Visions of the Future (literally... ish)

I have been sooooo sick.

Quite seriously, I have been about as sick as a person can be without requiring hospital admission.  This year's 'flu virus came and hit me with the sick-stick hard and repeatedly and brought along its best mate, bacterial chest infection, for good measure.  My lung capacity dropped to an estimated 30% normal.  I basically stopped sleeping for three days because my body knew I would drown in my own lung froth if I didn't stay conscious.  Oh, and to make it even more fun, my family got the same thing (except youngest son who got it two weeks ago).

I was literally in tears at one point, wheezing "I just want to sleep!" to whatever passing godling might have taken pity on me.  If Satan had been in the market for souls, he'd've got a bargain deal.

This has meant a minor delay in development and rewards for you guys, but I'll be doing the Monthly Mini Draw for everyone apart from Stefan in the $5+ group this afternoon and I'll let you know the result.  I won't be publishing an updated version of the rules just yet, because the changes are so very, very minor, so far.  But I have added the names of all the new $3+ patrons to the list so that, next time there's an update, you'll all see your names in lights (well, in small font on the legal information page, but, y'know...).

However, there is one, pretty major upside to all this horribleness I've been through (and, actually, am still going through, but it's definitely the downwards slope, now).

My doctor suggested I should try to sleep sitting up in order to stop the lung froth from interfering so badly with my breathing at night.  Long story short: I cannot sleep sitting up.  But it turns out that, sufficiently sleep-deprived and medicated, what I can do is enter a state of altered consciousness in which I find myself in a scifi bar filled with all manner of weirdness.

This was no Mos Eisley Cantina.  This was a bar made from steel and light, where I literally watched one patron absorb another directly into its ear.  No one else there looked remotely human and yet I was aware that they were all, to some extent, human.

At the bar, I was met by a black siamese cat the size of a wolf with a monocle and a smile.  And it said to me "You've come too far; this isn't what you're here to see".

He picked me up and took me back.  I was aware of moving backwards through time, stopping occasionally to see extraordinary sights my brain couldn't process except as beautiful and human-built.  But eventually I came back to somewhere dark.  The lights came on and I was aware of a huge space, filled with what looked like entertainments for small children.  And two teenage girls had broken in, scared and confused.  And then, just as suddenly the lights went out and they screamed.

Hundreds of miles away from there, I stood on a road in an empty city and saw the horizon rippling towards me.  As a howling wind shot past me in a cloud of searing dust and ash I saw the world tip and buildings fall - not merely rocked off their feet, but massive skyscrapers literally hurled up into the air and back down.

Eventually - horizontally - I lay contemplating what I'd seen.  It would be another day before I enjoyed normal sleep again, but I'd found the whole experience quite restful.

For the elimination of doubt: I was not literally seeing visions of the future.  I had explicitly been trying to work out something about the narrative of the Zero Dark rulebook and setting as I had been sitting there, trying to use my sleeplessness constructively.  And I had been consuming relevant imagery from across the internet during the day, whenever my pulsing headache eased enough to permit the use of a digital device.  So I was intentionally primed for this kind of thought.  But the intensity and coherency of my little spirit-walk was very inspiring and, as a result, the precise trajectory of the Zero Dark narrative will be changing to reflect my experience, and a certain giant siamese cat will be making an appearance.