I try to open my eyes, blinking rapidly to get my churning stomach settled, a sour feeling in my throat confirms that it is one of those days again. Still bleary from sleep, I close my eyes and reach out my right hand for the meds on my bedside table, a little white IKEA office drawer that came with the apartment I rent. Instead of feeling the smooth white paint and scuffed edges, my hand finds only empty air. I grumble, feeling the bile in my throat. I try to sit up and that's when I realise that I am not in my bed, but what feels oddly like a cool patch of moss.   

Okay that's bizarre I think to myself.  

I'm not the partying type, so the odds of me ending up asleep in a random forest somewhere are next to none. Eyes still close, I try to think past the urge to throw up that I usually wake to. I remember staying up late last night like I usually do, watching videos, playing some games, having a quick wank while listening to some random audio porn. I also distinctly remember putting on a Yes album at low volume, the ca 1 hour runtime enough for me to fall asleep most days. Overall an average day for me, nothing that I can remember that would explain me waking up outdoors.   

Still feeling the urge to hurl I try to open my eyes once more, after a few seconds of blindness due to the northern sun gazing down on me my eyes focus.  

You have awakened

A semi transparent white rectangular window hovers in the middle of my field of view as I look up at the sky, holding out my hand, my arm straight and palm up to block out the sun. I can clearly see the system window through my hand, somehow looking as if it's behind it and in front of it at the same time.   

Ignoring my surroundings for now, I try to come up with any possible explanation, waking up outside was weird enough but having my own GUI, that went beyond my understanding of current technological possibilities.   

Option 1, I had been implanted with some secret super high-tech neural device during my sleep, exceedingly unlikely.  

Option 2 might be that this is all a dream, hard to prove conclusively, shelve that thought for now.  

Option 3 could be some kind of insanity, uncomfortably likely, unfortunately. I had been in a bad place mentally for the last couple of years, depression, anxiety and severe stress, the source for my current unruly stomach. But I had been getting better, hadn't I? I couldn't just have snapped in my sleep, could I?   

A stirring sense of panic in my bones, I started my breathing exercises, stomach in and out along with slow deep breaths. This anxiety was not helping anything. Although possible, there would probably be little I could do about insanity on my own, so I continued brainstorming.  

Option 4, something so ridiculously outlandish that I couldn't think of any possible explanation. Not much better than one, but it gave me the motivational push to gather more information.   

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Now focusing outside my own mind, I start hearing whispering voices all around me. So not alone then, might be good, might be bad, impossible to know as yet.  

With a weirdly stiff neck, I slowly try to look around my surroundings for anything familiar.   

I lay on a circular patch of vibrant green moss ca 10 meters in diameter as far as I could tell, unmarked by footprints and with dew forming from dissipating mist. In a repeating pattern, weird rock formations surrounded the moss, forming a hexagon with what looked like a pitch black robed figure standing on each. Further afield trees grew, mostly native birch and pine but some smaller scrub brush as well.  

All together, it made for one of the most bizarre scenes I had ever seen. At once a natural formation of some kind, and yet with such mathematical precision and symmetry as only intentional creation could offer.   

I could at the very least determine that this was not a place I knew, the flora was semi accurate, but nothing else made any sense.   

Unable to make head nor tail of my surroundings, I looked down at myself and couldn't help but stare in shock.   

This is probably when you would start to wonder what could possibly have been a surprise to me at this point and well, I don't blame you, so let's back up a bit shall we? 

I am, well was, is strictly more accurate, a student studying in a medium-sized city on the east coast up in the far north of Sweden. Not much more than your average bloke around here, that being a nerd with the potent combo of burnout and depression, with not much more going on. I had some friends, but my family lived on the other side of the country, so I spent most of my free time alone in my apartment, short story, a loner in heart and soul.  

And now I was lying outdoors looking down on what was distinctly not my own body, it would be more descriptive to say that I was looking down on the naked body of a woman in her early twenties. Her… well, my body a pale alabaster with a few odd looking tattoos in a deep black under my now modestly protruding chest and spiralling down along my legs and arms. They gave me an instinctive sense of something, a soft call almost, they were from what I could tell something more than could be seen with the naked eye.   

With shock starting to fade and my unsettled stomach forgotten, I concluded to myself; option 4 it is, and I who was "looking forward" to an average day of doing nothing whatsoever of consequence.   

Resting my head back on the moss and poking one of my breast just to make sure, yep that's a boob alright, I once more focused on the window hovering in front of my now closed eyelids, and while I would not have admitted it to myself even a little I was shaken to my core and focusing on one thing at a time was all that kept me from shutting down completely.