Standing at the huge, thick plate-glass windows looking out on the sprawling lab complex siting on a hill above the small town below, Sandra Wincott watched as steady sheets of lightening split the night, breifly illuminating the scene in flash-strobe brightness.
"I don't like this..." The slender, auburn-haired young woman fretted, crosing her arms just below where her small breasts swelled the front of her off-white cable-knit sweater. Though the lab was carefully climate-controlled to a comfortable temperature, she shivered and huged herself tightly as she stared out the rain-streaked glass.
Seated at the card-table, Jack Lowry cocked his head in the direction of the pert, cute, denim-clad posterior Sandra was inadvertantly providing a good view of. With a lewd smirk, the dark-haired, well-built young man winked one Sinatra-blue eye at the slightly pudy, tow-heaed 'geek' sitting across the table from him. As Gary rolled his eyes behind his silver-rimmed glasses, the taller, muscular Jack turned his head towards Sandra.
"Aw, is Sandy-Wandy afraid of a little thunder...?" Jack asked in a pouting tone of voice.
Turning away from the storm that wracked the night outside, the petite graduate student glared at Jack, sitting comfortable - almost arrogantly - with his feet up on the table, clad all in denim from his jeans and jean jacket to his black denim collarless shirt.
"Asshole." She retorted, her pixish face surrounded by it's deep red page-boy haircut ill-suited to the disgusted look it wore. She gestured with one slender hand at Gary. "Why can't you be more like him, huh?"
"Who - nerd-boy?" Jack replied, smirking. "Look at him - Pale, chubby, dressed in slacks and a button-sown short sleeve shirt... He's a clone of Drew Carey, only younger! Why would I possibly want to be like him?"
Gary's teeth clenched, and he prepared to finally overcome his shy, quiet nature and blast the arrogant asshole with a verbal assult. For the past four nights, the gradute-student rotation at the university had thrown them together, 'babysitting' a tenured professor's quantum physics experiment - which meant doing little more then making sure that the unexplained dials and readouts remained within the carefully-explained 'acceptable range'. Such an easy task, especially for three people, left them plenty of time - time Jack seemed to use solely for the purpose of antagonizing Gary and hitting on Sandra.
Gary opened his mouth to let him have it...
...but never got the chance.
With a tremendous roar, the world turned to white and the floor shook under their feet. All three students were knocked spralwing as the blinding light vanished - to be repalced with complete darkness and cool, falling water splashing over them.
"Damn - the sprinkler system must have kicked in!" Gary said, trying to clear the blue-orange spots in front of his eyes as he wondered why the floor of the lab felt so uneven...
...and seemed to be covered in - grass?
"What the hell happened?" Jack demanded, angrily, looking around as his eyes adpted to the darkness. "We're outside!"
They were indeed. Stunned, the three students looked at the large, tree-edged feild they found themselves in, a light, cool rain falling from the night sky and steadily soaking them.
"The storm's gone..." Sandra mumbled, shocked - then she looked around a little more closely, and her slim, elfin jaw dropped. "We're... We're still here!"
"What's the fuck's that supposed to mean?" Jack demanded. "Make sense, girl!"
"She's right!" Gary gasped, having caught on to the same thing. "This field.... It's the same place where the university is! Or... was. Look - there's the highway, and down there's the town."
"How the hell can an entire university disappear?" Jack asked, tugging his jean jacket up in an attempt to protect his fairly long, luxuriant, oh-so-carefully-styled hair.
"I don't think it did." Gary said, feeling as if he'd been gut-punched. "I think we're the ones that disappeared. Maybe lightning hit the building and did something to the experiment - but I think we've been pushed into a different quantum reality, one where the university was never built..."
As it happened, Gary's 'educated guess' had hit the nail right on the head - but there was something else about the situation that he and the others didn't know...
They were in a state of quantum instablity. Though none of the three could trigger it in themselves or each other, being from the same 'probability', any person or item in this version of reality could activate that instability, changing any of the three in almost any way, physically or mentally...