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.
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