The Pineapple Drabble

The sun was bright in his eyes and there was sand in his shirt.

"Pineapple?" A hand appeared in his view, waving a pineapple like it was the Holy Grail. That hand had very strange fingernails, Will noted. They were more like talons or claws than anything else, and looked dangerously sharp.

"No thanks," Will said, sitting up and shaking the sand off himself. The stranger in front of him shrugged, grinning cheerily. His hair was bright blue. Almost too long to be real, a tendril of it curled next to equally talon-like toenails.

"Oh well," he said, withdrawing the pineapple and tossing it over his shoulder. "At least I offered. You won't get another chance, mind."

Will blinked several more time. He was beginning to hope that this situation would make sense any second now, but still the feeling that something was wrong persisted. The man grinning in front of him, for one, seemed quite odd, and he really wished that he would stop soon. He finally decided on a question that seemed safe, and asked it. "Where am I?"

"The Island," the man said happily, rocking back on his heels and standing. He offered a hand to Will, who took it.

"What island?" Will asked, making an attempt at extracting his hand from the man's grip. Despite Will having risen to his feet by now, the other man still hadn't let go. Finally freed, Will began to brush sand off of his jeans. Being busy doing so, it took him a moment to understand what the man was saying once he answered.

"The Island. You know that song by The Eagles, Hotel California? Well, when you come here, you can never leave. Isn't it awesome?" Will looked at him incredulously and wondered if he was in the presence of a serial murderer. This was his mother's fault, Will decided. She had wanted to reconnect, go on a cruise as a family like when they were younger. He should have said no, but she had begun to mutter words like "ungrateful" and "seventeen hours of labor" and he had been forced into it. Seeing his confusion, the man's grin brightened even further. "It's like this. Your ship went caput and you went sailing into this inter-dimensional hole and, well..."

He wasn't a serial killer, but instead seemed to be crazy, Will realized. He could work with crazy.

It was strange, though, that the hair wasn't getting any less blue-looking and there were still those strange talons...

"See, you came through the Gate of Worlds. My name's Zef, by the way." the man said, still smiling as he gestured behind Will's back. Will turned.

It looked like something from a show on the Sci-Fi Channel. Will might not have noticed if he wasn’t looking for it. There was a hole in the horizon that looked like a calm sea, but it was not the same sky blue sea that was lapping at Will’s toes; the two seas didn’t match. Will turned around again and scanned the landscape, all white sand and huge, towering trees that looked like palm trees but, in fact, were not. Instead, they were crowned by giant pink fruits that vaguely resembled lettuce. He faced sea again: it still looked like there was a hole that had been filled by a different sea.

He decided that perhaps someone (most likely the government) had invented and kept secret virtual reality machines and he was stuck in one. This seemed a bit like an RPG; maybe his purpose was to find his way home again and then he got recruited to their secret organization. Still, the bonus points would make it worth it. Considering the points you got just for sliding down a flagpole in Mario, you had to get a good amount from something like this.

"How do I get home?" he asked the strange, blue-haired, talon-fingered Zef.

"Oh, you can't," Zef stated breezily. "Remember? Hotel California? We've got an in door to this dimension and an out door to this dimension, but unfortunately they're on completely different sides of the universe. You'd die of old age before you got there. That's why I'm here to say hi to the newcomers."

Will considered that for a moment and then, much to his later dismay, fainted.

Zef frowned. "I hate it when they do that."