On the first morning of the reintegration process for Earth, about six miles in a straight line from the parking lot John was currently ferrying telescope parts to, a woman woke up with what was easily one of the top five worst hangovers she had ever experienced. Her head was pounding ruthlessly in her skull, and her entire body seemed to be pushing its way up her throat in a nauseating attempt to remove poison from her system.

Her extremities were unnaturally cold, but her chest and face swelled with heat. She feebly pulled her limbs closer to herself in an effort to fix the disorienting dichotomy, but was made more uncomfortable by the dragging rustle of her clothes through what felt like leaves, sticks, and small stones. It was decidedly not the soft and warm bundle that was her sleeping bag that even her addled mind had expected.

Her bastard friends hadn’t even helped her into her tent, she realized with a groan.

Years of training her body and mind through similar experiences in college told her to force her eyes open a crack despite the pain of the glaring sunlight. As she did so, her body creaked uncomfortable as she unsteadily rose on quivering hands and knees. The ground had sapped all but the feverish warmth that left her core sweating from her body, and her limbs were left stiff like those of a corpse. Now barely resting on her knees and elbows, the world seemed to tumble forward lurchingly and her nausea increased exponentially.

She immediately vomited onto the forest floor, dumping the contents of her stomach with brutal inefficiency. It was all she could do to keep the rush of liquids off her hands as she lost control of her digestive tract.

She was mostly successful, as far as she could tell. She only stopped after the third dry heave, at which point she pushed her body to tumble into an untainted area beside her while she panted for breath. She shakily held her head in her hands as she wondered what the hell had happened the night before.

She had gone on a camping trip with some of her college friends and someone had the great idea to bring a massive bottle of Jin Beam green apple whisky. The cheap alcohol had the benefit of going down way too easily, and from then on the night became a blur of drinking liquor straight from empty water bottles by the fireside.

She vaguely recalled her chair falling over at some point before she presumably blacked out.

A small voice in the back of her mind, trained through years of abuse, reminded her that she desperately needed water. Another louder voice yelled that she needed better friends.

Through her squinted eyes, she made out a backpack leaning against one of the tree stumps that marked the camping site. She crawled to it and, without any consideration for whichever of her asshole friend’s it was, tore through it until she wrapped her hand around a bottle of water.

She greedily ripped it from the bag as bits and pieces of things stored within it were strewn around the outside. Her hand trembled with trepidation as she brought it to her lips, even now her body rejecting the thought of more liquids entering it. She was no stranger to brutal hangovers though, and forced a few gulps of water down painfully.

Then, before her nausea could assault her once again, she stumbled her way to her shared tent and flopped through the half-zipped flap that served as its doorway. Without caring if anyone inhabited it, she curled onto the nearest sleeping bag and forced her stomach into obediance. For now, she needed to sleep. If not for her health, then to escape the horrible throbbing of her skull for a few more hours.

She promised herself she would deal with her friends when she woke up again.

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She slept horribly, as anyone likely would when it felt like their brain was trying to escape using brute force. She flitted between agonizing moments of wakefulness and brief moments of unconsciousness, sometimes sipping from the bottle she righteously stole from her friend’s bag and other times hanging her head outside the tent doorway to spew her guts.

Since she wasn’t able to get a good read on the sun’s location earlier, its brightness being one of the chief offenders of her painfully continued existence, she had no idea how long she was out for when she finally stepped out of the tent on two wobbly legs. Her friends were still absent, and she was beginning to become more worried than pissed.

Jacob had a bit of a thing for her, so the fact he hadn’t even bothered to check in was a huge red flag. Emilia and Jaron might have been some of the biggest enablers of her overly drunken state the night before, but they would never let her suffer alone. Emilia was her best friend and Kyle was the kind of weirdo who loved cleaning up parties almost as much as he liked drinking at them. Lily was a bitch, but she would at least pretend to care in front of her boyfriend Eric, who absolutely was her friend.

So then it begged the question. Where the hell was everyone?

She resolutely decided she needed to find out, and unsteadily stepped into the campground. Careful as she was, she still nearly tripped as her eyes were squinted to keep out light and they failed to notice a thick branch by her feet. The quick movements that caught her, however, prompted another wave of nausea and a heavy groan.

“Come on, Maria,” she begged her own body as she hunched over with her head in her hands. “Deep breaths. You got this.”

She then tripped again, this time unable to catch herself and tumbled to the ground.

“Fucking— argh!” Thankfully, she had landed on something soft with a crunch of leaves beneath it. It felt like a shirt? She gripped it tightly, clenching her first around the material as she forced her eyes fully open.

Yeah, it was a shirt alright. Jacob’s shirt, she remembered. Then she looked around herself and found more articles of Jacob’s clothing, as well as the offending instrument of her downfall, his boots. Why would Jacob be running around in the nude, she wondered unless—

The thought of it rendered her mind blank for a moment before she shook her head. Whatever kinky shit her friends got up to while she was unconscious didn’t bother her, so long as she was left out of it.

Maria looked around and found another set of disheveled clothes strewn about the forest floor about six feet away. They were Eric’s, which only added to her confusion. Jacob an idiot and she could somewhat understand his choice to run around the forest at night totally wasted, especially on a dare. She thought Eric was smarter than that. Then again, she sighed, when that much alcohol was involved smarts didn't really mean much.

The bigger question was where had they gone? Surely they hadn’t fallen in a ditch somewhere while the others chased them around, right? The other three weren’t so stupid or so inebriated, she hoped. She struggled to remember who the voice of reason would have been, but the effort only rewarded her an exaggerateed pulse of her splitting skull.

Maria finally pushed herself off the ground again, and took a few moments to stabilize herself. Depite the newfound pain, she widened her eyes for any more items underfoot. A quick glance about the campground identified those two as the only sets of clothing in the area, thankfully. She breathed a light sigh of relief.

The entrance flap of the tent adjacent to her own was sealed shut, and beckoned her forward as the final rational possibility for what was going on. Perhaps they had, for some reason, decided to all share the same tent and leave her on the ground? Maybe they partied much too late into the night and were now sleeping off the effects? Maria felt her face grow warm and her heart beat faster, which she attributed to the nausea and overall rattled shape of her body.

Once she stood before it, she grabbed the zipper and ripped it downwards without any hesitation. If her friends wanted to get up to that kind of business she might not stop them, but she would absolutely make fun of them for a while. If not for the impropriety, then for leaving her to die on the forest floor.

Unfortunately, what she saw instead of five of her friends packed comically into a tent barely large enough for three was a set of empty sleeping bags. They weren’t there either, and with that realization came a creeping feeling of being utterly alone. It was dismissable before, perhaps able to be logiced away by other circumstances, but the inherent fear that came with being alone in the woods soon weighed on Maria's psyche unabated.

And as she became aware of it, she also noticed that there was a distinct lack of foresty sounds. Everything was still, quiet but for the rustling of canopy leaves in the wind. It was as if much of the forest's creatures still slept in spite of the risen sun, whose shadows she now recognized meant a it was only few hours before midday. Much too late to hear nothing.

“Guys?” She called out to the sea of trees.

“Emilia?” Maria yelled her best friend’s name despite the protests from her body. The bubbly return she had come to expect from her friend never came. She desperately scanned the campsite for the bag that had contained their phones— as keeping everyone off of them was apparently thetical to camping, but the bag was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, beside one of the logs that she thought she remembered the bag being leaned against, there was naught but blackened char and ash. Other than that, the campsite was just as she remembered it aside from the empty bottles and cans of alcohol that must have appeared some time the night before.

“Is anyone there?” She screamed now, hunching over even as she did so to calm her distraught body, but her words were swallowed by the forest around her. There was no response, not even from the animals.

She was alone.

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Maria leaned heavily onto her impromptu walking stick as she retched into a bush on the side of a hiking trail. Her bile was yellow and thick, barely watered down by the water she had been forcing herself to drink. With a bodily tremble, she wiped her mouth and nose on the back of her sleeve.

“Fucking backpacking,” she swore to herself. If one thing was certain, she was never going backpacking again.

Or drinking whisky. Sadly, that one was a lost cause. Just the thought of it made her want to vomit again.

Her body tried to do just that, only to shudderingly cough when nothing came back up. She panted for a few seconds until the nausea abated slightly and her fevered body cooled enough to move again. She grabbed a water from the side of a bag on her back and sipped ever so slowly as to not trigger her gag reflex.

She had only waited until the sun was directly above her before she gave up waiting and left the campsite. Even if her friends had abandoned her, she rationalized, they would have taken their supplied with them at least. The worst case scenario, then, was that they were in danger somewhere. Thus, she had backed a lightweight bag of water, food, and her car keys to make the trek out. Assuming both cars were still there, she would need to drive somewhere and come back with help.

Either her friends were somehow lost or… Well, she didn’t really want to think about any other alternatives. She was going to have enough trouble hiking the nine miles of meandering trail back to her car.

Maria pushed her weight into the walking stick and forced herself into a hunched position that was minorly more comfortable than standing straight up. She told herself that all she needed to do was to keep walking. Left foot, right foot, left foot, over the root, avoid the mud, away from the ledge, and onwards.

One step at a time.

Distracted as she was by trying not to misplace her steps or vomit, she only made note of the few landmarks she walked past. First were the boulders and rocks that jutted up from the earth on either side of the hiking trail. They forced her to weave between them while she stepped from stone to stone, and she reminded herself that Lily had fallen here only a few days ago. It was hilarious, but she couldn’t laugh then or now.

Then because it was mean, and now because she didn’t want to fall either.

A few minutes later, she walked past a half-fallen tree where Jacob had stopped to piss. That other tree beyond it was where she had stopped to piss, pissed that there weren’t any bathrooms out in the woods.

She hung her head to avoid the pain of light and focused on her feet again. Right foot, left foot, again and again. When she finally looked up, she was happy to discover that everything still looked familiar. Of course, she would have noticed if she walked off the trail into the underbrush, but it was a welcome sight nonetheless.

She suddenly had the urge to laugh despite her circumstances. Jacob had promised yesterday that hiking a trail back the way you came would look oh so very different. He claimed to be somewhat of an experienced hiker, but she was beginning to think he might have just been trying to show off. Or maybe she was just good at hiking?

She made a mental note to make fun of him for it later.

Until now, she had had no trouble making out the landmarks that she passed on her way in. A smile spread across her face as she looked in front of her, her elation eating away at some of the visceral discomfort she otherwise felt.

There was yet another landmark she recognized up ahead. This was the rocky outcropping…

The rocky outcropping where Lily had fallen and she had to hold back her laughter.

Maria froze.

But that was impossible, Maria thought as she shook her head. To her estimation, she had passed those rocks fifteen to twenty minutes ago. Unless that was a different rocky area? She could have sworn there was only one such like it on her way in, but she admitted she could be misremembering. There were just under nine miles of trails in her muddled memory after all.

She pushed ahead regardless. To the current Maria, there was no use worrying about some forgotten rocks.

As she approached the boulder laden area, she soon became increasingly certain that this was where Lily had fallen. The rocks she had passed earlier must have been something she forgot about in the limelight of the event. That or the hangover was making her more confused than she thought.

Maria sighed, as it was probably a bit of both.

She gingerly stepped through the rocks, careful as to not replicate Lily’s mistakes. She stared at the ground by her feet, making sure every foot placement brought her soundly to the other side. It wasn’t until she was through the rocky outcropping that she looked up again.

And there ahead of her, barely visible through the trees, she was absolutely one-hundred percent positive she could see the rocky outcropping where Lily had fallen the day before. She turned around and inspected the rocky landscape behind her, noting similar shapes in the boulders that towered on either side of the trail.

She suddenly worried that she had taken the wrong path from the campsite, but quickly denied that thought. The campsite was on her right when they arrived, and she was sure she left with it on her left. This was the correct path. It was even familiar!

The problem was that it was too familiar.

She had no idea what was going on, but Maria knew that her car was waiting for her at the end of the trail. The alcohol must have addled her brain more than she thought, and she swore to herself that she would wait until her head cleared before she drove, but she would get there at least. Out of the woods, to safety, and then later, home.

She would do it herself if she had to, she thought with conviction. Just herself and the trail in front of her, her supposed friends be damned. Maria thought it would, if nothing else, make a great story to tell later.

When she got to the end of the next eerily familiar rocky outcropping, any mirthful thoughts of storytelling vacated her mind. There, much closer than the last time, were the very same boulders and rocks that jutted up around her. Worse still, an incredible sense of dread began to fill her as her squited eyes made out the head and shoulders of someone standing on the other side of the rocks.

Goosebumps rose from her skin and she froze. It may have been mostly obscured by the boulders, but she was certain she recognized the figure. It was a view she had only ever seen when she stood between two mirrors.

Her figure.

She whipped her head around fast enough to rouse the bile in her stomach again. Behind her, the very same scene stretched out in the forest beyond the rocks like.

There, standing just in front of the rocks as she stood before her own, was a vision of Maria's own back. The figure's hair still held the momentum of her quick turn, and waved in the air identically to her own. Just like Maria was, the figure was clutching a long stick in one hand and her head in the other, desperately trying not to vomit.

She instantly did, and so did the other her.

What the fuck was going on?

“Hello?” she called out once she regained control of her throat. A shiver went up her spine as the same “Hello?” called out behind her in her voice. She turned around again, more slowly this time. Once again peaking out behind the bouldes in front of her, Maria saw her own back again.

She shut her eyes tightly and suppressed the urge to scream.

“I’m crazy, I’m crazy, I’m losing my mind, just… just don’t look. Keep your head down. Car. Home.” She whispered to herself, squeezing her temples between her palms as if putting her world back into place. She had reached deep inside herself and found a will she never knew she had, demanding that she would get out of this forest if it was the last thing she tried to do.

And so she stepped forward, left foot after right foot after left foot, dragging herself along with the aid of her walking stick. Through the same boulders and over the same stones again and again until she could hear her own footsteps and haggard breaths echoing from behind her and in front of her.

When her own ankles became visible in front of her, Maria finally couldn’t take it anymore and closed her eyes with a scream. It echoed around her in a way that set every nerve in her body on edge, causing her to abandon all care and run forwards. She inevitably stumbled on the loose stones underfoot and plummeted to the ground.

Suddenly, the boulders were gone. The stones beneath her gave way to soft grass and solid roots as she tumbled onto the forest floor. Her echoing screams and heavy breathing became hers alone once again. She looked up with sallow eyes, and saw a massive trunk of solid wood. Her eyes followed its great width upwards as it spired higher than the natural canopy of the forest proper. Its branches curved up and over her head before cascading down behind her like a willow.

As she followed its contours with her eyes, Maria felt it. An all encompassing feeling that calmed her frayed nerves, eased her haggard mind, and alleviated the turmoil that wreaked havoc inside her body. It was a feeling of home.

It wasn’t her home, of course. She knew that.

But it nevertheless made her feel safe. It was peaceful, composed in a tranquility Maria had never felt even in her own home. The willowy branches encapsulated the area from high above the other trees in the forest, blocking the natural vegetation from entering the space. They created a leafy bubble of solitude that nothing but scattered petals of light could penetrate.

She couldn’t be sure, but it felt like the roots beneath her body then sunk below the surface to accommodate her shape. The grasses as well seemed to envelope her body in a cool embrace that drained the final vestiges of adrenaline-fueled tension from her.

In the wake of her newfound haven, Maria pulled her limbs closer to her and shuddered. She had no idea what was going on, where she was, or where any of her friends were, but exhaustion soon filled her adrenaline-deprived limbs and kept her on the ground. With her arms wrapped tightly around her legs, she buried her eyes into her knees and cried.

Her sobs continued unabated until exhaustion finally overcame her body entirely. Heedless of her position on the ground for the second time today, Maria drifted off into sleep once again.