Where is Everybody?

On May fifteenth, I would never have dreamt what would happen during my off period. I came home from the shopping mall and would not be coming back in ten days. Yet something real unusual happened between now (May 25) and then, and my break would become anything but. It was 8:15 AM, and dawn was present. I was up watching one of my favorite cartoon shows from the 1980s, one I enjoyed as a kid, and do even more as an adult. One which furthermore was rebooted. It was on my desk computer that I was viewing this good piece of nostalgia when I took a glance out the window and saw the break of dawn through the closed curtain. I took a glance at the clock, then as I was watching its face read 8:15, the time suddenly shifted and it was now ten AM, an entire hour and forty five minutes later. Not only that, but my bedroom was instantly brighter. It goes without saying that this sudden scene shift as if an hour and extra minutes passed by skipping the intervening time was jarring.

I never got to go back to post. The show was several episodes later in the run, as it was playing the whole time I was gone. That would be the weirdest thing, had it not been for the deathly silence that enshrouded me and my whole environment otherwise. There wasn't a sound as I paused the video and listened. I dropped a pin to confirm I hadn't gone deaf. Not only was I not deaf, my hearing had dramatically improved, as had my other senses as I would find out later. There was no sound of traffic as my window was open. There was no sound of footsteps, no sound of flames crackling, no sound of sizzling meat, no television set or radio broadcasting. Not even a gust of howling wind or birds chirping. I turned on the TV only to find that nothing was on. I switched my radio on listening for broadcasts, only to get static on every station that doesn't have a long preexisting playlist. I tapped away at my keyboard after returning to Google in hope of finding recent activity. The only recent activity I could find online was automated. No person had left posts on any of my favorite videos or responded to my emails. Only preprogrammed stuff seemed to keep making recent updates. I didn't even bother trying to use the phone for reasons I will explain later.

After walking about, I managed to find six other people, all complete and total strangers to me. Three of them were in crosswalks or walking on residential streets when it happened. They all agree they saw the same thing and it happened at the same time. They all saw all the cars in the street vanish into thin air, and they all agree it happened at 8:15, or around dawn in any case. The conflicting views are in the immediate moment afterwards. One's a man who saw his watch on the ground with a crack in the crystal reading 11:00. Another is a woman who tried using her phone but couldn't for the same reason I couldn't (again, I'll get to that later, but it has to do with touchscreens), yet had a watch which also didn't stay on her wrist, and was dented when she checked the time, which read 12:00 PM. They both agree it was much brighter and later in the day, afternoon or nearer instantly after everything motorised and most people vanished. The third was another young man who was walking down his residential street when it occurred. He doesn't have a touchscreen like most of us do, so he could check his phone (from 2006) for the time, which read 8:20, five minutes later he emerged. The other three were all in their homes when the mass disappearing act unfolded, yet they also agree at the same time things suddenly changed. They all felt weird, and suddenly could see things, hear things, or feel things they could not before. None of them could contact their families who vanished altogether like mine did, and could reach their friends, neighbors, and bosses. I sincerely hope this whole thing is a nightmare, and I'll emerge from it. I have a feeling that this day will be the start of a new calendar, the marking of a new age, like the BC/AD change. For the meantime, we'll keep using the normal one, and I will keep recording the days, marking them n-o when nothing eventful happens, and describe what has happened when something's going on, day-by-day.

If you are reading this currently, or at any point in the future, you may already know what happened or what we look like, but in case not and this whole thing is reversed or just a dream, getting teleported minutes or hours into the future while everything else in motion and most people vanished is far from the only thing to have happened. All of us who came back minutes or hours after disappearing have found ourselves in bodies that aren't our own. Why couldn't we use our phones? Because our new forelimbs apparently aren't conductive. The bodies we possess are totally alien. What's more is many of us look like some kind of Equinn alien, definitely not something from Earth. Several of us have forelimbs that end in a blunt tip without any clear indication of manipulative powers. Somehow, we have been able to use doorknobs and keyboards and so on just fine. The rest have taken on something that has clear hands. This includes some things that seem to have come straight out of classic myths. A gryphon and a couple of humanoid forms. One of them is a humanoid body with a dog face. The whole thing is more or less human in shape and size, but the face is quite clearly canine. There's also a humanoid body that seems to have largely reptilian features. The whole thing is covered in scales, save the vast bat like wings, has a reptile muzzle and brass claws and a tail. The rest are quadrupedal, have four limbs that end in blunt mostly flat and rigid appendages, and are surprisingly small for something like that. I can only think of goats being this small. Also, two of us seem to have... intuition is it? We can feel and detect an energy source in the air, one that was most assuredly not there yesterday, or we were specifically given bodies that can detect this energy's presence in the atmosphere while the others cannot. I am one, the guy with the old phone (Anthony) is the other. I wonder if that energy has anything to do with this. I will record tomorrow's events in the evening when most of the day is out. Hopefully we will meet somebody else, and the seven will become... well more than seven. Perhaps my relatives or immediate neighbors will turn up. And maybe we'll have answers.