Today

I slept until 11:30. Most of the last part of this sleep was a nightmare. It was a really complicated nightmare-- there was this band of animals, a jaguar, a black panther and a red fox that was terrorizing the neighborhood. They were eating everyone's dogs and cats right out of their backyards. They ate our Bernese Mountain Dog (that we don't actually have). I ran outside and called in our [real] dog Maggie so that she wouldn't get eaten either. But it was impossible to live all the time in fear. Eventually we had to let Maggie out to go to the bathroom. We took turns escorting her down the stairs from the deck to the grass. She was nervous and wouldn't always go right away, looking at us with her flat almond eyes. None of the neighbors would leave the house for fear of the animals. We heard that someone's dog had been attacked by the band and while the people ran outside and screamed at the animals to get away and watched their dog be torn to pieces, a gang of brutish men broke into their house from the other side and robbed them blind.

My dad is a city council man for our city, and we expected him to be calling people and organizing to have these creatures taken care of, but he was unusually silent and thoughtful. While we were fussing over Maggie and combing the house to make sure all of the doors to the outside were locked, he was staring out the door of the laundry room, seeming like he was somewhere very far away.

I was nervous as hell and I was checking the doors over and over and over again. How was it that my house has SO many doors? There is usually always one that is unlocked. From time to time I would hear or see the jaguar or the panther or the fox through the window and I would double my speed.

Finally, after I woke up for several minutes [7:35am, a relic of my work week wake up time] we confronted my dad. "Aren't you going to do something? Aren't you going to try to save the neighborhood? We can't live like this forever!" Outside the night was getting stormy and dark.

He sighed very heavily. "I can't do that." he said. "I know them. I know the three of them." We were shocked. "You know them?" He tried to explain. "They used to be my friends, you know, back in Wisconsin, when I was a kid. They discovered this terrible power of transformation. They asked me if I wanted to join them.... I said no. I always wondered if that was the right choice. They won't hurt our Maggie, not if they realize that this house belongs to me. I need to talk to them, but in their animal state it is possible that they wouldn't recognize me until after they attacked. I've put up signs on the windows, telling them who I am. As they circle our house, they will read them. Then... they will come to me."

"But... these are evil men!" we said. "If you knew who they were, why didn't you ever turn them in!"

"They weren't evil men back then... and they were always my friends... I couldn't turn them in, not the way they were... not with what they had become. What kind of life would that be? Back then they had formed a squad, just the three of them... they did a kind of vigilante justice. They attacked people, or scared people, but only evil people who needed to be taught a lesson. They were standing up for the community where our law enforcement was failing. I just couldn't reconcile myself with some of their methods... that's why I didn't join them. I have to figure out what has gone wrong. I need to talk to them, I can't just let them be shot."

We were all shocked. At that point the back of the house started shaking as the doors were being battered by the big cats. We could hear them growling out there in the rain. At the front of the house the doors started to rattle as well... this time the large, troll-like men were slamming the doors with their huge bodies, trying to break them down. Finally one of the doors gave and the hordes of men came flooding into the house. I heard my dog give a yelp from the living room and I ran to get her just as at the back of the house the kitchen window gave way and the jaguar and the fox came pouring in, sliding on the island in the kitchen. I grabbed the dog bodily from where she cowered next to the piano and took her back into the kitchen. The jaguar and the fox had disappeared. There was a mud soaked man of my dad's age sitting at the counter. He breathed heavily in and out. He was talking to my dad. My dad saw me coming in through the door and said, "This is The Jaguar." I nodded to him and he looked up at me through his dripping brows. I saw another mud soaked man standing towards the kitchen table. "You must be The Fox," I said. He nodded a bit sheepishly. I got the impression that he didn't find his moniker to be as fearsome as the others in the group. I guessed that you didn't actually get to choose which kind of animal you changed into. "What a hell of a way to have a reunion," said the Jaguar wearily. For the first time my dad's expression had gone from worried to angry. He asked the Jaguar what the hell had happened to them. The Jaguar didn't want to answer in the presence of his men. He looked like a man who had been under a terrible spell and was only just now realizing all the things that he had done.

Then there came a deafening growl from outside. The men rushed to the windows. The black panther, barely visible in the darkness, was strutting defiantly up and down the backyard, flicking its tail back and forth. It looked injured. The men like hungry animals rushed out the back door and down the stairs from the deck. It was our turn to run to the windows. We didn't know what kind of words were being exchanged between the haggard, evil-faced men and the injured panther, but they had formed a circle around it and it was pacing, growling. Suddenly the men attacked. The panther mauled the first man and turned on the others, tearing each successive man to pieces. But the circle closed and they grabbed the panther by the neck and started beating it to death with their fists.

The Fox made a start as if to run out of the house and intervene, but The Jaguar put his hand on his shoulder. "No." he said. "You know he's doing what is right." The Fox agitatedly turned from the window. "We should be out there with him, dying for what we have done."
"We must remain, to insure that what we did is put right, and that those monsters out there no longer terrorize or use anyone like they did to us and this town."
The men, more like trolls now, had finished with the panther, who lay shiny and black and still in the long grass out by the river in our backyard. The ones who had survived the encounter went off in different directions and disappeared into the darkness.

"He was our leader," The Jaguar explained. "In a sense. Those men... they tricked us... they ensnared us in their horrible spells... they turned us slowly into something we never wanted to be. When we saw your signs outside, Dave, we realized in one instant what we had become! We couldn't take it! It was agony realizing all the things we had done, the crimes we had committed... all of those innocent pets we had eaten as our thirst for blood had increased. The longer we stayed in the bodies of those animals, the worse it became... the more like hounds we were for those men. But The Panther was our leader. He knew that if one of us died, the men would go on, still using whomever was left. But if he died, they would disband their horrible operation. The Panther was the strongest and most fearsome of us all. That is why he called them out to him just now. He wasn't really injured, except in his heart. He knew they would try to attack him if he was weak, because they were greedy for power. But he also knew if they succeeded in killing him, the spell would be broken."

"Can you still change?" asked my father.

"I don't know," answered The Fox, "but I am never again going to try." The Jaguar nodded. The three old friends looked as if they would embrace, but instead looked stonily at one another, all too aware of the absence of one of them, the one who still lay in our backyard, his blood flowing out and intermixing with the rain.

When I woke up again it was about 11:30.

Then I ate some cinnamon toast and packed my things until about 1:30. Then I fell asleep again until 5:30. Really, I could probably go back to sleep right after dinner. We'll see. It's been a strange [non]day.

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She crouched down further behind the barrels. What was she going to do now? Would invisible people notice if she came walking out, visible? That is... could they see one another? She had no idea how such things worked. It was certainly something they had failed to cover in her science class, along with everything else that seemed helpful for the real world.

There was only one way to find out. After all, nothing could be as strange as the place she had just come from, and these people seemed friendly enough. All she had to do was reach the edge of town- and then... then?

She squeezed out from behind the barrels and walked boldly into the crowd, her feet sinking into the shimmering golden sand that seemed to coat everything. Some of the invisible people seemed to turn towards her as she walked, but nobody moved to intercept her and nobody cried out at her.
Which way out of town? She decided to ask someone. Was everyone looking at her? No, just a few here and there, she thought. But she couldn't see their eyes, anyway, so how could you tell?
She should ask someone who looked like they knew where things were... someone who didn't look too busy, either. It was so difficult when you could not even see whether their face was kindly or their eyes focused on some important task. This was much more difficult than asking things of normal strangers, which in her opinion was already scary enough.

Tentatively she approached what looked like a large, floating dress wearing a fancy hat and carrying a parasol next to a finely tailored three-piece suit with a smart-looking walking stick.
"Excuse me very much," she said in her most polite voice, the one she always used with her father's important University guests, "Can you tell me which way it is to the edge of town, if you please?"

The large hat turned down at her. "My goodness," it said, or rather, the lady beneath the hat said, addressing the front of her jumper, "what an ostentatious accessory you have, young lady."
She looked down at her clothes. She was wearing a simple red jumper with a white undershirt, black socks, patent leather shoes and the red scarf her grandmother had knitted for her. That didn't seem very ostentatious at all.
She bowed apologetically. "I'm very sorry, ma'am." It seemed very frightening to stare at the blank space where the woman's face should be. One could not even guage her expression!
The hat jerked back suddenly. "Oh, my, I quite forgot that they talk! It's been so long since I've journeyed to any country where that is the style!" There was a fit of laughing, which seemed to contain more than one ladies' voice.
She looked around, startled, to see where the other voices had come from, but the other people in the marketplace seemed abnormally quiet and still.
"Why does it stare into empty space?" asked a different voice from the direction of the invisible woman, seeming to address again the front of her jumper instead of her face. "I've never heard good things about them," said a muffled female voice. "Just between you an me, I think they're a little tacky."

She stared wide-eyed at the dress, unsure of what to say. What did they mean when they said "it". What was staring into empty space?
"Why won't you answer me?" said the second voice, speaking from the vicinity of the dress. A velvet-glove emerged from the dress's sleeve and plucked at her jumper. "Hello!?!" said a fourth voice from the glove itself.

The glove flew back into the sleeve as if it had been burnt.
"Why.... I think it's DEAD!" it cried.

For a moment there was a pause, like a great taking in of breath as everyone in the marketplace drew back from her a single step. Then chaos was unleashed. Before she could even protest the hat gave a loud scream and fell to the ground in a crumpled heap. The dress leaned heavily against the three-piece-suit, dropping the parasol and leaving both velvet gloves hanging momentarily in the air. The muffled voice from within the dress began screaming in loud sharp bursts- and would not stop screaming. The three-piece-suit made a lunge towards her, but it could not make a proper move as it was burdened by the weight of the fancy dress and in many different pitches of men's voices it was trying to soothe the screaming voice from the interior of the dress.
Suddenly she was struck from behind by something hard and small. A radish! The urchins and the shop keeper had both turned from their argument and were throwing radishes at her! Without thinking, she started to run, blindly dashing away from the advancing mass of clothing and into any open space.
"MURDERER!" someone shouted, "It must have killed them!!"
She looked up too late to avoid running into a knot of customers emerging en masse from a nearby stall. They grabbed her fiercely with their sleeve cuffs and pant cuffs and anything they could muster and threw her to the sandy ground. She wrestled against them-- their strangeness, their many voices, their lack of faces- their lack of hands, their lack of anything human besides clothes! Clothes!! Sand was filling up her shoes and getting in her ears and eyes. A large amount went spilling down the back of her neck.
Then there was a shout, a shout which emanated from her but at the same time certainly did not emanate from her at all.
"Get away! Get away! You hear! She didn't kill us! You hear! We're very much alive!"
The jackets and workshirts that she had been tussling with got to their feet, shrugging their headless shoulders and turning to one another. She was pulled up by her jumper... quite literally pulled up by it as she was certainly untouched by anything else.
"I am quite sorry." said the voice, coming decidedly from her jumper itself, which was now dirty beyond belief. "I believe you thought that we were dead. We are not. Thank-you for your concern, but my goodness, what a reaction! We had employed this human to ferry us through this country so that we could rest ourselves from our long travel. I am sorry, I am a foreigner and not used to the customs here. I did not realize that our human would find trouble. I understand that you are not used to seeing humans here."

The crowd rustled amongst itself in its strange, thatchy voices. Some apologies were mumbled, and they began self-consciously brushing themselves off.
The three-piece-suit finally came foward. He was cradling the lady's hat in the crook of his sleeve. "Please, young lady, let me apologize," he said, addressing her jumper, "we have heard stories about human beings wearing about suits of lifeless clothing... you can imagine how horrifying that would be... I am so sorry for our error. Please know that we welcome foreigners in our peaceful land, and I hope you do not judge it by our hasty actions."

She curtsied involuntarily and gave an awkward bow.
"Of course no offense has been meant, and none shall be taken," replied her jumper generously. "If you will kindly point us to the way out of the city, all will be forgiven."

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"Wow!" said my advisor, looking over my shoulder at where I was pointing on Mars.

"You've made a discovery!!"

Somehow I wasn't really that excited about my discovery. I don't even know what my discovery implies, and now I have to write an abstract about it for a conference in Moscow that I'm not even going to.

My advisor reassured me earlier that he wasn't going to just make me into a "mechanic", someone who knows how to do everything but never gets to really interpret and discover things in her own research (because that's kind of what's happening right now with the Mars General Circulation Model). Well, frankly, I'm much better at being a mechanic, and I get a lot more pleasure out of it than I get out of "making discoveries". I like helping people better than I like being "famous". My perfect job would be if someone gave me a problem, I went out into the field and did all the field work, came back home, analyzed it all in a lab, made figures, wrote a lit-review, methods, and results, and then somebody else came along and praised me profusely, wrote my conclusion, and ran away with my paper to do with it as they pleased. They could really just write the whole paper if they wanted.

That is to say, I like figuring out how to solve problems... I don't really care what the answer is. Does that make me a bad scientist? Hmm... I think this means I'm going to have to go into industry....

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If were to write a series of books based on my friend Toku and his adventures in America, the first one would naturally be "Tokuhiro Comes To America" and there would be one called "Tokuhiro Goes to New York City" and of course "Tokuhiro Goes to the Beach" and maybe "Merry Christmas, Tokuhiro!"

But the book that would be about today would be called

"Tokuhiro Saves the Day"

because that is precisely what he did.

It was after work, around 6:30 or so, and I was still working as I often am, between checking the rates of U-Hauls and reading the Onion, of course, and Toku came down into the lab. He was so sorry to bother me, he got across, but the RELAB was very hot. The RELAB is a laboratory run by some of my favorite professors which measures the spectra of small objects (oftentimes meteorites and lunar rocks and soils). It is very expensive and delicate. In fact, in order to enter the RELAB you must don little white booties and spin yourself in through one of those darkroom doors. The fact that it was hot was a little disturbing-- after all, some of the instruments in there are dedicated to measuring things in the near IR part of the spectrum... heat! Toku indicated that it is usually not hot in there. So Toku found the closely guarded code to the door and we booted up and spun around into the lab, where it was about 79 degrees, even though the thermostat was set with a minimum of 50 and a maximum of 60 degrees F. There was even a humidity guage... I began to think that someone liked to strictly regulate the heat in this room and that something had gone quite awry.

So I called. I called everyone I could think of. The head of the relab was on a ranch in New Mexico for the summer. The second in command is in Japan. We called almost every professor in the planetary department with no success. Then I called all of the students who had ever worked in RELAB. No success--- they were all supposed to be playing frisbee until 9 pm! Then I called all of the technical staff. Then the administrative staff. I finally got one of the secretaries who was like, "What? I don't think we can do anything. I'll call someone tomorrow if you want. But write me an email, because I'm definitely going to forget about whatever it is that you said was going on by tomorrow." I got a hold of some random students, who suggested some other people to call, but I couldn't reach those people, either.

We went back up to the lab, where in a half an hour the temperature had climbed to 83 degrees.
Surely there was an emergency number? Toku said that he emailed the second-in-command in Japan, since he checks his email a lot. I had no idea what time it would be in Japan. Toku thanked profusely me for my help accompanying his words with a series of short bows but worried that I worried too much. He told me that he would attend to the problem himself from now on because he hadn't meant to disturb me when I was busy. I looked at him dubiously but I agreed that I'd go home and since he works late I told him to check on the lab later tonight and call me if it was "very very hot".

As a last effort, I sent an email out to everyone that I had called and some people who I hadn't (namely the Professor in Charge of Everything), explaining the problem. It was she who finally wrote me back (the only one out of the lot to respond at all). She called the emergency number that had been escaping me and a crack team of the building maintenance team was dispatched to fix the problem immediately. Her email was littered with exclamation marks.

So as far as I know, everything is going to be ok.

And all because of Tokuhiro, who Saved the Day.

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When she opened the tiny door the flood of noise that had been heretofore muted sprang into lively eddies of echo throughout the small shaft. Her way seemed blocked once again, this time by several large, dusty barrels which had been pushed up against the opening. Through the barrels she could just see little flashes of color as people milled about outside. A marketplace!

She could hear a multitude of strange, rasping voices like thatch on burlap, hawking their wares. Birds this way! Here, some fish! Five! said a woman, Not a penny less!

What a relief to be in a marketplace! No more sneaking about, a real crowd of people out in the sunlight, friendly people, going about their business like nothing at all had happened! She pushed at the barrels with her hands. They were very heavy. Smoothing the bottom of her jumper under her legs and sitting back on her hips, she braced her arms against the frame of the door and pushed heavily with her legs. The barrel slid a little way out. She gave another push, and it gave another inch, turning slightly along its rim. She slipped down from the door and into the space behind the barrels.
From here she could see the marketplace. There were a great variety of tiny carts and shops, each shadowed by its own awning and obscured by its own mass of customers. The were carts selling great heaps of vegetables, including a cart selling only radishes. There were so many radishes they overflowed onto the ground and the shopkeeper was angrily defending the edge of his domain with a broomstick from a group of little urchins who squatted in the dust nearby.

But this is not what she noticed about the marketplace.

The people... if they could be called people... were not people at all, but only the clothes of people, animately moving about the scene as if filled by flesh. But they were glarely empty of anything like living bodies. Why, but they must be invisible people, she thought, a wave of fresh sweat breaking suddenly across her brow.

The shopkeeper at the radish stand was nothing more than a study brown work apron, a pair of coarse brown trousers and a stiff white shirt. He wore a key round his upper arm on an elastic band. His cuffs were wrapped around the broom, which he continued to wave erratically at the young... rags... that's all they were, a pile of dirty rags and faded t-shirts, darting out and fetching radishes, which disappeared into the folds of their clothing. That's all they seemed to be, her mind said, checking itself. Invisible people!

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Sort me!

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Everybody was doing it....

Link: The Harry Potter Wand Test written by sputnik845 on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

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