Chapter 8: Free Tour

Junior did not want to go to any other strange worlds. The only other world he wanted to go to was Earth.

Then another person came by. Her name was Glynnis Johnny. She wore glasses and was holding a clipboard. She was the tour guide. When she saw Senior and Junior, she immediately asked them if they wanted a tour of the building. Junior reluctantly agreed. Senior did not want Junior to go with a stranger alone. He knew his son pretty well, and he may either get lost or wander around, so he went on the tour, too.

The first place they went to was the front desk. “These seats are for guests. On normal days there are only six seats, because there are never more than six visitors. By the time a seventh visitor comes, the first visitor is already on tour, hopefully.” Senior could tell Ms. Johnny enjoyed her job. Then they went to the Viewer Lab. Before she could explain anything, Junior pointed out that they’ve already been here. He said the same with the Postball field.

Then they went to the second floor by elevator. When they got to the top, they saw a kitchen.
“We know, we know, this is a kitchen,” remarked Junior. “Is there any room that shows us status on the Viewer Lab? Besides the Viewer Lab itself?”

“Well, there’s the Status Room,” said Glynnis. They went down a long hall of doors. Inside the last door on their left, there were several other doors. They went through the one closest to the window. There was a single computer in this room. It had a blue screen. “We still use the old models,” explained Ms. Johnny. “We haven’t upgraded to iMacs or anything yet.”

“But I noticed you do use laptops,” said Senior.

“Yeah. That’s the latest type of computer we have.”

“How does it work?” asked Junior.

Ms. Johnny typed: RUN “STATUS” Then a program popped up. There was a list of several planets, including Earth. The name of each planet had a different highlighter, depending on its signal. Earth was red. She typed EARTH_STATS, and the screen turned red. This is what was displayed:
EARTH

• SIGNAL STATUSES: GREAT (BLUE)
• GOOD (GREEN)
• EH / SO-SO (YELLOW)
• MINOR PROBLEM (ORANGE)
• MAJOR PROBLEM (RED)
• IRREPLACEABLE (FLASHING RED)

CURRENT STATUS: MAJOR PROBLEM

PROBLEM CAUSE: EARTH’S SIGNAL WAS FINE AT THE LAST CHECK. THE NEXT DAY, SOMETHING HAPPENED THAT DISTORTED THE CONTROLS AND DISTORTED THE SIGNAL AS WELL. THE EVENT THAT CAUSED THIS IS UNKNOWN.

“Well, that sort of helps. All we need to do is fix the controls and...oh, wait, the controls are on the camera, and the camera is on Earth. Never mind,” said Senior. “Unless, of course, there was some sort of...”

Then Mr. DaLoiff came running into the room. He looked ecstatic.

“I think we may have solved the problem!”

TO BE CONTINUED

Chapter 7: The Inverse World

“How dare you call a man ‘nuts.’” whispered the man. But Senior figured that since everyone’s brain was inverse from theirs, to everyone else his voice was loud.

“Well, I meant it in the best possible way,” said Junior, trying to sound innocent.

“He’s just kind of young, okay?” explained Senior, ignoring Junior.

“You don’t need to shout!” shouted the man.

“Boy, are you a hypocrite!” said Junior, and because of the looks on everyone else’s faces, he took it back. According to him, everyone was crazy.

“Where are you from? Why are your thoughts the exact opposite of the truth?”

“Um, Earth. W-why?” cowered Junior.

“So, you’re visitors from another planet, eh?” whispered the man. Everyone gasped.

“And why do you say our thoughts are the opposite of the truth?” asked Senior.

“Because they are!! Look, you say your shirts are several colors, but everyone sees one. You claim our world is dingy brown, when everybody knows it’s very colorful. You try to tell us that we’re whispering, but it’s as plain as day that we’re screaming our heads off. You make it clear that you’re shouting. But you know very well that you...”

“Okay, okay, I get the point!” interrupted Senior. “Our senses are probably just inverse from each other, that’s all.”

“So, if I hold up this green bottle, you can only see...”

“Plain brown,” finished Senior and Junior.

“Okay, and we say this bird on the boy’s shirt is brown. But what color is it really?”

“Gray,” said Junior.

“We’ve always heard myths about people from different planets, but it seems they weren’t myths at all. You prove that myth correct. And apparently, the senses of the people living on your planet are opposite from the senses of the people living on our planet.”

“Really? I was just about to say the exact same thing!”

“But words have the same meaning, don’t they?”

“I think so.”

Junior tugged at his dad’s shirt.

“Excuse us, we have to go now,” Senior told the man.

“Bye, uh, come back soon?” whispered the man.

Senior and Junior turned around and jumped. The man could not see them anymore. They had decided to go back to Sprigg. It took a little while before they finally got there, but not as long. In a few seconds, they could see Mr. DaLoiff and Mrs. Hyken controlling the camera. Junior tried to wave to them, but they still did not move. Besides the fact that there was no static, and this did not take a while, this was exactly like traveling from Earth to Sprigg. Then they felt the familiar sensation of non-cut-into-your-skin glass, and they fell out of the screen.

“I guess I should have told you that people on that world think the exact opposite of yours,” said Mr. DaLoiff.

“Well, we kind of figured that out ourselves,” said Senior.

“Maybe we should’ve told you ahead of time,” said Mrs. Hyken.

TO BE CONTINUED

Chapter 6: Exploration

“No, not yet,” said Mr. DaLoiff.

“But you said we solved the problem!” cried Junior.

“He meant we figured out how it happened,” explained Mrs. Hyken. “We haven’t fixed the signal yet. We still need to figure out how.”

“Oh,” sadly moaned Junior.

“Do you want to take a look at some other worlds while they fix the problem?” asked Senior. Junior jumped up and down smiling. Senior took that as a yes. “But we’ll need one of you to move the camera around so we’ll be there if we decide to go home.”

“How about you do rock, paper, scissors?” said Junior.

“What’s rock, paper, scissors?” asked Mr. DaLoiff.

“It’s a game. All you need is your hand. A fist means rock, a flat hand palm down means paper, and two fingers mean scissors. Rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, and paper beats rock.”

“Got it,” said Mrs. Hyken.

Mr. DaLoiff stuck out a fist, and then Mrs. Hyken stuck out two fingers. She waited because she didn’t want to have to do it, so she made him lose on purpose. Mr. DaLoiff groaned.

“No, no, no, you have to do it together,” corrected Junior. He demonstrated with Senior. After he showed them, they did it right. Mr. DaLoiff won, so Mrs. Hyken had to control the camera.

Junior’s first exploration choice was a dingy brown planet called Lingslie.

“Promise you’ll follow us around with the camera?” asked Senior.

“Promise,” said Mrs. Hyken flatly.

Junior and Senior stood on the cylinders, and jumped into the screen. The sensation going to another world was not very pleasant. Not only did their senses stop working again, but they narrowly avoided colliding with several random objects. This took a lot less time than it did for them to travel between Earth and Sprigg. In about a minute, they were standing on a very rickety board. The board appeared to be on an ocean. Everything was brown. It felt very depressing, and Junior’s eyes even started watering.

“C’mon, let’s go,” said Senior, and he dragged Junior off the board. The sky was dark brown, the grass seemed to be dead, and there was not even a glance of a non-brown color (besides their clothes). The first place they went to was a two-story building. There were a lot of people chatting everywhere. Despite the overwhelming and depressing brown, no one seemed depressed. One person eventually saw Junior and Senior, walked over to them, inspected their clothes, and eventually spoke. His voice was not like a normal person’s voice, but it was more creaky and rusty. Junior later described his voice as “creepy.”

“What’s with your mono-colored clothes?” was the first thing he said.

“What do you mean, mono-colored?”

“They’re all brown!”

Junior and Senior looked at their clothes. They were not brown. They were black, white, orange, blue, yellow, and all sorts of colors.

“No, they’re not. Your world is all brown, unlike our clothes!”

“Oh, this exciting place?”

Junior and Senior were baffled.

“That’s not brown. That’s blue and pink and yellow and white and green and orange and red and even gray, but almost no brown.”

“Uh, you have it backwards. OUR SHIRTS are NOT BROWN, but YOUR WORLD is BROWN!” shouted Junior, as if the man could not tell the difference.

“Junior!” scolded Senior.

“What did he do?” asked the man.

“He screamed at you,” Senior answered.

“No, he did not. In fact, he whispered! You’re the one who’s being loud. In fact, if your voice were any higher, I bet you’d break one of the glasses in here!”

“YOU’VE GOT EVERYTHING BACKWARDS!!!!!!” screamed Junior, as loud as his voice could go. But no one seemed to hear him.

“What?” said the man. He brought his ear closer to Junior’s mouth. “Stop mouthing words. I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

“This guy is nuts,” Junior whispered in his dad’s ear. Suddenly the chatter stopped. Everybody turned to Junior. It was so quiet, you could have heard a fly walking on carpet. Senior looked at his son in disbelief. He could not believe his son would be this rude!

Junior looked around the room. He slipped back a little bit.

“Was it something I said?”

TO BE CONTINUED

Chapter 5: The Meeting

After the game was over, Senior, Junior, Mr. DaLoiff, and Mrs. Hyken went back inside the office. Earth was still malfunctioning. Mr. DaLoiff tried banging his hand against the screen, but nothing happened.

“Well, I guess it’s time for our meeting.” said Mr. DaLoiff.

“Meeting? What meeting?” asked Senior, Junior, and Mrs. Hyken.

“The meeting,” said Mr. DaLoiff, “that we’re about to have. To decide what we’re going to do about your broken signal. I mean, our broken signal for your planet. I mean, the planet you used to live on.”

“He always stutters when he gives a spontaneous speech,” muttered Mrs. Hyken. Senior rolled his eyes; Junior didn’t know what “stutter” or “spontaneous” meant.
Mr. DaLoiff and Mrs. Hyken sat down at two laptop computers. Senior and Junior sat down next to them. “How are we going to get home?” was the first thing Junior said. Mr. DaLoiff explained that someone else on Earth had to fix the signal to get back, but the chances would be astronomical that someone would know to fix the signal and do it right! Senior sighed.

“What does that mean?” asked Junior.

“It means,” explained Mrs. Hyken, “that you won’t be able to go home, because someone on your planet has to fix our camera. But no one on that planet knows about us! And even if they did know about us, they don’t know that we can view their planet! And even if they did know, they probably wouldn’t know where the camera is! And even if they did, how would they know that something is wrong? And if they did, how would they know how to fix it? And even if they did know, they probably wouldn’t know how to do it right!! And the worst part is, we can’t even tell them how, because we can’t put anything from this world into that world!”

A long period of silence followed, and then a monotone “uh...” from Junior. Apparently, he had a hard time following the definition. He thought it was even more confusing than the original explanation!

Senior didn’t want to have to explain it too, so he just muttered, “Never mind. Move on.”

“This is weird. Earth’s signal has never been this malfunctioning! Do you think you could have done something?”

Senior remembered the game he and Junior were playing before they got sucked into Sprigg, and recalled, “Well, early on, Junior and I were playing a game. We were kicking a ball all over the place. It bounced everywhere.”

“That may be the problem. The ball may have hit the invisible controls of the camera, moved them, and distorted the signal. When were you doing this?”

“I think it was between 9 or 10:00.”

“Okay, that is probably not the problem...the signal was broken when we checked at 7:00.”

“Well, what else could be the problem?”

Senior’s eyes grew bigger, and shouted, “You know, earlier on, before 7:00, I opened the front door really quickly. I noticed that we fell right next to the door.”

“So...?” asked Mrs. Hyken.

“So maybe the door whacked the controls of the camera!”

“Yeah, I could have sworn I heard something just before I woke up!” exclaimed Junior.

“That’s weird. I heard something too! It sounded like a thump, a couple bleeps, some typing, and then some more beeping.”

Mr. DaLoiff and Mrs. Hyken stood up. “That settles it, we’ve solved the problem!”

“You mean we can go home now?!” cried Junior.

TO BE CONTINUED