I was back at this 5105cfhouse. My extended family was meeting us there, so we could go someplace, I wasn’t sure where. I had to rush to get ready to go since it had been pushed forward by a few hours, so I didn’t get to have a real breakfast, Then, whatever-it-was (I was thinking it might have something to do with some sort of tour, or actually a swimming pool, but that didn’t make sense) was pushed back from the time it had been reset to a slightly later time (but nowhere near what it had been originally). It was something to do with an order system. We were “fifth,” but we jumped at the chance to be “second” or “third” even though we would have to leave a lot earlier, something like that) and I just fried up a hamburger with cheddar real quick on the stove and suffered through that (it tasted delicious, but I can’t stand grease like that, I’d prefer grilled).1 (lucid here 1?) So I’m standing there, waiting to go, when my half-cousin walks in in a loose shades-of-green-elongated-triangles-with-some-orange-elongated-triangles-“rainforest”-pattern two-piece swimsuit,2 me standing trying not to look like a slob because of holding half a greasy hamburger, and says it’s been pushed back to the original time. Through the garage door I can see two vehicles, with her mom, two uncles, and my dad trying to properly prepare (or unprepare?) things for travel. I’m still not sure whether it’s a swimming pool, or some sort of prison-tour-like thing or something completely different, since the words seemed to still be intentionally unclear (the intention of the words, not the intention of the person speaking) and, unexpectedly, the attire just makes things even less clear. Everyone comes inside and/or upstairs, and the second floor3 (lucid here 2?) has changed from vaguely similar to my grandmom’s 5965ffhouse but with a double staircase down to the first/ground floor in place of the dining area to a nearly blank yellowish-painted room with same staircase. There was a clothesline hanging over the well of the stairs near the top, and people kept teasing me about the spooky ghost dress (I think it had become some sort of running gag, since I hadn’t actually seen anything, but it had started to spook me nonetheless). There were three rooms at the, well, let’s just call it the “north” end of the o800b3house, if the room I had been staying in was originally on the east side of the floor that had changed and the door to the garage was on the west side of the first/ground floor. The adults had noticed from the first room (rightmost one, to the east) that they did weird stuff, and tested the other rooms by trial-and-error. I forget what the left and middle rooms were, but I did get to check out the rightmost room.4 The rightmost room was called the “duplication room,” or the “knockoff room,” since anything you put in there doubled, but the duplicate lacked details of the first (books would have scrambled print on the inside pages, a duplicated human would be a sort of soft mannequin with unclearly defined clothing, and the original wouldn’t notice it until it was already there, but there was an opening to a ground floor, sort of in the city on a sidewalk but no sound went through and nobody even turned to look in the direction of the “entryway,” and another door in the left side which seemed to connect to the doo on the right side of the middle room.5 The duplicaytion room, as I’m thinking of calling it as I write this (a portmanteau of “duplicate” and “decay”) is bigger than it should be, for it extends between four and five feet to the left, and the doors are at most 2.5 feet apart. There is a door on the right side if the room, but it doesn’t open. They were moving stuff out of the duplication room, and I had decided to test it, I started out by using the paper I had been writing (not the one I had been writing, but the backup instruction paper thing), like how they had tested it earlier using this paper thing one of my other cousins had printed out or something (an optional hard copy version of some computer project). I see a c=fdw volumes of manga on the shelf, with a greyish-silver spine, and I’m like, “cool, Full Metal Alchemist,” but when I look closer it’s only several volumes 8 and volume 10. The duplication of the paper was a success, and the paper had some slightly scrambled lettering. I decided to try duplicating a grate, see if it had little enough detail that it would be duplicated relatively perfectly, and it is, but interestingly the shelves built into the upper walls aren’t duplicating. The books are, but it seems to be “absorbing” any books that wouldn’t fit before the door is reopened. I start closing and reopening the door really quickly, and from what I can tell the only air current is from me moving the door. I’m getting a really bad feeling, and I’m wondering what it would have been like had I still had the half of the hamburger to try and duplicate, and (fortunately) right before I try my earlier idea of putting a piece of paper on the threshold and closing the door over half of it, I am woken up. I’m afraid to go back to sleep.
1 For some reason my mouth still tastes of the hamburger, even though I should be awake (although time does seem to be passing unusually quickly, though at a steady rate of one second per tick of the second hand), and I had some Thai meal with pieces of really tender roast duck, noodles, and vegetables in a really delicious sauce earlier today while I was still awake, and that was ten hours and a drink of blue powerade ago.
2loose as in imperfectly fitted, not as in stripperific
3 first floor for those in British- and Spanish-based countries
4 I never saw the south wall of the new second/first floor, I was in first-person view after the change only as long as I wasn’t facing that direction.
5. The middle room was a small dressing room, just as large on the inside as it should be based on the wall it was behind, with one door on each side wall, some kind of old-fashioned dresses (like party dresses, not gowns or everyday sort of thing) and a large formerly freestanding mirror built into the top of a sort of vanity table cabinet dresser thing but only deep enough to hold the mirror and probably-shallow drawers, the surface on top wasn’t deep enough to use as a table or counter.
