Archive | April 10, 2020

Saving the Cult (if not the World), Chapter Fifteen

Saving the Cult (If not the World) "It's time." Manfield Lee knew he was good at sounding authoritative even when he didn't know what he was talking about - he'd turned a fortune into a megafortune doing just that, after all, not to mention running the Organization - but right now, he DID know what he was talking about. After all, it was just a date, wasn't it? And if the date turned out to be wrong, well, then he knew exactly what to blame it on, and that blame would fall on the scholars and the psychics, not on him. The other thing Manfield Lee knew how to do was to place the blame in very specific ways that were not him.

Grocery shopping was not, in theory, a novel sort of thing.  Lina did it every second week for the family back home. 

But when she was doing so with three rich boys who had never had to do that sort of thing – “Why not just have a grocery service?” – it turned into an adventure. 

It helped, or possibly made things worse, that it being late at night, they were nearly the only people in the store.  It helped that they were actually buying things, although Lina’s mental list appeared to confuse everyone but Jackson, who actually knew how to cook. 

“So why are we shopping again?” Dylan asked, when the cart was half-full.  “I mean – there’s already food up there.”

“But is it good food?  Also, I want to make pizza.”

“Make?  Make pizza?”  Continue reading

Work From Home Blog: Day 19

Today, in lieu of a work blog post, I’m going to present a couple scenes or snippets from my morning dream, which was weird.

Class was in a huge room -a cathedral? Possibly a former cathedral. It had that feeling.  The professor was unkind, short with anyone.

And as if the words had been presented on a script, I found myself cutting in.  “Professor, if you think that we are idiots, the reasonable thing to do would be to explain things to us when we ask questions. If you continue to berate us, we won’t ask questions, and thus we’ll stay ignorant.”

The professor ignored me completely.

I fled up to the choir loft. Here things become a little obscure, because I believe three things happened at once, but my dreams do like to overlap scenes.

Angels came crashing in from the highest window, from the skylight, and landed in the choir loft.  Other people examined them, finding they were covered in lash marks, dead, fear on their faces.

What could make the angels fear? people murmured.

The man-who-was-courting-dream-me brought me a bag of chocolate and told me he thought I was crazy, but it was all right.

In another place, an Emperor forced a prisoner to tell him who he’d been.

In the Cathedral, the Emperor walked down the stairs and declared himself returned.  He declared the man-who-was-courting-me to be his heir, because such was needed now, in this time of chaos.

The Emperor was back, he declared, and there would be Changes.

I watched the man I loved – by this point I was no longer me, outside of that person, but we’ll stick with “I” for the moment – walk out to greet the crowd, a smaller crowd at a rural church.  He’d been adorned, wearing the golden headpiece and torque of a pharaoh, although his lovely curly hair was still visible.

(Was the scene where a ninja-warrior girl broke in and stole some clothes from a statue, the golden headcloth and the complicated torque and some clattering head-beads, was that part of the dream, or was that in something I watched?)

“He’s not all that good looking,” murmured Missandei in my ear, but I disagreed.  He was perfect – but the Emperor had stolen him from me to make him a god.

I was watching as the now-High-King-and-Savior (the man who had courted me) took off the headpiece.  “Is this what you did to them?” he asks the Emperor, in private. “When you came the last time? Did you trick them into making them think you were a god?”

“I did what was necessary,” the Emperor told him.  “And so will you.”

The overarching story appeared to be one of someone who ruled over a huge empire but rarely made a showing, who used trickery a la Wizard of Oz and special effects when he needed to, especially on backwards worlds.

And then, of course, I woke up.