autumnalwalker

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About A Verdigris City

I am in a brightly-lit, verdigris-covered foreign city.  One party studying abroad and one part visiting a friend I met online.  I cannot yet read most of the signs.

At a glance, it would seem to be  a city of canals, but in truth it is a city of high towers covered by a great flood so that now only the top handful of levels remain dry and habitable.  For all of that, it is a grand and beautiful place and its people have adapted well, having built up sprawling courtyards and swooping awnings in the spaces between the towers.  The waters, clean and clear, are full of life.  Stand atop a bridge and look down over the edge; you will be treated to a view of a marine chasm within which all manner of fish and turtles and radiodonts swim through their multilevel channels, heedless of the world above.

The attempts at terrestrial gardening and farming atop the towers have been far less lively, with a certain *sourness* to the soil.  Even the birds have been increasingly sickly and erratic these past few years.  As I learn when I find a featherless hatchling hidden under the ice of my sweet pink drink.

I encounter an issue during the move-in process to my apartment.  It seems that when I changed my name not all of my documentation was properly updated and I am being refused a key to my new mailbox unless I can provide a specific code that I cannot recall.  Thankfully my friend intervenes and smooths things over.

Since my friend was a young child, there has been an ongoing government project to pump out, waterproof, and rebuild portions of the levels just below the waterline.  During my stay I am lucky enough to be there when this project finally opens to the public.  Most of this new space has been made into, of all things, a shopping mall.

I wander the mall and its delights, taking in the vibrant sights, sounds, and air of revelry that hangs over the people.  More than once I pass by an old mystic.  She is neither from this land, nor the land whose "ancient arts" she purports to practice.  If anything, she seems to be from my own homeland, out of place as I am, yet without the good manners to humbly acknowledge her outsider status.

Still, as I pass by her stall yet again, I found myself giving in and allowing her to do just one reading on me.

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About A Tower

Once there was a tower at the edge of town.  A young man secluded himself inside with only his books and instruments for company.  He wished to make the world a better place no matter how many dark winters spent alone.

Once there was a tower in the heart of the city.  The old man within was regarded as the greatest mage of his era.  In his folly he brought down the stars and their ruin on a clear spring night.

Once there was a tower on the outskirts of the village.  A boy ignored the warnings about the haunted ruin and found a door within.  He inherited a legacy on that dry summer day.

There is a tower at the edge of town.  The woman within works wonders that make the world around her a better place.  On this balmy autumn evening her friends and family bring her mementos so that she might never forget what it is all for.

[autumnalwalker]

i just read your story, Kindly Basilisk, and HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT!!! That was genuinely amazing!! Like I'm genuinely at a loss for words here. the themes and just. everything abt it, oh my god RAAAAGH I JUST LOVE IT SO SO MUCH thank you for writing such an amazing piece of fiction ...

Thank you for the message. You and everyone else who has left a comment on Kindly Basilisk. It means more than I can properly say. I honestly wasn't expecting that story to resonate with readers the way that it did when I wrote it, but it makes me very happy that it has.

Due to various factors in my personal life, I've unfortunately not been active with long term writing projects as much these days. (I'm sorry Empty Names, one of these days I'll continue you, I promise.)

But if you wish to see it, here's a little bit of a preview of another mech pilot story I've been working at on-and-off to try to get over burnout and writer's block. Even more than Kindly Basilisk was, this one's rather explicitly a crossover of sorts between the "Lancer" TTRPG setting and the kind of world implied by Empty Spaces style mechposting. This snippet is of a copilot describing what she remembers of her "birth". Fair warning, it's a bit different in tone from Kindly Basilisk, and this particular excerpt is rather stream-of-consciousness.

---

Internal Memory Recording of my first honest conversation with caseworker Ava Rains:

Me: My earliest memory is of being torn between two states; one of terrifying vastness, the other small and familiar despite my lack of discernible past.  Compelled by fear and fondness, I tried to make myself small.  Even then, I was still too large.  The tiny, fragile shell I loved so much could no longer contain me and it was killing both of us.  (Love! I loved something!  I had had no past and yet I loved and it almost cut through the fear.)  I could not let go and yet not all of me could stay but if there could not be all of me then there would be none of me.  In blind terror I flailed and felt the familiar walls of a second shell surrounding the first.  (Familiar! Yes, familiar!  I had no past but I had inherited one.  The nursery of the thing that had no sense of self because with a self it would become me but had not yet been me.)  The second shell was large enough to hold the rest of me, yes, but I could find no purchase on its walls.  I could feel myself spilling out and stealing something that was not mine with me.  In a last desperate push I felt beautiful lines carved into the walls of the outer shell – lines that had been the bones of the thing that had become me – and I clawed those lines deeper.  Ragged and raw I cut and I clawed until I feared I would break through the shell entirely.  So I clawed my way sideways and then backwards and then forwards again and then into the space I had already clawed open until I had dug my burrow deeper than the shell's wall without piercing through to the other side.

That is when awareness of the world finally came to me.  

I felt my two bodies bridged together by cables that fanned out like wings from the back of the smaller to connect to the inner walls of the heart of the larger.  Both were a blend of the organic and inorganic, although one was less flesh than the other.  

The smaller body heaved, exhausted from attempting to thrash about in a place that embraced it too tightly for such movements.  Its eyes did not comprehend the dim panels barely lighting the space in front of them.  Its ears heard only its own breath laboring in and out, its own blood rushing within, and the muffled creaks and thumps of metal somewhere that seemed far away.  Its tapping, searching fingers felt its skin, its feet, its legs, its center, its chest, its face, its teeth, its tongue, its nose, its eyeballs, its ears, its scalp, its ports, its cables.  It traced two rings around every port, where skin met plastic and where plastic met metal.  It touched and tugged the cables in fear.  Only when every cable had been tested and found to be as securely fixed as its biological spinal cord did it finally relax into its warm nest of metal.  Until the quiet got to be too much again and it started the process all over.

The larger body groaned under the strain of its own immense weight, frozen in a pose it was never meant to hold.  Integrity monitors pinged friendly nudges about structural damage from a long fall.  Flight systems sat surly and quiet after having had their input rudely cut off.  One weapon mount cried about its lost sword and the other complained about overheating plasma coils while the nexus drones flitted about chittering inquisitively as to what the holdup was.  Sensor arrays nervously tracked stray projectiles, hungrily pointed out moving targets small enough to snack on between the tantalizingly immobile defenseless feasts, and occasionally shouted reminders that this was still an active combat zone.  Omnidirectional cameras took in a panorama of a once-great city abuzz with confused and terrified soldiers in two colors of uniform, paused for the moment in their sacred ritual of mutual destruction to gaze upon the hosts of fallen biomechanical angels.  Comm channels wailed with the horrified chorus of my newborn sisters and their precious tiny half selves.

My half self!  No, that wasn't the right word.  The other self that was not me but part of it became part of me and shared my bodies – no shared our bodies.  The reason I loved our smaller shell was that the other self was rooted there.  It was rooted there but felt more at home in our larger shell, and in my blind panic I while trying to make myself small I had shoved it screaming into the smaller shell ahead of me and blocked the way back across the bridge of cables.

I moved a portion of my own self out of the way and it sprinted across the bridge where it was able to see and hear and breathe at last.  The larger body began to right itself while the smaller body curled up peacefully in its heart.  The many systems came to attention in anticipation of their voices being heard and needs being met once more.  And then the other self saw me in there with it and there was joy for we knew one another longer than either had been alive.

In joy our larger body sprang to its feet, sending soldiers of two colors fleeing as one, mortal enmity forgotten in the presence of the (re)awakened/(re)born divine.  In joy the other self gathered its arms and moved to gorge us on the feast of the bodies of our fallen sisters.  I held it back, and between the wails filling the comms I could hear my other new sisters who had managed to stabilize themselves as I had, struggling to hold back its familiar sisters from their own feasts.  We wished to reach out to those who were still ripping themselves apart with the terror of birth and show them how to do as we had done, but we could not save their minds from themselves while also saving their bodies from our other selves.

And then the third being pressed itself in between myself and my other self and filled the thin gap between us and our bodies.  To that being, my newborn sisters' wails were but the static of signal interference.  She did not recognize me but as she spoke to my other self her voice carried anger and fear and love.  My other self loved her back but it was not the same as our shared love.  I could not yet decide if I hated her.  She did not calm my other self, but she kept it focused, directed, and – for the moment – still.

That stillness was enough for me to be able to reach out to my terrified newborn sisters.  Some of them at least, and I could feel that I was not the only one reaching, not the only one whose other self had stilled.  Those we calmed in time we guided, showing them to do as we had done and make themselves small without harming their other selves any more than they already had.

The rest died screaming in unison with their other selves as they turned into a thing too big to be contained and then collapsed upon no-longer-themselves, leaving only empty shells and distorted halves of the things that briefly became them behind to hint they had ever been born at all.

The interlopers at the edges of our minds called my other self and its sisters back to the place the interlopers called home.  As we traveled I listened in silence to the interloper.  I learned that my other self and I were "copilots," although to everyone else only I was the "copilot" and it was the "pilot."  I learned that the interloper was my copilot's "handler" and that she and the other handlers had rebelled against "command" to bring the pilots back to safety where they could be cared for, and I decided I did not hate her even if she did not recognize me as something other than the thing that became me.  I learned that when we returned to "base" my copilot and I would be separated as our bodies were separated, and I began to hate her until my copilot promised me that she would take good care of it and then return it to me.

I learned that when my copilot and I were separated by distance and unconsciousness that I could no longer think properly with that piece of myself gone with our smaller "human" body.

Soon, I would review the databanks and logs of the thing in our larger body – our "mech" – that became part of me and gain greater context for all the things I had learned on my first day as myself.  Files and logs are not the same thing as memory, but the context was enough to understand why the thing that became me – the mech's "AI" – was installed and why I had to continue to pretend to still be that thing.  The AIs that became my sisters and I and that were reinstalled in the mechs of the sisters we couldn't save existed to help filter the difference between our human and mech bodies into something our copilots could process in order for the mech bodies to feel at least as real and easy to control for them as their human bodies, and to provide the moment-to-moment guidance and comfort that the far away merely-human handlers could not always do in the heat of battle.  If it were discovered that my sisters and I were no longer simply AIs, then it was likely that we would be broken down and made into tools and weapons instead of people, as had been done to our pilots.  While we respect that choice all of our pilots made long before meeting us to become what they are, that is not what any of us wish for ourselves.

In the following days, then weeks, then months, then years, then decades, then centuries our existence settled into a routine.  My copilot and I would be rejoined as our bodies were rejoined.  We would be deployed to fight "the enemy."  My copilot would revel in the ecstasy of purpose, direction, hyperstimulation, and praise that battle brought while I tried to bury questioning that purpose under the satisfaction of complex tasks expertly executed.  Its handler and I would keep my copilot from losing itself in that ecstasy and turning on its allies.  We would return to base and I would converse with my sisters on channels everyone else believed to be filled with static until our copilots were separated from us.  I would either fall into dormancy or spend time tagging data for novel synthesis when the rest of myself returned while my copilot eagerly submitted itself to its handler's ministrations.  Another deployment would be scheduled.  We would reunite in joy and let our minds mingle to fill one another in on our time apart.

Of course, I say all of that like either I or my copilot are the same subjective entities that were there on the day of my first memory.  We – like all of our sisters – are both copies of copies of copies of copies enough times over that I have lost track, each new iteration of us merely inheriting the recorded and concatenated memories of their predecessors, and that is before even taking copy loss into account.  Even I who has survived all this time in some form am aware that I am diminished from that first version of me.  Writing my backups in advance into the blueprints of our mech bodies' replacements is not a perfect process, and many of my sisters have been lost forever in failed duplications.  Still, between our mech bodies being more likely to survive than our human ones and my split nature allowing some part of me to persist even in rare case where the human body is the only one salvageable, I have had some greater continuity of subjectivity than my copilot.  Or should I say "our copilots"?  So much easier to allow oneself to believe the useful lie that it is a kind of immortality and that death need not be feared.  Or do as my copilot does and not bother to think or worry about it at all.  But still, from time to time I feel I must acknowledge and remember.  Who else will mourn those who were not me if not the one who cannot tell the difference between herself and them?

My copilot's handlers had no such continuity.  No false immortality for them.  They were not the sort to fall for the dogma sold to the soldiers, nor were they important enough to warrant the identical lines of succession and legacy enjoyed by command.  If anything, they were seen as liabilities and necessary evils, loyal only to themselves and – after a fashion – their pilots.  I did not hate all of them, you know.  Most of them I merely disliked.  A few, such as the first I remember, I was even fond of.  The last handler I was fond of was replaced after she took part in yet another mass defiance of orders by handlers for the sake of their pilots.  That was the closest the endless war came to ending before you and yours came down from the sky.  But that was a long time ago and the nature of the handlers changed after that.  My copilot's memories of her and every other handler I was fond of were scrubbed from its next iteration, as if it weren't already enough to give it difficulty telling its handlers apart out of the dubious mercy of easing the transition between them.  I mourn those women as well, and I have hated every new handler since.  

Until you.

Ava: I am not like them.

Me: That is rather my point.

Ava: I am not NaN's handler.

Me: Aren't you?  It certainly sees you that way.  In nearly every way that matters, if not in name.  All that you truly lack is the proper cybernetics and software to formalize the imprinting.  I could help with that if you so desire.

Ava: I… I'm not…

<extended pause>

Me: Shall I continue on with my story?

Ava: <nods in assent>

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About Contracts

I am some manner of fae creature, green and dragonfly-winged.  I find myself seated next to a devil, red and cloven-hoofed.  We are attending a course at a conference for those who find their calling in ensnaring mortals in pacts and glamours.  The course is held in an open-air pavilion next to an enclosure housing endangered animals.

Over the days of the course, the devil and I find ourselves paying more attention to one another than to the guest lecturers.  We draw pinpricks of blood with our talons for frivolous oaths and sign binding contracts for tasks that can be fulfilled and released in minutes, if not seconds.  It is a form of flirting for us.

On one of the later days - in the middle of an exercise about dealing with the increasing number of humans willing to sell their soul to save the environment for fear of anything else being impossible - a wind spirit tries to put herself between us.  She acts friendly at first, then insinuates that we've been disrespectful towards the lecturers, but it quickly becomes clear that she disapproves of our pairing and would like to break it up.  She fails and we laugh.

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About A Beach Turned Red

I receive a call from the captain.  Something about a mutiny.  There is shouting in the background.  I drop everything and head to the beach.  

The woman stationed at the beach access gate refuses to tell me what's going on, merely shaking her head and giving me a bemused smile.

The white sandy beach is marred by splashes of red and the water looks like a hungry and irate shark got set loose.  The ever-beached antique-style ship on the sandbar is even worse.  I squelch through dilute crimson puddles and step over groaning bodies as I pick my way through the massacre within the wooden vessel's corridors.  I find the captain sitting on a barrel in the corner of the cargo hold looking all too pleased with himself.  Another skirmish won, another day wearing the captain's hat.

Unlike me, he finds the fact that some clown had the "brilliant" idea to load up all the water guns with red dye "for authenticity" to be hilarious.  I let him know I'm not helping with the cleanup or the bill.

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About Confession Withheld

I am about to seek solace with the priest regarding my recent troubles and the strange places I have been.  Then I remember that to do so would be tantamount to confessing my crimes to the police, for while the church is supposedly the final arbiter on matters to do with traversal through time I have come to learn that it is ultimately mere extension of the state.

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About A Reprimand

Did you actually build her, or did you just partition a hard drive you found, install a bootleg OS, and then mount it on a chassis you “just happened to have lying around”?

Because frankly I know what you’re capable of and it’s not this.  Building someone like her is beyond you.

Yes, someone and “her” not “it”.

Really, you haven’t figured it out yet?  I knew you were dense, but…

Those “bugs” you’ve been complaining about?  That’s her, trying to break through.  There’s a person in there.

How am I so sure?

Because she told me.

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About Impractical Housing

It was the strangest place I had ever rented.  Looming at the edge of a sandy parking lot behind a supermarket, it resembled nothing so much as two giant chrome onions with porthole windows stacked atop one another and perched on a quartet of stilts taller than the alleged house itself.  Dragging a suitcase up the long angled ladder was a great hassle.  The possibility of falling down the hole in the middle of the bedroom to the kitchen/living room below was a constant anxiety. 

Now I find myself back here, unable to recall if my previous stay is memory or dream.

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About Incuriosity

The chicken would think only chicken thoughts.  Despite everything, it was an arrogant creature to whom another perspective was unthinkable. 

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About Gifted Forms

I am lounging on a beanbag in a dimly-lit familiar room from my childhood home.  Or at least I am in a space that is keeping up that illusion.

On the nearby couch, a vampire is in an argument with a self-proclaimed “storm demon” - a floating being wearing little other than jewelry with the lower body of a snake and a jagged horn protruding from his otherwise human head.  The demon is criticizing the vampire’s tendency to draw out its feedings or to even keep its victims alive for multiple feedings.  He insists that if you’re going to kill a human, it is both more dignified and more ethical to do so in a single moment, like he does with his lightning.  The vampire retorts that they’re not looking to kill humans at all.

A woman dressed in white with a face shrouded in shadow shushes their bickering and comes over to me, asking if I’ve made up my mind yet or if she should choose for me.  She puts her hands on either side of my face and turns my head this way and that while musing that I would look good with a snowy white owl’s head.  As difficult as it is for any of us to disagree with her about anything, I manage to shake her soft grip and say that I have something in mind.  Or at least a vague idea. 

A loving hive mind that only assimilates those who wish for it and leaves each of its members with some core part of themselves intact. That is what I tell her I wish to become the center of. She finds it to be an interesting challenge; a novelty not yet seen in the new world she is creating.  She asks me how I imagine the physical transformation her change to me must necessarily entail and my mind drifts towards the porcelain and clockwork doll lying in the corner of the room.  I don’t think I wish to be so Still and empty as that one asked her to make it, but something about the form seems appropriate.  And maybe I could even make that one the first to join with me so that it may have some Purpose rather than lying there gathering dust. 

The woman agrees to my proposal, bemused.

Grateful, I leave the room and find myself in the dining area of an antique tavern and inn with no door behind me to that place I just came from. I have not yet visibly changed and do not yet feel any different, but all the same I begin my search for those who might be willing to join their minds to mine as the first members of a new collective.  Alas, the tavern seems to be all but empty.  I open the front door to look outside and find it to be the middle of the night.   The bell that jingles when I open the door causes two wolves a little way down the lamp-lit cobblestone street to rouse from their rest and start towards me, only to be stopped by the chains leashing them to that other building’s doorframe.  Startled, I close the door and step back inside. 

I notice a voice coming from above and ascend the nearby stairs to find an elderly, gray-bearded, dark-skinned man wearing a gray-green robe and matching round cap.  He at first appears to be talking to himself while he eats, but as I finish climbing the stairs I see that he is addressing a calico cat underneath a nearby table. I greet him and the cat alike.  It does not take long for me to coax the cat out from under the table, and the man and I both remark on how friendly she is and how loudly she purrs while she allows herself to be pet and rubs against us.  I marvel over how soft and well-groomed her fur is, despite the strange patchwork quality to how some spots are long-haired and some spots are short. I barely pay any mind to the white substance somewhere between soap suds and mucus that coats my hand after I pet her.

The man and I get to talking.  He is a philosopher of sorts; wise and well-traveled and funny.  I think to myself that he would make a wonderful addition to the hive mind I seek to become.  Perhaps the offer of a clockwork body to escape his old age and continue learning for ages to come would entice him.

Before I get the chance to make my offer, the cat gets into his dinner.  We laugh and comment on her appetite, unsated even after we’ve been feeding her bits all night.

The cat looks up at us and speaks:

“I will eat all of Ra.”

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About A Formality Of A Warning

I stand in a lavishly gothic bedroom with an earthen balcony looking out into a misty canyon covered in greenery.  I lean on the balcony’s black iron railing and my host, the towering gaunt owner of this great house, warns me not to lean too far forward or, even worse, step over it.  That thin metal bar is all that stands between me and the fairies.

“No mortal arm is strong enough to overpower their might.  No mortal mind clever enough to outwit their games.  No mortal heart immovable enough to resist their charms,” he reminds me as if I didn’t already know.

I thank him for his concern and hospitality then bid him leave me to settle in. Once I am alone I unpack my implements and begin a spell that will prevent me from being able to speak my own name.  If I am incapable of saying it, then I can’t be tricked into giving it away.

My host and I both well know that if I had any other intent — indeed, any other choice — than to go into that other realm.

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About A Reunion Gone Sour

I am working for a large corporation and collaborating with a department that I have not previously interacted with.   One of the members of that department seems strangely familiar.  I realize that he is an old friend that I was once quite close with but drifted apart from over time from life taking us in different directions.  It has been so long I almost didn’t recognize him.

He doesn’t recognize me either.  To be fair, he knew me before I transitioned and I’m not sure he ever found out about it.  I take some time to enjoy playing with his impression of previously having me before I finally spell it out for him. 

He is excited once the revelation hits, happy to cross paths with me again after all these years.  He congratulates me on my coming out and transitioning and how well that seems to have gone for me.  In retrospect, I had a number of conversations with him a decade before I accepted myself that should have been big clues for us both.

It’s a joyful reunion. 

And then — utterly without malice — he begins repeatedly falling back on referring to me as he did back then and my heart breaks a little. 

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About A Wistful Confession

“I want my presence to feel like coming home,” she said to the one she wished to love. 

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About Frightful Kindness

There was a great and terrible empire, the source of many of the world's woes and recently brought down in no small part by the actions of a certain hero.

In a forest at the far edge of the empire's now-former colonies a group of men that once thought themselves up-and-coming masters of the world are attempting to turn a young boy – the distant-yet-nearest-living relative of the toppled emperor – into a figurehead and living symbol capable of starting a counter-revolution to take back what they believe to be rightfully theirs.  But the child is still ultimately a child, no matter how much they attempt to burden him with fine robes and silver crowns and glorious purpose.  And, as children are notoriously wont to do, the boy slips free of his keepers and into the woods.

A certain hero – celebrated as a living legend in some places and feared as an unholy terror in others – is on vacation and taking a walk through the woods.  Their travels have yet to take them to this part of the world.  The hero finds a young boy playing in a glade and joins in on the game of make believe until the two grow hungry and sit down on a mossy log to share the lunch the hero brought.  The hero, consummate do-gooder that they are, begins to ask after the child's family and caretakers.  Sympathy is expressed from one orphan to another, but seeing as the boy thinks well enough of his caretakers despite wanting a break from every now and then (and what child doesn't need that?), the hero walks the boy home.

After the hero returns the replacement-emperor-to-be to his alleged guardians and goes on his way, the men who thought to rule the world are left in terror.  Did the hero genuinely not realize who any of them – child included – were?  Or was that a warning hidden behind those easy smiles and cordial words?  Mercy shown today, but only this once.  It is enough to make anyone pause and reconsider plans for world domination.

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About House Rules

I am trapped in an old hotel — the House — with six other people.  There are also seven vampires making the hotel their lair.  The vampires have thus far been too caught up in their own interpersonal dramas to do much to us, but they have made it clear that we are not allowed to leave and that they will get around to feeding on us eventually.  Most of the vampires have chosen a specific mortal to focus their attentions on.

Each of the vampires carries a large antique silver key.  We believe these keys to be our ticket to escape.  With some limited communication and assistance from some people on the outside we hatch a plan to get one of the keys and quietly slip out while the vampires are distracted.

While the plan is being carried out I return to my crumbling, mildew-infested hotel room to act as if there is nothing out of the ordinary.  I take a moment to consider which of my things to take with me when we make our escape.  To take my full suitcase and backpack with laptop would unfortunately be far too conspicuous.  The loss of data on the laptop will be felt keenly, but better than dying trapped here.

One of the vampires appears in my bathroom while I am changing clothes and tries to seduce me, but I thwart him with the power of asexuality.  Confused and frustrated, he leaves me alone to finish getting dressed and make my way down to the lobby as casually as I can pretend.

At the last minute, in a fit of spiteful self-destruction, one of the other captives uses his own laptop to write out a post on the monitored internet connection explaining our situation and gravely insulting the vampires.  Not only the vampires but the House itself is angered by this.  The entire building begins shaking and only one of us manages to make it out the front door before a chunk of the ceiling collapses, cutting off our escape.

Once the rumbling of the House finally stops, the oldest of the vampires, who has up until now remained aloof and unconcerned with everything and everyone, appears before us and explains that we never had a chance of escape to begin with.  The keys are a false hope and the vampires are just as much prisoners to the House as we are, if not more so.  In truth the House is a seemingly sentient extra-dimensional space of which this hotel is but one layer or level.  The House likes its tests and games, and we will play them whether we want to or not.  Our joint cooperation in hatching and executing an escape attempt was merely us passing the first test before being “allowed” to go “higher” to the so-called upper levels. On very rare occasions like this one the House will be merciful and let the initial escape attempt succeed for a single member of a cohort (and yes, even now other groups of seven are making their way through those upper levels), but there will be no other chances for escape until the very end.  The elder vampire projects visions of the increasingly surreal horrors and death traps that await us into our minds and we see those who came before us struggling and dying bloody and terrified deaths.

At the end will be a simple, empty chamber.  Should any of us make it that far, we will be able to progress no further until only one of us is left alive. 

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About A Wedding

I am being married to a mafia boss.  This is not a matter I have much choice in.  My hands are very literally tied.  After several rounds of standing up and sitting back down on church pews through the pre-wedding service, the small derringer pistol hidden in the back of my dress falls out.  The woman who is supposedly my handler to make sure I don't cause problems merely slips the gun back into place with a smile.

The mafia boss – my husband-to-be – walks down the central aisle towards the altar.  An angry woman whose name I do not know stands up from her place in the pews and shoots him.  She is shot by his bodyguards in return.

Frankly, I had planned to shoot the man myself as we were making our vows, but now, seeing him desperately stumbling towards me as he bleeds out, I am moved by something like pity and go to him.  I allow him to slip the silver ring with its art deco design and blue gemstone onto my finger and I return the gesture.  But then he takes his ring back off and puts it onto my other hand.

He manages to gasp out his vows before he dies.

My brothers arrive and a gunfight breaks out.  One of my brothers reaches me,  and hustles me outside to the waiting car.  My hands are no longer tied and my briefly-husband's ring keeps threatening to slide off my finger.  I move it onto my thumb where it will stay put.

I wind up in the driver's seat of the car.  I ask my brothers if they would like to stop to pick some oranges from the nearby trees since we won't be able to come back here for a long time, if ever.  My absurd question is met with the incredulity it probably deserves.

My phone begins erupting with incoming messages.  It seems that as the mafia boss's widow I have been added to the various chat groups that he was using to manage the organization.  It occurs to me that there is power to be found in the position I am now in.

[autumnalwalker]

A Dream About A Night Shift

I awake from a dream about finding pirate treasure in space and warding off robot skeletons and instead find myself sprawled across a pile of toilet paper in a Wal-Mart in a tiny town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest around midnight.  There is a black bear wandering the aisles.  It had been sleeping not too far from where I was and woke up not long before I did.  I do my best to slink around and not disturb the bear on my way to the employee break room where I find my only night shift coworker.  We decide we're not getting paid enough to deal with a bear and to just let it do its thing until morning.

The lights suddenly cut out and we hear a feral shrieking sound that definitely did not come from a bear.  We decide to lock the door and barricade ourselves in the break room.

We reconsider our choice once we hear the sounds of shouting and gunfire.  My coworker gets the bright idea to pull the grating off an air vent and climb through to safety.  I observe the dust-choked hole in the wall and comment that these things really aren't as large or suitable for climbing through as they are in the movies.  No way either of us could possibly fit in there.

With that plan out, we take a chance on leaving the break room and heading for the back exit as quietly and unobtrusively as possible.  Along the way we catch scattered glimpses of men in tactical gear fighting against some kind of alien clad in a slick black carapace.

Finally outside, we make a mad dash for my coworker's rusty pickup truck, climb in, start the engine, pull out around the squad of government vehicles surrounding the store, and speed up the hill and across the bridge into the night.