perfidy

I had organized the first annual Ministry Million Dollar Carnival.

It was a large-ish, open-air affair with all manner of booth, contest, and confection. I was walking around the carnival, half-surprised that everything had gone off as planned. There were legions of people in attendance, and all appeared to be having a good time. Even the weather was nice. Well, nice according to the aesthetic of most folks.

So after a bit of all this, someone...I'm not sure who, but someone from the Ministry circle...might've been a Minister, or possibly Murdoc...came over and pointed out that we don't have a million dollars to give away, or even a million dollars' worth of merchandise; the whole thing was basically a sham. I thought that was odd, and started to argue that that was entirely irrelevant, but decided to finish out-processing from the Marine Corps instead.

As a former soldier I *have* had dreams about people I knew and units I was in, but I never once dreamed of being in another service branch.

So I walked over to the admin building and found myself explaining to a retention officer why I wanted to leave the Corps. As I recall now, it was a famous actor...Jeff Goldblum, maybe?...who was the officer in question. I said that I had done my time and it was just time to get out, to move on, that sort of rap. We finished the paperwork, shook hands, and I walked out to join a waiting expedition to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

We made the summit in rather short order, only to find that the peak was actually just level with a little, scrubby city and the fact that it is among the largest natural features on the planet really is just an accident of relative observation and associated physics. In short, after cresting the mighty mountain I was rewarded not with an astonishing view of Earth's grandeur but an eye-level view of a rather shabby and dark empty parking lot that I could step onto from the peak.

So I looked around a little, but went back to our camp just short of the summit and told everyone what the deal was. Then I noticed that my cat had actually followed us up the mountain and was being a pain in the ass in the tent, so I bitched at him for a bit.