Being the Hero

The afternoon sky alights with flashes of lightning streaking from one angry cloud to another, and I stand my ground, facing a vampire who obviously hasn’t eaten yet.  Those fangs are huge…a wooly mammoth’s tusks don’t grow THAT big.  Still, I’m ready for him this time…I spent all day waiting for this walking horror movie freak, and now I’m gonna take him down.  The vampire stalks me, the pupils in his eyes doing a hypnotic dance to try and daze me before he uses my neck for a buffet.  He finally leaps toward me, and in one stroke, I grab my trusty broomstick and…

Broomstick?

Aw, man…!

The room is dark, as most bedrooms would be at 2:30 AM.  I sit up in my bed, pulling the covers off my sweating body.  As dark as my room is, my mood is even darker, and I finally turn on the light by my nightstand.  It’s bad enough that I have stupid dreams like this after playing “Diablo ®” or “Neverwinter Nights ™,” but every time I face a monster in my dreams, I’m never prepared like the heroes of those great games.  Just once, I’d like to fight these fiends with a broadsword and not a broomstick!  Is that asking too much?

After taking care of certain needs, I return to my bed, ready to study the back of my eyelids for the rest of the night.  If I try hard enough, I just might find something there I’ve missed.  After a few moments of tossing and turning, I finally go back to sleep.

Screams echo through my ears as the castle’s denizens run across the drawbridge, some of them diving into the moat.  In a sudden burst of intelligence, I decide to ignore the sage advice not to walk into a building that everyone else just left.  Once inside the castle, I see the biggest, ugliest dragon my anchovy-pizza induced imagination could conjure up; huge black scales, moldy-green eyes, stalagmite teeth and dragon breath that makes the stone gargoyles cry.  I barely have time to move before the dragon belches, and the fireball coming from its mouth looks like the sun had fallen to Earth and wants to kiss me!  My only chance is to try and block it with my shield and hope I don’t get fried anyway.  I sling my hubcap around my shoulder, and…

…awaken in an even worse mood than I was in 90 minutes ago.  See, this is the kind of crap I’m talking about. I get a chance to be the hero, and my imagination screws me up with something idiotic.  C’mon, a hubcap?  Phooey!  What’s worse is, it’s now 4 AM, and any chance I had of getting enough sleep is lost now.  Still, I’ll have to try.  My boss doesn’t like it much when I get my beauty rest during working hours.  Thus, I close my eyes again and force myself back to sleep.

The tower reeks of smoke and burnt feathers, probably an experiment gone awry.  The wizard looks every bit like he’s having a bad hair day and wants to make up for it by turning me into a toad, or whatever form is fashionable these days.  While he waves his hands around, I have to keep from laughing because I have this sucker cold.  No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will severely cramp his style!  Before he can speak the final words to separate me from my humanity, I quickly reach into my belt and in a smooth motion, I throw the weapon I’ve been saving for just such a moment: a badminton birdie that floats, swirls three times, and lands four feet away from the wizard.  He looks at me for a moment, and begins to laugh.  Funny thing, though, it’s not a hearty laugh; it sounds more like...a beeping noise.

Beep…beep…beep…beep…beep…beep…beep…

…at which point I reach over and turn off my alarm clock, feeling both discouraged and tired.  5:30 definitely comes too early in the day, especially when you’ve spent the night starring in a twisted triple-feature dream sequence.  There’s only one cure for this, you know: I’ll just have to finish beating Diablo ® right this minute!  Now, where’s the rest of my pizza…?

“Diablo” is a registered trademark of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.

“Neverwinter Nights” is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.