I spent about three hours hiking down the right side of the brook. As I hiked some things just seemed off. Other than wearing fur and being told I had levels. Not being able to read a book but clearly being able to read was a huge one. Then there were the other things that were messing with me.

I’d seen a squirrel with a horn. I might have written it off as me not seeing things right, but, I saw it ram another one that fell off a branch. When I checked on the squirrel that fell, I saw it was dead and had a small hole about the size of a number 2 pencil eraser in its chest. I took that dead squirrel for a meal. I also saw a sparrow-sized bird have a single leg with a talon on it like I’d expect on a hawk. At first I had thought I was some sort of test subject but I was starting to second guess that idea kind of quickly.

I hiked until the brook joined with a creek or stream, or perhaps it was a small river. I never knew what would make something a river versus a stream. It was about two or three feet deep and around fifteen or twenty feet across and cold, very cold. It reminded me of the Green River in Saluda, North Carolina, near the waterfalls, so I guess it was a river since it was about the same size.

“Upriver or down? If I go up the ground should get more rocky and so more likely to find some place to rest. But people build on rivers and so going down should help me find others that can tell me what’s going on.” I muttered.

Then I turned downriver. I didn’t get fifty feet when I heard what sounded like a weed trimmer spinning up. I looked around for the sound and saw a yellow jacket the size of a baseball bat flying right at me.

Now, the thing about yellow jackets that people tend to forget is that they eat meat. That means that they hunt, and they tend to chase things that are bigger than them. There is a reason that they have such a bad reputation. They are unreasonable. They feel a breeze blow them away from where they want to be, and if you are close by; they sting or bite you. They see the sun, they sting someone. They don’t see the sun, they still sting someone.

I did what every sane person in the world would do if they saw a 3-foot long flying stinger of hate. I ran like a chicken. Yelling and screaming the whole way.

The problem with this strategy was the nature of yellow jackets. The unreasonable part. I jumped the brook and ran for all I was worth, hearing the weed trimmer buzzing behind me and closing. What was worse was that I could hear three different tones.

I heard the sound behind me change just before I felt pushed forward and felt a weight added to my back. I listened to the clicking of mandibles right behind my ears as I went into a forward roll.

“Nope! Nope!” I yelled as I was going toward the ground.

I wasn’t sure if I would trap it when I rolled, but I figured that if I tried to roll, it would come off one way or another. I was happy when I saw the thing on the ground as I recovered. However, the other two flying at me made me much less optimistic. In fact, I would say they downright scared me.

I took a deep breath looked around, “No good.” I said.

The one on the ground was working on getting its wing-back in place. I didn’t have many options now. If I ran, then I would be chased, and my whole body weight didn’t even crush one of these things.

The two flying ones started to circle. I quickly backed myself up to a sizable tree. I needed to cut out one direction of attack. I chose to keep my backpack on for some added protection, even if it made moving odd. I also didn’t want these things to carry off my bag or run me off like the wolf did.

The one on the ground was angry and moving towards me. She hadn’t gotten her wing fixed but was going to fight me on the ground.

I readied my spear and took a baseball swing for the flying ones. I thought that I missed the first one as my spear went under it but instead, I caught the wing and took a section out, dropping it to the ground.

“Take that!” I yelled and grinned.

While I was celebrating my victory over the flying monster, the other one landed on my back and stabbed me with its stinger.

I felt the very tip of the stinger enter into my lower back. It felt like it was just a scratch until I felt a rush of liquid being pumped into the wound. It was like when a dentist filled my mouth with novocain, but it burned.

The red bar showed up again full, but beside it was the same neon green drip that showed a 5 on it. I screamed in pain and slammed my back against the tree behind me.

I heard a crunch that sounded like the world’s largest cockroach being stomped on. I also felt the stinger slide deeper into my back. I saw my health dip as I staggered forward.

The two nightmares on the ground were coming at me with their mouths clicking. The first one was moving to my left while the one I had just downed was coming right at me.

I dropped my pack, which pulled the smooth stinger out of my back. I yelped in pain as the stinger angled out of my back, causing a larger wound to appear. I was only a few moments into this fight, and it wasn’t looking good for me. My main weapon was good for soft targets, not giant exoskeletons.

As the two monsters approached, I saw the envenomed timer click down, and a tenth of my health disappeared. I wasn’t sure how long the stinger’s venom would affect me, but I knew that the two guys on the ground could kill me if I didn’t finish them off.

I stepped towards my right to try to keep them from getting to me at the same time. Then I brought my spear overhead and dropped it down like a hammer at the fair. I made contact with the yellow jacket’s head and watched as my spear slid off. I hadn’t even made it move. It just took the hit like it was nothing.

I turned my recovery of the clubbing strike into a set up for a stab. As soon as the point was lined up I jabbed forward at the same one that I had just hit. My spear slammed into the head and bounced up and over the head not even leaving a mark.

I backed up fast. I wasn’t sure what was going on. I killed the one that was on my back when I slammed it into the tree but this one shrugged off my swing like it was nothing and my jab didn’t even slow its advance. I looked over at the dead one and saw that the thorax with all its little hair was cracked and that the abdomen was separated from the rest of the body.

I circled around as the insects kept coming at me, clicking their mouths. I stepped in and swung at where the thorax and abdomen met and was happy to see the back half pop off. Yet, even in my joy, there was a pain in my left leg as the other one had jumped and bit me with its giant mandibles. I dropped towards it as my leg gave out from the pain and landed directly on top of it. Snapping its head off of its body. My red bar was flashing, showing a third of my health was gone in an instant.

The one that I broke the back off was still alive, and it was walking towards me like it was going to kill me. I didn’t have time to stand up; I had to act. I shoved my spear at it only for it to bite the tip and drag me towards it. The strength of the yellow jacket was enough for me to stumble forward.

I let go of the spear just as it bit through it, breaking it in two. It was dead, I knew that much, but if I didn’t make some room between it and me, I was going to be finished as well. I pushed myself up off the ground and shook the head of the dead yellow jacket off my leg. Then I grabbed my bag and finally started to move away.

I had my life but felt like I lost that fight. The venom was done removing health, but I had something flashing on the green bar, and I had an outline of me with my left leg and lower-right back flashing. I was guessing that those were indicators showing where I needed medical treatment.

I muttered and grumbled, “Ain’t going downstream no how! There’s got to be a nest of those hell sent bugs! This whole place is unreasonable! Half-dead wolves, evil snakes, unicorn squirrels and giant yellow jackets!”

After another ten minutes, I took a break and hobbled into the river to wash off. I adjusted the leggings that I had and tied them so that they would cover the messed-up part of my leg. Then I pulled the leftover snake out and ate the rest.

Finally, after about twenty minutes of rest, all of the icons in my vision were gone, and I could get back to hiking. I looked around and quickly found a stick that I could use to hike with. I would need to figure out how to put a point on it as I’d lost my other one.

I went up the river until about midday. Hiking the river was just about as hard as I expected. Rivers in the mountains tend not to have shallow banks but start to cut into the stone, which I was hoping for. If I wasn’t still dealing with almost dying to a snake and then a nest of yellow jackets I would’ve thought the place was beautiful.

I paused to figure my way around some trees and rocks. “It’s gonna be a tall order to find me a place that I can get up to without getting hurt, and where snakes aren’t likely to get to me where I won’t wash away in a flash flood.”

I let out a sigh and kept moving upriver. About two hours later I needed water, so I climbed down the bank to a sandy spot. There were large boulders that I used to jump from one to the next as I made my way down to the sand. As I went down, I saw a small rock outcropping about twenty feet lower than the dirt above and a short climb across a small ledge where my feet could hang off a bit.

“That might just do for the night.” I muttered.

I made my way to the outcropping. It had a small tree on it, and there was no collected driftwood. The outcropping was about four feet wide, with the tree on the outermost side. Not enough room for a fire, and I didn’t want to try to dig into the solid rock face since I only had a rock to dig with.

Since I knew that I was mostly safe from water rising and could lay down and use the tree as a rail, it was time to work on my camp. First, I drank the rest of the water from my skin. Then dropped the contents of my bag near the tree.

I climbed down with just my stick, empty pack, and water skin. When I got to the bottom, I first filled my water skin and set it down near the water on the sand. Then I started to gather deadwood. It was kind of easy in this type of the area to find the wood, almost always caught on the bank just a few feet higher than the water. It came from when the river would flood, so I knew that because the deadwood was this low, I was right in my thoughts about my campsite for today being safe. After I got wood, I stacked it up in the middle of the sandy spot.

Once again, I noticed the lack of people. There should be some trash of some sort in most places like this, but there was none. There were no plastic wrappers and no cups, no spoons, nothing to show that people had been anywhere on this river.

This made me more nervous as the lack of people wasn’t something that I was used to. I didn’t tend to like people and preferred to be left alone but people meant safety from nature. If I was going to find help, not seeing signs of people wasn’t a good thing.

After I got my pile of driftwood, I started to make a fire. I pulled out my fire horn and dropped the warm coal into my tinder, and started my fire. I knew that I needed a new fire so that I could move a coal again. I’d never done this, but it seemed like my muscles could duplicate what the man in my dream had shown me. As I was working on starting the fire, I looked down at my left hand and saw burn scars all-over my palm and the insides of my fingers. It looked like an old scar, which made no sense to me.

“I can’t remember if that was there when I woke up the first day or not.” I whispered to myself.

I “knew” the best way to make a new spear was going to be with a fire. So I sat down to work the end with the fire heating it up and scraping it down with a nearby rock. It was nice to be warm and not have to move much after such a long day.

Once my spear was made, I needed to let the fire die down to cook on. I had nothing to cook, but I could use my spear for fishing if there were fish, and I could also make a fish trap if I took the time. The fish trap was another one of those things that I just knew how to do. I even saw the thin limbs I would need to make the trap.

I looked out in the river to see if I could see anything swimming around. I remembered when I went fishing growing up, and I could always find trout in the slow pools of water behind the rocks. So looking down, I was happy to see what looked like trout in there. My other memories kicked in showing me ways that I could catch them.

This second set of memories that I was picking up on was odd. They were like my own in many ways, but they were also so much unlike them. I felt like I had skills and knowledge that I KNEW that I didn’t have. I’d never been spearfishing, nor had I ever built a fish trap, but I felt like I could and even knew what I needed. Just like cooking fish over coals, I knew with the certainty of experience that I could and what I needed to make it happen, yet I’d never done this. Perhaps these skills and memories were somehow given to me when the HUD was put in.

“Well let’s see if I can use this spear…” I said as I started to move slowly into the cold mountain water.

I slipped into the water from the sandy bank, and it was cold. Oh so cold. I had to stand still for a few moments on each step as the cold reached up higher and higher on my body. Finally, when I got thigh-high in the water, I was able to move around in the water so that I was between the fish and the rest of the river.

I started to walk towards the fish, and they backed up. Soon they were in a much shallower area that I could spear them. My first attempt scared all the fish more than they were. As one, the school of fish darted past me and back into the main river, leaving me cold and still hungry. I overshot my attack and lost my balance and ended up completely under the cold water.

“Crap! That’s cold!” I sputtered as my head came back out of the water.

I got out of the water and shook off. I was colder now than in the water and I still needed to eat. I moved to the next area that looked good, and tried again. I got the fish up close where I thought I could spear, and this time I went all in and got one. I pinned it to the bottom of the water with my spear, and as it flopped around, I reached in and pulled it and my spear out.

I picked up a small rock, brained the fish to finish it off, and went to the fire. Unfortunately, it was still too hot to cook on, so I went to the third pool, repeated my fishing, and got myself a second fish.

Back at my fire, I took off my tunic so that it would dry. Then I got a small stick, sharpened a point to it on a rock, and gutted my two fish. It took me a good thirty minutes or so to do what would have been all of thirty seconds with a knife. I ran my hand through with the stick once causing me to drop one of the fish back in the water.

I dove in after it and managed to get to it before it washed down. Living in the wild without anything wasn’t nearly as fun as the shows and books made it out to be. My hand was bleeding as I finished the job of gutting the fish. I had nothing to bind it with and so I was just to to work until it closed up.

“I hope this thing closes up as fast as the snake bit did. Whatever they did to me has at least helped with healing faster.”

I went to the bank, got two green sticks, ran them through my fish, and kind of angled them over the fire so that they wouldn’t be too hot and burn but would get enough heat to cook. After that, I climbed back down into that horrid cold water and took a bath using the sand to scrub off the blood from the fish and the dirt from the hike. I noticed that while I was still me, I had calluses that I didn’t have before.

After getting out, I went to my fish and rotated them over. By that time the small gouge in my hand had healed over like it had been weeks and not minutes since I hurt it. I had nothing to dry off with, so I just had to stay near the fire to finish drying out. Then, I started to make a list of what I had.

“I have a place I can sleep safely, fire, water and a way to get food. While I would love to have a roof I should be mostly good for a while. Biggest problem is this dang HUD with its popup windows, along with these memories that aren’t mine but somehow give me skills.”

I packed up a coal into my fire horn, still not understanding how I knew to use one. So while my memories told me to just grab the coal, I used sticks to move it.

I filled my bag with some of the thinner branches of driftwood and headed back up to my sleeping spot.

While I figured that I had been safe where I was, I didn’t want to roll off, so I took the branches and used them and my axe to build a make-shift wall. I hammered in a few of them to be vertical posts and then used the rest to kind of weave between the posts. It was far from a good job, and I was sure that if anyone saw it, they would laugh.

“Got to hack off some branches for a bed now. No need to be cold and sore again.” I said as I started to the forest with my handaxe.

About when I finished getting everything arranged, I saw that the sun was down and we were moving into twilight. So I ended my time getting ready quickly and used the last of my driftwood to close off my path with a few spiked sticks that I half made and half broke. I figured since I had to jump a few feet to get to the path and then the ledge was less than a foot wide in spots, I should be good, but if not, then I’d feel better with a few sticks pointed at the ledge.

I settled in, and for the last few minutes of light, I started asking myself those questions that keep everyone awake at night. How did I get here, who am I, what was the meaning of this life I have, and lastly, what the heck those messages were that I got when I looked at the books and why the message said I couldn’t read.

First I knew who I was, I was… “Well, that’s odd; why can’t I remember my name?” I muttered.

I looked down at the river before me and started to try to remember my name. “I know who I am, but I don’t know my name,” I grumbled.

It was like it was on the tip of my tongue but not quite there. I could remember working, school, and hiking. I could remember the names of people I worked with and my best friend from college, Kuz, who took me kayaking, but my name was gone.

“Hell, they took more than just the past nine months or so of my memories, they took my name,” I yelled.

I sat and stewed as the light was leaving. My name was gone.

Anytime I thought about a memory where I should remember someone saying my name, it was like my name was overwritten. Even roll call at school, everyone else’s first and last names, mine just blank air and then a pause that was too long. Heck, I could even see people’s lips move for a name, I just couldn’t hear it.

I could remember who I was or at least what I was before waking up in the forest. I was a call center supervisor for a cable company, and a good one at that. That being said, my bosses were dumb micromanagers. When I thought about that job, all I could feel was my heart tense up and just this feeling of loathing.

I could even remember talking with one of the managers who wasn’t that bad on the last day I remembered. I told him that I hated everything. After that, I didn’t remember anything until I was in the forest.

I tried to force my brain to remember something. My name or something from the past few months. The closest I could get was some odd memory of a cool office with lots of books and odd baubles. I had no idea if it was a real memory, an implanted memory to lead me off the right trail, or something I made up on the spot. Right now, I was just nameless and lost.

I started to breathe deeply. I needed to stop my downward spiral. “So they jacked my name, and shoved this other stuff in me. I am getting pop-ups and have what I could only call a health bar. Then there is the skill leveling, and the monsters. This is just like a game. So if I am in a game that means something like VR is going on and there is no way to run from this. If this is all real then I am not on Earth anymore.”

I breathed deep for a few more moments letting my mind take in everything I just said. It was a technique that I had learned in the past. Speak out what is going on and it gets your hearing involved and you can think through it better. It worked well for me sometimes…

“So if this is all some sort of messed up game then there might be an interface or help files. Might even be a log out option.” I whispered as I laid on the branches.

I remembered how hard it was to try to use the books that I couldn’t use. I closed my eyes, thought real hard, and said, “menu, log out, display, help, wiki, status report, progress, testing, stats,?”

That last one got me an eyeful. Popping up in front of me, I saw a Character sheet that I guessed was me, but it was in very small type, like it was zoomed out. I had in front of the sheet a pop-up that said.

Verbose or short?

Like I’d think everyone would do, I said, “Verbose.”

However, once again, nothing happened. So I looked as hard as I could at Verbose and thought Verbose and still nothing, so I looked at Verbose and thought select, still nothing, and then I looked and kind of used my eyes to focus like I was squinting at verbose, and then I got my sheet.

Level:0

——

Name: Arn

Race: Wild Human

HP: 20

SP:30

MP:40

Defense:1

—-

Primary Class: Enchanter*

Secondary Class: Linguist* (Ancient Languages)

—

Strength: 14*

Dexterity: 12*

Intelligence: 8

Willpower: 9

Vigor: 10

Vitality: 10

*Wild Humans have a plus 3 to strength

*Wild Humans have a plus 2 to dexterity

*Wild Humans have a plus 2 to all survivalist and warrior class skills

*Wild Humans have a negative 3 to all Language skills and can not start as the linguist class

*Wild Humans have a negative 1 to all Magic class skills due to low intelligence and cannot start as a enchanter class because of linguistic issues

*Wild Humans all start out illiterate

—

Racial skills

Spear 1**

Survivalist 1**

Tracking 1**

Primary Class

Enchanting 1

Script* NA

Ink Making 1

Etching 1

Power Imbuing 1

Socketing 1

Secondary Class

Ancient Languages* NA

*Due to Wild Human starting restrictions of being illiterate, this skill can not advance until Intelligence is higher than 12

** Racial Bonus for Wild Human, affect levels of all Survivalist class and warrior class skills plus 2

The biggest thing that stood out to me was that I had a name. “Arn?” I asked the world. It didn’t feel right, like it was almost right but not truly right. My tongue didn’t feel right. “Arn. Arn! Are-IN.” Nothing I said or tried seemed like it was the right way to say my name to make it seem correct. Like the name was me but also not how I was used to responding.

Perhaps the name slot was a filler. If I were a test subject, it could be the project name or something like that. I have no idea what it would mean, but that might be right, or it could be my initials. Which still would leave me without knowing my name in either of those two options. While it didn’t truly feel right, it seemed closer, so that was helpful.

I laid down as best I could and looked up at the sky as I listened to the night. The past two days were messed up, but at least I could remember them. I’d been worried that whatever had messed with my memories would have been ongoing, but it appeared, at least for now, that it was done. It felt odd that I was able to do things that I’d not done before. Yet, it also felt nice to be able to take care of myself.

Whatever system this was, it wasn’t perfect since it thought I couldn’t read. I was looking over my skills when I drifted off and got yanked back to awareness by a new pop-up.

By your actions today

You have increased your level in

Survivalist! (level 4)

Hiking! (level 1)

Climbing! (level 2)

Spear! (level 2)

New knowledge has been granted to you!

Spearfishing sub skill unlocked (level 0)

Primitive cooking unlocked (level 0)

Right as I was drifting back off to sleep, I could've sworn I saw two moons in the sky. But, when I tried to focus on where the second one was, clouds moved in, and I couldn't figure out if I was just tired or if it was a second moon.