I woke up the sound of birds chirping and the sun hitting my face. And the feeling of grass poking into my sides. And... insects crawling on my neck. Ew!
I snap to alertness and begin shoving the damn bugs off of me. I let out a wriggle of disgust. Then I take in my surroundings.
So. Forest. That's not where I went to sleep. What kind of weirdo rawdogs it on grass anyways? Certainly not me. But that's besides the point-- how did I get here? Did I get kidnapped? No, no one would bother with that.
Also, where is here to begin with? I scan my surroundings to see if I recognize anything familiar. But no, it's just trees and birds and wildlife. I mean, I’ve seen nature documentaries. Something should look familiar. That tells me I must be pretty far from home. I should have at least recognized some species from movies, though, right?
I pull my phone from my pockets-- I listen to music as I sleep-- and notice the lack of any signal. Well, forest, so unsurprising. But opening my map reveals I don't have any GPS signal either, which leaves me befuddled. GPS coverage is global, all phones have GPS and I have a clear view of the sky.
Which could mean either:
A) Phone's broken.
B) Satellites are gone.
A is unlikely, my phone's a pretty new model. Upgraded barely a month ago, and with a reliable brand. B is... well, *really* unlikely.
Welp. I can figure that puzzle out later. First priority is survival. Let's break this down:
- I need to get to human civilisation (I've won, yay!)
- I need clean drinkable water (Dehydration kicks in pretty quickly)
- I need food (preferably cooked)
- I need something to defend myself from the local wildlife.
For getting to civilisation, I need to get information. For now, the best ways I can think of is to climb the highest tree or hill nearby and see if I can spot any traces of civilisation. If that fails, find the nearest river and follow it (upstream or downstream?).
I think on it for a minute and decide: if I find the materials, I’ll need to craft a knife, a spear for defense, and look out for fiber-producing plants to make string. Fire through friction—sticks, string, rotation. A container for water would be handy too.
My immune system is going to be overloaded with the new microbiome of this place. Meaning I can fall sick really easily, and potentially fatally. I cannot afford to skimp out on hygeine. Maybe I should try and ferment and distill some alcohol as a disinfectant, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Now, I have a decent-ish plan of what I should be doing. Time to explore.
Okay, this forest is *weird*. There are lots of pretty glowing things. I'd have loved to appreciate them, but I'm informed that nature uses bright colors to warn of poison. Which is because poison is pointless to survival if your predators have no reason to suspect you're poisonous. By the time it kicks in, you're dead. I'm sure you might be happy to know they're dead, but evolution doesn't think that's useful. (Evolution doesn't think at all, dummy)
Well, unless it's actively weaponised-- but that's venom, not poison (or at least I think it is.)
The insects are pretty cool too, even if they scare me. Again, if they're venomous, I have no defenses against that. I steer clear of any bugs I find, and plants too, and honestly just any wild life I can avoid. It makes traversal a pain, but hey, if it makes my chances of survival go up I'm not going to complain (despite the fact I just did).
Anyways, I find the mother of all pretty glowy things. It was pretty easy to find, because the closer I got to it, the prettier the forest got. What am I looking at, you say?
Well. It's a massive crystal spike driven into the ground. Plant life has wrapped itself tightly around it, except where there are glowing fissures in the quartz like material. I feel some kind of heat static sensation as I get closer to it. Thinking on it, I've been feeling this sensation since I woke up, it's just been so faint that I never gave it conscious thought.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
What... is this... thing? What am I feeling, exactly? Some kind of charge in the air? No, that wouldn't make sense. That kind of static over that kind of scale would probably cause lightning or something. I can't explain it.
So I focus on the sensation. It feels as though it's coming from within my head. And when I turn my mental eye towards my head, I feel as though I can sense a 3 dimensional structure.
Huh? What the hell!? Humans don't randomly get new senses. That's like waking up one day and having sonar vision. Not happening.
Has happened, though. Not sonar though, otherwise I'd sense a lot more than just some structure within my head. Speaking of which, it's not my brain. It's some kind of amorphous blob shape with some incredibly complex structures within. Tendrils appear from the membrane and then follow my anatomy. Tendrils that were invisible to me just a moment ago. What the fuck?
I hold my hand up to my eyes. Yep, tendrils reaching all the way to my skin. Just before, branching off into many many microscopic little veins that exit into little pores. So, there's some kind of function to this? These are for transport? Transport of what, exactly?
As if answering me, I feel a pulse exit my head structure (I need a better name for that) and travels through my body. My sense terminates at the skin though, so I don't sense what happens after it leaves my body. My other senses don't even recognize anything happening.
Hmm. I spend the next few minutes mentally poking and prodding at my head amoeba (do amoeba have tendrils?) trying to get it to do that again with little luck. Only when I focus on the surface of my skin am I able to trigger those pulses. I try varying the intensity and frequency of pulses, seeing if it triggers a change I can pick up with my other senses.
When I pulling instead of pushing, well, I feel a sort of electric-heat sensation rush through my hands, up my arms and into my head through my spine. I gasp as the world takes on a sharp clarity, and slows down. I can see, through the corner of my vision a bird flap its wings in slow motion.
I quickly figure out it's only my mind that's in quick time. My body's in slow time, I can *feel* the muscles contracting, pulling and overcoming inertia. And oh boy, the pain signals are coming in. Ow! I think I was basically spamming my muscles with signals and now they're cramping. Ow. Shit. Fuck. Oof.
Thankfully the bullet time wears off and I am not forced to live through extended pain time. Just normal pain time. It takes a few minutes of cursing and hopping to recover.
After which, I'm introspective. Too many things haven't been lining up with my expectations which means I need to seriously start questioning my beliefs. Question is, which ones?
To start off, am I still on Earth? I mean, the odds of me randomly teleporting to another planet is basically zero. Especially a habitable one, and in a way that doesn't instantly kill me.
That's assuming that someone didn't arrange for this to happen. In which case, all bets are off. Yeah, but what kind of hyper civilization kidnaps random people though? For shits and giggles? Come on. But organized by some super entity is still my best explanation for it.
If I'm not on earth, then the night sky should be pretty different. Like, how many moons does the planet have? Hell, even if it did have one moon, it's still going to look different than our moon. If it's not and it's still not Earth, I call bullshit.
So I'll have my answer when the sun sets then. But also, I'm not at all prepared for night fall.
Survival! I got sidetracked by the new physics stuff. That's what it is, right? New physics? Well, shouldn't there be more obvious changes to--
Okay, stopping myself there. I can think about it later. Survival. I'll mark this place down for later visit. For now, go back to previous plans.
By the time night hit, I had a fire going, and created a rudimentary shelter with some branches and leaves. I'll admit, I was a little concerned in my abilities at first, but I guess fear of dying is a pretty strong motivator. So I pulled it off.
Granted, it's not really complicated. Find dried wood and leaves, create a little contraption to generate heat and friction, and turn that into fire. The annoying part was how much time it took. My skin has also accumulated a fair share of scrapes from all the rough wood I've been hauling. With the bullet time, I had plenty of time to plan my moves even as I acted.
The whole endeavor has left me physically exhausted. But satisfied. I chose a spot where I'd have a clear view of the sky as the sun sets.
And speaking of, there it goes. The view is scenic. Wallpaper material. But soon enough, there it is, the moon. And oh boy, that is not our moon.
For one, it's a lot larger in the sky than ours was. That either means it's closer or bigger. I'm not sure which.
It's also got what looks like mini cities on its surface. Holy shit! That's so cool. Those must be massive in size to be visible from down here! I need to get a telescope so I can look closer at those things.
Oh! I guess that means there's still civilisation on this planet. That's a relief. And an advanced one at that, the logistics of building mega cities on the moon are far beyond what we were capable of.
Maybe they can help me go back home. I do have friends and family back home, and I'm sure they're not exactly thrilled about my disappearance. Have to get home before they die of worry.
Well, that marks the end of today. I gather some more sticks and close off the entrance to my little shelter. I lay down on a collected pile of leaves. It's not comfortable, but it's the best I got.
Night night.