No Service

Chapter 1

Meg Thomas took a walk in the woods one day.

Meg Thomas being a short tempered red-head who just wanted to go home. Though, besides the hair, that describes most of the people she spends her time with in this hellish nightmare. They were pretty unbearable at the best of times, but this time her adventure wasn't to escape their typical kind of arguing. She just stood up, turned around, and started walking. Meg wasn't sure what compelled her to do it, but here she was, making her way through this stupid forest one step at a time.

The red-head raised her head and looked up to the tops of the trees all around her. She was convinced when she first arrived, but Meg wasn't fooled by the accuracy of the leaves flowing in the breeze anymore. The Entity had a vast knowledge of a lot of things, like how leaves were supposed to look and how they were supposed to move, but there was something undeniably off about the forest all around her. She spotted a pile of leaves just ahead along the path she had been following and stepped over to it, kneeling down and grabbing a hand full of the brownish leaves, crinkling them between her fingers and letting them fall to the ground. They almost felt like real leaves. They almost held the softness that they were supposed to, but they were a little too textured. They felt almost like paper.

Meg never thought she would miss what leaves felt like.

With a resigned sigh, she began to push herself back to standing upright, but when she placed her hand down to keep her balance, her fingers landed on some kind of hard rectangular object below her. She paused and stared at the pile in confusion. She brushed the leaves aside and saw underneath the pile was... some kind of phone? It wasn't like any kind she'd ever seen before, at least not like the ones that existed before she came here.

Why was there a phone hidden in a pile of leaves? The Entity didn't just leave things lying around, so this has to be some kind of mistake, right? Meg pressed the power button slowly and the screen lit up bright white with a single apple with a bite out of it in the middle of the screen. Not only was there a phone in the nightmare, but it also worked? How was it charged? How long had it been there? She had so many questions.

Meg sat down on the ground Indian style, brushing the stray dirt off of the screen as she waited for it to completely power on. She moved her thumb across a button under the screen, taking in the feeling of the ridges on the smooth surface of the face of the phone. It had been so long since she had held anything even close to a phone before, and the last time she had they didn't look like this. They were smaller and you could open and close them, not to mention there was a keypad where you could type in numbers and text people.

Before she could think any more thoughts the apple disappeared and was replaced with a picture of space and a small blue square in the top left corner with text under it that read "Messages." Above the square was a bar across the screen with five little smaller bars standing next to each other that were all different sizes, biggest to smallest. She brought the phone closer to her face and looked at everything a little better. The picture of space must be the wallpaper, but she had no idea what the blue square was. The bars at the top left must be how good the connection is. Five bars was a pretty strong signal. She wondered what that could mean.

Meg looked down at the button under the screen again, thinking this through. How was she supposed to use this thing? She pressed on the button and the screen shifted. It swiped left and showed a bar at the top that said search. Okay, well that did something. She pressed the button again and the blue square flew in from the right, back into it's original place. Weird. Maybe she could...

Meg moved her thumb over to the blue square and pressed it against the screen. The blue box expanded quickly suddenly and something else now covered the screen. Replacing the space background was now some kind of fancy looking messaging program. Okay, so this kinda was like her old phone that she had, but it was a little newer. It reminded her of the touch screen panels she had seen in science fiction movies before. This phone must be from the future, or at least what year it is now since Meg was taken and trapped in this place. ...How long had it been anyway?