The secret sub

My family and I were working for the Government.  I'm not sure in what department.  I'd gotten a bunch of information that was classified, and that was a problem because we weren't spies, we weren't supposed to have this information, and we didn't have any clearances; something had gone wrong.  I think it was information about a secret submarine.  I was trying to limit the damage.  I was trying to organize a meeting of the people who knew about the submarine, without letting anyone else know that there was anything going on.

I was hiding the secret documents by tucking them into back issues of Sorceror's Apprentice - which is an actual magazine, basically an RPG fan zine with delusions of grandeur, that used to be published by Flying Buffalo, years ago.  It mostly focused on their Tunnels and Trolls face-to-face RPG.

There were birds building a nest on the deck railing at my family's house in Sooke.  I heard the birds referred to both as "jays" and as "spoonbills"; they looked a little like bluejays (not Stellar's jays) but nothing at all like spoonbills.  They had little flat tufts of feathers that stuck out above their beaks, sort of like second beaks.  There were at least three birds apparently cooperating the build the nest.

I was riding in a car with my father driving, and I was using some kind of wireless Internet access to look for information on the birds and the secret submarine.  I kept searching the query "three noses" "granulated pork" (that is, two phrases) in Google, even though it returned no interesting results.  I thought that on one of my previous searches I'd seen a page summary including those two phrases, and it sounded like something I wanted to read about, but I couldn't find the page again.

I tried looking in an unabridged dictionary, with ornate covers carved from some white substance, possibly wood or plastic.  But I did something wrong and all the pages suddenly vanished.  The front cover clattered down onto the bottom cover.  There was a ritual that could be done to bring the pages back, but it was elaborate and time consuming.  Two old men would have to chant, and throw roses, while a young woman tossed blank sheets of paper onto a stack where they would be transformed into dictionary pages.  It would take a whole day per page - years to restore a dictionary with thousands of pages.

Someone was telling me about stage magicians who used dictionaries in their shows.  If anything went even slightly wrong, the pages would disappear (as had happened to me) and because nobody wanted to bother with the ritual, the only practical thing to do in such a case would be to buy a new dictionary.  The cost of the new one would be deducted from the magician's pay, and most of them were in dire financial straits as a result.