The forest had seemed beautiful from the outside, its deep greens and misty darkness drawing Maso's eye. He'd wanted to walk in it, to immerse himself in the otherworldly atmosphere that seemed so strangely enticing.

This was a mistake, Maso thought.

Lanoch had handed him a machete and told him to come back after he completed one 'quest'. He'd skimmed over the options; there were more than he'd expected, and even though they didn't take long to read, it was hard to make sense of what most of them were asking for. Or what the rewards were.

Or just any part of them, really.

Maso had chosen one that didn't seem like it would be particularly difficult, with the presumed bonus of being able to explore the forest outside of the village. This quest called for him to gather a strange kind of herb that grew on the forest floor, like a small and leafy tree, which Lanoch had told him to refer to as a shrub.

This had, as previously mentioned, been a horrible mistake.

Maso had thought he was used to thick forests, that some of his (admittedly limited) experience navigating them would be applicable. The Origin's bioengineered forests were dense, scientists cramming huge numbers of trees into as small a space as possible. He now realized that this hadn't really been the case.

They'd still accounted for humans walking between the trunks to inspect the fruit production, or for machines to actually do the harvesting. The forests had been designed so that they fulfilled the bare minimum of space for the trees to breathe.

This forest had none of that. It was like every single organism was competing for space, maximizing their size to fill in whatever minuscule region they could, growing and coalescing over and through one another to blot out even the most fractional specks of sunlight.

Maso's machete swung with a vengeance to cut through large shrubs and spindly low-hanging branches, but it felt like every other step his foot sank into mud or something grabbed at his ankles. Lanoch had told him that he'd be able to find the herbs a half hour's walk or so away from the village, but what kind of 'half hour' was that? Were the elves - Aspen - used to traversing this absurdity? Would they be faster, leading to warped time estimates?

And even if he did make it to where the herbs grew, without his vision augments, he might not even be able to see them.

Maso heard a creek before he saw it, and he squinted to try and make out its boundaries, carefully stepping around the water. He had done training for situations like this before, but it had never been real, never invaded his every sense like this did. The Immersives for extraplanetary training were built from data harvested on previous missions, but every environment was different, and it was hard to get time on the networked intelligences to simulate long-term possibilities.

And in the Immersives, his vision augments had provided him with a map, so he'd known where he was going.

Forget finding the herbs - Maso didn't even know if he'd be able to find his way back.

He groaned, then immediately regretted losing his focus as a branch hit him in the chin. A slash of his machete sent it tumbling towards the ground, but it didn't even make it halfway there, catching on other greenery.

With no warning, a voice came from his left, crisp and shockingly close.

"You shouldn't do that, you know."

Maso froze.

"That tree is probably older than you are," the voice continued smoothly.

Maso's brain caught up to him, and he spun to the left, snapping his machete out in front of his chest.

"Smarter, too. Seeing as it doesn't need to chop off its fellows' limbs to survive in the Moràngra, hm?"

Sitting on the ground, back against a tree, and no more than three steps away from Maso, was a man that Maso certainly hadn't noticed before. An Aspen, he assumed, although the forest's oppressive darkness made it impossible to glean any details about the man's features.

"Who are you?"

The man stretched one arm above his head - the movement barely visible in the darkness. "You look a little stressed, friend. I'm just teasing you, I'm sure that branch will regrow." The man paused for a moment. "Of course, it'll be a long and tedious process, but it'll be back in a few years to smack you again."

Maso had seen the size of the forest before he entered. He wasn't taking any kind of path or trail, and there was no way that he'd been moving in a straight line. The chances that he'd just stumble into a stranger - especially considering nobody else seemed to venture into these forests - seemed slim to none.

"How long have you been there?" he asked.

"Oh, maybe two years, give or take a few," the man responded. "It's quite pleasant here, wouldn't you say? The trees keep both the sunlight and the cold out, so it's easy to lose track of time."

Oh.

The man was insane.

Maso had a horrifying realization. This man was only the second person - was 'person' even the right word? - that he'd met on this planet. The first had been apparently expecting people to reincarnate on their roof, and was perfectly fine with the notion that an amnesiac stranger had done so. He'd sort of assumed that Lanoch was abnormal - it was easy to imagine that the other Aspen he'd passed while making the way to the forest were much more similar to the humans on the Origin, considering their visual similarities and apparent mannerisms.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

But what if that wasn't the case? What if everyone on this planet - or at least this species that he was now somehow a part of - was simply a lunatic?

Maso frowned. If everyone in the vicinity was untrustworthy at the most basic level, did he have any way of confirming that anything Lanoch had told him was true?

"To answer your question," the man said, breaking the momentary silence, "I'm Rèmsciore. But you, my budding tree appreciator, you may call me Ciore."

Maso heard this, but he was thinking about other things, considering his options. There were two choices. The first was to get as much information as he could from Ciore - specifically, to figure out where the village he'd came from was, and head back immediately before he got even more lost. The second was to assume that this 'Thadh' thing knew what it was doing, and that his 'quest' could actually be completed.

To assume that the bizarre, hallucinatory text he had been reading, which a potentially-insane stranger had told him to take instructions from, was trustworthy.

Okay, Maso thought, there's really only one option.

Admittedly, this strategy also relied on a separate, potentially unreliable source.

"Do you know the area?" he asked anyways, taking a small step forwards.

Ciore laughed. "Just as well as you do! I used the map to get here, and I haven't moved since."

"You have a map? Can I see it?" asked Maso, taking another step forward. He holstered the machete as he did so, realizing that it might be a bit too intimidating.

Ciore didn't respond. Even only a couple steps away, the man's expression was unreadable, but the silence suddenly felt strange, like he wasn't just contemplating an answer.

A few seconds passed, and then a few more, without the man saying anything. Maso's right hand hovered nervously beside his machete's grip. If worst came to worst, he was already in a standing position, and Ciore didn't seem to have a weapon with him. Maso would win the fight -

- unless he can use magic, Maso realized. He'd scanned through a tiny portion of the help menus while initially making his way into the forest, before it had become too difficult to navigate without giving it his full focus. But he'd been able to get a better idea of some of the abilities people had on this planet, and now he realized that it would be impossible to gauge his strength against any of them.

Finally, the man spoke, breaking Maso out of his concentration. "Are you not familiar with the wayfinding system?" he asked - completely normally, like there hadn't been any pause in the conversation.

Something about that unnerved Maso, but he pushed it out of his mind. "No. What's that?"

"Ah, that explains how you ended up here, then. I would be more than happy to answer that question - but first, why don't you tell me your name? You didn't give it earlier, which was quite rude, by the way."

"Maso," he replied. Realizing that his hand was still hanging uncomfortably close to the machete, Maso crossed his arms, leaning back slightly.

"That's quite an interesting name," Ciore said. "I don't think I've heard anything quite like it before?"

"It's foreign."

"Ah, I see," the man said, trailing off.

Ciore didn't continue speaking, but Maso wasn't sure what to say. These gaps in the conversation made him startlingly aware of how quiet the forest was. He'd had a buzzing in his ears before, the sound of his blood pumping, but now that he was standing still (and against the contrast of the conversation), the forest became utterly silent. Even the rustling of leaves, during brief breezes that didn't seem to originate from any particular direction, was muted and indistinct.

It took so long for Ciore to say something, that Maso even read through the latest 'notification' that had appeared:

> New Quest: "Find Your Way to the Wayfinder!"

>

> Rewards: A map - but not any old map. A top of the line map, complete with not only all the things you've come to expect from a map (like place names, general geographic features, and a mildly helpful legend) but also fantastic new features - like a list of the top ten places to find venomous snakes, or a chart showing the temperature at any location!

>

> Penalties for Failure: You'll look like an absolute fool in front of this complete stranger you've stumbled upon in the forest.

If these were being generated by the Thadh, Maso couldn't fathom why. The title of the quest was almost always something he was trying to do anyways, the rewards were the entire point of doing it, and the penalties were - well, mostly irrelevant. There had been a few earlier where he'd noticed things like Your eyes will melt like ice thrown into the sun or The ground itself will open under you and you will fall to a painful death, but he'd 'succeeded' at all of those quests anyways, so he supposed it was a non-issue.

"So, the wayfinder?" Maso prompted.

"Ah, right, yes, of course," Ciore said. "Go ahead and open up your crann, it's under one of the menus."

Crann? Was that what the information display Lanoch had showed him was called?

He'd never asked for more details, or even really confirmed that he was seeing what he was supposed to see, but thinking about it again, Maso realized that the idea of a tree communicating such mundane information through data superimposed on one's vision was...

...actually completely ridiculous.

Maso activated the neural recording anyways, his voice speaking once more of its own accord: "Thadh."

"You're really a beginner, eh?" Ciore said, chuckling. "Very smoothly enunciated, though."

Maso was already scanning the assorted menu titles, trying to see anything that indicated it might contain a map.

"Okay, okay. Don't jump ahead too far, eh? It's a pain to get back without restarting. The wayfinder is in Auxiliary, which is in Inventory."

This immediately presented a problem. Maso had previously glanced at the Inventory menu, which had a preview of the objects he possessed. Not particularly helpful, when he could simply look down and see that he was wearing a 'thin white shirt'. He hadn't really seen a point in looking further previously, but that decision had been helped along by the fact that he still had no idea how to actually select a menu item in the first place.

It was just a menu, though. How bad could it be?

Maso squinted his eyes and stared at Inventory. He waved a hand in the air, pointing towards the icon. He blinked four times, pointed, and physically tapped his eye. Finally, he spoke it out loud: "Inventory."

"Uh, you all right there, buddy?" said Ciore, still laying with his back against a tree. "You can't talk to a menu. Well, you can, but it can't hear you."

> Quest Failed: "Find Your Way to the Wayfinder!"

>

> You look like an absolute fool in front of this complete stranger you've found in the forest.

Maso ignored the popup. "I don't know how to select it," he said.

The man guffawed, clapping his hands together. "Oh boy! Well. You might not be making it home tonight, sorry to say! There's a reason you're supposed to start learning that kind of thing as a child, although most don't do that anymore."

"How do I do it?" Maso asked, voice flat.

"Ah, you just have to think it."

Maso thought Inventory. Nothing happened.

"But, you know, you have to think it in a very specific way. Like how you think about - well. Menu selections, I suppose."

"That's not helpful," Maso said.

"Do I look like a teacher?" Ciore responded. "Just think it really hard, in as many ways as you can."

Thirty minutes later, Maso finally opened the wayfinder.

A map, fully coloured and replete with detailed writing across its surface, filled his vision.

There was just one little problem. It filled his vision.

"I can't see anything but the map," Maso said.

"Yep! Makes it easier to focus on it, eh?"

"How do I close it?"

"Eh, just do what you did before, but in reverse."

Maso spent a minute committing as much of the map as he could to memory, then vowed to never open it again unless he absolutely had to.

He then immediately turned back towards the village he'd come from, without so much as another word to Rèmsciore. 'Quests' could wait for tomorrow.