I'm in some sort of hotel, and there's a buffet, but the food really sucks. The sushi in the buffet was bad enough that I spat it back out into the garbage. There's watermelon, but it tastes like saw dusts, etc. The ice cream seems okay, though.

While getting some ice cream, I see Meiko singing a song I seem to know the melody off, but not the lyrics. Another dark skinned Asian (Philipino?) girl comes along and joins her in song. I hum along, and the second girl asks me how I dare sing along with two beauties like this (and she intones her question in such a way that it's not rhetorical). I tell her "I dare because I know both of you." Her eyes go wide in recognition and she says "You're Elias's friend!" In response, I sing the beginning of Luv To Me, as if it were some inside joke or something that is meaningful between that girl and I.

I don't remember what happened next, but now I'm in the hallways in between the rooms of the hotel. There were adults at the buffet, but for the rest of the dream, it's only kids, like around the age of the students in Harry Potter.

Fast forward a bit again, and now I'm in one of the rooms of the hotel, but it's not my room. I guess the door was unlocked, and I just randomly stumbled in and befriended the kids here.

Also, apparently, everybody in the hotel has a deck of cards from sort of collectible card game. One of the peculiarity of this card game is that on the back of the card, the type of the card is listed (is this a mech, an enhancement, a mana source, etc.) However, this seems to not be strongly enforced in my dream (i.e. sometimes the back of the card has this info, other times, the back of all cards look identical). Additionally, the back of the cards say "PlanetTech" on it, like that's the name of the game. When I look at the mechs, this is clearly a rip off of BattleTech. The Catapult, Daishi, etc. are all very recognizable, and they even name the mechs "Catapult", "Daishi", and so on, but the words "BattleTech" don't appear anywhere. Also, the weights of the mech seem much higher, like 2300 tons, instead of the typical 60 or 100 tons.

There's maybe 4 to 6 kids in the room, goofing around, but one of them is explaining to me how to play PlanetTech. I tell him I have a vague idea of how to play (maybe I had glanced through the manual?) but I've never actually played a single game yet, and I'm still fuzzy on the details. So he's trying to go over the details with me when an alarm rings, and that female synthetic voice says some keywords that categorize the nature of the alarm.

"That means someone's attacking, right?" I say to the kid. He nods. We simultaneously both say "On screen" or something like that, and the hotel AI or whatever it is shows on a screen a map of the hotel, and some icons representing robots. Everybody in the room is silent. I take a quick count of the icons.

"There's 5, right? And only 3 of them are tough. We can take them." I note the central one is a daishi, and there were 2 other tough ones, but I can't remember which. The other two looked like medium mechs, though. "Oh wait, actually there's 7, but still they're wusses." The other two, I hadn't noticed until now, were light scout mechs, way ahead down the corridor, scouting ahead. The response was uneasy silence. I ask for last minute tips from the kid.

"Are we playing for keeps?" I ask him. I'm referring to the concept that in some card games, if you lose, you have to give one of the cards from your deck to the winner. "We're playing with dues", the kid nods. "Well, I only have shitty cards in my deck, so that's okay." I say, trying to sound comforting, but I realize if I only have shitty cards, that means I'll probably lose.

"If he kills the mech I'm in, am I out of the game?" I ask. I forget the exact wording of the answer, but the answer is no, I can switch to another mech. Then, I sudden worry hits me. "This *is* a turn based card game, right?" He shakes his head.

"Real time."

'Fuck', I think. "Oh so I can't go like 'Re-ge-ne-ra-te: tap this card to...'" I read in slow monotone, mimicking me taking a long time to actually read the text on my cards. Again, an uneasy silence in response.

Suddenly, the kids are flipping cards onto the floor, and I figured the game has begun, so I kneel down and start flipping cards over from the deck into my hand, and I realize I have no freaking clue what the turn sequence is. I also have no clue what would happen if I cheated, not necessarily even on purpose, but simply because I didn't even know the rules very well. The first card I got in my hand is a land. It hadn't even entered my mind to consider how many cards I start with in my hand, I just put the land down immediately. Draw another card, and it's a creature, but 0 cost, and I can tap it for mana, so again I put it down. Then I draw something which costs 3 mana, and it was some sort of enchantment I guess. Draw another one, and it's another 3 mana card, but this time a creature, and it says I can pay 1 mana and tap it to deal 5/8 damage to a target. I realized I'm in way over my head and have no frigging clue how to play this game.

Fast forward again a few seconds, and we're hiding under cardboard boxes, Metal Gear Solid style. The enemy is standing right in front of us, though I can only see their feet. They know we're there, though, and they taunt "You can jump out now." My allies are flipping their boxes and standing up, so I do too.

So these enemies, it turns out, aren't veteran storm troopers or anything, but just another bunch of kids, maybe a bit older than the "bad" kids from Harry Potter, like say 16 or something. All guys. Now I'm amused instead of scared. After all, I'm still 25, and that gives me some seniority. And plus, they seem to be holding Guitar Hero controllers.

I start chatting the "bad guys" up, as if they were my friends. It's as if I'm using the techniques I know for seducing girls and trying to apply them to platonic relationships in order to diffuse the situation and avoid a PlanetTech combat if possible.

It turns out they plan on battling us in both Guitar Hero and PlanetTech, and I'm trying to egg on the Guitar Hero part while not mentioning and hoping they forget about the PlanetTech part -- mainly because I'm probably way better at GH than PT. There's some resistance from the bad guys, and I think I play off of that, ("Why you so hostile?") and he says something about my not having gum (could it have possibly been something like they don't wanna be friends with me if I don't have gum), so I respond "So give me some gum", and they do, and now my allies, particularly the kid who was teaching me how to play, is protesting about my apparent sudden change in allegiance, but I try to ignore it, 'cause I'm doing this for him (if we got into a PlanetTech fight, I'd probably lose), and he's doing the equivalent of cock-blocking me.

So I'm trying to get a feeling of how good these kids are at Guitar Hero. I told them I haven't played in a while, and I'm beginning to suck, and then I drop the name "Through the Fire and Flames", saying something like "The other day, I could only get 3 stars on it, and now I'd probably fail it" (which is a total lie, I've never been able to do TtFaF at all) just to gauge their reaction. There is no visible reaction, but hopefully I've spooked them a bit with my bragging.

Suddenly, the floor trembles, and someone says "It's Dad!" and I just somehow know the "D" is capitalized, because it's said the same way people say "It's Mom!" in Futurama. Also, I somehow know "Dad" is some sort of evil giant (sky-scrapper height) robot that everyone fears. The floor is trembling in thumps, like the scene from Jurassic Park, and everyone is trying to be completely silent. I guess Dad has super sonic hearing too. I don't dare asks anyone any questions about what's going on.

Somehow, I'm in the lobby, and kids are trying to quietly run, presumably to some safer point. I see a bathroom, and I decide to try my luck there, but I seem to be strolling a lot more casually than everyone else, perhaps because I figure if Dad really does have super senses, he might be less "suspicious" if I acted completely normal.

So the bathroom is pretty filthy. I walk in front of a urinal, and it looks like another kid gets the same idea as I do, 'cause he walks up to the urinal as if to pee, but he doesn't. I do actually, manage to get a few drops out, but it's clear that I didn't really need to go. I wonder how sensitive Dad really is. That's when a bathroom attendant comes over and flushes the urinal for me with a napkin. He smiles to me like he was doing me a favor, but now I can't "pretend" I'm peeing anymore.

So I head over to the sinks as if to wash my hands, but the knobs are pretty nasty, and I don't know if turning on the water would attract more attention to myself (assuming Dad really can hear everything we do), since all the other sinks are off. That's when I notice a bunch of girls are also hiding here in the boy's bathroom.

I don't know what the hell I was thinking for this next part, because of that whole Dad thing, but I start hitting on the girls! I tease them for being in the wrong bathroom, and joke that I should have also ran into the girl's bathroom under the pretense of hiding from dad. They mostly giggle, but don't answer back verbally.

That's when a giant fist bursts through the wall, and grabs some random kid, while a voice that might be hired to play Santa Claus in cartoons says "Awwwwwwwww... hold still!" The fists disappears with the kid out the hole in came in from. Then, seconds later, punches through again, with that same catch phrase: "Awwwwwwwww... hold still!" It turns out that every time Dad punches through the wall, he says this. And he grabs mayve 5 more kids, one after the other, and if you extrapolate the path he's taking for the sequence of kids he's grabbing, it leads straight to me.

So I panic, and start running, not giving a damn how much noise I make (and it looks like all the other kids, at least in the bathroom, are doing the same. The bathroom attendant just sort of mysteriously disappeared from my dream.)

That's when I woke up. The sensation, upon waking up, was a little bit worried, but not really scared or freaked out as I might have felt when waking up from a nightmare. I had the feeling Dad would not have killed me or anything if he caught me. It'd be scary to be held by a giant robot against my will, but I somehow sense he didn't mean me any harm. He was just scary in the way that all distant, stern fathers are scary.