No Quickenings on Holy Ground

This month's FT has a roundup of lightning related deaths, including one where Highlander fans can fill in some details ;-)

Church vaults were often used to store large quantities of gunpowder - a terrible place to hoard explosives, as lightning frequently strikes high church steeples. In 1769, lightning hit a church tower in Brescia, near Milan, and blew up the 100 tons of gunpowder stored there. The explosion leveled one sixth of the city and killed about 3,000 people, possible the worst recorded lightning disaster in history. Times, 26 June 2007

... and of course two guys with swords were not involved at all...

(no subject)

I read some more textbook. Yaay me. I now feel I could write a bad Access level ramble on the hybrid nature of identity in My Beautiful Laundrette. Unfortunately I only have two days to write a good degree level essay.

This is the part I hate. I have headache, I have exhaustion, and I still have a hand in day.

just when the builders are finished with my flats...

This is my college, where I go to study. I know it says 6th form in there but they run degree courses too. I quite like my college. It is small, compared to lots of studying places, but large, compared to, well, everywhere else I go. I only got lost the once last year and that's cause they built something new and I ended up in a can't get there from here. There are many corners of it where I can sit and not want to pull my hat over my eyes. It is college of win.

So why do they want to knock it down and start over?

Now I do have to admit there's never enough classrooms, things are always getting double booked, we were trying to fit 36 students in a 22 person room sometimes last year, and the number of rooms with computer access is pathetic especially compared to the number of lessons where it is necessary to access a computer. But clearly all of that is a low second to my mental health needs. *nods*

... *sulks* ...

... okay, I can see their point. But... I don't want to study in a building site. Nobody told me I was going to study in a building site. Granted they've been rebuilding the canteen block since I can remember and they took the main building apart to put a new lift in and change an office into some classrooms and nobody telled us about that either, but... oh bugger, I just realised that the English classrooms are mixed in with the builder classrooms so that actually is the buildings they're talking about knocking down in the first phase.

First thing I'm going to do is ask how this plan effects my studyings. Because they sold me a degree so I kind of assumed they'd have rooms to have it in. For all the years of it, which is 6 on a part time course. Or possibly 9, at current rate of progress.

I don't know. I realise things need done, I just... does it have to keep on doing when I'm around? Meh.


... I sulk and have a stompy dance tantrum when we have to change classrooms unexpectedly; changing the buildings is going to be Challenging. :eyeroll:

... yes I am fully aware this is a me thing. I'm just fed up of complaining about me.



Okay, not my problem today. Today's problem is entirely home based, since I brought all the books home from the library. I can do more reading and erode that problem.



PS: Our principal is called Dick Palmer. No, really. You can see on the BBC, and on the website, and everything.

the grand adventures of sleep girl. well, boy tonight.

Dreamed I was a guy. With magic type superpowers.

I had been away for years, and now I'd been called home by the really old guy who'd mentored me. He looked like the original Q from Bond, only a couple hundred years older and more frail. He met me at the security booth at the front gate and showed me in. The whole setup was considerable more elaborate than I was used to. Looked like he'd moved in to a stately home. Which he had, though only the one set of rooms.

After all the walking involved in getting me down the driveway he needed a bit of a lie down. He said I should have a look around, meditate, get centered after the journey. He wandered off to his rooms, and I went looking for somewhere to sit down.

I found a meditation group meeting, doing stretches (yoga?) to start with but settling into sitting meditation. They were a mixture of ages but all wearing the same blue stretch clothes. One lady was very visibly pregnant, and not so much stretching as finding a new place to be just about balanced. They nodded and smiled when I vaguely waved at a spare space, so I joined them. I slowed my breathing down and spaced for a while. It was cool. I was breathing about once a minute I was that chilled.

Then the next breath I took I noticed tasted odd. I opened my eyes and everyone else was looking a whole lot more relaxed but in a very sloppy way, sort of sagging. I reached out to sense the room and found it was full of poison gas. So I rolled out the door again - which I'd been sitting nearest, as usual - and slammed it shut, sealing it with magic. The slamming woke the two guards at the security post just down the hall. They were dozy too - the air out here wasn't as bad, but it wasn't quite right. I yelled at them about gas, but they didn't have gas masks and they weren't reacting right. One kept trying to open the door again, said something about the pregnant lady. I had to yell at them that keeping the door closed might be the only thing keeping the rest of the city safe, and poisoning ourselves wouldn't help anyone.

Then I ran off to trace the source of the gas.

It led back outside, off the grounds, and into a busy street. There were taxis and tacky shops and a whole lot of street people. I got up close to the guy who reeked of the trace spell, but when he turned to see me he just smiled. And then a bunch of the nearby people turned around and pulled knives out of their pockets (those sliding ones they used for boxes at the supermarket actually) and surrounded me.

I blinked into a higher mode of magic, looking for options, and the only thing in the whole street that stayed the same was the buildings. All these people, the ones with the knives, they changed to look kind of like zombies or vampires or in one case a sort of weird half dragon. Even the most normal had eyes so big bright yellow-green they belonged on a surprised cat. The bad guy at first glance looked pretty much the same too, but second glance showed he was concentrated, spotlit, so very much himself he was making the world his backdrop without really trying. He was a guy who wore power like skin, and skin like it was entirely his own design. A completely deliberate guy. I had to blink and look away before I felt like part of his pattern too.

The knives were a problem. I got myself in a less noticeable mind, then drew on magic to speed my way and started moving kind of like the Flash. It would only work in very short bursts, but there was a nearby building with wide open front doors, so I zipped in there. It was a tourist information, in a ridiculously bad neighbourhood, and I had a hunch.

Inside a bunch of teenage-too-aged kids were hanging around. As I slowed down they all turned around to track me, despite my attempts to be unseen. There was a guy in front of me - looked like Danny John Jules actually, with some kind of gold and beads headdress as looked vaguely Chinese - and he was staring at me with this half a grin, showed his point teeth, and nodding. I mumbled something about what was with the staring, did I have something on my face, and he grinned wide and told me "You're a window; you opened yourself." Oddly, this made perfect sense. Clearly he meant that now I was wide open to magic everyone around here could see the power in me, which made using it for hiding kind of counterproductive. I shrugged out of that spell and looked around more carefully.

There was a guy by the desk in a long coat, bulging oddly around the legs. Under desk level he reached in and I could see he had two kinds of container there, like a liter of bleach and something I was going to guess was not going to mix well with it. As he flipped off the lids I ran for the desk and yelled 'attack!' The woman on duty reacted immediately, hit a panic button. It dropped shutters everywhere, front doors, in front of the desk, and in the arches beside. I barely ducked under in time to get to the staff side. The gates were big and steel. Unfortunately they were also those brick pattern grilles you usually get over jewelry store windows. "Gas!" I yelled now, slightly more helpfully. Not a whole hell of a lot she could do now - the containers were dropped, pouring out, and something noxious was forming. It seemed almost heavier than the rest of the air, spreading slugishly and barely up to waist height yet. I looked up and saw there were big steel beams where a second floor should be but nothing on them. I scrambled up the security gates and sat on one. Bought a few seconds. Then I looked with my magic again, hunting new options.

The teenagers had magic around their feet, ears to the ground, word on the street, their own little store of power plugging them in to the place. It gave me an idea. I poured my own power into the ground, wound it together with theirs, and used the lot to pull the bad air down. Suddenly instead of a rising mist there was an ankle height fog bank - still a problem, probably rot right through their shoes, but they were climbing up out of it the same way I did only not so tall since the front area actually had a ceiling. It would be enough, for now. I couldn't see the woman on the desk but I could hope she'd get herself far enough out of there.

Then someone tapped me on the shoulder. Rather surprised to find someone else up here I turned around, to find a guy perched like a monkey and hanging sideways from a beam. He leaned in fast, and I flinched back, but he just stopped in front of my face and breathed breaths with me. I could feel the hint of good magic there and leaned closer to him. Then he touched lips and we breathed mouth to mouth until we were both dizzy. When I leaned back and got a deep breath it tasted cleaner than anything else had all day, and I felt better. In fact I only realised how trashed I'd been feeling when it all went away. The world came into wide focus instead of the ragged narrow blur I'd been pouring all my concentration into.

So I noticed someone else was there, downstairs, next to the big steel wall that was probably some better security doors. A guy. A very familiar guy. Someone I hadn't seen in years, who put a smile on my face just by still existing. I dropped down - touched magic to feather fall - then rushed over to him, grabbed his face, and kissed him.

For about the first thirty seconds I told myself I was trying the same magic on him as had just been done on me. Then he started kissing me back and I didn't need an excuse. It was great.

I felt there was something off about the power flow in him. The healing went only so far, down through his lungs but no lower. I was feeling tingly good down to my toes, and although that was by this point not entirely down to magic, I didn't know what was blocking mine. I broke the kiss to lean back and look at him. I had at some level noticed that he was in a wheelchair, just hadn't considered it important compared to seeing him again. Now I noticed the chair was a full electric job, and he was strapped in to it at several levels, with a big back rest and somewhere for his head. On the one hand it was pretty cool, him wheeling around in his very own car seat, but I did know what a chair like that was for. He kept one hand on the little joystick, lifted the other from the keyboard and touched my face. He did it with quite a bit of difficulty.

Suddenly I had some idea why he'd disappeared, why he'd told me he didn't want to see me, and my reactions were busy having a full on grief-guilt-fear-anger-joy full spectrum experience. On the one hand he wasn't dead; on the other, had he really thought any of this would matter compared to what he'd meant to me?

So then I woke up.
Some days my dreams are all setup. I figure I've got a whole novel right there, if I wanted to follow it all through. But it's all beginnings, and so quite frustrating to wake from right there.