Chapter 2
He had cleaned and bandaged his wound at what turned out to be a small river, or a big stream. It still hurt like hell when he took a step, or moved his leg, but maybe, just MAYBE he could be lucky enough not to get the wound infected. Then again, he cleaned it with water from a wild river, he didn’t think that would help him much. Or would it? He should’ve watched more Man vs. Wild when he had the chance. While tending to his wound he noticed that the wound he died from wasn't the only thing that had dissapeared. He didn't have a single scar on him. It was unnverving to say the least, but with no answers popping out of the blue, all he could do was accept it.
He realized that he was pretty thirsty, but he was pretty sure that unless it was a special stream, water from a normal river could kill you because of bacteria.
Choice 1: die of thirst.
Choice 2: test your luck and maybe survive.
He molded the choices in his head… heat kills bacteria, so if he cooked the water, he would increase his survival chances. He looked around. How do you make a fire? Flint stones can make a spark, and friction between wood can cause fire… No flint in sight. But then again, making a fire would take a while for a newbie like him, what if the branch-fucking-wolves came back? He sighed for the hundredth time. He wished he’d joined the boy scouts when he had the chance.
‘This is bullshit’ He thought angrily, as he punched the ground in frustration. He was supposed to be dead but he definitely wasn’t resting in peace.
‘Okay, focus now.’ He shook his head.
Choice 1: Risk a fire, if he could even get one started, and hope the branchwolves wouldn’t come back, or
Choice 2: Risk drinking the water as it is, and hope that water from another world or wherever he was, was clean and didn’t make him sick, and then hurry the fuck back up into that tree.
He looked around nervously. He didn’t think he could take the wolves in his condition, so he hurriedly drank from the river, and limped back to the tree. The water tasted weird, cleaner than he was used to but also kind of earthy.
A new problem presented itself as he made it to the tree: Jumping without using his left leg. He held back a sigh. ‘I am not going to sigh at every god-damn problem that presents itself’. He told himself as he crouched down on his right leg.
‘I can do this. Just like jumping with two legs… but with one.’ He almost facepalmed at his own thoughts. He needed a cape, mask, and a big CO on his chest, then he could emerge as Captain Obvious.
Jax smiled despite his situation. Suddenly he felt really up-beat. He could do this, no problem. All he needed to do was jump.
He had been in the position for to long, and his leg spasmed as he tried to jump. He cursed under his breath.
He succeeded on his fourth try.
***
He needed to make this more comfortable. He had tried to sleep in the tree, but had awoken often, mostly the times he felt like he was going to fall down, but also because it was so damn uncomfortable. The sun had risen and he had given up on sleep. But he was damn tired.
He climbed down the tree and made his way towards the striver (combination of stream and river). It was beginning to warm up and to that he was grateful. He was wearing an old sweater, over a blue t-shirt, and jeans. Not the warmest outfit. His worn sneakers were nothing special either.
The birds were singing, and it was slowly getting warmer, even though the night hadn’t been cold. Thank god he came here in what he presumed was summer. He would be half dead already if it was winter. As it was his left leg was giving him enough problems. It still hurt every time he took a step, but he convinced himself it was better than yesterday.
As he drank from the striver again, he noticed something that made him happy: fish! He could get some food!
His stomach rumbled. He needed this, but how? He went back to the tree to retrieve his fighting stick from the night before. It could double as a fishing rod maybe… But he didn’t have any string. A spear? It wasn’t sharp enough, and he had no way of sharpening it. If he had some flint he could shape that into a dagger, then tie it to the stick… with the string he didn’t have. He groaned in frustration. Humans now-a-day have it too easy. Why isn’t survival in the wild a requirement in school, like math… it could be instead of PE. What use did he have of being good at dodgeball now?! Then again, math didn’t help him in his current situation either… none of the knowledge he had from school helped him right now.
He looked at his stick in defeat. Then an idea came to mind. The inner bark of a branch could be used as a string! Well a bad string, but this solved one of his problems. Now he just needed to shape some flint into a dagger and BAM, he had dinner! Well breakfast really, but whatever.
Problem number 2: No flint in the proximity. And he knew nothing about shaping flint into a useful form. Also he needed a fire… and how long did it take to catch a fish with a spear?
He took some deep breaths. Stressing would NOT help. He had all day to get the hang of this. He could do it. One step at a time then:
Step one: Find flint stone. He needed to move from his beloved and safe tree. He should probably follow the striver. This relied so much on luck that he almost reconsidered. But he needed food, and to get food he needed a weapon. He turned to his right and started walking. Hopefully it was the right way.
***
The sun was now way over the horizon but hallelujah, praise the lord, thank his lucky stars, all that pain was not for naught. He was now on a small beach by the striver (maybe he should just decide whether it was a stream or a river?), and for once he had luck on his side. There was indeed flint among the stones. And was that a bush with berries on it, he saw there? Indeed it was! He started eating them greedily, until he didn’t feel so… exhausted. They tasted like raspberries. He took some with him back to the small beach, took a flint stone and a normal stone, lay the flint on a bigger rock that was coming out of the ground, raised the rock in his right hand… and stopped. ‘How the hell do I form it like I want to?’ He thought. ‘Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.’ He started hitting the flint.
***
By sheer dumb luck he managed to get a daggerish looking flint on the second stone he tried. It took a long time, the sun was now high in the sky, and his ears were ringing from all the noise he had made. But he had now completed step 2: shape the flint.
Now on to step 3: make some string from bark.
He looked at his stick. He didn’t want to mutilate it, it had been too useful. He could mix this step with step 6: find some firewood. He went into the nearby forest, and quite easily found lots of dry wood and leaves, which he brought back to the beach, his new base of operations. He sat down and started stripping the first branch of its outer layer of bark, to get into the thing he needed: The more flexible second layer.
***
God this was taking a long time, and the berries could only do so much to keep his hunger at bay. He had finally completed step 3, and moved on to step 4: Attach the awesome dagger of death, to the mighty stick of awesome, using the unbreakable string of… death? No already used that… usefulness? Sure, string of usefulness.
This didn’t take as long but he was skeptic. The dagger could fall off any minute, he reckoned. But it was getting late and he still had to catch a fish and make the fire, and cook the fish… on something. He couldn’t just put it into the fire, he honestly didn’t think of that before. He looked at the bark he had just acquired. It would have to do. And so step 5 began: Catch a fish with the mighty spear of awesome unbreakable and useful death… He needed to rename it at some point.
***
The sun had gone down when he finally had a fish on his spear. Even after he had realized not to aim directly at the fish, but trick it into going a certain direction and then striking, it had taken a while, and the unbreakable string of usefulness wasn’t unbreakable at all. He almost lost his awesome dagger of death three times. But he finally had a goddamn fish. It was big enough that he needed to hold it in two hands. It was honestly the most beautiful fish he had ever laid his eyes upon… but maybe that was the hunger talking. He was so hungry but he still hadn’t made the fire… and standing in the striver for hours had made him cold. He reeeeaally needed this fire going.
Step 6: collecting the firewood, was already done, and he had stacked it neatly. He knew how to make a fire at least. The thing he wasn’t used to was using flint stones to do it.
Step 7: Start the fire… went better than he would ever have thought. After all the trouble with the fish he was getting nervous about not being able to do it, and his hunger pains hadn't helped, but the stars and the moon gave him enough light so that he could see what the hell he was doing. The night shone much brighter in this world, than in his old, thankfully. He managed to start it after his tenth try. It was some kind of miracle. Must have been because it hadn’t rained in a while. Finally he was able to start the step he had looked forward to the most:
Step 8: Cook the delicious fish! He was already drooling just by looking at the raw fish. Still…
“How do you cook a fish? Damnit…”
***
The cooked fish tasted fine. He had gutted it like he knew he should, but after that he was stumped. In the end he just put it on a big piece of bark and layed it on the edge of the fire, but that took too long, so he impaled it with a stick and put the it over the fire. But then the outer layer started cooking too fast, so he had to raise it a bit more, but the sand on the beach couldn’t support the weight, so he had to sit with it in his hand. But it tasted fine.
He felt pretty good about himself when he finally laid down to rest. He decided against sleeping in a tree, he honestly doubted he could even raise himself up into one, he was just so damn exhausted. He looked at the beautiful night sky for a while. It honestly looked amazing, there were far more stars than he was used to, and even though he couldn’t recognize any constellations, the sight calmed him down a lot. He fell asleep next to the fire, glad for it’s warmth, with a smile on his face.
***
He was standing in the room... that room. The darkness was bleeding out of the walls like blood. Maybe it was blood.
His dad’s last words “I loved you the most,” echoed in the darkness. The loneliness was pressing against him, he wanted to reach out, to reach for his friends, but just as his hand is about to raise... he lets it fall. Their backs are turned to him as they walk away, and he stays in the silent room, not really knowing why he didn't call out to them.
The darkness spreads like a curtain, and a small black horse with wings and a horn emerges from it with a look of pity and wonder. It tries to tell him something but her pity burns into him, and as she breaks the silence of the room he opens his mouth to ask for help.
Instead, he screams at it to leave. He screams and screams and screams until he is alone in the darkness again. And there he stays, all alone... so alone.
***
Far away, in a castle on a mountainside, princess Luna came back from the dreamworld looking troubled. The nightmare had been intense, and the creature having it was one she had never seen before, but one that must have been within Equestria for her to be able to enter its dreams. She looked up at the moon, shinning brightly in her sky. The darkness in the creature’s nightmare had been so lonely. She could still feel it clinging to her coat, making her recall her long imprisonment on the moon.
Even after her reformation, even after Discord, Chrysalis, Sombra and Tirek terrorized the ponies, even then a lot of them feared her still.
Though Ponyvile seemed to fear her less, and she had found friends among the elements of harmony, and of course she always had her sister.
Yet despite all she had, a part of her was convinced that it was more than she deserved.
She couldn’t deny that this night, and many nights prior to it… she felt as lonely as that creature seemed to be.
***
Jax woke up in a cold sweat. He had slept past the sunrise this time, but he still felt tired. He slowly got up and stretched. There was a brown bear looking at him from the riverbank. He almost fainted right there and then, such a shock is not good for you so early in the morning.
He thought quickly, what was that saying? If the bear is black, step the fuck back. If the bear is brown, lay the fuck down.
He instantly pretended to fall over dead, landing on his side, trying not to curse as his wound opened. Damn that hurt!
The bear just kind of looked at him funny, then resumed on it’s travels.
‘Well that was odd. He didn’t even sniff me or anything. And what was with that look he gave me?’ He pondered on it for a moment before deciding it wasn’t important. Actually he was glad it went this well. He sat up and looked down at his badly bandaged leg. He had used part of his pants for the bandage, it had been ripped by the branchwolf anyway, but he felt he needed to use some new bandages. How often should you change your bandages? He felt stupid for not knowing these kinds of things.
He needed a bath. But the river was cold and he didn’t have a towel. He looked over at the fireplace. The fire was burnt down, leaving only ashes. He needed to start a fire, take a bath, catch a fish, cook the fish and then… what? He didn’t have a goal. Surviving was his goal, so he should probably focus on that.
‘This beach is now my camp. I must fortify it so bears can’t just come walking in, or worse, branchwolves and whatever else this forest holds of dangerous animals. So I need to make an axe. And explore the area. Maybe there’s some fruit nearby that I don’t know off.’
And so, over the next month Jax began his quest to survive, exploring more and more of the area, upgrading his weaponry, making the spear of doom (his new name for it) more reliable (the dagger no longer falls off every ten minutes) and doing all in his might to survive the strange creatures that lived in this strange forest. He fortified the beach so well with thornbushes that he had to climb up a tree every time he needed to leave or enter, he made an axe, an extra dagger and even started hollowing a tree to make a small boat. But for all the work he did, it all seemed for naught
As he one day met something that was… terrifying.
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So far so good. I'll have to read a few extra chapters before I decide to give it a thumbs up and so far I've seen no reason to thumb it down.
Hmm, what did he plan on boiling the water in even if he did make a fire back then?
6417224 He didn't think so far I guess ^^ He doesn't come up with some brilliant solution either, if that's what you're hoping XD It's never mentioned again as far as I remember. He just drinks directly from the stream
Sorry had to chuckle at "wild river". Decent story so far though.
6639503 yes. As opposed to a tame river... uhm... alright then, just keep on readin' ^^ I get better with... words... later on. I think.
good. though would have edited a bit to introduce Luna. Also wood have liked to see more of his survIval trIals.
6867049 I know, but I couldn't publish it as because of the lack of important keywords (apparently having Luna in there wasn't enough) so I decided to skip until the ponies got involved.
s2.quickmeme.com/img/d3/d30963b2324c51fe4ecad158c5d37b64f180742e9b7dc719eae56c9876802ea4.jpg
felt a bit rushed here, just fyi
the bear:
s2.quickmeme.com/img/45/45fdd4cc5bd595066def55c73e277d210983a57c254de0362c6ac4f2a9e12298.jpg
1: survive
2: follow the water
3: ????
4: profit (find civilization)
Hm...
Against Bad water: a indian well search near a river a place with grasses or roots dig with a stone or stick until water fills it. It is filtered by the Sediment and the roots.
Roots are also rather bendy ( string substitute?)
Just found this one. Loved the first two chapters. Best description of someone who only has the vaguest idea of what to do in this type of situation I have seen. I love primitive camping, cutoff date 1840.
Back to reading!