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Remembering the Zodiac.
Apr. 26th, 2011 09:36 amJust how weird can this get?
You are walking along an enclosed passage, holding a rope tied to a striking-looking ram. As you come up against a barred door, a barrier slides down across the passage behind you, between you and the ram, and as the rope slips from your hand, the door in front of you opens. You are in an empty bullfighting ring.
Well, not quite empty. There is a bull in the ring, and it's looking at you. It seems annoyed. It paws the ground. It grunts. In short, it gives every indication of charging you and impaling you on its long, sharp horns.
Matching doors open to each side of the bull and two identical rodeo clowns—twins, as far as you can tell—run out into the ring. As one distracts the bull, the other runs up to you, looks up, and starts gesticulating as if guiding some piece of equipment.
Something grabs you by the shirt and lifts you out of the ring. You look up and see that it's a flying crab, which is holding you in one of its claws. It soon deposits you outside the outskirts of the town with the bullfighting ring.
Safely on the ground, you hear a roar and see a lion nearby. It does not appear to be aggressive, but—well, it is a lion, so you are wary.
A maiden emerges from some bushes near the lion, walks up to it, pets it, tells you not to worry about the lion, and motions for you to follow her.
She leads you through a small forest to a paved, two-lane road, where there's a set of truck scales. She instructs you to wait for someone to take you to safety and leaves the way she came.
The road is straight and deserted. There is no traffic. You hear a skittering sound and turn around. A scorpion, about the side of small cow, is coming at you across the surface of the scales. It moves mechanically, but steadily.
Just as you turn to run, an arrow strikes the scorpion and kills it. You look in the direction from where the arrow came and see a centaur armed with a bow. Seeing the surprise on your face at seeing him, the centaur notes that if you follow him, he'll show you something really strange.
He leads you some distance down the road to a bridge over a river. You descend to the river bank, where you are introduced to a being that is a combination of a goat and a fish, lying in the shallows under the span. After a brief negotiation, you board a skiff and the goat-fish tows you downstream to a stone jetty, where a water-bearer is about to carry an aquarium full of water up a hill. He asks for your help, and you pitch in.
It turns out the water-bearer is taking water from the river up to a swimming pool in which there lives a large fish. The fish sticks its head out of the water and suggests you might want to start at the beginning again.
* * * It occurs to me that it takes a lot longer to commit this to phosphor than it does to remember the signs. This could easily be expanded to help with, say, the Latin names of the signs, e.g. each of the twins might have a gem in an eye (Gemini), or the goat-fish might be watching a film by Frank Capra while eating popcorn (Capricorn), etc.
And the purpose of the exercise? It's to strengthen the imagination and to create loci.
Cheers...
You are walking along an enclosed passage, holding a rope tied to a striking-looking ram. As you come up against a barred door, a barrier slides down across the passage behind you, between you and the ram, and as the rope slips from your hand, the door in front of you opens. You are in an empty bullfighting ring.
Well, not quite empty. There is a bull in the ring, and it's looking at you. It seems annoyed. It paws the ground. It grunts. In short, it gives every indication of charging you and impaling you on its long, sharp horns.
Matching doors open to each side of the bull and two identical rodeo clowns—twins, as far as you can tell—run out into the ring. As one distracts the bull, the other runs up to you, looks up, and starts gesticulating as if guiding some piece of equipment.
Something grabs you by the shirt and lifts you out of the ring. You look up and see that it's a flying crab, which is holding you in one of its claws. It soon deposits you outside the outskirts of the town with the bullfighting ring.
Safely on the ground, you hear a roar and see a lion nearby. It does not appear to be aggressive, but—well, it is a lion, so you are wary.
A maiden emerges from some bushes near the lion, walks up to it, pets it, tells you not to worry about the lion, and motions for you to follow her.
She leads you through a small forest to a paved, two-lane road, where there's a set of truck scales. She instructs you to wait for someone to take you to safety and leaves the way she came.
The road is straight and deserted. There is no traffic. You hear a skittering sound and turn around. A scorpion, about the side of small cow, is coming at you across the surface of the scales. It moves mechanically, but steadily.
Just as you turn to run, an arrow strikes the scorpion and kills it. You look in the direction from where the arrow came and see a centaur armed with a bow. Seeing the surprise on your face at seeing him, the centaur notes that if you follow him, he'll show you something really strange.
He leads you some distance down the road to a bridge over a river. You descend to the river bank, where you are introduced to a being that is a combination of a goat and a fish, lying in the shallows under the span. After a brief negotiation, you board a skiff and the goat-fish tows you downstream to a stone jetty, where a water-bearer is about to carry an aquarium full of water up a hill. He asks for your help, and you pitch in.
It turns out the water-bearer is taking water from the river up to a swimming pool in which there lives a large fish. The fish sticks its head out of the water and suggests you might want to start at the beginning again.
And the purpose of the exercise? It's to strengthen the imagination and to create loci.
Cheers...
