Three Trek fans walked down the aisles, examining merchandise. The only one who had altered his appearance, choosing Vulcan, held up an old style uniform for inspection before discarding it in the original pile. "I can't find the right shade of yellow," he complained to the other two.
"It's all the same color, Kristian," Steve pointed out, eyeing the food stand. "There is no other color of yellow in the old uniform section. In the TNG section, however..."
"Hey guys, is that Leonard Nimoy?!" Michael exclaimed, pointing wildly into the crowd.
Steve sighed. "Would you just calm down already? It's bad enough that you HAD to stick with us..." He glanced over at the food stand again, and mentally counted his money. "I'm going to get something to eat. Meet me at the main stage in a half hour, okay?"
"Sure thing, Super Dust Storm!" Michael agreed cheerily, provoking a loud sigh from Steve. He quickly turned to Kristian and started talking his ear off, making the Denmark boy look pointedly nervous.
Steve wove his way through the crowd, and at one point he thought he saw a very familiar girl standing in the crowd. A girl with long dark blond hair and color-shifting eyes hidden behind bronze glasses. She was standing next to a Klingon-like girl with yellow-blond hair, talking and flipping around a bat'leth. Then he blinked, and the two were out of sight.
Shrugging it off as a coincidence, he turned to the food stand menu to decide what he wanted. But he couldn't shake the strange sense of uneasiness that had suddenly come over him...
And then the lights went out.
There were startled screams from the crowd as two more blazes of blue light flashed in the dark, illuminating for just a moment the frightened faces of the two girls he had seen. Then a bright yellow glow surrounded not two, but THREE people down on the ground.
A soft click from behind him made Steve freeze in disbelief. "Do not move," a harsh, guttural voice snarled. "I do not want my captive to be damaged." There was a strange chirping noise, and the attacker spoke in a foreign tongue. Before he could protest, everything around him fizzled into a bright yellow light and when it vanished, he was no longer there...
~~~~~~~
As soon as the shot was fired and the lights went off, Kristian grabbed a glow-in-the-dark toy phaser and held it up to see what was going on. Michael had become unusually silent, edging closer to the source of light as if it would protect him.
"Steve?" Kristian called cautiously, pointing the slightly glowing object in the direction they had last seen their friend. Michael also turned to look that way, just in time to see him vanish in a pillar of yellow light alongside someone. And that someone was pointing a gun at him from behind.
"Oh my gosh!" Michael nearly screamed hysterically. "Steve!"
"Don't worry about him, worry about US!" Kristian whispered loudly, eyes darting around. There were two dark figures next to them, leveling unmistakable phasers at them.
"Do not attempt to escape," one of them said in barely understandable English. The other spoke into a small device, and grabbed onto Kristian's arm, making him drop the toy phaser. The first one took hold of Michael's shoulder, and they too disappeared into golden light...
And materialized in a small room.
The two assailants stepped over a raised part of the floor and one slapped a panel, causing a strange shimmering effect on the air across the opening of the room. Then they stomped out, giving the two boys plenty of time to examine their surroundings.
The room was about ten feet by fifteen feet, with nothing but a metal bench on the far side of the wall. There was no carpet, only an unidentifiable metal plating. Kristian, naturally interested, knelt down to trace a finger along the seamless floor. "This is...amazing," he said.
"Amazing? What's amazing?" Michael began to say, getting louder and louder. "We've just been kidnapped, and we're being held in some room with a force field and we have NO CLUE WHERE WE ARE!!!!!"
"Could you two keep it down over there?" a voice said from the next cell (for that's what it obviously was). Whoever it was sounded angry, and maybe a bit scared.
Abruptly, it clicked. "Steve? Is that you?" Kristian called, getting as close to the force field as he dared. "It's us. Kristian and Michael."
"HOLY-!" The other boy was at the force field in a matter of seconds. "How did you two get here?"
"The same way you did, evidently," Michael said, eyeing the electricity lines around the archway. "I think we got beamed up, Scotty."
"Be serious, Michael," Steve said in warning.
"No, he's right!" Kristian exclaimed suddenly. "What we experienced was exactly the same thing as they did on the old Star Trek show, whenever they transported anywhere! Michael, you're a genius!"
"I am?"
"Wonderful. How does that let us get out of here? I dunno about you, but whoever kidnapped us isn't planning a tea party," Steve said. "One spoke to me, and he said I was his captive. He didn't want me getting hurt, he said, and then I appeared here."
"They probably want to learn about the human race or something," Michael suggested, shrugging. "Although I can't imagine why they would pick us."
"Or us," a feminine voice cut in. All three boys glanced to the left, at the cell on the adjacent wall. A teenage girl was standing there, right next to her force field door. Even though she was still in Vulcan disguise, there was no mistaking her for anyone else.
"ALLISON?!" all three exclaimed at once.
She nodded, looking tired. "Yeah. And Jessie's here too." She put a hand to her forehead. "Man, those phasers sure pack a punch on stun...I've got a migraine the size of Texas."
"You think YOU'VE got a headache?" Jessie asked sarcastically from further back in the cell. She sighed. "When I said I wanted to go to a Star Trek convention, this is NOT what I had in mind."
"Well, that's the price you pay for being a Trekkie," Allison called over her shoulder. "Personally, I think we should have EXPECTED it."
Before anyone could ask what she meant, the strangely familiar transporter sound filled the room and two people appeared in the cell next to Allison and Jessie. Both looked startled at their surroundings, but neither made a move toward the force field.
"Hello?" one of them called shakily. "Is there anyone else here?"
"Yes," Allison answered. "There are five of us. We're all prisoners too." She moved to where the two other girls might be able to see her. "I'm Allison, perhaps known better as Lugia42 or Charmega."
"Charmega?" one of them asked, familiarity coloring her voice. She stared at the other girl. "Well...I'd always hoped to meet you, though this is certainly not what I had in mind. I'm May Solo." She gestured toward her companion. "This is Lia. You know her as Mistoffelees."
The other four introduced themselves, and then they lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. It was fear, of course, but mostly boredom. Evidently their captors didn't care about the mental state of their prisoners.
Then the whole ship jolted, and the deck plates began to rattle. An odd whine wafted through the air that seemed vaguely familiar, but no one could figure out why.
Allison, being the most devoted Trekkie present, finally snapped her fingers. "We're time-warping!" she realized aloud. "Whoever's in charge of this thing is doing a slingshot around the sun in their spaceship...sending us to the future!"
"Just like in Star Trek four, right?" Jessie remarked in astonishment.
"Exactly," Allison said, a bit nervous. "But that means...we ain't in Kansas anymore, Toto."
"Are you sure it isn't time for a 'colorful metaphor'?" Jessie quoted, and all six others were forced to agree.
There was a whooshing sound, and then everything went black.