Once upon a time there was a vast suburban trailer park, where daytime soaps were the only form of education.
This resulted in unimaginable stupidity, but gave the population a light to follow in the futile, self-oppressed vacuum of their lives.
They dressed, spoke and behaved like soap opera characters, discussing their world in episodes and storylines, and adapting their lifestyles to conform as closely as possible to the plot broadcast to them. This helped blank out the lack of genuine romance and adventure in their own world, for it was shameful and forbidden to act with any kind of spontaneous honesty in the confines of their self-imposed cage.
All communication was carefully monitored to prevent unscripted self-expression, for in this and beyond lay the dark world of the unknown, which was feared more than anything else...

T-Bait awoke and peered through the dusty trailer window, eyes scanning the horizon curiously. A glimmer of light flickered in the early morning haze from far away, and it was clear that what had appeared in the dream was real.
Without hesitation, T-bait set off, moving quickly towards the horizon over unfamiliar terrain. At times the beckoning light would fade and falter, but never for long enough for its existence to be doubted.
Then suddenly, as night fell and the distance grew shorter, it vanished completely.
T-Bait stumbled around blindly in the dark, perplexed that what had seemed so real until now, suddenly seemed imaginary.
Sheer desperation set in. Was this yet another of the trailer park's cruel mirages?
Without warning, a dim, flickering glow broke through the darkness. Peering out from between rocks, was a face. A human, luminous, smiling face.
T-bait rushed anxiously towards it, tripping clumsily over the rocks that lay in the way before falling awkwardly to the ground in front of it. Eagerly, the excited bait looked up.
The face was fixed in a smile. An unnatural, disturbing, permanent smile. The taught, false expression seemed to have been moulded out of plastic, and the dead eyes stared out at nothing.
T-bait recoiled in horror. It wasn't the vision. It was the contorted mask of a soap-opera character grinning mechanically, on a continuous loop, from the screen of a television in the dark. Waves of nausea swept over the exhausted traveller, and everything went blurry, then blank.

T-bait woke up looking at the sky and, unable to move, lay watching as it changed from blue to a menacing dark green. A huge, sinister cloud that had hung over the trailer park for years began to twist like a whirlpool, and an immense, swirling spiral formed in the sky. A vast funnel screwed its way to the ground, enclosing T-Bait within its circular walls and tearing up the surrounding earth like a furious drill. The face on the television grinned stupidly as the angry monolith tore it from its fixings and smashed it to pieces against the rocks. T-bait lay motionless, awaiting the tornado's wrath. Strangely, there was an air of peacefulness within the circle, and a feeling of completion.
The twister sucked T-bait high into the air with the force of a giant vacuum cleaner, and spat the paralysed observer into the sea before shredding the trailer park like a blender shredding peas.
THE END.