Right before the hurricane comes in, K and I make a run to the grocery store before the drones arrive to beam aboard their protein requirements in a hoard.  Milk, water, booze, flour, rice, apple turnovers.  You know, the stuff you’d need in the last days of the acrockalypse.

Gum machines are still instruments of enlightenment, despite half-hearted attempts by the puerarchy to make them into mere sugar dispensaries.  The old school fighters of random stupidity still follow the musical harmony creature as it dances through our reality to balance the antisystem, lest it continue the path to one-sided aggrandizement.

While I’m opening my wallet for the mandatory vacuuming with bonus peak oil food prices penalty, K takes a few quarters and gets herself a little rubber figure and on the first try gets what she wanted.  A little red devil figure.  I take my turn, and I get a little robot dude and a purple devil figure.  She’s happy that she has a little devilkins she can put on her keyboard, it reminds her of our Frankie, who is a devilkins.

Fast forward back to now, and the jack up we just started dealing with on top of the usual realization that it’s all Sector 2.2 days for a while. While K works her brand new bread magic to make us bonus food, and I try to make sense of the psycho-nautical habitat we find ourselves in, we examine our devilkins figures.  They both have what look like cat ears for horns, except her ears are facing the back, so it really looks like horns, and the “Made in China” is on the tummy instead of the back.  Mine is the opposite.  It makes them both different even though they are the same thing essentially.  I think K’s looks cooler, but my purple dude still has character, he’s more cat-like.

Okay, it’s obviously a clue.  I had a dream two weeks ago, where I was trying to keep my mirage from waking up.  He was in a coffin, and I was with a bunch of people, trying to convince them to help me before it was too late.  I was chopping my mirage’s limbs off with an axe, afraid he would wake up and we’d all be jacked.  His eyes were open and looking at me letting me know he knew what I was doing.  Perhaps what I was doing was futile.

I had another dream three days ago, where I found an open entrance into the underworld, and I started digging dirt away to get inside.  For some reason, I called into the tunnel with a howl, and it echoed down into the darkness.  I grew very afraid, and all of a sudden a scary, vicious seeming gollum-like creature appeared at the opening and started trying to dig its way through.  I freaked, because I didn’t want him to escape, and I didn’t want to get yanked into the underworld or have my arm eaten off like what happens in the horror movies.  I woke up before I knew what happened.

Yeah, more clues.  How do me and my mirage deepen our relationship without letting the other make changes on who we are?  The last time I tried to do something for my mirage, he played a mean trick on me.  Maybe I’ve got this all wrong.  But I’m pretty mad, and I guess I’ve been letting things slide long enough.  This night in a haunted house is turning out to be a long one.

So I knock on the basement door to the laundry room and say, “Yo, mirage with all the spooky scary stuff.  What’s up?”