Batch

07-15-2013 -- I am standing around Fullerton College, visiting with people and talking to Neville Longbottom. He needs to find a way to make money, and somebody suggests a high-stakes poker game, but he declines, saying he knows how they collect what they are owed if you lose money, and he needs all his limbs, thank-you-very-much! I try to make a joke, saying maybe he ought to try testing new drugs. I did, made a lot of money, and it never had any effect on me, ::spasm, seizure, drool:: but it falls flat. Never was very good at telling jokes.

Unfortunately, talking about the tough guys seems to bring them about, and they are suddenly after us, even without losing in any high-stakes poker matches. In the process of running from them, we find ourselves in the world of the Wheel of Time, being chased by dark friends as we try to both protect and limit some of the control of the Aes Sedai, while behind us there is a ring where midget wrestling is going on. I don't know why, but every single midget hates every single non-midget, and they are all trying to attack us every chance they get, while we defend ourselves as best we can while trying to ensure nobody gets seriously hurt.

Eventually I escape from that mess, and do a little travel that leaves me arriving in a small sea port where there are lots of small stalls selling sea-related items like carp and sardines and nets and things. There is also a huge six-floor branch of Harrod's, which seems tremendously out of place in this tiny harbor. I am considering going inside and looking for travel guides, which I have decided I want to collect. Soon I have moved inland a little bit, and find myself standing on a slight slope leading to the entrance of some ancient stone works, or perhaps some kind of coal mine, and somehow I know I am somewhere in Gloughchester or Glastonbury or some such area in England.

05-20-2013 -- [Hints of lots of stuff at the edge of my memory, which might be in the same dream, or from different ones in the night. Might have been bits with Harry Potter, Runescape, and/or Roller Coaster Tycoon.]

I find myself delivering a package to some place that seems to be a bit of a cross between a hotel or maybe an Orlando Paving plant. I make the delivery, then call in, but dispatch doesn't seem to have anything else for me. It seems to be kind of blending between a courier job, and hints of driving for Mears. I find myself considering exiting the parking lot through the proper exit, which would force me to turn east, where I would have to drive a little way to a place I could make a u-turn, while somebody leaving in a truck or a bus takes a side road they aren't supposed to, but it will allow them to head west immediately, and I am wondering which way will be faster.

But then I get a call from dispatch telling me to just wait patiently, and soon they'll have something else for me. I remind them that I've been doing this for a while, and I know it is all part of the job. I glance around the parking lot, and notice they seem to be almost setting up a flea market or something, and as I find myself near a stall of used books, I decide to go take a look.

I find myself carrying my worn paperback of Jordan's Eye of the World, and as I find myself glancing at several other Wheel of Time books on their shelves, I am hoping they won't think it is their book. I am glancing at the titles and see a few Dick Francis novels, a few Gordon Korman books, and several shelves of old Choose Your Own Adventure books, but I find I have no interest in that series, anymore, so I ignore them. I find a bunch of the really early Wodehouse novels, and then, oddly, a 3 Investigators book that I have never seen before, which seems to have the 3 Investigators solving a case at Blandings with Emsworth and Galahad and the rest. Very interesting.

One of the people who works at the shop is considering getting some of the Korman Macdonald Hall books, and I am putting in a good recommendation for them, then as I try and look at the lowest books on the bookcase I am looking at, I start to sink a couple of feet into the floor, which makes it much easier to look at the lower titles.

As I am looking at some of the books, the flea market is suddenly attacked by several dementors, and everybody starts screaming and panicking. But it seems a lot of the dementors are finding they aren't as effective as they might be. One dementor has grabbed a young child, and is trying to torture her, but she says the dementor is less painful and horrifying than the cancers she had been fighting, and she sacrifices herself to destroy the dementor.

[A friend of mine yesterday was explaining something called Live Like Bella, which is about a young girl who, as a baby, had a cancer, and the doctors said she was going to die. She had a miraculous healing. Since then, she has come down with two or three other kinds of cancers, and each time, the doctors say she is doomed, and then she receives another miraculous healing. Through it all, she has remained upbeat, and tried to live her life to the fullest. I expect being told about this brought about the above scene.]

Another dementor is coming right for me, but a kind of dopey (but very loyal) friend of mine throws himself in the way, and in some way through his sacrifice, manages to half take over the dementor, before they both explode. He seems like one of the Wodehouse male romantic interests, loyal, not too bright, a nice, ineffectual guy. But he sure managed to take out one of the dementors.

I find myself making the comment that these dementors must be from the movies, not the books, because they seem a lot weaker than the book dementors that can only be scared away by a Patronus. By this point, the vehicle I am driving is a cab, not my own car or a shuttle van, and I somehow kind of see the future, and realize I am just about to be attacked by another dementor, and instead open the trunk of my car just in time for the dementor to fly in, then I shut it again, trapping the thing!