Returning home with family and friends, my attention is fixated on the skies. UFO's/Alien crafts of different sizes and types, as well as military flown crafts are flying by and no one else in my party seems to notice them. I don't care that they aren't watching the sky, I am enthralled at every sighting. My party knows what I'm doing, that I keep looking to catch a glimpse of the next one, or focus in on something in the sky toward the horizon. Jim seems annoyed as he asks me what I'm looking at.
"All the crafts in the air." The sky was abuzz. Something was happening that we the public weren't aware of. There was an urgency in the air from a collective extraterrestrial knowledge and I wanted to know.
I passed a room as we headed inside and noticed a wobbling circular craft in the corner of a man's garage. His hair was aging, and his skin was tanned and rough. I stopped in excitement and pointed to the small toy-like craft as it wobbled in a zipzag path toward the man.
"Oh its 'so-and-so' [I don't recall the name he referred to him by]."
"Yes. He's part of the 'so-and-so' [ET organizational name]."
I get a better look. A tiny alien is driving a kid's toy UFO. It's white plastic, with cutout sections where a windshield or window would be. Vibrant colored lights that seemed more for spectacle for a child than of use to the alien operator. He had animated a kid's toy into an operational vehicle somehow. I pondered the science he might be using to perform this, and magnetic field was the only answer I came up with in the dream. Imagine a remote control helicopter. Now imagine a humanoid alien small enough to fit inside it could control it by manipulating its remote capabilities and bringing those controls to its fingertips in the cockpit. He animated only a few levers, making immovable plastic functional.
The creature looked like a creature out of Star Wars. It had multiple eyes that protruded out of the head like a lobster, or the Gran species of the Star Wars Universe. It's face was oval, and its skin was forest green like Gredo.
My neighbor's alien friend was coming to warn his human correspondent of what was happening. This man, my neighbor, revealed himself to me as a member of an order that exchanges intelligence between humans and alien councils. My neighbor gave himself a title, like the 7th Sun/Son of the 11 Stars or something more grandeur and cosmological.
I returned to my home where my adopted sister Shantey, my partner Jim, and some unrecognized family members were waiting. Shantey was upset with me. She needed a painkiller and couldn't find anything.
"Why didn't you just come to me?" I asked.
"I thought I still had some and you took them."
I go to my room's medicine cabinet [this house is nothing like my home in real life, it is a communal home for a group, though I didn't understand what our mission was, or why we were joined together, until later.] I pull out my giant bottle of IB prophen, just as someone who heard she was looking for meds came up and asked me if I also needed some. I showed her my bottle and she laughed shyly.
In this organization, or school, like Girl Scouts, I guess, we were paired with someone we would be keeping in check, and assisting in their development and responsibilities. Mine was a female peer who would have preferred to be paired with someone who was part of the larger social circle of women, but tried to make the best of being with me the outcast. I was outcast in that I had trouble sharing the blind acceptance of everything our higher ups told us.
The house was alive with excitement. My partner came to me and pulled me toward a commons room where cafeteria style chairs and tables were set in rows and red linen cloths were thrown over them, making the setting an elegance that only ostracized me more in my own sense of belonging to this group. I knew I belonged there, we were each individually selected to be participate, and it was a long-term commitment away from our previous lives and families.
"What's going on?" I blandly ask my partner.
"We got approved, we're going to the Mediterranean!"
Our team leader who hands down the messages from the organization leader, and is the authority figure we take our orders from, tells us we were approved for a team mission to a famous vacation spot. I couldn't tell if they were excited to finally be on the move, if this was a vacation, or it was the chance to do some work. Either way, I didn't buy it. My partner was frustrated that I wasn't more enthusiastic. It felt like a camoflauged win, there was something our superiors weren't telling us.
To accept the mission, and board the airplane, we had to sign a contract and accept a gift of deceptively cheap rings. My partner got me to relent, and out of concern and curiosity, I accepted my spot on the trip. She gave me my box of rings. They were silver bands with lovely centerpieces of purple flowers, very girlish. "Just like the rings I already have." I said, laying my hand against the box to compare the four or five rings against the ones already on my finger. It proved they were overstock, and not particularly special. I felt my suspicions were confirmed. This trip is hiding something.
I recall a brief scene on a plane, then my team, led by a man and woman dressed like Morpheus and and assassin queen, erupts out of an elevator in a rich area. We are on a practice run, exercising our abilities. No citizens of the area are out, must be night-time or early morning. I see my teammates demonstrate their unique talents in the field. We each have a sort of super power. One jumps thirty feet in the air, another is super fast, but we all have increased stamina, accuracy in our aim, faster reflexes. We are trained weapons and they tell us we help people. We are a black operative unit that goes in fast, corrects a problem, eliminates a threat, retrieves something, and gets out quickly. The civilian population has caught a glimpse of us around, but isn't sure who we are or what our motus operandi is, and we do not divulge our name, only that we are there to help and that we are a government issued task force to protect citizens.
I don't know my skill yet, and it makes me wonder what they see in me. Why do our team commanders keep me? Why did they accept me in the first place for this team when I'm at a disadvantage to the others. The assassin queen captain insists I have compensated for that with increases in all the other standard stats. Morpheus, in his calming and reassuring tone, tells me I will figure out my gift soon enough.
As I'm questioning them about my abilities, we are all flying through a skyscraper, up stories and around ascending flights of stairs. We would look a blur to anyone who may have caught a glimpse of us, and we frankly weren't concerned with being seen momentarily. There were many times, we had to interact directly with the populace. Discretion, efficiency, and quality of performance were our standard though, so we ended up seeming avoidant to being seen. It wasn't always a deliberate action to not be seen by a civilian, unless that person was our target or the sight of us would negatively impact someone after a serious commotion.
Slipping in and around floors with speed and grace, I began to take note just how different I was from my other teammates. I troubled myself with second guessing, accountability, empathy. I almost ran into a a glass shield, which one of my teammates would have done without stopping, but I adjusted my course, slowed, and swirled around it. I didn't want to shatter the glass for someone to clean up.
"That is your skill, right there." My leader said, hanging a few paces/swings behind me. She was specifically referring to my second-guessing, critiquing every action and consequence. "We need someone like you to keep us in check." But the dynamic changed as I realized that knowing my role, and executing my role meant I was an enemy walking amongst them, and she would turn on me. Their success hinged on being able to fulfill a mission swiftly, and without consideration of both sides, because that meant I would never agree to some of our actions, and would rouse my team against their orders if they knew our task assignments had other angles.
My movement through the floors became a flee from my captains. I felt their intentions change, they had kept a mission secret, the one that said if I should ever recognize my skill, I am to be eliminated. I was valuable as long as I didn't understand my talent, and simply did it without thinking or owning it. Once I attached the confidence of knowing it was what I excelled at, it put them at risk of exposure and sacrificing whatever task we were ordered to carry out because I would inevitably doubt their resolve and morality. I still believed they were trying to do good, but I also knew she would kill me upon my discovery and trust in my skill. It meant those nagging concerns became valid concerns about what our authority wasn't telling us, and that there are other sides to the stories we act upon.
I flit around the building, asking people if they've seen my target, or my other teammates. I come upon a room where I telepathically see a husband indulging in an affair, and a followup reading of the wife ascending the steps to the building to return home. I barge in and tell the man to quit what he's doing, appeal to his morality, and inform him that he has only minutes before his wife walks in. I presented him his choice of having her find out by walking in on him having sex with another woman, or of telling her when she arrives. I hurry the woman out the sliding glass doors to the balcony, jump her down, and accelerate back up to the balcony despite my chance to escape the building because I heard his door open and shouting ensue. What if it was my commander who found the residue of my presence in that room and questioned the man about me? What if he hurts him to keep him silent about this incident of a rogue operative. I enter to find the wife, and a moment later, my commander enters.
"Who is she?" The man asks me. The situation has escalated quickly, and I brought even more danger to them. I turn and shoot the wife in the head because I know the commander would kill them both for seeing this encounter if I didn't do something to change the outcome of this scene. She can feel my determination to stay and with the coming of an ambulance, it would be too risky for her to try and clean up the situation now. She left me to clean up. Shaking, I drop down to her in apologies. Her husband is distraught at just moments before been cheating on her and now she lay dying before he could come clean. I call for an ambulance, but misdial the simplest three numbers. I wonder if stupid delays in care for her like this will mean her death. I dial again and get on with a dispatcher. I explain she's shot in the head and ask the husband for the address, but they never ask where we are. I ask her what to do. She asks me questions and I have trouble concentrating. I ask her to repeat. I can hear her like its real, like I'm really on the phone with someone else, though I know its a dream. I'm surprised I ever made out the words she said. It was like waking consciousness where someone has to say words and it takes your brain a moment to process. In dreaming, you sometimes know the answer as they are speaking it, or sense a person's thoughts without the linear processing of words to thought.
I talk to the wife, she doesn't seem to know she's shot. She just looks around confused by our expressions. Her husband sobbing, the hope in my reassurances. Then she falls unconscious. The dispatcher instructs me to tuck her chin into her chest, something about blood flow that I'm sure had no truth in physical biology. I had been increasingly agitated why the dispatcher made no mention of an ambulance on its way or an ETA.Suddenly I hear an ambulance alarm approaching and look to the husband with a smile of relief and hope. She was fading fast, and I wondered if they'd be able to do anything when they got here anyway. Before I woke, I doubted if this ambulance was for us. Did she not send one because she knew it was hopeless and this was more a charade of motions for us to feel like we tried? I looked back at her husband, both of us listening intently for a sound that the ambulance had stopped here. I wouldn't accept my plan had failed. I looked back at her silent face and thought about where the bullet had impacted. My shot was too aggressive, but she would survive. I told her husband she'd need help, she'd have brain damage. She might not remember today, and will need to be cared for. I figured it would be good repentance to change his guilt and prove his love.
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