2 Chapter 2 - Where, and what am I?

What appeared before Alan was quite odd, it looked as if he was in a dark cave, the sounds of slithering and twitching was everywhere. It was too dark to see anything.

"Was I kidnapped while laying on the ground? Was those lights the effects of drugs?" Alan immediately thought to himself. He tried opening his mouth to yell, but couldn't even produce spit enough to salivate his tongue.

To add insult to injury, he could feel himself slowly falling asleep. Alan was dumbstruck.

Wondering what to do, he could feel himself adjusting to the climate around him. What was before a cave to him, now looked more like a giant woolen round house, the earth beneath him seemed to be moving and twitching, and shadowy figures could be seen flowing through the walls, in and out of the holes of the round woolen like substance that responded to their every touch.

This, this wasn't a house at all, It was a giant mushroom!

Alan had now completely adapted to his surroundings, the white woolen like substance now appeared to be spores with small rims flowing up and down, the shadowy figures slithering around looked more like centipedes now that he could see, their legs long and twisted, as if a spider mated with a worm.

Towering half the size of Alan, these creatures didn't seem to near his presence, as if they were afraid of what would happen if they did, or perhaps they simply didn't care about him.

Alan was in complete shock, but weirdly enough he wasn't scared at all. This new change of scenery brought with it a certain uncertainty, one that didn't seem hostile to Alan, but rather welcoming, like he was back home.

Alan examined his body, he felt tiny. The bulging muscles on his legs, his arms dark red with long green lines exuding red smoke. He looked rather imposing.

"Was this the same red smoke as when I collapsed?" Alan thought as he came to his senses. Struggling to sit up, what greeted him immediately was the enormous pull from the corner of his back.

*Phoof*

This sudden pull caught him by surprise. He stopped moving altogether, afraid of encountering the wrath of this thing that so desperately wanted him to lay down.

Alan's brain was storming, it was completely blank as to how to get out of this situation. Now he understood why he had been feeling so weak, his energy was slowly succumbing.

This thing was eating him!

God knows how long this had been going on before Alan woke up. What awaited him if he stayed like this would be a slow and numbing death.

"I can't die like this, I haven't even figured out what the fuck is going on" Alan was desperate, who knew how long he could continue like this before all his strength was sapped away.

Before the creature could react again Alan rushed himself up, threw his hand behind his back and grabbed onto the wormy like centipede bitten into his upper shoulder, in a contest of reflex, Alan easily won. This thing that had been eating him was different than the other centipedes, it was not brown like the others, instead it was the same color as Alan, Dark red.

"This must be why the others were staying away, it seems this one is the Alpha"

Feeling something flowing out of the massive hole this thing created, Alan had no choice but to remove himself from the nest he was residing in, it was simply too dangerous to stay, what if the other centipedes decided to attack? Having detached his grip of the worm, he quickly found a small hole and threw himself out of it.

Laying on the flat soil outside of the Mushroom, this environment was beyond anything he had ever seen before.

Hundreds of Mushrooms lay stretched out in even spaces on a massive field like forest, each one blooming with the rounded patterns of red, white and black. Small centipede like creatures were drifting around these mushroom structures as if they were the natural place to nest in this environment. Some mushrooms had large holes the sizes of horses, as if an animal ran straight through. The greenish halfmoon in the sky glowed like it was the sun, not even a hint of a star could be seen in the sky.

"This definitely isn't earth, where have I gone?" Alan started guessing his current situation.

He drew some conclusions, earlier when he was experiencing the feeling of floating, perhaps that was his consciousness, or soul as he had also guessed before, "Maybe I really did fly through time and space and landed in an unknown world, or maybe this is all the effects of drugs, perhaps this is what the mind experiences when it's close to death"

That wouldn't explain his body however, everything he had been experiencing was unlike that of a dream, he could feel and sense the environment around him, the wound on his back had stopped itching completely, in fact Alan could not find a single thing wrong with his back, as if it healed while he ran out. The red smoke had become more apparent since he left, it flowed around his body at a higher rate than before, reaching all the way down to his legs now.

Touching his face, Alan was extremely surprised to find that he had no nose, on his two sides of his forehead were small horns similar to the Demons of mythology, in the middle of his forehead was a line which felt like that of a closed eye although with no eyelash, he had no hair to speak of besides a few protruding lines circling on the top of his head.

"Could I even consider myself human anymore?" Alan wondered, although he had a few guesses before, This scene completely changed his perspective.

"Did I reincarnate as this thing? Was my soul replaced with the original creature? If so, what happened to this thing originally, did it die and connect with me?"

Hundreds of thoughts ran through Alan's mind like a sandstorm, where were he? Did his original self die? Alan simply couldn't connect the dots.

But all of that was secondary, Alan needed a safe place to figure out what the hell was going on. He didn't know what dangers this place hid, in fact he didn't even know what this monster he had become consumed. His instinct told him to find shelter.