Crimson Bullfinches

Several dreams last night, one where I fell again, and this time scraped up my knee as well as twisted my ankle and banged up a hip. But the worst part was that I tore holes in my favorite pair of pants.

The last dream this morning found me in my VR rig at the office, logged into Steam Trunk with my non-development character trying to replicate a teleportation game bug that had been reported, but we were unable to reproduce it with the development accounts. (Probably because they had a different teleport/instance tracking system.)

I was playing in a high mob intensity area, working on a king of the mountain scenario, one of the slightly more common reported trigger areas, when I overlapped the bounding box of an "Extra Large" wolf mob. The sanity teleport kicked in. Then all the teleportation gizmos in my inventory, one after another, began to fire. I was suddenly at the bottom of the hill, then on the edge of some violet and blue cliffs, about seventy clicks away (one of my "vacation" teleports had fired.) Then to a sandy beach, then to a portrait mobile device view of the minimalist map (low bandwidth, icon based for mobile devices) then several others, including the holding area for one of the more popular team sport gauntlet arenas. When I appeared there, I was also in my Crimson Bullfinch uniform, so at least the uniform widget part of that teleport charm was working along with the teleport. The uniform was a sort of padded striped looking armor with a catching mitt on one manipulator and a ranged thrower on the other. I also had the wide angle /medium range helmet. I could see the top down gauntlet overlay showing a match in progress. I noted that both teams were advancing off center from each other in a four by four square, and had passed one another, but just before the match turned into a straight race the cowboy hats at the top of the leftmost square snared the top four of the opposing team and then their strikers opened up, knocking the other team's cargo tokens willy-nilly across the narrow field of play. A sneaky maneuver well executed. As I blinked away from that location I got a message from another player complimenting me on the outfit, and asking what color it was. The last couple of teleport gizmos fired and I was left sitting on the top of a stepped pyramid overlooking a jungle. I made a note that the text communication overlay needed to be improved in the VR interface.

Before debriefing with the debug team I searched back through the messages to respond to the player who asked about my gear. I explained that it was my "Gauntlet" scout/striker uniform, and the team colors were dusky maroon with black pinstripes.

Then I went back to the VR to try to figure out, with the bug fix team, where the heck I ended up, and how the bug had fired not only the usual teleport gizmos I had in my inventory, but even the unopened charms in my mystery loot trunk. The Mystery loot charms weren't even supposed to be generated until they were opened. I looked in the "Mysteries Trunk." All of the items were still there, and all indicated that they were still unopened.

The detail on the "Gauntlet" map was amazing. Also, I seemed to know that Gauntlet Matches were played in teams of Two, Four, Eight, Twelve or Sixteen. The Crimson Bullfinches fielded all of the team sizes. In the top down map, each player was indicated by a top down view of their headgear with their number below it and their cargo token in the center (if it hadn't been displaced yet.) Little icons next to them showed what type of manipulator they had and if your range and sensitivity were enough, you could see active charms by zooming in. The Crimson Bullfinches B-Team was one of the open teams used for pickup games, their uniforms were white with maroon pinstripes. Don't know why my brain thought it was important that I knew that.