I meet Willow Rosenburg in yet another universe where Buffy (me) never arrived in Sunnydale. She's actually alive in this one, and seems to be a successful something going to school somewhere. Cue shenanigans. Running through a mall after a bad guy, considering a shirt on a mannequin. Then there's a car chase through Ixburg. We've been captured by someone relatively benevolent. I'm not Buffy, but another superhero. I go to sleep, and am treated to a fast-forward view of myself tossing and turning. I wake up when I realize that there's an old man staring at me creepily, and I find that I'm somewhat glad I'm playing a male character. Probably. My dream-self looks like Nicki Aycox right now, but everyone sees me as a guy? Yeah, I've done this before in a dream. Some interesting conversations happen. Kind of like on the forums here, actually. Anyway, I'm sitting in the kitchen of the farmhouse, plotting my escape and working on the projects I've been assigned. Willow's here, too. I think they want me to illustrate a comic book, and the people they're working with want me to design a website for them, the Catholic Church in Ixburg. I endeavor to cause their brains to liquefy and dribble out their ears, and decide to add a twitter feed to their homepage. This is Your Church on Twitter. Scare Factor: 3 for the creepy old guy.
Things to Run Away From Really Fast #7: Allegiant Little Kids I'm browsing the forums here, thinking about dreams. Then there's something about the library here. Which reminds me, I need to return an overdue book. I walk into a bar, where, apparently, Lindsay is bartending. I order a drink, and end up sitting down with her and a few friends while they eat supper. We talk about the Charlie Brown Christmas special, and discuss parts of it that probably didn't exist in real life. You know that one girl, who really didn't want to go to the Brown's house for Christmas Dinner but would rather have gone to New York for a Broadway show? Yeah? Why couldn't she have done that? That would have been cool. There's four or five of us, and we start walking. Shift. We're in a playground. I look around, trying to place it. "Aw, man." I say, "We're in Ixburg! Quick, someone think of somewhere nicer." A couple people glance back at me, bemused. I give up and strike up a conversation with one of the girls, who has red-brown hair, a ponytail, and glasses. I try to ask her name, but she says it so fast I can't understand it. I ask again and try to repeat it back to her. One of the other girls laughs and tells her to stop teasing me. We're still standing outside the school at this oint, and a teacher comes out to yell at hus. "Ixburg sucks!" I shout, assuming there's a game going on right now. Little kids come out and throw rocks at us. We take shelter in a non-existant frame of a shed just outside school grounds. "So," I say to Lindsay, "Next time, you pick the setting." Allegiant Little Kids. Scare Factor: 1 for banality.
March 9, 2010 My name is Lucifer, and I'm busy. "But you have to stay here! You're the Lord of Hell!" says the ex-cherub, who seems to have been recast as my secretary. "I don't, actually. I've left this job once, and I'll leave again once I have this place reorganized." I'm standing up at a desk, looking at blueprints. I turn toward the ominous wooden door at the other end of the (hellish) office-space. The door leads to a dimension where damned souls are trapped. As they make their way to the door, they inch closer to the end of their torment. At which point, welcome to bureaucratic hell. He continues to pester me, "But God wants you to-" "Okay, look," I interrupt, "I don't care what God wants. In the actual comic book, Lucifer didn't care what God wanted. Every version of the devil, ever, actively resisted doing anything that God wanted him to do. So what makes you think that I care?" I realize that I've broken out of character at this point, but the demon seems to actively resist the idea that this is a dream and I'm not really Lucifer. I decide to be amused instead of summoning up a gale of fire with which to burn him alive. Because, as the devil, I could totally do that. Instead, I throw my hands up in the air, metaphorically, and walk through the now-open doorway to the realm of the damned. The door swings shut behind me, cutting off the shrill ranting of my unfortunate secretary. I take the form of a woman with short, blonde hair as I take the first steps into the realm usually thought of as Hell. This area is closest to the exit, and as such, is actually fairly pleasant in comparison to the rest of hell. This, of course, means that it's a boring approximation of a cave that slopes slowly downward. The cave curves away in the distance, and I know that it's an infinite spiral to the bottom. The soul nearest the door looks like a boy in his young teens, although he probably lived to be older than that. The boy is building a fence up the sloping ground, not noticing as it collapses into inexistance behind him. He is intensely focused on the task, trapped, as all the damned are, in a nightmare of his own creation. I approach, and as I do, I hear deep, threatening barking. The boy reacts in a panic, looking about wildly for the source of the noise, not seeing me. Part of the fence has been shaped into a basket-like form, with half-rotten plywood as the bottom. A rottweiler puppy comes into existence as I look at the space, and it barks at the boy. When the boy sees it, he starts to back away from the puppy, and away from the door. I'm standing directly beside the puppy, so I pick it up. The dog starts barking and the noise in the boy's nightmare lessens. I look at him, and he sees me for the first time. Finally, his eyes land on the door behind me... End. Bureaucratic Hell. Scare Factor: 3.
Recent Comments
