RAIN!

Rain! Rain! Rain, rain, rain, rain!

It rained last night. I went out and stood it in. It was like 1 am, and it was the kind of rain that's so heavy you're instantly soaked, and I didn't care.

Rain!

I can see sky now! It doesn't smell like smoke! We have OPENED WINDOWS!!!!!!

OMG rain!

*ahem*

Yeah. These last ten days have been really bad on my mental health. It's like double-extra covid. Trapped inside, but not only should you not go out, you can't even venture into the garden, go for a walk, or open a fucking window! All the while death and fire slowly creep closer, and when you do have to go out, there's this constant anxiety. Is the mask sealed well enough? Is it working? Can I smell smoke? How much of this can I even breathe before I get lung cancer? (Which, by the way, is what my mother died too young of in February, so that's sorta raw and made of brain-weasels right now!) What about the goober, is she going to get lung cancer? Is her mask sealing?

The whole ordeal was like a special hell, designed just for me.

And then rain!

I grew up in the desert. Rain is something very close to sacred for me. So many of my early stories center on rain, especially on the summer thunderstorms like the one we had last night. I have dragon species where the biggest differences are which ones can "dance" in thunderstorms safely. The one song I composed in my life was about rain.

Rain, and this kind of rain specifically, felt like a blessing.

Now there is sunshine, and the windows are open, and it smells like RAIN!

Luke, I am...you, apparently?

I had another long narrative dream last night. I wish I could remember more of it. It was a Star Wars AU, set in the fantasy casino kingdom that I guess is going to be a recurring dream setting now. The last one of those was very James Bond but with mermaids. This one was, well...Star Wars, but with a circus. He he. That's the part I was dealing with right before waking up, so it's what I remember best.

I was Luke, and in this version Leia was very much the main character, I was more a side-kick. Also we weren't siblings, we were love interests. Han didn't seem to be anywhere in this, though Chewbacca was Leia's bodyguard.

She was also an *actual* princess (what does "princess" even mean in the original? Her father is a senator, what exactly is she meant to be a princess of?) Her father ruled the casino kingdom, which this time was a whole Vegas-like city, though still centered on the royal Castle-Casino that was a bit Excalibur, but more of a tower?

The Dark Side folks had set up a whole plot, though, and managed to assassinate her father. So she stepped up and took charge of everything, including the plans to deal with them. There was a whole long sequence in the immediate aftermath of the assassination where we were chasing them, and they kept setting up weird, elaborate puzzle death-traps in our path, and Leia kept being the one who figured out how to solve the puzzles, save everyone's lives, and continue the pursuit, but in the end they all got away.

Eventually a rumor surfaced that somebody had seen Anakin in the capital casino, and I went out to try to find him. In this AU he and Darth Vader were different people, and he was...either my (Luke's) literal brother or like, Jedi training fraternity brother, I'm not actually sure, I just know there was old kinship. Also he had hella long hair, which was redder, for some reason and he was doing a super anime bishonen aesthetic? I'm preeeeeeeeeeetty sure there was some brotherly homoerotic tension going on there. Whee, my brain!

So there was a massive business with my trying to catch a specific taxi he would be driving, as it turned out he was driving taxis for unknown reasons, without him realizing it was me. That sequence was long, involved, and mostly full of me failing. I caught the right taxi once, but he got out of it. I caught up with him several times, but he kept just running away, assuming I was trying to kill him. I just wanted to talk, though, to see if he could be saved from the dark side, because we were brothers.

Eventually I cornered him via a weird sequence involving him being in the crowd at a big outdoor carnival and circus. He was watching some performance, and I couldn't get to him through the crowd. So I got a motorcycle from somewhere? And found a set of performers who were using special blankets to fling people into the air. (You know, hold the sides with the blanket slack, pull it taut suddenly? They were doing this in big teams, and flinging anybody who'd volunteer. The dream was a little fuzzy on what happened to the flung when they landed, lol.)

So I found a big team that boasted they could fling more than anybody else, and asked if they could fling me on the motorcycle. They had some hesitation, and I challenged their strength, and they were like fine, yes, we are the BEST, we will fling the motorcycle!

They flung me towards the crowd were Anakin was, so I was sailing dramatically through the air, revving the engine, and everyone scattered out of my way as I landed and skidded to a dramatic halt, right in front of Anakin, who was like "Fuck" but couldn't run with the crowd behind him, and also he was just too startled by my arrival.

Then I pulled out my lightsaber, lit it for just a moment (as he went all "Extra, double fuck" and grabbed for his) but then I turned it off and tossed it at him. "You keep this for a while. I just want to talk, I promise."

And that was when I woke up. Damn, I wanted to know what happened next!