The One With Buzz Lightyear

Right, fine that's enough of re-posts and guest posts. You guys deserve some fresh, quality produce. So, here, steaming hot and fresh out of the brain-oven is The One With The BUZZ LIGHTYEAR

The sun streamed through Andy’s open window. On the wooden floor Woody and the other toys were playing cards and idly whiling away the empty hours performing routine maintenance. Hamm and Rex were up on the desk in front of the window, they were each using either side of the console controller to manoeuvre their character in a computer game. 

On the screen the strong, dashing Buzz Lightyear of Star Command dodge heavy fire and rolled athletically behind cover. Wearing his characteristic white and green armour with scorch marks and dents, he tensed and then exploded back into the fray. 

Picking off enemies with his wrist laser, he sprinted (sprant?) for the closing blast doors that would, within seconds, prevent his access to Zurg’s underground fortress. With the last ounce of strength he dived through the gap and the doors snapped shut.

But in the brightly lit interior a huge green tentacle monster awaited. All slime and poor graphics. Buzz was trapped and his laser had no effect. Slowly, surely doom advanced upon him.

Restart   Y   /   N  ???

With a cry, Rex threw up his tiny arms and Hamm loudly claimed to anyone listening that the game was a fix and couldn’t be beaten. Buzz who’d been stood, leaning against the windowfram watching the street outside nonchalant as a space ranger can be, sighed, walked over and took the control.

Restart Y.

Within minutes (or instantly because this is dream time and my brain can do what it likes, including having GREAT rendering on Buzz Lightyear, but awful rendering on scenery and tentacle monster) Buzz was back behind the same wall for cover again. This time he’d managed to acquire Hyper Armour and picked up a Plasma Launcher along the way in a side quest. He stood pristine and barely out of breath, no scorch marks and cheesy grin firmly in place.

Buzz in hyper armour. Obviously. Not Magneto (at all)

Strolling out from behind cover he vaporised the approaching enemies and, turning the weapon up to 11, blasted a hole through the fortress doors big enough to drive a car through. He walked to the hole, peered past the still-glowing, tortured steel plates and saw the huge tentacle monster sliming toward him. Seconds later burnt green calamari littered the floor and Buzz shrugged off the, now-spent shoulder cannon and walked through the hole in the door.

Into a deserted production facility.

Forget graphics, when you imagine this: Everything was crystal clear. The new-suped up armour was gone and had taken the wrist-mounted laser with it. I was completely alone.Row upon row of cold steel tables had the slight slant and drainage plug-hole that suggested bad, messy things happened here. From the ceiling hung chains ending in sharp steel hooks, covered in clotted, dried blood. What little light there was came from a few (far too few) white florescent tubes that blinked randomly.

I walked, silently between the tables. Looking for a way out. A way onward. But there was nothing but a locked door. White, like the rest of the room. Hall. Workshop. Whatever it was.

Behind me a test-tube fell to the floor from one of the tables and the tinkling of glass was accompanied by the clinking of the hanging steel chains. Maybe not completely alone. I froze.

My skin was crawling, my heart beat faster and faster in my throat and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Fighting every instinct I have, I forced myself to turn around. To face whatever was standing behind me. Poised. Ready to strike me in the face and tear me limb from limb.

But there was nothing there.

Then I saw them, two scorpion/human guards. Pale and gleaming. Armoured and dank in their chitin skins. Not truly alive and, therefore, incredibly difficult to stop, but fast, agile and single-minded. One scuttled across the ceiling and the other darted between the tables.

(Art by the talented MDMartin on dA which is here)

I ran, but locked in the room with them where was I to go. I knocked over a few tables to clear some space around me. If I could see them coming, I might be able to swing a kick or land a punch.

But it didn’t come to that. As the metal table legs screamed across the ceramic tiles on the floor, an answering shriek came from directly above me. I looked up in time to see a shape dropping on me, all legs and claws and venom. And death.

And I woke up rather than face it any longer...

Re-post: The One With The Bus Full Of Matresses

There's been a lot going on at this end of things. Firstly, I won the 200m time trial at the North of England Regional Track Sprints. Which I'm pretty cheerful about. 

 

 Also, the Space thing is going well, I'm like, 58th, which means that unless something goes really wrong in the next three weeks I get to fight for a place at space camp in September. We wait and see.

 

 In other news, I'm still living with Guen and it's awesome. Living with the rabbits: Less awesome. One of them runs away from me all the time. And the other is a sneaky bugger and keeps trying to sabotage my stuff. A few days ago she dropped my phone in a pint of lychee juice. Why? Giggles. Just for the fun of it.

 

 

Ah well.

 

Anyhow, I've been dreaming a lot recently, just not writing them down. Why? Because I'm lazy. So here's an oldie

 

The One With The Bus Full Of Mattresses

Mike, Bugsy (Malone...M'Lone...M. Lone...Mudassir Lone. Why am the only person that thinks this is a good nickname?) and I had gone on holiday to eastern Europe. I think it was Romania. Possibly, somewhere more chzek. Anyway, we each had a backpack and a tent and we were just messing about really, no particular purpose or anything. It had just started gently raining while we were walking along the side of a deserted road toward some mountains. We found an old abandoned bus which people had used to discard old mattresses. It was full to the brim. Mike and Bugsy climbed in, their combined weight pushing down the top of the mattress pile so it was about 50cm lower than the ceiling of the bus. I tried to climb into this gap and join them, we could kip here tonight. Thing is, that I didn't take my pack off, and with it on my depth is more than 50cm, which meant that, try as I might, I couldn't get in. This frustrated me enough to wake me up.

Knowing that I hadn't set my alarm, I picked up my phone to have a quick look at the time and work out whether of not I should get up. It was 7:41, I had at least an hour. Time to finish this dream at least. I turned over, refolded my pillow and went back to sleep.

The guys had done good work on the bus, it had been driven to a forest clearing at the top of a huge cliff, and the mattresses had been removed during the journey. Apparently in this part of the dream my travelling companions we're being played by my brother, my father, Adil (a guy from school) and a girl (sometimes played by Jo and sometimes by someone I didn't recognise). The bus also had a driver now, and the lights worked. In fact it might have been a different bus for all I know, the windows had been repaired and it didn't smell like rust anymore. The driver was standing outside about ten metres from the bus having a cigarette and looking at the sea at the horizon over the cliff.

The light had pretty much gone and we had the internal lights on the bus going. Six of the mattresses had been retained and were laid between the chairs (see diagram) and each had been claimed by one person to sleep in.

Above - The Layout of the new bus. The letters mark where the feet of each occupant would have been. Me = Me. D = Dad. A = Adil and C = Chris. Dr = Driver and G = Girl.

Dad got up, leant his pack against one of his seat and left the bus to talk to the driver outside. The rest of us played silly buggers in our sleeping bags for a while and then settled down to tell stories before going to sleep. Adil told this one.

"In the beginning Superman could not be beaten, even by kryptonite." As soon as the narrative started up, the view changed. The viewer was watching a cartoon. In seventies style, with a low frame rate to save production time. The areas of colour were flat and block filled and the back ground was repeated when the characters moved to save effort.

The cartoon showed Superman, in rather a cool outfit (like this but without the cape: http://hallofheroes.free.fr/Images/UltimateDC/superman.jpg) and some other superheroes exploring a cave structure in a growing mass of kryptonite here on earth (Superman Returns anyone?). Where the walls are cracked the green light of kryptonite shines through, with pulsing "ray" lines like in any good seventies cartoon. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the cave system starts collapsing. Chunks of green rock come falling from the roof and the heroes beat a hasty retreat.

Just as they we're coming to the mouth of the cave, Wonder Woman snagged herself on a sharp rock and couldn't make it free, so Supes flew back in to save her. He managed to throw her out of the cave mouth just before it closed.

He was trapped, in the dim green darkness. He didn't know if he was ever going to see the light of day again. The glow from the kryptonite lighting his prison, flickered and went out. His heart rose into his throat and that heart began beating faster and faster.

Above ground the other four heroes surveyed the rubble, clouds of poorly animated dust settled as the dusk claimed the sunlight. Suddenly, the ground shook once again and with the scream of a trapped animal CK burst from the shattered kryptonite, straight up as if shot from a cannon. He left the shot. A couple of seconds later his body landed on the sharp green shards in front of the other heroes with a crash and he got up babbling. Eye's rolling in his head he staggered backwards trying to put as much distance between himself and the kryptonite as possible. Crying and sweating, he brushed his arms and shoulders trying to remove the thousands of fragments of green from his skin and clothing.

"Bollocks!" said Chris. The scene cut abruptly back to the campers all sitting around in their sleeping bags in a bus. "are you trying to tell us, that Superman's kryptonite thing is psychosomatic? No way!"

"No, dude, seriously, it's true!" Adil insisted.

"Really? Alright, what happened next?" Chris asked intrigued.

"So, yeah, he staggered backwards" The scene cut back to the weeping Superman. Who was ripping his outfit from his body in an attempt to rid himself of the green splinters. Paying no heed to the cliff behind him he continued going backwards, and didn't even seem to notice when he had stumbled over it and was falling towards the rapidly approaching waves.

As soon as he hit the water, the cartoon stopped and it looked much more life like. With the kryptonite washed off by the water, Clark composed himself and started to tread water. He called out to a nearby boat, which picked him up.

The long thin, motorised canoe turned out to be full of Chinese shark-fishermen on their way back to Beijing with two or three live sharks thrashing around near their legs. In return for being rescued, Superman showed the fishermen the most efficient way to kill a thresher shark and a blue shark (which are the two species they had in the boat (what? I know my sharks)), but also told them why it was a bad idea to fish for sharks in this area, due to the fragile ecology and gave them other hunting grounds.

Before arriving in Beijing they had learned how to tie various knots, how to efficiently skin and/or fillet a shark so that they didn't have to just use the fins any more and how to keep their little outboard engine running properly. Then knowing it was about time for me to wake up, I opened my eyes and looked at my phone again, it was 8:58. Perfect.

Guest Post: The One With The Sweet Mop Of A Creature

Hello folks - I'm spending too much time on the track and not enough time dreaming recently, it seems. Luckily, I have friends who do dreaming for me. Here is another Guest Dream, this time from the Nrothern Territory in Australia.

The One With The Sweet Mop Of A Creature:

Legs all a jumble, I'm galavanting through the pricked shrubs of my habitat, navigating my path to a well known water hole like some desperate koala running from a bushfire. 

Thirsty, tired and on edge...with fur - a dark muddy mass of lanky legs and nested fur. What am I? I don't know. Some sweet mop of a creature. I have no want for meat. All I can think about is sucking on some chlorophyl. Sucking? I'm not even sure what kind of masticatory apparatus I have. 

A chorus of whispering grass and cicadas is loud all around me as I move in an unsuspecting daze. Suddenly, the sky opens blue, the air loses it's whiff of any wet comfort and I see before me a siren red desert landscape with a big black tack of a velodrome left of centre. 

The rustling and buzzing stops and is replaced by the wail-like whooshing of white wheels spinning round and round the loop. I'm scared, yet curious. I see Greg atop those wheels - adorned with a pointed black helmet and Lycra from head to toe. 

He reminds me of a robotic peddling human cross drone. I can't see his face but really want to. He is oblivious to the sordid meek creature in the bushes. 

That's all I remember. 

E. 

Guest Post - The One With The Rabbit Possession

Guest dream by my partner and co-adventurer - The One With The Rabbit Possession

Guen and Greg had been invited to a meeting in a countryside inn. The building was a squat, two-storey block, whitewashed and set slightly into a steep hillside in the middle of nothing but farmland. The inside was over-decorated with chintzy knick-knacks, floral plates and teacups and the like and filled with the sort of quiet regulars that you might expect in an out-of-the-way country pub.

 

The meeting they’d been summoned to was less ordinary. The Doctor and all of the past and present companions had been invited to council in the Inn’s saferoom. And some safefroom it was: The mirrored walls were feet thick and without windows, the door was impenetrable, thick and armed with a very solid lock. In the centre of the room was a long oval table, around which were seated many of the companions including Greg and the ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston).

Before the meeting was started, Guen remembered something she had left in the front rooms of the Inn and went to retrieve it. Almost immediately after she had left the room one of the companions that she did not recognise, a good looking, shorter man, with a tanned face and strong black hair rose and addressed the assembled group.

                “I will now seal the room” – He told them, and the group took their seats so the secret and protected meeting could begin. But the tanned man stepped out of the room completely and slammed the door closed.

Watching from a distance, hidden by other inn guests, Guen watched him lock the door* securely and felt cold dread. The doctor and the companions were trapped in a cell designed to withstand any attack and their jailer was walking off scott free.

But she didn’t have time to do anything about it right now, the other inn guests were behaving weirdly. Guen raced back to join a friend she’d made, a younger blonde girl. Never having been a companion, the girl had not been in the meeting and was now silent and afraid: The pub goers were possessed and their behaviour was changing rapidly and becoming more and more hostile. Guen grabbed her hand and they fled the front rooms.

The pair raced along the balcony that skirted the building, many, many metres off the ground**. The possessed mob tried to grab at them through the windows and Guen and the girl fought them off with planks of wood.

Finally, they scrabbled up onto the roof-top garden of the inn but the horde has found a way up there as well. But, here they changed. Their attack stopped and, although still trying to nibble and nip the other girl, they began to attempt to lick Guen on the hands and on the shins.

At this point the tenth Doctor appeared, and seeing through the change of behaviour of the dangerous guests he said “It’s OK now. They’re all possessed by the soul of your dead rabbit."

And, with that assurance in mind, Guen woke up.

*I hope it was wood – Sonic doesn’t do wood.

 **Many, many metres up on a two storey building – Tardis Inn much?

Send Greg To Space...

So, here's the deal.

For some reason, Lynx (Axe, to my American pals) are sending some people to space.

It's sub-orbital so I won't have time to set up any experiments *this* time, but its a start.
And the testing will be grueling and painful. Which I know you want to hear about.

To advance to testing I need to be in the top few of this leader-board.
Which you can help me achieve here: Vote for Me

From the bottom of my heart - Thank you.

Greg

The One With Polarised Lighting

Ugh, I had a pretty rough patch emotionally recently. Lots of self doubt and worry about the future. As is its custom during times of high stress, my subconscious has been trying to pick me up by screening a new and exciting film of its own creation each and *every* night.

As to whether this one cheered me up? Not hugely. But it was interesting none the less...

The One With The Polarised Lightning

The lectures had abated for a lunch and the poster session wasn't starting until 14:30. Chris and I took the opportunity to slip out of the beach-side hotel and conference centre to wander on the sand and skim stones in the surf.

Walking through the coarse grey sand, Chris and I expressed the exact same opinion at the exact same time: We sighed. To be alone, without the 5-10 students and professionals asking questions everywhere we stood was bliss. Without being asked to pose for photos or shake the hand of the 10-year old winner of such-an-such a science prize. Just...alone with our thoughts. Not a word was said.

Chris and I had given the last one of three keynote lectures at the symposium. Scientists from all over the world were in attendance and listened enraptured as Sir David Attenborough outlined an ambitious conservation plan that relied on emerging power and energy technologies and was so crazy it just might work. After this, my brother and I took Stage One. Between us we detailed a renewable energy system that used polarised lightning to power the cities and countries of the future. The watching audience had erupted into applause and questions and at 14:30, our posters would further explain the mechanics of the system. Until then though, our time was our own.  

(The conference centre looked a lot like the Apple Campus, but it overlooked the sea)

Five hundred metres or so down the beach there was a small café. We reached it and met our mother and grandmother for lunch. They'd not wanted to come up to the hotel. We ate and as we were all about to start the short walk back to the conference centre. I spotted a very interesting beetle (yeah, that bit is a LOT like real life). It was the shape of a soldier beetle, black and yellow striped like a Colorado potato beetle and had a bright purple head, making it one of the most striking insects I'd ever seen.

I walked closer to see it, but was distracted by finding Sir David sitting cross-legged in the sand, holding a fistful of grains and letting it flow slowly out as if from an hourglass. He looked up for a second, his worn face crossed with the lines of a long and illustrious life, and said "I am old. What good is life without productivity?", before letting the last of the sand run out of his fist and closing his eyes. 

I knelt down to talk to him, to tell him that every person in that hall had thought him productive, that his life was *so* full of meaning to so many, but I stopped. Partly because I couldn't think of the words. And partly because I'd just put my hand on a thistle and biting my tongue to prevent my crying out also prevented me from saying anything.

I stood back up, picking long, brittle thorns from my palm and strode after the three members of my family. I looked at my mum and thought that she would love life even if she were a disembodied brain and a jar with a single eyeball. Her phrase is where there's life, there's hope. And I was sure she'd say so if I asked her. I saw her catch Chris' attention and point offshore. And then I turned to look. And my heart raced.

About two kilometres offshore was a towering storm-cloud. The winds ahead of it were whipping up ocean froth and the waves were increasing in size. Neither of these thought meant much too me though. I knew that Chris had set our machine running before we gave our presentation. Without any lightning it had been a very dry demonstration, but if this storm became electric then, if our calculations had been correct, we would see something new.

At once the sky was split with lightning. Chris whooped and yelled. He had his polarised sunglasses on and screamed for me to put mine on as well. I did so just as the sky was lit again. The lighting was a myriad of colours. Some parts blue, some green, some crimson red and purple. I fell to my knees with relief and joy. It worked!

Exultant with joy, Chris ran into the surf still in his smart trousers, shirt and tie. I did the same. We splashed and shouted and grinned like idiots. Nothing could bring us down now.

Until I saw granny, our frail octogenarian granny, enter the water at the same time I felt the character of the surf change. The first of the big swells ahead of the thunderstorm were reaching the beach and they carried a lot more power than she could stand against. The sky had darkened under such heavy cloud, but in a flash of lightning I saw her swept out. By the next flash she had sunk. I swam to the spot and dived, but was unable to reach her. I could barely make anything out in the gloom, but her pale skin and white hair helped me to see her. Every time I tried to swim down, the air trapped in my shirt would buoy me up. I knew she was gone.

And as I surfaced and gasped for breath, salt water turned to cotton and I stared at a blank canvas of plaster by my bed. I whispered to the darkness (very quietly for fear of alerting waiting grues to my presence) "No." And closed my eyes again.

The same first swell came again. The same unstable second preceded my grandmother's disappearance to sea. This time I swam harder, faster. This time I didn't have to dive twice. I knew the spot, and I knew how fast she was sinking. This time there was no shirt.

With Granny back on the beach, shaken and bedraggled, but alive, I considered the dream. It was falling apart now, I was mostly aware of cotton sheets and the fact I'd had most of the duvet stolen, but I could still see the multicoloured lightning and feel the pride in a machine well built. One thought stayed with me: A life without productivity is no life at all. So why had I fought so hard to save it?