I was pleased. I had found a stream. Well, it was more like the stream was crossing the path I had been following, and it looked like someone had sort of rearranged the rocks in a makeshift fjord. Frankly, I was just glad that the signs of humans were all over the place since I doubted very much that those goblin things, or maybe skeletons, would have wasted the time to fjord a river, or even make a gravel track.
I was about two miles closer to the mountains now, and the stream was...maybe… twenty feet wide and three feet deep at its deepest, but considering the four-foot high earthen banks on either side and the fact that the flow was coming from the northeast, I bet that spring made this thing swell a lot. The mountains were not snow-capped, meaning it was probably mid to late summer or fall, at least if seasons worked here the way they did on Earth.
Fortunately, several tree clumps were close to the water, and their roots seemed to be the strongest part of preventing erosion. Willows and their visible joints jutted out of the embankments and shaded the majority of the stream. The water was clear, and I saw what looked a lot like brook trout minnows and a small crayfish darting through the shallow rocks.
That was good. That meant that the water was healthy enough to support fish and healthy enough to drink. There was wood, water, food, and potentially enough supplies to support at least a short-term camp. I didn’t want to be right on the road, so I followed the stream for about ten minutes until I found a nice solid copse with lots of dead-fall that was still within bare visibility of the road.
If this world was savage, I was young enough and healthy enough to set up some kind of a more permanent camp, but I was a lot more interested in finding a few people, so I could at least get the lay of the land, find out what ‘sub tech six’ meant, and maybe restart my life. I had both legs and both arms, and I was very healthy… I had no idea how far the ‘system’ thing reached here, but when I crossed the brook, the feeling of being watched seemed to ease off.
Since there wasn’t any snow on the mountain peaks, the chances of a flash flood were pretty slim, so I started setting up a place to camp, with a lean-to of fallen wood and branches, but on the secure bank. I set up a fire circle down closer to the water, among the rock embankments. Prairie fires could be a nightmare, so while I wanted to purify some water by boiling it, I didn’t want to risk a fire getting out of control.
Was it dangerous being so close to the trail? Absolutely, but I was working with basically no information here. The fire ring was set so that it was behind a curve in the stream’s embankment from the road, which should disguise any light, and dry deadfall as well as several large rocks that surrounded a sort of poor man’s Dakota fire hole. I was able to find quite a bit of really dry driftwood and deadfall, which meant that this particular place hadn’t been harvested in a long time, if ever, and simply a few runs over each piece with my knife trimmed off the shreds of old bark.
In about twenty minutes, I had a nice, low-smoke fire going and was using the pot to boil some water. I was keeping an eye on the road, but I had no idea how long I would have to wait to see someone. Mostly, I just wanted to know about the locals… would I see knights in shining armor? Old-fashioned pilgrims or pioneers? Cavemen? Or hordes of goblins or skeletons? It was a hell of a complicated question, but the first trick of exploring is to create some kind of a base camp.
I also built a sort of rock hole in the stream and then tied a couple of long shreds of beef jerky around a stick to attract fish. A wier is possibly one of the oldest traps known to man, basically using sticks or rocks to surround a chunk of water, with a narrowing entrance of some sort. It’s extremely reliable since once a fish swims into the wier, very few are smart enough to get out. If it’s deep enough, and has some kind of bait the fish can smell, it’s almost guaranteed to catch something, and grabbing the trapped fish was as easy as making sure you don’t get jabbed by any spines.
When the sun started settling, and I’d drunk deeply from cooled water from my weird-looking lidded pot and cup, I went ahead and buried the pit under rocks. Sure, a campfire at night is comforting, but it also draws lots of attention even if you have it mostly concealed. The pot… It was interesting, but it was almost like a fat-lidded bedwarmer, an interesting design that allowed it to hold almost as much water as a canteen, and the lid stayed solidly fitted even when tucked into my belt. Kind of a useful design.
I was tired, and once the fire was out, I rolled under the lean-to and dropped it on top of me. Sure, it was likely I would catch a few bugs curled up in my duster, but I didn’t know the wildlife or local life, and I didn’t have anyone else to stand watch with me. I had enjoyed worse accommodations, and despite having a layer of detritus and fabric covering everything but part of my face, I was reasonably comfortable.
This kind of terrain made caves or other shelter unlikely, and I didn’t have time to build serious defenses, so I had simply set out some sisal threads tied to rocks that would clatter if someone tripped them, covered myself up with flotsam as best possible, and looked forwards to a restless sleep with my sheathed knife pressed against my chest.
In the morning, after a surprisingly restful and almost bug-free night, I discovered THREE nice-sized fish in my trap. Starting another low-smoke fire right as dawn crested, I filleted the brook trout, which was a very good size, and made myself a bit of fish stew with wild onions, lambsquarter, and a bit of salt from my bag, letting the other two undersized catfish go as I broke down the trap. The stew tasted better than any food I had eaten in years and filled me with energy, which was a little amazing.
It was starting to feel a little strange… not just physically, but I felt REALLY good. I was feeling… self-reliant. Like I could do anything I used to do, and more. It was a great feeling. For now, I had food, I had water, I had basic supplies, and my memories of survival training, and I felt better than I had ever felt before, even when I was at my best.
I was looking back on what I had ‘accomplished’ while I was trapped in that environmental pod. There had been something wrong in my head. What I’d almost done to that girl in the tutorial… What I’d allowed to be done to me. It felt like I’d been dosed with amytal or something, my self-control had just been…. Absent.
I’d done so many things I wasn’t proud of, and worse, I didn’t feel guilty about them, either. I’d never missed a night’s sleep even when my Christian upbringing screamed at me that I was evil, a monster, or worse. I always had a strong will, and the ability to resist my nastier urges, and that ability had been almost missing when I was whatever… reborn thing that they had made me into. I was surprised that I had insisted on keeping the energy credits since I hadn’t even given a moment’s thought to agreeing to their stupid ‘resource hunt’.
What weirded me out a little was that I had been able to keep so much stuff that had been translated from the cage, but the one thing I needed, possibly more than anything else, hadn’t been supplied… some method of holding water other than that pot. The question was, why?
More importantly, why hadn’t I gotten thirsty yet? I’d boiled a pot of water last night, taken a few sips, and cleaned myself up, and this morning I wasn’t even remotely thirsty.
Was that recycler doing something? I hadn’t much needed to pee, either. I knew if you were willing to filter your own urine, you could keep yourself hydrated and lose very little except sweat for long periods, weeks. Was that why I didn’t get a water bottle? One fish had pretty much fed me, too.
I went ahead and polished off the fish stew I had made, and then cleaned up the pot and put it on the remains of the fire to dry and heat up before putting the fire out and burying it yet again. For whatever reason, my recycler, or my affinities, or whatever weird things had been activated in this world, I probably wouldn’t have to worry too much about water for some time, and possibly not much about food.You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Scattering the remains of my makeshift campsite, I headed back to the road, to see if I could find something resembling civilization. The stream meandered alongside the road, and I was fit enough to start covering a good bit of distance.
“Jessie?” I asked, hoping I still had whatever it was that had been helping me before, and had ‘helped’ me by pointing out that I was a mistake to whatever the game was.
The lack of any sort of answer let me know that… whatever system existed outside of this world, it didn’t seem to exist here or was being kept hidden. I guessed that might have been what the messages about ‘protected’ meant. Was some sort of Trekkie ‘prime directive’ thing in place?
When I was battling six different kinds of cancer, obesity, and diabetes, I’d had way too much time to read. What else can you do but submerge yourself into fantasy when your life is a living hell? I’d read lots of stories from all sorts of genres, from mil-fic, romance, and modern horror to pure fantasy, dungeon core, litRPG, portal fantasy, and even a little manga, although I wasn’t a huge fan of the ridiculous and ignorant tropes that seemed to populate the manga and anime genres.
Kung Fu was… fun, and very stylized and pretty, but it wasn’t a real combat art, at least not in the kind of fighting that filled the real world. Just like Brazilian Jujitsu was very popular in the octagon, but almost useless in a real fight. The secret to real-world fights was to learn to use any advantage you could find, fair or unfair. If you were fighting for honor in a life-or-death struggle, you were fighting to lose.
One of the drill sergeants had spelled it out to me very succinctly when he had beaten me badly after I tried to show off some of the Jeet-Koon-Do moves, thinking I was a badass fighter in AIT.
Hand-to-hand combat was a tool to get a knife, a knife was a tool to get a gun, and a gun was for killing people… but if you couldn’t get a gun or a knife, you used whatever tool you had available to do the same thing. Otherwise, you were just comparing dick sizes.
That was why when I found a grove of hickories… Which looked like nutmeg hickories, a rare species on Earth, I tracked down a solid two-inch thick sapling, probably newly grown that was dying beneath its sibling’s thick summer cover and proceeded to spend the next two hours cutting a spear, a slightly more effective weapon than a knife alone.
Nutmeg Hickories were easy to identify since they had spear-tip leaf clusters and slightly shaggy gray-brown bark, but the green, growing nuts were not close to falling yet, and the quad-beaded hulls in sets of two were distinctive. Looking at the state of the nuts, I could tell it was about mid-summer, with possibly a month until fall started to take over.
Ironically, while I remembered a lot of minor factoids from repeated survival training and getting dropped naked into harsh environments and expected to survive and find my way back as exercises, I had never actually made a spear before. My fighting experience almost always involved third-world jungles or sandy shitholes where improvised weapons were usually broken weapons, kitchen implements, or looted pieces of junk. The fact that, aside from the dirt track on one side and the nearly virgin stream on the other, there were almost no signs of civilization was sort of novel.
I probably should have been curled up into a ball doubting my own sanity, desperate to get ‘back to Earth’, freaking out about not having plumbing, or assuming I was in some kind of VR game or coma. That was what most of the protagonists of ‘transported to another world’ fiction seemed to revel in, but I couldn’t seem to care. I mean, I felt like I was healthy for the first time in forever, and I’d already seen shit like walking corpses that made magic a very real possibility.
If this was a VR game, well, I lucked out. I could feel both of my feet and had zero interest in disproving this reality. I felt fully alive, I wasn’t in pain, I wasn’t in hell, and my dick worked… everything else was just trivia. Of course, if that trivia included hot women it would be a lot more interesting, and the fact that I seemed to have had a gamelit-style character sheet that no longer existed kinda made things break with what I expected from ‘transported to an alternate world’ books, or even ‘got stuck in a virtual reality game’.
I also wasn’t exactly positive if I had died. There hadn’t been any truck-kun, I never hovered in space talking to a god, and I wasn’t some sort of foretold hero or summoned by a powerful sorcerer to save the world or anything. When I had cleaned that trout, it had just been a trout. A big, healthy specimen, but I didn’t get experience points or gold coins or treasure chests or magic cores, it was a big, tasty fish that had the same guts that any other fish I had ever cleaned had.
If anything, it was more like I’d been transported to Kentucky back in the 1700s, complete with squirrels, good pure freshwater fish, the constant bird and insect calls, and a big-ass muzzle loader braced on a fallen tree that I’d just noticed pointed directly at me about thirty feet away.
Behind the blackened rifle, which had an octagonal barrel that had a black hole that suddenly looked amazingly large, I could barely make out a beaten-looking hat, and I was disgusted with myself. In my prime, I would have been looking out for ambushes in a foreign zone, and there was no way a sniper this close should have gotten the drop on me if a gun that looked more like a man-portable cannon could be considered a sniper rifle.
Great. I was looking for a place to dive into for cover, but the stretch I was on was remarkably free of anything that could stop a bullet. Not unless I wanted to dive into the water that was too far away for me to have even the slightest chance of making it before even an amateur shooter could drill me. Add in the fact that whoever it was had lined up the shot without my even noticing them before I was in the perfect position to get potshotted implied that whoever it was probably wasn’t an amateur.
What a great story. “Survived cancer, got frozen. Woke up hundreds or thousands of years later, explored a dungeon, got shot and killed the moment I set foot on an alien planet. The end.” I wouldn’t be seeing any royalties from that, I was certain, and I had zero confidence that plot armor would protect me from a bullet the size of an avocado pit. I didn’t have some overarching destiny, I wasn’t brought here to fight the demon lord, and I bet I was as mortal as hell right this moment.
I was halfway through carving my new spear, and I dropped both it and my knife on the ground before raising my hands slowly. This wouldn’t be the first time I’d been ambushed OR captured, and the fact that I wasn’t already dead implied I might live longer by being cooperative.
“What are you?” I heard a breathy, very feminine voice call out from behind the scary-looking muzzle. She was speaking English, and had a faint country twang, cementing the idea that maybe I was sent back to Earth. Maybe this was a post-apocalypse kind of thing after all, although the question sort of surprised the hell out of me.
“Uhh… What do you mean what am I? I’m not a zombie or a nuclear mutant or anything?” I answered loudly enough to hear.
“Are you fey?”
I was confused, was she asking me if I liked men? Or if I was some kind of magical cookie-baker with butterfly wings that challenged unwary knights at crossroads? “Not that I know of. Are you?”
She coughed, was that a laugh? “You speak common. You aren’t a vamp or an Ogre. I don’t recognize your aspect… Primate? You aren’t a Lakelander, and you don’t have a gun… what are you doing so close to Kanten? How did you survive? And put your hands down, you look stupid with your hands up like that, especially since you aren’t gathering or forming essence.”
I slowly lowered my hands, “I was trying to show you I was unarmed.” I thought about it. How much information should I share with this woman? The transtator message had implied that this world was protected, would running my mouth land me in bigger trouble? I felt especially stupid because the weird leather armored duster I had been wearing when I first woke up implied that this world had serious threats that made it a necessity. And I’d been strolling along like I was on vacation. Not that leather would stop a bullet. “I am not sure what you’re asking me.”
She lifted her head a little, enough that I could see a pair of vibrant green eyes peering out from under her floppy leather hat. “I was asking what species you were. You are too big and not ugly or stinky enough to be a greenskin, you aren’t raging and trying to kill me like a spawn. You are walking in the sunlight so you aren’t a vamp, and you don’t smell like one of the necros. If I put up my gun, you aren’t going to suddenly try to jump me? I promise I can still nail you before you can get to me if you do.”
I shook my head, “Nope. No interest in attacking anyone unless they attack me first. I’m just glad you didn’t already shoot me, the way I was waltzing past you like a blind idiot. Species? Like, Human? Or Italian? My name is Tony Wilkins. I am… not sure how I got here, or even where here is.”
“Italian? What the hell is that?” she asked curiously, finally lifting the barrel of what I now realized was some odd sort of blunderbuss. That would explain why the barrel looked like it could swallow my entire head, or maybe it was just perspective. A barrel looks a hell of a lot larger when it’s pointed directly at your face.
When she finally hopped to her feet, I suddenly realized WHY she had asked what a human was, and got a hell of a shock. Her clothing was similar to mine, leather duster, boots, thicker leather armored torso with a short skirt, and a longer dark brown calf-length skirt beneath it. But what the clothing contained was absolutely staggering.
She was a skunk.