There were a bunch of people over at my house to watch a new Voltron series. One was Ms. Medusa the pseudo-Goth from YCM, sitting on one couch; another was Patti from my parish. My friend John was there, and so was my little brother. The living room had been rearranged; the TV was against the chimney and we all had our backs to the windows as we waited for the show to come on. My dad peeked in from the hall, carrying a bowl of Cheetos, as it began. "Oh," he remarked worriedly, "That's the most dangerous episode." We laughed, but it did look like it; waves of lava were lapping up the sides of a stone spire in a huge cavern, dissolving the rock. Atop the spire was a small building, supposedly a castle, but very small.
I went in, driving a toy Batmobile: it moved, half of its own accord, as I gripped the back. Gouts of lava spewed from a sewer pipe underground, and I whooshed into the opening between spurts (I think my brain got this from Brian Jacques' Pearls of Lutra--the Ruddaring isle). I dodged around pillars in a dark blue chamber, evading vague alien shapes, as I attempted to get into a forbidding castle sitting atop glowing green ooze.
Patti was interested in going out with me. My feelings were mixed; I didn't know what to tell her.
There was a convention of action figures at the house I went to for day care when I was little. Crowds of people wearing G.I. Joe uniforms wandered around huge piles of plastic toys. I looked at an old set of Voltron lions and crept around with John, carrying a Super Soaker. I thought this would be a great thing to do in college, to play games of pretend like we were kids again. I would start a club!
Standing in front of an escalator, on white bathroom tiles, in a mall. I was defending Patti from an approaching gangster in a white tuxedo. He shot at me but missed. I returned fire with a tiny white pistol that was supposedly semiautomatic, but the trigger was broken--I had to manually pull the trigger forward after each shot. Nonetheless I managed to fatally wound the attacker, staining his white tux with red. He collapsed, his face going pale, but soon got up, zombielike. His arms were covered with a watery substance that I knew was powerful acid. I shouted for everyone to stand back, but someone--maybe Patti--ran forward out of compassion and touched the deadly liquid.