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.