Xenodreams

So I don't usually use this blog for "personal" posts, but eh, I needed somewhere to write this.

Like most folks, I forget most of my dreams. Occasionally, however, I remember a long on with surprising clarity. When that happens I usually feel compelled to write it down somewhere, so let's see how that goes.

The dream started with a remake of Xenogears (an old but awesome PS1 game) with voice acting and 3D characters rather than sprites, but somehow I ended up watching/playing Xenosaga (its 3 part PS2 successor). As it often goes in dreams, I eventually ended up inside interacting with the characters, sorta.

So we were at this enemy space station fightin' one of the big bads. We beat him back but realize he's not beaten for long and we need to make our escape (which is similar to what happened in the actual game). The party finds a bunch of fighters and we commandeer them to make our escape. I ended up being co-pilot for Jin Uzuki, the main character's brother, which is weird because he wasn't even in the game that scene was from, but he's a cool guy so I didn't complain. Once we got our helmets on and the cockpit closed and figured out the flight controls we were off on a whirlwind big city adventure.

Neither of us were experienced with the craft, but being the smart fellows we were, we figured we'd learn as we went along. We sort of did, but we also sort of flew into some sort of anomaly that sent us flying back in time.

We ended up in like, 1940s Detroit or something. There were a bunch of teenagers cleaning up a park nearby, and for some reason Jin hopped out and started helping. Nobody seemed to question the fact that a middle aged Japanese man with a giant Katana and a futuristic flightsuit had just appeared out of nowhere and grabbed a rake.

Our ship appeared to have mysteriously developed cloaking ability, so I wandered around a bit before returning and hopping out as well. The party seemed to have finished their project, so Jin and I joined a few of them to go awanderin'. We were a bit irked at having landed in an age without many of the technological conveniences we were used to (by the standards of the far futurey space age, brick buidings were like mud huts) but we tried to do our best to settle in. After all, there were far worse times we could be sent to.

We got along well with some of our new acquaintances, but we were still thrilled when we learned that the Zohar (a mysterious, powerful and important relic that plays a large part in the Xeno* games) was being used in experiments in a nearby lab. This didn't make much sense since the Zohar should've been in Africa at the time wouldn't be discovered for like 100 more years, but whatevs. Dream logic.

Figuring that this might somehow have our solution, we took our little ship and broke into the lab, sneaking/crashing our way to the Zohar. Jin worked some magic which looked deceptively like mashing buttons and hoping for the best, and us, our ship and 2 unlucky security guards who happened to be nearby all got sucked into a flash of light and ended up in a desert somewhere.

Our new companions seemed a bit upset, so I used the ship's external speakers to say "So while it's perfectly reasonably for you to be upset, we ARE all stuck in a desert together, so it might be wise to stop banging on our ship so we can all work together." That seemed to placate them, so we set about the business of finding food and shelter. I found some scrawny bushes that would do for kindling, and Jin went off to find food while our guests tried to stop wanting to kill us.

Eventually Jin radio'd that he had found food, a herd of sheep (in the desert, go dream logic), and he was off to the east of us. Of course we had no idea if it was really east, but we'd seemed to have made an unspoken agreement to pretend that this planet's sun worked like Sol and did the whole rise east/set west thing. Our guests wandered off in the wrong direction, but I managed to catch up with them and set 'em right.

After a bit of wandering in what we though was Jin's direction, we found . . . an inn. In the middle of the dessert, a quaint little building like you'd find in a quiet country town. So we went in (except for some reason I crawled in through a window) and found Jin sitting at a table. The "meat" was, uh, unusual and I began to suspect that, considering we were potentially on an alien world, "sheep" had been an approximation. Nevertheless, it wasn't bad tasting and it didn't kill anyone, so it seemed to be ok.

At this point the necessities of eating forced our two guests to remove their helmets, revealing that they were not the burly angry stereotypical guard dudes I'd been expecting, but actually were two very attractive young women. It seemed we'd been able to set our differences aside and we had a more or less pleasant dinner chat. (It's worth noting that the girls were wearing high tech body armor like ours, despite having come from dream-1940s.)

Eventually we were visited by the locals, an elderly woman dressed all in brown. We tried to communicate with her, but despite trying greetings in every language we know (which for my part seemed to include a LOT of D&D languages), we were unable to find common ground. I was about to try Abyssal and Infernal but decided against it since I didn't know what kind of place this was, and what effect speaking the words of such fell tongues would have. Plus I doubt that would've worked either.

She wandered off and we went back to contemplating our food, when one of the girls heard someone calling her name. I forget what it was, which irks me, but I think it started with an M. Marika or something? We'll go with that. I advised her not to wander off alone, since we had no idea what this place was and that was more than a little bit suspicious, but she would not be denied and rushed off to find the caller. I followed her cautiously, since I didn't think my suspicions were unwarranted.

It seems I was right, as she wandered into a dark room, and some beast lurking on the ceiling snapped down to bite her. I pulled her out of the way just in time (dream hero, go!) and produced an energy blade with which I cut the creature in two, presumably killing it. We carefully made our retreat from the room and . . . I woke up. That was the end of that. Alas. Oh well, maybe I'll get to see the end of the story when I fall asleep next, though that seems unlikely.