text: [Themes: sci-fi, science fiction, serious]
  
  You're walking back to your dorm room. It's the last night of final exams and your brain is exhausted, but finally, you have finished. Your backpack feels lighter than it has all semester (since you have already sold back most of your books), and the weather has finally gotten warm after a long winter.
  
  You still haven't finalized your plans for your summer. Some friends have invited you along on a road trip for a couple of weeks. Exploring the south western United States could be fun, you think. But then there are family obligations. You promised your uncle that you'd help him run his newspaper over the summer. This would be a great job experience, especially considering the fact that you're majoring in Journalism.
  
  You weigh the pros and cons of both choices as you cross the deserted campus. It's almost eerie this late at night and you realize that you've only seen two other people since you left your exam.
  
  You pull your backpack closer and try to think back to the self-defense lecture you had had once in high school. Although comically all you can remember is to hit someone in the groin. As you are trying to remember whatever you can from that class you hear a metallic scraping sound from your left, making your skin crawl.
  
  Again you contemplate your options:
  
  [Author's Note: My first story on here, and also it's a story I have been working on for years but never got around to finishing. So it's more of a story than a choose your own adventure (thus can get long in some places). Depending on how well it is liked I may continue on with it and flesh it out a bit. There are several possible endings, two of the endings are considered 'best']
  
  > check out the sound on your left
  (you are either very brave or very stupid)
  
  Cautiously you walk towards your left, every nerve tense as you wait to hear that screeching sound again. You scarcely breathe as you move in the dark. You feel as if you are being watched.
  
  You have moved about ten feet when you hear the sound again. This time louder, which is bad enough, but also now it is coming from behind you. You jump as you swing around, expecting there to be something behind you.
  
  You see nothing, but your senses are going wild and your skin feels like it's crawling. Every instinct is telling you to run. What do you do?
  
  > stay and examine the area
  (once again, you are either ridiculously brave, or incredibly stupid)
  
  It's probably just some stupid freshmen goofing off, but you decide what's there to lose. You have nowhere to be and your finals are over, and you loathe the idea of returning to your dorm after spending the last few days buried by books in there.
  
  Therefore, you make the horrible decision to shuffle around in the dark searching for the source of that screeching sound. You had only made it a handful of feet into the darkness when you are surrounded by intense white light. Your whole body feels as if it is on fire and you instinctively hide your eyes. You lose consciousness due to the intense pain...
  
  > wake up...
  You wake up freezing. You are naked, bound to a futuristic metal chair, and surrounded by about fifty other people, also naked, also bound to chairs. Some of them are awake, crying and mumbling, struggling to get free. They are of all different races and ages. You can only understand a few others who are speaking. The rest seem to speak various other languages, you're pretty sure you can make out Spanish, and maybe Russian, as well as some Japanese.
  
  The man in the chair next to you turns and asks you "Parlez-vous français ?" you shake your head no, you had taken three years of German in college instead of French. You try to listen for anyone who seems to know what is going on while absentmindedly pulling at the metal bars that hold you in place.
  
  You hear the loud screeching noise again. The same sound which lead you to this position in the first place. Only now it is much louder, and right above you. Awkwardly you tilt your head to the side and glance up. You quickly wish you hadn't. Above you are hundreds of aliens. Blue skinned, three translucent blue eyes, and lots of big scary teeth, all staring down at you and the other humans. You panic, struggling more against your binds, but to no avail. The other humans also panic, some are screaming, which makes your ears ring. You just wish it would all stop...
  
  You hear a humming sound to the sides of your head as metal bars start closing in around you, trapping your head in place. A strange helmet begins to lower down onto your head. You can see that the same thing is happening to the other humans, most of which seem to be in various stages of terror (for obvious reasons). The helmet settles onto your head, completely cutting off your vision of the other prisoners, intensifying your feeling of claustrophobia. You're starting to wonder how things can get much worse when you feel needles shove into your head, originating from the helmet. You scream in pain as millions of thoughts, images, feelings, scents, and sounds start pouring into your head from these needle like things.
  
  Through the helmet, you can hear everyone else screaming and you realize, yet again, that you have a choice to make.
  
  > fight the pain in your head
  You grit your teeth. You always thought you were a survivor, secretly tougher than the world gave you credit for. Now, through the pain you realize just what it means to survive. You can still hear the other humans screaming, you wish you could turn off the sound. You realize that you are trapped in your own head with this horrible agony. The needles are pumping in information like some kind of messed up matrix thing. You're trying to fight it, to stop the flow of information from getting into your head. You realize it's useless however. It's coming in from too many points. Information on different sounds, smells, tastes...every feeling you can think of, is forcing its way into your head. The pain is unbearable, and fighting it has become tiresome.
  
  You begin to realize that there are fewer people screaming now, things are beginning to quiet down. You are unsure whether to feel grateful or more scared because of that...
  
  The pain is agony, you feel like you are swimming around in your mind searching for a life raft, or anything to rescue you...you never in your wildest dreams thought you'd die like this...
  
  > keep fighting!
  and indeed you refuse to die. At least, you refuse to die like this. A sniveling whining scaredy-cat locked in their own brain. You try to think of anything you might do to fight back against the pain. But you are still bound to the metal chair, and your head trapped. Physically you are restricted. Mentally, however, there are options. You realize that the needles may be doing more than pumping your head full of useless (and painful) information. They could be giving you just the weapon you need to free yourself. You realize that you are connected, and receiving more and more information by the second.
  
  You have two courses of action you can take. One involves using the information already pumped into your head and seeing if anything is worthwhile, perhaps on getting out of this predicament or who/what is doing this to you and why.
  
  or
  
  You can choose to follow those needles and see where the source is...a sort of, out of body experience. Normally you would never try anything so crazy, but something tells you that at this point, if you put your mind to it, you can achieve it.
  
  so what will it be?
  
  > stay within your own mind and search around
  You choose to stay within your own mind, a much safer option than attempting the out-of-body experience. You frantically search the information that the needles are still pumping into your mind. Something must be useful, you reason. You vaguely notice that you can no longer hear any of the other humans, and you are unsure whether to be thankful that they are no longer screaming and distracting you from your work, or worried about the implications their silence means.
  
  Finally, you stumble on something useful. Information about what is going on! You and the other humans around you are experiments on how much information the human brain can handle. The aliens who abducted you are doing illegal research on different species in various galaxies. They're hoping to find a species akin to their own. That's the good news.
  
  The bad news is that now you hear alarms. Some more digging, in the now readily available information in your brain, reveals what those alarms mean. Collision. The aliens' spacecraft is on a collision course with something, and you're trapped within your own mind...
  
  The panic within you starts to return and you realize that you are still in a lot of pain from the needles pumping information in your head. At this point, you are tempted to just give up and surrender to the pain and die...but the thought of dying without an identity with everything that makes you into you replaced by the stupid information makes you rethink that plan. After having analyzed the information in your head, you realize why everyone else is silent. They have all succumbed to the pain and died. The only reason you're still alive is you refuse to let yourself be rewritten. You keep using your brain. As long as you can keep doing that, you will survive, well...except for the collision...
  
  The alarms are still going off, and they seem to be getting louder...or at least more annoying. You can hear the aliens talking amongst themselves in a panic and you're beginning to understand them (hey! Maybe all of this random information isn't totally useless after all!). You're pretty sure you caught something being said about you...which could be good or bad, depending on the context.
  
  Your thoughts are interrupted by the same searing white light that brought you to the alien vessel in the first place. Everything goes blank.
  
  > wake up (again)
  You wake up lying on the ground on your campus. It's starting to get light out, you can hear birds singing nearby, you're fully clothed with your backpack still nestled between your shoulders. You brush the dew off of yourself as you stand shakily up, wondering what happened and if it was all a dream.
  
  Clumsily you begin to walk back to your dorm. When you finally do make it back to your room you doubt anything actually happened and figured your mind must have snapped from all the stress from finals. Until you look in your mirror, however, and see all the red, partially healed, puncture wounds on your head. Your screaming wakes up your roommate who grouchily throws a pillow at you.
  
  Grabbing a quick change of clothes, you run out your door. Needing to just get away and think about what happened to you.
  
  After wandering around campus for a few hours, you decide to go get some food, but where should you go?
  
  > Chinese restaurant - egg rolls and rice sound yummy right now
  As you enter the small Chinese restaurant, you hear some commotion in the back room. You wait impatiently for someone to come out and take your order, by now you're stomach has started to growl fiercely. But after close to five minutes of standing around and waiting in the empty restaurant you're fed up.
  
  What do you do?
  
  > go to a different restaurant?
  Enough is enough already, and you've never been the patient type when hunger was involved so you leave. Where to now?
  
  > Pizzeria- Pizza...the breakfast of college students everywhere
  You walk up to your favorite Pizzeria, Tony's, and walk in. The place is deserted except for a bored looking server.
  
  "Sorry, we're not serving today," she says, "the oven is broken and we're waiting for the repairman to get here."
  
  Your stomach growls as you get frustrated. You're starving and now pizza isn't even an option? What is this world coming to?
  
  You weigh your options...
  
  > see about fixing the oven
  "I can help," you say as you confidently stroll behind the counter.
  
  "I don't know if that's such a good idea..." the server stutters, as she tries to stop you.
  
  "Nonsense, I'm certified with the International Society of Certified Electronics Technicians," you lie and fleetingly wonder where you got that information from.
  
  "Oh well, uhm...okay?" the server says as she steps out of your way.
  
  You head back towards the oven and analyze the situation. After tinkering around a bit you ask the server if there are any tools. She disappears for a moment and returns with an old, rust covered, toolbox. You open it up, grab the tools you need and set to work.
  
  Within five minutes, you shut the lid on the toolbox and call the job done. Before last night you could barely close a pizza box without problems, now today you suddenly have the knowledge and abilities to fix them yourself with old rusty tools.
  
  The server calls the cook who arrives momentarily, upset that his impromptu day off was interrupted early. But he quickly starts the oven up and bakes you your favorite pizza, on the house.
  
  As you eat, you ponder what happened to you last night. Why were you abducted, who were those other humans, what really happened to them, and why were you returned home?
  
  Also, now there are the implications of your new 'powers' to think about. You have a feeling oven repair was not the only thing you learned thanks to those needles, and you wonder how long it will take before you realize the full extent of your newfound knowledge.
  
  (Congrats, you stumbled upon the storyline of the second best ending!)