Meta Gamer in Equestria: Odyssey

by reflective vagrant


Chapter 1, I Arrived. (Wilderness, Part 1)

I sat there on my tiny island in that nexus of unconsciousness, with the Princess that reigned over it at my side.
"I guess I can start at the beginning, like you suggested. I can't really think of where I should start. It's such a complicated mess," I told Princess Luna as she sat down next to me. "Are you sure you have time for this?"
"I have other duties, yes. However, any problem left alone too long can cause great havoc in my dreamscape. I need to be here by your side making sure you don't spiral into madness just as much as I wish to be here to support you. If that is the best place you have to start, then I will listen patiently."
I looked at her, knowing I should be thankful, yet I still didn't want to talk. But I knew I would have to deal with her one way or another and this was her playing nice. So I decided I may as well take my blessings as they came. "On the day I woke up here..."


I found myself coming to consciousness slowly and groggy, as if I had slept half the day away after an all night gaming session. At least that was the speed I started waking up at. The sound of birds chirping and the sensation of waves of water brushing along side me quickly made me snap to a panicked alertness. Somehow I was lying face down in water!
My body whined at the commands my brain gave it, but it performed its job post haste nonetheless. I lifted myself out of the water, gasping for air as soon as I knew I was clear.
As soon as I had made sure I had coughed up as much water as I could, I started assessing my surroundings. My hands had sank a few inches into the sandy mud of the shoreline.
It felt as if every part of me were soaked. I was just now noticing a lake behind me as I dragged myself out of the water to a small patch of dyer sand-mud. I must have barely missed being washed down the small stream feeding out of it just few yards to my left and wound up at shore instead. Surrounding the lake was trees on all sides. The lake didn't look to be well kept and was probably not a part of any public park. Or at the very least, it wasn't a part meant for the public.
Pulling myself together, I felt the pack on my back and a soggy bedroll hitting the back of my head. 'Was I camping? I don't remember camping. The last thing I remember was trying to give my apartment some well needed spring cleaning.'
Regardless how I had gotten here, I was here, wet, lost, and possibly sporting a little oxygen deprived brain damage from however long I was in that lake. The first thing I needed to do was assess my situation further and try to get dry.
I did my best to shake the bulk of the mud off my hands and gather some dried driftwood from shore. With some chance luck, the first thing I found as I rustled through the pack that was with me was a crude flint and some easy to burn wood shavings in an old fashioned tin.
With a fire going and warmth slowly returning to my soaked form on the shore of some unknown lake in an unknown forest, I sat there trying to keep myself calm and get my wits about me for the long haul. Wherever I was, my chances of survival didn't look good and I would need every last bit of tactic and strategy I could squeeze out of my inexperienced brain to not die.
I mean sure, I've skimmed over some material on wilderness survival in the past. Air, body heat, water, food and shelter were important, roughly in that order. I managed to get the fire going, but I had a feeling I used up a good chunk more of the kindling in my kit than a more experienced hand would have needed. I had one more use worth in the kit at how much a person at my skill level needed to use, maybe two if I were lucky. I had no idea if I could manage to make more, at least any more that would work right.
Speaking of inexperienced, I needed to check myself for injuries and get a better look at what equipment I had. I should have done that earlier. I did a quick pat down on my arms, legs and ribs, not feeling any particular bruising. I stripped the oddly old fashioned furs I found myself in and was shocked.
My torso was tinted green, and the spare tire around my gut was gone. I wasn't sporting any special looking six or eight pack like some model or body builder, but just the fact that that much weight was gone meant some time had passed.
I quickly finished stripping, and checked my vitals as best I knew how. From what I could tell, I wasn't sick or anything, just a lot thinner and a bit greenish. Like someone had pulled a prank on me and dunked me in food dye or something. Scraping the last bits of the now dried mud off my hands, I was finding that even my palms were sporting this new tint.
'Whatever kegger I got dragged to, I must have been slipped the mother of all Mickeys to wake up like this. Dyed green, weeks or even months of memory missing, and stranded in the wilderness.'
I pulled my head back and gave an exasperated sigh. "I practically live under a rock and I don't even drink. What kind of sicko would manage to pull a stunt like this on me?"
I just gave a huff and knew I'd have to work with it. "Whelp, with my fat stores gone, food has now become a higher priority. Don't have any reserves to work with."

A short time later, I looked at a sky reddening to what would probably have been a beautiful sunset if it weren't for the trees blocking my view. It was the only nice thing about the situation and I couldn't even enjoy that right. I had managed to check myself over better and found nothing out of place besides the sudden slimming and green tint.
I also got the odd bedroll and odd firs I had for clothes drying for the sake of long term warmth. In fact everything I found in the pack was also oddly old fashioned, like it all had come from a antique store or otherwise hand crafted.
Most of the items seemed odd, but potentially useful. I made a mental list of them, with particular note to some. Some were tools, some were supplies. Thankfully there was a little food too. That meant time I could spend getting my bearings or bait I could use for getting more food.
Setting that aside though, I opened another segment of the pack and was dumbfounded for a moment. My stupor slowly began to grow to worry as I numbly pulled out seven or eight rolled up pieces of old fashioned paper with an elegant ribbon around each, four vials filled with a reddish liquid, a pretty big pearl, and finally what scared me the most: two large, old fashioned books that sat neatly below the other items.
"Please don't match. Please don't match," I spoke aloud as I carefully opened the books.
Each page had an odd text to it ripped straight out of one of those video games that is supposed to be a fictional alphabet that the player doesn't have to know. As I feared, the two books were identical. I couldn't exactly tell what was in them, but I still knew exactly what they were. They were spell books. Wizard spell books to be exact. One the original, the other a duplicate in case the original got lost. A common tactic for wizards to keep from losing their hard learned spells permanently. Although the spare was usually kept at base, instead of on them. The funny thing is my eyes almost moved as if they wanted to read the page. It was probably just a simple trick like alphabet substitution or something and my eyes were still seeing patterns it almost recognized.
With my breathing quickening, I looked around the other items of my camp, and found they matched, at least as best as I could remember. It was pretty typical a pack for a spellcasting type Dungeons and Dragons character.
Quickly I picked up the signaling mirror and gave my face a good look over. "prosthetics," I whispered to myself as I looked at the bone like nubs going straight up and back the middle of my now bald head and fin like appendages where my ears should be.
"Someone brought me out here for a solid bout of live action role playing... How did I agree to this?"
As I looked up again to try to enjoy the evening sky, I saw what I could only describe as an animal that shouldn't exist flying. I couldn't tell exactly what it was due to the sheer distance, but it had its hind legs, front legs, and was sporting a set of wings on top of that. A hexapod. Six limbs. Nothing that big had more than four limbs, wings included.
I gingerly brought a hand up to one of the fins at the side of my head. With a quick twist and a muffled whimper, it finally donned on me what had really happened.


It had been the better part of a week since I first awoke on that muddy lake shore and found myself in this predicament. I was lucky enough, if lucky is even the right word for it, to have those few supplies on me. Without them I don't know how well I'd have managed.
I've been stumbling through this dense forest as best as I could. Shelter has been virtually non existent. I've lost more hours of sleep than I'd like to admit wondering if I'll wake up the next morning.
To top it off, I'm not even in my own body anymore. I've tried wrapping my head around it as many different ways as I could. Every time I could only come up with the conclusion that I had either become a water dwelling like creature, or I had been transformed into the race of my first successful RPG character, a water genasi.
For those of you that are scratching your heads, all I can say is that they are supposed to be mostly human, but with water djin or genie ancestry, and were slightly magical. The problem was that I didn't seem to have any magic, not even the little stuff inherent to all water genasi. The only reason why I still saw that as a possibility is that upon closer inspection my pack had his most current inventory in it, right down to the small amount of rations that I've already consumed while stumbling around.
'Heh... I made this guy to be a survivor, but without his magic he's just a pansy.'
*Grugle* my stomach growled.
'A pansy that's about to get in very deep trouble if he doesn't find food soon.'
Finally pushing past the last bit of brush to the next clearing, I found myself back at the same lake I started at.
"And I give up." A small thump of knees in mud could be heard. "I can't find my way out like this."

* * *

Rocks, logs, and whatever else that looked like it had soft mud underneath, that's what I was looking for for the rest of the day. There was a good chance of termites or other creepy crawlies there. I was also on the lookout for trees with loose, dead bark.
To be honest, the thought had crossed my mind of looking for these spots before, but I was too disgusted. Now though, I didn't care.
"Thank you, Star Trek Voyager," I whispered as I found a rich nest of grubs. I quickly put them in a solid looking tin from my pack.
'Time to cook these buggers before they start eating each other.' Hey, I was hungry but I wasn't stupid, eating any flesh raw was more dangerous than eating it cooked. If I was going to stoop low enough to eat grub worms and random bugs, I was at least going to be practical about it.

After a... filling meal, I spent the rest of the evening conserving my strength and recovering. I worked on trying to replace some of my kindling with bark and cooking up another batch of bugs for the next day's meal.
Once I filled a small pouch with the roasted bugs, I set my best tidbits of bark inside the cooking tin and set it in the coals to dry out overnight. Dry bark tidbits were bound to catch fire easier than moist bark and hopefully mere coals wouldn't set them aflame through the tin.
I set a not so dried out log on the fire to last through the night, grabbed my crowbar and laid down to sleep by the fire. It was the best thing I had for a weapon since I didn't have a knife in my pack. I know, right? A crowbar but no knife.
With a slow mental double check of any other preparations I could make, I finally settled down and made a quiet prayer to whoever or whatever might have been listening that I might wake up the next morning.

* * *

I was at that point between being asleep and not asleep, in that part of my sleeping rhythm where I could easily fall back into a deep sleep, but it was also easy to wake up with minimal prompting.
That prompting came quite suddenly as I felt the subtle breath of a creature on me from behind.
I knew something big enough to be a threat was there, investigating me. It must have realized that I had woke up because its breathing stopped quite suddenly. The moment seemed to stretch on forever as I laid there stiff with one thought running through my mind: Both of us knew that both of us were aware of the other. I didn't know if it was hostile, but I had to presume it was.
Finally, the moment broke as I tightened my grip on my crowbar as subtly as I could, but it wasn't subtle enough. The creature leapt away before I could even start my swing. All I could see was a grayish blur of what looked like the last bit of the hind legs of a hoofed animal diving into the underbrush.
I stood there, getting my eyes in focus and listening intently. I couldn't hear anything. I couldn't see anything—which was odd, because you'd think grey would stand out in the brush when sunrise was throwing funny colors every which way. Whatever it was it was good at hiding. No noise, and no movements that would give it away. The only thing that left me aware of its presence was a gut feeling.
My eyes scanned around as much as possible, only leaving the underbrush momentarily to confirm the hoof prints in the mud from the creature. It wasn't split hoof like a pig or a deer, but one whole hoof like a horse or donkey. If it weren't for the fact that I'd seen ample signs that mythology had suddenly become real, including the fin like ears I was using right at that very moment, I would have probably relaxed a little. But I couldn't relax, not when there was reason to believe the prints could mean something other than a passive herbivore.
I knew I wasn't likely to succeed, but I still decided I needed to search for this thing while it was still around.
As I made my choice a tingling sensation arose on the back of my neck. That tingling wouldn't go away, even after I tried to shake it off. Whatever the tingle was, it wasn't going to go away on command. This feeling persisted for a long while.
And then all of a sudden the tingling feeling honed my search into a single direction. With a quick turn of my head I caught a glance at the same hooves again, darting out of sight around a large patch of trees and bushes several yards away. At the same moment the tingling feeling dropped.
The creature had finally fled. Somehow I had won the standoff, if only barely.
All I knew is suddenly I wasn't alone out here. Friend or foe—scratch that. I didn't think I was going to find a friend out here. Hostile or non hostile, I had to be ready for my new neighbor... or neighbors.