Story

John Marshal awoke to the sound of his alarm early on a Friday morning. He groggily gained consciousness, and realized the sad recurrent day ahead of him. He punched the alarm, and tossed the covers off his body and walked to the bathroom. As he looked in the mirror during his shave he was greeted by the same fatigued person he had known for the past seven years. Ever since he had taken his job as a doctor at Upper Chesapeake, he had been hounded by late night calls from the overcrowded emergency room. As he finished his shave, he sauntered to his bedroom to dress in the same attire he had known for what it seemed eternity. He just wanted something exciting to happen in his life; something to break his drone of a life and get him into the field of something more excited. He was tired of getting the same cases in his clinic over and over again, and wanted to explore the breathtaking experience of life. He looked at the picture of a vacation spot he had planned to go on about 2 years ago, but had been canceled ever since the breakout of avian flu hit the United States and his job hard. He looked at it with the intensity of almost being there and he closed his eyes and imagined what an exhilarating experience it would have been, and he felt a rush along with a brush of wind over his exposed skin. He opened his eyes reluctantly to what he expected to be the world he had always known, but was greeted with the voices and bustle of the streets of Oslo, the vacation spot that had been taken away from him so long ago. He closed his eyes again to see if he was hallucinating, but he found the experience to be as authentic as he had before he closed his eyes. H quickly ran up the street, dodging traffic and construction obstacles in his way. John ran to the nearest store to try and grasp what he thought was a trance. The response from the shopkeeper was a jumble of words in a deep northern European accent. He tried to grasp what was going on but couldn't. He backtracked to try and target where and how he had started to travel. Then he remembered, it was the picture; yes it was definitely the picture. He decided to try it out again and looked at the picture of a Fortune 500 magazine, seeing one of the newest built penthouses of Mr. Toyota in Tokyo. He closed his eyes, and he again shuttered as the wind rushed him to the next location. He landed on the mat that looked similar to the one he had taken yoga on some years back. He looked around the room and saw articles of Mr. Toyota's accomplishments through the years, and his rise to the top of the chain of the car industry. He walked quickly into the next room, only to be greeted by the stares of hundreds of Pokémon figures from the selves that lined the room. This was the most scared that John had been in a long time. He fled the room only to run right into a Yu-Gi-Oh statue and passed out. When he awoke, he was met by the stare of one of Mr. Toyota's guards in their unusual outfits; Pokémon outfits. He was escorted out by the guard and kicked out into the bustle of a wave of short people outfitted with strange anime clothing. He was lost and upset, he felt like crying but he couldn't find an alley to enter the feedle position because not a square foot was unused. He had to find a magazine, and quick. He stumbled into a consignment shop and found a magazine in Japanese, but could still make out the picture of the top hospitals in America. Obviously Upper Chesapeake wouldn’t be on there but he could sure find John's Hopkins. He walked outside only to find a pile up of Toyota Priuses. Good old Japanese engineering had cause the electrical breakdown in the cars, and people were flying everywhere from the uncontrollable car. Then he saw it, a small lunchbox looking car, hurtling toward him while he frantically paged through the magazine trying to find John's Hopkins. He found it millimeters before the car hit him and he felt that euphoric feeling again, and was dropped into the center of John's Hopkins visitor center. He was home again.