How I learned to play 'Sage'

WARNING, SLIGHTLY NSFW IMAGE SOMEWHERE IN THIS WALL OF TEXT

Before the events that I am about to tell you about took place, something important happened to me. I am not sure that something important happened to me, actually, but I have a rather good idea, let's call it a feeling, that something important happened to me. Unfortunately I don't remember the important thing, for if I did, I would tell you about it too. However, I do remember some details about it. I remember that it happened in a dark house. I remember that for at least part of it I was hiding behind a chair. And finally, as you might have guessed from the last bit that I remembered, I remember that it was scary.

That is all I remember about my scary; chair-hiding event in the dark house. However, the next bits I remember quite a bit better, and think you will get a kick out of reading them, so it is about those that I will now write.

I find myself next, after the scary house, in the basement of my old fraternity house. I haven't been an active member of the fraternity for about a year now, since I changed both majors and schools, but I still remember the layout of the house quite well. There seems to be a party going on, so I grab a cup and make my way into the next room, which I remember to be the room that parties were contained to.

I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back I should have been struck by the fact that the interior of the room, which is underground, was a minimum of four times larger than I remembered it having been. Maybe I just cast it aside saying to myself that the fraternity was composed entirely of engineers, and if anybody could enlarge the basement of a house that was more than 100 years old and located smack-dab in the middle of downtown Milwaukee, it was engineers. Besides, there were people to meet and partying to be done, so I was not concerning myself with architectural things.

Before I started meeting new people, I wanted to make sure I still recognized some friendly faces, so I began to walk around the basement trying to recognize people. To my surprise, the only person I recognized was a girl, we will call her Anna, primarily because that is her name, that went to my new school in central Illinois and lived in Chicago. Again, I should have been immediately dumbfounded to find somebody at a house they didn't know about that was one hundred miles and change further north than where she lived. But I just exchanged pleasantries and continued on my quest to find familiar faces.

Apparently it had become a game of sorts now; everybody go see if the new guy recognizes you. I was still not recognizing anybody. Then I found a middle-aged Native American woman that seemed to recognize me. I'm going to stop pointing out places where I should have discovered something was amiss at this point, but just so you know, middle-aged Native American women don't party at fraternity houses. I had one of those moments where you realize that the person you are confronted with recognizes you, but you can't for the life of you remember them. I gave up with a smile and said I couldn't put a name with the face anymore. To my surprise, the Native American woman didn't seem sad that I didn't remember her, but she did seem like she really wanted to show me something. She gestured to my left, and I turned to see a couch populated with four people about my age. The palpable pride in the Native American woman's smile let me know that these were her offspring.

There were three beautiful girls and a handsome boy on the couch. I didn't recognize the boy or one of the girls, but to my surprise I DID recognize the other two girls. One of them was Masiela Lusha, + Show Spoiler +

better known as Carmen Lopez from the television show George Lopez, and the other was Lucy Hale, + Show Spoiler +

better known as Rose Baker on the television show Privileged. I turn back to the Native American woman and, to jokingly congratulate her on bringing such beautiful children into the world, I take a bow. The joke went over nicely, as I was now standing in a room full of uproarious laughter, and found myself on the receiving end of a tearful hug given by the Native American woman.

I apparently decide at this point that I am not going to find any people I recognize, and decide to use my new-found party fame ("Hey, remember me? I'm that guy that bowed a while ago.") to start making some new friends. I stumble upon a group of three Mexican Gentlemen, and they seem nice enough, so I invite myself into their conversation and they don't seem to mind. I am starting to get to know the group, but then all of the sudden a bell starts ringing from some unknown location, and the room livens up in activity as the guests start moving furniture around.

I have little time to figure out what is going on while one of my new Mexican friends grabs me by the sleeve and pulls me into a folding chair next to him. I am now seated, with my new posse to the right of me, staring down another row of four seats about 20 feet across from us. All eight participants in what looks like it is about to become some sort of competition are wearing roller-skates, so although I don't know what is about to happen, I am okay with it, because roller-skates are fun. Now we watch as a ninth person fills four jugs, of about two gallons each, with a blue liquid that I recognize to be dish-soap.

Picture this, but bluer.

Also, this image came up when I googled 'blue liquid dawn', and I thought it was important that you all see it.

Anyways, I am now informed that we are about to play a game called 'Sage'. Why sage you ask? I haven't a clue. I would have asked the same question myself except as soon as my Mexican teammate finished telling me the name of the game, a whistle blew and the game was on.

At this point it was obvious that I was going to learn to play sage by actually playing sage, so, mirroring the moves of the participants around me, I got up and skated like a madman for the jugs of dish-soap. To my dismay, the person sitting across from me reached the jug between us before I did. This, as I am sure all of the avid sagers reading this know, means that I have to drink the jug of dish-soap while the guy that started across from me tried to catch me. If I finish before he catches me, I would assume, I win, so I skated away and began drinking.

I did a few laps around the room, my opponent in hot pursuit. It is at about this time that I recognize my opponent to be an old friend from HighSchool, Andrew, but I decided that I could say hello after the game was over and forced down a mouthful of soap. I see a large table across the room with a collection of small christmas trees on top of it and make a dash for it, since it seems like my best bet to lose my pursuer. I go to the right of the table, and my pursuer goes to the left to try and cut off my escape on the other side. Luckily for me, however, the christmas trees are tall enough and bunched closely enough together that neither of us can see each other, so I stop on the right side of the table and get ready to dart away the second he reveals his position.

Unexpectedly, a long time passes with no sight of Andrew, so I begin to slowly make my way around the table to locate him. When I reach the end of the table, I am informed by two gentlemen that I don't know that Andrew was electrocuted and killed on the other side of the table. This is bittersweet news; bitter because a friend just died, but sweet because I no longer have to finish the jug of soap. Now, as you could imagine, I begin to vomit from all of the dish-soap that I just imbibed, and to my dismay I spit a wet ping-pong ball onto a severely over-taxed surge protector. Wanting to avoid yet another electrocution, I get on my knees and begin to carefully extract the ping pong ball.

It is at this time that I realize, as I hope you have already figured out, that I must be dreaming this. Partying with television stars and drinking dish-soap on roller-skates are apparently normal activities for me, but the presence of a ping pong ball will make me doubt the reality of any situation. As some of you may know, I am now lucidly dreaming, which means the remainder of the dream happens with me knowing that it is a dream. Unfortunately, I was unable to go one step further to actually control the dream, because if so I would imagine all future characters would bare a striking resemblance to the woman pictured below the dish-soap up above, and most likely have a breast related emergency that I simply must help them with right away. But I digress.

Now that I know I am in a dream, I realize that, at least to me, it seems like an interesting one, so I set off in search of a pen and something to write on so that I can write as much of it down as possible. I am not sure how I planned to get the pages out of the dream, but I had just drunk a large quantity of fictional soap, so I probably wasn't thinking straight. I find a small sketch book on the floor, next to the ping pong ball, and begin flipping through the pages to find an empty one. Unfortunately, it seems that the sketch book is already filled, front and back, with drawings of all the guests at the party with the recently deceased Andrew, as some sort of memorial to him.

Now, the room is empty, and I sit down, sketchbook remembrance in hand, and turn on the television. The channel that it was last turned to had a cartoon on, and apparently dreaming me doesn't like cartoons, so I changed the channel. The next channel opened up with the words 'Video On Demand' streaking across the screen, which meant to me that what followed would most likely be pornography. Now, I do not dislike pornography, but I had a vague notion that my mother could enter the room at any moment, and she most certainly would not approve of such programming choices, so I quickly switched back to the cartoon. Besides, I felt that it was my duty to make sure that the memorial I was now carrying found its way into the right hands, so I went outside in search of those hands.

When I got outside, it was raining, and I looked across the street to see a girl, that was quite obviously sad about something, standing in the rain. A car passed, obscuring her for a moment, and, as will happen in movies sometimes, when she re-appeared she was being embraced by a man that hadn't been there before the car drove by. Before I could react, another car passed and with that the man vanished. This girls ability to create and destroy ghosts based, seemingly, on traffic patterns, intrigued me, so I began to cross the street to investigate the situation more closely.

For better or worse, I do not know what happened with the girl in the rain, for it was at this moment that my sister's live-in boyfriend opened the garage door to leave for work, which roused me from my slumber. Upon waking up, I realized that this dream was worth remembering, so I quickly got a pen and paper and wrote down as many details as I could.
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I decided it was good enough for me to turn it into a short story of sorts, and I hope you enjoyed reading it.

How I learned to play 'Sage'

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