“What…where am I?” I grunted as I came to my senses. I looked around for something, anything familiar, but there was nothing. I was in a dense forest with nothing but trees in all directions.

“Hello. Is anyone there?” I shouted. My only response was an echo.

‘Did I black out? I was running from Nick… He was going to catch me… Wait… that light…. It swallowed everything… What happened?’

Memories of that day flashed through my mind. I woke that day to a body slam from Didi, my little sister, after my alarm clock failed in its function. I hurriedly finished my homework as I hurried to school, more out of laziness the previous evening than because of the homework’s difficulty. I endured another long boring day of class, full of teachers repeating themselves a dozen times in the hopes a few of the denser students might absorb the information through osmosis while I daydreamed in the corner about finishing high school next year and abandoning that place forever. After school, I had a confrontation with Nick, a local thug in training, who had wanted to relieve stress from both mind and fist by exchanging schoolwork for fewer beatings. I was fleeing from Nick, down a back alley when that strange white light surrounded me. Then next thing I remembered I was in the forest.

A myriad of possibilities raced through my mind. ‘Have I been kidnapped? Why? I’m not rich. I’m nobody. I’m just an ordinary seventeen year old boy, perhaps a bit cleverer than most, but not really special. Besides, if I was abducted why am I free now? Why was I left in the middle of nowhere? Revenge? Nick?’ I had just been with him, but Nick wasn’t the sort to pull something like this. He’d just kick the shit out of me and be done with it.

‘Why here of all places? A prank… TV?’

I gazed up at the trees. The world spun as I turned around and around in a desperate search for cameras. I saw nothing.

‘Is this even real? I’m high aren’t I?’ I panicked. ‘I’m going to be is so much trouble. How do get down? How do I get it out of the system?’

I shoved a couple fingers down my throat in the hope that I could force up whatever was ailing me. It worked, or at least the vomiting part did. I hurled a mouthful of stomach acid on the ground but that was it, no signs of food or anything else I might have consumed.

‘Perhaps a dream?’ I thought, not ready to leave the ‘not real’ angle yet. Tap. Tap. Tap. I gingerly patted my cheek with my fingertips. ‘…Not enough.’ I closed my eyes and…

Slap.

Birds perched in the nearby trees scattered, startled by the sudden noise.

‘It’s not a dream,’ I concluded as the pain in my face and hand pulsed in sync with my heartbeat. ‘Not a dream… Not a prank… INSANITY!’

“Have I lost my mind,” I shouted.

Lost mind… lost mind… lost mind… lost mind… Again, the only response was an echo.

“If I was crazy I wouldn’t question my sanity,” I tried to reassure myself.

‘If I was sane I wouldn’t be talking to myself,’ a voice in my head retorted. I shook my head vigorously, trying to throw out such useless thoughts.

‘Think Isaac. Think. Get your priorities straight. No one can tell if they’re crazy. The how and why of your circumstances can wait. For now, focus on getting back to civilization. Step one, what do you know?’ I rummaged through my backpack. Somehow, I still had all of my belongings. In it, I found all the normal school supplies, notebooks, textbooks, a calculator and a bunch of pens. I also found a half filled stainless steel water bottle and a couple energy bars, so at least I wouldn’t starve in the short term, and a flashlight, so I wouldn’t be stumbling around in the dark. I emptied my pockets. They contained a wallet, a cellphone, and a set of keys.

I checked the phone. ‘No signal. Not surprising.’ I paused when I noticed the display. 2:22pm Wed, Sep 23.

‘I… haven’t lost time?’ I took another look at my surroundings and another explanation occurred to me. ‘Teleportation, I must be crazy.’

Taking what little I knew, I moved to the next question. ‘Where am I?’

I started simple. I looked up at the sky and took a deep breath of air. ‘Nothing strange. So I’m probably still on Earth. The forest is too deep for me to see anything other than the trees. What do you call them… conifers, so… North America or Europe.’

I noticed the moss on the nearby trees grew on one side. ‘Assuming I am still in the northern hemisphere that means that side is north. Then the sun is to the east so it’s morning.’

I frowned at that, unhappy that the time on the phone disagreed with my nerd-edge, but otherwise set my feelings aside. They wouldn’t help me. With nothing better to do, I headed downhill, figuring since I didn’t know where I was the direction didn’t matter so I might as well conserve energy.

Moving was slower than I’d expected. I was from a small mountain town and had hiked through the forest many times, but it had always been on well-established paths. I never realized how rough the wilderness really is. Branches scraped against my arms and legs and bugs ate me alive as I cleaved my way through an endless swathe of foliage that seemed to grow denser and more difficult with my every step. It was nearly half a day before I reached a clearing and got my first good look at the landscape.

I was at the edge of a large canyon that extended to either side as far as the eye could see. On the other side of the canyon, the dense forest resumed extending up into the mountains. A wide winding river ran through the center of the canyon. The ground on either side of the river began relatively flat before gradually sloping upward into cliffs at the canyon edge. Pockets of trees and bushes were scattered throughout the canyon but most lied in the deepest region close to the river.

‘Damn.’ No distant city in the valley, no antennae or observatories poking up near the mountain tops, no comforting airplanes or clouds of smog polluting the clear sky, there were no signs of human activity as far as the eye could see. ‘Where the hell am I?’

I climbed down the rocky cliffs and moved towards the river. A couple hours of hiking had already consumed most of my water and I could use some more.

I reached the river by mid-afternoon and, after finishing the last drops of the water bottle, I refilled it. I didn’t drink straight from the river. I couldn’t risk getting sick while I was alone and didn’t know what insidious bacteria lay hidden in the river water. Fortunately, the bottle was metal. It would be easy to boil water once I got a fire started.

It was getting late so I moved to my next problem: shelter. I hadn’t seen any predators but didn’t like the idea of sleeping out in the open defenseless. After weighing my limited options, I settled into a small cave that cut into the canyon wall a few hundred feet from the river. The entrance was narrow, only a couple feet across, but before long, it widened into a pocket the size of a bedroom.

I started working on a fire. The sun would be down in another hour and animals tend to avoid flames. I found plenty of firewood in the forest and a few crinkled notebook pages made perfect kindling. The only problem was finding a way to light it.

I tried rubbing a couple sticks together, but after twenty minutes, I had to stop to catch my breath. The sticks got hot but failed to produce anything but smoke. ‘How hot does it need to be? Fahrenheit 451. Paper burns at 450 degrees.’ I dropped the sticks. They had gotten hot, but nowhere near that hot. This wasn’t going to work. I looked over my belongings. There had to be something I could use.

‘The flashlight!’ A wide smirk spread across my face. To produce visible light, the wire inside the bulb must reach a couple thousand degrees, significantly more than I needed to light some paper.

I pulled out the flashlight, removed the bulb, and carefully broke the protective glass covering it. Once the bulb was reattached, it was as simple as flipping a switch. The hot filament easily ignited the paper.

By sunset, I settled at the cave entrance, tending to the fire as it boiled my water, hoping that the placement of the fire at the entrance would discourage animals from coming in.

As the moon rose and the last of twilight faded away, I began to hear the stirrings of the forest, the rustling of leaves and the chirping of crickets as occasional howls broke through the crackling fire. The only other noise was the grumbling of my stomach. Energy bars were no replacement for a proper meal.

“Hhheeeaaaah….eeeaaaah….eeaaah.”

‘What wouldn’t I do for a cheeseburger right now?’

“Hheeaah… eeaah… eeaah.”

‘Wait that isn’t my stomach.’ I focused on my ears, trying to locate the source of the sound.

“Hheeaah.”

‘Not from me. Or the canyon. Behind.’

I spun my head around so fast it gave the world motion blur for a fraction of a second before my eyes could refocus on the creature before me. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it sooner, the biggest rat I’d ever seen. Before I could do anything, it pounced at my face.

Instincts honed by years of bullying shifted me into a familiar defensive stance. One arm covered my face while the other shielded my genitals. Its primary target shielded, the rat had to settle for taking a bite out of my forearm.

“Get off,” I shrieked, my arms flailing wildly as the rat clung for its life, pushing its fangs deeper, digging all the way to bone.

Thud. Thud.

I bashed the rat against the cave wall repeatedly until it was forced to let go.

“Hheeaah… eeaah… eeaah.”

Undaunted, the rat attacked again. I backed away in terror, singeing the hair off my arms as I forgot about the fire. Backed into a corner I grabbed a thick twisted branch from my meager stockpile of firewood. The jagged bark covered my hands with minor lacerations, but it was the only thing available.

I swung. The makeshift club cracked the rat in the face and sent it sailing across the cave. The rat fell motionless on the ground but I didn’t let up.

“Take this. And this!” I took a few more swings at the motionless rat. Just to be on the safe side.

Brring!

The strange ringing in my ears interrupted my berserker state and an even stranger blue semitransparent textbox opened up a few feet in front of me.

You gained 7 Exp

You have learned new skill: †Hammer Mastery†

†Hammer Mastery Lvl.1 (0.0%)†

Grows with experience with blunt weapons

Damage increased by 3% while wielding a blunt weapon

Attack speed increased by 3% while wielding a blunt weapon

After a moment, the messages faded away, leaving me dumbstruck.

“Damn, I have gone insane.”