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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.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

This is me...Sadly


Only instead of "French" read "Latin."

Cecil and the Alien Apocolypse

In this dream, I found myself behind the wheel of Cecil, my old '69 Plymouth Satellite. I'd found it parked on the top of an abandoned parking garage, and had, for some reason, taken the old keys as a sort of good luck charm when the aliens attacked.

The aliens were long gone, having either been defeated, or having found what they were looking for, gone on their way. The human world had been pretty much left in a complete shambles, however. Oddly, a rather largish group of aliens had also been left behind, but not voluntarily, it would seem. One of them was now traveling with me. It climbed into the passenger seat after tossing it's collection of bags into the back seat next to my rollie and backpack. After I put the pair of 5 gallon cans in the trunk, I climbed into the driver's seat. I turned the engine over, only slightly amazed that it started on the first try. The V-8 rumbled in the enclosed space, setting off car alarms several rows in all directions.

"That's my baby, I missed you." I patted the dashboard, it had been restored, as had the seats, and was now a plush dark brown pile. The beige vinyl seats had been redone in dark brown and grey herringbone, very attractive. The steering wheel had also been replaced, a bentwood wheel polished to a high gloss. I carefully backed the car out and started down the ramp to exit the parking garage. I had it in mind to head back towards home, to check on family and friends, and to switch over to Little Red, who would be quite a bit more quiet, not to mention getting fifty MPG versus fifteen.

I tried to explain how the seat belt worked. To a creature with no true permanent form, I suppose it seemed an odd thing. Their own craft "seats" were essentially buckets with padded holes around the top rim. After a bit I gave up and just told it to "hold on a best you can." It oozed down into the floor area.

We drove past the other empty cars, only occasionally setting off a car alarm as we drove by. My companion slouched down further in the passenger seat floor, apparently frightened of the noise. I suppose I should have been a little more worried about the noise as well, just as we exited the parking structure to head down the four story exterior spiral, there was a loud explosion on the exposed part of the exit ramp. The structure rocked and I managed to get us to a stop before plunging into the wrecked and still smoking hole in the exit ramp spiral. Still, one of the front tires dipped onto the abyss. I was glad the Plymouth was rear wheel drive and was able to pull us back up to safety.

"What the hell? It's not like we're a threat to anyone!"

We got out and picked our gear up, back on foot, I lowered our bags by rope down to the bottom of the spiral, then, trying to stay on the sturdiest parts of the rubble we scampered down as best we could. I'd left Cecil parked with the keys in him. Thinking I would go back up and try pushing him over to the entry ramp, and this time just letting him coast down silently.

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Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Sailing Away

This morning's feature was a cruise on an inflatable sailing ship. I inflated the vessel with my shop vac, then launched it into the surf next to the pier where Ruby's is located. Once aboard, I was trying to get the mast and rigging set up right, while also getting my navigation software configured. I wondered why I hadn't done that before the launch.

The sea was fairly choppy, and the ship seemed to be just a little bit floppier than would strictly be desirable. I finally got the jib up and the boat headed out to sea, where it seemed to be smoother sailing. Once under way I went below to set up my cabin, essentially a camp stove, bed and cooler with power provided by some solar cells on Mylar atop the cabin. I didn't like the way the cabin was flexing, and started the process of adding more air to the ship.

Te further out to sea I got, the better the sailing became. Soon I was skipping along over the waves, and the ship bounced me along like a giant wind driven bounce house. I was glad I had a safety line.


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Monday, January 07, 2013

Aircraft Fantasy, and, Sun Block

In the first dream, I was, once again, flying around the broken world in an aircraft with four wings put together like a "+" sign with the cockpit and the main thruster on the centerline. The cockpit was a funky rotating thing, as the whole aircraft had to rotate 90 degrees to land on its tail like a '50s rocketship. when landed the thing looked a lot like a Christmas tree, especially since it was painted in green camoflage.

I landed in the cleared parking lot of a large strip mall. The cars that had been left behind had been all pushed up against the perimeter of the parking lot as a makeshift wall of sorts. It wasn't immediately clear if they were supposed to be keeping things in or out. The others of the group soon landed in the empty parking lot, most of them in ultralights that would have little trouble getting out in a hurry. A couple of them landed on the roof of the longest building, as they wanted to have a little bit of air beneath them when they rolled off, and the wall of cars made them nervous.

We unholstered our ray guns and set off to open the gates of the mall, to see what we were up against.

Unfortunately, that's where that dream ended.


Sun Block

The next dream started in a much less apocalyptic mode. I was in the park with several of my friends, we'd brought out my telescope to track one of the largest sunspots ever in recorded history. It was big enough that you could just make it out using the pinhole projection method.

I got the scope all set up and even had the tracking motor working properly, we set up a drawing board with paper on it for a screen and had my camera ready as well. It was about five in the afternoon, so we figured we would have about an hour before the sun went behind the houses next to the park. Several of us had brought jackets to sit on, and to wear if we decided to stay and use the telescope after it got dark enough.

I managed to get the image focused on the paper, and there was the giant sunspot, surrounded by a fractal dusting of smaller spots. That surprised several of my friends, as they hadn't been following the photographs. I had printed the photo from a couple of days ago, when the sun's rotation was in nearly the same position. Some of the group started outlining the sunspots with a marker.

"You missed one," CD said.

"No, that's new, it wasn't there a minute ago," SCV, her husband, said, then drew a dot where it had appeared.

"Look, there's a bunch of new ones."

"I've never seen sunspots form so quickly," I noted, starting to feel nervous.

"I wonder how many there would have to be for us to start feeling cooler?" One of the people asked, not sure at this point which friend it was.

"Sunspots are actually hotter than the rest of the sun," SCV pointed out, "so we'd actually start feeling warmer."

"But wouldn't it get darker?"

I thought that it might, as the spectrum shifted into a range that we couldn't see. I looked away from the drawing at the sky, thinking it was a little bit darker than I remembered. The image of the sun was now mottled, much like the skin of a rotting orange. The sunspots were beginning to merge, and SCV suggested that I should start the camera up in movie mode. The sky was getting darker.

I put in a new memory stick and switched over. Just in time. Like soap bubbles merging, the sunspots began to stretch towards one another and to join up, soon the sky was noticably dimmer, a false dusk. About ten minutes after the sun was more "spot" than sun, I noticed there was a huge aurora shimmering above the north and west.

"I think we might want to get inside, or put on some more sunblock. This doesn't look good."

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