Chapter 3

Sonja grimaced at the newsletter she saw laying on her roommate's desk. Where does Teri get those? she wondered to herself. Shrugging her shoulders, Sonja gathered her soap, shampoo and towel and headed to the bathroom. Sonja knew as far as roommates went, she could have done a lot worse than Teri. The two had been assigned to each other their first year at the University of North Carolina at Elm Island and had quickly become fast friends. Although Teri and Sonja were disparate in appearance (Teri was a tall, willowy blonde, while Sonja was petite, curvaceously athletic and of obvious Mediterranean descent), the two girls' personalities were almost identical. That is, except for Teri's obsession with conspiracy theories.

Sonja stepped into a shower stall, adjusting the water temperature until she got it the right temperature before stepping underneath it. Sonja leaned forward, getting her just-past-shoulder length hair before she started lathering it. As she watched her hair, Sonja couldn't help but reflect on Teri's latest obsession: "The Snatchings."

Sonja shook her head as she considered all the newsletters that her roommate was constantly bringing home, each one hawking a different pseudo-history. One month Teri would be telling her how the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was the beginning of a plot to bring the Federal Reserve Bank into being, the next she would be talking about the shot fired from the grassy knoll. And now it was "The Snatchings."

Sonja couldn't help but shake her head and laugh as she stepped out of the shower stall, toweling herself off. When Teri had shown her the newsletter on alien landings at Roswell, New Mexico and subsequent abductions of human beings by aliens, Sonja thought that was the wildest thing she ever heard. That was until Teri told Sonja about "The Snatchings."

Sonja put on her robe as she continued rubbing her hair dry with her towel. According to Teri and her newsletter, the launching of Sputnik twenty-five years ago had caused a rift to be torn that led into a world of giants. Giants who abducted Earth women and made them into their personal sex slaves. Sonja couldn't help but giggle at that thought as she opened up her dorm room. Just how did the physics of giant sex work anyway?

Sonja quickly got dressed as she remembered how earnestly Teri had repeated stories from the newsletters, stories of women who had escaped from the dimension of the giants. It was all Sonja could do to keep a straight face through the entire telling.

With a little smile, Sonja put on the aluminum necklace that her roommate Teri insisted she wear at all times. According to Teri, not only would the aluminum necklace keep her safe from being abducted by inter-dimensional giants (who were due, according to Teri's newsletter, to snatch a new batch of sexy Earth girls in the next few days), but it would prevent secret government agencies from reading her mind. And prevent aliens from beaming her aboard their spaceships, Sonja reminded herself with a little laugh as she grabbed her books and headed for her first class.