[center][h1][color=a2d39c] Alan Lisowski[/color][/h1][/center][hr][hr]

The door to his apartment was getting stickier everyday. Alan sighed and pressed his shoulder against it, leaning into the moldering wood for a few seconds before it finally popped open, hinges squealing in protest. He stepped inside and fumbled for the lightswitch a moment, before his apartment was illuminated in all of its decrepit glory. Chipped paint, mold on the walls, vermin - this place had it all.

There was a note on the table, written in his roommate's distinctive chickenscratch. [i]Date tonight after work - don't wait up for me. Wish your boy luck![/i] Alan rolled his eyes and set the note back down, wondering not for the first time where Peter found this seemingly bottomless supply of women. [i]Artists.[/i] 

To say that Alan had had a rough day at work would be an understatement - some sort of biblical plague was sweeping Madison High's english department, so it had been all hands on deck for the substitutes today. Worse, because literature was his 'area of expertise', he couldn't just put on an episode of 'Bill Nye' like if he'd been subbing for a science class; the school board had actually expected him to do something, and so he'd spent all day bouncing between classes, trying to pick up lesson plans for Harper Lee, Wordsworth, Fitzgerald, all while a parade of street-tough high school students did their level best to sabotage the panicky sub.

All the minor failings of the day were still buzzing in his head when he sat down on the stained couch, all the 'should-have-saids' and 'would-have-dones'. Alan closed his eyes and leaned back on the sofa, and after a few moments of drifting he found himself someplace new.

Before he even opened his eyes, the first thing he noticed was the smell of the sea, pure and clean. A gentle breeze blew against his face and the blackness was replaced by a clear sky, blue and orange from the sunset. He was standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean, the gentle waves lapping at the rocks some distance below him, the yellow sun hanging low on the horizon. For a moment he was transfixed, and found that he could not look away.

When he finally managed to rest his gaze away from the sunset, he turned to see something stranger still. Behind him was a rolling, enormous field of grass - yet patches of the grass were darker than others, in a bizarrely formulaic and familiar pattern. Sixteen statues were at his side, ranging from five to three feet tall - intricately detailed nautical figures. There were eight ships, two lighthouses, two seahorses, two fishermen, a captain and a mermaid, all hewn from the whitest marble he had ever seen. 

A chessboard. He was standing on a chessboard. In the distance, parallel to the cliff's edge, the opposite number of his pieces were arrayed, black as obsidian and still as stone. Alan furrowed his brow and disturbed the silence with a single sentence. "Pawn to E4."

Slowly, the figure of the ship in front of the captain slid forward across the grass, taking up its new position on the grass board. This was shaping up to be a very interesting dream.