Ever since his waking a cool breeze had gusted high above the ground. The wooden pillars holding up the sky remained clean for over a hundred feet before branching out to form the canopy. These higher boughs shook slightly swaying with the wind.
Ulric's eyes couldn't help but be drawn up to the leaves above. The flickers of green, lightening blues, and new day light made for a suitably *ahem* magical backdrop against which to come to terms with his new reality.
"So. I guess it's farewell Earth. Farewell Home. Farewell Parents."
He brushed a nascent tear off the corner of his eye and firmed up his will. Breathing deeply of pristine air, Ulric focused his thoughts inward, on his body, the sensations rolling through it, his new self, and on that vague warmth growing in his chest.
"Status"
[https://i.imgur.com/vBAMFTG.png]
"Huh. I'll be damned." Ulric started. Looking at this, if he was reading it in the context that he thought he was reading it, the old girl had done him a serious solid.
"If anybody scans me, they are going to see some serious Watcher fuckery." he rationalized. It was all right there in plain speech, no ambiguity whatsoever. He wasn't going to argue with the results though, he needed no other sign of the quality of the craftsmanship than to look down at a body that belonged to an Olympic gymnast, rather than a forty year old worked to death engineer.
That asterisk next to human and the corrupted text was a little concerning but, all told, there was nothing to complain about.
"Magic." he said. "Now ain't that some shit."
Ulric took a moment to bask in the status window, stray thoughts held just below conscious awareness drifting. A strange birdcall pulled him out of his reverie.
Right, he thought. I'm now ass out in the middle of a forest which is like nothing that ever existed on Earth outside of the Carboniferous era. If then. He resolved himself to get his head in the game, first by assessing his immediate surroundings for tooling, shelter, fire, water, and possibilities for clothing.
Despite being in a forest, the sheer ungodly size of the trees proved to be a challenge. They were so large, with limbs so high off the ground that getting to fresh timber would require a climb that would be easily lethal from which to fall. Not to mention that he'd be doing the climb completely naked and he had no idea what sorts of predators operated in a forest like this. Could be there was some kind of bird that liked to pick naked pink semi-monkeys off the trunks of trees.
Rainfall would likely not be a tremendous issue at least. Most trees tended to have branch and leaf angles which guided the water to run down the trunks and the thickness of the canopy would virtually guarantee that only drippage, rather than direct downpour would make it to the forest floor.
Feeling the ground thunder under his feet Ulric dug his feet into the forest floor, scraping back the leaf litter to allow him to get a look at the soil. As he was expecting, the leaf fall was only a couple of centimeters thick lying atop a deep black loam. It would appear that this climate experienced cold intense enough to trigger seasonal leaf falls. If the thinness and dryness of the leaves was any indication this was likely a season fairly distant from the last fall. Meaning the next one was much likely sooner rather than later, especially given the cool air.
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Ulric had always run a little hot. He had a passionate hatred for muggy summer weather but routinely went out in winter in a light long sleeve shirt. The air at the moment was just beneath what he would consider a comfortable resting temperature, especially given the high humidity inside the forest's autoclime, the climate a large forest generates inside itself.
"Alright then." he decided. "First project, we need to find a place to shelter and generate fire." He reasoned that if he could get a fire he could handle finding materials for tools and hedge his bets against the weather turning. Exposure killed more people stranded in the wild than any number of predators after all.
Having confirmed his goals he took off walking towards what appeared to be a higher hill some half a kilometer way from the lesser rise on which he had started. The gentle decrease in elevation was accompanied by a slight decrease in temperature, which helped Ulric confirm that physics seemed to operate more or less normally, with damp cool air being of greater density than warmer air. No magical fuckery here, or at least not yet.
His legs carried him without effort, his breath came easily, and for the first time in a decade there was no pain in his left knee and ankle. A car accident had stolen much of that leg from him, with three surgeries failing to restore the basic strength necessary to stabilize the joint under heavy loads. It was transformational. This, he decided, was in fact worth dying for. He was marching through primeval wood, in a magical land, in peak form, at the absolute perfect time of day and temperature in which to hike. If only the breeze passing over his dangles didn't remind him frequently of the, ah, exposed nature of his journey.
The lack of direct sunlight proved to be a double edged sword. The lack of underbrush made travel and visibility far easier than in a patchy canopy with dense floor growth, but it also left him devoid of obvious options for tinder and tool making materials. Small branches, dead standing, vines, all the things that tended to grow in less well developed forests were missing here. He might need to make a break for a dead fall if he could find one from the top of the next rise. The only other real option would be to attempt a climb.
He'd heard of the green desert, a hazard of deep forests in which there was actually almost no resources for animal life. The trees had so successfully established a monoculture that they drove out most other plants, leaving only the few that could utilize the tree's resources. If he was in one, he'd be in deep trouble, as the only real way to survive a green desert is to find your way out of it and he was sorely lacking in the ability to navigate without risking gaining a vantage point.
These thoughts followed him as he walked. Occasional birdsong broke up the sighing of wind through leaves. He occasionally stilled and focused on his hearing as a faint sound beneath his conscious notice caused the hair on his neck to rise and a freeze reflex to take hold. Instincts evolved over millions of years of successfully keeping soft squishy mammals from feeding other much less squishy mammals. Not listening to them was a fool's game, especially in strange country.
Moving quietly but quickly he made the next rise in a matter of a quarter of an hour having circumnavigated three of the towering trees. Each trunk was at least 20 meters in diameter. Each one had a thick brownish grey ridged bark the valleys in which he could fit his arm. The leaf litter was very nearly unbroken in any direction he looked. No fallen branches he could see. No dead giants. Nothing that he could use, at least not without maybe digging into the loam. It was entirely possible that some of the small ridges he saw were actually dead trees that had been buried by their living cousins. Not that that would have provided much use. Anything buried in that was going to be damp and rotted to the point of being more soil than wood.
The ridge turned out to be a blessing. From there he stood on a sort of escarpment. A bare few kilometers stood between him and a precipitous drop in elevation from which rolled the canopy of the lower forest. Misty clouds hovered over those tree tops which formed a sea of green all the way to a set of mountains which ran perpendicular to his direction of travel. Jagged stone and white peaks denoted a young mountain chain that ran off to his right without end. Bad news for him, mountain chains like those were a bastard to navigate. Without a clearly established path that had been thoroughly trekked to ensure the passes wouldn't close due to avalanche or rock slide you could easily enter such a range fully supplied, never to be seen again.
Sliding his eyes to his left he saw that the mountain chain dropped to rolling hills through which a large river ran, probably fed by glaciers. It was easily over a hundred kilometers to those hills, if the size of those mountains was anything to go by. And between him and that seemingly gentle land was an unbroken wall of verdure.
"Holy fuck."