Intimancer

Chapter 1

“What the fuuuuuuuUU- OOF!”

Rick was awash in pain as all the air in his lungs was forcefully ejected from his mouth when he collided with the hard ground.  As landings went, he had worse, although not by much.  His lungs still struggled to regain the breath his belly flop knocked out of him.  Eventually he recovered enough to breathe with some regularity, his hands reaching out to grip the sparse grass in front of him to help slowly pull himself on his arms and knees.

He remained there on all fours slowly filling his aching lungs with the cool air when a soft breeze blew by and tickled him in a way that brought him back to more conscious thought.  Looking down he noticed that his nethers were completely exposed.  In fact, he was as naked as the day he was born.

Another “What the fuck?” escaped his lips as he scrambled to his feet and looked around frantically.  He found himself surrounded on all sides by tall trees and dense foliage.  His clothes, that he could have sworn he was wearing two minutes ago, were nowhere to be found.  This situation was just too weird.  Panic began to claw its way to the front of his mind.  Rick shut his eyes and desperately tried to fight the urge to run screaming deeper into this mysterious forest.  That certainly would not have helped.

“Take a deep breath.  And slow down.” He breathed out, as if speaking the words out loud would cause them to manifest.  “Dad always said that even in the worst of situations there is always time to stop, breathe, and plan your next move.”  He repeated the mantra several times, breathing slowly and deeply in and out in between each sentence.

While Rick’s father didn’t always follow his own advice, when stuff hit the fan and things really mattered, the man became absolutely unflappable.  Mentally picturing his father’s stoic face during one of their first disastrous family vacations seemed to calm Rick down.  He felt his heart rate slow and his breathing become more even.  Slowly Rick opened his eyes again and looked around with a more critical gaze.

“Step one;  Are you in immediate danger?”  He looked down at his nude form again.  “Well, while my junk is hanging out, there doesn’t seem to be anything trying to claw or bite it off, so I think I'm good there.”  He gave a wry chuckle at that.  Humor was good.  If you could make a joke in a situation then things weren’t quite at rock bottom…  yet.

“Step two;  Confirm where you are, who you are with, and what tools you have available.”  He laughed again “I’m in an unknown forest, I’m alone, and I’m naked so no tools for me.”  But after a moment he realized that wasn’t necessarily true.  Yes he didn’t have clothes, his phone, or even the pocket knife his dad gave him when he turned ten, but he wasn’t in a barren wasteland with nothing to use either.

 

A sharp rock could be used to cut and shape a tree branch or cut some strips out to make cordage. A large stick could be used for defense or even as a splint in case of a broken bone.  The possibilities were endless.  The knowledge that he had options finally tamped down on the last vestiges of panic into a far corner of Rick’s mind.  He now felt a budding sense of hope to replace the overwhelming fear.

As he began searching for what he could use from his surroundings Rick tried his best to remember how he ended up in this absolutely ridiculous situation.  How the hell did one find themselves swan-diving naked into a forest?  Try as he might, he just could not remember.  It was like a black void swallowed his most recent memories and desperately trying to dredge them up caused Rick to feel a slight headache forming.

Deciding that further attempts on his more recent past would just be futile, he changed gears.  I can remember my name, my family, and what seems to be 18 years of childhood.  So that’s something.  He thought.  He then started going through all the major events starting from his last birthday.  Let’s see, I turned eighteen then a few months later I graduated high school.  After that I was getting ready for college, yeah!  I remember packing and… There was that void again.

Rick remembered he chose and got accepted to a university far away from anyone in his family.  He didn’t have many friends where he grew up and figured that college would be a great chance to start something new.  He wanted to forge something for himself and the prospect of striking it out alone with no support excited and terrified him in equal measure.

“And yet, here I am.” He chuckled wryly to himself.  He was most certainly alone now, whether he wanted to be or not.  He figured he was now mentally all caught up more or less, mysterious black void in his memories notwithstanding.  With another deep breath he mentally switched gears once again, focused fully on the here and now.

He used a somewhat sharp stone he found nearby to cut a decent sized branch from a nearby tree. He then cut away all the excess limbs and cut off most of the thin and brittle section of the front, leaving him with a somewhat straight wooden pole about as long as he was tall.  Which admittedly… wasn’t much.  He unfortunately inherited his height from his mother’s southeast Asian heritage leaving him quite a bit under the national average for adult men.  With a sigh he did his best to sharpen the tip of his makeshift spear and stood back up.

While he would have loved to harden the speartip in a fire he didn’t feel that he had the time.  Based on the light that filtered through the trees it was about mid afternoon and that left him with precious little time to prepare.

“Alright, Step three;  try to secure water, shelter, and food.  Mostly in that order.”  His dad often told him that an average human could go a week without food but would die of thirst twice over before that happened.  So finding a spring or a river was top priority.  If he couldn’t do it before it started to get dark then he would instead find a safe place to sleep and try again first thing when he woke up.

With a deep breath and a grunt to psych himself up for the journey ahead, Rick set off deeper into the forest in search of a means to survive.

…

It seems that wandering around a strange forest looking for water was an extremely difficult task.  While water had proven to be quite elusive, luck herself didn’t completely abandon Rick as he padded along the forest floor.  About an hour after setting off he found a bush with several bunches of berries nestled within its boughs.  After sampling one Rick found they were blackberries and gleefully took another handful or two.  Food wasn’t as good as water but it was better than nothing at all.  Plus they tasted divine.

With the day coming to an end Rick decided to give up on his thirst for now and focus on finding a safe spot to sleep.  It didn’t take him long to find a fairly thick tree with low hanging branches.  Using another sharp rock he cut away some limbs from the nearby trees and laid them down in a tent pattern against a low branch.  His shelter complete, Rick laid down on a pile of leaves he lined the floor of his shelter with and did his best to fall asleep.  He was emotionally and physically drained but sleep did not come easy.

He kept thinking of home, of his family.  His mother’s warm smile and soft embrace, his father’s tall and sturdy back, his little sister’s bratty attitude.  The possibility of never seeing them again crashed against his mind like a tidal wave.  He bottled it all up and shoved it deep down into the forgotten recesses of his mind.  He would survive.  Only once that was achieved, could he worry about what was lost.

He was still struggling to keep the emotions in their container when he finally passed out from exhaustion.

When the pale light of dawn poked through the canopy Rick was eager to leave his shelter for good.  To say that was the worst night of sleep he ever had was no exaggeration.  The temperature of the forest, while fairly comfortable during the day, dropped considerably once the sun set and his shelter did little to stop the wind from flowing through the gaps in his makeshift walls.  As a result he could only sleep fitfully at best leaving him, cold, miserable, and sore all over from the unyielding ground.

Rick felt the walls of his dry throat rub together like a tube lined with sandpaper.  The urgent need for water nearly caused all the panic and suppressed feelings to come bubbling back up from where he mentally shoved them away the day before.  It took a bit longer, but Rick eventually got himself steady enough to think straight.

He needed to secure something better and fast.  Rick stood and pondered what he could do to maximize his chances of finding water, or better yet, civilization if it existed.  He gazed around and examined the topography of his surroundings.  The forest was fairly flat but there were some rises here and there representing slight hills.

Water flows downhill, so if I could find out which direction that could be I probably would find water easier, right? He pondered.  Lacking any other ideas, Rick ran to the top of the nearest hill and started to climb one of the trees on top of it. 

Poking his head out of the canopy, his view from atop the tree took his breath away.  Virtually everywhere he looked he saw a sea of green gently rolling in every direction.  Following the emerald waves further out from his position, Rick then gazed at the far horizon.  After a few moments he found what he was looking for, the faint outline of mountains.

If water flows downhill, then the opposite direction of the mountains should be the coast.  And if there is a coast there should be people.

  It was by no means a perfect plan.  But what else could he do?  His life suddenly turned from a potential college drama story to quite literally ‘Naked and afraid’.  He just had to survive until he found people.  Where there’s people, there’s food, shelter, and hopefully, answers.  Answers on where he was and why this whole debacle even happened in the first place.

That was the part he hated the most, the lack of knowledge on why this was happening.  Not knowing the how and why he was stuck in a random forest grinded his gears in a way that he just couldn’t articulate.  Something obviously happened to him and every time his mind tried to coax the information out he kept running into that emptiness where the memories of his most recent past should be.

Either I somehow got the world's worst blackout drunk on my last night before college or something else must have blocked or stole those memories.

It was that last thought that chilled him the most.  He couldn’t think of any way it was possible to purposely block someone’s ability to recall specific recent events, but something deep in his mind made him feel like that may indeed have been what happened.

Rick shook his head to clear his thoughts.  Survive now, questions later.  Once again noting which direction the mountain range was, he descended the tree, picked up his spear, and began walking in the opposite direction of those distant peaks.  Toward, what he hoped, would be people.

He never really cared about being alone before, and the longer he kept walking around naked, the more comfortable he was beginning to feel in his own skin.  But there was just no way he could continue to survive for long.  He didn’t have the skills, strength or training to last more than a week at most.

Just one foot in front of the other.  Just keep moving forward.  He intoned over and over again.  He had a plan.  He just needed to stick to it.

Several hours later, when his willpower was beginning to flag, his diligence was rewarded.  Cresting a hill Rick saw that there was a sizable furrow that ran through the other side almost like a giant ran an ax along the ground and carved out a winding path through the forest. Or it could be a river! Rick quickly ran to the embankment and looked down.  Sure enough he could see a tiny trickle of a stream running gently through what he now knew to be a mostly dry riverbed.

It was then he noticed the body.