Day 2: Welcome to StrangerVille

I sit up and hang my legs over the side of my bed. I think I just had a nightmare. I was walking around this town and everyone had a freakishly smile across their face. Even mom and dad. And that lady I met yesterday, Marlee, had one too in my dream.

I look over at the time and it’s close to 4:15 in the morning. I was hoping for another 45 minutes of sleep. But I’m awake, so I am going to make the best of it. Work starts at 6:00. I’m pretty stoked as this is my first official day. On the bus yesterday, I found out there are other new recruits as well.

I let my mom and dad sleep in. No sense in waking this early in the morning to see me off. I know they would want to, but it’s nothing special. At least not to me.

There’s a military jeep waiting for me outside indicating it’s time for me to head off to work. I’m hoping I can impress my boss and my colleagues. I change into my uniform they provided and head out for my 8 hour shift of doing who knows what. But I’m eager to find out.


Junior wakes up around 8:00am and notices his son has already left for his first military training day. He was hoping to give Joseph a pep talk beforehand.

Heading outside for some morning fresh air, all he could see what that today was a cloudy day. The temperature was cooler than yesterday because of it.

To his right, he caught a glimpse of the wild bizarre plant his son had shown him a picture of from yesterday. He walked over to it and was more curious about it. He assumed it was some sort of night light. He wondered why there was still a pulsing glow to it. He concluded to himself that since it is cloudy outside, it must be activating it that way somehow.

He also gets spooked by a noise from behind him and he sees a person which looks to be like a woman walking along their driveway. To Junior, she looks like she might have some sort of disability to her. Perhaps she is lost and needs help.

Being the outgoing and friendly guy that he is, Junior approaches the woman who he thinks might need his help. He waves to her and says hello, but gets no response. The woman just moves around in circles tilting her head with a wide grin on her face while her eyes are wide open.

Junior waves his hand in front of her face, yet still has trouble getting her attention. He starts to feel bad that this young woman might be lost.

All of a sudden the woman stops and faces Junior making eye contact with him, but says nothing. He begins to get nervous at this point because he doesn’t know what to do. She leans forward and stares at him which makes Junior lean back flabbergasted.

The woman’s body straightens up and she begins to speak weirdly but understandably. She still had that really big grin and wide eyes. Her head also continued to jerk and sometimes went all the way sideways.

As Junior went to pat her shoulder to tell her he will help her, her arm and hand reached and grabbed his turning it. This woman was strong that Junior thought and felt as if she was going to break his arm. But she eventually lets it go. She also hasn’t said anything else.

But soon enough she begins to speak again. But she’s not making any sense with her words. Junior was trying to figure out what she was trying to tell him. Something about her mother it seems. This woman obviously thinks her mom is beautiful which is nice, Junior thought. He also caught a name of Bella, which must be her mother’s name.

All of a sudden, the woman turns around and walks away. Junior asks her if she would like him to call her mom for her. But she only continued to walk with a limp again and her head jerking.


I arrive home a little after 2:00 in the afternoon. During my time training, I noticed our camp was next to the crater Marlee had mentioned to me yesterday. And I did see there was a building within the crater. I found that to be really strange. But this town is actually called StrangerVille, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

We did a lot of physical training exercises. My drill sergeant was impressed with how I was doing. We also started learning hand to hand combat. We had weapons, but we were to also learn how to defend ourselves if we weren’t armed.

Dad eventually sits me down and tells me about this early afternoon with another visitor we got. He thought she might have been special needs or had some kind of mental disability. He said she knew who her mom was and that he wanted to call her for this woman, but she ended up walking away.

He also said she had this really big smile on her face. This brought me immediately back to waking up from my nightmare this morning. He described it very similarly from what my dream was.

After dinner, I wanted to check out the town a little more. Of course mom and dad wanted to come with and sight see as well, so I let them tag along. Some of my colleagues recommended checking out 8 Bells which was the town’s bar. I guess I could go for a drink.

Not to my surprise, my dad talks me up to the others at the bar. I work with these people and now my dad is embarrassing me in front of them.

After what feels like hours of my dad trying to make me look good in front of my colleagues, a woman comes in and sits down at the bar. She is dressed in regular clothes and not military like everyone else is, besides my mom and dad.

My dad turns to look at her, but doesn’t say anything. The woman decides to break the silence and says hello to him, which give him a little shocked expression on his face. He turns to me and says this is the woman that came over today.

The woman looked at my dad strangely and tells him that she never met him before. My dad reassured her that she did. She talked about her beautiful mom. The woman starts to get upset and continues to repeat she doesn’t know him and if she did, she would never have mentioned her mom because she’s never met her before.

I grab my dad by the arm and he quickly jerks it away. Then he apologizes and says I caught him off guard. I tell him we should go and then say goodbye to the woman.

As I exercise before going to bed, I think about what happened tonight at the bar. I don’t think my dad is delusional thinking he talked to this woman. Especially since he told me right away when I got home from work. But why would this woman lie?

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