Postcards From the Beyond - Chapter 1

At first they thought it was someone playing a joke on them, but after receiving the mysterious postcards every day for a month it seemed unlikely that even Uncle Adrian, the infamous prankster of the family, would go to such lengths for a gag. The nonsensical nature of the postcards was too outlandish for his usual brand of joke in any case. They all seemed to come from a science museum. They featured pictures of swirling galaxies and futuristic spacecraft and daft looking aliens. The writing on them varied but mostly it was written in foreign languages, often the letters used looked made up. A few however, were written in English, but on those occasions they said really odd things like;

'Having a lovely time in the Raab Nebula. Weather fine, only occasional comet falls. Tony almost got eaten by a predatorial Brakitoria plant. Hilarious! - Love Astrid.'

And that wasn't the oddest message. One, which featured a picture of someone in a very amateurish alien costume, said;

'Dad, please pick me up in 30 parsecs. Meet you out back of Pythagorams Holo Hall. Don't want Zephrax to see that cruddy Starshuttle you fly.'

Why on Earth would anyone send a postcard asking for a lift from their Dad! And there certainty wasn't anywhere called Pythagorams Holo Hall in Upton on the Downs.

Sebastian pondered all this in his bedroom on Saturday afternoon, he had taken to collecting the peculiar cards and they were currently spread all about him on the floor. Sebastian Oakes was a very ordinary boy. For twelve years he had lived an ordinary life, in his ordinary family, in the very, very ordinary town of Upton on the Downs. Sebastian was quite content with this ordinary life, yet he couldn't help wishing for the extraordinary. That was why he liked science fiction and fantasy where impossible things happened. He read books, watched movies and played games where the most incredible things occurred. The heroes of these stories were always orphans, or had wicked parents, or had some other traumatic past. This led Sebastian to believe that he would never have a great adventure because of his ordinary, loving upbringing. He didn't get bullied at school, he was of average intelligence, he had a loving mother and father, and even his little sister, Madeleine, wasn't too bad, as far as sisters go.
By all accounts he was precisely the wrong kind of child for anything exciting to happen to. He was not overly concerned by this however, reasoning that he would rather live in a normal, happy family than have impossible adventures. What he never expected was to end up with both. And it all began with the mysterious postcards.