I awoke to the sounds of the forest. Birds chirped in the distance, bugs buzzed, and the wind blew lightly through the trees above and bushes around.

I felt stiff in a way I immediately associated with having slept poorly. And, although I had no memory of going to sleep in the wilderness, a childhood of camping trips and cold fall mornings waking inside a tent kept the experience anchored in the realm of the unusual rather than being panic-inducing.

A croaking groan left my throat and I sounded strange. More than the stiffness of a poor sleep, I felt strange.

Trying to roll over to lift myself to my feet just resulted in me toppling over again, though the ground beneath me was blessedly soft. My head throbbed, and my vision blurred.

When I woke for the second time, it was to the heat of the mid-day sun. A strange bird loomed over me, and in my panic I swiped at it blindly. I could swear that the thing smirked at me before flying off, making a noise like laughter.

I didn’t try standing again, having learned that lesson at least. I was still unsteady, but at the very least I could crawl without issue. This was about the point where I realized my anatomy was not what I expected.

I kept an iron control of my emotions as I did a careful examination of my own body, feeling the parts which I couldn’t see without a mirror. I was definitely quadrupedal for one, which explained my inability to do the two-leg shuffle. No thumbs either. Blotchy pink-purple fur covered my body. On my head I found two elongated ears, which might have suggested something like a rabbit, but the horn in the center of my head disagreed with that assessment.

As much as I might have wanted to sit down and have a panic attack, I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere. I focused on the hierarchy of needs, as well as I could remember it. Food, water, and shelter would be my first priorities, and then and only then would I let myself waste precious time on useless lamentations.

The lamentations of the damned. How it vexes me to see your conviction falter at the last…

A sound like a half-chuckle escaped me and I shook my head, smiling as a memory surfaced and dispersed once more.

Once I was really looking, it was hard to ignore just how tall all the trees were. While it was possible they really were that tall, I also had to accept the more likely explanation that I was simply much smaller. That raised a worrying prospect: I was probably much lower on the food chain than a human would be.

I focused on my senses. Without a clear line of sight to anywhere very far away, it was hard to tell if my eyesight was worse. My other senses were a different story.

I closed my eyes, and it was like a whole other world opened up for me. The distant noises, the subtle scents… even the feel of the loam beneath my paws told me far more than my sight had.

A group of birds were chirping back and forth, some way into the air and far to my right. Their location was constant, and the sound of them was unmarred by the rhythmic beat of wings in the air, so I knew they were perched.

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A heady, sweet scent wafted into my notice, and as the wind buffeted my front-left side, the smell intensified. Each subtle shift of the breeze accompanied a waxing or waning of the smell, swiftly letting me narrow down the general direction it came from.

I practically stumbled into the berry bush before I realized I had found it, so entrancing was the smell I was following. I wasted no time on chowing down, and only then realized just how hungry I’d been getting.

The fruit was sweet, almost overwhelmingly so. But it filled my belly, and was juicy enough that I suspected it would go a ways towards delaying my need for water as well.

In my single-minded focus, however, I’d paid no heed to the sound of the forest around me. And now that I thought to listen, the silence made my fur raise on end. I froze, trying to catch any hint of sound or smell around me, but the wind was still.

The sound of a twig breaking was all the warning I got before I was fleeing for my life from a pair of jaws snapping shut where I’d been only moments ago. As I scrambled to flee, the predator leaped over me and into my path, making a second attempt at taking a piece of my hide before I could turn.

Pain leapt into my senses as fangs pierced my back, but a canine yelp shortly accompanied them and I resumed my flailing, mindless flight from the location even as the spots on my back where I’d been bit bled white-hot agony.

When I came to awareness for a third time, the color of the sky told a story of a setting sun and I struggled to piece together the events that had led me there. I ached all over, and especially from my back where tender spots pulled and spiked with pain when I moved too much.

“I don’t like it. We should come back tomorrow.”

“Easy, Bert, easy. We’re almost done — ah.”

I nearly fled again in panic when I heard approaching footsteps, but the sound of words and conversation kept me from doing so. Then I remembered I was an animal, and hunters were a thing. But if this was a human…

They came into view and I was momentarily stunned. One was a human, yes, a young man kitted out for hiking. The other was an orange-red bipedal lizard with a flaming tail, and it was impossible for me not to recognize it.

Then it spoke.

“Hey, you still all there, or are we gonna have to fight?”

I blinked, speechless as I stared at the impossibility before me as seconds ticked by, and the lizard… the charmander tilted its head towards the human.

“He’s not talking.”

The human towered over me, I realized, but I stamped down on the instinct to flee. I knew I was already hurt. This was either my death, or the luckiest thing that could have happened to me.

“Okay,” he said, “Just stay calm little guy, we’re not here to hurt you. You look pretty banged up, and we want to get you some help. Is that okay?”

His voice was soothing… he kept it low, and calm, and easy to just listen to.

It made it easier to just relax back down into the soil that I only then realized was wet with my own blood.

He didn’t make any sudden movements, but he slowly reached down to his belt and pulled away a red and white sphere that I recognized, and looking between that and the charmander at his side, then to the pink-purple fur on the back of my paws, things finally clicked for me.

My ears twitched. My nose twitched. I remembered the horn on my head.

Oh, I thought, yeah that makes more sense.

And then my world was swallowed up by red light.