“I don’t think that’s going to hold.”

“Damnit, we’ve been at this for half the day!” John made as if to kick the shoddy looking structure, but stopped himself at the last moment. Instead he threw his hands up into the air and shouted obscenities. Alan just watched him for a moment, before gently pushing the much more muscular man aside and taking to the work.

“I need like, ten times as much grass. Braid it into ropes at least ten feet long, Mr. Weaver.” John grumbled and went about doing as he was asked. Alan wanted to grumble too, he was having to step in and do manual labor. Engineers were paid to think most of the time and do some of the time. Hell, isn’t that what college was about? Making your thinking time so much more valuable than your doing time that the doing part had to be damned worth it? What the hell, he decided he deserved some grumbling too.

“Goddamned HR courses should cover basic survival skills. Isn’t keeping your people alive after unexpected teleportation to an abandoned nudist wilderness in the strategic handbook? What kind of shoddy professors did you have that you never learned how to make a lean-to structural sound and watertight from mostly rotten logs and lots and lots of grass…” John raised an eyebrow, but stopped his own muttering, which seemed to have centered around the idea of how HVAC Engineers were worthless when it came to building structures that had no air conditioning.

An hour later, having doubly and triply reinforced each of the joints, lashed multiple sticks and logs together to form bundles held together with copious quantities of braided grass rope to form bigger logs where they had found none suitable, they had the skeleton of a lean-to large enough for them to squeeze into. There only seemed to be two or three hours of sunlight left. Aaron and Lucy were out looking for things to eat. Aaron was trying his hand at catching fish with a somewhat crappy, but seemingly serviceable grass net or basket that John had managed to weave. Lucy had collected a lot of rocks for throwing from the riverbank and was hoping to find some sort of animal they could hunt.

John and Alan had stayed to work on the shelter, the most important part. It had not been going well. Initially they felt that despite being a fairly thin section of trees alongside the river, there would be plenty of fallen wood. As it turned out, there wasn’t. Either because the river clearly flooded during parts of the year, which may or may not be soon or having recently passed, thus washing away most of the wood, or because the wood that wasn’t washed away seemed to be rapidly broken down by one of a half dozen different species of wood mushrooms.

Alan’s parents had been Permies of a sort, professionals but also dabbling in homesteading. Growing mushroom logs was one of the things they had frequently done. The native trees seemed to be fairly soft wood and broke down very quickly under the mycelial assault. He suspected that even without periodic flooding keeping the logs damp longer, the wood would not season before the fungus got to it. So it was mostly smaller, recently broken and even fresh branches and sticks that they had to work with.

At least they’d found a good pair of trees to base the lean-to against, featuring a natural crevices where the trunks had bifurcated early in their development while being close enough together to make more of a pup-tent than a true lean-to. It would be a fairly short structure and they’d have to be on hands and knees inside, but warm and dry was warm and dry. While John had gone about trying to assemble the initial form, Alan had begrudgingly dug a series of shallow trenches to redirect any rainwater around the structure instead of right through it, using some thicker bits of wood that were sturdy enough to survive the work. All of the trees were on at least light slopes and none of the rocks were even large enough for this purpose… not they weren’t all just along the river’s edge anyways.

At this point in the structure, they decided to go ahead and start trying to fill in the open sides. It was currently a thick bundle of sticks bound by grass forming the spine, with a series of lateral angled stick bundles to provide structure to the sloped front and back. They managed to make a sort of low arch for the ‘entrance’, bracing it against the spine. Now that the skeleton was in place they went about making smaller grass braids to string horizontally between each of the ‘bones’, making a grid with which to lay more grass onto.

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Then they worked from the bottom up, so that any rain sluicing from the higher up layer wouldn’t slip down at the seams. Lucy returned bearing some possibly edible things that looked like small shriveled beets and stubby carrots, then set off to fetch Aaron and scrub them in the river. John and Alan barely managed to get the last layer, the largely heaped ridgeline, held down by using just blades of the waist-high grass as ties, to fasten it to the layers below. They made it as tight as possible. Alan had little hope it would stop a good rain, but it was going to be a whole lot warmer inside.

Warmth was important. Even though they’d built up quite a thick layer of grasses tied onto themselves as ‘clothes’, it was getting downright cold. Above freezing probably, but close to it was the universal sentiment. They had gathered a fair bit of burnable pieces of wood that were useless in the structure. Aaron returned sporting fish!

“Not fish, a fish. One. It’s two or three pounds of meat though. I was able to do a decent job of cleaning it with a sharp rock. I noticed that a lot more fish started investigating as I was washing it out, so I ended up burying some of the guts and the head to try and use as bait tomorrow.”

“How did you catch it? Did the net work out?” Of course John wanted to know about the net. He wanted to be good for more than just braiding ropes.

“Yes and no… the net didn’t really hold up too well, but I was probably a bit too rough on it in my excitement when I almost caught one. I ended up making a trap by moving rocks around so a fish could swim into a little inlet and not easily find their way out. That worked a little, I found worms and grubs and put them into the trap. Then I just dropped a rock on the fish. Took me almost ten tries before I got this one. It mostly got trapped in the mud. I pulled it out by the tail and smacked it on a rock, then cleaned it up. That was right before Lucy found me.”

Lucy and John looked ravenously at the fish. Alan noted that Lucy had managed to clean the scraggly roots though.

“Ain’t y’all vegans?” John shrugged and Lucy stared him down.

“I’m starving and that’s energy we’ll need to survive. Don’t give me shit about it.” Oof, Alan realized he’d stepped in a mud-pie there. Was he the asshole? Redditors don’t even need to weigh in. Yeah, yeah he was. Besides they had never once given him a hard time for eating poorly or eating meat.

“Sorry Lu… I was a dick to say that. We’re all hungry and tired and concerned that the river water is going to give us the shits.” He got a mixture of nods and eyerolls, but the tense moment passed and they went about the next most difficult task. Making a fire to cook the food.

So it turns out… making a fire sucks. Rather that they sucked at it, really badly. None of them had been ‘scouts’ or any such thing. Lucy and John and Aaron all ‘hiked’, but even when they went ‘backpacking’ they had like a hundred different things with multi-tool functions that included lighting a fire.

The night was quite dark, with no moon apparent in the sky. The stars were starts. None of them were that familiar with constellations beyond the obvious ones, but the Big Dipper and Little Dipper weren’t visible. That didn’t mean a whole lot, they could have been teleported to the opposite side of the planet or something. In the dim starlight, thankful for the cloudless sky, they shivered and clacked rocks against other rocks hoping to find something that sparks. They rubbed sticks together between rocks, or just onto other sticks. They tried and tried and…

They ate the damned fish and roots raw. Hunger won out and the fire simply would not be. The water was icy cold and there didn’t seem to be any parasites or other issues, so they risked it. These kinds of decisions might very well result in their deaths, some part of them knew. Still, they were city people from the twenty-first century and their version of ‘hardcore backpacking’ involved digging a hole for your poop and limiting the duration of your trip by the amount of toilet paper you could hike in and out. That and no cellular data service.

Wasn’t that already asking a lot?

“The worst part was the skin. It was so chewy.”

“Ugh, don’t talk about it John, I don’t want to get parasites and still throw it up. Then I’ll just be hungry and infested.”

“Lu… that is probably going to give me nightmares. Anyways, why does John get to snuggle? I’m getting cold.”

“Uh…” Her response to Aaron was bound to be worth keeping their ‘secret’ all of this time, Alan felt. He listened in anticipation… “You should snuggle with Alan?”

“…hmmm, he does have all that extra insulation. Alright buddy!” Abruptly Aaron rolled over away from Lucy and John’s rather tight cuddle and wrapped Alan up in a chest to chest bear-hug-cuddle.

“Aaron. This is very close.”

“Dude, I’m cold. Aren’t you cold? You’re right by the wall.” The truth was that he was cold. Damnit.

“Fine. Whatever. Goodnight Aaron.”

“Goodnight Alan.”

“Goodnight Jocy.”

“G- what the hell is Jocy?”

“Your couple name. You know, since you two are….”

“Oh, ha ha! I see. Funny! That would make you two Aarlon! Or maybe Alron?”

“We should definitely be Alron, it rolls of the tongue better.”

“…shut-up Aaron, don’t agree with them!”

“Goodnight Alron!”

“If I didn’t love all of you more than my own family…”