"Sorry, but if I'm a hallucination I can't tell." He actually checks himself over. "Do I... seem like a hallucination?"

-- keep a straight face keep a straight keep a straight face --

Success!

"No, of course not, silly", she says, smiling innocently, while concerns about the general mental health of the battle-ready stranger following her around have mildly increased.

"Shall we ... go look along the path? I'm really not sure. Maybe you can tell me about how this world works and how you've survived so long while we walk to the river and try to notice anything out of the ordinary?"

"Yeah, that river with the elk and the vinewolves? That's what we'd call a clearing, even if it's not... a clearing." Danny scratches his neck. "I get that it might not be the best word, but I didn't exactly get a textbook when I got here. Any part of the hedge that's more than just..." He gestures around. "Thick forest. It's complicated, but in this place you mostly spend your time at something or traveling between things, and the river sounds like an at, unless you follow it for long enough that it starts to get hard to move again.

"Plus, remember how I said time is weird, here? It might not be possible to find the place you first got in unless we're synced with it in time, which can take some trial and error. So we need to make our way back to the river first, if we can, and then try to find your original path every hour or so. It might take a while, but if the river is the first place you stopped, it'll be the best anchor."

"What do you mean by 'synced with it'? What is syncing and how do we do it?"

"Like, okay, imagine it was 5PM when you got here? Then you spent some time traveling, but that barely counts, and then you were at the river for an hour. By the time you try to make it back, if no one else was at the place where you popped in... it's still closer to 5 than it is 6, where the entrance is compared to where you are. Or when you are."

She frowns in confusion.

"'the entrance is compared to where you are'?' I'm not sure I follow ... Are you trying to say time only flows when we are in clearings and that you have to get to a clearing at the same time of day as previous events, and then make it back to the portal at the same time offset as I got in ...? Actually, in that case we'd want to get to the portal before the time the elk turns up in the river clearing, if that's a daily event somehow? And actually actually, if things are just shifting on a 24-hour schedule, why not just backtrack from the river every hour till we find the portal?"

"Yeah, backtracking from the river is the plan, but getting there before the time when you saw the elk wouldn't help. That would work if the area where the portal was is stuck in time, but it's moving forward too, at its own pace. You can sometimes manage it if you go back and forth between two clearings and no one else is around, but it would be impossible to know 'when' the portal is at this point. I just know it gets harder to find the further you travel and the longer passes, because it can get caught up in someone else's... time stream, or whatever." 

Wait, there are other people here?

Oh damn, of course there are other people here. Danny is here, and it took no time for her to run into him.

"How many other people are there?" She does ask.

"Why aren't you with all these other people?" She definitely doesn't ask.

"I don't even know how big this place is. That tree you found me at? That's only the third time I've ever seen it, and I only climbed up to wait out the night because of the vines tied to the branch. I've never met someone else there before, or in most places I've been. But if you mean how many people I've met..." He shifts his weight. "You'd have to define 'people' first, and 'met,' but... people I've spoken to, with names I remember? Six. Things that might be people... a few dozen, maybe?"

She nods.

"Anything ... I should know about these people? Any reason you ... are traveling with me but not them?", She suppresses a wince, trying to note any sign of instability or aggression in the young man.

"Yeah, most of them will want to eat you, and you can take that several different kinds of literally and figuratively. There's a reason I only have five arrows left, and it's not because I'm a bad shot or don't know how to make more."

She tenses. "This place is getting more and more fun by the minute." Her hand drops into her pocket clenching around her knife as fear wraps around her chest. "Maybe we should get going." she nods at her own words, turns around and starts walking. A moment later she realizes how curt she is being, and makes herself stop and look back.

"You coming?"

He was already moving with her. "Like I said, I've got plenty of reasons to stay close."

"R-right", she stammers, quickly turning back to the path. She keeps a grip on her knife and hurries onward.

She is starting to feel quite frayed from the non-consensual acupuncture supplied by the local flora while the local fauna keeps attempting to debate her mortality. And now the first sign of humanity comes in the shape of a confusingly attractive lover boy with questionable intentions. She is honestly not sure if he's more interested in finding a way out of here or in to her.

On that note, she really wishes she wasn't the one leading. It would be far easier to keep an eye on him if she could actually see him. So she steps to the side around a particularly unbrambly part and attempts to let Danny pass her.

"I think you should take the lead for a bit. We'll soon hit the river where I saw the vine wolves, and I think you are far better equipped to deal with that than I am." She attempts to smile disarmingly at this not-technically-a-lie.

"You think I'd have suggested coming here if running into them was a risk? They sleep at night, so we don't have to worry about them until morning. You being in front makes it much more likely we end up where you've been before. Plus, staying behind you means I can watch your back."

She nods, signalling an outward agreement with no inward counterpart.

"Ok ... I guess I'm still getting used to this place a little. Want to tell me more about how it works and how you ended up here while we walk? Also how do we get food, water and shelter here?" As she turns back to the path and starts walking, she realizes Danny will have to speak quite loudly for her to hear him while they move single file through the dim forest. She feels rather condemned to trusting his supposed expertise and judgement. At least till she builds up a better sense of this place and how she might survive.

"The short version is that I got lost in the woods." He's speaking loud enough for her to hear him over the rustle of the greenery she's moving through, but it's hard to tell how far the sound is carrying in the otherwise silent forest. "I was on a school camping trip and lost track of time while out on my own. It got dark faster than I expected, or maybe faster than it should have... anyway, it took me a while to realize I wasn't even wandering through the woods I originally got lost in. Luckily I had my hiking pack with me. There's a book I read in middle school called Hatchet about a teenager surviving in the wilderness on his own, and it was kind of like that, except time was moving weirdly and a flower tried to eat me on what I think was my second day here."

He sounds flippant about it, and also a bit guarded. Or maybe he's just keeping most of his attention on their surroundings. "Anyway, water is mostly fine unless it looks or smells funny. It actually tastes cleaner than wild rivers and ponds back home did. Shelter is basically non-existent, but weather is rare, storms even rarer. As for wildlife... caves are more trouble than they're worth. Trees are okay, if you're a light sleeper. I don't know if any other kind makes it long. And for food, let's just say everything here does something. You might be able to figure it out ahead of time, and get lucky enough that it's just, like, some nuts that make you grow grass instead of hair for a few days. Freaks you out, kind of uncomfortable, but not dangerous. Much. On the plus side all the food I've found here has been really filling. I only eat once every three or four... I'd say days but they're basically always longer than that. Times I get tired enough to sleep, let's say, though maybe those are longer between too."

She is quiet a moment, waiting to hear if he will tell her more. People's minds often betray a certain shade of their intentions when faced with silence. It's honestly one of the tricks she picked up as a teacher: Keep quiet a little longer and most students will start offering excuses for things you didn't even know they had done.

"How about you?" he asks after maybe a minute. "What's your world like?"

"oh, uh ... time flows at the same speed for everyone. Well... mostly. And there are no entities out to kill you. Well ... in the area I live anyway. And no one has irretrievably lost their mind ... Well, ok, I give up. Some people do irretrievably lose their minds. I just don't know them. I happen to live in a very nicely ordered part of my world. It's a little boring. A bit existentially soul-crushing. But, honestly, my soul could use a slight crush right now." She glances back. "I mean, of boredom. I could do with some boredom and monotony and rest!." She quickly looks ahead again.

She hasn't noticed the flower or the arched tree, and they should be coming up on the river soon.

"Anyway, I guess I don't know what to tell you? We should be in a city right now. One of the biggest ones in my world. There should be buildings taller than any of these trees, and there should be millions of people. There should be electronics, like my phone. But I don't have any reception here. All I did was cut through the park on my way home, and instead I've ended up here."

"Sounds not too different from my world, honestly," he says. "I mean, I didn't travel too much, but you hear things from the news, or when adults are talking..."

He trails off, and a moment later she realizes why: they can hear the river.

The hedges she's pushing her way through start to thin, and in the dim light (moonlight? but she can't see a moon when she looks up) she can make out the glistening river. Fronds glow along the bank in bursts of orange, red, and yellow, and one of the trees on the opposite shore has glowing ivy tracing swirling patterns along its trunk and down its branches, giving off just enough illumination for them to make out that the area around them is clear of any beasts, wolf or otherwise.

Her breath catches and she stands dumbstruck -- It's so beautiful...

She lets her eyes move along the effervescent colors. The soft glow from the bushes reaches through her and releases a tension she had been carrying ever since she arrived in this place. The motes of light were friendly, but this ... this is a way more of the world should be. A way that this world was better than her world.

She looks around for a way to cross the river. Maybe the water is shallow enough to not soak through her boots, or maybe there are stepping stones further down? She skips away along the bank looking for a way to cross, her current purpose momentarily forgotten in overwhelming delight and relief.

The pale green glow of the tree doesn't extend far, so it's hard to tell the river depth in the gloom. But near a patch of glowing ferns she can make out a rock that's just within long-stepping range, and from there she can probably hop to the other bank...

A hand grabs her arm and tugs her back from the bank. "What are you doing?" Danny hisses in her ear. "We're supposed to head back toward where your portal might be."

She can finally make his features out in the orange-red glow of the ferns. He looks like the male boyfriend lead of some Disney channel original YA film, but grown and buff and scowly.

She can also make out the scars, a faint silver mesh that traces up his arms and parts of his chest. They look less like wounds and more like a thousand tiny cuts that have healed over and over, almost like an inconsistent tattoo sleeve of a spider web.