““Shit, where the fuck am I?!” I yelped, along with some choice other words that I find rather too unpleasant to note here; I was already freaking out, light-headed and filled with anxiety. Instead of the somewhat vast and bustling semi-cityscape I had fully expected to find sprawled out ahead of me, I was met with an entirely different sight—a boundless landscape stretching out in front of me, flat plains covered in lush, vibrant grass the color of deep forest green extending as far as the eye could see. And I truly mean that, as I quickly realized I was no longer standing in the dilapidated slums where I had once been. Now, I sat on the jagged, rocky edge of an impossibly high cliff, which dropped off sharply just a few feet ahead of where I rested.

  Still deadly confused, and fearful of that practically infinite drop, my chest was tight, me never being the adventurous type. But every second, that feeling seemed to be disappearing more and more. “I’m on another fucking planet already, aren’t I?” Another planet, a planet that isn’t earth…It couldn’t be earth, nothing was so beautiful.

  What a fast progression. Never thought I’d live to see the day…well, I never thought that this would happen either, but what can you do? And again, here I was, talking to myself, even in the face of all that.

  I gulped and rubbed my bleary eyes some more. I still held that same exhaustion, and despite any fear this was causing, I still was practically asleep. My head started to tip backwards and my eyes began to close, but I fought with all I had left in me to keep me lucid for just a little longer.

  From this dizzying height, I held a breathtaking bird’s-eye view, yet even from this vantage point, I couldn’t see past the seemingly endless field that lay before me. The distant horizon stretched out like an impenetrable barrier, stubbornly keeping its secrets hidden from my view and frustrating any hope of scouting further. The sun—thankfully the same one I remembered, though I wasn’t entirely sure why I had worried it might change—shone brightly above, its warm rays lovingly bathing the landscape below in a golden light. Despite the fact that it should still be nighttime. The entire area sparkled like a jewel, illuminated by the sun’s radiance, and the morning dew shimmered with tiny rainbows spanning every color, from vivid reds to soft violets, refracted in the air. It was a sight so awe-inspiring that I could hardly believe my eyes; my jaw had dropped lower than the deepest ocean trench. What also dropped was part of the section of rock supporting my weight, crumbling and falling down the cliff face, spiraling downward and then exploding into a million pieces at the bottom. I scuttled backwards and stood up quickly, feeling the stone barely holding up beneath me. I continued to reverse until my back hit something thick and tough, and I turned to see a wall of vines interwoven with tall redwoods.

  The freshness of the pristine air filled my lungs in a way that felt almost too pure, refreshing me more than oxygen had any right to. The scent that accompanied it was even more intoxicating. It was an aroma reminiscent of rain-soaked earth, a smell I recalled was called petrichor. Sweet, soothing, and impossibly relaxing, it was a fragrance I had loved ever since my childhood when I would run outside during thunderstorms, carefree and unconcerned about getting wet. I’d let the raindrops drench me, sticking my tongue out to taste them as they fell, performing silly little dances in the downpour just to amuse myself. The cold rain would always re-energize me, giving me a burst of life I could never find elsewhere. Not that I had any friends to share those moments with, even back then, but I had plenty of imaginary ones who kept me company. Not nearly to the quality of those I’ve been seeing recently, but still good enough for the time.

  I couldn’t resist laying back on some soft grass, a small patch near the rocky outcropping, allowing my body to sink into its comforting embrace while I stared up at the clear, endless blue sky above. Not a single cloud marred its perfection. A gentle breeze caressed my face, playful as it ruffled my hair and sent my clothes billowing in random directions. Carefully and methodically, I pulled blades of grass from the earth, running them through my fingers one by one to ensure that it was actual, fresh grass, and this wasn’t a film set. I was willing to look for any explanation at this point, to be totally honest, for both arguments, that it was real or that it wasn’t.

  Even still, this was great. I didn’t mind that the cooler temperatures of the high altitude stung my skin slightly—it only added to the sense of bliss that enveloped me. Everything felt so serene, so perfect. There wasn’t a single thing wrong with my current situation. I relaxed, forgetting all my problems and that all this had happened. I was still tired after all, I hadn’t slept much and it was late now. I tried my hardest not to reminisce on older times while I took my brief break, my respite, somewhere that hadn’t existed before.

  “If you’re gonna kill me… just do it now,” I said, my voice steady despite the storm of emotions swirling inside me, arm resting over my forehead, one eye only slightly open. “Not like I wasn’t going to anyway…you really want me to live that badly?” Silence was my only answer. No movement from the underbrush, no reaction from the plant life—nothing. Did I really want to end my life? I had wanted to escape from the life I had before and wasn’t this exactly that?

  I guess that meant they were waiting for me to make the next move, expecting some kind of action. This system wanted me to storm into that forest or scale that cliff. Too bad for them—I had no intention of playing along. Not now, not ever. Well, that was my goal anyway. “I don’t know…I might just jump if you aren’t careful…” I probably should have been more careful to shut my insistently replaying memories off…perhaps it was just the quiet environment that made it keep happening, leaving me alone to them.

  It was a cool day in autumn’s middle, a weekend in between two full, bustling weeks of school. Two weeks of being pushed over, tackled, punched, and trying to make friends with my bullies using my shallow understanding of social structure and hierarchy, my innate desire to fit in.

  The lawn I played in was one of browned, dead grass, overlooked by a dying oak tree I liked to climb from time to time. The sky was overcast as it always was every time I had come down here, but I liked to imagine it as being a clear blue; a similar hue to the sky above me now.

  “What are you doing over there?” asked my grandpa, a weary, gray haired and long-bearded man in a tank top, with just enough spring in his step to make you think he wasn’t nearing eighty, or that he would die within a month from a brain tumor he never told us of. He sat on the porch swing which was rendered immovable by his feet he always pushed so unnecessarily hard into the wood planks beneath him.

  “Just digging a hole to China!” I called back jokingly. I was digging, clawing my nails into the dirt messily with little effect, but it was primarily to waste time rather than any real purpose. I must have been around seven or eight at the time.

  “Come here, boy,” he requested, and so I came over post haste, dusting my hands off on my sweatpants. “Listen to me now,” he asked. “As your grandfather, I think I have a duty to give you some of my wisdom. For me, life got real bad a few years from where you are now, so if it gets you down…I heard this poem once, and made some changes.” He pulled a slip of paper from his back pocket, and before you ask, yes, it is a similar situation to you all now, but correlation does not mean causation. “Life for me is a handful of olives,” he told me, and while confused, I listened. “You just find them in your palm, and don’t know what to do with them, so you pop one in your mouth. The taste is sour, yet what else is there to do but chew? You feel happy when you’re finished, free from the suffering, then bite down hard on the pit. You keep on eating, obligated, no, forced to continue, your only solace the time before the next falls on your tongue. As you go on eating, the juices get more sour, the pits harder to grind up or swallow, so you remember when they weren’t as sour, and think they were sweet all the way back then. You go to have another, but realize they were the same as now. Even still, only a few remain, your hand is nearly empty, and it was all worth it, because in that last bite, you find that you enjoyed it all.”

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  Those are some of the words I’ve taken most to heart in recent years, although at the time I heard it, or even there on the cliff, I couldn’t possibly understand what he meant exactly.

  The old man crumpled the paper up and stuffed it back in his pocket. I was beckoned to come into his shack of a home, being sat down on his leg, an old banjo, heavy and unwieldy, placed in my arms. I nearly dropped it, but maintained my hold on it just enough so that it wouldn’t fall, lifting with all my might to support it. He wore a rough pair of discolored blue jeans, an unpleasant surface to rest upon. The faintest light streaming in from a high placed window illuminated us, casting the wood-grain flooring and scattered pots and pans into a harsh shadow. Grandpa sniffled something jumbled about how glad he was to bond with me like this, but I tuned it out, much to his disapproval. “Strum,” he told me, and so I did. The melody was discordant, so gramps placed his hands over mine to help me play the frail strings. “Put your hand here, boy. I said here!” he raged, infuriated at my non-immediate understanding, moving my hands around wildly to make sounds that didn’t sound quite right.

  “It’s so hard though! I wanna go!” I wailed, tearing up. My fingertips ached touching each string, tantrum onsetting.

  “Not until you’ve got the hang of this. Put your pointer finger here. Good, good,” he instructed.

  That strumming of banjo chords played on repeat, starting to get more disorganized and shrill until suddenly, my peace was shattered by ear-splitting, blood-curdling screams that pierced the air from somewhere behind me. The shrill, high-pitched cries were so jarring that they left my ears ringing. Here I was, finally starting to enjoy myself, reconsidering what I wanted to do…That there, my friend, is the end of a perfectly good plan of noncompliance. Turning my gaze in the direction of the noise, I saw what appeared to be a dense, tangled rainforest. The towering trees, with trunks thicker than anything I had ever seen, reached up toward the sky, their canopies almost blotting out the sunlight. Redwood giants stretched up as high as the eye could follow, and greasy, camo-green vines—each as thick as my biceps—wove through the underbrush like snakes, completely blocking any possible entrance. The thick foliage, along with the oppressive greenery, had gone mostly unnoticed by me earlier because it felt like it didn't belong, detracting from the beauty of the plains. Now, however, it demanded my full attention.

  Despite the overwhelming size of the rainforest, the strangest thing was that the only sound I could hear was the screaming—no birds, no insects, nothing that should normally fill the air with life. The entire forest was unnervingly quiet. It felt like when I had received that first notification–just a few minutes ago, I guess. I still could hear my breathing though. The damp surfaces of the leaves and vines glistened in the light, between soaked and slick, making the idea of climbing over them seem a fool’s errand. It also seemed impossible to crawl in between the vines, as they were very tightly entangled in something like a loving embrace.

  “Mom…” I thought about her, now of all times. Why did I have to think of her, because now my mind’s going to do that thing agai-

  It was several years prior, on a family camping trip. I had expressed disinterest in going on a long hike to get to her desired spot. “Experience this! Explore life, wherever it takes you!” My mother’s voice resounded in my ears.

  “No! Can’t I get a second of actual experience without you talking to me, you bitch! I don’t always need to have remembrance!”

  “What did you just-”

  “I said what I said and I meant what I said! You aren’t my real fucking mother! She’s dead! She’s fucking gone and long gone at that! You are a mental image! I am imagining everything you say! Leave me alone!”

  “I could never, you’re my dearest-”

  “You are nothing to me! You are the product of my broken self! You are nobody!”

  “That doesn’t change any-”

  “It changes everything, you whore! Yeah, yeah, your lesson is fine. I should experience it, should probably try to help whoever that was, and I was planning on it! I’m trying to believe that all this is actually going on, that I was teleported here. It’s still just a bit hard to believe though, especially when I don’t exactly have the best history of never imagining something. Then you come around, and continue to torment my brain from the grave! You and dad, you’re the cause of this, you know? You and whoever I’ve probably repressed!” I screamed, pointing at my head, though knowing there was not a soul that would see me doing so unless they were watching from somewhere nearby. Nobody else could hear her complaints. Why should I have to?

  But then again, I couldn’t tell where I was. When I was. Who I was. How I was.

  I couldn’t tell how to breathe. How to think. How to act.

  Oh.

  Mama needs food.

  My footsteps thudded against the crumbling and damp wooden planks, the sound reverberating in my mind. The creaks and groans of the floorboards were filtered out unconsciously but I could still faintly notice them. I was, of course, in the pantry, surrounded on all sides by a collection of canned food so large it could feed us through an apocalypse, arranged in a perfect circle; the product of all our savings being cycloned into the stockpile. The air was stale so I held my breath for as long as I could to avoid the pain that came from even just inhaling once in here. Gently grasping an unlabeled can of beans from a forgotten age, I returned from the pantry. The same creaks. The same feeling that the floor would fall out from under me and that I would plunge into the abyss below. I had only just left the region when I inhaled deeply, sucking all the oxygen around me into my empty lungs, then exhaling all of it out again in just a moment more. Don’t get me wrong, the air was still detestable, but it was glorious, wonderful compared to the other room.

  “Hurry-” an old, raspy but distinctly feminine voice croaked out to me, breaking me from my reverie. I’m sure the statement would have continued further but it was interrupted by a powerful coughing fit. I walked towards the voice, bracing myself for what I was sure would come, tensing my muscles. She was going to say something, I could see her lips moving, the words were about to come out–No. That’s not right. I’m not a kid anymore.

  I shuddered, returning to reality. I stood to attention from where I had been lying, trying to forget that experience. I was torn between the urge to assist whoever was in trouble and the daunting realization that I had no clear way of leaving my current position without either jumping off the cliff or somehow making my way through the dense jungle. See, I am a good person! I have some morals, I want to help this person, whoever they are! I…I do. That negates wanting to kill some others, I’m sure. Positive karma to the extreme.

  [Enlightened races should be nearly attuned. Path searches will commence in approximately 10 hours (planet “Earth” standard time measurement.) Enlightened ones must make their way to a standard teleportation point. Teleportation points are placed at randomized equal intervals.]”