Isekai Family Robinson: A slow-burn Isekai

Alejandra's theory on the forest mantas–as she was now calling them–proved to be correct. She ran into them three more times in the course of her exploration, the second time actually narrowly avoiding getting stinger-stabbed by a group of four of them. Judging from the varying sizes, she assumed she'd accidentally stumbled across a parent and three juveniles. Fortunately, the trees around her provided her ample opportunity to get out of range of the stingers, so she was able to just wait until they'd passed by without having to expend any precious ammunition on them.

What she was coming to realize was that the mantas may not actually be predators in this world. Their behavior was more like herbivores, gliding around and grazing on the fruits of nature and only reacting with their stingers when something came within range, and even then only when it was perceived as a threat.

Although unlike herbivores, the mantas seemed perfectly capable of consuming any of their kills, as she witnessed when a quartet of creatures she stumbled upon turned from her and back to the corpse of something that looked like a cross between a wolf and a razorback warthog once she'd proven she wasn't a threat to them.

She kept in close contact with the campsite as she went, checking in every fifteen minutes to hear progress on how things were going back there as well as to assuage any of Matty's fears about her. She didn't bother trying to remind him that she was trained for this kind of thing, and she certainly didn't go into detail about how she felt more at home like this than she ever had back in Long Beach.

This was where she belonged. Out on the sharp end.

It was coming to mid-afternoon when she noticed that the feel of the landscape was changing. Rocks and stones were starting to jut up from the forest floor with more regularity, and the trees were decreasing in size and shape. She hadn't encountered any of the forest mantas in a while either. Had she left their territory and entered something else now? It was hard to say.

She paused near a rocky outcropping to check her surroundings and re-assert her bearings. If the crude map she'd worked up was anywhere close to accurate, she was only about a mile from the Dilligaf's clearing, and she'd mapped out about a full half-circle of land from where she'd started. She'd been moving in a looping westward direction–assuming that 'east' and 'west' were still in the same place on this world–so now she was roughly on the opposite side of the clearing than when she'd started.

And, aside from a few squirrel-monkeys and some unfriendly acidic wildlife, she'd found exactly bupkiss.

It was useful knowing the lay of the land, of course, but she'd hoped to find something worthwhile out here. A freshwater stream, a copse of fruit-bearing trees, something that would be of benefit to the family. But all she'd seen were animal trails wandering off further into the jungle forest, and a few bushes that had berries the size of plums on them colored an eye-gouging red that practically screamed 'I am poisonous'.

It was nearing time to turn back as well. She'd promised Matty she'd return before the sun set, and by her account she had maybe another hour tops before she had to start making her way back. She did not want to be out here after sunset. Too many predators back on earth hunted at night, and she didn't want to meet any of their analogues here.

She was considering heading back early and just declaring the day a wash when she heard it. A low gurgling sound coming from the west, further along the trail she'd been blazing. Flowing water. Now that was worth staying out a bit longer for.

She made her way carefully. Where there was water, there could be life as well, and she was ready to bolt at the first sign of another manta or one of those wolf-hog things.

The landscape opened up even more, the forest giving way to clearings and meadows with more frequency. She skirted the edges of those, sticking to cover and not exposing herself unless absolutely necessary. And with every step she took, the sound of rushing water grew louder. That wasn't a stream, that was a full-fledged river she was hearing. And as the noise grew, so too did her excitement. A river meant fish, game for hunting, and maybe even hydro power if Matty could fashion up some kind of water mill. She wasn't sure if that was possible… But flowing water mean possibilities, and that was the important part.

And then there it was. She emerged from the treeline into a large semi-circular clearing. It was a huge open space dotted with occasional trees and shrubbery and strange mounds of grass and greenery, but with none of the overhanging canopy of the forest. Rocks and boulders cropped up here and there, breaking up the landscape at strangely regular intervals. A wide river flowed through the far portion of the clearing, narrowing down to white water as it exited down a gully towards the ocean. A high ridge rose up at the back of the clearing, so steep as to look almost unclimbable from this angle. And near the center of the clearing grew one of those massive multi-trunked trees stretching to the heavens, its branches enormous and well-leafed providing shade over almost a quarter of the clearing.

The Scout noticed all this in passing, because the main thing that Alejandra saw when she emerged from the treeline was that the clearing was obviously not a natural one. Time had obviously wielded its cruel weapons, but Alejandra could still see the outline of structures in some of the rocks–which now she could recognize as rubble from fallen buildings and not natural stone formations. Some of the mounds were obviously overgrown structures taller than she was, and in the shadow of the tree's branches she saw two or three structures that still stood, even if their roofs had caved in and their stone walls were starting to crumble.

Alejandra stopped and dropped to a knee as soon as she figured out what she was looking at. Ruins, like something out of a National Geographic piece on the Mayans or something. The structures were too far gone for her to get a definite sense of how they were constructed or what the aesthetics may have been.

But ruins meant people.

Even if they were long gone, died out or moved elsewhere, the fact that there had been people here at one point increased the likelihood of there being people around right now as well. It was possible that whatever had sent this village into ruin had wiped out the inhabitants and their descendants of course, but…

But Alejandra had spent years in a place where the conditions were among the harshest in the world, and people had found ways to not only survive but to thrive there. She would not discount the possibility of people doing the same thing in this place.

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"Matty," she called over the radio. "Come in."

"Go ahead Allie," the reply came almost immediately. "You heading back?"

"Not yet." She kept her eyes moving as she talked, sweeping over the mounds of rubble, over the divots in the ground that were most likely the remains of foundations, and over the few structures still standing beneath the tree. "I've found something. Looks like some kind of ancient village or something. It has running water and a bunch of ruined buildings. Could be exactly what we need, but I need to check it out first."

"Ooh! A ruined village! Tell mom that those almost always have cool secret treasures in the books!" Olivia's voice crackled from the background, followed closely by Matty's "I assume you heard that?"

Alejandra smirked "I did. Tell her I think it's too old and run-down to have much more than rubble in it, but I'll keep my eyes peeled."

"Do you need backup?"

"I don't think so," she said, eyeing the clearing. "Everything looks quiet. I'm going to do a quick recon, and then I'll contact you again if I find anything."

"Ten-four. Be careful, mi amor."

"Always, mi corazon," Alejandra said, smiling. Then she tucked the radio back onto her belt and stood up slowly. She brought her rifle around and held it low across her body, ready to bring it up and use it at a moment's notice. Even with the gun, she still felt under-dressed. Back in the Desert, she would have approached a village like this in full battle-rattle, with helmet, flak vest, and enough explosives strapped to her body to send her into orbit if they all went off at once. To say nothing of the fact that she'd have had at least a half-dozen members of her squad right behind her to back her up if things went ass-up.

But, as her dear departed grandmother had once said, "wish in one hand…"

She moved in slowly, taking her time, examining where her feet went and keeping her eyes constantly moving. This place didn't feel like any of the villages she'd had to investigate back in the desert. The air was not oppressive with hidden dangers, the noises of the forest didn't go quiet at her passing, and she couldn't feel the weight of hidden eyes watching her every movement.

But it didn't feel like a walk in the park, either. There was something in the air she couldn't identify, something that was setting her teeth just the tiniest bit on edge and made her bring the barrel of her rifle up as she moved, tracking left and right, seeking for any threats.

Nothing jumped out at her. Nothing took a shot at her. She made it through the outer ring of ruined buildings–probably storage and barns and things of that nature, the Scout concluded as it noticed the rubble piles and mounds looked larger than the ones near the center of the village. Her boots crunched on stone and dirt underfoot, finding what were obviously the remains of pathways in between the buildings. The grass had grown over them, but a few stone still remained to tell that these paths had once been cobbled.

She also found traces of acidic markings on some of the stones and on the shrubbery as she passed by, but they looked old, and the grass underfoot was growing taller than she thought it should be if the forest mantas passed by here regularly. Still, there were signs that they had been through here at least sometime in the near past. Maybe there was something like a seasonal migration that happened, and this was a spot along that trail?

Too little information, and not what she was here for right now anyway.

She kept moving forward, her goal the center of the village and the massive tree that stood there. It looked like something out of a fantasy book, with five massive trunks that grew almost equidistant from each other, like points on a star, and with branches that crisscrossed and grew together until it looked more like wooden pathways and streets a dozen feet in the air than it did any kind of vegetation.

The whole village had been built around that tree. Had it been sacred to the inhabitants? Some kind of forest god? Or was it just some attractive piece of topiary? Or something else entirely? Too little information. Maybe she should bring Olivia here, see if her daughter had any insights that might line up with what those books of hers said.

Alejandra snorted softly. To think, she was not only considering attempting to get useful intel from a fifteen year-old's fantasy books… But that she was doing so because the fantasy books had been accurate already.

And she had thought life back on earth was weird. She would have to–

Something snorted behind her.

Alejandra froze in her tracks and twisted her head around, tracking the sound. It had come from one of the nearer rubble piles, the walls and roof of the ancient house had collapsed completely but the doorway still remained, crumbling and deformed but obviously with space behind it. Alejandra peered into the darkness beyond the doorway, and then sucked in a slow breath as something back there blinked at her.

She turned to face the creature as it emerged, walking on four limbs. It was long and muscular, beefy around the shoulders and lithe around the hindquarters. It had a long sinuous tail that ended in what looked like a single hooked claw–not a scorpion sting like the mantas but something closer to a cat's ripping claw. Its head looked like a fur-covered cross between an alligator and a leopard. It had the cat-like ears set too far apart on a wide-head that tapered forward in an elongated muzzle… And that muzzle was filled with teeth, she saw as the thing opened its too-wide mouth in a huge yawn. The creature's body was covered with fur and scales, like it couldn't decide if it wanted to be mammal or reptile and somehow had settled on 'both' as the obvious answer.

The thing peered at her with gimlet eyes, not advancing but clearly not showing fear either. It was a predator, that much was abundantly clear, and Alejandra had the distinct feeling that it was sizing her up.

A soft trill from somewhere overhead made Alejandra glance up, never taking her gaze fully away from the gator-cat, and saw a pair of small blue-feathered avians swooping down towards her carrying a scroll in their talons. They stopped just in front of her, and with a complicated motion of wings and feet, set the scroll to unroll for her to read.

Thou Hast Found The City Of [Grummond]

Once this city was a thriving center of commerce and trade for the Empire of [Misnomer], but now it has faded into memory, its inhabitants slain and scattered by the great [Rib-Eye Steak].

Now, only the [crab apples] inhabit these ancient ruins, usurpers nesting in the corpse of [Misnomer].

Noble [mongoose] of the Empire, thy Emperor commands thee: Drive out these usurpers and reclaim [Grummond] for the glory of [Misnomer]! Great shall be thy rewards!

Thou hast received an Imperial Request!

–Clear the ruined city of [Grummond] of [crab apples]

Reward: [Singing Mice And Cheese]

The gator-cat made a sound like 'gronk', and the bluebirds cheeped in alarm and dropped the scroll to the ground in front of Alejandra, where it glowed for a moment before disappearing. The birds then darted off into the sky, clearly not interested in sticking around.

"Thanks for the warning," Alejandra muttered darkly as the gator-cat advanced a step on her. She held her ground. Predators would chase things that ran. Maybe if she showed it she wasn't afraid, that she wouldn't back down before it…

Then she heard another 'gronk', and two more gator-cats emerged from behind an overgrown mound to her right.

And then more slid into view to her left. Until she had a half-dozen of the things in a loose half-ring around her.

"Well shit," she said, staring down the barrel of her gun at the first gator-cat. "You all think I'm dinner, don't you."

The gator-cat 'gronk'd again, and took another step forward. And then another, the muscles in its hindquarters tensing up and claws unsheathing on its paws as it prepared for a leap.

"That's what I thought," Alejandra said.

And shot it right in the head.