Glieuaeiel's DJ

I Quit (8:00)

I'm at a sports club, where we're doing our warm-up workout outside. The current exercise involves teams of three. We lock arms in a specific way, then take turns trying to lift the people on our left and right using our core muscles. I'm the last person in our group to do it, so I wasn't expecting it to be as hard as it is. I try it once--try it twice--and then give up. With hardly a goodbye, I walk back towards the locker room to change and go home.

On the way is a swimming pool, and I accidentally trip and fall into it. At the last moment I remember that my shoes are muddy, and I hook my legs over the side of the pool so I'm hanging upside down from the edge. That way, the water stays clean.

After I pull myself back out, the club's head instructor is standing on the other side of the pool, looking at me. He commends me for my civic responsibility in keeping the mud out of the water, and as a reward, he says he's willing to overlook my embarrassing decision to quit the club. "We're back together," he says, and it's clear he's enjoying the double entendre. This guy seems kind of like a sleaze-bag, and I don't think I want back into the club. I throw an apple core at him and go into the locker room.

Inside, there are some students practicing Apparition. It makes me sorry to realize I'll never get a chance to learn it, now. The trick has something to do with having complete faith that when you turn around, you'll be looking at the new location; I never quite got the hang of it. Oh well.

I look over towards the secret door, which I also never figured out how to open. Then I see there's some kind of locking mechanism in the upper right corner. It's moving around, which must mean someone is trying to come through the door. Probably the head instructor trying to talk to me again.

Indeed, it is him. As soon as the door opens, we start fighting. It's a mix of Tae Kwon Do sparring and a knife fight. We end up back outside, advancing and retreating and circling around one another. I'm rather proud of myself for being able to deflect all of his attacks.

I am joined by a team of fighters on roller blades. They are part of a resistance group that has an ongoing feud with the sports club. Sensing my opportunity to cut ties with this place, I go with them when they leave.

Workout Schedule

Spoiler for Workout Schedule:

A woman is considering changing her workout schedule because a recently arrived man want to use the facilities at around the same time. She decides not to. Right now she's doing ab exercises. She notices she's in pretty good shape, so she keeps doing them for longer than she had planned to. I wake up messily.

Atomic Scale

I'm playing a game similar to Heroes III, except sometimes when you hover over certain places on the map, it will tell you that there's progress in the story to be found if you visit that location. I notice I've almost missed one of these, so I go back and visit it. To my surprise, a new area starts loading (like in Skyrim). Once we're inside, the game is in real-time 3D rendering and I'm traveling with a party (like in Baldur's Gate). We're inside. A male voice echoes through the stone rooms, telling us that for our next test, we have been shrunken down to the atomic level, and we must investigate the experiments happening here. It points out a small, cartoonish worm in a hat over by one corner, which is somehow responsible for the orderly functioning of the universe.

The voice also points out an object on the wall, and warns it not to touch it--but we already have. The voice explains that if we do (which we have), water will start attacking a specific member of my party (which it does), trying to cause him to slip into one of the bottomless pits scattered here and there around the building. Certainly, the water makes things difficult for us as we try to make our way down the hallway. I consider re-loading the game, now that I know better than to touch that object. However, in the spirit of role-playing, I decide to try to tough it out. There are other people down here with us, carrying out experiments in side rooms off of the main hallway. I'm not sure whether or not the game is trying to teach us about real-life science.

College Ceremonies

All the students in my year and my house at my school are gathered in a room for a traditional ceremony. Everyone starts by sitting down in desks, but gradually we get up to start dancing at the front of the room. Some people are too embarrassed to join in. Eventually the RHs try to command them to join, but that doesn't really work and it just makes things more awkward. So instead these students are told to get down on all fours and stick their heads inside of a half-scale cardboard model of a car, and start making "moo" noises. That seems ridiculously humiliating to me--hopefully it will make more sense in the context of the larger ceremony. But still, I think certain events have been done out of order. (The female RH seems to agree with me; she looks very uncomfortable right now.) Meanwhile the rest of us (myself included) are given pink roses. We're supposed to crowd around this car as well, so they can take a picture.

Somehow I get confused and lost. I end up in an outer hallway, alone. It takes me a bit to find my way back to the original room, since there are some big windows between rooms that make it unclear where the actual doors are. Once I'm back, I spot a friend sitting at a table, but everyone from my year is gone.

"Are you . . . privy to the plans of the RHs?" I ask her, hesitantly.

She says yes, so I ask her what I'm supposed to be doing right now. She says something about ceremonially dropping the petals of the rose, and suddenly I'm overwhelmed by the symbolism of it all. Without a word, I walk straight back into the hallway, and sit in fetal position, leaning against the left wall. People I don't know are walking past me, but I don't care. After a few moments, I hear my friend come out and sit down next to me. I feel a bit ashamed to realize that that's exactly what I wanted to happen. She asks what's wrong, and I start moaning about not knowing the point of this ceremony or of life in general. I know I should try to be more mature, but I guess I just hope she'll solve all my problems for me. But no, she refuses to be cast in that role. Without a word, she gets up and walks back into the room. I notice that she somehow walks through one of those glass windows that confused me so much before. I walk up to the window and test it for myself. It turns out there's not a window there at all. Weird.

Mock Warm-Up

I'm warming up with an athletics club. The instructor is leading us in dynamic exercises back and forth across a stretch of lawn outside. He asks us now to go the entire distance in just two one-legged hops. Bit of an absurd request, but we do it anyway, no problem. Somehow this particular stretch is a parody of a recent Olympic sprinter who thinks a bit too much about himself. We laugh. Later, we're given a rather complicated series of exercises that we're supposed to repeat for a while on our own count, though we're still supposed to stay together as a group. Somehow I notice that I've gotten ahead of one of the two other guys still exercising, so I wait with the third guy while the second catches up. This exercise will be more impressive if we do it together.