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Fermius Firefly

A Dream Log, whenever I remember the dreams I've had.

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Location: San Marcos, United States

Fermius is a pen name drawn from a series of short fiction I wrote when I published the small press magazine Stellanova (on paper.) I play RPG games to escape from my daily grind as a technology wage slave for the state of California. I eat out a lot in order to do my part in supporting our increasingly service level economy. I am butler to 2 feline masters. If you ask them they will tell you I'm not very good at it, late with dinner, don't have enough hands with brushes in them, and sometimes I even lock them out of their office.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Dream City Air Defense

The sky over my dream city was full of aircraft, blue and silver torsos with silver short wings. Instead of flying however, they hovered. I was in a very small agile craft and was weaving in and out of them, hunting the actual airborne invaders. 

My craft was equipped with lasers, and cameras. Apparently this was a game aircraft and not really armed. I was supposed to be flying amongst the aircraft that hovered over the city playing a game. Unfortunately there was a real invasion going on. The blue checked cowlings  were actually box kites with short wings. I was flying above them and never noticed if there were physical strings or not. 

I dodged and wove around them until I came upon the enemy aircraft carrier, a giant charcoal colored, plane filled landing field that lumbered through the sky, its defense guns taking shots at the kites that surrounded them but having little effect on the paper craft.

I lined up and made an "attack run" on the carrier. It took two passes of me flying at them with my ineffective game lasers and wing flashes (cameras) to get them to launch an intercept.

At that point I hoped to use my superior speed and maneuverability to lure them into crashing with the kites. 

This was a plan that was actually working as I woke up.

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Sunday, September 25, 2011

Arch Bridge Romance

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I was in the northern Dream City, the one with the highly arched pair of bridges over the bay. In this particular dream I was trying to get a couple together for a walk across the bridge. Tricky part was, they had each been separated from their groups and one was on the lift and the other in the crowd waiting for the lift.

The complication was that there was a large crowd of tourists who were less than polite, they kept cutting one another off, and were loading up the spacing gate in such a way as to create a hazard. Then the park staff would have to clear some of them from the gate, and while that was happening more would show up and demand to all be let on together.

It took me several tries to explain that the park would only let eight to twelve people on at a time, to prevent bridge collapse. This wasn't true of course, it had more to do with the capacity of the lift. (Any number who fit could climb the stairs and then walk across the bridge.) The noisome tourists got out of the elevator and were now in the courtyard arguing amongst themselves in an attempt to make eight to twelve person groups. 

The young man got off the lift so the first group of twelve could all ride together.

This was the opening I needed to get the young man and his (soon to be) woman together, suggesting that they both looked fit and therefore the four flights of stairs wouldn't pose a challenge to them. (And since no one hardly ever takes the stairs, it was actually more private.) The view was also better as the stairs were on the underside of the bridge for the first three quarters of the climb and you could look almost directly down at the ships and the bay below.

The woman asked if I was going to come along. The young man looked properly relieved when I said I had to drive over the bridge, as I lived far to the south. At that point myriad futures seemed to coalesce; I knew that I had succeeded.

I was pretty sure that my presence in the pedestrian access area, when I had arrived in a car, would be enough of a mystery for them to ponder together as they climbed the stairs.

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Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Found DROG File

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My brother and I were traveling together in a pair of wildly mismatched vehicles. I was in Little Red and he was in a large blue and silver van. We entered a town that looked like someone had beat it about the head and shoulders with a tree trunk.

We stopped in a clear spot in the center of town near what looked like it had been a park. Every manufactured item in the park was broken, burned or bent into unrecognizability. 

As we made our way towards the center of the park I started to get nervous. Turned out there was ahold reason. Three balls of trash and debris began to roll after us, converging as they came.

It looked like we were able to out maneuver them, but each time we did they learned from it and didn't fall for our tricks. 

My brother thought we were close enough to the cars to outrun them, but I knew that while his van would likely drive away from one or two hits, Little Red was unlikely to. 

I did know that my car was going to just start up and go, as I had left the engine on. 

We needed to outsmart them just one more time, so this time we split up, but looped back around, then took off with the three of the now over ten foot high balls crashing into one another. That gave us enough time to get to our vehicles. 

I have no idea why I thought they would stop chasing us after we left the park.  Because if anything, they were faster on the road.

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Exploration, With Installation

I was swimming around the very picturesque and massively undercut islands looking for a place to haul myself out of the rapidly cooling waters. All th while I was trying to configure Open Office on my waterproof tablet device. I ended up reinstalling the whole thing before I finally found that there was a special .odt file that needed to be deleted and replaced with a customized version for my device.

I never did find a place to climb out where I could enjoy the dark green jungle and flashing whitecaps on the dark blue sea. I kept expecting to see giant squid; thank you Minecraft.

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Saturday, September 03, 2011

Play Test

Dreamed I was working with SCV on Spare-Parts Online. We had a pair of systems up and running with about eight people on line with me. I was running on a system that was in debug mode, one screen was a duplicate, in layout, of the main screen, but filled with the text of the background calculations and current database values. 

I was trying to focus on the gameplay itself but kept finding myself looking over to the data display. After about twenty minutes or so I realized that the other players weren't seeing all the experience building, etc, so didn't have the distractions I did. 

The sp game system in the dream was much different than the pencil and paper game in that there were live Action Point recovery indicators, and the sliders that indicated effect and focus were continually changing as the initiative and actions flowed.

There was a three stacked circle display over the character, faded but visible, that showed the various resources a player could bring to bear at any moment in the game. The circles were the classic red, white, and blue.

One thing that was very different was the concept of resource fatigue and injury, without "Hit Points" to keep track of. Injuries directly affected the performance stats and equipment use related to the character's injury location. 

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