“Hey, you, are you planning on sleeping all day? Wake up already!”

Sam’s eyes snapped open and he flailed wildly for a few seconds, before the violent confusion of his rude awakening gave way to disorientation. He blinked his eyes a couple of times. He was wet, his cheek stung harshly, and the face of a tall brown-haired girl he didn’t know was peering down at him from above.

“Hey! What the hell was that for!?” Sam glared at the girl as he rubbed at his tender cheek. “What’s your problem?”

Ignoring Sam’s outrage, the girl stood up and dusted her knees where the wet grass had marked her pants. She regarded him for a moment as rain fell on his face before addressing him again: “Well good morning, finally. I don’t suppose you know where we are?”

Sam blinked, an angry retort dying in his throat. “Ah, come again?”

She cocked her head at him. “Well, I assume you didn’t just happen to fall asleep out here in the rain, so the question really shouldn’t have been that strange.”

As she pointed it out to him, Sam turned to take in his surroundings. What was he doing in the grass? He hadn’t fallen asleep outside at some point, had he? Where was he, anyway?

Slowly, he began to sit up, groaning, muscles aching from lying on the uncomfortable, uneven ground, and stopped, struck dumb by the sight that spread out in front of him.

They were on top of a short hill nestled in a deep valley, mountains rising all around them and disappearing in a mass of deep gray rain clouds. Under them a dark green blanket of trees draped across the valley’s floor until he could no longer see the ground. It reminded Sam of the times his dad had taken the family to the Black Hills, back when he’d still been around, but the Hills were much shorter than the mountains surrounding him, and the trees looked all wrong; instead of the omnipresent bull pines, the valley was filled with tall firs and dark spruces, like something from an cartoon Christmas special, or an old Grimm fairy tale.

“I... Uh…” he said lamely, “I… don’t think this is South Dakota.”

The girl snorted. “Well it hardly looks like Paris, and yet here I am.” she commented, looking out at the valley. She did have a faint accent when she spoke. After a moment of thoughtful silence, she shook her head and sighed. “Alright, get up. Let’s go take cover with the others, and maybe once we’re dry we can actually figure this out.”

She spun on her heels and marched off, and Sam had to scramble to his feet to keep up with her, but stopped short and gaped when he found himself faced with what his back had been turned to: massive standing stones formed a ring at the top of the flat hill, like a grand stone crown. The shortest stone must have been at least three times his height, and each of them was intricately carved with symbols and etchings, some too faded by time to be made out as more than faint smudges on the surface of the rock.

The stones were absolutely ancient, maybe thousands of years old. Was this some kind of Indian site? No, no way this could be America without this place having a parking lot or something, and at least some old-timer trying to sell handmade souvenirs to tourists.

And then, though Sam was no expert, the carvings didn’t look Indian to him either. He stepped closer, rubbing the faded symbols with his hand, feeling the roughness of the granite beneath his fingers. No, they looked much more like nordic rune stones, swirling, curved lines all along the length of the rock surfaces, and strange flowing glyphs and sigils from some long-dead alphabet.

Where the hell was he?

“Hey, are you going to just stand out there in the rain?” the girl called at him from the side. “Come on, it’s just here.”

She headed to a small primitive-looking cabin just outside of the ring, crudely built from old logs lashed with frayed rope. Sam hesitated for a second. There was no way this shack was up to any kind of code, the logs were streaked all over with the black lines of old mold and it swayed dangerously in the wind, but the girl’s mention of “the others” and the rain falling down on him and trickling down his shirt made up his mind. He hurried over to the cabin for shelter.

----------------------------------------

The girl was already squeezing water out of her hair when Sam stepped through the short doorway. The Cabin’s small interior had clearly not been designed for people as big as him, and he had to stoop to avoid hitting his head on the low frame. The floor was bare dirt, and thankfully mostly dry despite some water trickling in through the leaky roof. The small interior lacked any adornments except a small window that lacked a pane of glass, a long-broken table and pair of chairs, and a small pile of rotten old firewood stacked in a corner.

“Hey! Sorry we left you outside when it started raining,” a spectacled asian boy stood up from the floor, and smiled broadly up at Sam when he came in. “You were kind of hard to wake up and, uh, I think we’d have had trouble moving you. But it’s alright, since Camille went back to get you! I’m Kaisei, by the way!”

“Uh,” Sam struggled for a moment to catch up with Kaisei’s hurried speech. “Sam, nice to meet you.” He turned to the girl who was still trying to wring the water out of her hair. “And you must be Camille, then. Thanks for getting me, I guess.”

“You’re welcome. But don’t thank me too much, the credit for even spotting you in the tall grass goes to Tasha here.” Sam startled a bit as Camille pointed to a corner of the small hut. He hadn’t noticed the short blonde girl now looking at him with dark, intense eyes. “If she hadn’t, you might still be out there soaking up water and catching the flu.”

“Ah, thank you,” Sam said awkwardly to Tasha, fidgeting under her piercing gaze despite being almost twice her size. Eventually, though, she just nodded at him and turned to look out the window, sticking her hands in the pockets of a shapeless work jacket too big for her.

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“So,” Sam began, looking over the small group. “What… is this place, exactly?”

A moment of silence stretched uncomfortably among the other three, before Tasha broke it. “We don’t know,” she spoke quietly from her spot next to the window without looking away from it, with an untraceable accent in her voice. “We hoped you would.”

“Wh-what?” Sam turned to Camille. “Wait, you said you were from Paris… You mean you were there before?”

“Mh-hmm. Kaisei’s from Tokyo, and Tasha, Saint Petersburg. And you said you were in South Dakota. All of us going about our business, thousands of kilometers apart, and suddenly here we are. I’m guessing you don’t remember how you got here either, right?”

The question made Sam pause. He furrowed his brow as he tried to recall what he’d been doing before he’d arrived here. He was… at the garage, maybe. Leaving? He thought he remembered Wade telling him they were done for the day and to head on home. Had he gotten in his car already? Sam wasn’t sure, but he knew that there was no way he’d have just fallen asleep there, and even less that if he did, he’d just wake up in… wherever this was.

Camille had been studying him intently as he thought, and sighed. “No, I figured you wouldn’t. So the question is, how did four people at four corners of the world instantly get transported to this place that none of us recognize, without any of us even realizing?”

The four of them stood in silence for several moments.

“Do you think we got kidnapped, maybe?” Sam spoke up. “Like, I don’t know, someone drugged us and brought us here?”

Camille shook her head. “But why? None of us know each other, and the resources you’d have to spend to get four random people from four corners of the world and bring them all to this spot before any of them could wake up… it doesn’t make sense.”

“Well, that, and also none of us has jetlag.” Kaisei noted. After a moment of blank looks, he crossed his arms. “Well, it’s true! Just think about it! South Dakota is almost on the opposite side of the world from Japan, my night would be your day. Actually, wait a second..." he fumbled in his pocket and took out an old phone with a bright plastic case and a broken screen. "Yeah, it is supposed to be night, for me, according to my phone. Even if I’d slept ten hours, I should be completely thrown off my circadian cycle. But I'm feeling fine!”

“Uh, I guess?” Sam began uncertainly, “but what does that mean, exactly?”

“Uh, well, I don’t know,” Kaisei admitted. “I guess we could have been drugged for several days... No, no, wait, that doesn't make sense, I don’t feel hungry or thirsty. Maybe... we were fed with IVs or something?”

“Or something,” Camille deadpanned. “Still doesn’t answer why someone would go to all the trouble. That sounds like a lot of resources to spend on four random people to just strand them in the middle of nowhere.”

The silence stretched out as they all thought. Rain continued to fall outside, and drip through the cabin’s shabby roof.

“Well I don’t know about you,” Kaisei said suddenly, “but I’m freezing! Let’s try to start a fire. I saw the thing they do on TV where they rub the sticks together, I bet we can try that with these!” he indicated the pile of logs and tinder stacked up against the cabin’s shoddy wall.

Camille snorted, and drew a bic lighter from the pocket of her pants. “Use this instead. I think you’ll have an easier time of it,” she said, tossing it at him.

Kaisei fumbled for a second as he caught it, then looked at the bright red lighter in his hand. “Oh, right. That works too, I guess.” He knelt back down to his pile of sticks and with Sam’s help, a small campfire soon crackled on the floor of the hut, the four wet strangers gratefully warming and drying themselves next to its flames.

They sat in silence for a while, shivering when the occasional gust of wind snaked its way through the ramshackle walls and slid over their wet backs, but eventually Camille spoke up again. “Well, we’re not going to freeze to death, so what now? None of us know how we got here, so we may as well forget that for a bit and focus on something more important: none of us has no idea where we are, and none of our phones is getting any reception or GPS signal. Unless..." she looked at Sam expectantly. He took out his phone and checked, but just as Camille had said, nothing.

"Figures." she answered when he told her. "So, to sum up, no data, no reception, no GPS, and no idea where we are. How do we get out of here?”

“Usually in a situation like this,” Sam began, “you’re supposed to stay put and wait for a rescue. Moving around makes it harder for a search party to find you.”

“Is there going to be a search party?” Tasha asked quietly, without taking her eyes off the fire. “We don’t know how we got here. How will people know to look for us here?”

A moment of uncomfortable silence followed her words. Camille broke it. “She’s right. We can’t just wait and hope people know we’re here. Why would they? We need to get out there and find a city, or a town, or even a bus stop or something. But we can’t just stay here.”

“Wait,” Sam said, “have you ever trekked through a real forest like what’s down there? You don’t just walk through that in jeans and sneakers. It’s constant physical effort, and it’s exhausting. If we run around without a plan, we’ll just exhaust ourselves, and we don’t have any food or water, or any idea where to go. Do we even have a guarantee that there’s someplace we could get to? How would we find it?”

“So what?” Camille glared at him, raising her chin defiantly, “Are you saying we should just cower in here and wait until either someone stumbles upon us and rescues us or we starve to death? What are you, chicken?”

Sam’s cheeks grew warm, and he raised his voice despite himself. “Now look here a moment, I…”

“Quiet,” Tasha snapped. Sam whirled towards her, but stopped himself when he saw she wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were on the door.

“What is it?” He asked, in a more subdued tone.

“There’s something outside. An animal.”

Sam paused. “What, like, a dog or something?”

She shook her head. “A wolf, I think. It’s big.”

Silence stretched like a bowstring among them. Sam’s eyes and ears strained. They found nothing but the sound of raindrops on wood. He tried to control his breath, deep in, deep out, recalling the exercises, but a branch snapped outside. His heartbeat sped up, like a drum in his chest.

Finally, Kaisei couldn’t take it anymore. “H-how big…” he began.

A great weight slammed into the shack’s door like a giant hammer, and the whole unsteady structure shook violently. By some miracle, the door held. Outside, Sam caught a glimpse of flashing teeth and of a lot of fur.

“Holy…” he managed to gasp out before a resonant howl cut through the air and deep into his bones.

Holy shit.