The ball dropped and with a shatter the glass fell in a veil over the entire town.

Thirty-two degrees in SimCity was just about as cold as it got, and sitting in the backseat of a 1996 Honda Accord provided little protection against the icy temperatures just outside the metal doors. The cold radiated through the blankets and through the glass to the bones of the aliens inside the car. These aliens had seldom faced below freezing temperatures, much less a white dandruff settling on their shelter and obscuring their view outside. With a yip yip, the aliens began bursting through their personal haze and attempted to make sense of the scene taking place in the outside world. When they stepped outside, a rush of cold midnight air hit their purple skin as did the powder that obscured their vision and tangled in their feelers. Everything was covered in a transforming shield of white, air horns and screaming children yelped their excited sounds in the distance. The stars twinkled with the anticipation of a clean new start, and the aliens walked along the road.

A husky pranced around and romped dragging its owner by their leash, both with buggy grins lighting up their comparatively small faces. Fireflies disappeared and reappeared across the world with the flutter of a moth’s wings affecting the entire timestream at every point. Through a window covered with condensed water, a family of four screams, flashing every tooth in their entire jaw and more. The aliens sucked up everything around them through their extensive and fuzzy feelers, tasting, smelling, enhancing, and consuming every drop of life, death, and everything in between within the exact frame of time it occurred (though only within approximately a half-mile radius). Making sense of this night, however, was something just slightly beyond the realm of what they’ve dealt with in previous worlds and eternities. Feelings and intangible wavelengths were crystallized just slightly too largely to absorb through their slits, and they needed some sort of pulverizer to break the shell. Half-blind, the aliens trudged onwards for some form of glass cleaner and internal repair kit. They had fallen from the peak of everything that ever existed and would exist, to some sort of mortal purgatory.

The aliens walked on toward a door where they were greeted with champagne and lively music. A girl with pears for eyes and golden locks for hair turned to a man with a courteous smile and stood to garner attention from the rest of the room.
“Friends and loved ones, the macaroni and cheese has just hit the fan and it’s been another great year in paradise. If the alarm clock finally waters the ficus, here’s to many more golden days.” She flashed a confident smile at the applause in the room as her sister-in-law sheds a tear from the kitchen. Everywhere laughter and arm-touching resumed like a wave that infected every heart in the room. “Natalie!” the one-time speech-maker called out to a woman in black across the room. Swaggering over in her stilts, the woman leaped over and swallowed her target whole in an all-consuming embrace as they began discussing cousins and gouda cheese.
The minutes ticked onward and the room became foggy, though nearly everyone in the room appeared visually unaffected by the mist. In fact, with every tooth flashed, color described, and liquids melted on slabs of meat, the haze became thicker and more soluble. More like a jelly at this point, the golden shimmer penetrated every accessible orifice of everyone in the room, though barely slowing anyone down. Once someone would move and consequently break through a point in the jelly, it would reform back into a mold where their matter had once taken shape. Though this form-fitting jelly was seldom noticed by the otherwise occupied guests, the aliens began to choke and spit. The gelatinous consumer constricted and strangled the aliens at every point of their bodies, causing them to twist and contort with pain.
“The political situation in Nepal is getting quite out of hand if you ask me, John.”
“Someone take this bruschetta away from me! After this piece.”
“Did you hear Paul and Norma finally became engaged? Oh it’s just the best story. Hawaii at sunset, they were on a luxury yacht when suddenly a 3,000ft wall of water comes and hits them straight off, reducing the boat to planks! Oh it was the craziest thing for Norma, she was underwater for nearly a minute! Just as she thought she was slipping into the watery abyss, a giant squid comes from beneath her and carries her to the surface in its tentacular palm, and as she’s fully regaining consciousness and color while spitting up a gallon of water… here comes Paul, on one knee in a tiger shark’s mouth with the largest rock you’ve ever seen! The clarity of the most perf--”
Someone in India let the tiny yelp of being tickled suddenly as the aliens were now reduced to purple blobs and crawling at a pace of a fast slug towards the balcony, where the now mostly solid golden brick began to break off into pieces into the night air. Just as they were nearly reduced to coke cans, a jolly and bearded young man stumbled backward, forcing the aliens through the mass with the pressure of an exploded tube of lotion. Upon being squeezed through the equivalent of a straw, the masses immediately resumed their original shapes once through the now completely solid golden chunk behind them. With an unimpressive thump on the ground, their feelers lay seven feet away directly inside of a newly frozen bush.