"Oh, Mom," Lisa Donaldson sighed as she retrieved a package adressed to her from the mail room. "I thought I told you to stop sending me stuff! Oh, well... what goodies did send away this time?"
As a college junior, Lisa had been away from home for about three years. By now, she was pretty used to it. But apparently her mom wasn't. Despite her protests Lisa's mother insisted on constantly sending her money, home cooking, snacks, advice, and other helpful pieces of motherly love. Lisa didn't mind it during her freshman year, which was of course a pretty tumultuous time, but now it was starting to feel as though her mother had let empty nest syndrome get the better of her. She had tried to talk to her mother, to tell her that she was a big girl now and insisting that she stop sending away packages every week or so, yet her mother persisted in sending her more and more stuff.
"Well, as long as she sent it..." Lisa thought. A part of her actually liked receiving the gifts on a regular basis: her mom was a great cook and, being a flat broke college student, she wasn't inclined to refuse some extra cash.
To her surprise, when Lisa finally returned to her room and opened up the brown box, it contained nothing but a strange device and a note.
"Wha?" she said, picking up the note and reading it, hoping to gather a clue as to why her mother sent her this.
Sadly, the note didn't help much. It simply read:
"Found this lying around in your room and figured it was yours. Love you! Mom."
Putting aside the note, Lisa picked up the device and examined it. Amid the complex array of lights and circuits on the surface, she was able to make out two rather large blue buttons lying at the center of the strange machine. One was marked with a white plus sign, the other with a white minus sign. Protruding from the device's black body was what appeared a small cannon of some sort.
"Geez. This defintely isn't mine. How the hell did it get in my room, though?" she wondered, looking at it from different angles, as though doing so would give her a better idea of just what the heck it was. "How does this thing work, what does it do? I'd try it out, but... maybe it's dangerous..."