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I shuffled into the courtroom. The audience was filling the three rows of seats in the back. The center was blocked off on either side by a glass barricade with the sun shining down through a skylight on it. The judge sat at the front between his white pine podium and a pleasant yellow wall. On the other side was the defendant's table and his lawyer - a woman I was supposed to have a date with that night. WTF? She hadn't told me she was defending this guy. She hadn't even told me she was a lawyer. I couldn't let her see me here so I ducked down... behind the glass divider... and snuck away to escape down the hall.
Some kind of ancient sewer nexus. The floor was dirt, hardened and blacked with decades of scum. The path led down in front of me with a curious brick soffit running at an equal but opposite angle up the wall. To my left was another room, dark, dingy, blackened floor and brick walls but with a ray of light coming down from up above. In the room with me were a number of youths ambling mindlessly about like zombies but talking to each other, laughing, acting suspiciously. I felt anxious in their presence and crossed into the adjoining room.
In the center, below the ray of light, was a pit with a waist high brick wall topped with slabs of concrete cordoning it off. I looked down through three or four floors below. The remnants of a funeral pyre burned below me in a corner. I was saddened by the death of someone I didn't know. I dug in the pocket of my shabby brown coat and found an empty Snickers wrapper. I tossed it over the side and watched it flutter into the flames below, twisting and melting and finally falling into the flames. A friend of mine on the other side of the mezzanine had also dropped an empty Snickers wrapper but it fell just short of the flames.
The miscreants had followed me in from the other room. I caught a glimpse of something shiny in some of their hands. "Run!" I yelled at my friends. We made a dash for it and coalesced into a group through the exit. The rebels had made a show of it though, coming up quick and surrounding us in another square and unremarkable room with the same dirt floor and the same brick walls. They singled out Jeff and began to swarm him. "No!" I cried and elbowed my way into the thick of it. I caught one of them by the neck and performed a reverse choke slam on the kid. "Don't hit them! It will only provoke them!" It was unclear if the voice was that of one of my friends of that of the rebels' leader. In any case, my action caused them to break up and back away forming a circle around me, even Jeff having dissolved into the crowd. One of the larger boys - and he was large like a football player - raised a bow at me and aimed his curiously plasti-formed pinwheel (i.e. harmless) arrowhead at me. He released.
But my ninja reflexes - (where had those come from?) allowed me to grab the arrow out of the air as it charged toward my heart. With a sidearm pitch I flung it back at him and it jabbed into his forearm, somehow staying there despite not even piercing his skin.
The crowd stretched around me, circling me, taunting me. It was a trap...
