Glieuaeiel's DJ

Dodgeball Ritual

I'm sitting with my sister, watching a dodgeball game. All of the players are wearing gray shirts with four check-boxes in a row across the front, with a variable number of boxes containing X's. Only one person, a friend of my sister's, has all four boxes marked, and I ask her about it. "It's because he's dead," she says. Meaning he's already been hit four times, and it's an unusual circumstance that he would continue the game under these circumstances. "Oh," I laugh. "That explains why there's no one else wearing that."

One of the players gets the ball, senses an alley, and charges up the gym towards the end zone. There's a player from the other team right behind him, and it looks like he's going to get tackled, but he does a baseball slide and he makes it! But he goes past a wall and out of my line of sight. People are celebrating his point, but he calls out that he still got hit. So it's a point, but he gets a mark on his shirt. I try to remember--did he already have three?

He comes back past the wall. Yes, three marks. So he's "dead," now. Suddenly I wonder if there's a ritual to commemorate this occasion. I ask my sister, but then my question is answered for me when the guy carries out an ornate chair and a purple blanket patterned with silver stars, setting the chair in the middle of the gym.

I switch places with the player, so now I'm sitting on the stool, trying to cover myself with the blanket. Everyone standing around the chair has a funereal expression on zir face. Once I'm covered, I'm whisked off backstage somewhere. There are musicians back there. Later, when another player is whisked off in the same ceremony, I notice that one of the musicians is rushing terribly.

Laser Tag Classroom

I'm sitting in a classroom when I see an enemy sneaking through the door. "Watch out!" I shout. Then I pull out my laser tag gun and start shooting at them. They angrily shoot back at me, but for some reason their shots don't seem to register on my suit. I feel awkward, like somehow I'm cheating. Should I just pretend that they hit me, since by all rights they probably should've? But then the person shooting at me loses all of her HP and leaves. By now the classroom has prepared its defense against the incoming invasion. More enemies come through the door, and people start shooting. All of the enemies are shooting exclusively at me, and it's overwhelming. Plus, one of them is somehow launching laser grenades at me. I have absolutely no idea how to do that, and I feel like I'm losing. And indeed, soon all of my HP is gone. I guess they got their vengeance, but that was not fun.

Never Tickle a Sleeping Polar Bear (7:12)

Two people somehow anger a polar bear. It starts chasing them and they run all the way to the other side of town and into a building, where someone uses a phone to call for help. Help is slow to arrive, though, and meanwhile, we're all watching some kind of live feed that shows us where the polar bear is. It will reach the building in a matter of moments. Now, looking out the window, I can see it running down the street. And still no sign of help.

The bear comes inside, and I know it will kill people one at a time until help finally arrives to stop it. Seeing as those two idiots were the ones to anger it in the first place, I think it's appropriate that they should be the first victims. We push one of them into a pool as a sacrifice. The polar bear paces on the edge for a moment, then dives in after the sinking person. I don't watch, but a friend comes up and tells me, "Well, I saw it." I can imagine how gruesome it must have been. I realize that now I will probably start having nightmares about polar bears attacking me.

Rock Concert Setup (10:40)

I've agreed to help an old high school friend set up for tonight's rock concert. I'm just really curious about how all of this works. One of the first things we do is unwind a lot of extension cord around some concrete poles set up around the edges of the pavilion. We go around the outside about a dozen times. Then a big truck dumps some stuff in the middle of the room and start threading a bunch more cords every which way. Meanwhile, I keep asking a bunch of questions about /why/ we're setting things up in certain ways, and it's clear that my friend is getting kind of exasperated. He just wants to get the job done. And apparently I'm messing some stuff up: he tells me that I'm not supposed to run the cord right along the concrete bricks; they're not supposed to touch at all. I'm about to ask him why, but then I see the unhappy expression on his face as he waits for the inevitable question, and I decide I'd better give him a break. He thanks me for it, and I set about moving all of the concrete bricks.

Later, his dad comes in, and my friend says something to him that I don't understand. In fact, I'm not even sure if it was English. I look more closely at the pair of them. My friend keeps bowing and saying what sounds like formalisms in a language I don't understand. He's acting very, very respectfully towards his dad. I seem to remember hearing back near the end of high school that he did something very embarrassing; maybe the punishment for that is causing this behavior now.