Tedrick leaned back on the branch, taking and exhaling a deep breath. A warm breeze rolled by, licking his skin pleasantly. His skin. All of it.

Crap. He was naked.

Of course he was. Why would he randomly get transported here with his clothes? This was a whole new body, you weren’t born dressed. Why would he get transported here at all, though? Unfortunately, he had no way to find out unless he felt like asking the plants. May as well, he should check that he could still talk.

“What do you think? Why did I come here? Where are my clothes?” He asked the tree he laid on. A sense clicked on in the back of his mind, something he was vaguely aware of.

Confusion. How would I know? I’m a tree.

…I’m a tree? He jolted upright, nearly falling off his branch as he stared at the tree in question. “What the fuck? Did you just answer me?”

Another click in the back of his mind. More confusion. Strange little sprite, this one. It grumbled some about how strange faefolk could be.

Tedrick stared at the tree with his jaw hanging open. He… Sprite? Fae? What? But, how? What?! It made complete sense, in as far as anything in this situation did. He was small compared to his environment, he had wings, he could… Talk to things, and hear them answer.

He was a Sprite. This felt… Right, somehow, like it tickled memories somewhere in his mind, but he got little more than white noise with very soft outlines of an image.

“A sprite…” he said to himself, scooting to lean against a branch growing out of his current one. Well… It wasn’t so bad, right? He was tiny, sure, but that just meant he’d be harder to see while he figured out what was going on. He could… Fly.

It hit him that he couldn’t just walk, but fly. Actual, real flight. He… He didn’t just get back what he lost, but gained so much more.

All he could do was laugh for a while. He had no idea what was going on. Laughed so hard tears started to flow, the stress and fear and joy and confusion escaping the only way it could: hysteria.

He would wake up any minute now. Confused about his weird dream. He’d be really sensitive about his legs today, probably. He’d exercise extra hard to work out the anger he always felt after these dreams where there is no chair, no disease, no absentee parents resorting to buying his love, no 18 hour days at work, no need to prove to anyone he was as capable as anyone else.

So he guessed… for now, all there was to do was to enjoy his strange dream. He didn’t indulge in fantasy very often. But, when in Rome…

…

Well, he had come to the conclusion that this might not actually be a dream. It had been hours. He even napped briefly, planning for a couple of hours but only getting thirty minutes at most, yet he felt deeply refreshed. Maybe that was another perk of his size. Whatever the cause, though, he’d never napped in a dream before.

So as absolutely bizarre as this was, he had to take it seriously. There may be a way back home, but he’d never find out if he died. And if he was wrong and woke up, he’d forget about all this foolishness shortly after.

Speaking of forgetting, he realized that he seemed to be able to remember things in extreme details if he focused on it. He guessed that jived with the whole fae thing… They did the deal thing, right? You can’t do that if you forget it. So he chalked that up as another win. Though he had to question that “win” when he could clearly remember the feeling of rough bark on his back as he rocketed into a tree for the first time, tearing up his back and knocking his breath out of him.

Well, no matter how much of a pessimist he was being, he couldn’t deny it would be very helpful.

Now, the deal thing. He read a lot of legends and fairy tales and fiction in his youth, before he gave such niceties up for business, language, historical, and cultural studying. He had to be careful. He didn’t want to wind up stuck in some eternal deal. As far as all the stories went, fae could live forever if they weren’t killed, so it wasn’t out of the question. He had to be careful.

Who knew business classes and learning to read contracts without falling asleep would come in handy in a magical fantasy world?

He managed to find a still puddle and saw his wings. Beautiful dragonfly wings with an entrancing gemstone mosaic pattern that would change with his thoughts and mood, along with, of course, local lighting conditions. The most magical part, though, was that such wings could carry him at all. They were by no means small for his size, but they really weren’t big enough for the task.

His eyes were similar, albeit much less affected by lighting. They were also abnormally large and alien-looking. They had no sclera or pupil and were a strange mosaic pattern like his wings, also changing color with his mood. He’d have to do something about that for business, but… it was a very beautiful effect. Albeit, they were round like an owl’s, and that would take some getting used to.

He had incredibly pale white skin, but he supposed he was… more or less a newborn, though he seemed oddly well formed for a newborn; his bones were rigid and strong, and he didn’t really have any fat to speak of. At all actually. That was… alarming. Were fae biological in nature? He had no idea, and this was concerning.

Supporting this newborn theory was his hair. He had very little. More like fuzz than anything.

Tedrick did some experiments to figure out his weight, using a rough approximation of his height, about six inches by his estimate, to guess the weight of some rocks and making some simple ropes from leaves. A much easier task given he only needed to make a couple of feet of it. He was only six inches or so tall after all, and his experiment was a simple one. He tied the rope around the rocks he picked, and made a small stirrup on the other end.

He realized two things shortly after.

One: He was very weak. Preliminary tests showed he could only lift a few pounds at most, nevermind fly with it. Considering he used to bench over twice his weight and curl 70s easily this was mildly infuriating, but he had to remind himself that if he could do it once he could do it again, at least with equivalent weight scales.

Two: It didn’t matter all too much. He had magic. In particular, telekinesis. It seemed to stress its own resource, but he had no idea what it was. After figuring that out, he used a branch to compare weight. By his estimate, he was roughly a pound.

This was… certainly a change of physique. But he guessed it made sense, in as far as anything did. It fit whatever strange internal logic this place had.