Vance awoke to a deer licking his face as he bolted upright scaring the young doe away. He was in a forest clearing with birch pine and what looked like oak trees, scattered to his right along with some other trees he wasn’t sure he could identify poking out trying to fight for light among the massive oaks towering over them. He had on his favorite outfit of a Red Hot Chili Peppers shirt, a pair of black vans, and some black jeans. So at least there was that, Vance thought. To his left was a lake that stretched as far as the eye could see and a sign stuck out from the ground made of a metal post and a hammer-like sign that read “Welcome traveler, hope you enjoy what our world has to offer, it’s dangerous to go alone take this” but despite the sign saying take this, there was nothing near it besides grass, the pond, and the forest.

He noticed his reflection in the pond after searching for some kind of clue to what the sign was talking about when he froze. Vance had always had blonde hair, but his face did not anymore, actually, it was different in a few ways, before having a childish look from chubby cheeks and short hair he was, now looking more like a model with sunken cheeks and a well-defined chin, long brown hair and his eyes were even a lighter blue. He sat on a rock a few steps away and caressed his hair back. Vance started looking around at his surroundings a bit closer. A few feet away grew some kind of mushroom. It looked like a shiitake but seemed a little different though Vance was no student of mycology so summed it up to probably edible.

Vance was never some survival expert so his next move might surprise some of you including me, he took off his shoes and socks rolled up his pant legs, and walked into the lake noticing a drop off a few feet forward from where he stood, a few minnows floated by in a group and quickly startled off as if noticing he was there as they got closer, Vance reached in and found a nice piece of what he thought was a quartz and chert rock, it had some red swirls in the quartz parts so the thought of iron crossed his mind, he kept grabbing out rocks he liked and thought he could use, including a 20-pound slab of something that reminded Vance of marble but it had quartz in it along with a glass-like black rock. It was almost a perfect rectangle. He also found a nice solid gray stone and a few other pieces of chert.

He dragged all of it back to the sign and sat down on the 2 ft tall monster of a rock he just dragged there and grabbed up the solid gray stone and a piece of chert and started chipping at the side of the chert with the solid gray stone, sure enough, it fractured at the bottom chipping away in a pattern he had seen before about making aboriginal blades out of stone on youtube. He set down his hammer rock and moved over to the sign with his piece of chert stone and struck its newly formed edge against the side of the sign. "Damn no sparks!" Vance spoke aloud realizing he had just spoken his first word since he had come to this strange new land. The sense of not knowing where he was followed by a mosquito biting him, had him chucking the stone to the ground and pulling his hair in frustration. “Calm down”, Vance told himself. He knew panicking was the worst thing he could do he had to think and be rational he noticed it had to be around noon or so with the sun just starting to rise to the middle of the sky, he heard a rustling sound in the shrubs nearby and the thought of fire sprang into his mind a little more persistently.

Vance needed fire, water, and food most importantly before he dared venture too far, he had a feeling he wasn’t going to find a road or people too easily and at least needed essentials before he went exploring the land around him. Maybe even a boat with the giant lake that seemed to stretch on like an ocean. And all he could see were trees to the right and left until they became a blur. His eyes fell on the pile of stones and he picked up another piece this time the chert with the iron swirled quartz in it. He took his time and gave it a nice whack with his hammer stone, a nice flat piece broke off the bottom and he did it again around the edge until it formed out a nice foot-long oblong shape.

He set the stone down satisfied with his work so far, he could come back to it. What interested Vance right now was the sign and the way it resembled a war hammer, he started pushing at the hammer-like sign and felt it give a bit. He quickly began wiggling it back and forth and then tried to tug it out like a weed, he shortly gave up flexing his hands open and closed from the pressure. He grabbed his soon to be a stone knife and started digging around the post of the sign, Vance found it had a cement-like bottom and quickly started digging around the top of the cement until the whole base of the sign was visible, he gave the sign one more pull up and it came free from the hole.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Vance tossed the sign aside and sat down realizing he was way too thirsty to keep working at this pace. He went over to the water and took a handful closely inspecting it before he decided to just drink it. It wasn’t horrible tasting surprisingly a bit earthy for sure but he could figure out a way to filter it a bit later if he needed to. He went back to the sign and chuckled this should be fun. He grabbed the sign with two hands and brought the cement end up to his head height and bashed it on his nice futon stone and it came apart in a few pieces after a second whack. Now he had a war hammer!

All be it was from a steel sign just like the kind he had back home from stop signs, two metal pieces screwed together with holes poking out at every two-inch intervals. Although this one had a nice big hammerhead for a sign. Suddenly he heard a noise “bawk bawk bawk” and the sound of a shrub rustling just inside the forest off to his right. He got up and stood straight and silent. Looking closer he noticed what looked to be a chicken pecking at one of the buds protruding from the shrub, well more of a plant, it just had a bushy look to it, the chicken stopped suddenly and looked directly at Vance. Vance was feeling his stomach yell at him in frustration, and luckily the chicken went straight back to pecking away at his “shrub”.

Vance crept closer, thinking if he could get close enough he could just jump on the chicken and possibly get some eggs or chicken at the least. It was a hen, after all. He got within 5 feet of the chicken as it looked up. The cute little hen showed a green bar with 50 health and a level two above it. The hen then frantically tried to fly the other way. Vance ended up diving and catching a leg of the chicken when he heard a much louder series of “bawks” they sounded like some kind of malamute. Nothing like the little chicken he let go of just then. It scampered towards the sound of the booming bawking, and as Vance looked up, he saw what we could only describe in these words.

A giant motherclucking chicken staring right into his motherclucking soul. Showing twenty thousand under a green bar and having a double question mark as its level. It was on him before he could even finish the thought. This chicken was four times bigger than he was, and twice as tall, Vance must have ruffled the big bird’s feathers a bit too much because its beak took a massive bite out of his arm that just moments ago held what he thought was the start to a good survival rate. “Agh” screamed Vance as he lost twenty hit points and a red blood image in a square appeared below it.

He yanked his arm away and started sprinting as fast as he could away from that abomination of a foul. Blood was flowing freely from his would as he used his other hand to stem the flow, running as fast as his feet could take him, and not looking back. He eventually tripped over a root a few hundred feet away and noticed that the giant chicken had forgotten about him and was happily prying the bud carrying plant out of the ground along with the other little chicken happily bawking away at what Vance assumed maybe his mother. The pain was that of real-life despite the game like health bars. He had already tried everything he could think of to pull up some user interface with no prevail. He had collected rocks as a kid. It seemed no different from what real life offered him. Vance got out of that immediate area for the time. Vance needed something to stem the flow of blood. He limped towards the edge of the forest he had been running through and glanced back at the giant chicken, then the hammer-sign that was only a few feet away within what he hoped could be his base camp. He took his shirt off and wrapped it around his arm wound. Tying it while slightly wincing. Then started crawling to try his attempt at being a ninja and maybe unlocking some kind of stealth skill, he crept towards his hammer-sign.

Making his way there, he glanced over at the giant hen that was pecking a base of a tree a few feet away. He slowly picked up the hammer and a crazy thought popped up into his head of him frying a large chicken and he gained the courage to wield the hammer sign in both hands. Yelled out a battle cry of “Im gonna eat you!” and sprinted towards the chicken. The chicken however did not seem to even notice Vance and his Leeroy Jenkins looking self, not until Vance came flying in with an overhead chop! He missed the chicken completely, while it dodged back, and then forward. Pecked the signpost in half with one snap of its beak, grabbed its “hen-chick” within its right-wing and bolted off into the forest within a couple of strides.

Vance fell to the ground and cried. Why not? A good cry once in a while isn’t always a bad thing. After a couple of minutes, he sat up and started looking around. Glancing towards the opposite way of where the chicken had just run, trees seemed to be falling and crashing from something that had to be bigger than the mad mother hen, and it was coming right in his direction.