Batch

07-23-2013 -- Find myself playing video games with a grown up Jeff (childhood friend.) His joystick seems kind of sluggish, so he is hooking up a different joystick to play with, but it doesn't seem to work. He is just about to detach it when the screen flashes and I tell it him try it again. It seems it took the system a few seconds to recognize the new joystick. So we're playing this video game that involves shooting at robots and space ships and such in a sort of a maze-like building, and it is a game that I have never played before, so Jeff is kind of teaching it to me. As I approach the space ship and start firing on it, drawing it's attention to me, he explains that you have to hit the spaceship on the sides or behind with ten shots to disable it. Now he tells me! My weapon is almost drained from all the shots I am firing worthlessly at it's forward shields, and it is starting to fire back at me, and I am almost instantly destroyed.

We begin to play again, and this time I have a better idea what I am doing, but suddenly the game is gone, and this is now live. We are in a large room, perhaps 100 feet square, perhaps 100 meters, and maybe 30 or 40 feet tall. The space ship is in here with us, along with a lot of robots that are attacking us. This time I manage to get behind the space ship and fire on it, and I eventually manage to disable it, but I've almost drained my weapon, and am going to have to wait a while for it to recharge. Meanwhile I am being attacked by more and more robots, including ones with energy weapons, and one that advances on me, blowing large (perhaps about a foot in diameter) bubbles. If the bubbles hit me, they make me slippery. If they don't, they still land on the floor and pop, making it slippery. So whether he hits me or not, anywhere he has been becomes a dangerously slick surface.

The bubble blower has managed to grab my wrist, and is holding me, so it is easier for the rest of the robots to reach me, but I manage to twist free, and run for it. There seem to be more and more robots pursuing me through the room, and there is no sign of Jeff, so I look around and find a doorway in the west wall, right near where it intersects with the north wall. I run through and find myself in another large room about the size of the last one, but this one, instead of being wide open, is like a maze, with no big alien space ship, but lots of the robots wandering around, chasing me. I keep going through several of these rooms (I can only remember 4 or 5, but it feels like a dozen or so) generally alternating between a single large space and mazes, until I finally come into another room that looks almost identical to the first, including a large space ship in it. But everything is still.

I make my way south in the room and find a door like the one I entered my room through, and open it to find myself looking out at a classroom of late teens or adults (late high school or perhaps college students) and I am embarrassed about interrupting their class, so I hurredly shut the door, but might have just spotted Jeff sitting at the teacher's desk. As I start back through the room, I find the space ship and robots are now beginning to move, and I figure I have triggered them by opening the outer door. I realize Jeff may soon be bringing an entire room full of people after me, and also that, by solving the maze all the way through, I may have also provided that solution for the others. And I don't know if it will be all of us against the machines, or also against each other. I decide the safest thing to do is return to the room where I started, and already defeated the space ship, so I move to the top right corner and the door to the next room, and find myself looking at a straight run through all the rooms, with no maze passages. No idea where they went, but it makes it quick and easy to return to my starting space.

The area is a little calmer now. The space ship is still disabled, and most of the robots that were attacking me are now scattered throughout the entire maze. I fight a few more robots, including bubble blowers, and by now my weapon is recharged. Soon there are some others running around, and though they don't attack me, they do seem to be on a different team, so I figure they are probably Jeff's students. I find them moving a small, disabled vehicle (think the fast sleds that dropped off the rocket launching guys in the X-Men video game) out of the doorway to the next room, seemingly in preparation to seal the door, and I don't want to be trapped in here, so I rush for the exit to try and push my way through before they seal it off.

Meanwhile, I notice most of the others are wearing more and better equipment than I am, and wonder if they have earned it over the course of many skirmishes, or if they scavenged it during this game, and find myself thinking I should have broken into the space ship once I disabled it, and seen if there was any equipment within that I could have used. Oh well ... I'm still learning this. Most of the robots have now been destroyed, though some of the guys are still busy feeling up the chests of some of the female robots, while the ladies look on in disgust. There are some burgers available that seem quite thick, but not all that large around, but they take forever to eat, and are really, really filling.

Scattered throughout the maze are models of scientific principles, including the occasional tongue-in-cheek version. Instead of the five balls hanging from strings they have a full-size model of the cartoon floating around the internet with the five kids sitting on the swingset and the teacher standing to the side pulling one to the side, about to show conservation of motion or whatever the principle is. Somebody notices that I am not one of them, and asks me what I am doing here, and I am explaining my friend Jeff and the game, and they are also wondering if it is their professor.

One of the guys, who seems to have a bit of history, and a really good record (and a bit of an ego as well) is building a burger and is demanding to know where the mayo and the tomatoes are. He may be half-blind, because the mayo is right in front of him, but I think we're already completely out of tomatoes. Too bad, Mr. Attitude Guy!