SFC Lance Raven’s day was not going well. The only vehicle left at the Armory wouldn’t start, and he was tasked with transporting the “ordinance” (artillery simulators, flares, smoke, etc.) to Camp Turkey-crap (not its real name). Thus he was doing a technical no-go and had boxes of pyro stacked in the back seat of his personal truck. Normally he would be driving plus-or-minus 5 mph of the speed limit. Due to the broken down vehicle issue, he was running late and was speeding down the highway from Plainsville to Springtown doing 75 in the 60. Suddenly out of nowhere a stomach churning, spiraling anomaly appeared in the highway right in front of him. Slamming on the brakes, the last thing Lance recalled was one of the crates from the back seat slamming into the back of his head.
As the darkness receded and the pounding in his head intensified, Lance began doing an assessment. Step one, he began checking the area for danger. His truck was upright, stalled out, with no smoke or fire. Next he moved on to five meters out. No downed power lines or approaching vehicles he could see. He was sitting in the middle of a clearing. Twenty five meters out he could see an unbroken treeline. He paused in confusion. He could see no sign of the highway in front, to the sides, or in his mirrors. Unable to see beyond the treeline, Lance forewent trying to do a 100 meter scan. Finally he began his first aid self-assessment. Beginning at his head and working down through his neck, body, and then extremities, Lance started checking for bleeding, broken bones, and dislocations.
Finding no injuries except an egg-sized bump on the back of his head, Lance grabbed his cell-phone out of his cargo pocket. He needed to call 911 and report the accident, and then reach out to his chain-of-command. The First Sergeant was not going to be happy about this. An on-duty accident in a POV (privately owned vehicle) loaded with military pyrotechnics, not to mention the delay in training for the company’s troops. Sighing Lance swiped the screen on his phone and dialed *55 to reach out to the Highway Patrol’s emergency dispatch. After waiting several seconds with no ringing or error messages Lance looked at his phone’s screen and saw that he had no service. This was unusual, he had never experienced a dead zone anywhere along this route.
Lance was worried. First, he couldn’t see any evidence of the usually busily traveled highway from the driver’s seat of his truck. Then, he had no phone service where he had never had any drop in signal before. Opening up the center console, he reached in and pulled out the headlamp he kept in the truck. He could see a faint lightening of the sky over some of the treeline, but it was still too dark to navigate the unknown terrain without some light. Opening the driver side door, he stepped out of his truck to get his bearings and see if he could figure out where he was, how to make contact with help, and then inform the First Sergeant of his situation. As he reached up to turn on the headlamp, he caught sight of unusual lights swirling across the sky. It resembled the traces of fuel and oil slick on water puddles in a parking lot. He hadn’t heard of any predicted solar storms, coronal ejections, or flares, but thought that maybe solar radiation was affecting his phone signal, and maybe even what he thought he saw in the highway that sparked this entire disaster. Resolved to get things sorted, Lance turned on the headlamp and made a quick circuit around his truck looking in all directions. He still couldn’t see any evidence of the highway, and disturbingly there was only about 10 feet of torn up tire tracks in the vegetation behind his truck before everything went back to looking like a normal Midwestern meadow. Lance had been headed westbound when things turned into a cluster, and the faint light over the treeline was behind his truck adding weight to his belief that that was east. Opening the hunting and navigation app he had on his phone, he looked to see where he had ended up in relation to the highway. The app loaded and proceeded to spin the updating location wheel on the screen. Finally after about five minutes of waiting, the wheel stopped and “No Satellite Data Available” displayed on the screen. With a muttered curse, Lance closed the app, put his phone to sleep, and put it back in the pocket on his shoulder. Automatically completing steps one and two of the OODA cycle (Observe and Orient), it was now time to consciously Decide which direction to head for help. Did he wind up on the north side of the highway, or the south side? With no lights or noise indicating vehicular travel, he did a mental coin toss and decided to head south. Lance turned, unlocked the camper on the back of his truck, and reached in and secured his 9mm Beretta and shoulder holster from the lock box he kept bolted just inside. “Better safe than sorry” he thought to himself. Acting on his decision, Lance began striding toward the treeline to the south.
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With the clearing being only about 50 meters across, it didn’t take Lance long to reach the woodline. Up close, he noticed a slight break in the trees and a narrow winding trail only about three to four meters wide. Deciding this looked promising, but not willing to risk getting his truck with its camper stuck or damaged in the trees without more information, he headed in to reconnoiter on foot. As he entered the trees, he noticed a change in the background noise. He hadn’t been focusing on it and only now realized that he was hearing several different insect chirps and buzzes that he wouldn’t expect to be hearing in the middle of January. Focusing on the sounds, Lance identified what he thought might be crickets and cicadas, but there were other clicks and vibrations that he wasn’t familiar with. Making a mental note to ponder this more later he continued up the trail hoping to find the highway or other signs of civilization. He hadn’t traveled more than another few minutes when he heard a screech from off to his right. What looked like a green tinged possum jumped out of a tree, hit the path in front of him, and scurried off into the woods to his left. Turning to watch as the odd looking animal hurried away, he failed to see what he would soon learn had actually caused the screech and the reason the possum was running. Suddenly he was struck hard in the left shoulder and back accompanied by a burning sensation. Years of combatives training and martial arts allowed him to roll with the force of the blow and come up to a kneeling position. Fighting through the pain in his back and arm, he reached across and drew his pistol. Scanning around himself, he saw the ugliest coyote he’d ever seen. It was a blended grey and orange with spots and long hair tufts on its ears, and it was hissing at him. Hissing?!! As he acquired a good sight pattern on it, it let out a horrific scream between a child crying and a cat caught in a fan belt and leaped toward him. Double tapping the trigger, he drilled it twice center mass, and it dropped to the ground just a foot in front of him. As he stared at the creature that appeared to be more a cross between a coyote and a lynx than any animal he knew, he whispered to himself “great, Isekai’d by my own truck”. Nudging the beast, it snarled once before relaxing into apparent death. Suddenly an almost gaseous looking swirling light similar to what he had seen in the sky started rising from the corpse. Part of it drifted off up into the atmosphere while a portion started swirling faster and suddenly flashed toward him striking him straight between the eyes. Jerking away in apprehension, he realized he felt no impact. Taking a deep breath, wondering what was going on, he was again startled as he heard, saw, and FELT “ENERGY THRESHOLD REACHED, BEGINNING ACTIVATION…” just before darkness once again claimed his consciousness.