WRITING CONTESTS, original works

Snowy Plains (Sci-Fi)

Competition: Sci-Fi - March 2019: Day at the Office

Prompt: It was a Friday like any other. The office looked as bleak as ever, the coworkers were as tired as was to be expected. It was the last day of an exhausting work week. But then something happened, something that turned a boring day at the office into a science fiction adventure.

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SOME DAYS IT'S HARD to understand why things happen, and today was no exception for those working in the futuristic department of the technology company. 

It was a Friday like any other. The office looked as bleak as ever, the coworkers were as tired as was to be expected. It was the last day of an exhausting work week. Everyone was high strung and on their last nerve, borderline snappy and murderous at anyone who gave them a sideways look. 

However, in their exhaustion, someone added a little too much of a toxic concoction to one of the mixtures to go inside one of the most recent space jumpers. The result? What can only be deducted to be a black hole appears in the middle of the room, startling everyone.

Alexia, the one who made the mishap, is instantly examining it, glasses pushed up her nose and blue eyes furtive as her colleagues move to surround the...thing. Slowly pushing her arm into the middle of it, the young scientist feels her arm turn cold, causing a whole-body chill to sweep through her, goose flesh rippling over her skin.

Stepping through the hole, she arrives in a world of pure white. Her eyes fly around in wonder, looking back over her shoulder to see one of her coworkers making their way through the hole that seems to be in space and/or time. She watches as he attempts to form a coherent sentence, a bewildered and delighted expression on his face. Several more of her coworkers make their way through the hole, but Alexia ignores them in favour for walking further into the strange world.

A small part of a paragraph from one of her old textbooks runs through her mind as she looks over the snow-covered landscape: "Einstein's theory of relativity shows that time passes at different rates for people who are moving relative to one another."

Then, broken from her thoughts by something strange, she feels the cold begin to dissipate, and her whole body begin to be surrounded with warmth. At that, she stops shaking from the frigid temperature and takes notice of what's happening around her. Or, to be precise, what is surrounding her.

A soft golden light is encompassing her body, and a strange tingling sensation is traversing her, a feeling of something growing and twitching making her squirm until the light fades away. Looking down at her body, she finds that her skin is nowhere in sight, and that there's thick fur covering her arms and legs. Reaching up, she feels further fur on her neck and face, making her mind reel with disbelief and confusion.

Looking over her shoulder, she notices her coworkers are in similar predicaments. Multicoloured, fur covered humans standing a few metres behind her. Their eyes appear to be glowing with an ethereal yellow-green light, and they're sort of silted like a cat's eyes. Alexia lets out a breath she didn't know she was withholding and shakes her head, staring up at the sky.

"Another world," she breathes. "Unbelievable."