Starsnatcher - Trapped In An Alien World [COMPLETE]

Part 1 - Chapter 1.1 - Visitors

Consider this text file my final legacy.

Sorry to all I've left behind. I'd like to tell you why, but I literally don't know where to start. It didn't start with the abduction nor with the singularity stone nor when I entered the woods.

No, it all started with a single headline.

"Two college students abducted by aliens?"

The moment I glanced at my sponge rather than the screen, the message had already disappeared. Burger Bob's news screen now advertised the documentary Foreign Worlds.

I guess I had lost my mind from cleaning empty tables for hours. Either that or the tabloids sought to exploit the gullibility of Ernstburgh's townsfolk. Fairy stories about aliens had soared in popularity ever since the alleged wormholes had been discovered.

At the table next to me, an old woman shared a burger with her pet robot. The robot had a photo of her grandson's face stuck over its monitor. She knew her real family would never return to this town.

"I want you to study hard and do your homework well," she said, then pointed to me. "Otherwise you end up like this man!"

Ignore her, I thought.

Should I have told her that I did this for college? Thinking about it, she was not entirely wrong though. My chances of remaining stuck here even after completing my physics degree were damn high.

"Lunchtime!" Emma called from the common room.

"Sure," I whispered.

Like the lifeless doll I was, I dropped my sponge and turned to the common room.

Above the door to it hung a micro-LED monitor on that showed the news. The first headline for me to see was about some fancy farmscraper; the first of its kind to be completed in America. Great. In just ten years, even small towns would be full of them and Burger Bob would be even more dependent on the bio-corporations. Maybe that grandson could work for them. While that was interesting, the next headline was even crazier. It read "Unidentified Flying Object 'sighted'".

Maybe that was the real headline and the alien abduction was just something I had imagined. Under the title was the blurry photo of a night forest. Starved tree trunks as thick as branches squeezed together in blue mist as if they sought shelter from the cold. Bushes and grasses were prominent, too.

The only thing missing was an actual UFO. No flying saucers in the air, no ominous lights in the sky - nothing. Was the bad resolution to blame?

When I tried to read the text, the article was replaced by the usual reports of broken celebrity marriages. Now two minutes of political scandals had to pass before things got interesting again.

I wondered why they couldn't at least photoshop a flying saucer into the forest to make their story more credible. Or were the quotation marks around the word "sighted" supposed to tell me something?

"Are you going to come?" Emma asked again.

"Sure."

It was just tabloid journalism anyway. A dead forest didn't scare me. What was I supposed to expect from the news terminal in a fast food restaurant run by Mr. Graves?

I opened the door to the common room a crack wide. To my relief, only Emma and Steve were sitting at the table.

Mr. Graves was nowhere in sight. Compared to the continuous noise avalanche nearby, this room was practically a library.

The common room had the aesthetics of a junkyard being piled over a hotel room. In other words, basically what happened when you didn't automate your cleaning personnel. Grease stains and cracks on the wooden table contrasted with spaciousness and rich decoration you rarely saw in Ernstburgh. The mustard-yellow wall opposite the door was adorned with pictures of Philipp Graves' father Robert, the founder of this house, and the birth of Burger Bob. There were exactly 20 pieces and they were arranged symmetrically. First four on top of each other, then four times three, then four again.