Audio Engineering, City Mages

       I dreamed I was recording the on-air efforts of a female talk show host. We were broadcasting and recording from a cave in the mountains. Our internet connection suddenly failed, and shortly thereafter the phone connection also failed.
       "Get me back on the air!" the woman screamed at me.
       "I'm just here to record you." I did manage to reset the router and get the internet connection back up, but the connection to the radio station would not link up. "We need a real engineer here. How about if I send the last caller through to the station via email, and they can play that until the connection is re-made."
       "Well hurry!"
       I hurried. In the process I managed to clip off a few seconds at the end of the call. I knew the Doctor was going to be angry about that, too, so didn't tell her. I managed to get a response from the email I sent to the engineer there, and he took the file and set it to play on air. I then started working on making the phones work again. I couldn't get her desk phone to come up, but managed to forward the calls to my cell phone, which I then was able to plug the headphone wires in and rewire them to go through the sound board and into the recorder as well as the headphones.
       The Doctor didn't want to use my cell phone, so I had to re-forward the calls to her cell phone and connect my hacked headsets to it. She complained about that, too. But soon we had her back on the phone with her callers. I was able to start recording them, and then emailed the recordings to New York. It meant a delay of several minutes, but the Doctor was back on the air.
       I could tell from the looks she was giving me that this arrangement wasn't making her happy. I braced myself for impact after the final call of her three hour show was up.
       She ranted for a good 15 minutes, I recorded the whole thing, since she didn't bother to take off my headsets.
       I then forwarded the emails from the NY engineers, indicating the trouble was on their end and they were working with our hosting company to fix it. I then showed her the commendation from the station manager on my quick fix, emailing two to three minutes of the show at a time to them so they could keep on the air, even though the broadcast was a little bit delayed, we were still on. I showed the conversation I had via email with the engineers where we worked out a way to make a cell connection back to NY as a backup in the future should this happen again. And then I pointed out that I had cut up and resoldered my own headset rig to keep her on the air.
       She apparently was not a person who would back down in the face of evidence that she and her raft of assumptions was wrong. So the last thing I showed her was that most of the equipment we were using, the mixer, the MP3 Recorder, the studio microphones, etc, were all my own personal equipment.
       "I can afford to buy all of that myself."
       "Good, I've left you a list so you can."
       "You're not taking that stuff out of here!"
       "I have just sat through twenty minutes of you explaining how I'm not good enough to run your show. Well, even after I've showed you what NY and I went through to keep you on the air today, nearly live, you can't seem to say you're sorry, or even thank-you. I don't need the aggravation, so I will be going back to my studio. You hired me 'at will' instead of on a contract. Well I agreed, because my wife is a fan. 'At will' works both ways, Doc."
       "But, Monday's show!"
       "You have two almost three days to find someone or learn how to work the controls yourself. There are plenty of folks out there who can run a mixer and recorder."
       The Doctor was still shouting when the phone rang and NY was on the line. Not for her, for me. Apparently they had re-established the connection just at the end of the show, and had heard everything. Rather than hand me the phone, the Doctor put the conversation on speaker phone.
       The senior engineer begged me to stay on, promised to set up the system I'd suggested, offered a yearly contract at a considerably higher rate of pay, enough to retire from my real job, in fact, and then pointed out that the Doctor would have to come to their studio in San Diego, or NY if she didn't find a way to keep me on, they weren't paying for anyone else to make house calls on her behalf, that wasn't in their contract.
       "Fine, I'll pay someone myself."
       The engineer asked me to stop at the studio Saturday afternoon, "I know we can find a place for you."
       I finished packing up my stuff, and left, knowing that by the time I got down the mountain there would be several messages on my machine about making bumps and recording SSA's (Self Service Announcements) for Monday's show. Before I was at the end of her driveway, the Doctor would completely forget that I'd quit.

       Just before waking I had a short little dream where N brought me a little orange headed ape, an orangutan! I didn't know what to say, other than what the hell were we going to do when it grew up and weighed 200 pounds.
       Cut to the future, I am barely able to hold on to an intricately engineered staff device of some kind as I race across a warehouse district rooftop. I come to the edge of the roof. Whoever, or whatever, is chasing me lands on the roof with a loud chunking sound then I can feel the roof shiver as it glides towards me.
       "Where is that damned Ape?" I muttered to myself, then managed to make a line shoot from the staff out to some power lines across the street.
       The effort almost wipes me out. Just when I figure I'm going to have to use my staff as a club against whatever is following me, a huge red and orange head pops up over the ledge of the roof. I'd say my little orangutan had grown quite a bit more than 500 pounds. He grabbed me under one ape smelling arm and grabbed the shimmering line with the other. He leapt out into the space between the buildings and swung us safely down to the ground level, a full half a block away.
       I turned back to see a long Komodo, about 12 feet long, slither down the warehouse, shattering the windows it used as foot holds.
       The orangutan stood, shouting and growling a challenge. I was too weak to support him, though, and even with the two red tabbies rushing down the alley ways to help me, I didn't think I had enough in me other than for an escape.
       Suddenly, there was a tiger, and a mustang with a robed rider. There was an Asian woman, in a gold traced silk gown who stepped out of a Honda convertable, another tiger jumped out of the passenger seat and heeled as she approached.
       "You should bond one of my babies instead of your little kitties, next time." She said as she bent down to pet my white footed tabby on the head. The tabby rubbed her hand, then jumped up to hug the young tiger around the neck. Her adult tiger had joined my orangutan in corralling the Komodo, who's handler had not shown him or herself yet.
       "More juice with less brawn, besides, they can get into places un-noticed."
       "I thought you'd given up the breaking and entering game," she looked me over, "but apparently not. You have some pretty serious injuries there."
       The man in black dismounted and the mustang, hooves bursting into flame joined the other two large animals.
       The Komodo stopped its advance, realized it was in danger of being flanked, then turned back to climb the warehouse, where only the orangutan had any real chance of keeping up with it.
       The man in black tied back his slicker and withdrew an ebony short staff. He touched me with it. "Broken bones in your foot, how the hell did you make it this far?" There was an agonizing buzzing and I nearly fainted from the pain.
       The Asian lady shot him a look, "Gentle!"
       "I may owe you both my life, but I don't have to be happy about being drawn into this, and it works faster if I don't have to be gentle."
       "Faster is good. I had no intention of drawing you into this, either of you." The pain lessened and the buzzing fell off some. My tabbies were now at my heels looking up at the man in black.
       "My kittens cannot seem to say 'no' to yours," the Asian woman said. She turned back to her car and summoned a fringe and golden bell covered staff to her hands.
       "And I always pay my debts, I owe you a huge one. Damn! those cats a strong, I've mended a half dozen bones and they've powered it all. How did you teach them to do that."
       "Yes, you will have to teach us both that trick some day."
       "That, and the giant ape trick. I really want to know how you do that." I could tell the man in black was pondering the benefits of a twenty foot long flaming horse. My orangutan friend had grown to half the height of the building and was in a position to pick up then squash the Komodo. I stopped him. I didn't intend to start a war here. The Komodo flailed around in the ape's grip, unable to get a tooth or claw on the giant ape.
       "It is no wonder you never have energy, you give it all to your shimarae. (I am not certain exactly what she said, it may have been in Chinese.)"
       "You have to spend it to get it."
       "Or collect it and nurture it," she replied.
       "There, I'm done, and still ready to party. Should we take care of this lizard for you?"
       "No, I don't want to start a war here. Put him back with the thought that he did his job and scared the intruders away."
       "Oh! tricky, I like a challenge," the bells on her staff began to jingle in a rising crescendo of sound.
       I told the ape to put the Komodo back on the roof.
       "Ung?"
       "Really, more people stuff, trust us, it'll work," I added a "for awhile" under my breath.
       As the ape shrunk back down to his still giant normal size, another couple of staff wielding folks showed up. With the exception of the Chinese woman, who was all about tradition, I had noticed that the gaudier the costume and animal, the less talented the mage. Most of these were very flashy, but there were a couple, like myself, where the flash was exclusive to their staff and animal companions (if they had any, some could work without them, I wasn't one of them.) There was one man in the crowd who I took note of. He was dressed completely normal, save for his snakeskin boots and his stave was sheathed in a snakeskin pool cue bag (and might have been a pool cue for all I know) He was powerful, I could feel it ripple.
       While most stayed a half block away or more, he strode right up to us. I think he may have been tougher than the three of us together, but he wasn't showing any hostility.
       "Trouble?"
       "Injured myself while exercising the ape. He's tough to keep up with. You?"
       "I may need some help and you look like a good team."
       "We're not a team, I just owe him a favor."
       "Or a few dozen," the Chinese girl amended, "We are acquainted, but don't normally work together."
       "Perhaps I can change that. Let me buy you dinner in exchange for listening my proposal."

       I would dearly love (except for the pain part,) for this dream to continue at a later date. I really want to know what I was doing that had me running from the Komodo in the first place.