Dreaming of the future... what might or might not be...

Diane in her dream was Softgreyfur, a two year old lupus Garou who had never known humanity. Her life was her pack, parents and younger siblings. Though the brothers and sister of her own litter had already left this pack to go seek mates and territories of their own, she had stayed. She had grown up more slowly. But it was getting time and Mom and Dad, the Alphas of the pack, were losing patience. Before she'd be strong enough to challenge Mom, she'd be gone.

Softgreyfur was smarter than the others in some ways. Since she had started having visions of another world next to this one, and one day looking into a stream had stepped into the water and found herself in a ghostlit world, she knew she was different in more than intelligence. But it wasn't until her ancestor spirit started to talk to her in a language she hadn't realized she knew, that she began to understand what she was.

The ancestor taught her to shift form to a giant wolf, something that would come in handy when she left home and her pack's protection. The ancestor then appeared to her in a strange shape, upright with two legs. Softgreyfur had never seen such a thing. The ancestor said that the form was a human, and that fifty turns of the seasons ago - Softgreyfur had never imagined a time so long as fifty turns of the seasons - something called the Apocalypse had caused the death of billions of these creatures. Softgreyfur tried to wrap her mind around a number of billions. As many as there are leaves on every tree in the forest, the ancestor told her. That was a lot, Softgreyfur thought. They had to die so that the world would live, the ancestor said sadly. I was one of them. I died then too. But I had already left my seed in your great great great ... Softgreyfur lost track of the generations... -great-grandfather and so you have sprung from the seed of the Garou. We are the shifters, we can be wolf or homid. Homid was the ancestor's word for the upright animals, one that Softgreyfur heard as only a sort of soundimage in her mind.

And they're all dead now? So why tell me about them? Softgreyfur asked her ancestor. Because their places still exist, their cities (another soundimage that Softgreyfur found meaningless) still exist, and you must journey to one of those cities to find something that will bring you closer to me and to your own powers.

At this point, Diane woke, but with a strong feeling that the dream would continue. Everything but a "to be continued" subtitle said so. She felt saddened. Would it really take the death of all of humanity to set the balance right? Was that really Gaia's plan? She hoped not, the sadness of the result would surely overtake her determination to do right and make her falter if that were so. Yet the dream had not been sad, it had felt hopeful and right. Strange. Soon though she forgot the dream, at least until the next time she dreamed of Softgreyfur in her strange post-Apocalyptic future...

Back to the Drawing Board

Another dream catapulted Diane into the future. She knew somehow that this vision was taking place around the same time, across the oceans from Softgreyfur but in the same milieu. Her point of view soared across continents swathed in jungle, then focused in on one green-lit glade. A russet orangutan was making faces as it attempted to use a sharpened stick to poke a hole in a hard-shelled fruit. The fruit's tough hull was almost as hairy as the ape.

"Try a nice sharp rock," said a familiar voice. The dream's point of view swiveled and Diane saw Maurice, resplendent in turquoise paisleys against a salmon orange rayon Hawaiian shirt. His trousers were vertically striped in lime and olive acrylic weave. "No, m'boy, not that rock... the other one... now, set it against the coconut and strike it with the big rock..." Maurice shook his head with mock sadness as the orangutan tried this feat, then yelped as it smashed its finger between the rocks.

As the orangutan dropped its coconut and went looking for easier things to eat, Maurice shrugged eloquently. Then, turning, he looked directly at the dream's point of view, and it was as if he saw Diane there, though she could not see herself and did not feel present in the dream. "Primates. They make humanity look easy to work with. A pity about the humans, don't you agree, m'dear? Not that I can't make do with any material to hand. Certainly I can. And in give or take three million years, your typical orangutan will be wearing a necktie and telecommuting to work."

Diane's sleeping mind wondered why Maurice was still alive, when according to Softgreyfur's ancestor, they had all died. As if she'd asked aloud, he answered. "What a perceptive question. Technically inaccurate, I'm afraid. Only those who have ever partaken of the breath of life, can have it choked out of them, m'dear. I have always abstained, myself."

So he was saying he was not alive and therefore could not have died? "Pree-cisely, couldn't have put it better. Must be off, so much to do, so much time to do it, y'see." And with that the apparition vanished. Diane's sight seemed to blur, her eyes stinging so much from the residual retinal images of Maurice's clothing that she woke up, once again writing the dream in her notebook.

Diane woke from yet another dream of the Post-Apocalyptic world of Softgreyfur. She wondered to herself if the dreams would ever stop. She remembered something, then, a bit of trivia from the past.

When she'd been in college and living with the Glasswalkers, there had been a television. She hadn't watched it often, but one time, she'd found her attention caught by a TV show called the Outer Limits. An old program, made years before, but shown repeatedly, apparently very popular. The story had been about a woman who was a typical housewife of the time the show had been filmed.

She had gone shopping at a flea market, Diane thought, the memory slipping and twisting in her mind so that she could not remember details. Diane thought the woman had bought a locket. One day, wearing the locket, she'd got frustrated with life, husband and kids, and just yelled "shut up!" At those words the world stopped around her, everything but herself frozen in time.

The housewife had found many uses for the time-stopping locket. When her husband was about to be late for work and couldn't find some vital thing, she'd stop time, find it for him, and then he'd be just in time to leave for work after all. When the kids drove her crazy, she could take time out to relax before she lost her temper with them. And so forth.

The end of the story had come on an ominous note. The world of the housewife had many warnings of a war about to start. And the finale had been that as the bombs began to fall, she stopped time and looked at the frightened faces, the warheads frozen in the sky above... fade to black and roll credits.

Diane wondered about that. Would the end of everything be such horror that a person would choose to freeze time before it happened, rather than face it? The story was an interesting one... her Galliard's mind turned it over and over, wondering what she could make of it...