Once upon a time in a remote Russian village, where everyone was having a nice and beautiful day. The sun was shining over the lake and the day was getting started as everyone started going to their work.

Ivan went to cut down some trees as Alexander started tending and harvesting the crops, and the ladies went out to buy some food from the market to cook. Suddenly a mysterious piece of land appeared in the air, which freaked everyone out. No one could have faked it by using projectors as it was an underdeveloped town with very few modern resources.

Lotta contacted his friend Jack, who lived in the United States of America, to see what that island was made up of and understand how it suddenly appeared in thin air. When Jack told his friends about the town, which was called “Town of Lake Topozero” (TOLT), they all wanted to know more about the strange island floating over it.

After a while, TOLT got really popular and soon there were many visitors, such as news and media persons, tourists and celebrities, who came there to see the wonders of that island. They wanted to take footage of that island and put it on the internet to get rich by people watching their videos. The town also made a lot of money from the tourists and everyone was very happy.

But one day a man named Tom was watching the video when he realised that the island was fake and just a projection. He started telling everyone about it and wrote about his discovery. Because of that, TOLT started losing money since it was bad publicity for them and tourists stopped coming. However, they couldn’t understand how it was fake.

Tom found that it was a projected imagery. People were shocked and started saying a lot of bad things about the people of the town, that they were making a fool of everyone just to earn money.

The people of TOLT were very sad and upset, for they really didn’t know how that island that they all considered as real could be fake and an illusion. But Jack being the curious person he was, wanted to find out how and from where it was projected. He went on a search of the countryside around the town. After a few days, late one night he stumbled upon a strange kind of rays or light coming from behind a rock. He reached there and found a projector which was programmed to show a floating island. Jack wondered how it got there as there were no gadgets of this kind in a town as backward as theirs.

Jack then started looking around in the area to find a clue about who could have done this. At a little distance, he found a jeep and went near it. Inside it, he saw that the back was converted into a camp-like space, complete with a sleeping bed where a stranger was sleeping. Jack knocked at the jeep’s window and woke up the man.

“Hey! You are new around here, what are you up to?” Jack asked sternly.

A young man got up, surprised to see a visitor. “Oh, hello! I am Trev, I was just travelling around and stopped here for a few days.”

Jack wasted no time and asked him about that projector and why he had set it up to show the island in the air. Trev, confessed that he was a filmmaker and was travelling to shoot some documentary on nature and stopped there. One night he decided to try out the new projector he had just bought before the trip to check some videos that he had shot. He was trying its new features and it got late and he slept, when he woke up in the morning, he saw that the projector was still on it was projecting a picture of an island he had shot earlier, into the air and it seemed real.

Trev decided to leave it on as a joke as he found it a cool idea and see how people react to it. But soon the whole joke got so out of hand due to the publicity that he decided to continue beaming the image as everyone found it so fascinating. Trev said sorry for causing a lot of trouble and really apologised for his actions.

Jack asked him to come and tell the truth to the people of TOLT and the world so that they would know that the simple people of the town were not the ones who had set this up to fool the world.

Trev told the town’s people about the prank, “I’m really sorry! I just thought of it as a harmless joke but I really apologise for fooling you all. Every travel trip can’t always be fun and sometimes it will turn out bad,” Trev promised that he would never do something like that ever again and left the town.

Published in Dawn, Young World, August 29th, 2020