The Virtual Museum

There's a new exhibit in town- a sort of traveling, carnival-esque museum.

For a price, you can go back into history to experience events as recorded in the memories scavenged from corpses discovered in recent archaeological digs...

Becca and Laila and Amanda and I decide to explore it. When we pay our entrance fee, the Gatemaster hands us our brown ticket, and gives us all a long, somber look. "Make sure you don't lose it. It is your minds' passage in, and out, of the Past..."

We get into a Time-Jeep with our proscribed "tour guide," and off we drive into a rickety metal chamber. The doors close, and darkness reigns: then, the attendant flips a glowing switch on the Jeep's dashboard, and we careen backwards into the path of a prehistoric rainforest.

Prehistoric in the sense that it ISN'T from Earth- it's from an older, far more dangerous world. Turns out we've just entered the scavenged memory of an alien who crash-landed on Earth after a somewhat...turbulent adventure on a jungle planet.

And, yes- the moment we leave the jeep, flying octopi land on our heads.

The tour guide cowers behind his car door, crying frenzied phrases such as, "This wasn't in the contract! They told us we would see harmless Neanderthals! This isn't the history I signed up for..." 

Amanda, grabbing the spare crowbar from the Jeep's aid kit for protection against the octopi, replies: "Yeah, well, that wasn't how the Earth was created anyway! Besides, you're here now, so you may as well get used to it." She tosses him a lose tree limb. "Defend yourself."

We forge deeper into nowhere, thwacking at brambles thicker than mustaches, and generally having a good time. Becca starts up a rambling shanty of her own invention, and we sing along to the tune the way we made up songs for Mary when she couldn't come to Lost Lake that one year...

Man. Who'd miss the chance to experience an alien planet through the memories of a deceased savage?

She does have theater practice, though...

Which, in dreams I've had of what can happen in it, is a story for a whole novel...