Evening was approaching as I sat at my dusty computer with the sun on my back trying to finish up my latest eleven-part article about weather and status effects (or chickens—I don’t know, that was the haziest part of the dream), watching my room through my peripheral vision darkening around me. Though the magazine was a month from release, the deadline was coming. I had to finish. I had to submit. I proofread the last article in the series to make sure everything was in working order, making sure I didn’t look like an idiot at the last minute. But something was amiss. Chief HamsterSpeak proofreader msw188 (I think it was him) teleported me into the printing offices to tell me I needed to proofread better and showed me what he had changed. What he showed me was a brand new article I’d never seen before.

"I always proofread my stuff," I said. "There’s no reason to alter it."

The skinny guy with the sun visor stared at me, then looked into the vast chambers of muddy brown walls—to what, who knew—and nodded.

"Works for me," he said.

"You still need to fix your titles, though," said an ominous voice from msw’s direction, but wasn’t him. "We just need plain text. No flurries, please."

"No flurries?" I asked, and then it clicked. "Oh, yeah, got it. No fancy fonts."

I didn’t realize the voice was being literal.

As thanks for the contributions, the chief proofreader decided to show me the early printing process. He walked me through the early 1900’s style train station (where the office was built), around a greenish railing, and down a service ramp between an empty platform and a series of Christmas trees where eleven flatbed pushcarts each held stacks of pages representing my articles, along with supplemental materials like snow globes and garden gnomes setting on the edges. The fourth article, I could see now, had flecks of snow covering the title. At once the "no flurries" comment made sense. I brushed the snow away.

The second thing I noticed was that each article, written in courier format double-spaced, seemed to place precedence with the subtitle over the main title. Each subtitle was typed in a font three times the size of the main title, and was boldfaced.

When the short tour of my work ended, a five-foot tall newsie in brown suspenders and publishers cap came out of nowhere and ushered me up the ramp, past a hedge, and toward the production floor.

"Oh cool, a newsie," I said out loud, pointing at the side of his face about three inches away as we ascended the ramp. The newsie ignored me. He probably got that all the time.

The production floor was more like a waiting room with the five o’clock sun shining through windows onto yellowing walls. A clock hung by the corner of a small room with the numbers "2000" to "2005" circling the face. Looking through the door into the closet next to the clock, one could see a metal cylindrical machine in the corner, part black, part gold, very kettle-like. It was then that I realized the "clock" was actually a temperature gauge for a room that the publishing team apparently used to burn each article before committing them to print.

There was also a guard sitting on a stool along the left part of the room. He manned the turnstile leading out of the building, double-stamping the biceps of anyone who chose to leave the factory, provided they wanted back in.

At this point, Surlaw finally approached me, wearing a Catholic priest’s uniform, and asked if I enjoyed my stay; it was his voice I heard say "no flurries." I didn’t really answer.

Then he decided to leave the building in front of me.

He wouldn’t let the guard stamp him, though, so the guard had to stamp himself twice near the shoulders to cover his reentry.

I followed him out, though I didn’t see him again, down a large red stairway into a courtyard filled with thousands of college students. The courtyard was in the middle of a plaza, surrounded by thematic businesses scrunched together like an avenue at Universal Studios or Walt Disney World. To my left, the field had a setup for a rock concert.

A giant movie screen stretched from pillar to silver pillar, where the hype for Bachelor Party 2 began. And then a mask fell from the sky, landed in the field before my feet, and the film’s star, a dark haired girl I thought I saw before, but really didn’t know, came through the crowd, picked up the mask, stared at it, realized she’d die if she stared at it too long, and put it on. Then she went a little crazy.

And then, having had enough of what I’d seen, I left the park. And then I woke up.

So that was my visit at the HamsterSpeak printing offices. Hope you enjoyed the tour as much as I did.