Things to Run Away From Really Fast

07/20/10

I take invulnerability for granted.

I'm chasing after a kid on skis, speeding down a snow covered hill in Ixburg. Since when does Ixburg have hills, anyway?

When I get to the bottom, the kid is jumping onto the nose of a helicopter. The helicopter sways dangerously, the kid's weight moving it off balance. I'm the pilot now, trying to keep the machine on course.

I'm in my high school, in English with my eighth grade class. Our homeroom teacher says we have to get our heads in the game, as we'll be in grade twelve before we know it, and that'll be goddamn hard.

"Grade 12 was easy," I mutter.

A couple classmates look at me incredulously.

"Time travel." I shrug.

I go outside. I'm standing in the courtyard in front of the school when Mal Reynolds swoops in, shouting that we've lost Zoe - she's been kidnapped.

I call Zoe's cell, not really expecting her to pick up. The phone does get picked up, though, and I hear a male voice on the other end. We chat about kidnapping and hypothetical ways that everybody can get what they want, like our first mate back in one piece. We get along very well.

I tell Mal that he can land Serenity (the ship) on the top of the Ixburg apartment block. Wait, do my parents still live there? It's really hard for me to remember where in the timeline we are. I know that I'm dreaming, but it doesn't really register as important.

Walking along the top of the hill, I look at the horizon, and am surprised to realize that it's suddenly a lot lower. I'm walking along the cliff side of the Stawamus Chief, looking out over Squamish.

I happily run through what seems like a set freerunning route, making impossible jumps and pushing myself farther than I ever would in real life. I aim for a two-inch stick jutting up for the ground, try to land on the top -

Later, I poke around outside of a missile launch site. Some kind of shuttle is getting sent up into the air, and I'm informed via comlink that anyone outside is about to die a horrible and painful death. The countdown has already started.

I see two more people snooping around, both guys dressed in black. They seem clumsy and incompetent, and I wave at them when they finally notice me. They stalk towards me threateningly.

...three, two, one, lift off!

The air is filled with swirling shards of glass. White light burns down from above, refracted by the bloody glass and singeing the ground below.

The moment ends. The two thugs are a charred mass of bone, strewn about the untouched grass.

I wander down another hill, into an alley. I'm with a group of boys, and we've all joined up our bicycles into a chain that we've lit up with Christmas lights. Another bike speeds down the alley, lit up with neon, and I take a moment to appreciate how awesome it looks.

The boy at the front of the chain doesn't notice, though. He cuts off the neon-lit bike, and the rider crashes into the second and third bikes in the chain.

The four boys are swearing at each other, and the situation is about to escalate into violence. Calmly, I go over to the broken neon bike, and fix the chain and the broken cables. The owner notices that I'm touching his bike, and it distantly occurs to me that he might try to pick a fight with me next. I'm not worried.

The light sputters back into life.

Hills. Scare Factor: 2.

I wrote a couple interesting dreams in my handwritten journal this weekend. I'll make time to type them up sometime this week. I had a really vague string of lucid FAs, too.

ETA: "rocket launch, people die" was scribbled in the margins of my notebook. I can't believe I missed that. I bet it was exciting.

"Don't see why we had to take a job on this bo shui kueh piece of rock." I grumble to myself.

Mal steps onto the loading ramp. "Who's in rutting command here, Jayne?" He doesn't wait for an answer.

"All right everybody," he says to the crew assembled inside the ship. "We've got 'til nightfall before anything needs doing. With the exception a Jayne, here," he slaps me on the shoulder and ignores my growl, "You can all enjoy the benefits of civilization until that time. Kaylee? I believe you had something you needed to pick up..."

Mal goes over to Kaylee and discusses specifics of cost and necessity, and I pick up two 20-liter buckets full of water and start trudging into the muddy rainforest.

The first group of people I run into turn out to consider this a sacred duty or something, and decide not to kill me for this reason. That's really all I can remember up until the point that I join forces with a younger girl and go climb up a tower that just appeared. My boots have been traded out for the running shoes that I wear in real life.

The tower turns into an insanely high jungle gym, of the fall-off-and-you-die variety. The four people I'm with turn this into a game, describing the best way to get to the top. There are posts built into certain places for no reason, and these turn out to be part of the puzzle. I run up a 45 degree angle and slip, barely catching myself. I keep jumping upward until I'm climbing the underside of a slide. I've reached the top, and I'm just about to pull myself up -

I wake up.

Welcome to the Jungle. Scare Factor: 3. You know, Mal, as it is my dream, technically, I'm in command.

bo shui kueh: ...a restaurant? Apparently, I need to work on my Chinese.[/QUOTE]