“I can’t wait for tomorrow,” Thought Darren as he began to walk to his car. The SEFER (space exploration for energy resources) division had accepted his idea for harnessing the energy from coronal loops, the loops of blazing matter that form on the sun’s surface due to the magnetic forces of the star. The loops would be far enough from the sun, and cool enough to extract the materials from it, and then transform the heat energy into enough electrical energy to power the entire state of Texas for an entire day.

The people in charge of the SEFER division had decided on Darren’s idea as the best months ago, but the announcement had not been made until today so that the preparation for the mission could be finished, and the scientist with the winning idea would be surprised to find that he or she would be going into space to conduct their experiment the next day. That night Darren had barely managed to fall asleep. He was up late studying experiment procedures, and the excitement of his opportunity kept him up for even longer.

The next day he was ready to go into space. After running through the checklist a billion times, it was time for launch. With newly invented technology, Darren would be put to sleep after breaking through the Earth’s atmosphere, and would wake when he reached the sun the next day. When Darren woke up, the sight was amazing. Shielded by goggles that prevented the Sun from blinding your eyes, to Darren, the sun looked like a beautiful sunset.

As Darren began to get closer to the coronal loop, something was beginning to look “off.” Instead of the loop expanding from the sun, Darren saw it as if one side of the loop was going out of the sun, while the other side was being pulled in. Kind of like how serpents or “river monsters” come out of the water.

After getting a bit closer Darren almost fainted after seeing something else, and he said to himself, “Are those…scales?!?”

Paralyzed with awe, Darren was unable to move the shuttle as the “tail” end of the coronal loop whipped up and spewed out fumes of crimson red smoke onto the ship. Able to move again, Darren tried frantically to get away, but then became paralyzed again, this time with fear, as alarms began screeching that the hull had been breached. The smoke was eating away the hull, but instead of being sucked into the vacuum of space, the smoke began invading the ship, and was being inhaled by Darren.

The next instant, Darren’s mind began fogging up, and his whole life flashed before his eyes. Darren’s entire life, from birth, to walking, winning the science fair, discovering the hardest mineral in the word- skiraine, being accepted into SEFER, and leading up to the experiment he doing right now. Then, the world went black, but Darren wasn’t dead yet…