• Mood: Come, and dream it, as you go, on the light fantastic toe
• Music: Dinosaur Jr - Mind Glow

Dream Your Roots

The other night, I had the most spilltastic of lucid dreams, with elements of everything bleeding through the walls of sleep. I was wandering in a castle with a checkerboard floor, a la Super Mario Bros. 3. I lurked my way around various terrors, realising I had no weapons. As is the way with dreams, once I remembered I had no weapons, Morpheus made his move and said, "A-ha!" and suddenly the music changed. Yes, it was time for a Boss Battle. Who would be the Boss, the king of this castle which I and my friends had entered? I wandered into a room with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan in the center. And by some twist of NES logic, he was on a platform in the center of the tower which was floating in midair. Thankfully, he could not jump or reach me, but he sure could throw a seemingly infinite supply of the Conan Atlantean sword from the stupid Highlander sword catalog they advertise on the TeeVee. With deadly accuracy. My only defense? I could hide behind these curtain/tapestry things that seemed to be draped all over the room, hung so that the bottoms of them descended into the bottomless hole in the floor. You read that right; they were not against the wall. Bizarre. Probably inspired by the curtains you had to cut to get to Aghanim. Once hidden behind one of the tapestries, I did a Matrix-esque limbo maneuver that caused the sword to pass over my head. But not before it left a hole in the tapestry in exactly the shape of the sword.

After a while, I bored of this, so I decided to leave. I still had to fight my way out, which was interesting as I still had no weapons (not even a Captain N belt). I did stupid stuff, like turning some of the creatures in some rooms against one another. You've not lived till you've had a Dragon Warrior wolf () run off and bury a Stalfos (). The absolute best, however, was when I was confronted with a Metal Slime () on the bottom stair of the way out. Those guys were nearly impossible (impossibly hard, literally, as they were made of metal, sort of like Robert Patrick) to beat in the original Dragon Warrior. Usually, the battle ended with them running away, but this one wouldn't run because it was blocking the exit. It was not a random encounter but rather a forced battle. But I'm a more resourceful dreamer than even Randolph Carter, and this one I only thought about it for a second, before producing some salt packets from a fast food restaurant. I tore them open and chucked them at Slimy McGee. Because, you see, slimy things like slugs and snails hate salt, and it also corrodes metal (which is why car washes do good business in the winter). It worked like a charm, and I woke up wondering why I'd never thought to do that in the game.

Though I think possibly Earthbound is the only RPG that would feature "Table Salt" as an item. Ah, I miss Earthbound. I tried to design an RPG system that would allow for non-fantasy, non-future, modern-day Role Playing, but I am unfortunately lazy and never did anything with it.