Chapter 1: Chapter 1

The night was dark and quiet, with few souls passing through the empty and desolate forest. For most forests, even at night, the area would be teeming with life as animals hunted each other, foraged, and did their best to survive to the next day. However, most of the wildlife that had lived inside of these once-green fields had died or deserted this wasteland of death and decay.

One of the magically gifted may have noticed something wrong about the magic of the region, the way it rippled and distorted as if it was a healer’s patient struggling in its death throes. But even the non-gifted would be able to see the brown and decaying trees and distorted wildlife, hear the eerie silence, and sense the empty feeling of an entire region at the twilight of its years, the final rays of light slowly slipping into shadow as the region waited to die.

Deep within this deserted hellscape wandered a lone girl with brown hair and green eyes, dressed in bright pink and white pajamas decorated with cartoon rabbits and swearing as she tripped over tree roots. Her name was Alice Verianna. She was from Earth, and she had absolutely no idea how she had gotten here, where here even was, or what on Earth was going on.

The only thing she knew was that she had finally finished her homework, eaten dinner, chatted with her friends for a while on Discord, and then went to bed. When she woke up, instead of being inside her bedroom walls in the suburbs of Denver, she was in the middle of an extraordinarily eerie wilderness. She had been wandering around this area for almost an hour now, and she had yet to see anything besides sickly trees and dead branches.

Alice stumbled over a tree root for the umpteenth time and swore. “Where the heck am I? What happened?” She asked nobody in particular, trying to distract herself from her aching shins and mounting exhaustion. Alice had never been much for the outdoors - she much preferred a jungle of concrete to an actual jungle.

“Am I dreaming?” she wondered, not for the first time in the last hour.

She pinched herself, hoping that perhaps this time she could wake up. Of course, deep down, she had already figured out this was mostly wishful thinking. Human logic sensors tended to be off whenever one was asleep, which was why in a dream you could be dancing underwater while riding a unicorn and not find it the slightest bit odd. However, her logic sensors were very clearly and distinctly telling her that there was absolutely something wrong here.

Logically, she had gone to sleep in her bed. In no way should the result of the action ‘going to sleep in bed’ result in ‘waking up in the middle of the forest.’ She definitely couldn’t have sleepwalked here: first of all, because she didn’t sleepwalk; and second of all because even if she somehow started sleepwalking last night there would be no way she would make it so far away from her house that she couldn’t find any trace of human civilization at all; and finally, the idea that she had somehow got out of bed, opened the door to her room and walked out, strolled out of the front door of her house, and then merrily wandered out of the city without anyone noticing and stopping her, or her accidentally wandering into traffic and getting hit by a car was simply way too absurd for her to contemplate.

Pinching herself did nothing except hurt, and so Alice was currently pursuing the art of questioning reality and her life decisions. Truly a mystical art, it allowed her to realize that, indeed, she was still very confused, and no, she wasn’t currently ready to accept the conclusion that she had completely lost her mind. Without such high-level techniques, she likely would have gone insane somewhere around half an hour ago.

Sighing, Alice sat down on a particularly gnarled and thick tree branch to catch her breath. Wandering aimlessly didn’t seem to be accomplishing much, so instead of continuing to do so, she needed to take a breath and figure out what was going on.

“All right, fact one. I went to sleep in my bed and woke up in the middle of nowhere. It’s obvious that this couldn’t have occurred naturally, or at least I can’t think of any reasonable way for it to have occurred naturally. Therefore, someone must have moved me here. That person doesn’t appear to be in the vicinity currently, but they must have either been an intruder or my parents.

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"I can’t think of any possible reason for my parents to drop me off in the middle of the wilderness at all, especially on a school night, so…” Alice suddenly felt a chill surge through her body. Had she been kidnapped? She occasionally heard news about people being kidnapped from their beds and murdered by psychotic serial killers, but she had always figured the odds of that happening to her or someone she knew were only slightly more likely than winning the lottery - you had to be pretty unlucky for that to actually happen to you, right?

Alice looked around much more cautiously than before, fear making her take note of every shadow. Was the serial killer the darkness under the tree branch, coming towards her this very second? A moment later, she forced herself to calm her breathing, and began thinking more carefully.

This didn’t make sense either. If a serial killer had abducted her, why weren’t they here? If she was going to be murdered after being kidnapped, she figured that the person who abducted her would have at least bothered to make an appearance sometime in the last hour while she had been wandering around. Didn’t serial killers usually tie their victims up in sheds or something while they were killing them? Letting them wander around aimlessly was practically just begging to be caught by the police, or letting the victim escape, or both. Her serial killer theory might be possible, but it certainly wasn’t plausible.

Maybe one of her classmates was taking a prank way too far? But she couldn’t think of any of her classmates who would take a practical joke anywhere near this far - this was borderline kidnapping, which was on a whole different level than minor pranks. And how would they have gotten into her house in the first place? Her parents locked the door every night, and they wouldn’t have let in one of her classmates at this hour, much less let them drag her out of the house and drive off with their only child while she was still asleep.

Alice noticed that her thinking had run into a wall. No matter how she considered the situation, this was just impossible. There was no single theory that connected all of the dots in a way that also conformed to her understanding of reality. No one she knew had any motive to move her to a random patch of wilderness in the middle of nowhere, and she had no idea how someone could have accomplished the feat either. She was relatively certain she wasn’t dreaming either, so she… had no idea.

I notice that I am confused. This means something I believe to be true is not actually true. She began running back through her thoughts and ideas, but she couldn’t think of any way that the current events were plausible.

Alice frowned, and got up to begin wandering aimlessly again. If she couldn’t figure out what was wrong, then the solution was clearly wandering aimlessly! At the very least, maybe if she kept walking she would bump into someone who could explain what was going on. Or at least reach the edge of the woods, which might help her figure out where she was. If she could make her way back to civilization, that would be even better. She had no idea where she was and no landmarks to navigate by, so every direction was basically the same, right? This time, she resolved to go in a straight line while looking for something to navigate towards, and kept walking. And walking. And walking.

Finally, after what felt like hours of walking and finding nothing new, Alice ran out of energy and sat down on the dirt, dead tired, in pain, and still just as lost as before. And saw something completely absurd spring up in glowing letters in front of her eyes.

Through Training, you have increased an Attribute!

Endurance +1

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