“Mate, get off me,” Max groaned groggily, keeping his eyes closed.
It didn’t work.
The familiar prickliness of his neighbour’s cat’s coarse tongue grated as it continued to lap away at his right cheek.
Max was used to it, but that didn’t make it any less irritating. Unfortunately, it was the price he had to pay for leaving the window of his small central London flat open all night. He sometimes considered keeping it shut, but with it being July and the flat having no air conditioning and a low ceiling, it was a daily choice between being manhandled by a fat cat or melting.
He chose to be manhandled every time.
“I haven’t got any leftover chicken balls for you this morning, Larry,” he told the cat, his eyes still closed. “Besides, Bonkers Brenda will flip her lid if I give you any more junk food. You know she did three years for battering her ex-husband before she got you from the shelter, right? She’s told me you’ve got strict orders from the vet to lose half a stone by the end of the month, and I’m not prepared to take a beating for you.”
He continued to lie there with his eyes shut, feeling even worse about waking up for work than he usually did and realising he had just had an unnecessarily long one-way conversation with an animal.
Is this what his life had become?
Thirty-two with only a spoilt ginger cat for company.
It wasn’t even his cat.
He had no girlfriend. No interest from any of the women who were around him daily. Heck, he was lucky if he got a reluctant smile from the sales assistant behind the counter of the newsagent below.
Not that he blamed them.
Eleven years of being sat in a cubicle for eight-and-a-half hours a day answering complaints from unhappy house insurance customers had left him with a prematurely arched back, varicose veins, and a sallow complexion. Not to mention an appalling lack of muscle.
When he’d gotten the job, he’d sported a bit more of a desirable shape. He’d spent his childhood exploring the wilderness around the rural home he grew up in just outside of London with his younger brother James, and the wooden-sword-fighting and climbing of trees they would fill their days with had kept him fit and healthy. But as an adult, years of having just an hour or so of spare time after each long day in the office, given that he had to ride two tubes each way, had resulted in him usually choosing the empty dopamine hit of a quick takeaway and a session on his favourite video game over doing any outdoor activities or any sessions in a gym.
He might have felt better about his life if he had had a solid set of friends, but if he was honest with himself, he didn’t even have that. Sure, he’d join his colleagues for drinks every now and again, but he’d never felt like he truly fitted in with them, and more often than not, he would find himself the butt of their jokes. Of course, they’d always brush it off as playful banter, but Max got the sense there was more to it than that.
He had always been a bit of a lone wolf throughout school and college. The only true friend he’d ever had was James. But his brother was gone now.
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To this day, Max still had nightmares in which he would relive the moment the wooden balcony of their treehouse collapsed underneath them when they were play-fighting, and they plummeted into the river below. He had tried to hold on to James; he had held on so tight he had dislocated his shoulder. But the river was notoriously fast-flowing. There was nothing else he could have done to stop the current from pulling James under. That’s what he had told himself all these years, anyway. That’s what he had to keep telling himself.
God, he missed his little bro.
Pull yourself together, Max, he thought, and realised the darned cat was still licking.
“Oh, come on,” he complained, swatting it off as if it were some giant fly.
But as the animal scrambled away, he realised something didn’t feel right about his arms.
There was material on them.
Was he wearing his suit? Why was he wearing his suit in bed?
Come to think of it, his mattress felt strange too. It had never been a particularly comfortable mattress, being a cheap one filled with metal springs, but today it somehow felt more spongy than it did springy.
Should his alarm have already gone off? What time was it?
He opened his eyes.
Instead of seeing the crinkled plaster of his flat’s water-damaged ceiling, he was looking at… a blue sky.
What the…?
He blinked a few times to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him, but there was no mistaking it. He was staring up at a vast, cyan sky filled with white, pillowy clouds.
Where was he?
He lifted his arms and goggled at them.
He was wearing his suit.
Beginning to freak out, he propped himself up. He wasn’t in his bed, or any kind of bed at all. At least not a man-made one. He was on a bed of lush green grass in some kind of forest clearing.
Max realised something then - the air was crisp and fresh. That had to mean he was no longer in central London. The city had its fair share of parks and green areas, but the pollution was so bad even those had air about as fresh as a 90s Bingo hall.
He had to be miles away from the city.
But how did he get there?
He tried to remember going to sleep, but he couldn’t. In fact, the last thing he could remember was being sat in his office cubicle in the middle of the day waiting for the little light on his work phone to indicate the next call from an unhappy customer.
He began to feel panic rising in his chest.
How much time had he lost?
They did something to me, he thought. The jokers in the office must have put something in my lunchtime coffee. Something to knock me out. Then they drove me to a forest in the middle of nowhere and dumped me. Brian. I bet it was fucking Brian who orchestrated it.
Max’s floor supervisor had always had it in for him, having been the one who had found it hilarious to loosen the screws on his desk chair causing it to fall apart when he sat on it, and slip Carolina Reaper chillies into his sandwich on two separate occasions.
Max had had enough of the pranks. When he got back to the office, whenever the hell that would be, he was going to confront Brian and tell him he’d taken things way too far this time. He didn’t care that he might lose his job. He hated it anyway.
Max got to his feet awkwardly.
His bones felt stiff, and his muscles were sore. Had they roughed him up while he’d been unconscious? The sick pricks.
Max could feel his blood beginning to boil at the thought of his coworkers laughing at him as they kicked his comatose body, but then an unrelated thought replaced his anger; if he wasn’t in his flat, then he wasn’t in the vicinity of his neighbour’s cat. What the hell had been licking his face?
Max didn’t have time to contemplate it further, as something incredibly strange happened.
A short piece of music began playing; a sweeping orchestral fanfare that evoked a sense of wonder, like when the hero of a movie unearths a buried treasure, or they find a magical portal of some kind. As strange as it was to hear music in such a remote location, even stranger was that it wasn’t coming from anywhere in the surrounding area, but somehow from inside his own head.
Accompanying the music came a burst of golden light that left behind a few lines of shimmering text, floating in the air in front of him but moving with his line-of-sight, as though it was part of an internal HUD; the kind of thing a player would experience in a video game:
New Location Discovered!
Alryn Forest
+1 Exploration Orb
“What… the… fuck?”