Twoshadows - Nothing so exciting as a cave or rappelling, just a long hike in the hills near home that consisted of one part overconfidence and three parts stupidity. Thankfully I still hold the title for Luckiest Man Alive, so I got away with only some scrapes and sore muscles to show for it. Your dream reminded me of the moments during that little "adventure" when I thought maybe I was in some deep trouble.
odds - Hello and thanks for reading. That iced tea bottle was the highlight of my night. When I woke up I had a laugh imagining what the vending machine would look like.
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Cat Burglary
Tuesday, January 02, 2007, 1:09 a.m.
I’m standing in a brightly-lit, glass-walled room that is part lab and part cell. There’s a long table with several chairs in one corner. The room has no door, and beyond it are many corridors with spotless white walls. A creepy little man with dirty blond hair and a dark suit stands before me, asking questions that I refuse to answer. He finally gives up and leaves the room by passing his body through one of the walls. Now standing outside my cell, he turns back to look at me with a smug little smile.
Using only my mind, I pick up one of the chairs and send it flying in his direction. The chair isn’t strong enough to break the glass, but it still manages to wipe the smile off the bastard’s face. As he hastily walks down the corridor that wraps around my cell, I keep throwing chairs so that they slam into the wall near him with every step he takes.
Once I’m alone, I discover that the table is more than heavy enough to break through the glass. I step out of my cell and run down one of the corridors. After some random turns, I come across an extremely petite woman with short black hair and vaguely Filipino features. I realize that she is the reason I wound up here in the first place, that I’m somehow supposed to protect her. Without a word I pick her up and go running back down the corridor in the direction I came.
The woman goes into a frenzy trying to break free. As she struggles she changes into a humanoid creature with the head and paws of a cat, making her even more difficult to handle. I don’t have time to try and rationalize with her, so I simply look into her eyes and mentally sedate her. She curls up into a ball and falls asleep in my arms, purring slightly.
I run from the corridor into a wide concourse that looks like the combination of an airport terminal and a heavily carpeted theater lobby. All around me are dozens of man-sized insects. They are truly horrible creatures: no eyes, multiple arms, covered with a dark green exoskeleton and dressed in tattered netting. Each one is carrying a cat creature similar to my own. I know for certain that they mean these creatures harm.
I feel uncomfortably exposed, so I try to blend into the crowd by stopping at a bank of arcade machines and pretending to watch some boys play them. The carpeted floor beside me suddenly bulges up and adjusts its shape until it becomes one of the insects. Holding out two of its arms, it tells me in a hissing voice that it will be glad to take the cat creature off my hands. I calmly inform it that I’m not there, that it doesn’t see me. The insect lowers its arms, looks around as if confused, and shuffles away. Just to be safe, I turn in a circle and mentally project the suggestion to every living thing around me.
The scene fades to darkness, and everything that happens from this point is narrated to me by a disembodied voice that sounds like my own. I can’t see or feel anything, but I occasionally catch a glimpse of text against a white background, as if someone is holding a printed page in front of my face. This is the gist of what the voice tells me:
I manage to get the cat creature to my spaceship and escape. The ship, an asteroid-sized sphere, is very old and powerful; the tremendous energies that drive it are described to me in detail. When she emerges from her sedation, the cat creature is furious and refuses to have anything to do with me in spite of my attempts to explain the situation to her. I’m left with nobody to talk to other than the ship’s computer. This turns out to be not such a bad thing, because the ship is very old and has traveled to many amazing places. The computer spends the first days of our voyage telling me its stories, always referring to itself in the third person and never boasting.
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