It's not every day you go to sleep in a warm, comfortable bed and wake up the next morning naked, sore, and in a forest that couldn't have been within a thousand miles of where you lived. This part of my current circumstances, at least, I understood. Naked? Check. Awake? The mild headache and breeze confirm that I'm not dreaming, so again check. Oak trees -- or something like oak anyhow -- when I live in a desert? Yeah, something's rotten in the land of Denmark.

The thing that really drives the point home that I'm not in Kansas anymore, Toto? That would be that I'm seeing some kind of HUD display like in a first person game. That and the very clear two moons in the blue morning sky. One reddish-brown, the other white and crescent. I'd read all sorts of stories like this over the years so I knew exactly what I needed to do, in very short order. It's patently insane but so is the situation I'm in so either I roll with the punches or I just lay down and give up. Only one of those options is acceptable. If I'm being pranked or hallucinating somehow I'll just have to wait for that to become clear. In the meantime:

"Status!"

…

"Menu!"

…

Okay so scenario one is a bust. Next up. Let's focus a little more on this HUD I'm seeing. There's a long bar with a centered 0 at the bottom of my field of view, with a transparent human body image in the upper right. There's a bar on the vertical left with red, green, and blue vertical stripes. I'm not punching myself to check that one out but a quick bout of jogging in a circle causes the green section of the bar to shorten towards the bottom. So that's Stamina, then. Red, Green, Blue. Fairly standard stuff. When green means stamina blue usually means mana, which implies magic.

I sit down in a comfortable and relatively bug-free nook in the roots of a larger oak tree and start to meditate, seeking some inner energy or to absorb world energy or whatever, calling on my past years of martial arts training (which I've not practiced in over a decade. I'm no schlub but I'm hardly a Bruce Lee either. In a real fight I'd exercise the time tested Robin Style: bravely run away.). I recall enough of my old training and chuuni style of thinking to try the qigung exercises I'd learned before I accepted that none of that stuff was empirically sound… and I give it long enough that I'm now sitting in shadow. Thirst starts to get the better off my concentration and I accept it's not gonna happen. Maybe that blue bar is just a glitch, or it means something else. I decide to just ignore it for now.

Okay. Next up. Have to accept that I'm on my own wits here, in what would appear to be late spring by the number of leaves on the trees. I have no idea if I'm the only human being on the planet. If I'm even on a planet. It's almost certain that if I encounter anything that has language and makes tools that I won't be able to communicate. Though the fact that I recognize grass and oak trees and millipedes means I'm probably in familiar evolutionary territory. The HUD means there's likely exceptions to that assertion. In any case, I'm not going to last very long if I stay where I am now.

I do an immediate surroundings check to see what's potentially useful in the vicinity of where I woke up. As I do, to keep my mind busy, I keep an eye out for saplings that are between thumb and wrist thickness. There's a few nearby, though I can't tell what kind of tree they are really; the bark is green but the leaves are completely round. Finding one with few branches, I bend it over with a foot and start whacking against the base with a relatively flat river rock I found. No idea what kind of stone, except that it's grey and a little weathered. After a few minutes -- mostly because I'm keeping an eye on my green bar to ensure I don't wear myself out, I have a decent walking stick.

Next up is collecting the loose stones and sticks I've found and building a recognizable feature so I can have a hope of finding this spot again when I inevitably leave to go find food and water.

Walking stick in one hand whacking away at undergrowth to keep a clear path, and that smooth stone in the other, I begin to make my way in what I have decided is a generally northerly direction -- based on the way the shadows grew over me during my second failed experiment at understanding my newfound circumstances. So hey, at least I got something out of it. My progress is fairly slow as blazing larger oak trees with a river rock isn't exactly easy-going, but it's not like I've got a GPS to work with, here.

~~------------~~

Welp. The inevitable has happened. My fool self managed to not pay enough attention and cut my shin on something sharp. A thorn of some kind of bush. It was bleeding badly enough that I had to hold my hand down over it and press an oak leaf against it as the best I could do bandage-wise, cursing up a storm as I did. Afterwards I noticed two things. One: that red bar inched downwards minutely, and second -- the body "map" showed a bright orange-yellow spot on the same shin. No idea what to make of that. Both an overall health and a localized injury display? Useful I guess but usually overkill.

At least it wasn't worse. But I'm going to need some kind of protection if I'm going to keep on keeping on. Not that I have any clue what that might be or how to make it.

I keep on trekking north for about as much further as it was before I got cut on that thorn, before I finally realize that the orange-yellow spot is completely gone. No idea how long ago that was, but I carefully peel away that crusted-on oak leaf and discover I can barely see a scratch. On the one hand -- mixed signals much? On the other -- at least I don't have to worry quite so much about dying from minor injuries.

Come to think of it, why am I not thirstier than I am? It's starting to get annoying, sure, but I'm not aching of thirst despite far more exertion than I normally engage in. Gah… file under worry later. For now, this trekking through deciduous forest thing isn't helping me very much in finding shelter, let alone water or food. Time to up the ante. And by up I mean that literally. I climb up the tallest tree I can find nearby, as far as I'm comfortable going without having to break the three-points-of-contact rule. It gets me far enough to see over most of the trees in the area and allows me to look for breaks in the canopy. It's a long-shot but I definitely see what looks like a small rise to the east that's near what I hope to be a medium stream or small river. There's another of these super-oaks near there too. It's a destination, though I have no idea how long the day is here or how long it'll actually take me to get there.

Still, a goal's a goal.

~~------------~~

I feel like I've been walking for hours, and I can't really tell how much daylight is left. But there's definitely not a whole lot left. I've been periodically climbing the smaller trees in order to orient myself correctly towards the larger tree, using my trusty flat rock to scrape blaze marks on the trees I pass. Good thing to note: always make sure you do both sides of the tree you're blazing, but only in the "direction" of travel. Don't do a full ring: you want to be able to spot the marks easily on both the way to and the way from your destination.

I've kept a weather eye out for any more of those thorny bushes, and I've actually been collecting broken-off thorns from a few as I went. Seriously, the thorns are two inches long. I'm sure I'll get some use out of the bastards at some point. Tried to look for dry moss or loose bark as well, but haven't really had any luck there. Not looking forward to trying to make my first fire. I'll still try for it, though.

When I get to the second "super oak", I decide I've gone far enough without having a solid look around. I climb up again in the afternoon light and take another look around.

Jackpot. There's five small-medium streams that are feeding into a pond with crystal-clear water. No sign of an exiting flow but the other side of the pond appears to have those oak trees growing out like mangroves.

"Huh. Didn't think oak trees grew that way. Probably don't. Meh. Checklist time! Shelter: can probably make a lean-to out of this here uberoak. Water: clear, flowing, and copious. Best I can do for now. Food: I'm guessing there's fish in that pond I can trap. Even if I can't make a fire people have survived on raw fish before. Fun, fun!"

Yeah, I'm talking to myself. Yeah, it's forced optimism. Fight me, me. Come at me.

I look around the effectively-a-clearing around the oversized oak -- seriously, they're four or five times taller than the other trees in the area, and there's no way any sapient foresters don't use them for landmarks if they exist.

Speaking of things that may or may not exist, where there's a HUD and super-healing, there's almost certainly things that go "bump" in the night. My original thought of setting up a lean-to is now in retrospect seeming less than stellar as ideas go.

Unfortunately, I haven't a lot of great options, here. I do find a spot where two roots as thick as I am wide meet and arch up a little, though, as they meet the tree itself. Between them and a bunch of broken dead limbs from the tree I'm able to drag in place, I manage to make an area that requires a bit of effort for me to crawl into. A little creative post-holing with my walking stick and I have reinforced those limbs a little further. To do any better than this I'm going to have to see if there's different plants down by the pond I can use: the ground-cover here is all low leafy stuff, no grasses or vines.

A short trek down to the water later and I've tasted the sweetest fluid I've ever imbibed… and hopefully won't kill me. Fun times. I do notice a few glints in the seriously crystal-clear water and some sizeable rocks. Fish, crawfish… reeds. Grasses. Over in the "mangrove" area there's plenty of the stuff. The shore of the pond's rocky but gets sandier the closer to the mangroves you get. My toes squelch as I make my way through to the reeds, collecting dead grasses and reeds as well as live/fresh ones, all in one giant double-armful of material.

I get all the way back to my makeshift tree-hovel before I realize I should have also made a fish-trap, as there's basically no chance in hell I'll successfully spear-fish anything this week. Remembering what little I'd learned from watching survival shows on science channels, I start sucking on some of the live grass just to have flavor while focusing on getting my shelter finished.

I've never made rope grass before, but a half-remembered YouTube video guides my hands as I start twisting a thumb-thick bunch of grass together. A few false starts later and I've gotten the basic idea of it down, and it goes far quicker than I'd thought. The length of the pond grass and its overall stiffness, I'm hoping, will let me bind together thigh-thick branches to make a decent wall and roof over my root-nook so that I'll be safe in case something wolf-sized decides it likes the smell of human meat.

I even manage to put together what amounts to a ramshackle door with a "latch" -- it's just an upright tree stem in a hole surrounded by pounded-in rocks and wrist-thick branches bound together with grass-rope, with a loop on the inside that I can stick my walking-stick through and wedge in place against the roof, but it's better than an open hole.

The whole thing takes up most of my remaining sunlight to build, but it does actually have enough space for me to stand up and move around a little in, so I'll call it a win. The ease with which I made the grass rope even gave me the idea of trying to make a hammock since it's clear I'm not going to get a fire tonight and I'd rather risk going hungry than getting some fish parasite, so I need to do something with my time. The end product there is… not the best. I wind up working into the night on it, thanks to a third, larger moon providing enough light to see by. What I finally wind up with is far from comfortable -- loose bits of grass poke out at me and there's a few spots where the cross-twine just breaks -- but it's a hell of a lot better than sleeping naked in the dirt. And it certainly keeps my mind off of the sounds I hear outside of my hopefully wolf-proof hovel.

The upshot to that kind of stress, though, is that it makes it easy not to stay focused on how hungry you are.