Critical bodliy functions have been adapted

Essential bodily functions have been adapted

Full body adaption in progress...

"What the..." Tony tried to speak, still laying on the ground. He couldn't feel any part of his body, but assuming he hasn't gone crazy or died, the blue boxes floating in front of his eyes were real.

As if to prove their existence to him, another blue box appeared underneath the first, accompanying his strangely weak voice:

Estimated Time until Completion: 22h 7min 39sec

... Okay, maybe he was crazy. He shut his eyes again, searching for the last thing that he could remember. It turned out to be a cave.

"The 'Little Slip'... They sure had a cynical way of naming things." As far as he could trust himself, the cave was anything but little. But what about the second part, the 'slip'? Maybe he did just slip. Maybe he really died, cracking his head open on one of those stones.

"I should have listened to Black...", he whispered melancholically, before starting to wonder what had happened to his so called 'guardian'.

The answer came pretty fast, though not in the way that he expected: "Ohh, so you remember me! I feel so honored that you bothered to remember the name of some insignificant, old ring that only wanted to spoil your fun of falling into a fucking rift!!!"

Although Black seemed to be quite enraged about their little trip, Tony felt as relieved as never before when he opened his eyes again. "Black! You're still here! Oh thank God!"

He started to think again: "If Black is still here, then I can't be dead, can I? Well, I'm not alone anyways, and I didn't just make the whole cave exploration up... But where am I then?... Wait a minute."

"Wait, what do you mean, I 'fell into a rift'?"

There was an exhausted sigh and some mumbling too quiet for him to understand, before the ring started to speak loud again: "To keep it simple, you accidentally fell into a hole inside space and ended up somewhere else."

"Somewhere else?"

"Somewhere not on earth."

"... Like, another planet? An alien civilization?" It was quite hard for Tony to imagine some little green men floating through the massive canopy, but he was open for new things. He doubted though that he was open enough to accept aliens until he would finally see them.

"I don't know. I'm a ring, not a map, so don't expect me to know everything about these lands."

Tony could tell from the way Black acted - too emotional, too talkative - that he was insecure too, just better at hiding it. But more than anything, the dull ring seemed to be angry. Angry to be here, angry to not know where 'here' was.

"Alright, calm down. I need you to help me with something."

As soon as he asked for his help, Black calmed down and his anger dissolved, along with some of the tension inside Tiny's body - or at least the part of his body he could feel, his face. He could say much about Black's bad temper or his habit to nearly strangle him to get his attention, but above all that, Black was his friend, and he could count on him.

"You see, I can't feel my body, so I just wanted to ask... You know, if it's still there and in one piece..."

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It might seem useless to ask a ring which was obviously lacking eyes about the condition of his body, but although he never told him how, Black had some way to know what was going on around him.

Tony wasn't disappointed: "Don't worry, you’re all right. No injuries, no blood or bones... Neither inside nor outside. You're good... Have you tried moving your body?"

"Well, yes. But I can't, I can't feel anything other than my face."

There was a moment of silence, similar to the moment in which a teacher thinks about how to explain the math problem after the third question. Tony grew impatient and worried, and finally broke the silence: "What?"

"No, it's just... You can see, right?"

"Yes. We're in a forest, there's the sky and the trees, and those blue boxes."

"You see the blue boxes? Good, now tell me, what do they remind you of?"

Tony didn't have to think long. He has always been pretty secluded from people, spending his time digging through books and, later on, games. When your old friends call you a freak for talking to a ring, then it helps escaping into a game world where talking to rings, or trees, or books is common.

"It can't be... Games? This is a game world? But that's not possible!", Tony exclaimed, frantically moving his eyes over the green around him. It looked far too realistic to be anything other than that: reality.

"Relax. It's not as impossible as it seems. Different worlds simply work differently. And I guess the reason you can't move your body is that it hasn't yet adapted to these new rules."

More silence followed. Tony was in the thinking-while-trying-not-to-go-crazy phase, and Black was in the... well, he wasn't in any phase, he was impatient and growing irritated. He knew that a revelation this big wasn't something a human could easily cope with, but his short temper didn't listen to his rational thoughts.

Luckily, Tony didn't have to find out just how bad this could have ended, as he spoke again pretty soon: "So what do I do now? Lie around and wait for my body to adapt? That’s gonna take forever."

"That's one way to do this. But we don't have a clue where we are, and I don't want to be eaten and digested by a hungry alien creature. So here's what you do now: Move your arms and legs."

Tony rolled his eyes: "I just told you that I can't move them! Are you even listening?"

"You told me you can't feel them, and that's a difference. So don't think about moving them, just move them. Like you always do."

What felt like the next hour was thus spent with Tony lying motionless and a tense face on the ground in some forest, while the ring kept advising him how to move his arm, interrupted by a few heated dialogues about uselessness.

In the end, Tony only managed to lift his arm when he got so annoyed with the 'Just do it' that he felt the deep desire to slap the ring off his breast and into the forest. Apparently, his anger had reached a point where his brain disregarded any logical parts telling it that it was impossible to lift an arm you couldn't feel and just lifted it.

Tony stopped surprised halfway through the slapping motion, and Black shut up mid-sentence. Then the fifth blue box appeared:

Adaption has progressed through external means.

Estimated Time until Completion: 17h 25min 46sec

And he could feel it. His arms, his legs, his muscles, the ground. He lifted his hand, and watched it rise. He pushed himself off the mossy ground, which was the reason for his wet back, and stood up while the dangling, dull ring on the leather cord kept cheering him on.

And finally he stood, his head high, his legs shaky, his breathing fast. He stood in the middle of the forest where maybe no human had stood before, and smelled the air no human had smelled before.

He felt like Neil Armstrong, and the all too familiar words echoed in his head: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Though he rather felt like plunging to the ground than leaping.