Insight

Chapter Three: Dinner and a Show

We ended up seated at the same round table as we had been at for lunch, Lilith and Sam joining us as well. But they had draped black table cloths over the wooden tables and added centerpieces of unlit candles and flowers and had sprinkled glitter in the middle of everything. Strings of colorful lights and streamers had appeared in the rafters on the ceiling and the nurses were dressed nicely. All of the campers looked out of place in casual clothing. When the river of wheelchairs being rolled in had slowed to a trickle, someone near the door turned on a megaphone.

"Helloooo campers." He sounded way too happy. "To welcome you to camp, your nurses will be serving your food to you. There are a few menus at each table, you'll have to share. Our apologies about that, we weren't expecting this many to be here. This is the largest camp we've had in years, with a total of two hundred and seventy eight campers. However, this is the one of the only two times you will be served, the other is the last day of camp. You will usually do as you did for lunch, going through the line back there and serving yourself. I know you all must but hungry, so I'll save my spiel and tomorrow's schedule for later and allow you to look at the menus. Have a nice dinner!" He turned the megaphone off and tucked it under his arm, turning to the person next to him and saying a few words. She suddenly hurried to the long rectangular table where the nurses were sitting and turned on a radio. Soft classical music I'd never heard began playing and the nurses all got up and found their children.

Nurse Allison was the first to our table. "Syany. What can I get you as a drink?"

"Dr. Pepper. What is this music?" I responded promptly.

"Well, we don't have a dreamscape station and we're not sure how everyone will react to Onowon's popular music so we settled on orchestral stuff, figuring it's not much different."

"Wait, are you telling me I'll never listen to the music I like again?!" Moxy exclaimed.

"Well, the camp store has music players that you can put all your earth music on. But they're pretty expensive. You'd have to spend all your beginning credit."

"Fuck. How can I get twenty one credit quick?!"

Nurse Allison looked at her weird, not knowing of our excursion after lunch. "Well they're giving fifty credit for attending the meeting thing with Those Who Be tomorrow without being reminded."

Moxy sighed in relief. "Good, I'm going to get an iPod right after the meeting then."

"They're not iPods." Moxy didn't have a chance to ask what they were as Nurse Susan arrived to get her drink order. Nurse Allison left to fill mine and Raven slid me a menu.

"Share that with Moxy, everyone else is already set." xe said. Everyone elses' nurses had already been and gone and every two people were sharing a menu. Nurses quickly came back with the drinks and announced that they'd be back in five minutes to take orders. I propped the menu up on the table on the first page. It was set up much like a restaurant's menu, listing appetizers, salads, and soups. Moxy and I quickly agreed to get an order of onion rings and share it between us. I decided to get an order of General Tsos chicken.

"This menu is really strange." Someone said.

Aiden quickly agreed. "Yeah, who puts Chinese, American, and Italian meals on one menu?"

I was puzzled and Moxy whispered "In the dreamscape, you went to a restaurant depending on which culture's food you wanted. If you wanted Chinese, you went to a Chinese place. If you wanted American, you got fast food or ordered a pizza." I nodded, remembering the types of food, but not the way in which dreamscape restaurants/cultures worked. Soon Moxy's nurse came back over.

"You know what you want?" she asked Moxy.

"Um, well we want an order of onion rings as an appetizer," Moxy gestured between us as Nurse Susan punched numbers into the same device used to log the cabins, "And I think I want the tomato soup, but I need to know if there's milk in it."