"C'mere," Dawn heard Laura whisper from the hallway. She looked up to see the dark-haired Caucasian woman beckoning to her, a secretive smile dimpling her ruddy cheeks. "I've got something so cool to show you." Laura's hazel eyes sparkled with excitement as she punctuated the words with a few insistent nods in the direction of her office, just in case it was somehow possible that Dawn missed the implications of her words, and she practically bounced on her feet as if her body couldn't quite wait to get moving.
With a familiar sigh of amused exasperation, Dawn levered herself out of her chair and locked her computer screen. She knew what this was about--it was a rare day when Laura didn't come back from her lunchtime walk with some little find she was enthusiastic over, from a little tree frog that she managed to coax off the bark of an elm to a baby garter snake to a particularly vivid pink flower she spotted just off the path. It wasn't exactly the sort of thing that Dawn went gaga over the way her nature-loving co-worker did, but Dawn knew she'd never get anything done until she followed Laura down the hall and made a few interested noises over the latest find.
"So what is it today?" Dawn asked, closing her office door behind her and following Laura down the hall. "Did you find the last passenger pigeon or something?" She couldn't help teasing Laura just a little--the older woman was always telling Dawn that she'd feel so much better and more energetic and filled with zest for life if she only joined Laura on her daily walks, but Dawn enjoyed relaxing with a good book too much to give up her lunch hour tromping down to the nearby wilderness reserve and back. Giving Laura some good-natured teasing helped underscore Dawn's firm commitment to indolence.
Besides, Dawn didn't feel like she had anything to apologize for, just because she didn't fit into the 'willowy Asian' stereotype. She knew plenty of guys who liked a woman who was a little bit plush in the right places, and if they didn't mind that she had the palate of a hummingbird and preferred lounging in bed to long walks, then Laura could dang well get used to it too.
Not that the other woman seemed to notice the teasing. "Even better," Laura said, seemingly propelled down the hallway by her own anticipation. "Oh, just wait until you see it!" She flung open the door to her office and ushered Dawn inside, pointing to something on the desk that looked like a bundled-up old jacket. She closed the door behind them and darted past Dawn, pulling aside the loose cloth to reveal something smooth and white and perfectly round.
Dawn looked at it quizzically. "Is that an egg?" she asked, approaching the desk slowly while peering at the mystery object. It looked too big and round to be an egg, but Dawn remembered seeing a nature documentary that said that eggs came in all sorts of shapes and sizes based on the nesting habits of the bird and stuff. Maybe this was a crane egg, or an egret? It looked big--Dawn was pretty sure her hands would barely fit around it if she picked it up. Maybe it belonged to a heron? Dawn suddenly hoped that whatever it came from didn't have a maternal instinct. Anything that could lay an egg that size probably wouldn't have any trouble breaking a window with its beak.
"That was what I thought, too," Laura said from behind Dawn, her voice tinged ever so slightly with smug satisfaction. "But when I got closer to it, I realized it was something so much more special." There was a strange quality to her words that set Dawn's hackles on edge, without exactly knowing why; it was that kind of low-key fanaticism that people got when they were trying to sell you on some shitty new nutrition supplement, or explaining the benefits of Scientology. That next step beyond enthusiasm into full-on obsession. It made Dawn a little nervous as she tentatively leaned in for a closer look at the not-egg.
"I dunno," Dawn said warily. "Is it, like, made of quartz or something? Because I--ut." Dawn felt the words dry up into an inarticulate grunt as the orb suddenly burst into a vibrant display of colors that practically dragged her eyeballs down into the swirling depths of the object. She gripped the edge of the desk as a sudden wave of vertigo washed over her, forcing her to lean heavily on the solid oak for support.
Dawn tried to ask Laura what the hell was going on, what she was looking at, what was happening to her all of a sudden and why her gaze seemed to be inexplicably magnetized to the mysterious orb in front of her, but all that escaped her lips was another mumbled yelp of confusion. "Guh?" Dawn blurted out, trying to control her body and her mouth and her eyes and failing at all three.
"Ssh, shh, it's okay," Laura cooed softly, coming up behind Dawn and gently petting her back. "It's okay. Don't try to fight it. It's so much better when you stop resisting and let it inside your mind, Dawn. You wouldn't be able to resist anyway, so why try?" Laura's fingers smoothed back Dawn's long black hair, stroking it as the orb continued its implacable pull on Dawn's gaze. The colors flowed endlessly inward, creating an optical illusion of bottomless depth that seemed to swallow Dawn's mind more and more as she stared deeper and deeper. It felt like it was absolutely impossible to look away. Within moments, Dawn stopped even trying.
