It had been a long time since I had been at this mall. We were waiting for everyone to get out of the car in the underground parking lot before going upstairs. Not only were the elevators gone but the building now only went to the 8th floor instead of the 16th. We were headed towards the internet cafe on the top floor to play a low-stakes, for-fun, League of Legends tournament.

I had started taking acting classes recently and I decided to take a slight detour before heading over this morning. I didn’t expect to see two other people there when I walked down the steps to the labyrinth*.

I walked through the rain to get to math class and saw that everyone was already seated through the glass walls. Even people who usually did not come to class were inside and I had a moment of panic as I thought that I might have been late.

We were play-testing a game that one of us had made on the table. The fork-shaped space consisted of square tiles, some of which were occupied by dice. The two players took turns rolling die to see how far to move and at the end of their turns, all units in the four directions from the player pieces were destroyed. One player’s goal was to simply destroy the other player while the second person had the goal of killing all of the ’neutral’ pieces.

Whenever I looked away, the stove would turn back on and the kitchen faucet would open again. I shouted out into the street for help but no one seemed to care. After running back and forth to keep everything under control, the house finally caught on fire. I ran onto the street to meet some surprised faces. Apparently it was the first time that the neighbors had seen me. I also noticed that a string of Christmas lights would continuously curl up the column behind me no matter how many times I pulled them down. I asked why someone would play such a cruel joke on me. Apparently this was supposed to be a rite of passage and everyone knew about it.

I had just moved into a new house and the residents were introducing themselves to each other. Someone to the left of me turned to face me and tried to sell me insurance. I looked ahead to see that the kitchen cupboards were stocked with paper plates. I felt a wave of shame for not knowing what to do.

The lake that had contained a sunken train carriage had now collapsed into the sea. Unfamiliar with the layout of the train, we compiled a 3D environment from the many Vines that were taken here. “That’s dumb” someone commented. Whenever I shone my flashlight to the far end of the carriage, an amorphous blob with eyes would peek in and out of our sight. This was apparently a freshwater octopus that was in the original lake. It seemed afraid of us as it remembered our last encounter.

It was a sunny day and I was being chased in a hedge maze. I tried to ’log out’ and log back in an attempt to throw off my pursuers. It turned out that I didn’t go far enough before doing so and they simply waited around the area where I blinked out of existence.

We were watching a movie on the big screen of a movie theater but somehow it was also being projected from the TV trolley that was standing in the middle of the first row. Two people on the right side of the theater were having some kind of dispute about seating assignments and who got the lifesaver. I told them that I would give up mine if it meant that they would stop arguing.

We ran through the underground mall looking for an exit. We vaguely recalled coming down by elevator across from a coffee shop but were unable to locate said cafe. We kept moving forwards until we found ourselves in the parking lot and met some other people who were lost down here. I suggested that we should probably turn back as this area seemed unfamiliar. “Oh shit”, one of our group members said. “What?” I asked.