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.