Chess in the Morning

I wake up in my old room on Concord Drive. I need to get the Fischer Random Chess game ready for the day, so I go over to the shelf with my chess set on it. The chess set is a brown and white miniature marble chess set, with a king about 3/4 of an inch tall. I noticed that the knights were broken, and looked around for the glue. Eventually I realized the Elmers glue-all was hiding behind the rat's water bottle. I couldn't see it directly, but I could spot it's distorted label through the bottle. As I'm gluing the knights back together, I figure that this is a good excuse to finally get the nice wooden miniature magnetic set I was looking at. I try to remember what price it is and a price tag floats in front of my face with 29.99 written on it.

I set the knights aside to dry, but the condensation from the water bottle has left two drops of water right where I place the knights. After thinking about it for a second, I figure it's okay. I'm going to need a place to put two pieces while playing anyway.

I pick up the FRC computer. It's a small tan box with a red button on it and a small LED screen. I press the button, and the screen reads 4012. I'm not sure what that means so I get out the instructions, which is one of those one page with a dozen fold jobbies. The initial 4 apparently doesn't mean anything, as no matter what you start with rook-knight-bishop. The next two are Python style indexes, so 0 means to the left of the rook. That's where you put the first "matching piece." I'm not sure what that means, but I'm guessing it means "duplicate." That gives me rook-rook-knight-bishop, and the 1 then doubles the knight. The 2 then gives the order to put the pieces in, but there's no details on what 2 specifically means.

I'm totally confused and ready to give up, but before I can I wake up.

Fratricidal Pythonic Rats

I went to see Jason, who was living at the house I grew up in on Concord Drive. We were down in the basement, which had been remodeled to look like Evan's parent's basement. I brought over my rat Hermes but was having trouble keeping track of him. At one point I was holding Hermes in might right hand, and I looked to my left and found another rat and his baby desperately clinging to my right arm. I realized it was Hermes long lost brother, and was overjoyed. Then Greta sat down next to me with a large albino rat, which I realized must be the mother of the baby.

At this point Jason had to get up and deal with some other people who had come over to visit. I was trying to find a box to take the rats home in. But all the boxes were full of colored wooden blocks. When I would empty them out they would turn out not to be the right size for the rats. Meanwhile, the rats were all scurrying about, so once I figured out that a box didn't work, I would have to crawl around the room collecting more rats. In the middle of this Greta gave me a note saying that Jason wouldn't be able to get back to me.

Then after a couple more tries with boxes, the people Jason was supposed to be talking to came in. They were very well dressed Russian nobility. I looked down and Hermes' brother had become really huge in my arm, with Hermes' head sticking out of his mouth. I didn't understand what I was seeing. The Russian woman took a cigarette in a long cigarette holder out of her mouth and said something snotty to me about rats. I looked down and realized that Hermes' brother had completely swallowed Hermes. I freaked out and started smashing the brother's head against my cheap folding table from the Game Cave, but he wouldn't die, he just kept whining at me piteously.