I dreamed that I was walking home from college classes, and I passed through a particular subdivision every day. Today, outside the first house on the right, there was a mother cat and a bunch of newly weaned kittens playing. Across the street was a somewhat older kitten, bony and thin. He was mostly white, but had a black and brown tabby pattern in blotches across his face and back. He came up to me and I picked him up and went up to the door of the house and knocked.
A woman opened the door, and I could see that the house was humming with the activity of at least a dozen children and just as many kittens, all of them white with either black and brown tabby, gray tabby, or blue Siamese point markings over it. I asked if the starving kitten was hers, and she said it was one that had been missing, but if I wanted it, I could have it, because the cats and kids were getting to be too much. I asked if I could have one of the younger kittens, too, and she said I could, so I picked out one that was about half white and half silver tabby, with a cap of soft gray stripes between its ears, but a mostly white face.
I set off to carry them the mile between there and home, but about three blocks away, I remembered I had left my backpack. I went back and got it, and set off again, but then the smaller kitten was missing. I went back and found it and the woman gave me a paper sack to carry the kittens in. We poked some holes to better aerate it, folded down the top, and I set off carrying it carefully in my arms. I decided to call the bigger one Bexar and the little one Medina. Bexar was very calm, and never presented a problem, but Medina kept slipping away.
On about the second trip back to the woman's house to see if Medina had made it back there, it was night already, but the yard was ominously bright. When I got close, I saw that an outdoor fireplace that had been lit to keep the chill away for the outdoor cats had caught the lower branches of the small, spindly trees on fire. I shouted to the people in the house as I began to fling water from the bird bath and the cats' water dishes onto the flames.
The woman came out and we put out the fire, I sorted through the kittens to find Medina, and set off for home again. Then I realized that I'd picked the wrong kitten, and went back, and the woman asked me if I could also take two of her children and raise them with me, because she just couldn't manage. I felt so awful for the two kids she was willing to give away to a stranger, so I took them, but I made her sign a paper saying that she agreed I should, and gave me permission and guardianship and all that.
So I handed the sack of kittens to the boy, who was about seven, for him to carry, and I picked up the girl, who wasn't yet two, and we set off. We stopped off in the Ammansville church hall to use the bathroom and get a drink of water. There was a big meeting of some sort going on. Somehow kids and kittens got shuffled away, and I was asked to accompany a young woman on her trip to Russia.
I figured, hey, paid trip to Europe, and she was the daughter of someone pretty important, so I didn't feel like I could refuse, so off we went. We landed in Brussels, and took the crossing there. I'd rented a little red car, and was pretty confident I could drive just fine, since at least it would be on the same side of the road. We passed through customs, changed our money, bought some cheap designer knock off shoes, and set out.
In the next town we met up with some of my friends, which was good, because they were much more organized about where they were going, and knew which roads to take, so we agreed to follow them. The elevated roads were really rickety constructions of steel supports and wooden boards, and it really looked like we were driving on old train trestles. It was pretty terrifying, but apparently one of the roads we thought we'd take was basically a roller coaster track, so it was a good thing we'd met up with people who knew I'd never be able to handle it.
We stopped for the night in a tiny town, and had ham and potato tacos at the pub. We started talking about our route, and there was one road I was interested in taking, but it turned out it was basically a horse track that circumnavigated the entire country, and that wasn't really feasible. So we decided to go to Moscow, then cross into Turkey and go see Hagia Sophia.
Then a woman came into the pub, and she had a baby head hanging around her neck and was screaming about vampires. It turned out that Angelus knew that Buffy was part of our group, and had turned the woman's baby into a vampire. The woman had cut off its head, because she had to, but instead of turning to ash, both parts of the body were simply incorruptible, and, if reunited, could reassemble, so she had carried the head into the village to find out what she should do, but she was also half-crazy. She was very clear that the child was a message to someone, and we all knew it was Buffy, and that Angelus would kill again and again if we couldn't get to him.
Some folks in the group kept telling Buffy she needed to take a step back and think about who was doing this, and why. I got frustrated and started shouting that it was more important to figure out when and where if we were going to stop him. I stormed off down a hallway, and then I woke up.
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