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A blinding jagged bolt of lightning tore the night apart, flooding the vicinity with bright white, then all went black; two seconds later a deep rumbling began, which quickly built to an ear-shattering crescendo, tapering off to a slow booming.  The rain fell in heavy pendulous blobs, sheets and sheets, like some giant ant army coming on and on in droves, never ceasing. 
           
Chocolate-brown scampered across the grass and snuck under the bush.  His fur was matted to his body like a second skin, which kept him warm.  The black beady eyes looked up as another bolt ripped through the night sky, outlining the tall cylindrical object standing like a giant sentinel guarding against any approaching evil.  The rat looked up at the strange architecture: a pipe, somewhat similar to a flute, with square holes running up to its top, it color like that of milk, stained with gray due to its age.  The rat then saw the moon in a bizarre break of clouds, fully and shiny like a marble, in line with the sculpture, like a giant pool cue lining up for one of the universe’s biggest games of billiards, where it was necessary to make the moon hit Saturn and pot it in the black hole light-years away.
           
The moon was almost in position for the phenomenon to take place, tomorrow night it would all take place.  Of course, the rat had no idea about the oddity, all he knew was that something was up, something bad was going to happen, no now, but soon, very soon. 
         
As the thunder began vibrating the very fabric of the air once again, the rat turned tail and scampered back to its burrow, where its multitudinous family waited.

Scott Stone through on his back-pack, checked that he had his keys, then left Q building of Parkside Commons, just one of the developments of the residential area at California State University, Long Beach.
           
Stone put his hands in his trench coat pockets and began making his way to his first class, Introduction to Investigation.  He was undeclared, but seemed to be leaning more and more towards Criminal Justice.  As he walked in the classroom, he sat himself in his usual seat, at the front of the class.  The class was already three-quarters full, but he did not attempt to engage in conversation with anyone, not even with the cute brunette next to him, who could have done with some help on her homework.  He pulled out a Virginia Andrews and lost himself in the many complex characters.
           
Stone was not your average, go-lucky, college student.  He was basically a social outcast, a misnomer in that he didn’t fit in, anywhere.  He didn’t have friends, he had casual acquaintances and that was as far as it went, and you know what, that was exactly how he wanted it.  So long as he had VC Andrews and Star Trek, he was happy.  One might look upon this as a somewhat pathetic and simplistic life, but that was how Stone liked it.
           
His dress code was pretty straightforward: anything black was okay.  It was necessary to shine a light into his wardrobe, if one wanted to select a specific item of clothing, since it looked like the dead of night in there, but then Stone had the entire line-up memorized.  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, he was sort of a nerd.
           
And then there was the trench coat.  That, to pick a term, his Pride and Joy, with a capital “P” and a capital “J”.  It had all started when he began watching The X-Files continuously and had immediately been drawn to Mulder’s character.  Within a month, he was smitten with the series, mind you it drew a close second to Star Trek.  And then one day he had seen this old trench coat in a second-hand store on Pine Street, for twenty bucks, he hadn’t hesitated.
           
Since then, there was rarely a day when he didn’t ware it, even in the heat of summer, which was kinda why he drew a lot of stares, but he was used to it.  And then there had been that tragic Columbine High School thing, which actually made him really depressed.  What with the serious overpopulation problem, the population, the Greenhouse Effect, the depletion of the ozone layer, along with all these wonderful diseases like AIDS, not to mention things like cancer (now over fifteen types) and the Ebola virus.  Then there were other little niceties like the destruction of the Earth’s rainforest, and the dwindling wildlife, species disappearing for eternity every day.  And now there was that dreaded Y2K thing.  Well, that’s life!
           
The planet was dying; the problem was no one realized it.  When he went through these periods of depression over the state of the world, he often thought of a quote made by Chief Seattle in a time when there was little wrong with the world: “the Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the Earth.”  Not a truer word had ever been said.  The teacher came in; class was about to start . . . another lonesome day in this destitute world.

           
The white cylindrical perforated tube had a clear background of black, sprinkled with billions of stars.  The time was at a few minutes to midnight.  Stone walked up to the piece of architecture, the Bell Tower they called.  Why, he didn’t know.  There were speakers inside it, but he had never heard them utter a decibel of sound. 
           
Stone often came out here at around this time.  The campus was empty, quiet, at blessed peace, where he could just look up and study the stars and wonder.  There was actually a small doorway in the Tower where one could go in and look up, pinpointing a few stars.  Stone went in there now and sat down.  He rested his back against the wall and looked up: a sliver of that white sphere could now been seen in his artificial telescope; even though it didn’t actually magnify, it pinpointed, created a center of attention and what better than the moon.  A few minutes later, three quarters of the moon was in the sight.  Stone wondered if that gray fuzz, a crater, was the Sea of Tranquility. 
           
As the white orb filled the end of the tube that Stone was looking from, a bolt of luminescent blue lightning shot down through the top of the Bell Tower, its origin far off in distant space.  As the light hit Stone, he felt no pain, but a comfortable numbness; his body was enveloped in a bright blue.  His body began to buzz and then began vibrating; he now felt angelic, which was new to him, since he was not in the slightest religious.
           
All of a sudden Scott Stone just disappeared, all that was left behind was a grain of sky-blue sand.

           
What took place that night was a rare astronomical alignment that only takes place once ever eighty-four years.  It is known as a syzygy, where there is an alignment of the sun, Earth and either the moon or another planet.  In this case, it was the moon.  The bolt of blue luminescence is an enigma and remains one.  But then no one saw it, so it was never discovered or realized.  Stone was gone for a total of twenty-four hours and returned at 12:04 the following night.
           
No one even noticed he was gone.  

*

           
Stone slowly opened his eyes and saw a complete whiteness.  He began moving his limbs ever so slightly, to make sure they were all in working order; no problems there.  He carefully stood and then comprehended that the whiteness he had seen had been the fine white sand of the ground.  It was then that he realized that he wasn’t in the Bell Tower anymore, he wasn’t on campus for that matter; so just where the hell was he then? 
           
Stone looked up to a black night sky inundated with the golden sparkling stars, much like he had seen every night when he looked to the heavens.  He turned and saw a pale white moon, huge in size, like a giant pearl suspended in space.  A red fuzz rose up in the cornet of his eye and he turned further and gazed upon another giant moon, this one blood-red, but still pearl-like.
           
He wasn’t on Earth anymore.
           
“Holy crap!” was all he could manage, the shear enormity of this whole situation sinking into him like a cold icy oil, the black oil in The X-Files.
           
That last lightning bolt must have passed straight through the end of the Bell Tower, but instead of him being electrocuted and left as a burned chunk of carbon on the ground, he had, through some inane stroke of misfortune, if you like, been transported to another planet, in another universe.  It was the only real explanation for it, but Stone was not at all happy with it.