Disclaimer: 'Yellow Submarine', and all related characters and imagery featured in this story, belong to Heinz Edelmann, George Dunning, The Beatles, and Paramount. This is a fan-fic and I am making no profit from it.
Copyright: Kate Goldin is my own creation and rightfully belongs to me, R Cooper, aka Manquare, Chikkennoodul, etc. (See profile for other usernames.)
It all began with an ordinary trip to the shops on an ordinary day in late summer. A warm and sunny afternoon, with clear blue skies dotted by a few stray clouds. It was in fact the clouds that started it all, for it was the way they dotted the sky that caused Kate to take notice of them in the first place. As she strolled alone through the suburbs of her home towards the town, she had happened to glance up at the sky, and had then realised how odd the clouds were starting to look.
For these clouds that dotted the sky were literally becoming like dots themselves. The further Kate walked from her house, the more the patchwork pattern of little puffs of cloud was starting to appear…synchronized.While the clouds themselves were losing their irregular cloud shapes and becoming distinctly circular.
It was at this point that Kate stopped, frowning, still staring up. The clouds no longer looked like clouds at all. Now they looked more like dark, round holes, all forming a perfect polka-dot pattern in the sky.
Kate managed to wrench her eyes away from this extraordinary event just long enough to glance about and see if anyone else had noticed, but there were hardly any other people around, and those few souls that were wandering the streets were certainly not taking any notice of the sky.
Then, as Kate craned her neck to look back up at the holes in the sky, she was suddenly and inexplicably overwhelmed by a wave of dizziness. Clutching her hands to her head, Kate shut her eyes tightly and staggered, then fell… But she did not hit the ground. Instead, when Kate opened her eyes again, she found herself looking up at the ground and falling down towards the sky, as if the world itself had been turned upside-down.
Kate was now completely disorientated – she could not tell whether she was falling down or being dragged upwards by some invisible force. Free-falling with a slight drifting slowness that felt much that sinking into deep water, Kate twisted and turned over in mid-air, catching her first glimpse of her apparent destination.
She was falling straight into one of the holes in the sky. But unlike the other thousands of holes, which were a foreboding black, this particular hole was green…
Powerless, Kate sank into the hole, and for a few moments all she could see was green, before the world gave another sickening lurch and she was falling again, this time plummeting towards the ground.
Her decent was once again slowed down by the strange, low-gravity atmosphere, but it was not enough to prevent her from getting the wind knocked out of her when she finally hit the ground, and for a short while she simply lay there, stunned, waiting for the dizziness to subside, before sitting up and taking in her surroundings.
It was as if she had fallen into a painting – someone's idealistic vision of paradise. Rolling green hills, trees heavy with ripened fruit, gentle waterfalls and rivers, and multi-coloured flowers everywhere. The beautiful scenery went on as far as the eye could see, lit by glorious sunshine and clear skies. Distant hills were dotted sparsely with small buildings and strange monuments, yet there was not a road or telegraph-pole in sight. Everything was coloured with a vividness unlike anything Kate had ever seen before. She was in another world.