Modern Fantasy Adventure

        I dreamed quite the active adventure last night. Running with N and A in a broken down city of some sort. N had a sort of Gatling gun. We found ourselves helping find and recover a group of orphans who had run from a train wreck caused by marauders.

        I wish I could draw well enough to capture the richness of the dream environment. Not to mention the crunch of the gravel and stone under foot, the smell of the charred ruins, the sounds of people in the distance, shouting. We made our way through a set of old subway tunnels where a man in a flat brimmed hat had a ‘universal’ remote for us. Unfortunately we had to excuse ourselves as I heard a child shouting.

        We raced up into a broken down building, I asked N to blow a hole in the wall on the third floor. Leaping through, (not really flying, but a hell of a jump) I found the child and picked her up before the single guard in the room could react. We became invisible, I’m not quite sure how I was able to do that, but I did. The little girl kept crying, though, giving our position away. He made the fatal mistake of following me as I jumped back out of the hole in the wall. N’s Gatling gun took him and tossed him back into the room. The little girl was so stunned by my action that she stopped crying. We landed as though we’d only dropped a few feet. I knew that I always landed that way, no matter what height I was dropped from.

        When we got back to the safety of the tunnels, the man with the wide brimmed flat hat (priest?) waited patiently for us. He still had the remote. I took it and thanked him. I looked at it closely. It didn’t have any manufacturing marks on it, no labels other than you might find on a standard DVD controller. (No eject button.)

        I tested it. It seemed to control time for everyone around me.

        “It’s guardian angel on a stick,” A commented.

        “No, I think that’s the guardian angel,” I pointed the man with the long coat and flat brimmed hat, who was all ready vanishing into the crowd. He tipped his hat to us. N and A decided that I should hold on to the remote, as I’m the one he handed it to, and I didn’t seem to have any other weapon. (Although being able to become invisible and jump 60 feet into the air gives one a considerable advantage over the average bear.)

        Later we were on a slope. N had run up to the ridge, but took a stun blast from someone on the other side. She sprayed the Gatling gun right down over us. I hit the pause button as the top of my head exploded. Then rewind. I unexploded. A unexploded. I let time step forward and found that I could move and pull A out of the way. I let the stream of bullets pass overhead and ran up to N to pull her finger off of the firing stud and bring her down the hill to safety.

        I knew that the remote had saved us, and that the batteries were rapidly depleting. I thought I could feel them recharging, taking energy from me, somehow. We snuck back down around the ridge. I used the FF button to allow us to see where the patrols went, and then rewound to our starting point. I went invisible and dashed across the encampment into the tent where two more of the kids were being held. I cut them loose and told them to hold on to me. I hit pause and we ran back to N and A. I could tell the remote was almost drained at that point. I looked it over, again the feeling that it was recharging. I found a button lock and immediately knew how to set a password. I keyed in a number, and then tested that I could unlock it. Satisfied, I tossed it into an empty cargo pocket.

        We walked the kids back to the subway station, where we found that everyone else had also been recovered. N, A and I climbed (well I jumped) to the top of the train. We stayed on until we were out of the ruined city, N clearing the single blockade with a well-aimed burst from the Gatling gun. A used some sort of miniature radar dish to cause the marauders to rapidly flee the area.

        On the way back N asked if there was a way to FF us so we didn’t have to make the long walk.

        “I don’t think so.”

Ad astra per technica,

FF