Three Very or One Slightly Short Stories
So, I woke up this morning after about twelve hours of sleep, having had a whole series of unusual dreams. Looking at them after having set them down on the digital equivalent of paper, they seem to be my subconscious addressing various stylistic themes seen in action movies, and of course the most detailed bits are near the end, because that was just before I woke up. Are they three separate stories, or all part of one larger one?
The aeroplanes hang above the city, frozen in mid-frame, captured in invisible bubbles with very slightly different-shaded air inside them. Propellers are frozen crisply in mid-spin, as are the trails of hot exhaust gases behind them from flight and torn damages.
One of the pilots is in mid-jump, clambering free of the airframe to leap to safety as it falls, but a dragon is swooping up alongside with its jaws wide open, ready to snatch him if another second or two could just pass.
Below, the people of the city go about their everyday business and pay the spectacle no heed.
In response to the threat, we have gathered a group of young people with the right potential to go to the other side for us, to fight and maybe die. It falls on me to give the speech.
"...as you know, there is a temporal difference between here and the other side. You won't be gone for very long at all, no more than a week, but over there years will pass as you do what you need to do, so if you make it back you will find everything just the same as when you left. And though it will be dangerous, the different laws of physics that apply over there will let you do things that are impossible here, acts of might and magic. I can't make you go, I can only ask that you do so."
Suitably garbed, in clothes made to look as much as possible like what little we know about the fashions and materials for robes and armor over there, the teenagers dressed up as warriors and warlocks, archers and arbiters, head hesitantly for the gateway.
The fur-pile is supposed to keep us from getting cold, out in the abandoned cottage cabin where we have taken refuge, but her paws keep pushing up against my butt, slowly but surely propelling me out of the heap of warm bodies. Finally accepting that it isn't going to happen, I slither out of the pile and crack my eyes open to discover that the television has been left going, admittedly at a volume close to mute.
What fascinates me though is that it's showing a sort of film I could never get away with watching if anyone else was awake, a sort of super-late-night only art-porn-action thing with lots of topless and occasionally fully nude girls, chases and explosions. Well, if I'm going to be awake anyway, I might as well watch.
The action is good but it's a little hard to follow with no sound. A crowded double-width carriage on a train, open topped and tightly packed with a multitude of mostly male diners like something out of the age of steam, is provoked into open violence by two of our heroes, actually heroines but dressed in the same black suits as all the men. This seems to be a strategy to disrupt pursuit, but then they have to shove and scheme their way through their own distraction.
Cut to the next scene, where hapless female hostages with no clothes on are being held in a much smaller closed carriage, seated tied-up on bales of hay and being guarded by a generic evil bitch in a uniform. Sex and violence ensues.
The remote is in reach, so I stretch out for it, hoping to turn the sound up just a fraction. There is a brief moment of loudness as I hit the wrong button, then frantically hold the volume to down until it's nearly silent again. The others stir but no-one wakes up, making my emergency plan to change the channel immediately and shut my eyes unnecessary.
In a seeming temporal transition that I can't quite make out, from one era to another, one of the topless heroines is now involved in some sort of high-speed chase alongside a red-painted cross-braced road bridge, pristine white sandbars shooting past. She unloads two shots into the flat hull of the racing hovercraft under her feet, then takes a couple of steps backward and pulls a backflip onto the identical craft following, as the one in front accumulates an ever-increasing variation in its trajectory and then flips out, spinning off to one side and and tearing itself to pieces.
From the second hovercraft she leaps across to a much larger and longer vessel, spray sailing past under her feet as she gives it the same treatment. Her gun is some sort of high-powered energy weapon that generates minimal splash-back and doesn't need to be reloaded, which must be why she's so willing to waste shots killing empty vehicles.
The plan seems to be that she will run backwards along the bigger flatboat to match the speed of the passing scenery, but just as this implausible plan is about to get good, an alarm sounds back in the real world and I implement my own plan of 'fell asleep with remote in hand'. Grey light is now seeping through the curtains and I guess the movie went 'til dawn.
Now I'll never know how it ended. There is general cursing as everyone stiffly unfolds. "It was only supposed to be for a couple of hours rest!" she snarls. "Look, it's nearly dawn already! C'mon, we have to get going before they catch up with us!"