Tim was pretty sure that whatever happened next, a schedule 40 two-inch y fitting wasn’t going to be much help. It was a shame because he had 16 of them on the cart, and a full shot worth of the little ¼ inch elbows.
“Hey, uh, beta test administrators, you don’t happen to want me to plumb a building or something do you?”
There was no response and Tim sighed. He hadn’t thought it would work, but he had half hoped it would elicit some kind of response. There didn’t seem to be any help available here, but there was a single break in the hedgerow that surrounded him, so Tim headed in that direction. As he approached the opening, on a whim he tried to identify the bushes that made up the border and what he saw caused him to stop the cart. The leaves of the hedge were orange, but not in a fall foliage kind of way. These were closer to traffic cone orange, and he moved closer and squinted, focusing on a single leaf. It was extremely slow and he hadn’t noticed at first, but it looked as if the individual veins on each leaf were slowly writhing. Tim was not an expert on botany, but he felt confident plant parts shouldn’t be able to move like that. Suddenly the 8-foot hedgerow surrounding the clearing seemed a lot more ominous than it had.
Tim knew he shouldn’t do it. He’d watched enough episodes of Star Trek as a kid, and he was hooked on Naked and Afraid nowaday. He’d always said he wouldn’t be that guy. When life finally presented him with the opportunity, he couldn’t help himself. Shaking his head in regret before he even fully committed, Tim extended a single finger and touched a leaf. Nothing happened, and Tim sighed in relief. The plant had an almost tacky consistency at the edge, and he rubbed across the leaf, wondering if he could feel the vein move. Immediately the leaf wrapped around his finger and it felt like his hand had been lit on fire.
Tim yanked his hand out and flailed it wildly in the air as he screamed incoherently.
“Shit-fuck, holy god-damnit hand owww mother bitch.”
The pain finally dropped to a steady throb that was sedate enough that he could think again and the first thing Tim realized was that he could see another of those floating text boxes in front of him.
You have been poisoned.
Lose 1 Hp per minute until cured.
As soon as he finished reading the box disappeared. With his vision unobstructed, he stared at the offending digit. His finger was slightly swollen, and had taken on a bit of an orange cast around the nail bed. He flexed it experimentally, then wiggled his whole hand and made a fist. It wasn’t inhibiting movement and seemed to be working okay. Tim wondered how many HP he could lose before it started to become a serious problem. 1 per minute was 60 an hour. He tried to do the math for how many that was in a day and figured out that not only did his cell have no signal, which he’d expected, but it wouldn’t even turn on. It took him awhile but he managed to come up with 1440 a day. He was kind of proud of doing that in his head at first, but then he started to worry. He didn’t know how much health he had, but 1440 sounded like a lot. He was betting he didn’t have that much health, and would be dead in less than a day if he didn’t figure something out.
Imminent death seemed like a hell of a motivator, and Tim grabbed the handle of his cart and started pushing it faster towards the opening. He was careful to guide it smack through the middle, with plenty of clearance from the hedges on each side. Unfortunately, when he’d left the circle he’d started with, he was presented with a featureless path leading two opposite directions. From the look of things, both of those branched out in a similar T not too much further along. While Tim had never been in a hedge maze before, he’d seen them on TV and he was pretty sure he was looking at one now. He drummed his still throbbing fingers on the handle of his cart while he thought.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Always turn right when you’re stuck in a maze. It was a rule of thumb that let you at least retrace your steps and start over. Slow and steady, but it would probably get him out eventually. He was losing 1 HP a minute though, whatever the hell that meant. He had the big metal sample cart. The plant looked pretty dense, but maybe he could brute force through the hedge by shoving the cart through the branches. As bad as one finger hurt, he didn’t really want to risk it. Tim looked down at the cart trying to decide how sturdy it was when he was struck by inspiration.
“I am a freaking genius.”
He pulled the fire extinguisher off it, then the pipe samples before locking the wheel in place with a foot on top of it and yanking back on the handle to pop a wheelie. Once the cart was up, he walked it back until it was sitting on one end, and the front which was now the top was about five feet up. He very carefully climbed on top of the cart, half afraid he would tip it over and pitch himself into the poison hedge. He made it up safely, and stood up, head and shoulders above the top of the hedgerow.
“This thing is huge.”
Tim tried panning to the side to get an idea of just how far the maze ranged, but gave up when his balance wobbled. After he had calmed down he focused on the area immediately to the front and noticed a couple of points of interest. There was a clearing with a big marble sculpture and another with a canopy of bright red silk. Most significantly though, there was a big wrought iron gate that seemed to mark the exit from the maze. At least the hedges disappeared and nothing but a fairly straight gravel path appeared to lay beyond it. Tim tried to plot a route from his location to the end, murmuring; right, left, right, right, then straight, then left but it was complicated enough he lost track pretty quick. After a couple minutes thought he came up with a plan and pulled the quality control stamp from the pocket of his jeans. He raised his left arm and on the inside where it would be unlikely to smear he started rotating the stamp, right, then left, then right. It took him a few minutes but eventually he was pretty sure he had a fairly straightforward route laid out through the maze. Oddly enough it looked like he’d have to go past the statue and the canopy both to get to the gate.
He climbed back down and righted his cart, then spent a few moments reloading it with the plastic samples. Tim was operating mostly from habit. He didn’t have any use for the parts, but the factory had beat into his head that they didn’t just leave parts lying around. Lean manufacturing, control the inventory and you control the profits. So after teleporting into some fantasy world with magical venomous shrubs, Tim took the time to reload his sample cart before he pushed on through the maze. At first it was easy going, every turn was right where he’d expected it, and while the cart wasn’t designed for outdoor use, the grass was short and the turf relatively firm. Over time though, it seemed like it took more and more effort to progress.
Tim was leaning into the cart, wheezing while he struggled from the short walk when he realized this was probably a result of the poison the text box had warned him of. This level of physical exertion was really pretty minimal, but the throbbing in his hand and the general feeling of malaise was probably due to losing too many HP. After resting for a moment without any apparent recovery, he decided it would be better to push on and hope for some kind of cure. Tim was pretty sure that if he’d followed his little stamp cheat sheet correctly he was only two turns away from the first noticeable feature.
The statue I could indistinctly see from my vantage point on top of the sample was actually the centerpiece of a large marble fountain. It was shaped like a caduceus with water dripping down from the wings on the top down to a large but shallow basin below. By the time he reached it, Tim was feeling completely wiped. He sagged down on the ledge of the fountain and trailed his fingers through the water, intending to rest for just a moment. The cool water felt good on his swollen hand, and finally his sluggish mind made the connection. He was pretty sure the snakes entwined around a pole underneath dove wings was a universal symbol for medicine back in the real world. Tim ignored the warnings his brain gave him of giardia or e coli and instead followed some more primitive instinct that had him lean over and drink directly from the pool of water.
You have ingested the Water of Life
All status effects are cured
HP recovery has doubled
Even as the textbox floated in front of him, the soothing feeling of the cool liquid in his dry mouth spread throughout his body. His hand stopped throbbing and began to tingle before it returned to normal. Tim drank as much as he thought he could safely hold, and then a few swallows more. He almost felt as if he should slosh as he went back to his metal cart and started to rearrange the samples. The pipe fittings were in flat plastic bins for ease of transport, but he dumped them onto the bare bottom shelves of the cart now. Each of the bins was a couple of square feet, but their low rims restricted him to only about a gallon or so in each of the three. Tim wasn’t about to leave this kind of resource behind without at least trying to take some with him though, so he filled each of them with the Water before he continued on down the path.