It's a beautiful night. You're sat on the beach, the sea crashing and retreating along the coastline, as you gaze upon the aurora borealis that fills the sky. It spreads across the black of the night like a glowing wave of purples and reds and greens. You look down again on the coastline that washes silently under the stars, when you see something bobbing on the horizon, something getting closer and closer every second. You stand and walk closer to recognise it as a note in a bottle. How charming! As it reaches the shore, you pick it up and take out the note. Strangely, the paper is charred, and the bottle is a brand you don't recognise. You open the note to scrawled, almost unreadable handwriting. Thankfully, you manage to make it out:
"Whomever gets this, wherever you are, know that I am in desperate need of help.
My world lives in apocalyptic chaos. I don't know how it all came to be, and I don't know why, but I don't care. All I've ever know is survive.
I live in a tiny village of human out lasters desperately trying to contact other life, but we can't because we have to spend all our time hiding. Hiding from these things, giants that come out at night and take away anyone they find. I don't know where they take what they catch, or what they do with them, but one thing's certain:
They've taken my mother and sister.
My father died of disease when I was younger, as did my older brother, so for the longest time it's just been me, my two sisters, and my mum.
Now there's just me and my one sister, and the few others in the village
It's been nearly two weeks now. We are starving and scared and worst of all:
They know that we're alive. That there are humans where they've been looking. So more will come, and more of us will be taken away.
Please help me, wherever you may be. Because the headcount is increasing and I can't stand to lose any more of my family.
Signed..."
That's where the note ends.
You look up at the sky, but now the beauty of the aurora is tasting bitter sweet from the cold dread looming within your gut.
You were once told a story of how the aurora borealis was a gateway in the sky to another world, and given the right power, it could open to another plane of reality. And now, with the charred note in your hand, it all seemed to be the case.
Yet with that was the ever-present feeling of guilt; what are you supposed to do? You want to act, but this note has come from another world, one that could be infinitely different from our own, and has passed through the many thin and thick layers of space-time itself just to reach you. And how would you even find this person, what chance would you stand?
You don't even know their name.
So you sit down on the beach, the now clutched in your hand.
Now this sky will never be the same again.
