Chapter Three: The Meadow

Copyright 2009. All Rights Reserved.
Beneath me there was only space: I was hovering in midair with nothing supporting me. I heard a high-pitched thread of noise which suddenly stopped, and then I realized that I had been screaming. My head reeled as I stumbled into the meadow. As I turned to face the doorway, Dobbs came into the room. I'm in so much trouble. I thought to myself.
“Natalie? Are you all right?” Dobbs said. His voice was blurry and fuzzy as though he was talking underwater. He looked towards the meadow, directly at me. I flinched, but he looked straight through me.
“Perhaps she is in the kitchen.” he said to himself. I breathed a sigh of relief. Evidently this was one of the glitches that Toald had talked about. Dobbs couldn’t see me, although I could see him. Then, to my horror, I heard Dobbs say
“How foolish of Natalie. She shouldn’t have left this unattended.”
“No! Don’t!” I screamed, launching myself towards the window, my only way to get back. But I was too late. The window disappeared, and I landed with a thud on the ground. Evidently when Dobbs had picked up the transporter, it had turned off. It had been programmed to respond only to my voice. I was trapped.
It is a difficult thing to comprehend, realizing that you are stuck on a planet billions of light-years away from home. It was comforting, though, to know that I was on my home planet, Earth. Unfortunately, I had absolutely no idea just where on Earth I was.
My father had decided that there was no need for me to learn the geography of Earth, because he thought I wouldn't be able to use it. Well, he had been wrong, and all the time spent teaching me star navigation had been wasted. I just hoped that I would have a chance to tell him how very wrong he had been.
I looked around me, surveying the meadow. Suddenly it looked a lot less friendly, and a lot more threatening. The whole meadow was ringed with trees. I went to the edge of the meadow and peered amongst the trees, looking for people or a road or something. But as far as I could see the forest stretched on for a long way. The meadow was fairly large, but it was desolate. I couldn’t see any sign of people at all. That in itself was curious. Shouldn’t this place be crawling with people?
I recalled a picture I had seen in my Earth history book, which had shown a beach at a popular resort. There was barely an inch of free space anywhere. I knew that special places had been set aside in attempts to grow rare plants back, ones that had nearly gone extinct from pollution. People were banned from going there.
My skin went icy. If you were caught trespassing in a plant reserve, you had to pay a huge fine. I didn’t exactly have a huge amount of money to spend, and I was saving it for more important things than paying a fine I had accidently gotten. My dad could even lose his job, if enough people got angry about this.
If I had accidentally landed in a protected area, the first thing to do would be to leave as soon as possible before someone saw me.
I looked at the trees around me. Weren’t they unusual for Earth trees? They all had large, heart shaped leaves and towered high above me, extraordinarily large. Then knowledge hit me like the proverbial snowball in the stomach. I wasn’t on Earth.
I felt numb. I sat down against a tree, trying to remind my brain that it needed to think. The light was fading very rapidly. A beautiful fiery sunset blazed across the sky for a few moments before fading down to muted pinks and oranges. Even as I watched, the meadow began clothing itself in shadows.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement. Turning my head, I saw a shadowy upright shape on the other side of the meadow. A human! I was saved! I sat there and savored the feeling for a moment, watching the figure.
The shape was looking for something on ground level, prying around in the bushes. One hand was clutching a large, bulky object. I wasn’t quite sure what it was doing, but it looked ominous. I shivered. Of course, it might have just been the time of day, but I decided I didn't want to approach the figure. While watching it, my head whirled through options of what to do next.
It had not seen me, as I was quite close to the trees and sitting on the ground. Maybe I could follow it and see where it goes. I thought, leaning forward to get a better look at the person. It was a stupid thing to do. The figure stiffened and whipped its head in my direction. I didn’t move. It stood listening carefully for a moment, and then its body relaxed. I imagined that it was trying to calm itself, breathing in the cool night air and listening to the calm silence of the night.
I closed my eyes, trying to look like a misshapen lump at the base of my tree's trunk. Everything was still. Through the midst of my tension an animal give a twittering call somewhere out in the forest. When I opened my eyes, the person was gone. Flinging caution to the wind, I stood up, hoping to have a better chance of seeing where it had gone.
An instant later, I found myself staring at a shape that stood only a foot or two away. When it began moving, I responded in the approved traditional manner: I screamed.