Total pages in book: 142
Estimated words: 134725 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 539(@250wpm)___ 449(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 134725 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 539(@250wpm)___ 449(@300wpm)
Coworkers saw it. I tried to sweep it under the rug, but a new shark of an HR manager decided she was going to take him down for it.
Last I heard, she was reported as a missing person. I saw her face on the eleven o’clock news. And me? As a result of all of that, I’m on Planet Phallyx. Oh yeah, Mr. Derringer’s uncle works for the UN. Good ole nepotism.
***
“I do not have a good feeling about this,” Lacey, a pretty blonde said, frightened eyes trained on me.
From what I could tell, Lacey rarely had a good feeling about anything.
Jetta, a sassy brunette, was arguing with a man who stared down at her over his clipboard. We were lined up inside a glass lobby of a castle-like building with stained glass ceilings done with gemstone patterns, near a set of rippled glass doors. The building was gorgeous, romantic. And everything felt strange. Even the air we were breathing felt odd.
There we stood: blondes, brunettes, me as the sole redhead in the bunch. We were all twenty-somethings from the USA, staring ahead at the foreign land in front of us.
Outside the decorative glass doors ahead we saw an outdoor reception area framed with tables laid out with food and drinks. It was strange-looking out there on the vast patio, seeing things that were not what I was used to. The sky was pink, the clouds lilac. It was as if it was sunset, but brighter. With cotton candy clouds, it was all quite surreal; it looked like a movie set. But I somehow felt in my soul that it wasn’t fake. This was happening. I was on another planet. For real.
Those tall men that examined us were more proof. They were aliens, for certain. They looked like us but were significantly larger and they looked … just … different. It was hard to describe as our features were the same, but they were more vibrant-looking, healthier-looking, despite being older. Older, but not at all elderly-looking. It was like their skin was glowing, almost. They wore lab coats and slim-fitting trousers that looked to be of suede, and they took snapshots of us by snapping a little phone-like device in front of us. Their bright eyes scanned their screens and then we were moved along. I blinked in shock at them, catching a glimpse of not the photo of what I looked like now, all dressed up and here, but instead saw a screen with a thumbnail picture of me from the day I entered that office building for my orientation. The screen also contained symbols and graphs. Our vitals? Information about us? I had no idea.
Some of the girls talked about how odd it all was. Some just stared at the vivid colors, the vivid men in lab coats, at the fancy food laid on the expensive-looking dishes. Me? I couldn’t help but feel like it was romantic-looking. Almost Victorian blended with something space-age. I was in awe of being in a very real fantasy world. As an avid reader, I let books transport me away to fantasy places. As a person, I wasn’t adventurous. But here I was… adventuring.
Beyond the reception patio area, I could see all sorts of greenery, scratch that: pastelle-ry, with lush grass that was green but more vibrant than any grass I’d seen, not to mention colorful flora, but then a forest was ahead of a large field and the trees were as if from a painting, colored in stunningly bright hues. Pink, purple, yellow. Leaves in odd sizes and strange-looking textures. And bright – as if they were also lit from within.
It was penetrating. My situation, that was. We truly were on another planet. And it was beautiful. Breathtaking, even. I suspected most of the girls didn’t truly believe it up until then. Jetta said she kept waiting for someone to shout “Cut!” or “You’re on Candid Camera!”
But I was sure it had to now be sinking in for all of us. This was real. And unlike the girls who had muttered they were skeptical, I’d believed it early on. I was a conspiracy-theorist from way back and had always believed in things others had doubts about. Ghosts. Vampires. Sasquatches. Werewolves. Aliens. I’ve always been open-minded. Maybe that’s because of all the reading I do. Science fiction. History. Fantasy. Adventure. Biographies. Self-help. Romance. I read everything I can get my hands on.
For me, books are life. But, better. Because unlike life, which has limits, books are there waiting to be opened, and opening them offers infinite possibilities. And I might be afraid of new things in life, but I was never afraid to crack open a new book. Reading made me feel fearless. While I was reading that adventure, I was ready for anything.