Gregory awoke to the taste of dirt in his mouth. He tried to lift his head and felt the tangle of shrubs and vines above him holding him in ce. With a few splutters and an audible cough he opened his eyes and blinked them a few times. He was back under the bushes!? Had he fallen asleep? Maybe he’d gotten tired or passed out and dreamt everything?N?velDrama.Org owns all ? content.


    He moved his mouth and felt the cut in his cheek sting sharply. Had Freddie done something and left him there? He checked his extremities for further injuries. Two eyes. Check. Eight fingers. Check. Two thumbs. Check. Ten toes. Check. Cock and two balls. Check. Thank fuck. In fact he felt fine despite some aches and the cut in his cheek that was little more than a shaving ident.


    What was troubling was the sudden dawning realisation that he wasn’t under the park’s bushes any longer. These weren’t the thin branches and thorny brambles of his former hiding spot. These wererge leaves, thick vines and long limbs of nts that didn’t look like they belonged in a well tended garden. A little wiggling and he’d freed his arm, a little more after that and he could sit up.


    He was sat in the middle of a forest. It seemed like he’d rolled there from a few feet away which would certainly exin why he was covered in shrubs and vines. Maybe he’d passed out and Freddie had decided to take him out and dump him in the middle of nowhere.


    Then again surely he’d have left a trail. Despite the obvious signs of where he’d rolled there was no evidence of anything disturbing the surrounding flora. He’d been camping a few times when he was young. He knew what to look for. Theplete absence of any trails was actually quite disturbing. It seemed like he’d just fallen out of the sky.


    Frustrated, Gregory moved his free arms to untangle his legs from the nts and vines before lifting himself to his feet. A quick nce around revealed a nearby tree that he was able to climb to get a better view of his surroundings. He found no signs of any trails around where he’d woken up but he did notice something else in the distance.


    He began to turn to climb down when one of the vines that had been wrapped in the tree came loose in his hand. The sudden loosening almost made him fall from his perch but he managed to bnce himself rather than returning to earth much sooner than he’d have liked. He looked at the vine, tugged on it and found ittched to a branch higher up. Now having been raised on a series of fantasy novels, movies,puter games andic books Gregory understood that chances such as these were made to be taken. He tugged on the vine again to make sure it was firmly rooted in the tree limb above and then allowed himself a small grin before dropping from the branch and holding on for dear life.


    The rush of air was felt immediately as he swung on the vine directly toward his point of interest. Shortly before he managed to get there the vine snagged in another branch above him and swung him hard to the right to m his body straight into the unyielding trunk of arge tree. Pain shot through his wrist where he tried to brace himself and he swore aloud to the nothingness that surrounded him. Arge bump on his forehead would also likely be swelling up to high heaven in no time at all as a result of his quick tete-a-tete with the hard wood.


    All in all it could have been worse and the pain seemed to subside when he saw what he’d been looking at. The forest floor was clearly pushed aside and there were notable tracks in the dirt beneath his feet. Large footprints, t with no treads or heels which was an oddity in this day and age and long thin trails indicating something with wheels had passed through the area. It seemed to be some kind of road.


    Gregory let out a breath of relief and started to walk. Roads had to lead somewhere. Hopefully they’d lead somewhere with a phone. Thinking back on his situation he considered that maybe swinging on the vines had been how he’d gottenid up in the ground in the first ce. It seemed a viable exnation for how he seemed to have dropped out of nowhere. Maybe Freddie had drugged him or something and let him loose in the forest? No, that sounded more like a Bond Viin than Freddie.


    What’s more this forest didn’t exactly scream English countryside at him either. Vines on trees? Did they even have vines in English woods? He sure as hell hadn’t seen any. The trees were wrong too. He knew what trees looked like and even what they were called in most cases but he saw no oaks, willows, alders, ashes, pines or anything remotely familiar. Some had needles like pine trees but the wrong structure, some wilted like Willows but didn’t have the right branches. Many were beautiful to behold with one in particr bearing vines that were in the midst of flowering along with the tree itself. He didn’t recognise any of the flowers.


    This was getting eerie. Since the gap in the road sometimes allowed the trees above to part he saw the sky and figured the sun wasn’t even at its peak yet. It waste morning, notte afternoon. He’d been out cold for an entire day?


    That was when he met Algra for the first time. It was certainly one of the more interesting meetings of his life. This wasrgely because she introduced herself with a deafening scream of a battle cry and then burst out from behind a tree in front of him wielding a veryrge club she’d made from a fallen tree branch.


    It was perhaps doubly or even triply startling for Gregory because Algra was, quite unmistakably, an orc. You see despite the many attempts of humans to dress up as magical creatures throughout the ages of earth the sad fact is that no matter how close your attention to detail and how brilliant your costume might be, no man or woman can quite manage to look like an orc.