Tuesday, September 20, 2011

The Greenland compound

I had entered some kind of compound (on the coast of, say, Greenland?), with mostly drab, gray, concrete architecture, and was walking indoors, from building to building. Nobody was around. I looked out a big window at one point and saw that the coast was quite nearby, but several stories below. It occurred to me that there should be penguins out there somewhere (okay, so maybe this wasn't Greenland), and I continued walking through different parts of the compound, staying mostly along the edge nearest the coast, trying to figure out how to get down and outside.

A few times I came across "dead ends", where the level I was on had nowhere else to go, but there was a railing and a wide open overlook to see the lower level below; there were signs indicating that I could go down, but the only way down was literally to go over the railing and figure out how to slide down the smooth concrete wall without dying. The last one of these "dead ends" I got to, I seriously considered going down, since there was a spot where I could wedge myself between two walls that were closer together than my armspan. But I think I ended up walking back some other way.

After a quick stop at a nearby restroom (in which, surprisingly, there was actually another guy in one of the stalls -- first person I'd noticed so far), I cut back around to an area where I'd been before. Now it reminded me of the entrance to a public building or school; the first thing as I entered the room was a series of steps and landings, which stretched from wall to wall (maybe 10-15 yards wide) and had three or four railings separating it into sections; it only went up maybe 6-8 feet, and then there were more hallways and rooms.

I started searching around some more, and then as I was getting ready to leave this part of the compound, a bunch of people started coming in and up the first set of stairs. I tried to push my way through them, and got most of the way to the bottom, but then I changed my mind and started going back up in the crowd. As I got to the top again and was headed towards the main hallway, someone behind me started asking "Kevin" a question. At first, I figured they weren't talking to me, since I didn't immediately recognize the voice, and I didn't really expect to meet anyone here that I knew. But I figured I'd turn around and check anyway. It turned out to be Kelly P, who was walking with Caitie R and another girl. Kelly's hair was very slightly braided on the sides, which looked nice. She was asking me if I remembered what Tywanda C or "Derrick Arins" (or was it Darin whom I met at LSA 2011?) looked like. I told her I would probably recognize Tywanda if I saw her, but I didn't know who Derrick was.

I continued walking. Kelly and the other girl went off to some class they were taking, and Caitie had somehow ended up in front of me, at the end of the hallway, at the gift shop that was there. Lots of merchandise was sitting out on a long table outside the gift shop's entrance. I walked by Caitie, but we didn't really interact (I don't suppose we have anything to talk about). I looked at some of the trinkets on the table. One really caught my eye. It was like a medium-sized glass bead, heart-shaped, with a solid white bottom, and a black dot right in the middle of the bottom layer. It reminded me of Hello Kitty when I looked at it. But the really interesting thing was that the glass was somehow structured to refract the light in a weird way. When I moved my head one way, the dot in the middle seemed to move slightly in the opposite direction. I swirled my head around, looking at it as the dot swirled around the other way.

Then I went inside the gift shop, but I didn't really see anything that impressive inside. I cut out the side door. I ended up going to a huge room, again with gray concrete walls, ceiling, floor. The ceiling here was probably 3 or 4 stories high. I went and lay down in a bed in the back corner of the room and the lights went off. There were tons of other people in the room as well, all lying in beds, going to sleep for the night. Since I had been here before, I thought I would show off a little trick. I reached my right tennis shoe (my shoes were black) and pushed a little button that was part of the rubber sole, and the bottom of my shoe became like a flashlight. I directed the beam onto the ceiling, where there was tons of graffiti, except it was more like bathroom stall graffiti, all black and legible in plain text. Some of it had quite elegant handwriting, actually. The impressive part was that most of the writing was large enough to read from the ground, so a capital letter might be as tall as I was (or taller). I don't recall what any of it said.

No comments:

Post a Comment