In the Asylum of the Supervillians

I was wearing blue pajamas and looking unsettlingly like Tintin, when a disembodied voice started trying to convince me I was an android. I think I was asleep in an attic somewhere, probably above a store. The attic was comfortably furnished, dresser and bed and mirror and such, but it was definitely an attic. I was blonde, short, and looking rendered (in the computer sense, not the pig sense). The disembodied voice angered me, and I started pointing out that everything looked computer generated, not just me.

I was too angry to sleep, so I got out of bed, walked to the dresser, and started assembling novelty pens. Man! I had a lot of novelty pens! They were chunky and purple. The top part had flowing goop in it, like a lukewarm lava lamp, while the bottom half was just oddly shaped. There were also miscellaneous innards, including some springs, and all in all they were hard to put together. I knew I stored them disassembled for safety, though, so this was just something I had to live with.

That's when I figured out that I wasn't an android, I was androgynous. D'oh! Being rendered and all, under the pajamas I just looked like a mannequin. It didn't seem to bother me much, though.

I walked out of my attic room into another attic across the street. We were probably connected by a walkway. The scene changed, and I was inside my body more. I wasn't as detached as I had been. The way to my previous apartment was gone; I was in a new scene entirely.

There were stairs. Marble stairs at crazy angles, and all I could do was climb them. I climbed for ages and ages, but I didn't get tired or bored. It was an agreeable climb, though. A gentle breeze was blowing and the air was a little chilly and moist, as though it came from the bowels of a huge castle. Not stuffy, though. Anyway, I climbed.

Ended up in an insane asylum. It was sort of like playing a role-playing game; I could tell who was an NPC [non-player character] just there for atmosphere, who I should interact with, and a few people looked like other PCs. The NPCs looked like extremely awkwardly rendered images, like the posable people that come preset. The other PCs looked more like normal humans, although everything, including my own body, was oddly smooth and featureless.

I don't remember the individual actions of the crazy NPCs or the orderlies, just that it was pretty standard, judging from all the movies I've seen involving insane asylums. It came as a complete shock when costumed supervillians burst in.

They were, again, standard costumed supervillians; dressed mostly in black and purple and green, wearing skin-tight suits and sporting comical masks and enormous capes. Unfortunately, all the crazy NPCs stood up, eyes glowing green, and began to follow their orders.

The other PCs (or so I figured they were) and myself exchanged a worried glance, and began working in unison to barricade ourselves in a room. That may not have been the smartest idea, but when zombies suddenly beset you, any action is better than just standing there.

We held the zombies at bay pretty easily, but one of the supervillians just charged right in, armed with hideous tools. He proceeded to attack one of us, a black guy who was somehow Edgar Allen Poe, with some kind of hideous automated psychosurgery machine. It was sort of a compressed air-powered lobotomy gun. Really nasty. Everyone kicked him and kicked him but it didn't help. That's when we noticed there was a balcony we could run to.

And just in time, too, because that's when the superheroes showed up. They were also poorly rendered, but they might have been recognizable, had they been clothed. They were completely nude, except for the odd tiara or boots. The naked superheroes flew in the window/door, and probably beat the stuffing out of the bad guys and the zombies. At any rate, nobody followed us.

There were about 4 of us who weren't zombies, and we decided to climb down the building, steal a car from the parking lot, and escape. The building was an ornate old house with lots of decorative curlicues, so we had no trouble climbing down. As we left, He-Man from the eponymous series charged in the door, sword raised.

The asylum had an immense parking lot, bigger than Disneyland. "Let's get a car right by the door," said one of my faceless comrades, "Those belong to the first inmates, and so the owner is probably dead." We split up and each tried to hot-wire a car. All the cars were Volkswagens, interestingly enough.

I did it first. I got a beige Bug running, and everyone piled in. We decided that the first thing we needed to do was to get some real clothing, rather than these pajamas we'd been wearing, and headed off into the sunset.