I dreamed I traveled in time with Claire Beauchamp on her second trip. But instead of Scotland, she’d gone back to North America just at the beginning of its colonization. She was going back to find the Native American she’d been married to. Somehow, her modern day husband Frank found us and cane with us.
We tried several times to leave Frank with the English settlers, but he finally caught up with us on the evening before a boar hunt. The hunt had been planned to supply a feast to celebrate Claire’s return. The people we had joined were willing to take Frank in, too, because they didn’t have any proscriptions against partnerships among more than two people.
Frank was considering this option, which was good, because he’d been pretty violently angry when he found us. But he’d never even considered he might be able to keep Claire in his life without dragging her back to the future with him. He was taking the night to consider, and if he joined the hunt, it would mean his acceptance of the offer to become part of the group.
Claire and I were put up in a hotel, because she was being kept separate from it all until an agreement was reached, and I was just kind of assigned to her, since they didn’t know what else to do with me. In the middle of the night, I was startled awake by a hideous, squealing screech. The boar had launched a preemptive attack against the camp.
As we were scrambling around in the darkness, an even worse sound rang out. Men began to scream in terror and agony. But by the time we got to a window, everything had gone silent. Claire was sure that she had heard both her men screaming, but we couldn’t get out, and we had to wait until dawn to find out what had happened.
One thing that had happened when the sun rose was that time had shifted back to modernity. There was a huge tapped off area in the field beside the hotel, and in the middle lay a brown hillock covered with wild, rough brown bristles. It was the boar. It was HUGE. And it had gores Claire’s native husband, then Frank as well, when he leapt in to try and help the other man. The people decided this made him one of them, and they were busy getting him cared for. Claire rushes to help.
I wandered off and ended up at a shopping mall. It was one of those places that’s kind of shops clustered around a hotel and convention center, and there was an environmental and gender equality convention going on. I ran into some friends from New Orleans who were there to give a talk about bird populations. They got me in for some of the talks, which was really interesting.
Slowly I began to realize that all of the talks were kind of being judged. There was a panel that was evaluating what they learned to decide if it might inform policy change. They were all old and middle-aged white men. And they all obviously had money. The chairman was wearing a late Victorian suit, with pin striped trousers, a slate gray waistcoat, shining boots, and a beaver hat perched on one knee with his gloves. He had a round, pasty white face, with a sharp chin, small dark eyes, and a mop of iron gray curls. He had a silver watch and chain.
I was wondering who he was and what he might accomplish by hosting and evaluating these talks, when I felt something kind of weird in my mouth. I pushed my tongue against one of my molars, and it broke off. I could feel the jagged edges still planted in my gum, and the raw little bump of tissue within them. I spat out the crown of my tooth, and... it was a golden brown on the outside and purple inside. It looked like a chunk of amethyst, but it crumbled like sugar in my fingers. I showed it to my friend, and we were all just aghast. But it didn’t really hurt, so I hoped it would be fine.
Then I woke up. And I checked all my teeth!
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