The Return: Disney Lands Read Online Free PDF

progress. Finn shielded his eyes from the stage lights and managed another sweeping
glimpse of the audience. No matterhow hard he searched, he saw only the retro boys and girls.
    He reached for the Return he kept in his pocket when crossing over. The Return, which looked a lot like an automobile key fob, was used to shut down Finn’s hologram projection and return
his consciousness to the sleeping boy in his bed. This, so he could wake up from his DHI state.
    Problem: his miniature black-and-white imagewas two-dimensional, not three. He didn’t have pockets. Therefore, no Return. No way back. Another problem: he didn’t remember crossing
over in the first place.
    He ran to his left and smacked into an unseen barrier. He fell down. Some in the audience laughed. At him?
    He jumped and struck his head. “Ow!”
    More laughter.
    He felt around. He was in some kind of a glass cage. He couldn’tmake out walls on either side, but something had stopped him. The same thing had happened when he’d tried to touch
the top and bottom.
    The announcer was still speaking; he referred to the woman Audio-Animatronic as “Mother.” She wore her oddly yellow hair carefully trimmed at her shoulders.
    Yellow, as in color. The stage lights were color as well. Yet Finn was black-and-white. Why?

    Two Audio-Animatronic kids, a boy and a girl, sat on the floor in front of him, staring. Color. Light flickered across their faces, light that seemed to be coming from Finn. The kids dipped
their mannequin hands into clear plastic bowls, eating fake popcorn. They were watching television.
    Finn was on TV! No, he was
in
the TV! And he wanted out.
Now!
    With skills honed from many adventuresin the parks, he sensed something coming at him from his left. A small silver golf ball that looked sort of like a UFO, flying at him fast. It was also
black-and-white and in extremely low resolution. If it was a special effect, it was incredibly unspecial.
    The UFO shot dashed lines at him. Remarkably, when they hit Finn’s arm, the dashes zapped him with little bursts of electricity. Theystung! Finn ducked to avoid them. The spaceship
altered course. The dashes of stinging pain hit him again.
    Wincing, Finn stepped forward—and banged into the glass of the television picture tube. The spaceship zapped him again.
Dang!
Finn turned sideways and stepped toward the glass,
leading with the side edge of his image instead of the full plane.
    Success. He fell out of the TV’sconfines and landed on the stage, flat as a sheet of paper.
    The audience applauded.
    Finn sat up, still flat as a pancake. He was regular size now, no longer miniature.
    He vaguely recalled strange sounding music, and looked over his shoulder to see a small television screen in a large box. The flying saucer on the screen was the same one that had shot him. The
television threw flickeringlight down onto the stage.
    Although he struggled to understand how it might have happened, he seemed to have come out of that same television.
    The show’s narrator spoke. “The family of the future will enjoy television in full color. The kids will be able to record their favorite shows on a videotape.”
    Finn came to his feet.
    The crowd applauded and cheered.
    The stage went suddenlydark then, and the narrator’s voice cut off mid-word. The house lights came up. A different man spoke over the public address system. “Ladies and gentlemen,
girls and boys, this attraction is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please proceed calmly to the nearest exit, and be sure to return later.”
    The crowd rose obediently. Mumbling patrons moved quietly toward the exits.
    “You there!” The loud male voice belonged to one of two security guards dressed as rent-a-cops with brass Mickey Mouse badges pinned to their uniform shirts. These two were
definitely not Audio-Animatronics, definitely not part of the show. They dodged around the stage, heading directly for Finn. Big guys, red in the face and