...which is only really clear to her when the branches she was pushing through grow thicker, and instead of revealing the path through the park, show a dimly lit forest.

She blinks, but the scene doesn't change. She looks behind her, but the park is gone.

She took this shortcut home a hundred times before. The park isn't large enough to ever completely block out the sight of the surrounding city, let alone get truly lost in.

But somehow, right now, it's clear that's exactly what she is.

She feels disoriented and oddly alert. Something is happening. Something she can't make sense of.

She grabs her cell phone, somehow expecting that she might have walked into a different part of town. Was she really that absent-minded on her way back home? It's really the only possibility.

She checks google maps, but her icon won't load. "Offline mode", it says. Huh.

She checks her reception, and finds none. Maybe something is blocking the signal? Some ... structure?

She looks around and only sees leaves and bark coalescing into walls of foliage.

Ooooor not.

"What the ...", she whispers under her breath.

Now the sensible thing to do is to turn around and trace her way back to familiar ground.

The sensible thing is to not walk in to mysterious places, while disoriented, and outside of cell reception.

Yet sensible things are boring. And her life is already so boring.

So she ignores the pounding in her chest, and instead pushes her attention outward to her senses. The quiet like glass, splitting in hair fractures from her slightly ragged breathing...

She steps forward slowly, scanning her surroundings, trying to make out where this path goes.

What does she see?

She's surrounded by thick underbrush, surrounded itself by thicker hedges. Her clothes give some protection, but she still feels stings as branches or nettles or thorns occasionally prick and scratch her. Each step adds a third sound to the absolute silence, masking for a moment the pounding of her heart and the harsh push and pull of her breaths.

Everything she sees is some shade of brown and green, though the dusky light makes it hard to see too far, and the trees grow thick enough to block her vision anyway. The sky is a vague haze of dim light, with no sign of where the sun should be. Noticing that draws her attention to the shadows, eyes roaming over the pattern of green and brown around her, letting her gaze unfocus to take in the all the black at once...

...until it becomes clear that they are not where they should be. It's subtle, so subtle she can't quite understand what's wrong until she looks up and around again to see the light's dim glow through branches, then down again at interplay of foliage and shadow.

The shadows aren't following the light, because the light is coming from everywhere with the same faint haze. It's hard to know what the shadows should be doing, in an environment like this... but her intuitive mind knows, somehow, that what she's seeing is wrong.

It only gets worse when she tries to look back and forth between two patches of forest, tries to compare the shadows between them, and realizes that they're changing. Not a lot. Not obviously. But a leaf that was a dark green before looks a slightly brighter shade, now, and then an even brighter one, then back to dark, then so dark it's hard to see at all... or did she imagine that it's the same leaf? Perhaps the wind... but no, there is no wind.

No wind, and no bird calls, and no animals, and no insects. Just her heartbeat, and her breaths, and the more she pays attention, the stronger the feeling of subtle wrongness is, and the harder to miss, like a 3D image she can't unsee. She has to actively focus her attention on things in the distance, tree trunks and patches of bramble, to keep the creeping sense of offness from filling her entire awareness with surreality.

She suppresses the urge to run. A rising panic fills her. Her mind feels like a room full of propane where one wrong thought might light a spark. Her eyes shift back and forth from the distance to the flickering, ever-changing wrongness of her immediate surroundings.

'I'm on drugs', she realizes. 'I must be on drugs.'

Wait, how? She just went for a walk around town, with a little break for a pumpkin spice latte at that cute coffee bar on 34th street. It had the cute couches and the cute waiter, and the cute ... uuuhm, do people spike each other's coffee nowadays?

She shakes her head. 'This is paranoid.', she thinks.

So maybe she is unwell? Is this one of those things that can happen if you have an aneurysm or a brain tumor?

In either case, staying calm is important - accept that things may seem different from how they truly are. If she's on drugs, she can give herself a bad trip. If she is having medical issues, then freaking out will make it worse.

She could also be having a psychotic break down. How do those even work? How can she tell if she's hallucinating?

Triangulate. That's it. Triangulate the information. This is just a puzzle.

Logically, if she keeps going, she should soon reach the edge of the park and hit the enclosing fence. If however, she is not in the park after all, then she should encounter a building or street. If none of that works because this is all in her head then she won't be able to perceive fences, streets or buildings. However, in that case her body should start colliding with objects that disagree with her mind's new creative direction for reality.

'And that makes *not running* pretty important.'

Also, this place is kind of beautiful in an eerie and foreboding way. Maybe she can turn this rising panic in to something beautiful. This experience will end and the world will become mundane again. Let's carefully keep walking forward, carefully keep picking a path past the brambles and thorns, and carefully keep focused on the more visually cooperative plants in the distance.

Breath in, breath out ... She's got this.

A few more steps, and a few more breaths, and she finds herself softly humming "Rockabye baby" as her fingers gently twirl around the thorn bushes in passing.

She walks through the waking dream of her (probable) delusion with an eye for the beautiful, and beauty seems to rise up to meet her. A spiderweb sits suspended between some branches, glistening with dew that's absent elsewhere. A flower peeks out from between some hedges, sky-blue petals stark against the endless green and brown of the forest. A gnarled trunk that bends sideways and up and over and down, forming an arch that almost looks like a gateway.

Occasionally the hedges are too close together, and she has to force her way through, brambles tugging and tearing at her clothes while the occasional thorns leave stinging white lines along her skin. It feels real, and grounding, keeping her from retreating too far into the dream-like state of wonder that's fed by each new beautiful detail she sees.

A tree whose long, thin branches droop in a leafy umbrella around it, faintly glowing mushrooms dotting its trunk. Another tree thick and tall as a skyscraper, stretching up in the distance like a looming giant, higher than her neck can crane, its branches eventually disappearing into the skylit mist above. The burbling, happy sound of a brook... the first sound she's heard that didn't come from herself, sometimes distant, sometimes seeming to be just behind some particularly tall hedges, until she pushes through one last batch and finds it ahead of her.

Along with an elk, standing at a bend in the stream with its head bent forward to drink. It's large as a horse, with massive antlers that twist and split into a dense forest above its head. Its coat seems to have moss growing on it in artful patterns that seem to gleam in the dim forest, and its eyes, when it looks up to stare at her, are pitch black.

"Holy shit", she exclaims very loudly inside her head and very softly outside of it.

She stands frozen, first simply taking in the shock of the majesty before her, and then finding her eyes hooked on to those pitch black pools.

Though she has never been an animal person, she very much knows that large creatures are inherently dangerous. Even the sweetest and most gentle of critters can accidentally kick her head cleanly through death's door.

And yet.

And yet and yet and yet.

She senses something different about this one. Some spark that normal animals never possess...

She considers stepping forward, and then considers the massive gordian knot of essentially-just-knifes on the creature's head.

So instead, she reaches out a single hand as if beckoning, as if showing there is nothing to fear.

She will wait here. Cock her head slightly. Softly smile and say "hey" in that sing song soothing voice of someone calming a startled child.

Water drips from its wet neck, and a black tongue flicks out along its damp muzzle as those black eyes stare back into hers. In her periphery she can see the antlers subtly shifting, becoming less knotted and tangled, almost forming a picture. After a few tense heartbeats have passed, it opens its mouth to give a high pitched bugle... but interwoven with the primal animal sound is the warbling of a wooden flute, a brief, mournful melody.

The stream slows to a stop as the sound echoes in the woods around her. Only when it fades away does the water begin to flow and babble again.

"Drugs. Definitely drugs.", she realizes. "Shit."

She has no medical knowledge to speak of. Back in college she had momentarily considered becoming a doctor, but abandoned the idea the moment she had to study actually live intestines.

"Wait wait, just think this through.", she thinks. "There are some basics: Heart rate, pupil dilation, dehydration."

She licks her lips. No cracks, and she doesn't feel particularly thirsty.

Next she grabs her phone and opens the camera app. She looks in to the selfie camera and studies her pupils.

They seem larger, but that makes sense in the dim light.

Ok, sure, her heart is pounding again, but that seems easy to explain...

"Maybe ... maybe this is a dream?"

She pinches herself.

"Ouch. Ok, not that either."

She is quickly running out of hypotheses here...

The elk's horns have shifted back into a tangled mess, and seem to be growing even sharper and more chaotic as it watches her. Eventually it returns to drinking from the river, the faint lines along its coat shifting to look something like a map...

Which she's so entranced by that she doesn't notice the dark figures until they're nearly on the ground. Six of them that she can quickly count, things that look like wolves but covered in (or made of?) vines, and crawling vertically down the tree trunks to surround the elk... or her and the elk.

She feels time slow down as all her senses snap in to focus. Slowly and naturally, as unhurried as can be, she steps lightly and smoothly back - back down the path, back away to safety. By the third step, her hand casually slides in to her coat pocket and wraps around the hilt of her carving knife. She had ever thought about how to use it in self defense instead of 3d-doodling on random objects, yet she wasn't particularly eager to find out if any of her fantasies would play out well in reality.

Luckily the wolf-things seem more interested in the elk that's three times her size, or maybe they just don't hear her as she eases her way back through the brambles. The brook masks some of the sounds, and she gets far enough that she can just barely make out what happens when they pounce.

The elk's antlers spear out in multiple directions,  piercing the bodies of three wolves as they leap forward, their vines lashing around their prey. It splashes away up the stream, lowing in pain as the remaining wolves claw and bite into its haunches, and soon they're out of sight, leaving the three bleeding monsters on the ground.

And then the stream is once again obscured by the thick hedges, and it's just her, her heartbeat, and her breaths.

"Fuck ... fuck ... fuuuuuuuuuck.", she curses under her breath.

If she is having a seizure, or is on drugs, or is asleep, or is in some crazy simulation, it doesn't really MATTER. This all feels too real. Stupidly, intensely real.

"I need to get out of here", she realizes.

Carefully and quietly she traces her steps back along the path, while her senses are still sharpened from the adrenaline rush. It's almost an unreal sensation in itself how she is instinctively trying to stretch her senses to take everything in. She needs to notice every sound, every movement, every change before anything can creep up on her and hurt her. Like those ... wolves? What were those things?

She shakes her head and keeps moving forward, ignoring the wrongness of everything, and focusing on getting back to the real world - the safe world.

It should be simple. She traveled in a more-or-less straight line to the brook, and by turning around and walking back the way she came...

She sees the massive tree. And the umbrella tree. But not the arch tree that she'd been tempted to go through, and not the flower she had half-a-thought to pick, back when she thought this was likely just delusion. Instead she finds the thick brambles squeezing in on either side... then expanding outward into three rough paths that definitely weren't here before, because the one on the right leads uphill.

And the faint light, coming from seemingly all parts of the sky equally, is definitely starting to get dimmer.

"Fuck."

She pulls up her phone and checks the battery: 56%. It has a flashlight and the screen is bright. She flicks it in to energy saving mode and puts it back in her coat pocket.

Next a way to stop getting lost.

She looks around.

Are there any long vines she could cut and string together as in to a rope?

Quite a few, thanks to her pocketknife! She'd have to be careful not to prick herself much, though; few plants here seems entirely benign.

Can she pick her way carefully to some vines and then skin any possible thorns off the vines themselves with her knife?

That sounds like a wonderfully logical plan!

She will proceed with her wonderfully logical plan!

Carefully ...

She logically takes the very end of a vine, and carefully holds it up so that her knife can slice along its length, cutting any thorns off it as she goes...

...which is how she avoids having her palm pricked by the new tiny thorns that start to grow from it.

Not long, and not particularly sharp. Probably wouldn't even break her skin. But definitely there, where they weren't a few moments ago.

Murderous fauna and flora. Of course it is.

She pulls her hands up into the sleeves of her jacket. It's made of soft leather, that plausibly can withstand the fairly short thorns growing along the vines. It's a little clumsier and a little slower to handle the vines like this, but she is now intent on making it work. How much rope can she tie together this way if she is careful to use her sleeves as padding, and cuts thorns away around the ends that she knots together with her bare hands?

Her carving experience combined with her precautions serve her well, and she can tie many lengths safely together. Some of them are harder to reach, but if she restricts herself to vines that wouldn't require climbing, she will relatively soon have a length of slightly barbed rope that's nearly 8 meters long.

After which it will again be noticeably, if slightly, darker.

She is starting to doubt her original plan. Tying the vines together works, but it's such slow going that she won't have a useful length of rope to Hansel and Gretel her way through the ever-changing forest.

The increasing darkness is also starting to fray her nerves. She furtively looks up and down the path, listening for any movement or approach.

As she ties together the last of the vines, she slings the 8 meters of thorny improvisation rope across her shoulder. She tucks the upper end under her hoodie so her face won't accidentally rub against the thorns.

Then she gets up, and slowly picks her way toward the right path that goes up the slope - maybe there is a little more light up there.

The path winds, back and forth, and so doesn't grow particularly steep. Still, her footing is uncertain, and it takes careful attention not to stumble into any of the thicker bramble, all while her fraying nerves keep her on high alert for any danger, a light layer of sweat keeping her cool.

One tree trunk she passes seems to have a sinister leer in the whirls of the trunk. Some dark patches in a hedge ahead make it look like a skull. There's finally a slight breeze in the stillness of the forest, and the sound it makes as it moves through the trees is like a fearful whisper.

But it doesn't seem to be getting much darker by the time the ground levels off. Ahead of her the hedges shrink to reveal a clearing with a tall tree in its center. Branches jut out from it, long and thick, and eventually disappear in the mist above.  When she looks back, the mist also keeps her from making out the bottom of the hill where she started; it just looks like a sea of green, with tree trunks rising up like islands.

huh. Is time passing normally here? At first she thought the sun might be setting but now she isn't sure anymore.

She pulls up her phone. What time is it?

It appears to be 7:03PM. She stares at the screen long enough for it to change to 5:48AM, and then about twenty-three seconds later to 9:01PM.

Just as it does, a mote of light lands on her screen and disappears into it. She can see it, under the glass, a glowing spot that swims around in the digital space of her homescreen, curving around letters and shapes like a curious fish in a pond.

Another mote of light falls onto her phone, then another, each one sinking into the screen. When she looks up she sees a small cloud of them descending toward her.

She drops her phone as if she suddenly realizes she was holding a live tarantula, and then breaks in to a run while waving her hand frantically up and down. Instinctively she dashes toward the open space around the tree. Once she is convinced she is not being followed, she rests her back against the huge tree trunk, trying - desperately - to catch her breath for a moment. Just a single breath...

"Shit"

When she looks back to ensure she's not followed, she sees the cloud of lights continued drifting toward the phone, but it fell facedown on the grass, which leaves them floating around it in a lazy swirl. Eventually the light of the screen times out, and the lights start to drift up and away into the mist... though she notices that most of them are drifting in a particular direction, to the right of where she stands against the tree.

The tree at least doesn't seem to have barbs, its trunk covered in smooth bark that has artful whirls of lighter and darker shades. The lowest branch would be hard to climb to, but seems sturdy.

She stares at the whirls in the bark, letting the flows of light and dark soothe her ever-fraying nerves. Calm. Grounding. Deep breathes. She notices the smell of the forest as a familiar sensation among all the shifting strangeness.

Once her heart has stilled, she looks up at the tree, trying to make out how high it goes. She isn't particularly athletic, but getting a chance to survey the forest might give her any hint on how to get back to her regular, normal, safe, boring, mundane, intensely missed and absolutely desperately craved for world.

She smiles as she realizes how this experience has quite readily cured her of her existential ennui.

She considers the rope and then the branch. She could swing the rope over the branch, then tie in a couple of knots to form loops like the rungs of a ladder. The bigger question is if she could even scramble up and down such a ladder without breaking her neck ...

She shakes her head. No, it's too risky.

Instead she slowly walks back to her phone and retrieves it, hopefully not disturbing the swarm of light motes.

Then she looks around: Are there paths leading off the hill? Can she see other notable locations in the landscape she might want to explore? Does the tree have any other features she may interact with that will not reliably lead to any rearrangement of her cervical discs?

A door, perhaps?

The light motes don't return from her picking her phone up, though she can still see some of them gleaming in the distant mist when they pass by the darker shapes of tree branches or trunks.

They weren't that clear before, which is when she realizes it's gotten darker again. Not by much, but enough that she can see a little less further than before.

Now that she pays more attention to the hedges around her, she notes some berries growing in the brambles on the opposite side of the tree where the lightmotes flew. Both directions have openings in the hedges where she could more easily pass, and behind the tree (from the direction she approached) there's a fourth path, this leading down to what looks like a small gully that ends on one side in the entrance of a cave, just at the edge her vision.

She looks back and forth between the light motes and the cave.

Of course, it's getting darker but there is also a free light source. The question is if this light source is actually safe, and if it will break her phone.

She suddenly remembers that some of the light motes had gone in to her phone. She pulls her phone out of her pocket but does not turn it on. Can she notice anything unusual about it?

She can! The light motes seem quite content swimming around in the dark of her off screen. Each is a bit smaller than her pinky nail, but their illumination spreads over about a third of her phone at any given time to reveal a dim and murky picture below... and after a moment she recognizes it as a picture she took a few weeks ago. Soon the picture changes to another one, the three motes swimming around until all of it has been illuminated at least a little before the picture switches to another.

ooooh-kay.

"Yes, my phone is now a fish pond of magical lights", she muses, giving up slightly more on what she once considered reality.

She turns on her phone screen again, and holds it out toward the swarm of light motes. Presumably this will result in her having acquired a magical lantern. "Or maybe my hand will explode now", she thinks wryly, "wait ...". She backpedals quickly. This place doesn't run on the power of manifestation, right?

"My hand definitely does not explode!", she blurts out quickly and far too loudly.

Her hand does in fact not explode, and the lights do indeed start to return, first a faint glimmer in the distance, then a noticeable stream of white spots against the background of the mist that coalesce into the motes. A few come from other directions, but the vast majority come from where they disappeared to last time.

First one, then two, then three, then a handful at a time sink into her screen, until it's like the screen is on maximum brightness. Only then does the stream of lights stop floating toward her phone, instead wandering around in midair again and dispersing back in the directions they came from.

wooooah...

Her face lights up, both from actual electromagnetic radiation as well as feelings of joy and wonder.

She reaches out her hand to try and touch one of the fleeing motes.

It's like passing her hand through a spot of warm air, and for the moment that the mote is inside her the red tint of her blood against the dark shape of her bones is briefly evident.

And then it's flying through and away, unbothered.

She laughs in delight, her momentary plight forgotten for all of three seconds. Then she catches herself on the way down. "Does this place actually run on manifestation?", she wonders.

She looks around, using her new lantern to see more clearly. Do her surroundings look more friendly? Did flowers sprout and birds take wing? Is the tree singing and flowing with a song barely out of hearing? Is ... I mean, come on, you get the gist!

Her mind stutters for a moment, self-consciousness creeping in, breaking her momentum. Fear clutches at her sides. Then she looks down at her phone again, bright as can be, joyful maybe.

Does anything look different yet?

Her phone, in the moment she glances at it, is flickering through pictures rather rapidly now that the whole thing is illuminated at once. Her surroundings seem... definitely not unfriendly the way they did on the way up the hill? Nothing seems to be obviously changing, although... the berries do seem tastier, when she looks at them again. The branch seems lower than it did. The whirls of the bark seem more artful.

All explainable by her mental state, her attention, or even just the way the light has changed. It's definitely a bit darker again, tipping more obviously into twilight.

She narrows her eyes slightly, and purposefully starts humming a tune. For some reason the most cheerful tune she can easily remember is God Bless Ye Merry Gentlemen, so Christmas carols it is. It's not even the right time of year but ... okay, focus. Focus.

Berries. She pockets as many of them as she can manage without squishing them.

Then she makes her way back to the tree and looks up in to the canopy again. Climbing is kind of risky, but also, this world might actually run on manifestation while containing murderous vine-wolves... Some risk-taking - very optimistic cheerful risk taking - might be in order.

She slings the rope off her shoulder, and throws it across the decidedly lower lowest branch. She is careful to keep her hands wrapped in her coat sleeves as she goes, though this makes the process of knotting the loops in to the rope slightly more challenging.

Once she is done, she steps into the lowest run, then sticks one arm through the highest loop she can reach, wrapping the vine rope around her arm. Then she puts one foot through the next loop, and her other arm goes upward through a loop higher.

This is, in fact, as hard as it seemed, if not more so, cheerful tune and attitude or not. Her arms burn as she pulls herself up, one careful fist at a time, and while thankfully the branch feels as sturdy as it looks, her rope is less cooperative, seeming to poke and prod her everywhere her body weight rests against it, regardless of her protective measures.

She eventually makes it to the top and collapses onto the branch, arms trembling with the effort and body a collection of stinging points, every previous prick and scratch she gained since arriving here seeming to be burning all at once, making her whole body itch as she catches her breath.

She grits her teeth, forcing herself to tolerate the pain while stabilizing her breath and her center of gravity.

How high up is she now and how bad do those scratches look?

A few of the scratches are bleeding, though none seem to need attention. Just a few drops of blood, here and there. She didn't exactly fail to climb the vines, she is here after all, but it definitely was unexpectedly complicated, and it's hard to know whether next time will go better.

She's about 4 and a half, maybe 5 meters up. The next few branches are closer to her than this one was to the ground, one even in reach if she goes on tiptoes.

It's dark enough that even from this elevation, it's hard to make out much in the distance... though in the direction from which she picked the berries, she can make out something that looks... vaguely... like a clearing, and some orderly rows of plants. Almost like a garden?

And from the direction the majority of motes went, she sees... light. Some steady glow, far enough in the mist that it's mostly just a lighter patch of it, illuminating the ghosts of trees along the way.

She regrets all the life decisions that led her to being a marginally bleeding mess lying on a tree branch 5 meters up in the air with no obvious way to get back down that won't result in her being a significantly more bleeding mess.

She glances up the tree trunk and then back down to the ground far below. Fear lances out through her body, shaking her hands as they clutch the tree branch. She lowers her face back down to the bark, and closes her eyes for a few seconds.

One deep breath, and a hefty dollop of peppy self-talk later, she has decided she will swing back down the vine rope. She will hold it tight in her coat-gloved hands, and let the magic of carpet burn save her from plummeting to her death increasing corporeal discomfort.

This is about ten times as terrifying a way to travel, but also shockingly efficient and surprisingly safe. She lands on her feet without too much jolt to her knees, and while her sleeves are now slightly shredded they kept her hands mostly safe.

Relief floods through her the moment she hits the ground. She gracefully crumples in to a heap, enjoying the realization that she made it out of that questionable decision in one piece.

"Ok, time to get going.", she thinks, "Where did the light motes travel off to again?"

She will very determinedly walk in that particular direction.

The twilit forest is more painful to navigate through, more unseen thorns scratching and snagging, more hidden roots stumbling her steps. But her phone helps find paths around the particularly thick batches, casting a kaleidoscope of rapidly shifting light out as her screen continues to display different bits of media on her phone every second.

Eventually the distant light becomes more and more pronounced, though it's not getting any darker, so far as she can tell. Instead she's just getting closer to the source, almost able to make it out above the hedges until she finally pushes through one last gap to find...

A clearing, bathed in a soft, ethereal glow of the motes. Hundreds of them are gathered here, swirling around in gentle currents above her.

In the center of the clearing there's something that looks very much like a Christmas tree, complete with ornaments and tinsel. Except the tinsel is moving, strings of motes that spin in upward spirals around it, forming a mesmerizing display.

And the ornaments are nothing of the sort. They're fruit, glowing fruit, each containing some flickering or moving images.

Motes pour out of her phone and toward the tree, each a different hue, where they gather into a rainbow sphere that swirls and coalesces into a new fruit on one of the lower branches. Through its translucent skin, she can vaguely make out some images from her phone's gallery.

The last thing she notices are that some of the branches of the tree are clearly missing, cleanly cut stumps sticking at varying lengths.

She stares in wonder... a Christmas tree. The Christmas Carroll she was singing.

Wow, she needs to think about this. How much of the manifestation is based on her feelings, her actions, her thoughts? Is there a strong relation between how this world moves and changes around and any one part of her, or is it more a probabilistic affair, or - even more dizzying - an associatively pattern-matching kaleidoscope.

That last option would be a little daunting, and truly more reminiscent of an LSD trip than anything else. Though maybe that is the right frame to consider.

Could she use this experience as a chance for personal growth? There are some risks. Like with any drug, she might step off the metaphorical roof cause she believes she can fly. Reality generally has pretty adversarial opinions on that sort of thing.

She wishes she had a better way to tether herself to that underlying reality. How can she know if the ground is where she thinks it is when the world is scrambling the input signal?

She bites her lip. Her thoughts have run down and no clear answer presented itself. Some heuristics might help though. Some handles to focus her attention on.

First of all, keeping her spirits up seems key. Focusing on the light motes that helped her and did not hurt her, led her to more wonder and beauty. Being prepared also seems to help. That rope really came in handy.

"Oh shit", she breathes. She realizes she left the vine rope at the big tree. Retracing her steps does not seem appealing though. Better to learn to keep track of her gear from now on.

She looks around, and considers treating the light motes as sentience. They have been friendly and beautiful. It seems like a clearly winning move to empower whatever factions in this world are benevolent to her.

So she smiles, and nods at the motes as they flow past her. Next she holds out her hand.

Do any of them land on her? Do any of them give her any sensation except warmth? She specifically focuses on conceptualizing the motes as little animals with minds of their own with tiny inner worlds filled with simple and endearing emotions like little... birds? Curious, helpful, beautiful. Maybe a bit of a hive mind, considering how they move and coalesce and seem to lack any personal identity.

Can she speak to them?

"Hey there," she whispers softly.

The motes don't seem to respond in any obvious way. They just keep floating around, occasionaly joining the upward spiral, or floating off elsewhere. Once in a while a mote will emerge from one of the lit fruit and then sink into a transluscent grey one, lighting it briefly with a flash of color before exiting again.

The whole process is utterly quiet. Her gaze jumps around, taking in individual pieces, then the whole swirling mass, imagining them like a flock of birds, then a hive of friendly bees, looking for patterns, legibility.

But nothing obvious emerges. A few motes wander off or in, mostly individually but occasionally in clusters of two or three, but most stay in the clearing.

"Maybe they can't sense me", she thinks. They responded to the light of her phone, but not to sound or movement. She can't think of any way to make a fire, and she has already used her phone screen. What about if she uses one of the fruits to sign to them?

She walks over to the tree and reaches out to the rainbow fruit that formed from the motes that traveled within her phone. She fails to notice that she is holding her breath, lips slightly parted, as her hand gently cups the fruit. Images from her cell phone cycle across its surface - Shots of the sunset across the city, art she had collected, a few stray selfies, images of her students at their graduation ceremony, her mother showing off a new embroidery pattern, the dilapidated motel room she had ended up in after an aborted attempt at hitchhiking. The images keep coming as she stares mesmerized. Slowly she tugs the fruit downward till the stem snaps quietly away from the branch.

The fruit is warm in her palm, like holding a lightbulb that's in the process of cooling down. Its skin feels closer to a peach than an apple, though its smell is... citrus? Pineapple?

A sense of familiarity also flows through her as she holds it. A sense that this particular fruit is *hers.*

A smile spreads across her face as a flush of delight rises through her body. She bites her lip again. On pure impulse she kisses the fruit. Then remembers that her intention was to try to communicate with the light motes. She slowly raises the fruit up in front of her, arm stretched, and moves it in an arc over her head.

Do the motes respond?

A few of the motes around the tree follow the motion, but most ignore her. One of the motes slips out of the fruit, but doesn't fly up. Instead it floats a little to one side, then the other, ever downward until it drops to the ground like a spark from a firework, glimmering on the grass for a few moments before fading.

She frowns slightly, her heart clenching. This isn't working the way she hoped. Everything is pointing more toward associative kaleidoscope LSD trip and less to direct manifestation of her thoughts, feelings, and actions ...

She has ever taken hallucinogenics and she does actually pride herself on never succumbing to a bad trip. She repeats the rules to herself: Take good care of your body, stay calm, remind yourself it will all pass and isn't real, then enjoy the trip.

Ok, yes. A mote dying is sad, but she can be here for it and this too shall pass.

She pockets the fruit, and considers becoming a little bit more pragmatic. She can't directly manifest the things she wants, so she'll have to gear up and go with the flow. What can she scavenge?

She looks at the tree again with a few branches missing. She pulls out her carving knife and starts sawing off an especially straight and sturdy branch. This might make for a good walking staff, and possibly a decent weapon. Ideally it's about as thick as half her wrist and as long as her body is tall.

There aren't any branches quite that long, and while some start that thick they taper rather quickly. But the branch will cut relatively easily, its wood soft and pliable, and wonder of wonders, it has no barbs she can see.

The most straight and sturdy branch has four fruit along its length. As she lifts it away from the tree, a handful of motes follow with it, and the upward spiraling dance around the tree adjusts to a slightly different pattern.

She looks at the fruit. Do any of them look especially interesting?

The first from the end looks much like hers, a shifting series of images that look like they might have come from someone's phone. A beach. A smiling face she can't quite make out. A cityscape. Some clouds. A dog.

The second from the edge is similar, though instead of photos it seems to be playing a film. As she watches, she can make out from the angle that it seems to be attached to the owner's chest, near a shoulder where the dark skinned arm is often in frame. Its owner seems to be traveling through some woods, occasionally stopping as the arm points at some trees or bushes. The image is too small to make out what specifically is being gestured at.

The fourth one near the cut is similar to the first, but the thirs... the images in the second are stranger. They look like images from some science fiction film, picgures of tall silver spires and massive derigibles above cities interwoven with more traditional pictures of flowers, landscapes seen from high above, and what looks like a pet ferret with big floppy ears and human-like hands.

As she stands examining the fruit, she realizes vaguely that the forest has once again become a little darker.

She picks the fourth fruit and makes a tiny hole in the skin with her pocket knife. A drop of juice wells up. She dabs at it with a finger and puts her finger in her mouth.

The juice is iridescent, and she feels it fizzing in her mouth like a drop of warm soda. The flavor...

She can't describe it with tongue-sensation alone. It's sweet, but a melancholy sweet. The sweetness of looking over an old teddy bear. Not quite nostalgic, more just a kind of sweetness that feels passing and faint. The echo of an emotion rather than one that still holds depth.

Another drop wells up from the fruit, threatening to drip down its skin.

It feels vaguely sacrilegious to consume what seem like someone's memories.

At the same time she is feeling increasingly light-headed and drained from the adrenaline fading from her system. She sighs. Sometimes you need to make choices, and those choices involve eating shards of cognition off rainbow colored Christmas trees in haunted forests.

She bites into the fruit, savoring the taste. If nothing earth-shattering happens to her in the meanwhile, she will eat all four fruit, while saving her own.

She will also experimentally test out her new branch by swinging it around. How long is it and how sturdy?

...something earth-shattering happens immediately, yes, on the very first bite.

A torrent of emotions surge down her throat, so strong it leaves her temporarily stunned by the flood of happy-nostalgia-wonder-joy-melancholy-excitement... she feels them moving through her body as she convulsively swallows, swaying on her feet as she experiences a dozen embodied emotions all at once, heart kicking like a mule and heat flushing through her face as she's left with her mouth agape and eyes glazed, glowing drops of juice dripping from her lips and chin.

She manages to hold onto her sense of self, but only barely. Just a little less control, and she would be singing, laughing, dancing...

Instead she just gasps every few seconds, or smiles, or gently weeps, as the warm pulp and juice trace a red glowing line down her throat and settle in her stomach. The emotions continue to spiral through her, like someone is turning the knob on a radio, taking her through one different mental state after another.

...The branch?

Right.

The branch.

It's... about half her height, and not particularly sturdy. The tree isn't quite an evergreen conifer, or even a spruce tree, but it leans in that direction, with thin branches that, if stripped of its pine-like leaves, would be more suitable as a switch than a cane, but less bendy.

She looks down at the fruit in her hand. She suppresses the urge to take another bite and instead decides to hurl the little emotion grenade deep into the forest. She pockets the remaining three, though. They might come in handy.

Next, she pauses a moment to enjoy the warm glow in her tummy. She feels full. Fulfilled. Content. Rich. Expansive.

Meals normally don't do this. Drugs might. Not any drug she knows though. But it wasn't like she was in Kansas anymore anyway. Or New York, for that matter. Or... is she?

"Wait a minute", she whispers, realization dawning. She cranes her neck upward and tries to look through the canopy to make out the stars. Then she realizes that she is standing next to a blazing Christmas tree that is obviously blacking out any night vision she may possess.

So she sets herself to finishing up her improv weapon by stripping the branch she cut from all leaves and twigs. It's not as long or strong as she had hoped. She looks at the tree and picks out another sturdy branch, saws it off, pockets the fruit, and strips it clear.

Now, to actually purposefully go toward the dark instead of the light. Preferably a dark clearing. Does she remember any such place from her brief vertical adventure, and can she make her way there?

She does not. It all seemed... kind of the same, illumination-wise, wherever she looked, actually.

Certainly some areas had more foliage overhead than others, and the glow from the mass of motes is what attracted her here. But perhaps due to the strange nature of light and mist and shadow here, none of the places she looked seemed noticeably more or less dark than others, and a clearing, dark or otherwise, wasn't visible through the dim forest she peered through.

Speaking of which, it's grown noticeably darker again by the time she finishes preparing the second branch. It's hard to tell in this strange place, but true night feels just a few minutes away, maybe ten at most. The pocketed fruit glow like covered lamps through her clothes, which is convenient given how hard it would be to otherwise see anything further from the tree.

 Which means if she wants to see the sky, she'll have to wander around and hope a clearing appears, or climb a tree again, higher than she did last time. She might have feelings about that, but it would be hard to notice them while her body/mind is still fluctuating between different emotional states.

"hmm, what if I talked to myself? Would that help with the manifestation thing? I can narrate my thoughts and see if that attracts good things. Or maybe the world will just give me solutions to my problems. For free. Please. Yes." She looks around hopefully.

"Gueeeeess not. Ok, not going to give up yet. Though please don't let the whole talking out loud thing attract big bad vine wolves. That would be bad. Very bad. Let's not think about the bad thing. Manifest good things. Good things. Cinnamon roles. Rainbows and kisses and unicorn farts. No, not farts. Aaargh, this is hard!" She bites her lip.

"Ok, finding the stars so I can orient. Or ... well, anything really. I should mostly figure out a way to keep walking in one direction and not get lost. Last time I couldn't find my way back to the entrance of this place. So let's retrace our steps to the big bad tree in the clearing and take that as my starting point."

She turns and starts walking the way she came. As she walks, she narrates everything she sees to herself.

It's dark enough now that she can't make out the tree in the distance, or much of anything beyond what's lit by her pocketed fruit. Still, she keeps a running monologue going of the various hedges and trees and bramble patches she passes by, occasionally noticing some feature of the forest above her.

What she sees are basically just more hedges and bramble patches and trees. The path is twisty enough that it requires her to turn slightly left or right to get by some hedges, resulting in her tacking back right or left the next time she can and hope she's going in a mostly straight line.

On the upside, it doesn't seem to be getting any darker.

On the neutral side, she starts to hear something else moving through the other-wise silent forest.

On the downside, it appears to be coming from behind her, and getting louder.

"Hedge, hedge, spiky thorn. Gosh this place is monotonous. It needs a gardener. A very sweet, kindly old man with huge hedge clippers and a straw hat, chewing a piece of grass." She muses out loud.

"Aaaand, another bush, another bush. Aaaand ... o... uuh ... sound? Hello?" She starts doubting herself. Should she really be committing to making this much noise in such a mysterious and dangerous place?

"Hello?" She turns around and looks down the path she came.

"Hi! I'm lost. Could you help me?", her voice trails off into the darkness in front of her.

The noise from the brush leading back toward the light tree slows, for a moment, as her words echo in the misty forest.

And then they start again, louder and more violently, like something is surging through the hedges, snapping and cracking wood along the way.

Her eyes widen as heat flushes through her body and her heart lifts off. For a fraction of a second her mind is entirely blank and then suddenly reboots into survival mode. She twists around and sprints headlong up the path, her muscles pumping, her legs propelling her forward faster than she ever imagined herself capable of moving. Air rushes past her face. Thorns claw along her legs. Air burns her lungs.

But she barely feels any of it as the world zips by.

The incline starts to steepen, and a few fruit drop out of her pockets as she scrambles up it. Her hands dart out to catch a couple, stuffing them back without losing pace as the flow state keeps her body moving without thought, until she emerges back in the clearing with the major tree.

Everything is still as she left it, except for one thing: the vinerope she left isn't hanging from the branch anymore. It's looped around it, like someone climbed it and drew it up.

She runs up to the tree and stops behind it, putting her back against the trunk. She catches her breath, trying to make sure she does so quietly. Then she notices the pain lancing out from her sides, and she doubles over, quietly retching. All her attention is on making no noise whatsoever while gulping down large breaths of air.

The heavy rustling through the bushes continues until something crashes through. She hears a series of snuffling, snorting sounds, and heavy footsteps moving toward the tree.

"Smell, smell, of course it's smell!", she realizes

She looks up the tree, trying to figure out if she can climb up. Could she poke the rope free with one of her two branches and scramble up? She'd never have enough time. Distraction. Distraction, she needs a distraction.

The fruit!

She grabs one at random, pulls it from her jacket, cuts off a slice to make it bleed juices, and throws it like a baseball pitcher as closely in the direction of the creature as she can manage without showing herself.

She then grabs one of her branches and pokes at the coiled rope in an attempt to pull it down.

The luminescent juices stain her hand as she cuts the fruit, and then there's a squeal as the fruit flights outward. As she reaches up with her stick, she sees the beast in her periphery, something like a mix between a boar and an anteater, rushing toward the light on all fours, huffing and slurping as it eats.

She just barely manages to snag the coil of vine, and with a flick of her wrist it drops back down to her.

She scrambles up the rope ladder heedless of the thorns.

She makes it halfway up before the monster finishes with the fruit, thorns piercing her skin a couple times. She hears it charging toward her, feels it grip the bottom of the vine... and then hears a thwump, hears it squeal in pain, and the vine goes slack again.

She manages to reach the top, arms and lungs burning, without any more deep gouges. Another piece of fruit drops from her pocket, and the beast immediately goes to eat it, an arrow sticking out of its back.

"You alright?"

Sitting in the tree next to her, legs wrapped around the branch below them and bow held carefully to one side, is a young man. Old boy?

It's hard to make out details in the dim light, but he's wearing a shirt that doesn't seem to have any buttons left, hanging open to reveal a muscular torso, and his hair is long enough to hang around his jawline.

He's also possibly cute. The low light makes it hard to tell for sure, but... yeah. Probably very cute.

She wants to collapse on to the branch and hug it for dear life, but instead she sits frozen in place, staring at the young man.

"Yes. Who...? What...?" She looks down, giving herself a moment to catch her breath. The creature is gobbling down the fruit, arrow sticking out of its hide.

She glances back at the stranger, suddenly feeling shy.

"Who ... who are you?", she stammers.

"Danny." He keeps looking back and forth between her and the beast, but once he notices her attention he keeps his head tilted down. His eyes keep shifting to her, however. Or maybe to the glow of her fruit. "You're new. And you speak English. How many clearings have you passed through?"

"uh ... just this one." She stammers. "Wait, are you also from the real world? Where are you from? What is this place?"

"Just this one? Impossible. Those fruit came from somewhere. How many things did you encounter, outside of the hedges?" He sounds impatient, suddenly, maybe even angry. "How many days or nights?"

She flinches, leaning back. Her eyes wander up and down the tree. She can't see any obvious way to go from here. So she makes her face smile, softening her eyes.

"Oh, yeah, totally! Uhm, there was this Christmas Tree? And..." she wasn't sure what counted as day and night. "The light kept shifting. Is that a day and a night? I only just got here, maybe 2 hours ago."

He's easy to read, or maybe she's just in a particularly focused state right now. The tension in him builds, fingers plucking at his bowstring in agitation, even as his voice gets less angry. "Two hours doesn't mean much here, unless you spent it mostly in one place. Time is odd, particularly when you're moving from place to place. If you've only been to a couple clearings... the opening you came through might still be there. We can leave. Maybe."

The beast is moving around below, having finished its meal. It's snuffling at the ground where some juice spilled. The boy, Danny, turns his full attention on her. "I'm from a place called America. It was real enough to me, and if you speak English, or something like it, then we're close enough that I don't care if it would count as real to you. Almost anywhere would be better than here. It's... people call it a lot of things. The one I heard the most is The Hedge. It's a place between worlds."

"I have so many questions ... people? What people? I didn't see anyone. Should we bring them? And I'm from America. New York, actually. How long have you been here? Do we have time to talk? Does time stand still if we stay in one place? Or do we need to hurry to get back? How do we even get back?" She pauses a second, searching his face. "And how do I know you are telling the truth?"

"You don't, but there's not much I can do about that. As for other people, all the others I've met are dead or Lost." The way he says it makes it clear the word is capitalized, somehow. "I don't know how long I've been here, but my clothes fit a lot better when I arrived. And you've got it the other way around. Being in one place is how time moves. Moving is what slows it. At least, in this part of the Hedge, and you don't look nearly torn up enough to have crossed over from one of the others.

"And yes, better to hurry." He looks around, and she notices that dark has fully fallen, now. "I don't know exactly how it works, but time and distance both make it harder to retrace steps. It's also hard to travel without light, but you've got those fruit... which, by the way, was a dumb thing to take. Not that you'd know better, but if something's in a clearing and looks valuable, you're gonna attract attention taking it to another one. Maybe from wild monsters, but worse would be from the things that put it there. Feel glad you haven't met anyone else, yet. Most aren't as lucky as I've been."

"Lost?", she rolls the word around in her mouth. "What does that mean?"

He said moving is what slows time ...

"And if we walk up and down between clearings, does that freeze time? Does our speed matter? How can you even tell the time? What does time even matter here? Are you aging? How old were you when you arrived?" Questions keep pouring out of her. Danny seems earnest enough, and willing to provide information. Also the creature below them still hasn't moved so it's not like they have anywhere to go.

She bites her lip and tries to study Danny as he talks.

His lips press into into a thin line. "Look, if you're injured or tired, I can give you my life story while we wait in this tree all night, but unless you want to be stuck here we should go now, and maybe I can answer your questions if you practice asking them one at a time. I've only got five arrows left, which means we should use another of your fruit to distract that thing and run for it."

She frowns, trying to think fast.

Trusting a stranger with her life seems iffy, though he did save her from that monster. Then again, she might not have needed saving if he hadn't pulled up the rope ladder to begin with. And for that matter, what was he doing up here in the first place?

She absentmindedly bites her lip.

Danny seems agitated and possibly dangerous. Maybe he'll keep helping her, maybe he won't. A place like this could drive anyone all sorts of crazy, so maybe he thinks he's helping her but actually she is in for a world of pain.

That bow looks very useful though. She knows some basic archery from her summer camp days. Supposedly he has food on him, and maybe more information about this place. But how can she tell if he is being honest with her? Lying is cheap and she knows so very little about what's going on. She'll have to trust her instincts and keep her eyes peeled.

So she nods at him slowly, involuntarily glancing back and forth between the creature below and the young man up here.

"Ok, so how would we get out of here?"

"We try to reverse the path you took. So long as you're in front, there's a better chance that works. We'll probably end up in a new clearing or two along the way, but the rest won't be too disconnected from them. When you start noticing the same things you originally did when you got here, the portal should be close, even if you don't see it."

"So long as I'm in front?", she repeats the words incredulously. She suppresses the urge to roll her eyes as she wisely remembers who is top ranking in the pointy object department. Well, actually she does still have her knife, she realizes.

"Ooo-kaaay", she breathes out slowly, then shakes her head. "Sure, sounds terrifying and dangerous and like something I entirely don't want to do, but I'm not sure we have better options. Though ... just to check: Do you know what the creature down there is? Does it have sensitivities? Can we talk to it? Are there options that don't involve us running headlong through a organic needle barrages followed by a rushing hell boar? Cause ... I'd sure be excited about that option?"

God, why is she so snarky when scared??? She bites her lip very very hard.

"I ... I am sorry. I'm really scared, and freaking out. And I shouldn't take it out on you ...", she looks up at him feeling pretty lost.

"Yeah, I... get that." He lets a breath out. "I'm sorry too, it's just been a while since there was somewhere to go that seemed worth the risk. I forgot that you might not know what to expect, here."

He settles his back against the trunk, still watching the monster below as it snuffs around in the grass. "I don't know the name for this specific one, but it's a kind of chimera. You see them around, now and then. Not all are hostile but this one's got some boar in it, and those can be nasty, even if they're not trying to eat you.  As for talking to it... hey! Hey pig thing, do you talk?"

There's a moment of silence as the monster below looks up, eyes gleaming orange in the light of her hidden fruit. A long tongue snakes up at them through its conical mouth, while its snout quivers and snorts between sharp tusks. Then it goes back to sniffing at the ground where she cut the fruit.

"Not usually an option," Danny says, then looks at her. "But it was a good question. As for sensitivities... they're basically animals. Heart, lungs, brain, you know. Sometimes there's something magical about them. Usually. Maybe always, and it's just hard to tell. If it came after you right when you left the... Christmas tree, you said? Then it might have been created specifically to guard it. Or maybe you just got unlucky. Still luckier than you would be if the person tending the tree found you." 

She notices herself relax a little as Danny lets go of his agitation. Nodding along as he talks, she can't help but laugh when he addresses the monster directly.

"Thank you," she says, "for explaining I mean. I... I don't mean to hold us up. I'm just ... I am really scared. I don't want to go down there and run in front of that thing. Is there any chance we can get rid of it all together? Like you said it might be related to the Christmas tree, so what if I throw all the fruit I have really far away from us. Maybe it's just tracking the fruit. Would you have a light source we could use if I got rid of all of it?"... shit, she realizes - that creates a huge dependency on the mystery guy she just met in a creepy magical forest. Though ... she does need to get out of this tree and options seem limited.

So she keeps her face straight and waits for his answer.

He grimaces and looks back down. "No light source, they tend to attract trouble sooner or later. If we get into the hedge quickly, we'll have a huge head start, since as soon as we start moving we'll be stretching time out. But... yeah, throwing all the fruit will be more of a guarantee. But it's hard to tell what else we might encounter, and the fruit might attract more unwanted attention, or it might be valuable for trading, even aside from its light." He sighs. "We can also wait it out. I expect it'll leave within an hour or so, and if not then by morning for sure. Whoever hung that vinerope here might come back by then, though, and I was hoping to be gone by then."

She frowns, looking down at the rutting boar creature.

"Ok, whatever, let's make a run for it. Getting back home is more important than anything else. If that one doesn't eat us, the next thing will." She takes a deep breath to steady herself. "Besides, I'm glad to finally have some company. I have some practice at monologuing, but it sure is a hell of a lot more satisfying with an audience!" She smiles at her own joke.

"So ... I throw the fruit at the count of ten, clamber down the rope, and make a run for it? I don't think I'd have time to check if you are following me, but I am guessing you can keep up." She eyes his physique, then feels caught out, and looks away blushing.

She can hear his smirk. "I'll keep up. It's been longer since I've had company, and I've got triple motivation to keep you close."

Triple???

She doesn't ask though. Is he hitting on her? Why can she even notice that while they are in life threatening circumstances?

She blinks a few times rapidly.

"Uh, yes. Ok. Yes. On the count of 10 ..." She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes.

When she opens them she feels momentarily calm. She looks at Danny and nods.

Then she grabs the remaining fruit, stares in to the middle distance, and starts counting down:

"10, 9 ..." she looks down at the boar creature "8, 7" Holy shit what is she doing?! "6, 5" This is insane .... "4, 3" fuuuuck shitshitshitshit, "2, 1" And she throws the fruit into the bushes with every shred of force she can muster. Yet as the light arches away from her, she is plunged into darkness. A darkness she had not properly anticipated.

Where is the rope? Where is the rope?!

She feels around by touch, and winces as she skims across the thorns. Ouch.

Then she starts clambering down clumsily feeling around in the dark.

The creature runs off after the fruit, and by the time she reaches the bottom of the vinerope her eyes have adjusted to their distant light.... light that's getting weaker as the creature eats another one. Still, she can make out hedge well enough to tell which direction she arrived by when she first came here.

Danny is half climbing, half sliding down the rope, and a moment later he lands beside her.

As soon as her feet hit the ground, she spins around and sprints away. She feels light as a feather for the first 300 yards till the first rush of energy falls away and she drops into a more sustainable pace, catching her breath as she goes. It's not the only thing she needs to catch though as she finds herself pitching forward a bit too quickly down the sloping path. Luckily falling forward is a lot like running as long as you keep your feet between your face and the earth. And luckily this frantic attempt at locomotion has her coming up on the three-way split in the path any moment now. The three-way split with no obvious portal.

Danny better be right about this.

Thorns and branches tug and pull, tearing her clothing as she shoves her way through the dark hedges in a reckless gravity-assisted charge. She somehow manages to avoid tripping on any roots, though she comes close a couple times, ankles almost twisting as she lands on uneven ground.

Eventually she reaches the bottom of the hill, momentum abruptly stalling as the ground levels out. It's so dark she can barely make out where the paths lead, though she can roughly remember that the one to the left leads back to the river, one to the right goes straight, and the one roughly ahead curves off to the side.

Danny comes through the hedge behind her much more quietly, though nearly as quickly, and practically knocks her over as he runs into her from behind. His arm grabs her around the middle and heaves to keep them both upright.

"Sorry... you're quicker... than I expected." He sounds only half as winded as she is, though she can feel his heart pounding rapidly against her back through her jacket. "And more reckless... thought you were tumbling... head over heels... lucky we didn't lose each other."

It's been a few seconds now, and his arm has... failed, at letting her go. As in, an attempt was made, or something like one, his hand loosening and shifting around her waist as if about to pull away before suddenly gripping again, keeping her against his chest.

She feels him take a deep breath, and then his arm relaxes again, and this time does uncurl from around her. "Why are we stopping?"

She leans into him, her muscles too weak to resist, her mind too muddled to notice. She sways for a moment as he lets go, then catches herself and blushes.

"I ... the portal. This... is where I arrived." she stammers, looking around."At least ... I think I did?"

She is starting to feel pretty stupid and frustrated about all this. Then she bites her lip, squares her shoulders, and turns around to face Danny -- face Danny very very closely apparently. Her resolve weakens for a moment as she feels herself drawn in by her currently entirely inappropriate instincts that need to go take a hike while we are trying to save our lives like sane adults.

So she steps back to a more comfortable and polite distance. "How would we recognize the portal? What does it look like?"

She heard his breath catch as she turned around, and it seems to also take him a moment to reorient after she stepped back. "Nothing, they could be anywhere. You can't tell until you've walked through them, or someone else has. Did you appear right at the bottom of this hill? Was there anywhere else you went before you found the tree we just left?"

She takes a moment to think it through ... If the portal looks like nothing, and she only remembers walking on fairly narrow paths, then why would she not have hit the invisible portal when she backtracked from the river?

"Are you sure about that? I walked down here," she points behind her, "till I hit a river of some sort. I saw a magic elk get attacked by vine wolves so I snuck back and made my way up this hill hoping to get the lay of the land. I do ...", she frowns. "I do remember the path being somehow different as I walked back. I had noticed a flower and an arched tree on the way to the river but then later they were gone. I was a little too distracted by the introduction of magic and violence to reflect on this particularly much." She pauses and turns around to look down the path.

"Do you think the paths can move or change? I guess I hadn't thought about that at the time ... I still thought I was on drugs at that point. I'd still be tremendously relieved if that were true." She looks over her shoulder and raises her eyebrows at him, half joking, half pleading.

"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.

"Don't...", she twists around and tries to wrench her arm free.

She saw a way to cross the river. She finally feels alive again, but his grip is threatening to jar her out of this magical moment.

He is not giving an inch, so she puts all her weight into pulling away from him. "Please. Just let me go..."

Instead he just holds her tighter, and when she uses her body weight to pull away, he pulls her back against his chest. "Stop! You can't just run off, it could be dangerous!" He struggles to hold her in place. "What's gotten into you? What are you seeing right now?"

Panic rises in her as he holds her tight. "Let go!" She pushes against his arm with all her might but it's like she picked a fight with an iron beam. "Let..." she pushes harder, "me..." she grits her teeth, "go!" she puts all her will power into the demand, calling on the forest and its magic to help set her free. She imagines him pushed backward as she is propelled forward, across the river bank, toward the fluorescent brush and glowing tree that beckon her.

somewhere in her mind

a single

forlorn

click

followed by a triumphant clatter

Nothing of the sort happens.

Instead, as she lunges away again, his foot slips when he takes another bracing step, sending him into a sprawl... and rather than drop his bow to catch himself, he releases her arm.

A wild smile spreads across her face as she rushes toward the crossing. With one great leap she lands on the submerged stone, water splashing up like embers in the auburn glow of the fronds on the other side. Her speed carries her across the river where she lands amidst a sea of yellow, orange, and red. Her hands trace the fiery leaves as they tickle her senses. Mesmerized she makes her way over to the web of glowing ivy drawn across an ancient tree trunk. She touches it gently, marveling at the feel, rubbing her fingers together to check for residue.

She studies the tree, tracing the patterns, gazing up into the branches. Then she presses her palms flat against the bark, leans her head against the trunk, and takes a deep slow breath. Something unfurls inside her:

Does she actually want to return to her world?

Return to what?

It wasn't like she was doing anything useful there. No one is waiting for her. She has a chance to explore now. Maybe even to make a difference somehow.

Somehow.

She turns slowly, leaning her back against the tree (is that a comforting warmth spreading across her back?), and looks at Danny, sprawled on the other side of the river.

Her voice sounds strangely distant to her own ears, like the words are not coming from her, but simply exist in the space between them.

"I'm staying."

He stares at her from across the river, then slowly rises back up. After a moment he hangs his bow over his shoulders and holds both hands up.

"Look. I think... maybe I haven't been clear, here. I know it's a lot to take in, but this place, it fucks with you. Okay? It gets in your head. Whatever you're seeing or feeling right now, you can't trust it. Shit, I don't even know if you're hearing the words I'm really saying right now... what's 1+1 equal?"

She cocks her head to the side.

"Don't you see? We can make a new life for ourselves here. Or..." She pauses a moment and then smiles. "If I bring you back to our world, can I have your bow and arrows and other gear?" She bites her lip, a reddish glow dancing across her eyes.

Danny's face is starkly lit by the red and orange glow of the ferns. "Yeah. Absolutely." His hands are still up, his voice coaxing. "If you can get me home, I'll give you all of it."

She frowns. That was odd... his tone... his words...

"You are trying to trick me. You must think I'm losing myself ... Don't you see? You are stuck in your obsession. 1+1 is 2, but you are assuming that you are the only one who can see clearly. The magic here is beyond anything anyone would deem possible! How would you know if my mind had gone or the magic warped the air between us, making me hear different words than you actually said? For that matter, how do you know if all those other humans are truly Lost, or if this place makes all humans turn against each other - distorting all our perceptions?

Don't you see? It's a choice in the end. You can't trust your senses here. Observations shift. We need to figure out the rules of this place from scratch. Which laws of physics still hold. But part of that is also embracing the magic that is actually here! That magic doesn't have to be bad! The beauty here is mesmerizing. I finally feel alive! I don't want to go back cause I have nothing to go back to. My life wasn't going anywhere. I was drifting aimlessly. I get that you had your whole life ahead of you and want to get back to that. So let me help you and then I'll take over your place here. But don't stab me in the back for wanting a different life than you do."

She licks her lips, then mutters "back back back" while tracing one finger across the warm tracery of ivy behind her back. A thrill runs through her, and her eyes unfocus a little, looking straight through Danny.

The young man watches her in silence for a handful of rapid heartbeats. The river burbles and chuckles along between them, the colors on his face shifting from orange to yellow to red as the fronds sway. Behind her, the tree seems to give off a pulse, its glow surrounding her in warmth before it fades again. A single leaf falls in front of her, veins melding together in delicate blue swirls.

Danny finally lowers his palms. "I had a hard time learning not to try to save people who don't want to be saved. If you can help me get home, and you really want to live here... I won't stop you. I'll even help." He holds a hand up. "Deal?"

"Let me bite your neck." She grins, her eyes shining. Her senses are buzzing, on fire, exploding, enveloping her mind, intoxicating. She felt the pulse from the tree run up her arm, finger tip tracing the glowing ivy. She is riding the wave, feeling it out. The warmth, the glow, the sensory overload.

And all through it, she stares at him, grinning, slowly raising her other hand, running a thumb along her lip and then tracing the relief of her teeth, rubbing across the sharp tip of a canine while gauging his response.

"Then we have a deal." she drops her hand suddenly. "You still think I'm crazy and you are much stronger than me. I need to know I can trust you."

"Yeaaah... that's not happening." He lowers his hand. "And I'm starting to reconsider letting you near a portal back to your world, but I'm too selfish to care that much. If you try to bite me on the way, though, I'm going to subdue you first and worry about the portal after. Understood?"

She raises her eyebrows. "Why would I trust you then? I might as well make my own way through the Hedge."

"I didn't make it this far by letting every girl who acted high on glamour take a bite just because they asked nice or were pretty. Besides, you climbed into my tree, and I spent an arrow saving you before I even knew anything about you. If anything, I should be the one asking you to convince me not to cut my losses rather than risk whatever fae trap you might be part of."