Chapter 4: Sink or Swim
My country was located in the middle of the Equator. Anyone living here could tell you that the sun was, barring cloudy days, a massive ball of fire hell bent on turning any man or woman dumb enough to brave its heat rays into a sweaty abomination of a person, 365 days a year. Unless the trees were overshadowing your roof, it was the same even if you lived in the middle of a forest. I knew this because my grandparent’s wooden house had gone from “fairly warm” to “hello sauna” after they cut down the trees at the main entrance to prevent them from falling on the roof.
Where I was could not be anywhere close to the Equator, assuming that this planet wasn’t so different from Earth that any attempts at a comparison would be a moot point. The midday sun rays were warm but not scorching. The air was cool in the open and even cooler near the forest because the canopies had absorbed most of the heat. It helped that there was a blue snake of a creek slithering across the trees and undergrowth as well. Birds were singing, flowers were blooming. This could’ve been an idyllic scene straight out of a movie if not for the fact that there was a half-naked man frantically washing his underwear and pants in the creek, desperate to save whatever crumbs was left of his dignity. That half-naked man was me.
I didn’t quite remember how I did it, but somehow I managed to persuade the entity to let me out of the cottage via a series of frantic gesturing and pleading. Once I confirmed that they weren’t going to stop me—unlike the first time, they simply watched me as I circled around them—I immediately left through the open back door. I was hoping to find something like an outhouse or a well to clean myself, and if there was nothing I was even ready to travel all the way to the glassy pond I had seen yesterday. Anything was better than having to wear my soiled pants for even a second longer. Thankfully, it never came to that. The second I spotted the small, winding creek just a short distance away from the cottage, I took off as fast as I could without leaking anything. The rest was history.
As I scrubbed my clothes mechanically, my mood suddenly took a turn for the melancholic. It had always been like this. One moment I was lying on the bed, and suddenly, depression. I was thinking about the fact that I actually had to live in this world from now on. My parents had always been, for the lack of a better word, overprotective. As a result, my independent skills was abysmally lacking in the best case scenario, or outright stunted in the worst. For starters, I had never learned how to cook a meal for myself. Sure, I could cook extremely simple stuff like noodles and rice, eggs and vegetables and so on, but a ten-year-old with extremely reckless parents could’ve done the same thing. I had never picked up any maintenance skills either. While my dad was extremely proficient with it, he would rather do all the work by himself unless he had no choice, and as an introvert I was only too happy to ignore the so-called non-essential stuff in my life. Camping? I couldn’t even jump a drain without my mom nagging me about safety, and that was a couple months ago. I’m thirty-one now.
But now, my lack of skills was going to haunt me. My luck had been exceptional so far. If I had arrived at this world with an empty stomach, I might have been too weak to make it to the cottage. If the cottage was too far away or hidden from view from where my starting position, I would’ve wandered aimlessly until I eventually succumbed to my wound. And even if I hadn’t cut myself, the entity weren’t in their cottages yesterday, so I would’ve wandered into the wilderness after a fruitless search and eventually died for one reason or another. Speaking of wilderness, it was a miracle that there were no predators in the area. I vaguely remembered that some animals could smell blood from miles away, and the smell of blood must have spread at least five times that distance. Or maybe the wind here is different from normal wind. Can’t forget that weird, glassy pond. That reminds me, I should wash my shirt as well, I thought to myself while pulling off my shirt.
Last but not least, if the eldritch horror in the cottage was even remotely similar to the ones in the stories or my imaginations, I would be dead or driven insane by now. But no, not only did she heal my fatal wound, she even sheltered me and kept me fed. Lucky, lucky, lucky. But even I knew that good fortune could only last so long.
I need to learn how to hunt and forage because the entity isn’t going to feed me forever. Even if they do, I don’t think my bowels is going to agree with a fruit-only diet. I need to learn how to cook, because if water from another country can make someone ill, then germs from a whole nother world is only going to be worse. Although… I don’t think I’ve caught anything even though I licked the dew on the grass yesterday, so maybe… nah, don’t be crazy. Pa would murder me from across the universe if he learned that I ate raw meat.
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I need to learn how to make weapons, because god knows I can use an advantage, and to do that I need to find the right materials. Maybe I can find a stick and carve it into a spear? Speaking of sticks, I need to learn how to make a fire the old-fashioned way. If it’s already this cold near noon, then the night’s gonna be—wait, it wasn’t too cold last night, or I would’ve frozen to death. Also, can’t forget the smoke I saw coming out of the chimney yesterday. Does that mean Miss Plant knows how to make fire? Is it weird eldritch powers, or did she pick up the skill after studying humans? I would say it’s weird that a plant-like entity can make fire, but then again that’s just stereotypical thinking.
I glanced behind my back. There she—they—you know what, I’m just going to refer to her as she and Miss Plant from now on. She looks feminine anyway—she was, standing at the entrance and staring in my general direction thinking god-knows-what. Never in a million years did I imagine that I would encounter a real life alien, much less survive the encounter. Why had she saved me? Helped me? Was it out of the goodness of her heart, or was it something else? Not that it mattered too much. I would pay back the favor as soon as possible not just because it was right, but also because it was less messy that way. I didn’t know what I could do for her though. None of my skills were useful in the wilderness, not to mention that I could barely communicate with her. Establishing a two-way communication where we actually understood each other was going to be as difficult as me surviving this place alone. Oh well. One step at a time.
It was around this time I realized that my mood had improved somewhat. Maybe it was because I had broken down my big bad problem into small, tractable chunks, or maybe it was because thinking about the intriguing puzzle that was my savior was enough to distract me from the enormity of my situation. Regardless, I decided to capitalize on my improved mood and do something that would improve it further: taking a dip in the creek. By now I had scrubbed my clothes clean as best I could with my bare hands, and the water was looking more and more tempting by the second. Also, god knows I could use a bath after everything that happened. So, I looked back at the eldritch horror and yelled, “I’m going to go for a swim! Don’t worry!” After I’d placed my wet clothes safely on the bank, I slowly stepped into the water.
The deepest depth of the creek was only waist-high, so there was nothing to be afraid of. I let out a sigh of pure satisfaction as I sat down on a rock, leaving only my neck above the water. This, this was one thing in this world I could get used to.
Speaking of the creek, it was yet another unusual landmark in this unusual world. I assumed that it was the offshoot of a river deep inside the forest. The water was so clear that I could see its rocky bottom perfectly, and it tasted fresh and sweet and full of minerals. That was where the normal ended though. Anomaly number one: there were no aquatic animals inside the creek, though there were aquatic plants. I couldn’t spot a fish, a prawn or even an insect no matter where I looked. I wasn’t particularly concerned though. Between not being able to fish for food and worrying that some strange creature would bite my bottom or worse while I was bathing, the latter would be the bigger concern most of the time time. As for the possibility of contamination, Miss Plant probably would have stopped me if the water was harmful, so I didn’t worry about that either.
Anomaly number two was much more alarming: a sinkhole; a bottomless pit of darkness that stood at the literal end of the creek. I had seen plenty of creeks in the past where the water vanishes into some seams before reappearing on the other side, but this was nothing like that. The sinkhole was around fifteen meters in diameter and just a tad wider than the creek itself. Like a gaping maw, it swallowed both ground and water indiscriminately. The first time I saw it, I had nearly lost grip of my pants and wondered how the hell I hadn’t noticed it sooner. While sinkholes were hardly uncommon in my world—I had watched some nature documentaries that mentioned them in passing—this one didn’t feel right for some reason. How should I describe it? It was like someone had drilled a hole in the ground to create an artificial end point for the creek. Yes, that was it. It felt man-made and unnatural. But why would anyone do something like that? Surely there were better ways to redirect a stream than drilling a bottomless pit on the ground? I couldn’t even begin to guess.
I swam a little, but made sure that I was always swimming upstream. It was a good distance away from where I was, but better to be safe than sorry. The last thing I wanted was to fall into some bottomless depth of no return.
A while later, I climbed out of the water and wiped my body with my clothes. After I wrung out the water, I left them to dry on the grass before heading back into the cottage. Obviously, standing naked in the open was a surefire way to catch hypothermia. I tried to ask Miss Plant to start a fire since it was still rather cold inside the cottage, but unfortunately this communication ended in failure. In fact, she hadn’t done anything besides staring at me after she fed me those fruits. Oh well. I went back to my mattress and waited. A much longer time later, when my clothes had finally dried enough under the sun, I put them back on and circled around to the front of the cottage. It was time I retrieved the possessions I had left behind at the starting point.