Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. I'm alive. What just happened? Open your eyes, Trevor--it could be recovering and about to stab you. Open. Your. Eyes.

My eyes snapped open and immediately dropped through the now empty doorway to the floor, first anchoring on the textured black plastic of the machete's handle. It was suspended about a foot off the floor, with the wide, heavy chopping end buried--oh geez it was buried in the skull of the gnoll, right behind the eyes. There was blood seeping out of the wound, but much to my relief, no gray matter. I shifted my gaze to its eyes, which were still, unfocused, and very much devoid of life.

Oh God. It's dead. It's dead and I killed it. Oh God. What if it wasn't hostile? What if I'm a criminal now? What if the gnoll police show up and arrest me? Oh God. I would deserve it. I definitely deserve to be locked up after that. It was just minding its own business and I chopped it in the head with a freaking MACHETE. What the hell was I thinking, making assumptions like that? It probably didn't want to kill me, it probably had a family. And kids. Pups? Would gnoll babies be called pups? It doesn't matter, Trevor. You're a murderer. You murdered this thing without any evidence that it was intending to hurt you. Oh God. Ohgodohgodohgod.

With my mind reeling in relief, panic, regret, and self-loathing, I sank to the plywood floor of the shed, leaning against the wall. I cupped my head in my hands as tears sprang to my eyes and streamed down my face. I began to sob and wail, salty snot and water collecting in the dust and crevices of my skin. Rocking back and forth as I wept, it never occurred to me that the hypothetical "gnoll Police", or indeed any other beings, could be nearby hearing my breakdown.

My breakdown lasted longer than you would think for an adult, but eventually the sobs and wails became whimpers and hiccups, and finally abated to long breaths across raw vocal cords. I wiped my face with my shirt, avoiding looking at the gnoll's empty eyes, then leaned my head back against the shed wall to get my breathing under control. My mind was fairly empty, not thinking about my actions or the potential consequences, nor even my next moves. After a while I took a deep, shuddering breath, and let my mind get back into motion.

Alright. So, I've got a dead gnoll here. I killed it. I can't just leave the body there in the doorway. Whether it was hostile or not, I need to move it out of the way in order to do anything else. Okay. Here we go.

I levered myself off of the floor, bracing myself between the wall and the edge of the folding work table attached to the bare wall studs. I took a moment to brace myself, then looked down again at the dead gnoll. Not much had changed, except that the blood pool was slightly wider, and had started to dry around the edges, as well as at the site of the wound. The eyes were still open and empty, and there was no movement whatsoever from the corpse.

I hesitantly reached out toward the machete, and gingerly wrapped my fingers around the handle. It felt like this was the first step to the cleanup process, removing the murder weapon from the body. At first, my tugging was gentle, as if trying to lift a sharp knife from soft butter. The machete didn't budge. I gave it more force, and the gnoll's head just tilted toward me, causing me to drop the handle like the business end of a soldering iron. Smiling sheepishly at my jumpiness, I grasped the handle again, and gave a sharper yank in an attempt to dislodge the machete. Again, the gnoll's head came along with it--but I didn't drop the handle this time! Wrapping my other hand around the hand holding the machete, I squatted, engaged my core, and pulled hard using my back muscles. When the head of the gnoll moved, this time I just kept pulling until the machete *schlicked* free.

Oh God. Now I can see it. Oh God. That was deep. I'm gonna puke. Oh God.

Wretching, I flailed for the closest five gallon bucket, which accepted my breakfast of a banana, oatmeal, bacon, and orange juice.

Once I was done coughing, spluttering, and blowing my nose, I set the bucket aside and wiped my face again on my now very crusty shirt. Then, very deliberately not looking directly at the head of the monster lying in my doorway, I stepped over it and out into the fresh air and sunshine.

Alright. I'm okay. I survived, and I'm back in the sunshine. Let's have a look around to make sure there's nobody else nearby.

I slowly circled the shed counter clockwise, peering as far as I could in every direction. Nothing new registered--just the open grassland in every direction except West, where the mountains rose to their snow-capped majesty. Although, there was only so much I could see from ground level...

Anyway, even though I'd been avoiding thinking about it, there was still the issue of the dead gnoll in the doorway of the shed. Coming back around the front of the shed in the same direction my defeated foe had come, I paused briefly for a self pep talk.

Alright Trevor. Time to nut up or shut up. Just grab its ankles and drag it straight out a few yards. That way you can get to work on making some kind of lock for the inside of the door. You can do this.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Mimicking a Japanese anime protagonist, I smacked my cheeks before clapping my hands together, squatting down, and taking the gnoll's unclad ankles in my hands. A slight heave up and back, and we were on the move. It felt like the gnoll weighed two hundred pounds or so. Definitely enough to warrant some grunting and grip readjustment. It took ten or so shuffling steps to clear the doorway and ramp, then another dozen to make it what I judged to be "far enough" away. I tried very hard not to look too closely at the rapidly darkening stain left on the plywood. I also had to school myself to look away from the contents of the body's loincloth. Some things you just can't unsee. At least I didn't have to look at its face, since it had landed face down and I wasn't about to try to turn it over.

Dropping the gnoll's ankles, I stood up straight and shook my arms out. "Step one, done" I said aloud, to no one but my deceased "companion". Taking another look around, I headed back over to the shed.

Alright, Trevor, let's take stock of the situation, shall we? You and your shed have been transported to God knows where, for no readily apparent reason. This place doesn't seem to be Kansas, the USA, or even planet Earth. There was at least one gnoll monster, and presumably there are more, somewhere. The environment and atmosphere don't seem to be immediately toxic to me. That's what we know for sure at this point.

From that point, nothing is concrete. Anything further is purely questions and guesswork. If there are monsters, are there monster hunters? I hesitate to even hope, but is there magic? Of course I'm going to jump straight to magic, it's every nerd's dream. If there is, how do I learn it? Is it an innate talent or a skill that can be learned? Speaking of skills, do I have any "cheat" skills like some protagonist? Actually, let's leave the conjecture alone for now. The more immediate question is how to secure the shed door, since it's my only protection from anything, currently.

I crossed the few remaining steps to the bottom of the ramp. Looking at the door gently swinging in the wind, I figured that the easiest way to secure the door from the inside, would be to move the gate latch from the outside to the inside. Simple enough, just remove and re-drive a few screws. That raised questions about how to secure the door in the open position, but right now the priority was security over convenience.

Stepping over the evidence of my crime, I made my way inside and blinked once or twice to adjust my eyes. It wasn't pitch black inside, what with the sun streaming in through the door, but the contrast between that and the shadows took some effort to see through.

The shed actually had a pair of doors that opened outward from the center, though the left-hand door was almost always latched in place using a rod going into a hole in the floor. I wished I had something similar for the other side, but again, it was designed to be accessible from the outside rather than secure from the inside.

On the right, past the yard tools hanging on their pegs or leaning against the wall, was an old wooden ladder hanging on a hook. Just past the ladder was my tool cabinet. It was a super cheap thing Patricia and I had actually encountered in the "finds" aisle of a grocery store, but it was plenty for a semi-handy home hobbyist like myself. It had six drawers--four in the top section and two in the bottom--with a small cabinet for larger tools at the bottom. Opening the top drawer, I glanced through my screwdriver collection for a standard phillips-head screwdriver. I found it and headed back toward the door.

The latch was as simple as anything could be, just two pieces of metal (probably galvanized steel) with a hinge in the middle. One end was affixed to the door, and the other had a slot in it, which would go over the ring attached to the opposite door, and then you'd put a padlock or a stick or whatever through that ring to secure the door in the "closed" position. I removed the screws holding the latch and the opposing loop from the outside, and reattached the parts on the inside of the door. Now all I had to do was close the door, slap the latch over the ring, drop something like this screwdriver through the hole, and it would be much, much harder for anything to come in and get me. There was now no way to secure the shed from the outside, but I couldn't imagine anyone caring to break into a shed when no one was home, especially out here in the middle of nowhere. Doubly so if the door was left to just swing in the wind, which to me would communicate, "Nothing worthwhile in here, the door isn't even closed let alone locked."

With the immediate question of security addressed, I now had to face other aspects of my reality, and look to the future. Not a pleasant prospect, honestly.

I opened the door again and was about to sit in the doorway, before I remembered one aspect of the situation I didn't really want to; namely, the blood pool from the gnoll. I could either try to remove it, or leave it to dry and just live with it. I knew that the porous plywood would hold on to a stain no matter how hard I tried to clean it up, but at the same time I didn't want to deal with the sticky stage of the drying process, and then the crust afterward. So, I resolved to at least try to rinse the worst of it away.

I had stored ten one-gallon jugs of water in the shed, in case we lost utilities for a couple of days as a result of living in the middle of "Tornado Alley". I popped the cap on one jug and poured a few splashes onto the blood pool. It splattered some, but since the blood had already started to coagulate, it more or less stayed in the same area. I then grabbed my flathead shovel and scraped the liquid out the door onto the ramp. I poured some more water more precisely to rinse the ramp off, and somehow felt a lot better once the majority of the crimson liquid was fertilizing the grass rather than shining in the sunlight on the flat wood.

While I was rinsing grossness out of the shed, I grabbed the bucket with my breakfast in it and rinsed it into the grass off to the side of the ramp as well, then turned the bucket upside down on the ground to drain, and sat on top of it. I chugged some water, capped the jug, and set it next to me. Looking out over the grass, feeling the warmth of the climbing sun on my face, I asked myself out loud "Well, what now?"