Nazrax

Security breach
I'm in a kitchen, helping a guy I don't know with his fish tank. We're trying to fill it with fresh water, but each time we try we see a bunch of drops of nasty black oily stuff floating on top. Eventually, I just ask him for a large measuring cup. He doesn't know what I intend, but he gets down a four cup glass measuring cup from a cabinet. I hold it sideways and gently lower it into the tank near a bunch of the oily staff, and a lot of it flows right in. I dump it out (in the sink?) and go back to the tank. Already I got over half of the stuff. I do it again a couple more times and the stuff is pretty much gone.

Now I'm outside with my wife. The house is behind us, and very tall trees are all around us. As we're talking about something, I notice that a nearby tree has a light colored sedan held waaaay up high by some enormous spider webs. I stop in mid sentence and point it out. She looks at it nonplussed and says it's been there for a while. I try to think about what to do about it when I notice that some of the guys from church are here to deal with it. They've set up a block and tackle so they can lower the car without powered equipment. I'm surprised that they've set it up at ground level, but i don't think much more about it. Using a really thick rope hooked to the block and tackle, they gently lower the car. I point out the mechanism to my wife, since we'd been talking about how they work just the other day. We go over to look at it more closely. I'm amazed that with only four windings and only about five feet between the fixed and movable parts they could lower the car over a hundred feet.

Now we're back in the kitchen. My wife is offering me various hot drinks; I ask for one she hasn't mentioned but that I know we have. We start talking about playing a game. The games we've played recently have been fun, but long, and we're both in the mood for something shorter. We talk for a moment about a chess+checkers hybrid, but neither of us actually knows how to play it, so we decide against it (I think that on each turn we're supposed to move a chess piece first, then a checkers piece; but I can't quite remember). Now we're sitting at a small table playing checkers. I'm vaguely aware of the rules, but I haven't played in a very long time. My wife isn't much better off than I am. I'm red, she's black. Somehow, I've already gotten most of my pieces past hers. She makes a comment about having tried an aggressive strategy that didn't work out so well. Looking at my pieces, I realize that I've already got three pieces that have reached her side of the board. I look for a way to mark them as such, but not seeing anything handy nearby I just flip them over. They're an unusual design for checker pieces, being narrower on top than on bottom, so it's easy to tell which ones are up-side-down. We continue playing. I manage to knock off a couple of her pieces; she comes very close to getting a couple of mine, but I realize what's happening at the last moment and get my pieces to safety.

Now I'm having trouble seeing the whole board. For some reason, I'm having to scroll to see it, making it much harder for me to play. I find a preferences page with options for checker appearance. I try out a couple of odd looking ones, but I'm not a fan of how they look. I try to revert to the traditional design, but I end up with a "missing graphic" message where my token is. I stop fiddling with it, knowing I'll have to come back later to get it working right. I scroll down to my edge of the board and see a piece that's about to reach it. I hadn't realized she was so close! Then I realize that this isn't one of my wife's pieces. Has someone else joined the game? I pull up the list of connected players and see that, besides myself and my wife, there are two other uninvited players. At first, I assume that we accidentally left our game public; then I notice that the account owning the piece about to reach my side has a comment saying something about having root access to all trusted Church networks. I panic, kicking her from the game, then changing my passwords. My wife is getting impatient, but I tell her how important this is. We keep playing the game, but now my mind is on the intruder, wondering how she got in and how much damage she may have caused.

Now my wife and I are in the car, with her driving. We pass a pasture, and she points out an ancient gate with a latch that's nearly impossible to open or close. We talk about how sad it is that the animals only get a few minutes of pasture time a day because of the old latch. Now we're still in the car and I'm talking security stuff. I'm trying to figure out what to do to ensure the intruder, or another like her, can't mess with me again. I plan to create all new VPN keys and to change all my passwords. Beyond that, I'd previously taken the naive view that someone on the VPN could be trusted with full network access, but I now see that was foolish. I'm going to have to set up firewalls to partition the VPN, along with password protected gateways to allow access between networks only when authenticated.

Now we're walking into a subway station with my in-laws. As we walk onto the platform, the train is pulling out - except the "train" is actually the row of seats along the wall. My wife runs after them, beckoning for us to follow, and manages to sit on a seat near the end. I follow, but her parents stand indecisively. I call for her to get off since they aren't coming. She clearly doesn't want to but gets off just before the line of chairs leaves the platform. We return to her parents who say they have something they need to do before getting on a train. I have a brief vision of a young woman in a security booth flipping between camera feeds on a small black and white monitor. Now the four of us are walking down a dimly lit tunnel. We come across a room cut out of the stone with boxes all around the perimeter - it seems my inlaws want to buy some black market goods. My wife and I turn around and quickly walk the other way, not wanting to get caught up in whatever is going on here.

Now I see a room with high shelves in the back filled with empty cardboard boxes, ranging in size from boxes large enough to easily hold a man down to flat-pack boxes only a couple of inches thick. Someone makes a comment that this is a "hobo hotel" and that parts of it look more comfortable than where she sleeps. Now I see her: she's dressed up in a funny suit, kind of like Kiwi Blitz. She's preparing to fight one of the smugglers. He doesn't know it, but she's used something on the hobos to make them very protective of her. The fight starts out going well for her, as she's very nimble and can dodge any blows he tries to land. Eventually, she lets herself get hit in the shoulder. It's not a hard blow, but it's enough that her hobos become protective of her and start to swarm the guy. They're huge, hulking men, reminiscent of the brutes from Bioshock 2. Now the fight is over and she's going down a side passage.

Fragments:
I'm walking into a mall with a couple of other people. We're going in some kind of back / service entrance, which makes me a little nervous. We pass an open door on our right leading into an auditorium of some kind, but we ignore it, continuing on. Just past it we walk through a sensor that detects we're walking the wrong way and sets off an alarm. We quickly head back to the exit, not wanting to run into security.

I'm in our upstairs bathroom running the shower, trying to get the temperature right. My second daughter is standing between the toilet and the shower.

I'm downstairs in our family room. My second daughter is holding one of my PVC penny whistles, except it's about three feet long and has many holes all down its length.