You would be caked in mud, if you weren’t so thoroughly soaked you looked like a wet poodle. The air is not cold, yet, which is lucky. Still, you must find somewhere to dry off.

The field expands in all directions as far as you can see through the thick sheet of rain, so you pick a direction at random and start walking. As you let your eyes roam, squinting against the raindrops, something keeps bothering you. It’s as if you’re glimpsing something out of the corner of your eye, but every time you look, it’s gone.

You trudge on. Every few meters you stop to give one of the mystery-veggies a half-hearted pull, but it’s as if they’ve permanently fused with the ground. After a dozen fruitless attempts, you give up and trudge on.

By the time you reach the edge of the field, you’ve no idea how you've been walking. In front of you, a line of trees reaches toward the sky; you’ve reached the edge of a forest. The trees its made up of look like those on Earth, a mix of evergreens and deciduous trees with their leaves beginning to show a yellow tint.

Stolen story; please report.

You step under a big oak tree, thinking its thick canopy will shield you from the rain, but it does not make as much of a difference as you had hoped. The air is noticeably cooler now, and your teeth start chattering. Following a vague notion that your chances of finding a dry spot are greater in the forest, you wrap your arms around yourself to keep in the warmth and march bravely into the darkness.

A few minutes later you start to seriously doubt the wisdom of your choice. Not only are thorns grabbing for your ankles and roots trying to trip you up, but you can barely make out anything in the twilight. You have to walk with your arms stretched out in front of you, feeling the way, and once you get so tangled in a thicket that to break free, you tear your shirt almost to threads. A few times, you think you see something flash in the corner of your eye, but it always disappears before you can get a proper look.

Finally, you find something; a large rock, offering a modicum of protection from the elements. You roll yourself into a little ball, back pressed against the rough surface of the stone behind you and wrap yourself in the thin, wet, but still better-than-nothing fabric of your clothes.

As you drift between sleeping and waking, you think fondly of your cocoon of System messages, where you knew neither cold nor hunger nor worry. Even the void vertigo seems, now, not quite as bad.