"What does everyone want?" Scott Fulton asked, looking around the table at his family.
"Pizza!!!" Megan said. She was an adorably cute little girl, the sort who liked dolls, and pink, and seemed to have boundless energy.
"You ALWAYS want pizza," her older brother Cody said. He was the classic middle child, trying to get noticed in between the unbearable perkiness of his little sister and the drama of his older sister.
Alexis didn't bother to answer. She was on her phone, texting to her friends, and trying best to act as if her family wasn't even there.
This annoyed her mother, Kimberly. She taught at the same high school her daughter now went to, and she dealt with that sort of behavior all day at school, despite a ban on cell phone use during school hours. "Alexis, dear..." she said. "Can you please put away the phone and answer your father?"
"One minute..." she said.
None of them noticed the man take aim at them, and activate his machine, but when he did, for a moment, everyone felt an odd sensation, as if it had suddenly gotten cold for a second, but they quickly brushed it aside.
What the inventor didn't know was that he had started an effect in motion which would cause a chain reaction, but that it would take time. The Fulton family certainly didn't know what they were about to experience.