Laird of Hardnosed Ambition

I was attending a convention in another town. It was north of where I live - that was all I knew. It might have been Scotland. There were no landmarks to confirm, save that some of the walls looked like mediaeval fortifications.

I'd been in this place before - a dream I'd had a few months back. At that time, I was in the back of a taxi, trying to get to a castle - but the driver insisted on taking a long, circuitous route through crisscrossing streets laid out in an American square grid pattern like city blocks.

In this dream, I was at the castle, and I met a woman called Lorna. She had short, dark hair, an oval face, and she was just an inch or two shy of six feet. She said that she'd come to the convention to meet the guests, and she rattled off some former stars of Game of Thrones and one or two of the extras who'd turned up in Star Trek: Picard as XBs. The actors Isa Briones, Michelle Hurd, and Santiago Cabrera were named, which somehow made sense - if they had been there, chances are I'd have forked out the heavy pile of dosh to have booked this con.

I got the general impression that this fan-run media convention had cost me a pretty penny, and that for my money there were all sorts of guest perks available such as nice hotel gifts laid out for visitors - I'd snatched up all of their 1Tb thumb-sized flash drives and microSD cards, but I'd discreetly turned up my nose at the cigars and champagne.

It was the last day of the con, and delegates were given a short break of two hours between panel discussions to go out and visit the town. The guest celebrities had been whisked away on a short tour of the historic town, so there was little to do but to go out in the autumn sunshine.

Lorna came up to me and asked if I could join her. There was a part of the town she had always wanted to go to. It looked like a row of bungalows to me. I lost Lorna somewhere, and sat on a low wall opposite one of the bungalows to wait for her. A delegate of the hotel approached one of the flats, looked at me and said "I'm not sharing," and went in - there were two scantily-clad female models, sex workers whom I'd seen earlier at the convention, doing some sort of commercial cosplay as video game characters for a forthcoming console game.

Wondering where Lorna was, I rounded the corner and saw that just past these bungalow flats was a much posher part of town. And in the middle distance, I saw Lorna and a female friend chatting with some chap who was riding in a limo. He looked rich af, and Lorna looked around before she and her friend got in.

She never saw me, but there was no mistaking the look of hardnosed ambition. This was what she'd come to town for. The convention had been an excuse.

I tried to make my way back to the convention, but the shortcut involved scaling a low castle wall, and it didn't look like a part of the castle which was open to the public, so I walked the long way back. Besides, shortcuts in my dreams aren't - if I take them, I literally spend the rest of the dream wandering around and never get to my destination.

The dream skipped ahead. It was already the end of the convention, and guests were being given parting gifts. Apparently, I was checking out already, the bill having been settled - and they'd offered comp laundry, so my clothes for the con were fresh in their sack, washed and pressed and sealed up in those vacuum laundry bags for no extra cost.

The hotel lobby looked just lavish, decked out in a kind of medieval style, with the reception desk set between the entrance doors, facing into the lobby, meaning you'd have had to pass by the reception desk coming in or going out. I saw coats of arms on the front of the desk, but I couldn't tell if they were real heraldic coats of arms, or if they'd come from Game of Thrones or Harnworld.

I ended up taking two of those cigar cases home after all, as gifts to the few friends of mine who still smoke, but my bags were positively groaning with 1Tb flash drives and microSD cards worth hundreds of pounds. So I guess my time at the convention had been profitable for me, too.

And that was it.

I never wondered what happened to Lorna or her friend. A person with that kind of ambition and ulterior motives really has no place in my life.

Pic is unrelated, sort of.