#1
Reeb
This post is being edited on account of this now being a catchall dream thread with the garrison ending. Please feel free to post your dreams in as much detail as you like here!
#2
Reeb
DAY ONE

So I'm sitting in the top of the bleachers at school with my friend from junior high watching a boring play when I start talking about how you never know what people are going to be like and why you should never trust anyone with a sinister laugh. For some reason the example used in this is my best friend walking by an access-way to some underground tunnels which network beneath the school and leads to the exterior of a prison. This is never explained. He doesn't go in them or anything, just laughs walking by.

She scoffs and says "That's stupid, you should trust people more. I bet he's fine and you're worrying too much." or something to that effect. I'm greatly offended by this, but she shushes me because she wants to watch the play. I don't believe she wants to watch it for a second, but she's just ignoring me.

Smash cut to my room in the present day, where I'm ruminating on missing my old school friends, and I'm looking at the shards of some black crystal star in a miniature sarcophagus on my bedside table, where I futilely try to put them together like they're going to instantaneously bond if I just wedge them against each other really tightly. I spontaneously think about the days when it used to empower the friend I was watching the play with, making her into some kind of a dark divinity before we smashed it to stop her, and how good a friend she was before that but how that kind of ruined her for my friends group; the gravity of this situation is the equivalent of somebody skipping out on a friend because they started to do light drugs, I barely even think about it except as a wistful thing despite that being a pretty fucking big deal.

Reflecting on this, I get on my scooter, which is not an e-scooter or anything, just a normal scooter, and head to work two cities over with the sheer power of my foot-propelled scooter. Around this time I start questioning reality in my dream because some part of me nags that there's no fucking way I came this far on a scooter, but before I can start lucid dreaming my consciousness is dragged aside by a man in the parking lot of the same building right outside my workplace.

This heavyset man is walking in the same lot I'm in but going a different direction towards a K-Mart. He has a bear hat on, by which I mean it's colored like Jake the Dog and has a chibi bear(almost exactly like the overworld sprites for the bears in Omori) depicted on the top-front, a bright orange coat that matches it, and some cargo jeans. He's got his own theme song, which is some nonsensical thing that goes something like "Bear Man...Bear Man...alone in the world with a water bottle in hand." to the tune of the end of the Cat-Dog theme song.

I strongly empathize with this guy for some reason, feeling like I've seen him before as a fixture of my daily commute, but I don't have any recollections of speaking with him, so I just pass him by and go on with my day, letting him swing his water bottle by himself. I take a slightly different path that leads me to a 1950s era diner straight out of Back to the Future.

I arrive here to find my great-grandmother sitting in a booth with two other people. One of them, who I call 'Dylan', comes over and helps me fold my scooter, which I'm very embarrassed about being unable to do myself after having it so long and I make up some kind of lame excuse about how it's new and I don't know how it works yet. He buys it.

I come in to the diner and ask if anybody remembers way back when when that pal of ours turned into a god, but they're all distracted listening to the radio. I'm wondering what's so interesting that they're so engrossed with it that they don't want to talk about somebody's ascension to the divine, and they tell me, "Oh we're listening to prisoner radio CC."

"What the hell is prisoner radio AC?" I ask.

"It's prisoner radio CC, this hit new radio channel where people in prison get a window to the outside by talking on a radio show as a reward for good behavior. It's a new rehabilitation program where they reach out and sometimes get mail back from fans. It keeps them going and encourages them to get better."

This causes me to flash back to earlier in the dream where I was sitting in the bleachers thinking about the school connecting with the prison yard and I'm like "Oh my God, this is related."

I try and persuade them to come with me because, I suddenly realize, it was probably the prison that ascended my friend to godhood (somehow, this makes perfect sense in dream logic), and if she comes back from having moved out of state then she's probably going to go to prison and siphon all the power from there to become a stronger demiurge than ever before by using them as some kind of living battery, getting there like she did in the old days via the secret access-way (there is apparently no other way to this open-air prison).

I urge my friends to come with me and stop her, but they're like "nah man we're going to listen to prison radio some more" and I'm like fucking fine I'll do it myself.

So I set off to go to my old school, which looks nothing like my old school but instead looks like some kind of office building, where I try bargaining with the secretary on the intercom to let me in. I'm making absolutely no progress but then the Bear Man shows up and authoritatively demands, pointing at the secretary (we're now inside) that they let me through. His theme song is playing again, but it's an instrumental that sounds completely unlike the previous song and more like somebody banging out the intro from We Will Rock You over and over again.

Everybody acts like they know the Bear Man too and they're like "Okay, you're the boss."

I'm in the tunnels, which're a recreation of some crusty tunnels from Fallout: New Vegas, rushing for the prison to stop somebody who's self-admittedly out of state from becoming our lord and master...aaand it's about here that I wake up.
#3
Draku
bear man sounds based. he doesn't even have any real authority he just plays his theme song(s), carries himself with confidence, and does as he pleases.

prisoner radio sounds like a hilariously terrible idea. but the idea of people being so fascinated with it that they just have to tune in and stay tuned in is really funny
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#4
Reeb
I agree wholeheartedly. Bear Man was just doing his best with what he had, and what he had was swagger and sheer confidence. Prisoner Radio sounded like a fun and crazy idea to me and I wanted it to be real just so I could tune into the madness.

DAY TWO

I slept in exceedingly late today, which meant I woke up bleary-eyed, so this one might be a little more incoherent than the last where I just grabbed my phone the moment I woke up. It's a more disjointed dream than the last one anyway, which felt like it had actual progression.

We start on a road-trip with some friends and family. My former stepfather is there, as is my mom, and an assortment of random people who I considered friends in the dream but who have no relevance to anything whatsoever.

We're driving in the rain passing by massive truck when rain starts pattering down, which my stepfather whinges about. My mom takes this opportunity to boast about how women can do anything as long as they put their mind to it and driving through this maelstrom'll be a breeze. I support this with some kind of bizarre tangent about a Queen of England from centuries ago that got her head shot through with a musket ball and lost the ability to speak but managed to find a way to communicate through gestures of the hands and head. The term sign language never comes up. This is apparently some kind of esoteric concept that's never been thought of before.

We go from urban roadways to the sheet of rain pulling back to show we're in a desert, to which someone in a car asks if we should get directions, only to be shut down by my mom who insists that unless we see a roundabout we're going the right way.

Driving continues until we find an enclosed area that looks like a shack you can drive through where the door on the opposite end's blocked with a sheet of metal. Getting out of the car to investigate, someone cottons onto there being a gigantic robot next to us and we realize we're sitting at the top level of a secret base (that we drove into without being aggressed in any way).

As it turns out, the installation we're in is a secret Nazi base. We only took two dreams for Godwin's Law to come into play!

We're discussing what to do about this from a catwalk above them. Some among us feel duty-bound to do something about this personally, while others think we ought to just call the authorities and let them take care of it. Suddenly, someone disrupts a nearby chicken and the whole flock of them come flying out of nowhere like the cuckoos in Legend of Zelda and the jig is up, now people know we're here. Some kinda anime fight breaks out where people're outspeeding bullets and beating the shit out of fascists, but we're slowly losing ground and by the end of it everyone's dead except my mother and I, the former being knocked out cold, and I'm desperately wrestling for the gun of some Proud Boy wannabe when I sock him in the gut and over the neck, which gets him out cold. I look over the people who've fallen and promise to drum up the cash for a resurrection D&D-style. They never come up again in the dream, so I'm pretty sure that was an empty promise.

My mom and I show up at a movie theater that was apparently the destination of our road trip the entire time. They're showing some new Lion King movie that came out, and to promote it they have talking tigers to the right of the front desk who're just kind of hanging out talking about their young. My mom blows past them and insists we go into the screening as soon as possible.

Inside the theater, the projector is standing at the rear of the seating, and it's messed up. I have to personally fiddle with it to get it working, at which point I drop in a seat next to mom and start to watch it play out, but the moment it appears on screen it's grainy, hard to see, and there's some kind of numbers counting down on the top of it like FPS and runtime. Mom is so fussed about the damaged screening that she demands I go back and fix the projector, which I try to do unsuccessfully. She storms out insisting that we're not going to pay for this if it's so subpar, but I manage to smooth-talk her into staying at the place we traveled for-fucking-ever to get to for a little while longer while I ask the actual management of this place if they can help us and the other patrons. The staff in charge seem to think this is a really tall order for them to fulfill their fundamental jobs and direct me to the tiger enclosure for an unspecified amount of time while they work on the problem.

The streak of tigers are talking about having found their newest member of the bunch, which is a normal housecat. Despite looking absolutely nothing like the tigers in question, who're bright orange and a reddish hue, they've accepted it as another cub. Even in-universe I think this is stupid and nonsensical, but I keep it to myself so I don't upset a whole bunch of tigers. They're doing some kind of grand ceremonial ritual to induct the cat when one of the cubs distracts its mother with prattling about magic tricks. She performs a vanishing act on the cat, which then stays gone, and they all freak out. Wandering away from the collective, I think to myself about where it could've disappeared to and realize there's a stream running behind them and it must've fallen in and was swept to the other side.

I enter the water, which comes with a Genshin Impact stamina bar as I swim, something I'm very concerned about because I don't actually know how to swim and just trying to replicate movements I've seen from swimmers before is taking up a lot of energy on my part. I barely reach the other end before the meter runs out, doubled over and panting, thanking my past self for having made a "good stamina build". After catching my breath, my path takes me towards a small rock formation, which I begin digging out to find the missing cat inside. It now looks like a dog, but I don't care and pull it free, putting it in my arms and then swimming back across the stream with zero problems.

The tigers are thankful beyond belief and start assuring me that they'll reward me for my heroism. I'm doing my best to turn down whatever it is they're offering me when I wake up.
#5
Draku
the tigers were going to revive the fallen freedom fighters you abandoned bro...

Do you actually not know how to swim? That playing out in a dream must've been freaky.

Man they released a new Lion King movie and all the theater had on hand were talking tigers? Puh-lease.

I love the idea of your mom not giving a shit about them as a result and just going to watch the worst showing of a film of all time.
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#6
Reeb
I absolutely could've used that reward to get some tiger diamonds and didn't even think about it. Also them having tigers was apparently related to the Lion King movie, it was supposed to be starring them in a spinoff.

Mom just not giving a shit about anything but the movie was pretty great! I had a good laugh about it when I was transcribing.

It's true that I don't know how to swim. I've had tutors, but I'm hopelessly incompetent and I've nearly drowned almost every time I came into contact with a body of water higher than my waist, including indoor swimming pools. Swimming is a mixed bag in my dreams. Sometimes I can do it just fine, sometimes it's a heart-pounding fear because I have no idea when or if my ability to churn along is going to terminate since some vestige of my consciousness remembers I can't actually do it.

As for Day 3...nothing this time. I don't remember what I dreamed about. There're inevitably going to be these dud days, but I'm going to keep sticking with it.
#7
Reeb
It's nearing the end of the night, so I'm posting just to say I didn't sleep today. This thread doubles as a proud introduction to my eclectic sleep schedule.

I'm intent on making sure this thread gets at least 31 of my dreams in it, closes out when Fwd's Killing Game does, whichever comes later...ooooor someone decides my garrison time is up. In any case, this ideally won't affect my final total.
#8
Draku
(May 8, 2023 at 2:38 AM)Reeb Wrote: It's nearing the end of the night, so I'm posting just to say I didn't sleep today. This thread doubles as a proud introduction to my eclectic sleep schedule.
...excuse me?
[Image: s2n7oi.png]
#9
Reeb
I didn't sleep! Things have kept me up all day. I had a bunch of appointments to make, but I still felt like I should say something instead of just letting a day pass with zero word.

Unless you mean my use of the word 'eclectic', which wasn't the best. I'm tired and forgot 'variable' existed. Fits better.
#10
Draku
I was more of joking about the idea of someone just not sleeping at all on a given day hahah.
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#11
Reeb
It just happens sometimes when I get overbooked. On which note, I should really be getting to bed. Dreams to come.

Sleeping
#12
Yrrzy
cant imagine that, i sleep every day AND night
#13
Reeb
DAY FIVE: Dream 3

A bunch of puppets are lying around on what looks like a background of TV static. They look like muppet-type puppets pf various people, and a sign in front of them affirms that this is Act 3 of a play. Slowly but surely, mist seeps in from the all sides of the screen and slides into the puppets, lifting them up and causing them to begin to speak, which sounds like incoherent babble because there's so many of them talking at once with so many voices. Someone shouts "QUIET DOWN" and the perspective shifts to show a guy standing on the side of the puppets; he's dressed like a wizard, complete with star-emblazoned robes, pointy hat, and staff. The entire crowd has turned to stare at him.

"Don't you have any common sense?" he asks, or something like it, "The world is young and you are too."

One puppet that I identify as John Henry (it looks like a blonde girl) responds, but it just sounds like an incoherent burst of static.

Suddenly, I'm walking away from this scene, which seems to've been at a bistro. I'm talking about paying admission prices for seeing a show and my friends agree that it was terrible and they thought the tax man would have a happier ending. I don't remember any tax man and I tell them that, to which I'm berated for not having paid enough attention to the backgrounds of the characters.

We head for an arcade to play Street Fighter 15, but I feel like hanging back and watching because the strobe lights of the arcade are hurting my eyes. I'm watching them play when a puppet shaped like an exclamation mark comes up to my leg and asks me where the greenery is. Eager for a change of scenery, I gladly show her (it's a her) to a bedroom near by which has nothing to do with greenhouses. The puppet has become an actual person and asks me if I wanted to go to sleep, to which I decline, saying I've got a lot to do today and I can't afford to rest until it's done (apparently my long-lasting sleeplessness before this was remembered). She tells me that I'm being too soft on myself and I need to tighten up my core muscles by doing an exercise that can only be done in my sleep, which I ask her to show me. She flops down on the bed and falls asleep, at which point I say "Well thank god that's over" and leave the room.

I'm going through the city streets and I see that the entire population are puppets. By this point in the dream it's gone from Weird Dream Shit to Unsettling Dream Shit and I feel like they're all watching me, so I slip into a house nearby and start slowly but surely barricading the door after locking it. I back off from the sealed portal to explore the rest of the home, which is covered in cobwebs from having been disused for so long. After a while I make my way to the attic and find a box full of old toys, which hold some serious significance to me. I'm sorting through all these toys with a feeling of nostalgia when I see a pair of eyes staring at me from the bottom of the box and slam a chair over it, then put my hands on it (it has now turned into a suitcase), lift it up, and throw it out the window.

The streets are deathly quiet and dark as night all of a sudden as I lean out the attic window. I wonder where all the people went, then get a thoroughly eerie feeling in my chest and withdraw, shutting the window. The remainder of the dream is spent wandering the house, which seems to get bigger every time I loop through the kitchen, and even though I'm aware of this and weirded out by it I much prefer it to whatever's going on outside and stay there until the dream ends.
#14
Draku
that's horrible. fuck puppets
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#15
Reeb
They were perfectly fine for most of the night, then I spontaneously decided they were creepy. Such is dream logic, I guess.

DAY SIX: Dream 4

I dreamed that I was in college - apparently talking about going back to school in the other thread triggered a dream about just that. I was having a hard time getting by because of my math scores and I was convinced that what I was working towards, namely being a teacher, was going to be out of my grasp. Somehow, I wound up injuring myself, which led to me going to the nurse. The nurse there was extremely friendly and asked me, since I wasn't that badly hurt, if I wouldn't mind holding his tools while he went to work on another patient. I agreed.

At some point during his medical examination, I chipped in some relevant information and impressed him enough that he wanted to talk to me later. The injury that got me there was never brought up again. Truth be told, I don't remember what it was I had happen to me, so who really cares? At any rate, the nurse talked to me and mentioned that he was finishing his term at the school and wanted me to come with him as an assistant. School was no longer an issue, so I said yes.

A good chunk of the dream was spent diagnosing various illnesses, none of which really made any sense. None of them were memorable enough to make it into my recollections either. The next relevant point was that I started messing with medical inventions of my own accord and perfected some kind of process by which body parts could be transplanted, which made me world-famous. My acclaim was great enough that I was invited to see the President, but I got lost on the way and ended up in a flooded town with constant rainfall drowning it. I got out of my van and started slogging through the streets to get to a hotel.

The staff were invisible and inaudible, so they had to communicate their intentions by writing them down. I got checked in and my bags were carried up to my room, which was a massive penthouse suite I was sharing with some woman. I hadn't checked in with anyone, but I was completely unbothered by her being there and ordered a dinner that had to be brought in via Uber. It was an extravagant spread, but the only thing I was really interested in was a massive pizza. We had a good time right up until she started flirting with me, at which point I became stern and declined her advances, going straight to bed.

The sounds of people a room over walking on the wooden floor relaxed me, letting me kick up my feet on a pillow I put at the bottom of the bed and chill. Just when I was getting ready to doze off, ironically enough I woke up.

ETA: Turns out I probably had a medical dream because I'm sick today, go figure
#16
Draku
The idea of someone randomly mucking around with medical instruments to the point of accidentally revolutionizing the world of limb transplants is absolutely hysterical. What the fuck?
[Image: s2n7oi.png]
#17
Reeb
Such is the nonsense of dreams, I suppose. I treated limb transplants like they weren't a big deal. I remember thinking something along the lines of "well it was just a matter of not getting the cells to reject the transplant" like that was such an easy thing to solve.

I didn't sleep the whole of...two days ago now? Two days ago. In exchange, I slept the whole of yesterday. I'm hella groggy rn but I'm just going to commit this to "paper" before I get my breakfast.

DAY EIGHT: Dream 5

I dream about being asleep, which is a weird one to be sure. In my imagination I'm waking up groggily, an omen of how I'm actually waking up evidently, trying to find my stuff in an immense pile in the corner of the room. Midway through I get frustrated at the disorganized mess and start sorting it into piles of toys, clothes, and books, none of the piles of which actually stay faithful to what's supposedly being put in them. I shove the toy pile in a toy box, the clothes in a kitchen cabinet, and the books on a rack outside on the lawn before I head out to start the day. I'm satisfied with this placement and head out through a crop of forested land to start my day.

In the forest I encounter a tree full of raspberries that I scoop into a bucket painstakingly, making sure I pluck the entire tree dry by climbing up it and collecting the stuff in my shirt. These berries get ferried through the woods to a shelter for abandoned dogs, to which the seller is extremely thankful and hands me a medal. This medal, as far as I can tell, predicates the entire rest of the dream by being sports-related.

Now in town, we open off with me browsing through a supermarket. I'm hunting bargains for some sports drink because there's a basketball game happening later today and I'm convinced I'm going to get dehydrated really quickly, but this irritating lady keeps getting in my way and trying to get everything off the shelves. I recognize her as the coach for the opposing team snagging up everything she can to give her team advantage, but I don't confront her about it and instead decide to head straight to the game with a bottle of water instead.

This doesn't quench my thirst and I wind up sitting the whole thing out, where I'm appointed "strategic conductor" by the coach. This turns out to mean that I'm looking down on the whole game via an interactive display. What was initially introduced as basketball is actually a whole new sport where when you touch a ball, not only is it color-coded to belong to your team, but the carrier gains the power of flight via golden angel wings that stop being inactive tiny stubs on the back of a uniform and instead sprout up and out. Grabbing the ball institutes opposed d20 rolls to maintain control of it/steal it, and whoever steals it has to hold onto it for a total of three turns before it turns to their team color. Anything goes for trying to steal the ball back, including moves that're definitely banned outside of MMA. One of the examples I see on the field involves somebody dropkicking a carrier in the stomach, after all.

The conductor's role in this is to assign bonuses to players based on what they're doing. People in holding positions gain a +2 stacking bonus to seizing control of the ball that accumulates the longer they're in place in exchange for sacrificing their actual movement to be in a better position to intercept, but this includes people who're clinging onto the carrier without any attempts to actually steal the ball, even if they're weighing him down to stop him. I'd give a play-by-play of the actual sport, but my insight into it's limited and I spend most of the game concentrating on the board to assign points to each player since the conductor's role is to keep an eye out for the appropriate behaviors.

At the end of the dream, we're one basket up from our opponents with time ticking down and our team's in stalling position by weighing down the enemy carrier with the ball in their hands. The other team's moving to get into position to pass the ball to someone that isn't being restricted, but I feel confident we're not only going to win but get another basket in since the guy clinging onto the carrier has so many +2s and one of the people en route to seize it from whoever gets the ball's spent the entire game stacking cumulative bonuses instead of participating in the sport just to get the ball flawlessly in the last minute. Around here, I wake up.
#18
Draku
that sport sounds incredible

an absurdly violent spectacle with LITERAL ANGEL WINGS in play, that has a ton of tabletop rules inserted to immensely overcomplicate it for literally no reason

sounds like a real sport all right!
#19
Draku
(also what the fuck. reeb please sleep normally)
[Image: s2n7oi.png]
#20
Reeb
I can't sleep normally sometimes. Insomnia kicks in so hard that I don't get tired for entire days.

That sport probably wouldn't've been half as complicated if my brain didn't shoehorn in a reason for me to not participate directly. I'm surprised I didn't just have to sit on the sidelines, but I guess action and occupation were the order of the day.

Anyway, despite a 17 hour nap, I was still too groggy and went to bed for about five hours, which was enough to have a dream.

DAY NINE: Dream 6

I'm on a beach with a bunch of friends, enjoying a relaxing vacation laying on a towel in the sun as I watch them play volleyball, get ice cream, normal beach activities. It actually looks like a scene that wouldn't be out of place with real life - no weird dream stuff happening or anything. One of them comes up and asks me if I'd like to take a ride behind their jet ski inside an inner tube strapped a fair distance off to the back of it, which I gladly accept. I've actually done something like this before once and it was a lot of fun!

I get ready, laying in it, and we take off across the waves. I'm having the time of my life before the connecting wires break off and I'm left adrift. I call out to my friends, but they're too busy having fun to notice, and by the time they do I'm already in deep waters where they're forbidden from going (I envision this as a semi-solid wall that nothing is supposed to pass through with no indication as to how I did). Gently bobbing along off into the ocean, a fear strikes me as I remember that I can't swim and there's no feasible way I'm going to get back.

At this point, a spot of hope comes to mind. We're all on vacation in Australia, so all I need to do is hold onto hope that I can stay adrift until I loop around the world and get to Russia! This makes perfect sense and I pull up a GPS locator map on my phone to track my progress, which is, in nonsense dream logic, fast enough that I can see my blip on there constantly updating. I'm worried about sharks or the like coming to attack me, but nothing happens and I drift comfortably around the entire world to a shoreline in Russia, disembarking and heading off towards an airport.

In this airport, I find there's only two practical destinations available: The United States and Egypt, though there's flights all over the world. I don't want to head back home just yet because it seems like a waste of time, and I remember my friends, apparently on a very lengthy vacation, were going to head from Australia to an open pyramid in Egypt. Seeing this as perfect, I call back home and ask for translations from a qualified expert so I can get my Russian correct and manage to find my way to the proper aircraft, getting in and disembarking. The trip is unpleasant before I have to sit next to some intensely smelly dude, but before too long the plane lands directly at my destination (not an airport, right outside the pyramid) and I get out.

This entire segment is a distorted reference to the game Forewarned, a title where you delve into pyramids with supernatural mummies disturbed from their slumber and try to find a bunch of clues that indicate what specific flavor of undead you're dealing with. It's a bargain bin game that I only got because some friends were playing it. Think of it like a Phasmophobia clone if you've ever played that one, because it pretty much is.

My friends aren't there yet, so I decide to open up my backpack (I have a backpack now) and lay out a bunch of exploration tools on a fold-up table I had stored in there. I grab some miscellaneous junk and head in to scope out the place in anticipation of them arriving, thinking I'll map out the interior. The tomb's creepy as hell and there's an almost direct descent downwards on a sloped surface, along which I disable some traps to safely let me through before poking around the cavernous bottom of the tomb. Already worried, I hear a distant, noisy rumble that alerts me that the mummy in this tomb's now roaming around and I take cover in an alcove near a brazier to keep myself from being in plain sight, where I remain until he storms past me, not noticing my presence. I dig out my compass from my scrunched out position and remember the way I came in was due southwest, so I gently ease myself out of my hiding place and start back up towards the way I came at a careful walk, making sure I don't scrabble against the stone inside and make any noise.

By the time I get to the surface again, I run into a few of my friends already present and unpacking gear they prepared for this venture. I'm trying to persuade them against going into the cave because there's a loose spirit in there, but to no avail, and we're about to delve back in. Before we can, I wake up, probably sparing myself a formative nightmare.

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