Glieuaeiel's DJ

Giant Spiders

I'm playing a hard HOMM3 scenario. I decide to put in a cheat code and skip to the end of the scenario, just to see what it's like. I'm moved to the end of a dungeon, where I get the key that unlocks the way to the final boss. Then I exit the cave, emerging to a darkened portion of the overworld map that I've never seen before. To the north, past some mountains, a giant pair of red eyes is moving around. The final boss must be a giant spider; I've fought these before. I look for a passage through the mountains. Then somehow the light improves and I can see the rest of the spider's body. Well, not all of it; it doesn't all fit on the screen. This spider is much bigger than the ones I've fought before. Even though this is only a game, I feel a distinct sense of fear. Suddenly I don't want to find a passage through the mountains; I start looking around the rest of the nearby map area instead. As I do, suddenly I see motion to the east. Panning over, I see a new spider, a blue one, almost as big as the other. It's looking for me, and it will get here in moments. I run away.

Frags:

• granola bar
• Due to an accident, I smell totally rancid.
• Someone is commenting on a picture of religious protesters. One of the protesters is holding a life-sized caricature of a naked man with a sign hanging from his erection. I think maybe the man is supposed to be Romney.
• I have to shave my beard. It's kind of a shame, because it's a full beard about an inch long and it goes well with my longer hair. [IRL: I can't grow a full beard.]

Stormtrooper (7:51)

Somehow I've found a Stormtrooper uniform. I put it on to disguise myself as I walk through the enemy complex with the rest of my partners in stealth. It's uncomfortable to have the mask all the way on, so most of the time I have it lifted (it has a visor that slides up a bit like a space helmet, and a separate part that slides up to reveal just the mouth). Then I have to put it on again quickly when another Stormtrooper comes around a corner, so they don't see that I don't actually have the same face as Jango Fett.

Somehow we get caught. An alarm might have been involved. Now we're in a small room with about twice our number of enemies. Not many of them are armed--they're just officials of some kind--but there are two people with lightsabers. Almost by accident, I take out my own two-sided green lightsaber and start attacking them. I barely have a second to hope that the rest of my group takes that as the signal to start fighting our way out of here. The people with lightsabers go down easily, and I realize they were never Jedi-trained. Somehow they just found those sabers and tried to pretend they could use them to discourage us from fighting.

Once we kill everyone, we go back outside. There's a hole in the bottom of one of the overhanging upper stories, and I realize that must be the room where we fought. I remember randomly slicing a couple of stone columns in order to add to the confusion of our escape.

Homemade Board Game (7:51)

I'm not sure exactly what the avatar for the player character in this game is supposed to be. All of the art is a bit exaggerated and cartoonish, and some of the recognizable structures seem much larger than they are in real life. So my character is probably some kind of small animal, but I can't see well enough to tell what. I'm almost out of the building when I realize it's a worm. Curled up in a spiral and bouncing along on its tail. Ah.

Outside, a spider and a woman with a lightsaber are waiting to kill me. I hide in a tunnel while I try to figure out what to do. My primary weapon is some kind of projectile weapon that I charge by holding down a button, then fire by releasing it. I'm not completely sure how to aim it. I try charging it while behind a corner, then briefly darting out to fire before hiding again, but my accuracy is not very good and despite my cover, I come very close to dying. Then I wonder if maybe the spider and the lightsaber-woman aren't actually allies--maybe they'll start fighting each other if I can get them close enough to one another! I run out to find that they're already fighting. With one last swipe, the woman kills the spider. Without waiting for her to notice me, I hit her with my own lightsaber. Her health bar was low enough that the one hit kills her.

There's a cutscene: the camera pans across the street to a view of one of my allies on top of a flat-roofed building, then zooms in on an enemy climbing up an outside ladder. I have to kill that enemy before he gets to my ally, but I'm really far away. I took too long with the previous battles. My main enemy is not present, but his booming laughter accompanies the end of the cutscene, mocking me for my inability to help.

I run as fast as I can, charging the gun and trying to gauge how much I'll have to lead the guy on the ladder in order to hit him from this distance. My aim is not very good, though. . . .

Later, the enemy is dead, and a third ally has joined me and the other person (a woman). He reports that all of the enemies are gone, but now he will have to "let her blood." A double agent! Before he can speak another word, I punch him in the face, and he goes out cold. I get prepared for the woman to insist indignantly that she could have defended herself, but she doesn't.

Later, the woman is my sister. She's explaining that before the enemies attacked, she was working on a new board game that she designed with a friend of hers. She shows me a table of instructions. It's in German, but I manage to work out that there are four players, identified by the German words for "Northeast," "Northwest," etc. But then there's a fifth player that must be "Central." That worries me. There's no way the gameplay can be equivalent for all five players when one of them starts in the center. With four it would be fine. I debate trying to explain this to my sister. Later, I see the actual gameboard, which is apparently not symmetrical at all. It's divided into irregular territories on a continent. Lots of the territories have a picture of a building or other structure on them, which I assume are the structures that can be built on that territory. Some of the structures are portal rings, others are orc strongholds which I think are the places where each of the five players starts out. There are only two or three territories separating some of the strongholds, which seems too close to me, but I decide not to criticize that, either. Let her have her fun.

Someone Else's Dream (6:29)

There's something strange and kind of scary going on. One at a time, a couple of my friends and I have been drawn into this dream scenario. The rule is that the last person to arrive is in control of the dream, even if they don't know that they're dreaming or don't have good dream control. It's scary, because that person could unknowingly force you to do very dangerous things. I'm discussing the situation with my friends when suddenly a new person enters the dream, a stranger to all of us. It looks like a small four-footed creature with wings. We're worried, but then someone points out that the new entity seems very attuned to their mental state--they've already realized they're dreaming, and they're trying to escape. Indeed, the creature is energetically bouncing up and down. After a few moments, it disappears, leaving the previous dreamer in control of the scenario.

Spider Cleaning (8:06)

I'm in the basement of my house when a brusque girl comes walking up to me. She's been sent to clean out the spiders. I hadn't realized there were any spiders, and I say so. In response, she points at the ceiling of the bathroom. There's a sort of shelf made of cobwebs, with a couple big spiders on top and another clinging to the bottom. Oh. Wow, that's actually kind of scary. Then the girl starts swatting at the web with a broom, and the spiders fall to the ground and start crawling everywhere. Naturally, this makes me jump around a lot, and I'm impressed by how the girl seems totally unfazed.

Conference (8:06)

My partner and I are sitting down to have a civil conversation with the villains we've been tracking down. We accomplished this civility by trading parts of the skin from our face. So one guy has darkly tanned skin above his upper lip, and paler skin on his jaw and chin. The other guy has mostly dark skin, except that his lips and a patch of skin around them are lighter. (There are no scar lines at all, so it's not grotesque; it's just weird seeing such stark contrast in skin tone.)

Out With a Bang (8:06)

It's been a long story, and it's drawing to a close with the sole performer remaining on stage dancing to an upbeat musical number. With the final note of the music, she strikes a pose, and at that same instant, my alarm goes off and wakes me up.

Summer School

On Monday, we have an orientation. Then I go to bed to get rested for classes tomorrow.

For the first day of classes, we have to get in line for some kind of check-in. The line moves slowly, and by the time it's 8:25 I'm still a few places back from the front. My first class is at 8:30, so I think I need to go. I pick up my bags and leave the line, but one of the check-in ladies intercepts me.

"Oh, I'm sorry, did you have an early appointment today?" she asks.

I'm confused, because I don't think class counts as an "appointment," and doesn't every student in this room have class at 8:30? But we go through check-in anyway, and when we're finished, suddenly I remember that I was supposed to set back my watch by forty-five minutes. So I'm actually not late at all. No wonder no one else was worried.

I head to my morning class, thinking I'll be early. But when I get to the room, there are already a lot of people there. What? It's not even 9:00, and this class doesn't start until 10:00! But then I remember that this class is usually MWF, and we couldn't have class yesterday because of orientation. So the professor is squeezing in an extra session on Tuesday morning to make up for it. Hmph. Maybe he ought just have planned to have one less day's worth of material in the course.

The morning class involves a running game where there are a lot of items strewn around a medium-sized room with a grid-patterned floor. Sometimes new items appear in the middle of the grid squares. There are certain items we're looking for, worth more points than the others. We're competing to see who can collect the most points.

The first time I play the game, I think I did pretty well. But it turns out another guy actually won, because he grabbed the items worth the most points. I hadn't even known what those were, but now that I do know, I want to play again. The second time, I notice that there are people stuffed into lockers along one wall of the room, and some of them are worth points. The animation for the game is pretty good, and rather charming.

Now it's time for the afternoon class. I'm skeptical about this one, because the subject seems like total hocus-pocus. I'm not even sure what it is, actually. The professor tells us to take out our textbooks, and the whole class groans. We remember this book from yesterday. The title is completely nonsensical, and by now I'm pretty sure this class will be full of New-Agey crap that doesn't have any business being taught in a university. Good thing I'm sitting in the back.

During class, I notice that the girl sitting on my left is resting her head on my leg and dozing. That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, because it's almost like cuddling, and I'm glad she feels that comfortable around me. I'm also amused to confirm that she's just as bored as I am. She notices I've noticed, and she smiles. But it doesn't last too long, because the professor has the class break into groups for discussion and disperse to different rooms.

After discussion, there are still maybe twenty minutes left of class, but I don't feel like going back to the lecture hall. Everyone else leaves the discussion room, but I just spend a long time re-packing my backpack. I'm enjoying being lethargic, but I also hope that the professor doesn't take attendance at the end of class, so I don't get caught.

Later, I'm startled by a student coming into the room. But he's just there to move the front table back to where it was before discussion started. How responsible of him. Anyway, I guess that means class is over. Time to leave.

Seven Keys

A middle-aged man hands a young boy a pistol, warning him never, ever to speak a word of what has been done with that weapon. Presumably it was used to commit a murder of some kind.

In the very next scene, the boy brings the gun to another, older man, telling him mischievously that something terrible has been done with it. When the man asks what, the boy says, "We blue'd it," and takes out another of the same kind of pistol, except this one has been painted blue. Amusedly, the man pretends to be horrified by this action. The idea is that the color blue isn't very aggressive or serious or anything, so it has no business decorating something like a gun.

The boy pretends to aim the gun behind himself, but then coincidentally a spider the size of a small dog comes running into the hallway right where he's aiming. The man's face abruptly becomes very serious. Fighting these spiders is the main purpose of this community, and he says to the boy, "You may fire." But the boy, not having seen the spider, is just confused. Instead, the man lifts his own gun, takes careful aim, and shoots the spider.

Now, I'm in the final stages of a game involving these spiders. The building I'm in has seven levels, and in order to get a good score for the game, I have to collect one key from each level. The trick is that in order to reach the next level, you have to use the key from the previous level, and in the process of using it, you have to leave it behind. So there's got to be some kind of secret passage I can use to go backwards from the end and pick up all the keys. I'm running all over the building trying to find this passage, and I have to restart a few times from a save point near the top of it. There are about five or six other people helping me out with this.

This time, I try using a sort of wooden fire escape on the outside of the building. It's very reminiscent of a treehouse, spiraling around a tree and built entirely out of two-by-fours. There's one other person following me down. On one landing, there's a dead spider, lying in a pool of its own fluids. "Watch out!" I call over my shoulder. "Spider juice!" (It's very dangerous.)

Once on the ground level, I go inside to find a lot of people in a large room. They want something from me; they're expectant that I've gotten the keys; or something. In response, I start taking off my shirts. I'm wearing seven of them, one for each level in the building. But taking them off is actually very difficult. I can't quite seem to pull the first one over my head. A thirty-ish woman, someone I know, asks me what's wrong. I reply that I don't know. I tell her that apparently my arms just feel very tired and I can't muster the force necessary to take off a T-shirt.