A new post. It's an irrelevant Yuletide miracle!

Besides the two dream adaptations already posted, I wrote several others which I was too lazy to get around to releasing. Here's what might be the most interesting of the bunch, originally entitled "Life, the Universe, and Ducky Inner Tubes," because there weren't enough awkward appropriations of Douglas Adams novels' titles out there already.

               I was standing within a chimney made of rough stone bricks. The chimney wasn't attached to the roof of a building or anything, it was just standing around in a patch of dirt in a clearing in a small clump of trees somewhere in my hometown. It was tall enough for children to climb in and out of, wide enough to fit four children, and narrow enough to look like a chimney. Maybe Euclidean geometry was taking a sick day.

               With me in the chimney were three of my friends (nonexistent in reality). We were playing some kind of battle game- we might have been fighting invisible knights using our invisible bows, or maybe we were trying to survive in the wilderness and fight off giant rabid bears. A man walked into the clearing. He was about the shape of a bell, mostly bald, wore a red plaid shirt and jeans, and had a short grey mustache. He looked exactly like my kindergarten gym teacher, but that's beside the point. Most importantly, he had a plastic, yellow inner tube with a duck head around his waist. He turned towards us.

               “Hello, children!”, he said in an untrustworthy voice. “Would you like a ducky inner tube?”

We all stared at him for a moment before I answered.

               “No thanks.”

               “Are you sure? They're loads of fun!”, he continued.

               “No, we're sure,” I replied.

               “But they're three dollars in the store! You can have it for free!”, he pleaded.

               “No!”, I yelled.

               “It comes with WiFi-”

               “NO! Go away!”

The man, looking dejected, started to walk away. He turned back to us for a moment to speak.

               “You kids are no fun. I'm leaving for good!”, he declared, storming off.

               After he left, the ground began to shake. I glanced at the most sparsely wooded side of the clearing and saw a tall, thin rocket launching into the sky. Must be one of those NASA tests, I thought. I knew that the thin rocket was only a warning. The real rocket would come in a few seconds, and with it potentially lethal amounts of radiation. I ducked into the rock tube. Right before I was fully covered, I caught a glimpse of it. It was at least twenty times wider than the last rocket, and seemed to be coming up out of the ground itself because of its distance and the curvature of the earth. Wreathed in flame, it looked almost as if it was part of an old film strip, as it was blurred and shaky from the heat. The noise was almost unbearable.

               Once the shaking stopped, I peered out from the chimney, My friends were gone. They had either run home in terror or gotten disintegrated by the blast. Otherwise, everything was exactly the same. Since the games we had been playing could no longer continue, I pulled out the steering wheel and gas pedal from the interior of the tube and began driving. Yes, driving. Stone chimneys are surprisingly versatile.

               The area of the city I was in much resembled the clearing I had left. The roads were dirt, trees were everywhere and there was little to suggest a human presence at all. The first house I passed was my friend Arthur's (nothing like its real-world counterpart). I stopped because the strange man, no longer wearing the inner tube, was knocking at their door. It opened, revealing a pitch black interior.

               “Let's eat Seanathan!”, he said.

               Whoever was inside must have whispered to him, because he turned around and stared at me, a malicious smile on his face and an inhuman glint in his eye. It was then that I realized he was a vampire. Because 'vampire' is clearly a synonym for 'cannibal'. Anyway, he was a vampire, and Arthur's family, or a group of impostors, had been vampires too for some time. He started chasing after me, and I pressed down the gas petal as hard as I could.

               I accelerated to the insane speed of ten miles per hour, vampires close in pursuit. I could hear them cackling and chittering behind me. Soon I could see the river, and I knew I was close to a main street. Unfortunately, before I could escape to civilization, one of them cast a fishing line and hooked my chimney. It was strong line and I was stuck. But I was not deterred. Leaping out and grabbing onto the line, I began swinging rhythmically.

               “Back, and forth... back, and forth... back, and forth...”, I chanted.

               On the third 'forth' the line snapped and with the momentum I had built up, I was flung nearly to the shrubbery on the river shore. It was all a very pointless maneuver and I could have easily just run there instead. Knowing vampires had an aversion to water, I sprinted the rest of the way and dived into the river.

               My house, for whatever reason, was only a quick swim away from that area. I front-stroked all the way there in less than a minute. The water was warm and the moment I climbed onto the shore (neatly ignoring the existence of our docks), I was perfectly dry. It was getting dark out, but instead of going inside, I walked to the narrow strip of lawn on the left side of our house. This was because of an eerie purple glow coming from it.

               Slowly, I crept to the side of my house. Peering out from behind the wall, I saw the glow's source. It was a crashed spaceship. It was a meter wide at most, and was so damaged it was pretty much unidentifiable, but its alien origin was obvious. Creeping nearer, I saw various strange objects scattered around the metallic blob. There were two strangely curved fishbowls, each containing an equally strange fish, and tools of which the uses I could only guess were strewn everywhere. There was also a small, white comma floating above the rubble. I pointed my finger accusingly at it.

               “Hey, I remember you! You tried to kill me earlier in the dream,” I said, ignoring the fact that such a thing had never happened earlier in the dream.

               The comma drifted a bit to the side, and I turned my attention away from it.

               An alien came walking towards me. It was short, green, had large compound eyes and antennae, and wore a white robe. It was the most cliché thing I had seen that night. I asked it if I could help it fix its ship.

               “Sure,” it glorgled. “If you do, I'll bring you along to space,” it forgleeped.

               “Okay,” I affirmed.

               We worked long into the night. We completely reshaped the frame, reconstituted the windows, reassembled the hyperdrive, fed the fish, and fixed every last object. Or at least I assume we did, because while I was dreaming I skipped over this part.

               Now in the saucer, the alien and I flew over the city. We flew over Arthur's house, where his vampire family and the strange man (still without his ducky inner tube) were sitting in the yard looking miserable. We flew over the launch site of NASA's newest rocket, where we were given a very clear view of the upper mantle. I'm not sure how I had even fit in the spaceship in the first place, as it was clearly built for a creature at most half my size. It must've been geometry's negligence again. Anyway, the alien tilted the saucer upward, and we flew off into the stars.

               I never got to see them up close, because that's when I woke up.

More SOTMK illustrations

The last SOTMK comic story was incomprehensible enough, but this one manages to be more incomprehensible and a cringe-worthy quasi-romance fanfic at the same time. Accordingly, the illustrations got a lot weirder, though not as weird as these would be.

Arthur's original post can be found here: The Meeting of Abe and Mimi (see second section of post)

[Abe] goes to a log cabin that is perpetually leaning left, he knocks...

...and Mimi answers. She asks if he brought any friends.

He and her talk, and he hides under a couch that looks like a coffin.

Mimi yells at him and stabs him through the crotch with a surfboard, then pins him to a tree.

He comes back inside. Mimi hides his body under the couch.

Sean knocks on the door, and Mimi closes it in his face before she even opens it. That takes skill!

Sean blows up the door and flies in. He kills Mimi, and she punches him out the door.

Eh, I had nothing better to do (SOTMK illustrations)

Hey look, a new post! It's even more useless than the old posts, but that's excusable. This is the Internet, after all.

Last year I drew up some illustrations based on Arthur Borglestein's descriptions of his horrid old SOTMK "comics". As with the originals (which will never get anywhere near the Internet, Arthur wouldn't permit it), these drawings are pretty amusing (hopefully).

Arthur's original post can be found here.

So there's a cube with a combover. Abe is a stick figure and his arm is ten feet long. He knocks on the door.

[Sean's] home is a white void. They sat on black letter 'L's, and talked about how Peach is having a party. Sean wanted to come.

There is a big demon holding signs on a rock.

He flies off and laughs. SWAP! POW!  A rabbit shoots lasers from its ear and destroys the rock.

A wormhole opens and leads to Peach's castle. Abe and Sean are just in time!

A second comic description, this one of a story called "The Meeting of Abe and Mimi", was also included in the post, and I've partially illustrated that one too. Stay tuned for more*!

*Remember, this is Seanathan's Yarns. Be prepared for a long, long, wait.

You probably saw this coming!

Well, in case this wasn't already made obvious by the fact that this blog has become less active than the slide rule manufacturing trade, I've pretty much stopped writing. I really don't have much inspiration to continue at the pace I was planning to go at, and anyway I'm busy working on a game Arthur, a third chap, and I are creating.

I'll still probably continue, just at a really, reaaaaaaly slow pace. Sorry to disappoint the half dozen or so people (probably fewer) who were hoping for a new post.

Wow

This has sure been a slow month.

A Mission To Jupiter (Dreams)

Note: Sorry about the first paragraph.

                Far off in the distant reaches of space, I was aboard a spaceship. I had no particular reason to be there, but as usual took no notice of the fact at all. Nevertheless, I was allowed to and perfectly aware of how to pilot the ship. The control room itself was quite dull, walled in with tarnished metal plates arranged in a boring rectangular configuration, which were decorated only with a useless pattern of intersecting raised squares. The floor appeared to be concrete. The front window was entirely uninspired. It took up the greater part of one of the walls and was not even given curved edges or trim on the sides to emphasize its existence. The only other objects in the room were the door, which was inset about a foot into the wall opposite the window and split into two horizontally sliding sections, a railing in front of the window, and a control panel located near the front end of the right wall. The control panel was both incredibly simple and seemingly fake. It was a long, thick, rectangular slab of white plastic, tilted about 22 and a half degrees towards the center of the room, and held up by two metal poles. Its only control was a grey sliding knob. It had to be pulled along its wildly curving path at a specific speed and using a particular state of mind to move the ship. The control room's lack of design sense extended through every single other part of the ship.

                As I stood in the similarly designed hallway behind this control room, a message blared annoyingly over the intercom.

                “All crew members and stowaways of any importance please report to the teleport bay, now! The boss himself is visiting!”

                I walked through the maze of corridors and arrived at the teleport bay just in time to see the boss appear. There were no sparkles or sound effects or anything making the event interesting, the boss just wasn't there one moment and was the next. The teleport bay was slightly smaller than the control room and there was only one teleportation chamber. It was more of a tiny alcove than a chamber, with no discernible controls and only a metal plate on its floor to signify its importance. The boss stepped into the main room and cleared his throat. He glanced at his clipboard.

                “Hi,” he said. “Your next mission is to collect some pressurized liquid hydrogen from Jupiter. Just head into orbit like sooooo...”, he explained, waving around his free hand, which still was holding a pencil,

                “Oh!”, he exclaimed, noticing the pencil and extending the hand holding it towards the captain of the ship, “Take this! I need this hand to wave around!”

The captain took the pencil.

                “... and then send in a pod. You'll need seven grams of it. Keep it pressurized, we can't have any cheating,” concluded the boss, who stepped back into the chamber and vanished.

                All the people in the room except the captain left, eager to return to whatever they normally did. As you can tell, the spaceship didn't have much of a purpose. Being only a construct of a resting imagination, this is understandable.

                “Shame,” said the captain, “I never gave the boss his pencil back. I'll have to keep it safe for him.”

You may correctly surmise that the captain was extremely overestimating the importance of the pencil to the boss. Just how extremely he was doing so will become very clear very soon.

…

                The ship had reached Jupiter, and the planet looked strangely small through the window. Its odd beige and rust-colored stripes curved and faded in exactly the right way to make them look painted on. The time had come to collect the hydrogen, and I was standing in the control room, ready to move the ship closer to the planet. Eight other crew members, all dressed in white jumpsuits, were standing behind me for no obvious reason. I carefully moved the knob along its slider towards the left end of the control panel, which signified small sizes or short distances. Jupiter seemed to grow, but very slowly.

                After a few seconds of movement towards the planet, one of the crew members became impatient.

                “You're doing it all wrong! We've got to go way faster than that!”, he yelled, and then yanked the knob at an alarming speed.

                The ship flew straight towards Jupiter. As the planet as seen in the window grew larger, the ship began trying to rip itself apart. The floor shook with surprising vigor, and the lights went wild from absorbed radiation. By the time I finished my struggle back towards the control panel, all that was visible through the window was a uniform brown haze. The only illumination came from the giant electrical storms occurring below us on Jupiter. One I had a firm hold on the control panel, I slowly and carefully slid the knob back towards the right, inching us back into a sane orbit. At that moment the captain bolted into the room, panting from the exertion of running through every corridor in the ship in search of a pencil.

                “Have any of you seen the pencil? The boss needs it back and I've lost it!”, he half-sobbed.

                “No, captain,” droned the other crew members in unison.

                The captain's face went from an extremely worried, mortified look to one of utter despair and gloominess.

                I pulled open the top drawer of a nearby small, dark-stained, and ornate wooden cabinet which couldn't have possibly been there and pulled out the pencil, which could not have been put there. I showed it to the captain, hoping that it would cheer him up. It did not.

                “It's too late. I lost it, and I can't take it back. I would lose it again. I can't be trusted with anything...”

                The captain fell silent and left the control room. One of the random crew members glanced through the doorway and into the hallway, immediately recognizing the path the captain was taking.

                “The captain is heading into Jupiter's room!”

                'Jupiter's Room' was a room containing a human-sized scale model of Jupiter, accurate except for having a somewhat exaggerated equatorial bulge and a slightly greenish tint. It hovered about two inches above a raised platform and was surrounded by convoluted metal pipes on its left and right sides. By the time the other crew members and I arrived there, the captain had reached the far end of the room and was standing on the platform to the left of Jupiter. Though it was a scale model, its internal pressure was accurate, which meant that the captain's plan of walking straight through it would certainly and intentionally lead to his death. I rushed off to the only place I could think of that could help: The Infinite Couch Cushion Field.

                The Couch Cushion Field, luckily, was located a few feet to the right of Jupiter's Room. Both its ground and sky were white, and no end was visible. The brown, lightly patterned couch cushions stubbornly extended forever in every direction. I leaped out of Jupiter's Room and hit the center of a nearby couch cushion. There was, of course, an invisible button there which instantly rendered the scale model of Jupiter holographic, nothing but a field of harmless light.

                One of the crew members glared at me.

                “What exactly are you doing?”, she asked.

                “I just saved the captain's life, of course,” I boasted. The captain walked through the hologram and out the other end unharmed. “See?”, I said.

                “You're ridiculous,” she responded as the captain rushed towards me, not entirely sure whether he was grateful or furious.

                I woke up.

Fool's Errand, Part Three (The Nine Galaxies)

Note: Well, here it is, over a week late!
 

           The Zephyrian sat impassive in the control room, watching on a viewscreen as the arguments began and the passengers quickly turned against it. It was safe where it was behind the control room's locked door, and had no concerns. It would bring the ship back into hyperspace about a day later, as was planned, and then it would rejoin the others at the Muttering Dwarf Hub Station. There it would stay until some other curious group of travelers came, and though they probably wouldn't be as much trouble as these ones, things would go much the same way. Its life would go on in the usual Zephyrian way for another century or three, and then it would be forgotten in the onrush of years and deluge of new lives.

           What it still couldn't figure out was why Sanar had wanted the ship to fall into the black hole. It seemed like an incredibly stupid goal. It had gone through the ship's owner's bio in the computer files many times, and found no explanation.

           The pilot was passing the time calculating the motion of objects in a three-body system and composing fugues in various keys in its head when it noticed something in its peripheral vision. It was a blinking red dot on one of the viewscreens. The pilot moved over to the screen and read the overlaid text.

DEACTIVATED AIR FILTER, ID C-8

           The Zephyrian tapped the dot and a 3D projection of the ship's schematics appeared. The ventilation shafts near the dot were quickly turning red. Somebody had dumped a liquid into a vent in the common room, and deactivated the filter to make sure it could cause trouble. As it watched, more red dots appeared around the common room and more vents were filled. One dot briefly disappeared, but blinked on again quickly after.

           The pilot accessed the security feed on another screen, and was presented with the blurry underside of a piece of tape.

           The Zocronnans were trying as hard as they could to get its attention, and they certainly were succeeding- if they kept the air filters off, the oxygenators would be smothered in the liquid, and they would all slowly suffocate. If the Zephyrian didn't try to fix the filters, it would be violating the Spaceflight Code. Sighing softly, it set the controls one last time, left the control room, and locked the door behind it.

           Entering the common room, the pilot noticed the door wasn't locked for once. It also noticed that the air was filled with half-empty, drifting bottles of Aquanymphan ale. Finally, it noticed that the Zocronnans were clustering around the affected vents.

           “Must you do this? It doesn't benefit any of us,” it said. Its translator produced the strongest smell of despair it could, along with the necessary Zocronnan clicks and hisses.

           The Zocronnans did nothing but increase the anger and derision of their scents. Sighing again, the pilot went to each of the vents and switched the filters back on. Then, after it had finished, all of its limbs were grabbed at once and the Zocronnans tied it to the handholds on the wall. Nobody came to stop them. Apparently the elders and the few others who had stayed sane had been forced out of the room.

           “You really can't break the Spaceflight Code, can you?”, derided Sanar.

           “No, that would be unlawful. I have no reason to, and you would have blocked the oxygenators and suffocated anyway if I had,” answered the pilot in Zocronnan, unable to reach its translator.

           “Now, we have control of the ship! You couldn't have broken the Code for that?”

           “You will have control of the ship once you guess the password. I think you'll find it quite difficult to do that within the span of a single day,” corrected the pilot.

           “A single day? We have forever! We can force the password out of you if we need to,” threatened the owner.

           “You have a single day. I have programmed the ship to enter hyperspace and return to the Hub at the agreed time. I have done everything I can to make this trip go exactly as planned. My imprisonment here is not a setback, it is merely an inconvenience.”

           Sanar did not answer. He only deepened his scent before turning, pushing himself off the wall and leaving.

           “I have kept my side of the agreement and done nothing wrong, why are you so determined to put yourself in danger and defy yours?”, the pilot muttered as its mouth was covered in tape. It began humming one of its fugues but was silenced by a collective hiss from the Zocronnans.

           The quiet of the library was suddenly interrupted by a whooshing as Sanar flew through the air towards Zarannan. The latter was reading Tales from the Singularity, his wonderment just as strong as it had been when he was a larva.

           Zarannan looked up at the visitor and read a few lines out loud.

           “ Now the Great Minds proceeded to show the travelers more of their powers.

           The twenty-four watched as the in skies above them worlds innumerable wheeled and changed,

           their every motion a thought of the Minds, by whom this display could be triggered on a whim.

           “Why do you not leave here, and rule the galaxy?”, asked one.

           “This realm surpasses all your galaxies.” ”

           Sanar shivered briefly. The power they would be dealing with was astonishing.

           Then, the realization that he was in awe of a passage from an old, exaggerated larva's book hit him and his scent became one of annoyance.

           “There is a problem.”

           Zarannan looked up from the book again. “What is it? Did the Zephyrian not come?”

           “No, it was captured. The problem is that it has locked the control room and programmed the ship to leave in a day,” Sanar explained with a scent of regret.

           Zarannan snapped the book shut and flew to the door, even flapping his twelve spindly limbs in an attempt to get there faster.

           “We must figure out the password!”

           The ship's owner hesitated for a few delts before deciding not to follow.

           “That might not be the best idea,” he said.

           Zarannan turned slowly.

           “What!”, he yelled.

           “We have tried. We probably won't be able to guess the password, so let's not waste time on that. We should return, and maybe try again a few years from now. The Singularity will still be there,” Sanar argued.

           “But we cannot return! The pilot would report us, and we would be put on trial! That would be bad, very bad. Our only choice is to go on with it,” the other argued back.

           “We could plead insanity,” suggested Sanar.

           For a moment, it seemed that either of them could suddenly burst out in olfactory laughter. The moment didn't last long.

           A sharp, stern smell from Zarannan made the owner give in. They might as well try.

           They tried for what seemed like years. They tried various words in Standard, random jumbles of characters, smashing the door open with a crowbar, names of well-known planets, historical figures from various galaxies and eras, smashing the door open with a bigger crowbar, curse words, puns from an advanced Standard textbook they found in the library, text from signs they had seen in the Hub, mythological concepts, 'OPEN', 'OPEN OR WE WILL HIT THIS DOOR WITH SOMETHING WORSE THAN A CROWBAR', smashing the door open with a laser drill they couldn't figure out how to operate, more curse words, and finally, more random jumbles of characters.

           All the while, passengers had been visiting them to cheerfully share ideas for passwords, none of which worked. The elders and their supporters occasionally left their rooms to try to convince the others to let the pilot go, but always failed. The pilot itself did nothing to escape. Finally, after the laser drill gambit failed, Zarannan decided to give up.

           On the way back to the common room, where the two attempted hijackers were heading to regretfully inform the Zephyrian that it had won, an idea came to Sanar.

           “Don't Zephyrians love physics? We could try equations.”

           Zarannan spun around and faced the owner. “You couldn't have thought of that half a day ago?”, he hissed angrily.

           “That's not how thinking works!”

           “Whatever,” dismissed Zarannan, “I'm going to try equations.”

           “What makes you think they will work?”, hissed Sanar.

           The other Zocronnan didn't answer. He was heading to the library.

           Sanar joined him and they began searching for a book on physics. It wasn't long before they found one; a textbook for accelerated science courses entitled 'The Well-to-do Larva's Big Book of Physical Equations'. After a few failed attempts to open the control room's door using the equations for classical gravitation, relativistic gravitation, hyperspatial mechanics, and a few quantum equations, they, quite surprisingly, managed to get it open with the four equations of classical electromagnetism.

           Sanar was mildly disturbed by Zarannan's scent of triumph as the door swung open, as it was laced with strong hints of lust for power, and perhaps slight malice. Essentially, the smell was the equivalent of a humanoid's evil grin.

           “Now our Colony, our species, will have honor above all others'!”

. . .

The Time a Portal Ate My Shoes (Dreams)

Note: No, I don't know what the heck happens inside my brain while I'm asleep.

            I was lounging around in the front room of in my house with three of my friends. I have no idea who they actually were, but within the context of my dream I knew them. As we lay atop the teal, green and amber patterned rug in the front room, we cut sheets of white card-stock paper and created various unidentifiable objects out of it. Suddenly, an idea came to me.

            “We should make a portal!”, I suggested.

            “How can you make a portal out of paper?”, one of my friends wondered.

            I cut out four long strips of card-stock and taped them together, forming a rectangle. I cut out another sheet, wider than the rest but slightly shorter, and taped it to the left side of the bottom.

            “Simple,” I said, “you can make anything out of this stuff if you know how to do it.”

            I wrote the word 'PORTAL' and drew a few buttons and levers on the widest strip of card-stock. I drew a representation of a circuit board in the remaining space. On the left section, I drew more circles, but with lines radiating from them- these were meant to be lights. Once I had finished, I tapped one of the buttons, and the space between the segments of card-stock suddenly lit up in a blue-purple spiral.

            “Wow!”, gasped each of the three others simultaneously.

            “What can it do?”, asked one of them.

            I tapped some of the buttons and pretended to flick a few of the levers, and the glowing spiral disappeared. It was replaced by a view of a room within Arthur's house. In it were his father and brother, both staring intently at a sports magazine. Since they didn't seem to notice me, I threw a roll of tape at them. As I did this, they glanced up at me, waved, and then went back to their sports magazine, never noticing the tape. I pressed a few more nonexistent buttons and the portal returned to its spiral pattern. Not at all to my surprise, the lights I had drawn on had become actual multicolored indicator lights- the same kind you could easily find on any prop from Lost in Space.

            I had been looking away from the portal for only half a minute. I was helping one of my friends make his card-stock project look less like a spaceship and more like a formless, unidentifiable lump. When I looked back at where the portal should have been, it was gone. Alarmed, I searched the swath of floor between the front door and the coat rack. I quickly found the portal- and found that it had extended itself to include my favorite pair of shoes. They were dark leather shoes, and presumably somewhat expensive. (This is odd outside the context of the dream because I did not own any shoes in that style at the time.)

            “No! This thing is turning evil!,” I declared.

            My shoes were half-covered by strips of card-stock and were adorned with a row of small, amber indicator lights. I tried to turn the portal off by repeatedly tapping a drawn-on button, but all this did was cause the indicator lights to blink on, including the amber ones on the shoes. The space intended for the portal in the center of the machine was empty, rendering it useless.

            The portal crept along the carpet towards one of my friends. We watched with horrified fascination as it extended its shoe towards one of them, shuffling onward in short, sudden leaps. The shoe clamped on his hand, and he let out a mild yelp of pain. I yanked the portal away from him and tried to rip it to bits, but it stayed whole. It soon escaped from my hands and broke the front door's window, leaping into the unprotected world, escaping into the night.

            A day later, I was still worrying about the terrible machine I created. I worried that it had escaped into a major city and begun wreaking havoc. With a portal making up most of its body, it could sneak into the bank and teleport cash to the moon! It could keep the mayor at shoe-point for ransom! The worst part was, since it was built out of a weak material, it could change its molecular structure and become anything it wanted to!

            Finally, soon after sundown, I found out where it had gone. The local news channel was running a story about a mysterious attacker breaking into a local Enchilada Klaxon restaurant in the nearby city of Ravinia. My parents weren't watching, so I told them I was hungry. They told me to make a sandwich. I told them I wanted to eat at Enchilada Klaxon, more specifically the one in downtown Ravinia. They obliged and drove me there.

            There was no parking lot, only a large field of grass between the road and the restaurant. I leaped out of the car, ran to the building, and shoved open the door. The windows were dark, so my parents could tell something was wrong, but they did not stop me. I glanced around the darkened room, but didn't see anything unusual except broken dishes and overturned tables. I walked behind the counter. Nothing was stolen, but there was a faint light coming from a nearby doorway. It led into a corridor which led to the building's open back door.

            I rushed outside into the open field to see that the entire lot was surrounded by news reporters. I don't just mean a section of it, I mean the entire multi-dozen-yard perimeter of it. Their voices echoed softly to where I stood.

            “This just in! Boy rushes to scene of the attack at Enchilada Klaxon! Will he catch the mystery attacker?”

            “The temperature is sixty-four, the nightly sky is clear and the wind is blowing in a roundabout way. Perfect weather for action.”

            “The kid's parents say he does this kind of thing all the time. We say he needs to get a life.”

            Out of the shadows, from between a dumpster and a pile of rubble, burst the attacker itself. It was no longer a portal. It was a giant paperclip, much like the helper icon included in old versions of Microsoft Office. It bounced away from me into the field, making an unrealistic sound effect as it went. The reporters chronicled its every move.

            “Whoa! Look at it go!”

            “That thing looks familiar to me. I have a strong urge to hate it.”

            I rushed after it. It was fast, but I was faster. Once I caught it, I pounced upon it and tackled it. With all my might, I ripped it apart. Its gleaming metal vanished as it became a clump of tattered fabric. It lay motionless upon the grass, finally defeated. I stood back up and looked around.

            “Hey, he won! I didn't see that coming!”

            I woke up.