2 Chapter 2

The day greeted the lone sleeping figure with a beam of sunlight to the face.

Said figure grimaced and tried to roll over, but instead of feeling the texture of a soft bed, like he had been expecting, what he felt instead was the coarse surface of a tree branch. Shaking away the last vestiges of sleep, the figure stirred from his slumber and slowly sat up, even despite the tinges of pain, if the grimaces were anything to go by. Now properly situated, and with the light of midday illuminating his body, the figure could now be clearly seen. Though with his blue fur-lined jacket and beige pants being marred with dirt, -not to mention the various rips and tears of his garments, and his now filthy white locks- he looked like a particularly unfortunate hobo, but without the part of being old, so it could be said that he was rather just an unfortunate bloke who got mauled by something particularly nasty, which wasn't that far from the truth, in fact, that was totally what happened to him.

Anyways.

The guy decided to descend to the ground before he fell off the tree and worsened his condition, soldiering on in spite of the various aches and pains from his battered and bruised body. He was careful to test the strength of the branches before he stepped, or held, onto them, so as to not fall and aggravate his injured everything further. After a few minutes of careful descent, he reached the lowest branch and jumped down to the last feet from the ground, carefully.

He immediately, and carefully, rushed over to the water basin to quench his thirst and wash up his face, before he noticed his grime-smeared countenance, and decided to just take a bath in the stream, also carefully. He removed his clothes and set them aside before he waded into the water, he placed a few careful steps to test the firmness and the depth of the stream, before deeming it satisfactory and wading in further. He dunked his entire body and washed off all the accumulated grime from his body, scrubbing with care around his still tender body.

While he was lucky that he only gained a few bruises and scratches, and not mutilations and amputations, he was still in quite a lot of pain. So he decided that he was perfectly fine sitting in the quiet waters and feeling the water bob and weave around him, he even felt sleepy! But he didn't quite manage to fall asleep.

After a few more minutes of sitting in the eddy and doing nothing in particular, he decided that he was clean enough and went to wash his filthy clothes. He grabbed his pants and his coat, but left his undershirt and boxers where they were at, and submerged them in the stream. He washed them quite thoroughly, scrubbing off the dirt and grime till he felt that they were clean enough, and then he hung them of a relatively clean branch. He dried himself off and garbed his relatively clean undergarments.

After that he went back to the basin to inspect his cleanliness, satisfied, he made to go back to his drying clothes, before he noticed something peculiar.

Once again he inspected his countenance, consequently figuring out the thing that had been bothering him just a little bit during his nightmarish escapades. He didn't notice it then, when he was in a full adrenaline-fuelled fight or flight, mostly flight, mode and dodging beasts several times larger than his size. But now that he finally had a moment to himself, without any monsters trying to cleave him into bits and pieces, he finally took in his appearance.

Pale skin and white hair, those two things, in and of themselves, were already quite a peculiarity, but what really stole the cake in his weird-shit-o-meter was his apparent age. His complete, or the more well defined, set of memories indicated an age of somewhere between early to mid-twenties, though he wasn't really sure of the specifics, while his other memories said that he was eons old.

'The heck?'

But no, currently, he wasn't even that close to the latter age. Heck, he wasn't even in his twenties now. What he saw was that he had clearly been de-aged, because really, what else would explain what he had seen when he had first woken up? So now he had the face and body of a teen just shy of fifteen, not even on the cusps of puberty.

And that meant having to relive that particular stage of his life… he wasn't sure if that was any better than dying a horrible, messy, and painful death. They were essentially the same thing really, but at least dying didn't involve massive amounts of embarrassment, unless you also die in a horridly embarrassing manner, then both things would be truly alike.

But digressing from that particular topic, he was fairly sure that he, at the very least, was an adult before he found himself here in this strange situation.

And on that matter, where was "here" anyway? It couldn't be some sort of forest preserve or some such, because he was fairly sure that no forest was even remotely close to this kind of thing.

'And now that I think about it… how the heck did I even get here? It can't be a kidnapping, no one in their right mind would go through the effort of kidnapping someone, especially me, and then just leave me stranded in a strange red forest.'

As he was musing to himself, he didn't notice that he had already started to pace back and forth in thought. What he did notice though, was when his stomach growled loudly. Announcing his growing hunger and cutting off his silent musings,

"That right! I haven't really eaten anything yet, have I?! Oh how could I forget?!"

Yeah, it was probably from the various injuries on his everything.

In his rush to get to his clothes, –"Hopefully they're dry now."- he almost tripped on a rock, it was jutting out quite obviously, so he didn't know how he could have missed it.

'No matter, the clothes are dry now.'

He arrived at the place where he had hung his clothes, to see that they were already dry and ready for wearing. And he immediately headed out to the forest to scavenge some fruits.

Hopefully the edible looking ones wouldn't trick him.

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After a long while, he had finally finished deliberating on what to eat, 'This one or that one?', and even whether to eat it or not, 'Hmmm, I don't know… it looks quite edible…'

And so he got up from his position leaning against the tree, stretching while he did so, he promptly headed for the water basin to quench his thirst. Eating anxiously while hoping he wouldn't immediately keel over and die was really quite the mouth dryer, huh, who knew?

And so he was musing to himself that he didn't notice a protruding rock jutting out from the ground until he had already tripped on said rock. And so he promptly lost his balance.

"Waa-!"

As he fell, he reached out blindly for any leverage to steady himself, but instead of grabbing onto the bark or a branch of a tree, instead he clawed at nothing in particular, except air.

There was a thud…

And it was accompanied by a brief but undeniable flash of blue light.

"Wha?"

Understandably, he was quite perplexed.

What had that light been? And how was he not hurt?

And indeed, what could have been a few scrapes and further aggravation of his existing injuries was instead just him eating dirt, and none the worse for wear.

'How did that happen? Was that real, or was it just a trick of my eyes? But if that wasn't real, then how am I not hurting much more?'

He dusted himself off as he stood back up,

"Ok, let's see if we can do that again..."

He tried to remember that particular fall.

"Ok, so I was falling pretty unexpectedly, but I've fallen a lot more times before that, what with being chased by big monsters and all that, but this is the first time that that has happened… and on that matter… what the heck was that anyway?"

He recalled the sensation of terror at the unexpectedness of the fall, the feeling of panic, his heart beating against his chest, and that welling feeling of calm and safety that rose out of his gut.

"That feeling…"

He muttered.

"... where did that come from?"

He gathered his thoughts and tried to calm himself, and he remembered the feeling of calm washing away his panic, that serenity, the feeling of knowing that he wasn't going to be hurt by the fall, he recalled all of that.

And slowly, he opened his eyes to behold himself glowing a neon hue of blue, the aura of blue hues was radiating off of him in abundant waves, and unknown to him, the blue aura was suffusing into his injuries, healing them in the process, and rather rapidly at that.

He felt assurance, like nothing could budge him in the world. He felt calm serenity, like he was accepting of the situation that he now found himself in. He felt that he could do anything, like he could survive in this strange world, and maybe even thrive. The undulating waves were shining bright, and then they waned. The feelings suddenly cut off.

"Hua-!"

And he came down like an addict on adrenaline crash. Immediately, he felt sluggish, weak, and fatigued. He felt like he had just ran a marathon, and then came down with the worst cold ever known to man.

Horrible was a big understatement.

'Oh mah gawd, what the heck is this feeling… uggghhh… so tired.'

He sluggishly shuffled to a nearby tree to rest his tired body. Sitting down, he fell asleep almost immediately. He only had time to hear loud rustling before he fell to the sweet embrace of sleep.

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The next morning he woke up to the sound of indistinct chatter.