Hello there! Today started with a fall and it kinda just went downhill from there.

When I woke up I was dangling dangerously from a branch. After my traditional startled snort and babble of the morning, I tried to work out a healthy way down from my precarious perch. I'll just cut to the chase here, I did not.

There is nothing quite like a long fall and a sudden stop to start your day. Or at least I hope not.

How did I even get all the way up there again? Oh, wait. Yeah. Right. Note to self: DO NOT BLOW YOURSELF UP, unless absolutely necessary, or if theres some fun reason to, like anything really, Explosions are fun! Except then you have to deal with the deafness, and achey bones, and what-have-you afterwards.

Lesson learned there. Kinda.

My arm was weak, stiff, and sore. So even if I had wanted to climb down naturally it would've been a challenge. Probably would've ended the same way though.

So I had a problem, and how do I solve my problems? Well, I typically throw Tingles at them. If the problem persists, then clearly I didn't throw enough Tingles at it. It worked for the not-nots, it worked for the leggers, it worked for the little green men, it worked for the ravagers, and it kind of worked for the pit.

But, there was also the firetree party. Which went very badly indeed. Trees don't seem to mind being burned so much. But critters absolutely hate it. I've been doing my best to forget the sheer maddening panic and fear they felt when they were in my fire grasp.

Wait, why could I feel their feelings? Why haven't I thought of this before? What is going on with me? What are Tingles anyway? These are all good questions. And I have no answers for any of them. So I guess I'll just tuck them away in the back of my head for now. Maybe I'll figure this all out later.

Back to this morning.

My half-baked idea for getting out of the tree was to burn hand and footholds into the trunk and then use them to climb down. Maybe not the greatest idea, but probably not the worst. The whole tree caught fire way faster than I was expecting though. About as fast as a bad idea going wrong. Wait, no, it lit up exactly as fast as a bad idea going wrong.

See where I'm going with this? So my morning started with me falling out of a burning tree. Not the worst start to a day I've had so far. One word; diarrhea. I can't even tell if I am lucky or not that a passing fur-fat broke my fall with its fluffy body.

Morning exercise of the day: Fall out of tree, check. Agitate local wildlife, check. Flee from aforementioned wildlife, check. Morning exercise complete.

After finishing my morning marathon I started to look for food. Why not just fry the fur-fat? They may be wrathful gluttonous beasts with bad odor, and worse taste in food. But they are cute. With the little eyes and the big ears mixed with their basically spherical body shape. Much nicer looking than most of the other critters I've seen so far. And I have decided that I don't like setting fire to cute things.

Not unless absolutely necessary.

So breakfast was tart green fruit I saw some branch brains eating. With a side of roasted branch brain. Branch brains aren't cute. They're more majestic, and majesty goes well with tart green fruit. Whats the word for someone who says one thing, but then acts in direct violation of what he said? Because I'm one of those. Butchering is tough work! Especially when you are using a slightly sharp stone.

After breakfast I wandered aroung for a while looking for that pit I fell in yesterday. I wanted to see if I could find some tracks of whatever made it and follow them. Maybe to find other people, maybe to get revenge for being dropped into a pit. Sadly, I didn't recognize anything around me. That steam blast must have thrown me even further than I had thought.

So giving up on that I randomly picked a direction to wander off into. Some critters got roasted, some tunes got whistled, and my arm and nose healed up nicely. It was with high spirits I saw something I never wanted to see again.

The Burnt Forest. Just blackened and scorched trunks standing or fallen to the horizon where the mountains stood. With the odd occasional pocket that had somehow avoided the blaze. I'd come full circle. Putting the mountain to my back once again I charged away from my past mistakes. Hoping that they wouldn't chase me.

And that's how I ran into a swamp. Literally. I was tromping along, not really paying attention to where I was going, when with a *splorch* my foot sunk knee deep into sticky sucking muck. I tripped, and fell face first into more of the stinky morass. I lurched and flailed about for a bit. Trying and failing to stand upright. Finally, I managed to flounder onto something solid enough to stand on.

Which is where I got my first glimpse of the swamp. Tall grass and reeds waved in the sunwarmed breeze. Trilling calls of unknown things fill the air, alongside the quite murmur of the slow flowing creek that cut a squiggly ribbon through the swamp. I was standing among hummocks of tall grass. Tiny individual hills, the spaces between them filled with water and mud. Indistinct shapes slithered and leaped away from me. Hiding among the grass.

I then started heading deeper into the swamp, aiming to reach the slow flowing creek and remove some of the caked on muck that covered me. The uneven and soggy terrain made for difficult walking, and I pretty much stumbled my way across it. Finally, with a splash I entered the water.

Which is where I was introduced to the fang-logs. Long and scaly critters, they looked kind of like a fallen log with an attitude problem. And a whole bunch of teeth. They also nearly disappear from view in the murky water I had just thrown myself into.

On a side note, It would seem the satchel is both water and fireproof. And keeps the things inside of it safe as well. Which is nice.

Thankfully, the closest fang-log to me must not have been hungry. It flashed some fang, let out a spine chilling hiss, and vanished into the murk with a flick of its burly tail.

I fled the water immediately.

I hopped and stumbled my way back through the grass, and became the target of a singleminded pursuit by what must have been every single bug in the swamp. As I sent muttered curses and blasts of fire at the millions of biting, crawling, itching, buzzing, maddening, insects around me. I slowly but surely made my way to a dry spot. A little islet nestled amongst a collection of tall fluffly reeds with a single dead gnarled old tree in the middle. Once there I met yet another new creature. Shudder-suckers.

Shudder-suckers are small blackish slimy wormy things. They must live in the water here. I named them that because when I saw them stuck all over my body I shuddered violently, and also because they were suckered on me but good. Fire fixed that.

Fang-logs had already made a home of the dry spot before I got there. They seemed determined to stick around, maybe have me for dinner. Fire fixed that too.

Dinner was fang-log. Not bad tasting, a bit chewy. The hardest part was getting through their skin and removing the guts and bits I didn't want to eat. I used that rock again, the one with a vaguely sharp edge to it. Very, very, messy. That being said, there was a lot of meat on even the smallish one I had decided to eat. I gorged myself. Feeling full for the first time in ever.

I threw the left over bits into the water. I figured that something would come by and gobble them up.

Something did. No idea what though. All I saw were bubbles and some disturbed water, then they were gone. Freaky stuff.

So here I sit, in the damp sand of this little piece of semi-dry land watching the sunset once again. Burning bugs and feeling thoroughly exhausted. Wading through water and mud is very draining.

I definitely don't want to be laying on the ground if one of the bigger fang-logs comes back in the night. So I will settle myself into the branches of this gnarly old tree.

Hopefully fang-logs can't climb.

Goodnight.