I woke up with immense pain in my chest, and only slightly lesser pain around the back of my skull. Trying to reach out and examine my injuries, I noticed I was bound, with my own silk rope, no less.

“What in the Hell…” I groaned. There was a shuffling sound, and a half-lit gloom of the hut produced a panther that pounced on me and clawed at my throat.

“Ack!” was all I could utter, before the image cleared, and the panther turned out to be human after all, though no less dangerous-looking.

It was a menacing, wiry-muscled woman clad in nothing more than some mud.

Her eyes reflected back the candle-light in a way that made them all the more resembling the amber gaze of a cat.

“Who are you?? Whadda fuck is going on?!” she growled at me, and before I could answer, shook me like I was a wet rag, which did wonderful things to my pained chest and clearly informed me I had a busted rib. “Call off your dogs! They almost killed us!”

“Wha…?” I muttered. “What dogs? Oh…” the fog of concussion seemed to fade, even if the pain did not. “The otters. Did they harm you? They are very territorial…”

“Territorial my arse! They wanted to eat Gordo here-” she pointed at a sleeping man, wrapped in bloody bandages. “Call them off!”

“Ah, I can ask them, I think? They’re not my pets, more like wild animals that tolerate me.” I tried to rise but failed. “Can you please untie me? Uhh… I think you cracked my rib…”

“Serves ya well for bursting in like that, scaring the shite outa us.” Her menacing gaze was replaced by amused pity, when she hauled me up and untied me.

“Well, excuse me,” I said, a bit miffed, “but this is my home we are in, my supplies you are using, and,” I pointed vaguely in the direction of the river, “my raft you stole. I’ve spent days looking for you, risking my life at it. If not for me and the stuff I left for you, you’d be all dead. So how about a tiny bit of gratitude, and a proper introduction? Im Jack. Well, Jacek actually, but nobody can pronounce it properly.”

Two more shadows rose from the corner and turned into a pair of young women. One was limping along on a crutch, the other, a smaller one, was covered head to toe in cuts and river mud.

“We are sorry,” the small one said. “I stole boat. Not find owner. Need it fast. Need to save sister and friends. I am Nata, this sister, Sveta,” she pointed at the limping one, “this Candace, she is boss”.

“Boss? Oh, I do not doubt that.” I said, massaging my bruised chest. “So, Nata, you are the daring pirate that stole my raft? And sailed all the way back here? Quite a feat!”

“Flattery will not get you anywhere, boyo,” Candace said. “We still want answers. And food. Bandages as well. And call off the otters. But answers, first.”

“Ok, ok.” I gestured placatingly. “First and foremost, remember that I'm human just as you are, and in this place, it means we are on the same side because just about every other fucking thing is against us,” I saw her nod.

“Second, I have absolutely no idea what’s going on, why we are here, where is here, or what all of it even means. All I know is that I woke up in the woods, naked as a newborn baby, about eighty-seven days ago, and managed to not die yet. I'm pretty sure this weird place is not our Earth, or maybe even our universe, because there are a lot of impossible shenanigans going on in this place that defy science.” I saw them deflate after hearing my words. They clearly expected some explanation from me, which I could not give.

“Look, if you have any lingering doubts that you will somehow go back home, or be rescued, or return to civilization, lose them now. This is it, we are stuck here. But,” I added, seeing the look on their faces, “I managed to carve a little bit of civilization for myself here, and I’d love to share it with you, if you promise not to stab me again. There is some… stuff I need to show you, something that will help us survive, but you won’t believe me until you see it with your own eyes. Oh, and I also found another guy. A professional soldier, he is downriver from us, in the woods, looking for you right now. Between his skills and my supplies, you’d be safe…ish I guess. What's up with your friend?” I pointed at the sleeping figure. “Is he?...”

“He is fine,” Candace said with an emphasis that brooked no disagreement. “He was bitten by a hyena, and lost a lot of blood, but we managed to patch him up. We used up all your blankets and shirts for bandages though, to keep the wound clean.” She sent me a pleading look, and I read the subtext. The guy was not ok, most likely dying from sepsis, but she did not want the girls to know, at least, not yet.

“May I…. ?” I moved towards the sleeping man. She did not stop me, but she tensed when I lifted the bloodstained blankets of the man’s stomach, to reveal a nasty wound across his side. It was stitched with silk thread, but the stitch was not holding well. Dark blood and pus were dripping all over his flank, and soaking into the bedding. His skin was hot to touch and angry red welts were spreading away from the wound.

“I…I think this needs proper cleaning. I might even come up with some disinfectant, but I’ll need your help with it.” I turned to the door, and gestured away from the man, whom I hastily wrapped in the covers again. “But first things first. We are going to walk out of that door, together.”

“You cannot be fucking serious, mate. These things almost ate us! They were all over us the moment we landed here.” Candace held the door shut. I gently pulled her hand away, without using any force, or establishing any eye contact. It struck me momentarily how much like wild animals we both were. Technically, I was bigger and most likely stronger than she was, but there was no doubt she was the leader of the pack. I caught myself subconsciously using soft and subservient body language, not unlike what junior otters used with their pack-mother.

“Did any of them actually bite you?”

“No, but they almost did. Before we got through the door, one had my calf in its jaws already. And they were growling like mad.”

“Candace,” I sighed, and gestured placatingly, “If the otters wanted you dead, you would be torn to rags in ten seconds. These things are lightning fast, weigh easily sixty kilos in pure muscle each, and bite through bones as if they were breadsticks. But I have been living among them for months, and they haven’t harmed me. If anything, they protected me, and probably miss-read your arrival as encroaching on our shared territory.”

“Maybe Mister Jack is right,” said the one called Sveta, “We met the otters before. They only sniffed us and not attacked. They do not look dangerous, not like hyenas. They look friendly.”

“Now,” I interjected, “don’t make a mistake, they are very, very dangerous. They are just not likely to attack you unprovoked, as far as I know. But please do not mistake them for harmless, and most importantly, do not harm them yourselves. They are very smart, and very vengeful if you hurt one of theirs.”

I looked at the sleeping man. “Also, they eat their own dead, so might consider your injured friend a future meal. So whatever we do, we should keep them away from him until he recovers.”

“Got it. No furballs in the house.” Candace nodded. “So, what is the plan now? You're gonna introduce us to them?”

“After a fashion.” I paused, thinking. “Look, you’ve got to trust me ok? Just do exactly what I say. No sudden moves, no shouting, no eye contact with them. And most importantly, do not, do not harm them in any way. That spear of yours stays inside.”

“Can’t be bloody serious-” Candace growled.

“Candace, please.” Nata hugged her shoulder.

I slowly cracked the door open, and squeezed out. Immediately a swarm of wet noses slammed into my thighs, with some braver otters standing on their hind legs to bestow smelly kisses on my face, and rub their muzzles all over me. Sveta and Nata followed me close enough to press into my back, with Candace emerging the last and shutting the door. I backed off a bit to press our group into a human heap.

“Alright. Everybody stay cool. Get down on your knees, slowly.” They did as told, though I could sense their apprehension in the tautness of their muscles. The otters surrounded them, but instead of rubbing their noses on them, they undulated their necks like angered snakes, and emitted high-pitched growls.

“Now, here comes the weird part. Please, please do not freak out, and follow my lead.” I turned around slowly, and started rubbing my head and neck over Sveta. She froze at first, but soon reached back and started doing the same to her sister and Candace. Finally, I managed to awkwardly slither over them and nuzzle Candace’s neck.

“Mate, that's the weirdest orgy I’ve been to.” She muttered icily. “This better not be some weird fetish-thing of yours, or you get kicked in the bollocks, otters or no otters. ”

“Trust me, I'm not enjoying it either…” I mumbled, rubbing my face all over her ribs. “Also, your armpit smells.”

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She stared daggers at me, so I corrected. ”uh… I mean you have a potent musk which might be useful in this particular situation. And hmm, I think you should, would you mind…”

Her gaze at that point could ignite a nuclear reactor.

“Yes, I will rub my head around your crotch. Try not pecker me in the eye, will ya? Also, you smell as bad as I do.”

Mercifully, at that point the pack collectively decided that our display of mammalian affection was convincing enough. Several younger otters joined in, ramming their noses in our most smelly places, which of course happened to be the places where a sane person would not want an otter’s muzzle to be.

“Fkngg!” Candace muttered. “That damn thing is getting way, way too friendly…”

“Calm down, It’ll get bored and go away.”

“Don’t fucking tell me to calm down! You’re not the one getting an ob-gyn exam from a motherfuckin’ rodent!” She was crouching still, but just about to explode into violent motion.

“Mustelid, not rodent.” I corrected her before I could bite my tongue. “Slowly bend down and nuzzle it away. With your face.”

“What?!”

“Those things don’t understand human hands. Don’t grab them or push them with your hands, or they might bite. Push them away with your head, like this,” I bent down and pressed my face against the silky fur on the neck of the nearest otter. It rubbed its temple against mine, and let itself be pushed away with minimal effort.

Soon, we were all crawling on the ground, rubbing faces with them. Within seconds, we were coated in musk and saliva, smelling like dead fish and tomcat piss. Before the otters were done with us and departed, Nata looked like she was about to gag, and all of us had mortified expressions on our faces.

“I bloody hate otters,” Candace said matter-of-factly, with a haunted look. “And I hate you. Deeply.”

“Noted.”

“I mean it.”

“Of course.”

“The smell. The fucking smell. I reek all over. I can feel it in my bones. I'm going to set myself on fire to get rid of it.”

I saw one otter lingering. The big, spot-bellied female. The one in charge.

“Ok Candace, one more thing. Slowly, super, super slowly, pet its head.”

“Are you bloody serious? You just told us not to paw at those things, you drongo!” Candace hissed at me.

“This one… it's their Queen, or I dunno, their Alpha Female. Big Mamma. She’s in charge. We have an understanding of sorts.”

“She your girlfriend?”

I gave Candace an exasperated look, and gently petted the Alpha on the head. The magnificent beast looked up, and I could swear her black, beady eyes had more wisdom and patient understanding in them than I'd seen in the human faces around me.

Candace crawled next to me, and slowly reached out to the Alpha. Soon, Nata and Sveta joined her, and the otter had a moment of bliss when we all petted and rubbed her behind the ears.

“Ok, this one’s not so bad. Like a big, smart doggo.” Candace sat, cross-legged next to the creature that patiently accepted their affection.

“She is way smarter than a dog. All of them are. Like dolphins. Maybe even like chimps. It makes more sense to think of them as a tribe of weird aquatic people than a pack of wild animals.”

“Furry, smelly mermaids then?”

The Alpha perked up, as if reacting to a sound we could not hear, and slithered away into the reeds, fast like a greased bullet.

“But again, they are still wild in many ways,” I added. “ So be careful, don't frighten them, don’t piss them off, and don’t let them inside the hut. Oh, and don’t feed them or eat in front of them. If you give them even a single snack they become impossible, and won’t leave you alone. Also, they are the worst thieves, and will steal anything they can lift.”

“Now,” I said, standing up and fruitlessly trying to wipe my saliva-coated hands on my saliva-coated tunic, ”You guys want to see a magic trick?”

“Cool? Just…cool?” I was exasperated. “I showed you something that absolutely violates the laws of the universe, and… that is your reaction?” I pointed at the Duplicators, which were now spitting out fresh silk bandages, creating copies out of nothing, to nobody’s amazement but mine…

“Very useful too!” Sveta said, tossing another bandage roll into the impossible hole in reality. “We can make a lot of useful stuff. Bandages. Food. Clothing, finally!” she pointed at a copy of my tunic that Nata was busy wrapping around herself, turning it into a vastly oversized dress that reached past her knees. “Though it needs tailoring to fit us.”

“Oh calm down Jack. Yes, your Magic Holes are magic. Damn sick impressive, and I, for one, am stocked to be wearing clothes again. Or eating food,” she bit on a nut bar she got from my pantry. It was her twelfth in just so many minutes.

“But the… I mean, do you understand this breaks the Laws of Thermodynamics? This is proof that this world around us makes absolutely no scientific sense!”

“Jack, whaddya take me for, some bimbo from the bush? Of course, I know these things are bloody amazing, or terrifying, or at least very weird. I'm no dag, but I know my science well enough to understand this is profound, I'm just too rooted to care.” She patted me on the shoulder with a taffy-encrusted hand and reached for another energy bar.

“Ya wait till Gordo wakes up. His nerdy noggin is goin’ melt when he sees that. That man loves science stuff more than you do.”

I nodded for her to follow me, leaving the girls by the Duplicators. We went toward the treeline, and way out of earshot, before I asked,

“What do we do about him? You know that he is not doing well. I'm not a doctor, but that wound is definitely badly infected, and If we do nothing he will die of sepsis within days.”

She stared at me, searching for words.

“We did our best. We cleared the wound, and patched it shut. We gave him plenty to drink, in the few moments he was lucid enough. Not sure what else we can do. Less you are a secretly a pharmacist or something, and can whip out a miracle cure…”

I pointed at the tree beside me.

“No miracle cures, but this bark right here is a good source of aspirin, or something much like it. At the very least, it might help with the pain and inflammation, Or…. It can make things worse.”

“We’re not risking it then. Maybe he'll pull through on his own.”

“Candace,” I pleaded. “He will not. He was bitten by a carrion-eating fucking monster and then soaked the wound in swampy water for who knows how long. Infections like that don’t just go away.”

“So, what do you suggest?” She crossed her arms, staring at me intensely. Not with her usual hot anger, but with something much worse, concern, and fragile hope.

“We should make him some aspirin tea. Two, three times bigger dose than I ever used, on account of his greater mass.” She nodded. “And, ” I continued, “we need to cut him open again, let the pus out, and wash the wound. If we don't do it, he will rot from the inside, even if the blood poisoning doesn’t kill him before that.”

“Clean with what? Do you have a stash of iodine? Or at least booze?”

“Neither. But I have plenty of gray soap, and can whip up some very basic potash lye.” I saw her incredulous look, “Yeah, I know that putting soap and caustic lye into someone’s wound is not the best and healthiest idea, it might even make things worse. It might kill him. But if we leave him the way he is, he will die with one hundred percent certainty.”

She sighed and stared at the ground. “Still better than my idea. I wanted to burn the wound out with a hot stone or something. Cauterize it. Like in the movies.”

“I had the same idea, but the wound is so deep and wide we might do more damage than good that way. Plus, most of the wound is surrounded by fat tissue. I'm not sure fat cauterizes all that well.”

She snorted. “Good God, if only he were not a bloody fatass…”

I shrugged and started peeling off the willow bark. “If he were thinner, the hyena would probably have bitten his guts out. Seems like it only tore off his padding without rupturing anything immediately important. The fat probably worked as soft armor and saved his life, as weird as it sounds.”

We moved back towards the camp.

“Think we should talk to the girls? Before we do anything? He’s their friend too, they have a right to dec-”

“No they fucking don’t,” she barked with a voice that allowed no disagreement. “They are little girls still, and this is not a damn democracy.”

I wanted to interject, but she continued.

“It was your bloody idea, but I will make the call. If he lives, great. If he dies ‘cause of our meddling, I devo don’t want it to weigh on their consciences. Only on mine. ”

“But-”

“No butts. I will tell them, and they can assist, help you make the brew, and the lye, and the bandages. But I will make the decision, and you and I will cut him open together, while they will wait outside. We clear on that, Jack?”

I wanted to object, but really, she was right. In another world, I had children of my own, and would not want them to be forced to decide about another person’s life. “We clear.”

“Rapt to hear. Now, ” she said, examining the willow bark I held. “Are you really sure about that thing? It does not look very medicinal to me.”

About a half-a-day later, we sat in front of the hut, our backs pressed against the door. Our hands and forearms were coated in dried blood, and stinging residue of potash lye. Sveta and Nata were in the old smoking tent, working silently sewing shoes that would fit their small feet. They had not spoken a word to us for a while. They did not accept lightly that Candace made the unilateral decision to cut Gordo open, and they let us know in plenty of creative Russian cursing that did not mesh with their delicate elfin features. At one point Nata tried to block the entrance to the hut, and Candace had to slap her over the head to make her let us in.

In the end, we cut him open, poured out several handfuls of pus and rotten blood, and burnt the messy hole with caustic goop. Gordo, despite being at the very end of his strength, shot up and howled in pain. We used that moment to force-feed him the aspirin-tea, nearly drowning him in the process. I did not know the man, but I recognized a look of shocked betrayal on his face.

He must have thought we were torturing him.

And maybe we were, if this all amounted to nothing.

Between the pain, and the chemicals we put inside him, the last of his strength failed and he fell unconscious again. We watched him like hawks, monitoring his breath and heartbeat until, agonizingly slowly, both seemed to improve. His fever dropped, and the red swelling around the side of his torso subsumed. We crawled out of the hut, feeling and looking like bloody zombies, and collapsed out of sheer emotional exhaustion.

“Should…wash up…” Candace rasped, staring at her blood-caked hands.

I gestured impotently towards the river, which was just two hundred steps away, but could just as well be on the other side of the planet.

“Maybe nap first…” I exhaled, and leaned my head on her dirty shoulder. She tried to shake me off, but instead, collapsed herself.

We slept for many hours, despite it feeling like only seconds, when a distressed shout woke us up.

The voice shouted in Spanish.