They probably destroyed the world, because that's what big fish do. Just like cheetahs. The end.
We make it to our friend's house, a dark wooden cabin on stilts above the sand, and catch her staring wistfully at the sky. She has short white hair, and like all white-haired people around the age of 20 she's magic or something. I turn upward to catch what she's looking at and the sky is full of sea turtles, all paddling through the clouds in the same direction. (You might've thought that sea turtles live in the sea and have flippers in order to move through water, but that's because you're stupid.) Our white-haired friend sadly sighs that the migration of the sky-sea-turtles prophesizes the convergence of the Storm Fish to once again purge civilization. Bummer. Let's go down to beach to get our minds off it.
We walk along the beach, encountering an encampment of goblin-crickets. They live in a series of small mud-huts adhered to the sides of what look like BBQ skewers sticking out of the sand. Goblin-crickets are highly aggressive and territorial, but also very tiny, so you don't really need to worry about their attacks but it's polite not to rile them up. They look like black little cricket-men wielding spears, but there appears to be only one of them outside in the entire encampment. He haughtily proclaims that their culture demands outsiders passing through their lands first announce their presence by shattering one of the tiny bottles hanging from the Welcoming Pole in the center of the encampment. Which my other friend does. And then does again. And again. What are you doing? She doesn't know. She doesn't remember what she's doing or how she got here. Hmm! Oh yeah, did I mention? My other friend is also part of some magical bullshit elf race or something, and one of their attributes is that they are psychically attuned to the Convergence of the Storm Fish and begin losing all their memories when that happens. Also, they're shapeshifters. What do they shapeshift into? Screws. Yes, screws. Seriously. She shapeshifts into a 3-inch wood screw on the spot and disappears into one of the waves lapping up on the shore. I root around frantically in the surf trying to find her, finding other types of screws... machine screws... sheet-metal screws... but no 3-inch wood screws. It's all very emotional.
OK, time out dream, what the fuck are you doing? What is this? This is not how you conduct a story. Get your shit together.
I beat it back to the settlement to warn everyone that fishy doom is upon us all. I will take this information to the highest authority in the land - the innkeeper. He's our leader for some reason. He's an old beardy dude working the bar in the medieval tavern downstairs by the docks (but with big cables and computer screens and techno doo-dads lying around, because reasons). This is grave news indeed. He remarks that he will gather his innkeepingest army against the fish, and we just might stand a chance from being forewarned - although legend recalls that the previous, much more technologically coherent civilization marshaled their mightiest steel battleships against just one fish and their efforts were "as throwing stones against smoke," and were all wiped out in a single fin-swipe, but y'know. It's fine. In the meantime, I must travel the world and spread news of the coming threat to all the lands and yadda yadda to unite against icthyo-tyranny. Of course, few people even believe in the fish anymore so good luck with that.
I travel by night across an enormous suspension bridge to one of the neighboring, more militant and more oppressive islands. The bridge is ancient and in disrepair, so I have to creep along the pipes on its underbelly. Also I don't want to get spotted by the searchlights of the patrols guarding the other side of the bridge, due to their militancy and oppressiveness. I get a vaguely North Korean vibe from them, but they do know how to throw colorful luaus. North Korean luaus. I end up at one of them and try to blend in with the festivities. My friend is there too, apparently. (The same friend(s)? I don't know, the dream isn't clear on that.) Important people are at this gathering, so together we have to recon the situation without arousing suspicion. But there's a problem: Cameron Diaz's character from The Counselor is here.
OK, let me take another time out to explain The Counselor. The main point of this movie that Cameron Diaz is a cheetah. In fact, that should have been the title of the movie: "Ridley Scott Presents Cameron Diaz is a Psycho Cheetah Woman." Technically, there's something about drug cartels and the titular counselor who is also in the movie somewhere, but really the plot is that Cameron Diaz is a cheetah furry lifestyler and she has to wreck everyone's shit and cause necrophilic rape-decapitations of bystanders while having sex with your car because that's what cheetahs do, amiright? There are like 3 decapitations and a hundred instances of incredibly blunt cheetah symbolism as a metaphor for Cameron Diaz, who is herself a metaphor for the primal car-fucking nature of the Mexican drug war or something I don't know.
So, Cameron Diaz is here and that's bad. In fact, she is somehow aligned with the pro-fishpocalypse front working clandestinely to screw everybody because that's what a cheetah would do. (WWCD?) And there's money, because there's always money. So, our mission becomes breaking into Cameron Diaz's safe in her trailer and retrieving her documents to prove to the island officials at the luau that they are catspaws in her fishy cheetah schemes. And we're also stealing her money. We sneak in, break into her safe and take her everything, but she catches us halfway through and furiously cheetahs after us through the luau as we try to stop her with fire and poison, until the dream completely loses cohesion and I wake up without any satisfactory conclusion to the fish story. They probably destroyed the world, because that's what big fish do. Just like cheetahs. The end.