It's like I'm spending the night at someone's house, but it's my family. We're in a dark livingroom, on a couch facing a TV. Behind the couch is a door. I'm a girl, and 'Dad' rigs me and my little 'brother' to a couch with a bunch of extension cords. He says that if we break contact between any of them, he'll know, and that if they leave the couch, he'll also know. He demonstrates by lifting a cord for a second. A large bright light in his room (the door behind us) flashes on. He goes into his room and closes the door.
'What are we going to do, sis?'
I squirm through the cords, not actually breaking or disconnecting any. It's like I'm just unwinding them. I then untangle him. (NOW I'm male, again.) My little brother turns into Kathleen. She leads me into this smallish kitchen and starts opening cabinets and containers, exposing cookies and all sorts of delicious looking bakery goods she makes some sort of comment like
'We keep all of the good stuff under wraps.'
or something. As we look through the nook window into the livingroom, sunlight is starting to flow from the window next to the door. There's suddenly a pan of scrambled eggs on the stove. Dad comes out and asks how it's going, he looks very disheveled.
Dad becomes Gayland, the house becomes an 8th floor hotel room. Kathleen is gone.We're just chatting. Mom's down the street at a grocery store. He tells me to go join her. I know he's going to jump out of the window. I'm with Mom in the produce section, and her cell-phone starts ringing. I tell her
'You know what that's about.'
and she smiles and nods and answers it. And then her smile fades and she starts crying. We're outside, and in the street, right in front of the hotel, is a streak of blood from the middle of the street to the curb. Gayland's body is sitting on the curb on a stretcher, there's a large red-purple patch on his forhead, but no other damage. His eyes are open.
So I'm somehow forced to go back to live with Dad and James and Mariah. We're camping out on sleeping bags in a small room in a hallway of doctor's offices. James won't stay off of my bag, and there's some competition between Poke'mon games on our GBAs. I'm really sick of it, and things change again.
They become a different family, a timid, balding father, a stereotypical stay-at-home wife, and their son, who I'm apparantly friends with. They say they're going to the grocery store and I'm welcome to join them. It's some kind of novelty store. My friend's dad hands me a rubber chicken, and tells me to go give it to James. So I wade through the aisles and people and slap it in his hand, but he knows it isn't a real chicken. I follow them (James becomes their son again) through the store, and I take a turnip from the produce section, take a bite, and set it on a box. I play with all kinds of seafood, just fiddling with things.
Suddenly, I notice everyone is gone. The store is empty. I circle round a bit, and the lights go off. I hear a voice in my head (definitely not my own) saying something like
'Now, you get to discover what happened.'
I walk over to the same couch from earlier and lay down on it, knowing full well I couldn't win at this game. If I wandered in the dark, something bad would happen to me. The television screen flickers on. It's some tropical gameshow.
Things change, and I'm a gunner at the base wheel of some sort of star craft. My job is to keep little mechanoid pests out of the landing gear. A meteor hits the stand, and explodes, two small magnetic mice and a ball bearing scatter over the gear. I angle my gun and hit the ball bearing with an electro-magnetic shock with ease, but I have trouble getting the mice, my gun won't turn towards them. Eventually, I just bang the bottom of the craft against the runway and they break away.
It turns out that we are on that tropical planet from the show. I become a contestant and as we land, I see the host/greeter talking to a few guys. I pull a can of something alcholic out of a bad and it frothes while he says
'So tell me, have any of you broken any laws on this planet? No? We should be good.'