Chapter 2

It took the mysterious figure a few tense seconds to wheeze out a response.

“Unggh… Who… What…?” The voice was distinctly feminine.

“I’m… Stella…” I rasped. My voice was audibly a masculine baritone. Surprising…

“Stella?” the other person said. “Like… my g… girlfriend? Wait… My voice… It…”

Oh my god, is that Jake? “Jake?” I asked. “Is… Is that you?”

“That’s… my name…” the person said. It was Jake! “Oh… It hurts…”

I decided to get to the bottom of my injury. I attempted to sit up and almost blacked out from fresh spasms of agony. Screaming through clenched teeth, I gave up after only a few seconds of attempting it. Oddly, I didn’t feel the wetness of blood, or really anything out of place. The pain seemed to be just that - there didn’t seem to be any cause of it. I gave it a few more moments and tilted my head to look down my body, an action that was only marginally less painful than before.

To my shock, there was no visible blood, gore or other injuries on my body. To my even greater shock, I was wearing strange clothes. My sweatshirt and jeans were gone, replaced by a maroon tunic unbuttoned to reveal a white undershirt. My legs were clad in puffy pants striped purple and green, like a rich guy out of a Rennaisance painting. I could see the ends of black shoes on my feet.

I reached up my hand to touch my face, and I recoiled when I found a lumpy, fuzzy mass coating my jaw and neck. It took me a few moments to get that it was facial hair. Like, not just fuzz - a full-ass beard! This is getting more and more stranger by the moment - so I died, now I’m in a man’s body? Why? This makes no sense!

As I pondered this oddity, I could feel the pain in my body begin to recede. I sighed in contentment as the stabbing in my abdomen shrunk into a dull throbbing. Finally, I was able to sit up with minimal pain.

I ran my hands around my head, neck and torso. I seemed to have well-developed muscles and broad shoulders, like a low-end athlete. Reaching downwards, I quickly confirmed that my new body was, in fact, male.

A dopey grin appeared on my face. I’ve got some new anatomy, huh? I’d never really considered what it would like to be the opposite sex before, but now that I was, possibilities flashed before me.

Stop it, I chided myself. I’m in the middle of the goddamn jungle with another person. I think it’s Jake… Did the same thing happen to him? Did we both swap genders? I shakily pushed my hand into the ground and attempted to stand up. It was covered with spongy moss, and I winced when I pushed against a pebble embedded into the green carpet. Eventually, I got to my feet and looked around.

Aside from the blonde woman clad in the white garment I assumed was Jake, my vision was a sea of green. Verdant shrubs, grass and other plants lay strewn around the ground, protruding from a carpet of moss. Tall trees were packed closely together outside of the small clearing we were in - some of them looked like palm trees, others looked like birch trees but with diagonal red stripes that made them look like candy canes. They weren’t plants I recognized. Bright sunlight showed through the gaps in the foliage, dappling the lush floor with bright patches. The sound I’d initially assumed was coming from terrifying beasts actually was birdsong. The songs of hundreds of birds rang out in a chaotic symphony, calling to each other. The whole sight was quite beautiful, like something out of a nature documentary.

I quickly pulled my gaze away from the majestic view and rushed over to the person’s side.

“Jake?” I asked, bending next to her. Him? Him, I guess for now.

“Ungh… S… Stella?” the person said. “It’s… me…” He turned to me and I got a good look at his face. Jake appeared to have transformed into a fair woman in her early thirties. Her golden hair fell down in straight waves, framing a sharp, angular face that many men would find attractive, I guess. The face’s dominant features were piercing grey eyes that gave off an air of confidence and determination. The torso was short, somewhat scrawny and stick-like, and I was given the impression that whoever it had been before, they hadn’t eaten for a while. The garment was a white, ornate, dress-like robe, something you’d expect an ancient Roman noblewoman to wear.

“I’m here, Jake,” I called, extending a hand. “Let’s get up.” Jake didn’t really need my help, but he grabbed my hand anyway and I rapidly pulled him to his feet.

“Thanks, Stella,” he said. His (her?) new voice was soft in tone and sort of scratchy, kind of like Professor Flint back home. She’d taught Composition back when we were first-years and she’d got me into writing and reading for pleasure. He rubbed his forehead and touched his hair. “Damn, Stella! What happened?”

“What do I look like?” I asked. “I think we both… transformed.”

He looked at me for a second, then nodded. “Kind of like Henry VIII. But you’re more muscular and your face is broader and better-looking. You seem to be about 28 or 29.”

“Henry VIII?” I asked in mock astonishment. “That guy wasn’t exactly the nicest, you know.”

“Don’t worry,” Jake replied. “You’re still my same old Stella regardless of body.”

“And you’re always my Jake,” I replied. “Now, what to do…”

“Well, I think I read somewhere that the first thing to do if you’re stranded is to find civilization,” Jake said.

“How do we do that?” I asked. “We’re stranded in the middle of the goddamn jungle!”

“Yeah…” Jake winced. “Well, people tend to congregate near bodies of water. And if we can find a stream…”

“We can follow it to a river or something!” I exclaimed. “There’s bound to be a village or at least someone near a body of water.”

“Let’s go, then!” Jake said.

Stolen story; please report.

Scant seconds after we began our trek, my mouth began to feel parched. The thirst slowly began to replace the phantom pain that I had been feeling before. I saw drops of dew on some of the plants, but I didn’t want to risk getting poisoned. I hobbled out of the clearing and into the forest, licking my chapped lips. My pants felt much tighter than the garments I was used to, but they were well-tailored and I rapidly got comfortable with their feeling upon my legs. The shoes, however, took some getting used to.

Once, when I was a freshman in high school, I’d worn my mom’s heels to a dance. Almost immediately getting blisters upon stepping onto the floor in the pinchy, wobbly shoes, I’d rushed to the bleachers and spent the rest of the evening downing punch and staring at my phone. I’d never worn heels again. These buckled, black Pilgrim-looking shoes weren’t as wobbly as high heels were, but they definitely were tight and pinched in all the wrong places. More than once, I tripped over my own feet and had to stabilize myself against a tree trunk.

Jake wasn’t faring any better. The material of his dress-robe-thingy wasn’t very stretchy, and whenever he tried to take long strides, the garment caused him to stop in his tracks. His shoes were pretty much the same as mine, but they were colored green instead of black. Like me, he had to lean against the tree trunks for support every once in a while.

“God, how do people walk in these clothes?” he complained after the fourth or fifth time he tripped.

“Practice, I guess,” I said. “Lots of women wear dresses and pinchy shoes back home, and old-fashioned clothes like these are almost always more constricting than modern ones.”

“Still doesn’t answer my main question,” Jake grumbled. “What on God’s green earth are we doing in a goddamn jungle, wearing goddamn Renaissance painting clothes, in the goddamn bodies of opposite-sex people?”

“Guess there’s only one way to find out,” I quipped. “Maybe if we find civilization, they can help us get out of this jungle and back home.”

“I don’t know if we’re on Earth any more,” Jake said. His brow was creased in consternation. “I mean, unless my memory deceives me, we got hit by a fucking tractor-trailer!” He sighed. “I think we’re dead, and we’re in Hell.”

“Why do you think we’re in Hell?” I asked. “We didn’t do anything really bad.”

“Should’ve listened to my aunt…” Jake grumbled. His Aunt Lauren had been a super-fundamentalist - giving her entire income to sleazy televangelists, posting incredibly hateful comments on Tweeter and Facetome, the whole works. Jake’s family had cut ties with her long before we’d gone to college, but the memories of her legendary assholishness had never quite gone away. “I knew I was doing something wrong by not going to church… Should’ve given money to that Pastor Sanderson…”

“Hey!” I exclaimed. “We’re not in Hell. If we were truly being punished for our sins, don’t you think that God would tell us or something? Anyway, this doesn’t look like fire and brimstone. It’s a jungle! Have you ever heard of Hell looking like a jungle?”

He sighed. “You’re right. Spinning out now will only make it worse. Anyway, this doesn’t look too different from Earth jungles.” I was suddenly reminded of those stupid web novels I used to read before bed. In them, the characters got transported to fantasy worlds and went on epic adventures. Did we get isekai’d? Seems logical, but where’s the starter town? Where’s the harem and quests and shit? I don’t think I’ve read an isekai where the guy got stranded in a motherfucking jungle in the ass-end of nowhere before. Anyway, it was irrelevant. All of it was irrelevant. We just needed to find a way out.

It was next to impossible to actually see the sun through the thick overgrowth above us, but after what felt like hours upon hours of hiking , its began to dwindle, casting long shadows upon the verdant brush. We still hadn’t found running water, which was concerning. Aren’t many jungles RAINforests? Well, when it RAINs, doesn’t the water flow downhill? Also, the topography was simultaneously bumpy and flat - thousands of identical mounds lay next to thousands of identical divots. Tepid, greenish water pooled in some of them, looking unfit to even consider drinking.

Eventually, it got so dark we could barely see. “We should stop for the night,” Jake said. “Get some sleep. We can’t continue on in this dark.”

“No shit,” I said. “But we ought to make a fire. Wild animals hate fire, right?”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Let’s find a nice, flat patch to build it.” Thankfully, a clearing lay not twenty feet away - aside from being slightly bigger, it was nearly identical to the one we’d first appeared in. Fist-sized rocks were scattered around it, like a giant had been playing marbles and abandoned its game for whatever reason.

“Perfect!” Jake said, rushing towards the rocks. “We can make a circle around our fire with these to prevent a forest fire!”

“You sure know a lot about fire-building, huh?” I asked.

“Well, I watched Survivor a few times,” he said. “Picked up a thing or two.”

“You only watched it for the scantily-clad women,” I laughed.

“Well, you watched it for the scantily-clad men,” Jake said. By now, he’d gathered up a full armload of rocks. “How about you go find some dry wood?”

“Sure thing,” I said, turning away as Jake began to place the rocks down. While the tree trunks themselves were covered in damp moss, the low-hanging branches weren’t and I managed to snap a few of them off. I knew absolutely jack about firewood, but they didn’t seem wet to the touch. I also found a few sticks on the ground and added them to my armful.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, I returned to the makeshift camp to find Jake hunched over a now-complete stone circle, clear of moss and plants, around the size of a fire pit. He had two pieces of wood in his hands - one of them was thin and spindly, and the other was about the size and thickness of a hand.

“You got the firewood?” he asked.

“Yup,” I said, depositing the pile near the circle. “Now how do we light the fire?”

“With matches, obviously,” Jake snarked. “You know how abundant those are around here. Flint and steel would also be ideal, but alas. Instead, we use the oldest trick in the book - we use friction.”

“How so?” I asked. I’d seen something like this before, but I had no idea how it worked.

“You take a spindly piece of wood, and rub it against another piece,” he said, picking up the longer, thicker chunk. He began working at it with his fingernails, attempting to carve a divot in it. “You need to make a long groove in the wood. Anyway, we need some tinder. Can’t have a fire without tinder.”

“What can we use as tinder?” I asked.

Jake pondered for a moment. “Weren’t there a lot of birch trees around here? We can use birch bark…” Without a word, I turned and walked back into the forest. It didn’t take long to find one of those red-striped birch trees, and I peeled part of the outer layer off. When I had an entire sheet of it in my hand, I returned to Jake.

“Good,” he said. “Now watch the magic happen.” He began to move the spindly stick along the grooved one, slowly at first, then picking up speed. As he did so, I piled some of the firewood in a vague pyramid shape within the circle for ease of starting.

Within five minutes, it began to smoke slightly. “Put the birch bark up to the end of the stick,” he said. I gently placed the papery material next to the chunk of wood, withdrawing my hand.

Suddenly, I saw a spark flash in the air, then dissipate. “Damn!” I hissed.

“It’s okay,” Jake said. “It usually takes several tries. Usually takes a lot longer than this, too. Did this body have fire-making experience before?”

As he said that, another spark appeared, drifting onto the birch. Jake grinned, then bent down and gently blew onto the now-smoldering wood. Rapidly, the fire grew until half the papery material was ablaze. Jake quickly placed it onto the wooden pyramid, then stood back.

As I watched in awe, the wood began to catch fire. Jake put more birch onto it, and it quickly turned into a crackling bonfire.

“Well, we made fire,” Jake said with a hint of astonishment. He sighed. “I honestly wasn’t expecting to actually do it!”

“You got lucky, I guess,” I said. As I sat down and watched the crackling fire, all the exhaustion caused by today’s events caught up with me, and I suddenly felt tired.

After putting a few more logs on the fire, Jake yawned and laid down on the mossy ground. “God, I’m tired. I’m going to sleep,” he said.

“Me too,” I yawned, lying down beside him. We didn’t speak as I put my arms around him. His new form was decently muscular, but I felt different, too. I felt bigger and taller as I hugged him tight. As I drifted off, the sounds of wild animals echoed at the end of my hearing. I felt safe and warm, though. I had Jake and the fire. After all, what could get through them?