The Aerie
Had a weekend away in Chicago, meeting old friends and new and playtesting a soon-to-be-released roleplaying game. Events in Shadow World are based on an alternate contemporary Earth where a minority of the human population has psychic powers, and where pretty-much every conspiracy theory and secret society ever rumored to exist actually exists and is made up of these psychics. Think "X-Files" meets "James Bond".
The trip was full of weird events. For example, one of the scenarios of the roleplaying game includes a hostile order of psychic nuns in located Madison, Wisconsin. Don't ask. But as we drove down I-94 were discussing these psychic nuns, the Sisters of the Papacy. So imagine our surprise when, pulling into a rest stop in Madison, Wisconsin, we were greeted by over half a dozen nuns in habits.
The trip back was also eventful, to say the least. Despite knowing that traffic out of Illinois on I-90 was going to be affected by construction near Janesville, Wisconsin, we were taken by surprise by the extent of the backup. Miles and miles from the construction we had seen while heading south we ran into standstill traffic.
We bailed onto side-roads, and ended up in a lengthy backup at a stop-sign in rural Wisconsin. As it turned out, the backup we encountered was the lesser of two evils, but it was still phenomenal to see how much disruption a single stopsign can cause when it has to be observed by dozens of semitrailer trucks.
We were also growing increasingly hungry: we'd decided to "grab something on the road", not realizing that we'd end up stopped in a Wisconsin cornfield for hours. Serious, serious consideration was given to the idea of stealing a few ears of corn and grilling them on the manifold - the only thing that stopped us was a lack of tinfoil... and the farmer wandering up and down the ditch with a golf club in his hand.
When we finally reached the stop sign we turned the opposite direction from everyone else, determined to cross country north to I-94.
After 4 hours we had managed to travel 100 miles when we reached I94, and triumphantly sailed into Madison. But by now we were starving. So we exited off the freeway and looked for someplace to eat. We noted a Pizzeria Uno, wandered past it looking for other options, but after about five minutes decided Pizzeria Uno would do.
As we headed back to Pizzeria Uno, I noticed a large ball of black smoke off beyond Pizzeria Uno. At first I thought it was a nearby puff of diesel exhaust, but it became clear it was a much more distant and larger cloud of smoke.
More black smoke followed, and we could see an auto dealership up in that direction, so we decided to go past the Pizzeria Uno and see if there was a car fire at the dealership.
But as we approached the auto dealership, some odd things made themselves apparent. The street was littered with debris, including lamps from the streetlights. Looking around I realized that the lamps from ALL the streetlights had fallen out. Then I noticed that one streetlamp had a large, deforming dent about 2/3rds of the way up the pole... and across from the streetlamp was a white rectangular chunk of something that looked like... a wingtip?
Then we reached the crest of the hill and saw a small airplane burning in the parking lot of a car dealership!
We arrived before the local authorities, and as we reached the corner across from the flaming wreckage several squad cars appeared. Officers leapt from their cars and immediately began dousing the flames with chemical extinguishers. Another officer leapt into the road in front of us and waved us onto a side street, and we left willingly.
We made our way on back streets to Pizzeria Uno, and as we pulled into the parking log more emergency equipment arrived and the street outside the restaurant was closed.
We ate our dinner on the patio in what would have been a lovely sunset, except that a pillar of smoke, first black then grey then white, was looming over the restaurant. We talked to our server, who told us that the plane had just missed the restaurant, soaring silently only a few feet over the patio with its engine off.
It really bugged me to think about this. First, the picture of a desperate pilot trying frantically to save his life made it very disturbing to be sitting in the path of his final seconds. Second, we might have decided to got to Pizzeria Uno instead of looking around, and the pilot might not have managed to miss the Pizzeria. We could have had a light plane crash into the restaurant while we were having dinner.
Several hours up the road we stopped into another rest area... and as we entered, there was my neighbor Cat and her family. They reported that they had stayed on the freeway during the traffic outage, and had been trapped in their van for several hours, during which time their air conditioning had broken down.
So we got in about 12:30 a.m. very tired, but grateful that we'd gotten home safe, and with air conditioning.
Posted by Albatross at August 2, 2004 2:03 PM