It is Time

The time has come for a long-planned project at Pluckytown to come to fruition. I am talking about a progressive story. What is a progressive story you ask?

Well, we are going to be in the process of telling you, the reader, a story. The unique twist will be that each author/contributor will only be able to write 500 words at a time. When we reach the 500th word, we have to stop, regardless of whether it's in mid-sentence or not. There will be some challenges that will be in order, most of which I'm looking forward to:

1. Each author needs to be careful to remain consistent with the storyline. We want to entertain, but we want to do it on a consistent basis. As such, we need to avoid negating something somebody previously wrote by attributing it to a dream sequence or other such phenomenon.
   
2. Each author needs to be careful not to advance the plot line too quickly. It's not a competition. We're trying to put something forward that more or less resembles a novel, or at least a longer short story. It will definitely be tempting to try to accomplish too much in your allotted space.
3. Each author needs to remember to be original and entertaining. This first story will take shape as we write. None of the collaborators have discussed plot or characters or anything ahead of time. They will just have what has already been written to work with, and that's all.
   
4. We have been challenged by Kamp's wife, Anne, to write a story about aliens that is different from all the other ones.
   

So, without further ado, I bring you the first installment of Pluckytown's first progressive story, "500".