Chapter 2

In the quiet, newly-abandoned school library, the strange book which had been recently held upright by human hands gently began to fall to the table. Before it could hit the table with a thud audible enough to disturb the pregnant silence, there was a second flash of light, visible to only the blind and silent tomes that inhabited the bookshelves nearby. When the flash cleared, the mysterious book, too, had disappeared, its purpose accomplished. Mere moments later, Mrs. Ackers, the beleaguered and over-worked librarian, returned from her staff meeting. She looked around for the dependable girl she'd left shelving books while her friend kept her company. Neither student was anywhere within the library.

Mrs. Ackers frowned with a combination of concern and disapproval. She was somewhat concerned over the fact that Alex wasn't where she'd left her. Alex was a responsible girl, Mrs. Ackers couldn't imagine her leaving her volunteer work without at the very least leaving a note for her and locking the library doors. Maybe something drastic had happened to her and she had suddenly became ill. That might account for the Alex's neglecting to inform Mrs. Ackers in any way of her departure.

In the back of her brain, however, Mrs. Ackers was predominately disapproving. She had a sneaking suspicion that that Devlin boy had done something to make Alex desert her work. Sean Devlin was a quiet boy, but those were always the ones you had to watch out for. He was a secret troublemaker and Mrs. Ackers just knew that he had to be responsible for Alex's inexplicable dereliction of duty. Her blind certainty of this was so firm that even when she later found both Sean's and Alex's backpacks, still in the spots they had been originally laid, she wrote it off as mere forgetfulness on their parts and assumed that they would be back later to collect them. In fact, Mrs. Ackers had every intention of chastising them for their poor behavior. Mrs. Ackers was to come to regret this impulse in the coming days and weeks. For her speech to the two teens that morning marked the last occasion that anyone in the mortal realm on the Planet Earth ever heard or saw of Alex Johnson and Sean Devlin.

Inside the book known only as Fantasie, Alex Johnson and Sean Devlin were very confused. All they'd done was speak the title of that weird book aloud and now they were... someplace that definitely wasn't the library of Central High. Wherever it was, it quite obviously wasn't Earth. Last time they'd looked, the sky didn't come in mint green and grass didn't come in varying shades of blue running from pastel to sapphire (with the exception of Kentucky bluegrass, which is still a shade of green really).

The teens were standing in the middle of a large clearing. The white sun overhead shone brightly and brilliantly, yet gently. There were flowers in bloom and insects flying lazily in the glade. All in all, it was a very calming, idyllic, pastoral scene - or it would have been if the colors hadn't all differed slightly (in some cases extremely) from what was expected. The predominant color of tree leaves seemed to be black with scarlet-hued trunks. The flowers were lovely, but the startling shades of neon kept inserting a jarring note into the mind every time the colors were consciously noticed instead of idly passed by. When taken all together, it was a thoroughly disconcerting scene.

After slowly taking in the panorama before them, the two teens finally turned back to each other. "Well," started Alex, ever the practical one. "We seem to be here... wherever here is. And there's no door or anything, so I guess we're stuck here. Any ideas about what we should do now?"

Sean cocked his head a bit to the side as he thought about their dilemma briefly. They thankfully hadn't taken off their coats due to the always slightly cold atmosphere of the library, but that was about the only blessing. They had no supplies and with no backpacks they had nothing to carry any supplies with, no idea where they were, and because of whatever the hell that book had done, they also had no obvious way of contacting anyone or getting back home immediately. It didn't look too promising when he thought about it realistically. Still... "We might as well look for a way to get home, right? I mean, people are going to notice that we're missing eventually and they'll worry about us. So I guess we should just... pick a direction and go with it. Nothing really looks familiar and we don't have a map or anything, so what direction looks good to you?"

Alex was consistently amazed at how loquacious Sean became once he was safely away from his father, large crowds, and unfamiliar people. She knew it was a measure of his trust in her that he relaxed his guard enough to speak freely in her presence. And because she knew, she cherished it every time she heard his thoughts pour from his head without the extreme censorship he practiced around others. She shrugged, showing her indifference to the question of direction and said diffidently, "Well, we're already facing this way, we might as well continue on in that direction. I don't think it matters that much anyway which direction we go. Surely we'll find someone to speak to if we just continue to walk steadily in a direction."

"Sounds good to me," Sean concurred. "I just hope they speak English on this planet."

It was a worry Alex hadn't considered, and one she didn't really want to contemplate on top of everything else right now. "Me too," she agreed fervently. "Let's go."

They began to walk at a moderate pace through the new world they had so unexpectedly found themselves inhabiting. After ten minutes or so, they reached the edge of the clearing and the beginning of what appeared to be a forest. At least, they assumed it was a forest since they couldn't see through the trees to the other side, but it could have just been a thickly forested ring of trees around a large glade for all they knew.

Whether copse or forest, the two teens were glad to get out of the direct sunlight. The white sun, although it seemed smaller in the sky than what they were used to, still seemed to emit more heat than the Sun they were used to seeing on Earth. This meant that the day had quickly grown almost uncomfortably warm to the two teens who were still wearing the jackets they'd slipped on as a guard against a chilly Iowa morning. The shade provided by the strange trees were a welcome respite from the unaccustomed heat of the strange day.

The teens walked slower through the forest, conversing idly as they went. By unspoken agreement, they avoided the subject of how they got here and as many of their worries as possible. There would be time to deal with that later. Right now, all Alex and Sean wanted to do was forget their troubles for a little while. They were pretty heavily in denial and doing their best to stay there. So they talked about normal teenage things - school, gossip about people at school, homework for school, recent happenings on their favorite television shows... normal, everyday activities for them and thousands of other teens across the country.

However, in such alien surroundings it was impossible for them to completely escape the reality of their situation. Thus, tiny breaks in their state of denial appeared here and there like a windowpane slowly cracking under the pressure of an elephant's foot. For the moment, the small insertions of reality into their conversation came in the form of comments about the scenery around them. The tree that bore a striking resemblance to a poinsettia plant (if a poinsettias came 15 feet tall with thicker stems), garnered no little interest. So, too, did the exquisitely beautiful butterfly that had such a multitude of colors on its wings that it practically defied definition. The odd bird and flower also drew notice.