Ever since his waking a cool breeze had gusted high above the ground. The wooden pillars holding up the sky remained clean for over a hundred feet before branching out to form the canopy. These higher boughs shook slightly swaying with the wind, and he thought he might stay there forever savoring the freshness of the air, the unadulterated aliveness of it in his nostrils.
Ulric's grey eyes couldn't help but be drawn up to the leaves above. Flickers of green, lightening blues, the rare shaft of filtered day light that improbably arrived through that mass of foliage made for a suitably *ahem* magical backdrop against which to come to terms with his new reality. All around, as far as he could see, rolling terrain, steeper, rougher than he’d given it credit thanks to the reason defying size of the trees in this mystical place stretched on, sightlines broken up by trunks about the circumference of train stations, their gnarled grey brown bark, in whose crevices could hide a full-grown walrus seemed to shimmer, to almost glow. Hell, maybe they did, he was seeing pretty well down here despite the denseness of the obscuring forest heights that had to be blocking a tremendous portion of light from above. It was beautiful.
"So. I guess it's farewell Earth. Farewell Home. Farewell Parents."
He brushed a nascent tear off the corner of his eye and firmed up his will. Breathing deeply of pristine air, Ulric focused his thoughts inward, on his body, the sensations rolling through it, his new self, and on that vague warmth growing in his chest.
"Status." He said aloud, feeling the fool, and yet, there was an insistence on the world that was palpable.
"Huh! I'll be damned!" Ulric started, when fairy tale forest was obscured by a shimmering curtain of knowledge pulled from exactly nowhere.
Or everywhere, which might have been worse. Akashic…that was some kind of reference to a kind of all knowledge, an information singularity into which all data flowed and all data could be recovered, if one had the access. Magical bullshit, he supposed, was the key to get in the universe’s library door.
Looking at this, if he was reading it in the context that he thought he was reading it, the old girl had done him a serious solid. He had no benchmarks, no reference values, so much of the data presented was less than immediately useful. But he could guess.
Almost unbidden, as if the whisper of a question across the folds of his brain beckoned, detailed information to answer the unstated desire to know what these mysterious traits and titles were supposed to mean.
A low whistle that, in retrospect he would take back in case a tiger was squatting in the bushes nearby, escaped his lips. Frantic prey animal scans of the dim scenery around revealed no lurking horrors to pounce on Ulric’s unthoughtful signal to be consumed. He resolved to try harder to avoid getting himself eaten too early into this second crack at life before returning to his study of the Akashic nonsense in his vision.
"If anybody scans me, they are going to see some serious Watcher fuckery." he rationalized. It was all right there in plain speech, no ambiguity whatsoever. He wasn't going to argue with the results though, he needed no other sign of the quality of the craftsmanship than to look down at a body that belonged to an Olympic gymnast, rather than a forty-something year old worked to death engineer, troddling along on a bum leg.
That asterisk next to Valin, which translated into human instantly in his mind, and the implications of whatever was intended to be occupied by classes and thaumaturgy were slightly concerning, but he was coping well with the situation, if anybody bothered to ask him.
Nobody did, he was utterly alone and a few minutes of standing still revealed nothing to indicate that there was anything around except one jumped up space ape and a whole damned lot of lumber if anybody could whomp up a saw large enough to get it. Not that Ulric Einar would ever think of doing so, cutting one of these old trees was a concept that he was already thinking of in terms of words like “sin”.
"Magic." he exhaled softly, head shaking at the thought.
"Now isn’t that just some shit." He chuckled a few seconds later, still not comprehending.
Ulric took a moment to bask in the status window, stray thoughts held just below conscious awareness drifting. A strange birdcall pulled him out of his reverie.
Right, he thought. I'm now ass out in the middle of a forest which is like nothing that ever existed on Earth outside of the Carboniferous era. If then. He resolved himself to get his head in the game, first by assessing his immediate surroundings for tooling, shelter, fire, water, and possibilities for clothing.
Despite being in a forest, the sheer ungodly size of the trees proved to be a challenge. They were so large, with limbs so high off the ground, that getting to useful timber or dead wood would require a climb that would be easily lethal from which to fall. Not to mention that he'd be doing the climb completely naked and he had no idea what sorts of predators operated in a forest like this. Could be there was some kind of eagle that liked to pick naked, pink, semi-monkeys off the trunks of trees.
Rainfall would likely not be a tremendous issue at least. Most trees tended to have branch and leaf angles which guided the water to run down the trunks and the thickness of the canopy would virtually guarantee that only drippage, rather than direct downpour would make it to the forest floor. Or, that’s what he’d learned in his ecology course work, although most of that was somewhat theoretical since Earth’s ecology was a clusterfuck pretty much since the Collapse.
Feeling the soft, somewhat spongy litter and soil under his feet, Ulric dug his toes into the forest floor, scraping back the leaf litter to allow him to get a look at the exposed dirt. As he was expecting, the leaf fall was only a couple of centimeters thick lying atop a deep black loam. It would appear that this climate experienced cold intense enough to trigger seasonal leaf falls. If the thinness and dryness of the leaves was any indication this was likely a season fairly distant from the last fall. Meaning the next one was much likely sooner rather than later, especially given the cool air.
“Damn Watcher dropped me off in the fall.” He observed mildly, wondering how long he had to obtain resources to attempt a survival through whatever winters this planet, dubbed Varda, had to offer at his current latitude.
Or altitude, for that matter. He had no idea where exactly on this celestial garden he was standing. Could be the poles, on a world with no true summer, or right on the equator and the rest of the planet was a frozen hellscape. No way to know. A slight goose skin at a particularly stiff bit of wind made him hope frozen hellscape wasn’t on the menu. Cold took resources to beat and his were limited to being alive at the moment.
Ulric had always run a little hot. He had a passionate hatred for muggy summer weather but routinely went out in winter in a light long sleeve shirt. The air at the moment was just beneath what he would consider a comfortable resting temperature, especially given the high humidity inside the forest's autoclime, the climate a large forest generates inside itself.
"Alright then." he decided. "First project, we need to find a place to shelter and generate fire." He reasoned that if he could get a fire, he could handle finding materials for tools and hedge his bets against the weather turning. Exposure killed more people stranded in the wild than any number of predators after all.
Having confirmed his goals, he took off walking towards what appeared to be a higher hill some half a kilometer way from the lesser rise on which he had started. The gentle decrease in elevation was accompanied by a slight decrease in temperature, which helped Ulric confirm that physics seemed to operate more or less normally, with damp cool air being of greater density than warmer air. No magical fuckery here, or at least not yet.
His legs carried him without effort, his breath came easily, and for the first time in a decade there was no pain in his left knee and ankle. An autopilot software accident in a hauling cargo transport had stolen much of that leg from him, with three surgeries failing to restore the basic strength necessary to stabilize the joint under heavy loads, at which point the surgeons had replaced it with a “good enough” solution to let him walk and not much more. And never without pain. It was transformational. This, he decided, was in fact worth dying for. He was marching through primeval wood, in a magical land, in peak form, at the absolute perfect time of day and temperature in which to hike. If only the breeze passing over his dangles didn't remind him frequently of the, ah, exposed nature of his journey.
The lack of direct sunlight proved to be a double-edged sword. The lack of underbrush made travel and visibility far easier than in a patchy canopy with dense floor growth, but it also left him devoid of obvious options for tender and tool making materials. Small branches, dead standing, vines, all the things that tended to grow in less well-developed forests were missing here. He might need to make a break for a dead fall if he could find one from the top of the next rise. The only other real option would be to attempt a climb.
He'd heard of the green desert, a hazard of deep forests in which there was actually almost no resources for animal life. The trees had so successfully established a monoculture that they drove out most other plants, leaving only the few that could utilize the tree's resources. If he was in one, he'd be in deep trouble, as the only real way to survive a green desert is to find your way out of it and he was sorely lacking in the ability to navigate without risking gaining a vantage point.
These thoughts followed him as he walked, and he was entertained by the irony of recorded tales regarding the hazards of a wilderness mostly nonexistent in his life applying to his current situation. He’d hiked, camped, and played pretend that he could get lost in a forest whenever he could and now look at him!
Occasional birdsong broke up the sighing of wind through leaves. He occasionally stilled and focused on his hearing as a faint sound beneath his conscious notice caused the hair on his neck to rise and a freeze reflex to take hold. Instincts evolved over millions of years of successfully keeping soft squishy mammals from feeding other much less squishy mammals. Not listening to them was a fool's game, especially in strange country.
Moving quietly but quickly he made the next rise in a matter of a quarter of an hour, or so he judged, time was funky without much in the way of cues to judge it, having circumnavigated three of the towering trees. The smallest trunk he saw was at least twenty meters in diameter and it stood out like a sore thumb for being a pitiful runt. Most had to be better than sixty, seventy meters right through the middle. Each one had that same, slightly illuminating thick brownish grey ridged bark the valleys in which he could fit his body without trouble, with enough texture under his hands to be climbable, should the need arise. Straight up, but doable with all those hand holds and this reforged body’s strength. The leaf litter was very nearly unbroken in any direction he looked. No fallen branches he could see. No dead giants. Nothing that he could use, at least not without maybe digging into the loam.
It was entirely possible that some of the small ridges he saw were actually dead trees that had been buried by their living cousins. Not that that would have provided much use. Anything buried in that was going to be damp and rotted to the point of being more soil than wood. Or, you know, probably, he didn’t know how alien food chains and life cycles operated. Could be that these titan trees never rotted, just petrified and he was standing on a mountain made of eons of dead falls. Up ahead he saw the rise toward which he was making. It was the highest place he’d seen and he needed to find a vantage.
The ridge turned out to be a blessing. And a memory from which he would never part. Unfolding before him, Ulric’s steep climb to a ridge turned out to be the edge of the world. With his heart in his throat, he stood on a sort of escarpment. A bare kilometer of low rolling hills shaded incompletely by their soaring forest covers stood between him and a precipitous drop in elevation from which rolled the canopy of the lower forest. Misty clouds hovered over those tree tops which formed a sea of green all the way to a set of mountains which ran perpendicular to his direction of travel. Jagged stone and white peaks denoted a young mountain chain that ran off to his right without end. Bad news for him, mountain chains like those were a bastard to navigate. Without a clearly established path that had been thoroughly trekked to ensure the passes wouldn't close due to avalanche or rock slide you could easily enter such a range fully supplied, never to be seen again.
Sliding his eyes to his left he saw that the mountain chain dropped to rolling hills through which a large river ran, probably fed by glaciers. It was easily over a hundred kilometers to those hills, if the size of those mountains was anything to go by. And between him and that seemingly gentle land was an unbroken wall of verdure. A scene he’d never thought to witness in all his old life.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
"Holy fuck." Ulric Einar gasped at the sight.
With the full scope of his situation laid out before him, Ulric took stock. He was still naked. He was healthy, as a quick check of his status informed him. His stamina was likewise still full, which indicated that he truly was at peak fitness as even a rather quick ascent of several hundred feet of elevation had failed to wind him. Or, now he thought on it, even significantly affect his breathing. No discomfort in the muscles of his legs and back. He was still operating purely aerobically.
"I'll kiss that Watcher if I ever see her again." He told the tree he was leaning against. If he'd been in his old body, he'd still be half way up that ridge and he'd be in mortal agony at having to climb it so quickly.
But. He'd located neither anything he could use for tools nor fire. He'd found no options for shelter that didn't involve digging into the soil under the leaves or attempting to climb a tree and camp underneath branches. He wasn't yet hungry but that had to be coming. He was slightly thirsty. As he thought of it, he realized he'd been awake in this world less than two hours and hadn't yet voided his bladder. That problem he resolved presently and all the plumbing checked out so he supposed he should be grateful for the small things.
He had a goal now. A bearing. And it was as much a pipe dream as had been the graphene deposition simulation he'd written a lifetime ago. There was simply no goddamn way he was climbing down that cliff face without equipment. Or magic.
"Huh." he exclaimed. "I guess that's now an actual option. So long as I can figure it out in the near future."
He remembered the warning given before the Watcher had left. He could potentially do himself harm if he wasn't careful. Magic was a new variable, with unclear limits, and almost no parallels to which he could draw from his previous life. A black box into which he was somewhat reluctant to place his dick without more information. Important not to fall into the trap of having a hammer and starting to believe every problem looked like a nail.
Before he could use magic to solve problems though he needed to get a stable position from which to relax. Once he had that he could determine some safety protocols, and establish an experimental methodology that would allow him to make progress in understanding magic.
The immediate problem though was that he was still buck naked and without shelter. As if cued the wind blew and Ulric felt a sharp chill crawling over his skin that replaced the flushed warmth of the climb. Skin prickled and goose flesh rose as he rubbed his hands over his arms.
Damnit, he thought, that breeze was carrying quite the bite. Having decided where he wanted to go he began a quick descent from the ridge, using two of the giant trunks one to his left and the other to his right as directional beacons. Easy to get lost in strange terrain, especially when you had to detour half a football field to go around an obstructing arbor. Thankfully he had begun to warm up with the movement, to the point that he actually felt a mild perspiration at his scalp.
A half kilometer of gradual descent had him between two rises, following the bearing he'd taken between his guide trees. The terrain had somewhat changed, with more rock jutting from the forest floor, disrupting the leaf layer. A good sign, that indicated he would reach the escarpment in a few more kilometers. Maybe he could find a spring or some kind of rocky water catch, he was starting to feel the need to get something to drink.
At the top of the next rise, he finally had his diligence rewarded: a fallen giant had broken the canopy. He hadn't been able to see it from the high ridge as it lay nearly halfway filling a gulley between wrinkles in the land. The void left by the ancient had created a skylight through which golden light poured down, bathing the entire area in soft morning light. Low shrubs grew around and on the corpse of the old tree and so too did a kaleidoscopic array of leafy plants, many with flowers unlike anything he'd ever seen, in vivo or holonet alike. Flowering bushes, vines, small trees, grasses, and weeds of myriad shape each fought for space, vying to fill the pocket of light that stretched over a kilometer along the titan tree’s trunk and to the sides. Altogether, Ulric gaze upon an ovoid window to the blue Vardan sky about four square kilometers, whose edges still garnered enough sunlight to flourish, tapering into the dim understory of the ancient forest that covered this strange plateau. A glade. Perhaps a place to rest? To forage? To live, for some time?
Excitement strained against caution, so Ulric forced himself to a light stepping jog, taking care to mind his footing on the rock strewn, soft forest floor down the hill to the clearing.
Amidst the bountiful flora, the vibrant leaves and petals, he espied the colored bulbs of berries, and even a few bulging things that might just be fruits. Before exploring these, however, Ulric searched for the one element that would guarantee he could use this place as more than a grazing zone. And there! Mangrove shaped arches of roots, each big as the long-lost redwoods of his home world stood exposed, broken, pulled free, many torn to hang from the base of the skyscraper sized tree.
Several of those roots had rent the ground, had opened solid granitic rock in what had to have been apocalyptic violence. In a craggy shattered hollow where one root had drilled deeply into the stone, fit to hold a practice of water polo players, a pool of water lay pristinely clear. Smiling now he broke into a sprint. And what a surprise that was! It was the first time he'd actually pushed himself and the result was a bit of a shock, he'd covered fifty or sixty meters in only a dozen or so seconds. And he knew he had more in the tank, just what had that Watcher been up to? Was this what all the humans of this world were capable of?
Breathing more heavily now, he shivered against the cool air around the rock pool and knelt over the water. The reflection of a stranger stared back at him and checked his action. He distinctly remembered that last time he'd lay blurry eyes on himself in the mirror before his final day of work. Hair just as dark as it had been, a brown close to black, but longer. He'd kept his hair trimmed to near buzz cut, but it was now several inches long, not long enough to get in his eyes or be obtrusive but long enough to be noticed. Same slightly too sharp jawline, same aquiline nose, same grey eyes. He'd never been accused of being pretty but he had a sort of distinctive feature that appealed to some women, and even a few men, although he'd never had that kind of interest. But it wasn't his face that had him stunned to stillness, it was the body. That pudgy wreck was dead and gone, and in his place was an athlete. The impossible did good work.
Breaking from his indulgence in vanity Ulric drank deeply of the icy waters, caring nothing for the potential for microbial life. Not in water this cold, and filtered through who knows how much rock. Not to mention a distinct lack of animal sign. He wasn't an expert tracker or anything, but water holes like this generally attracted game enough that it didn't take a great deal of skill or experience to recognize the traces things left when they spent time at pools like this. No scat, no marks, no fur, no tracks, nothing to indicate that an animal had been here recently.
Fortune smiled as he investigated a section of broken canopy some three hundred fifty meters away from the torn-up roots and rock pool. The smaller branches had sprouted in sections which were long and straight enough to be of use as a walking stick or polearm shaft, about as thick around as his wrist. The bark on these sections wasn't smooth but neither did it cause discomfort, just enough texture to make a sure grip. Small as they were, these limbs broke with some resistance. In his heaving efforts, he doubted he could have bent them enough to break in his prior condition. After having collected a significant armload he headed back to the torn roots, to prepare a recessed hollow in which to create a shelter and fire lay.
In that previously cool area, Ulric noted that he was probably going a little too fast, was moving with too much haste, since he was feeling slightly overwarm. Another quick drink after dropping off his materials made sure he stayed on top of hydration and he returned his attention to the rocks to find some shards that might be useful to make a flint knife, or to use to create shelter flooring and firepit.
Forty minutes more steady work saw a sharpened rock shard cutting a notch into a lengthwise split branch, the long, perfectly straight grains proving almost easy to part with but a stern pull, which Ulric planned to use in a fire plough manner to create a usable coal. Dry forest grasses, shavings of wood produced with his stone knife, and finely chopped leaves would serve as acceptable tinder, though he wasn't one hundred percent comfortable with the amount or quality of tinder he'd managed to obtain. The forest kept things shaded and relatively damp, acted like a humidifier which made friction fires a test of endurance, and turned marginal tinders into fire starting material about as useful as a wet paper towel.
Fixing the plough board into a notch in the dirt with a leaf under the notch to catch any coal that formed, Ulric anchored the plough with his foot, took up his plough stick, and leaned forward to work the board until he'd burned in a furrow. Theory and practice were proven to be quite substantially different things. It took ten minutes fiddling to even get a track burned in so the thing stopped wiggling around, displacing his bird nest of fibrous tinder. Eventually he figured out how to place his body to hold things still and progress was made. Once burned in, he braced the foot board and applied a steady downward force driving the plough backwards and forwards rapidly. Barely a few minutes passed while he worked steadily, driving hard to generate friction. Small tendrils of smoke rose, wooden board blackened, and the smell of not quite burned hardwood drifted into his nostrils. Thusly inspired, Ulric increased the speed of his hands, driving the plough faster while trying not to disturb the plough board and loosen any coal that might form underneath the notch.
Significant smoke rose from the notch and Ulric quickly lay aside the plough stick and lifted the foot board, gently tapping the rest of the blackened ash into the lit coal. Raising up the leaves holding this coal and carefully adding grasses and crushed dried leaves to it, he gently cradled his hope and blew it to life inside the tinder bundle. Heat began to flare from the center of the leaf/grass bundle, and smoke poured out from the now forming ember. Ulric knew this next part would require some delicacy. He blew gently into the bundle held in his hands until a flame suddenly poured out from the top of the fledgling fire and he, as rapidly as possible without disrupting the fire, placed this into the firepit and stacked leaves and small twigs loosely on top of it. The flame took, leaves transferring embers to thin twigs, which blazed up to catch larger sticks.
"Hah!” He called and rose to stand, arms held high.
“I did it, it worked!" his voice rose in near hysterical joy.
"It. FUCKING! WOOOORKED!" Ulric shouted to the forest’s dim embrace, heedless in his victory over the fundamental element of civilization.
Soon enough, Ulric sat next to a steadily crackling fire, sparks sputtering upwards as dry limbs generated impressive heat. The air had turned comfortable as he'd worked on the fire and he was now bathed in thermal joy. Even the cool breeze didn't pucker his skin any longer.
Finally allowed some breathing room with his position, he was able to reflect on events. Drunk, dead, reforged, and strolling naked through a bush hippy's wet dream. He had magic, at least theoretically. He had a working body. He had a goddamn status window which he opened mostly just because he could. Not much to see there.
He noticed his mana had upticked to twelve percent, which meant that in about two hours his core had somehow increased its mana by ten percent. So. Five percent per hour without any particular effort on his part. The Watcher had claimed that there were factors which would increase this, including active focus on certain techniques about which he remained clueless. He'd need approximately twenty hours to max out his core, something which he felt was important, but also so foreign a concept as to be functionally useless.
"Just how the hell am I supposed to do this?" he muttered.
Turning aside from that before he got frustrated and killed his new fire buzz, he inspected the other stats, trying to draw conclusions about what the numbers translated to in terms of his physical and mental well-being. His health, stamina, and magic had percentages compared to a theoretical peak condition he guessed but there were no discrete values for these quantities. Probably because health and tiredness were more of a continuous spectrum. The same should be true for the six key stats though and they had quantized values. Perhaps whatever magic was associated with generating these values had predetermined benchmark values….a fascinating train of thought. And while those values could be benchmarked, internal workings like health, stamina, and magic had so much mental component and individual variance that an external benchmarking system proved unworkable, hence the normalized relative values. His concentration broke as he became aware of a soft snapping sound near his head. I would appear that he had retained his previous life's habit of snapping the fingers of his left hand rapidly when he was intensely focused.
Loading another few large sticks onto the fire, Ulric compared the stats to his perceived performance. His body felt strong and, as he'd found breaking the limbs and starting the fire, was indeed strong, so a higher Might made sense. He was also fairly resilient, having expended probably at least two thousand calories during his first few hours, all on no food and he felt good despite the activity, did that mean Durability reflected general endurance of the body? Something to follow up on. He'd never been particularly graceful and couldn't dance to save any number of lives, but had a good sense of balance and hiked frequently carrying loads through difficult terrain, well, until that cargo hauler had run him over, he had. Not having been raised playing sports he'd probably missed out on considerable training in footwork or running/jumping, but he’d always been plenty fast on his feet as a boy, so Impetus was likely a reflection of speed.
Without an average value for other people to compare to, the numbers lacked a precise conception but his gut said ten was a baseline for adult humans and his stats were indicative of a rather impressively high level of fitness. The mental stats were also somewhat explainable. He was a forty-three year old former engineer with a modern post-industrial society's educational infrastructure and thirty plus years of mental training, of course his Cogitation would be above baseline. Wisdom was slightly mysterious, Ulric never considered himself what you might call wise. Crafty maybe, cautiously considerate, certainly, but not wise. Perhaps Wisdom reflected to an extent willpower, he had that in spades. That wasn’t a brag, it was undeniable fact. Anybody who made it through the graduate schools of his era had passed multiple rounds of screenings starting when they entered middle education levels, was someone who could take obscene punishment and push through, and he’d always been a stubborn bastard of a man. Flexible of thought, Ingenuity was reflected in a lifetime practiced in identifying problems and solving them, he'd always enjoyed working with his hands and working through the protocols he'd made part of his career in engineering solutions, many of which involved fine machinery, attention to detail, and a deft touch. Again, it would seem that practice bred perfection and this world's magic attested to it.
In spite of the fire and the mid-morning light he chilled suddenly. And at that chill, next to a hot flame, he flashed back to the "tuning" of his core and the rush of volcanic heat alternating frigid cold in his body. He then reflected on the fact that despite a relatively constant motion through challenging terrain he'd consistently felt cold rushes despite a high tolerance for alpine and winter climates of his home.
A fever? He wondered. With a newly built body? Unlikely, no immune response was that fast and no microbial incubation would be short enough to trigger such response so soon. No this, Ulric decided, this was something more akin to that magic fuckery. It was possible that this was an effect of having a newly generated core which was na?ve to the mana entering it. Maybe the magical equivalent of growing pains. In any case, so long as it remained merely a discomfort, he'd shelve it and consider his next moves.
He had fire, he had a good spot for shelter, and he had water aplenty. He also had a fairly robust source of a variety of timber, including the shattered wood splinters big as a house that marked where the old Tree had broken its roots and limbs as it fell. So, most of the pieces were in place, he just needed to figure out how to put them together. He thought he remembered seeing vines climbing the trunk of this monster, as well as all those flowering shrubs.
Poison. A mild spike of adrenaline shot through him like ice down his spine.
"Holy shit, how did I forget about poison?!" He whispered, alarmed at the oversight.
If he'd run through or touched some of those vibrantly, perhaps even aposematically, colored flowers, he might already be in toxic shock. How in the fuck had he forgotten poison?
What a twist to the story that would be, Ulric thought dryly, to be reborn just to croak himself touching an innocent seeming bush or flower.
He'd have to spend some time and do a sensitivity test on those plants before he went and made a leaf and vine kilt. A virulent rash on the rod and tackle, followed by vomiting and paralysis, and capped off by multiple organ failure would be a rude beginning to what seemed to be a god's honest fucking adventure.
Ulric considered the presence of these plants and then the sporadic bird sounds he'd heard. But no animals. No insects, other than some kind of midges that didn't appear to serve any role except to scatter light and be slightly annoying. Truly, he had arrived in this world in the middle of a green desert. But maybe that would change, soon. This break in the forest canopy had vastly increased the diversity of life within a fairly large pocket of sunlight. It would follow that other organisms would be opportunistic enough to take advantage of such resources. However, these kinds of resources would be relatively scarce and he'd traveled several kilometers with nothing but the barked pillars that held up the woven limb sky as far as the eye could see. It may well be that he'd not encounter any significant wildlife that couldn't fly until he left this most ancient and homogenous part of the forest.
Just as he started to relax thinking this solar island may be too isolated within the green desert to attract any attention—
The roar split the silence
Gutteral. Deep. Feral.
Instinctive terror crawled up his spine to freeze him in place. Prey instincts ran the numbers, it had to be at least ten kilometers away, the way it echoed through the terrain, scattered off of these trunks. But that was too close by a continent to whatever the hell made a sound like that. Never a man overly bothered by mundane dangers, muggers, desperate thieves, the occasional mind addled psychotic that stumbled out of the dark to knife their drug manufactured pursuers, that roar scared his mouth dry.
Spurred by the possibility of a roaming predator, Ulric climbed out of the pocket of ruined rock he'd planned as his shelter to explore around the grave of the arbor and find materials for shelter and clothing. The thought of facing some kind of massive tiger, wolf, or fantasy land horror wearing nothing but his skin and a sour attitude was not appealing.
Nothing like a predator's roar to light a fire under the ass of a lone, recently reborn, dimensional traveler. Ulric immediately went to the dense plethora of shrubs and herbaceous things, to begin his toxicology assessment. Leaves and flowers first, he took a broad leaf in his fingers feeling its waxy texture which was, thankfully, free of oil. He immediately rubbed this leaf vigorously on a small spot on the inside of his left forearm and then repeated this with the leaves of each flowering shrub and herb he came across, mentally tabulating the time of contact and which plant had touched which spot in a centimeter by centimeter grid. He then repeated this task with the leaves of the flowers themselves on his left bicep. It'd be at least half an hour to be somewhat confident about the lack of sensitivity or potential contact toxins that could be detected before they caused a stroke or fatal arrythmia.
"Digitalis would be a nightmare." Ulric said to the clearing.
He had started narrating his actions to nobody in particular as a way to relieve stress and to help his mind catalogue events. It was the first time he'd been anywhere so eerily quiet. Even walking a relatively under traveled track in a fairly remote region back on Earth there'd always been some sort of noise. A distant road, a running stream, water filters, atmospheric scrubbers, generators, crickets chirping, some fucking thing. Here, the forest stretched around him like a living tomb, celebrating the supremacy of the arboreal. It was the kind of silence which ate into the subconscious and chipped away at morale.
While he waited for the sensitivity test to yield results Ulric harvested a few meters of vine and found it wondrously pliable while also strong enough to withstand a good hard pull between his hands. He could break it with an effort but three or four loops and it would resist whatever he did using the strength of his upper body alone. Most of the next half hour consisted of Ulric pulling vines, skinning the leaves off of them, and then looping them around his arms to make a roughly meter diameter coil. All told he'd probably managed to gather a solid three hundred meters of viney cordage. Enough to get a solid shelter in place. Enough to secure a sharp rock to a pole/branch and improvise a spear. And enough to make a tripod over which he could hang items once he'd made a hook stick.
Inspecting the skin in the test regions found only one patch of irritation, a section where the forearm skin had formed a few distinct blisters and which matched the area on his biceps where he'd rubbed the flower of the same plant.
"Stay the hell away from the yellow ones with the red stripes. Got it." he said, as he brought his vine coils and a heaping armful of broad sturdy shrub leaves that had a shape and color similar to large magnolia leaves to the pocket of stone he was already starting to think of as camp.
Stirring the coals and putting another bundle of broken sticks onto the fire Ulric set about figuring out how he wanted to construct his shelter. Wishing he had a folding saw, he grabbed the longest, thickest branches he had and made a tripod out of sturdy poles about five meters long. Lashing them together he then spread the poles centered over his campfire and had a conical space about two meters high with a diameter of around eight meters. There wouldn't be room to stand his two hundred five cm height but it would far easier to heat a smaller space and take less materials which translated to less work and time.
Ulric hadn't eaten for somewhere close to five hours and the activity was starting to tell. He could feel the first twinges of hunger, but at least he didn't yet feel the more pronounced impacts of calorie debt such as heightened exhaustion or lightheadedness. Absent an immediate source of food, conserving calories would have to take precedence over an ideal shelter. The bed he'd make would be a simple affair of 4 crossed poles lashed and edge poles laid to make the side struts of the bed with shorter sticks stacked to make a stick bed with leaves stacked on top of it. Heated rocks could be placed underneath to add heat as he slept without risking a fire too big in the shelter.
An hour of lashing poles, weaving thin branches, and tossing piles of leaves had a somewhat closed in teepee with an open top where the base tripod had been vined together. The fire put out an even column of smoke which vented through the top as intended. He'd left an entry way facing the rock wall which would limit the access of any potential critters trying to get into the shelter to having to circle around and go up against the rock wall.
"Unless they're that Godzilla thing I heard earlier, which would probably tear through these leafy woven walls like tinfoil and stuff me whole down its gullet. Not like that's worth worrying about anyway." Ulric summarized.
A heavy dose of fatalism had entered his voice at that last.
It was entirely possible that a behemoth could attack him, and tear him limb from limb with as little effort as peeling the legs off an ant.
Lurking giga predators aside, the shelter added an enormous degree of psychological comfort. Water, fire, shelter, a knife, sort of, he was making progress. He needed a weapon, both for protection and for hunting opportunity. A sling would be better for food, but he’d have to learn to use one. Stabby things were faster to get a handle on for Ulric just right now, so that’s where he started.
A quarter hour of striking stones found one with a favorable fracture which produced a hand long oblong shape with razored edges that would serve as a spear tip. Some fire hardening of the slightly too long walking stick he'd been using to slap brushes and check for animals and quick work with more vines saw Ulric armed with a fairly respectable spear.
As this work progressed the light had shifted from a warm golden towards an orange that suggested the fall of the sun towards the horizon. Not that he'd seen the sun since he'd arrived. The canopy was far too thick for that and its angle wrong to see from this gully between the ridges of land. The only glimpse he'd even had of blue sky had occurred from the top of that tallest ridge overlooking the escarpment some kilometers distant.
Major work completed, Ulric sat inside his teepee spear leaning next to his bed and set about attempting to make a kilt out of one of the particularly large sets of leaves off of a violet flowering sapling which reminded him of banana leaves. They were a touch fragile for what he wanted but if he ran a vine through a hole in their centers and layered them in rings he could make a skirt/kilt thing that would at least keep the wind off his bits and legs. Something similar could be done for his chest, a leaf poncho type of thing. It was patient work, which he was good at. It was also boring enough that he destroyed dozens of leaves and had to start over twice from breaking his vine with a too ambitious pull.
Sighing he set the nearly complete skirt aside and put another few sticks on top of the fire. Then he went to the rock pool and drank his fill, relieving himself onto the fallen trunk on his way back to the leafy teepee. Back inside, the smell of wood smoke, mellow and reminiscent of hickory, coupled with dim lighting had Ulric relaxing onto his improvised bed. Thoughts of a distant life left behind, of friends parted, of loves lost, and faint sense of mourning washed through Ulric's mind and he let sleep take him, accompanied by the gentle snaps and pops of a campfire.
Sleep was fitful and fleeting. Not helping was that every time he woke, Ulric experienced a variation of sweating heat, or shivering cold. The pseudo-fever was getting worse. He'd been able to mistake it for variations in temperature and effects due to the slightly cool breeze earlier. This last time though, with the only light having come from the remaining embers of the fire Ulric awoke sweating that gave way very rapidly to violent shivers. He dragged the unfinished leaf kilt on top of himself and stoked the fire to ride out the chill, trying to suppress a growing unease over the idea of getting sick while having no food and barely anything that could be considered the ability to care for himself.
Misery.
That's what you get from spending a whole night alternating between sweating into your leaf bed and freezing, with anxiety to spice the whole experience up throughout. By the time a dim light began to permeate the smoke vent of his teepee Ulric had begun to fear greatly that he was experiencing backlash from his exposure to whatever the hell mana was. His body had supposedly been built from the ground up to be in tune with it, but it wasn't like he'd been taught what that meant.
Can you be allergic to mana? He wondered fearfully.
