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The Touchstone Trilogy

containing

Stray

Lab Rat One

Caszandra

by

Andrea K Höst

The Touchstone Trilogy

© 2011 Andrea K Höst.  All rights reserved.

Cover art by: Andrea K Hösth

ISBN: 978-0-9871514-5-2

Published by Andrea K Hösth at Amazon

All characters in this publication

are fictitious and any resemblance

to real persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Author's Note

Stray Description

November

December

January

February

March

Lab Rat One Description

April

May

June

July

Caszandra Description

July

August

September

October

November Again

Glossary

Character List – Setari (Original)

Character List – Setari (Later)

Character List - Other

Author's Note

The Touchstone Trilogy is a diary in three parts, commencing in Stray, continued in Lab Rat One, and concluded in Caszandra.

A glossary of terms and phrases, and a character list, have been included at the end of the volume.

Stray Description

On her last day of high school, Cassandra Devlin walked out of exams and into a forest. Surrounded by the wrong sort of trees, and animals never featured in any nature documentary, Cass is only sure of one thing: alone, she will be lucky to survive.

The sprawl of abandoned blockish buildings Cass discovers offers her only more puzzles. Where are the people? What is the intoxicating mist which drifts off the buildings in the moonlight? And why does she feel like she's being watched?

Increasingly unnerved, Cass is overjoyed at the arrival of the formidable Setari. Whisked to a world as technologically advanced as the first was primitive, where nanotech computers are grown inside people's skulls, and few have any interest in venturing outside the enormous whitestone cities, Cass finds herself processed as a 'stray', a refugee displaced by the gates torn between worlds. Struggling with an unfamiliar language and culture, she must adapt to virtual classrooms, friends who can teleport, and the ingrained attitude that strays are backward and slow.

Can Cass ever find her way home?  And after the people of her new world discover her unexpected value, will they be willing to let her leave?

November

Friday, November 16

WTF?

Where the FUCK am I????

Writing that down won't give me an answer, but at least there'll be a record of what happened.  Not that I know what happened.  I only know what happened to me – and, yeah, I'm not making much sense.

My name is Cassandra Eloise Devlin.  Cass for short.  Never Cassie.

I was walking home from school.  I turned a corner, and I was here.  No flashing lights, no warning, no zoomy wormhole: nothing but me one minute in Sydney and the next here.

Here is...here is the problem.  It's definitely not Sydney.  I don't think it's Australia, either, unless it's Tasmania.  But I'm sure they'd have gum trees in Tasmania, and that's the thing.  The trees are all wrong.  Hills covered in trees, too many to describe but none of them remotely like Eucalypt.  The birds sound wrong too.