Chapter 9: Chapter 9

Sometime in the later hours of morning, when the sun had completely risen above the horizon, provided that you could find a hole in the canopy to see it, I was shaken awake by Syl, only to realize that our bodies had once more entwined themselves in our sleep. It wasn’t as bad this time, as it had happened before, but my cheeks still flushed bright red in embarrassment. We really needed to get some beds set up, to stop us from rolling along the large rock to each other. A small part of my brain, one I didn’t know I had up until this moment, chimed in ‘do you really want that though?’ I couldn’t fault the girl, she was right.

Rolling away from Syl to avoid prolonging the full body contact, I resolved to not mention it, and pretend that it hadn’t happened. Because, you know, that's exactly how things like this work.

If I act like it didn’t happen, surely it didn’t happen. Right?

I made my way over to the edge of the rock, where me and Syl had put our dresses when we went to bed last night. Mumbling out a ‘good morning’ to Syl, I slipped it on, and watched as she did the same beside me.  Much like yesterday, we decided to head down to the stream for a bath, but this time we rinsed out our clothes first, before waiting around forty minutes for the water to warm up a bit.

When our patience started to wear out, we made our way into the cute little miniature pool on the other side of the stream. The water was still cold, but after yesterday, I barely even noticed it. As a result, me and Syl spent much longer taking our baths today, and by the time we had finished and let the sun dry us off, our clothes were completely dry.

We got dressed, and discussed our options for today. We still didn’t have food, and so we decided to spend most of today looking for that, but we had also burnt most of the sticks I gathered that first night in this world. We decided to get that sorted before worrying about anything else. 

We made our way back to the rock, and set out to gather sticks. While the first time I did this, it had been dull, monotonous work, this time it was nothing of the sort. Syl was a bubble of unfaltering energy, always throwing out jokes, making sure there wasn’t a dull moment. She really was amazing.

After we had gathered enough firewood to last a week, we set off to where we had found the blackberry bush. We figured that since there was something there, maybe there would be more nearby. We searched that area for hours, looking for anything edible, but it seemed the forest animals had beaten us to it. We saw a good number of similar blackberry bushes, but they had all been picked clean. The same was true of pretty much everything else we saw. Either it was out of season, or had been picked clean already by the forest animals. It was frustrating.

Eventually, it started to get dark again, and we had to make our way back to our makeshift campground. We threw the last of our sticks up on top, and climbed up.

“I think we might have… overestimated how much wood we need” I quipped.

The entire surface of the rock was covered in the sticks we gathered. Even if we piled it up best we could, it would still probably take up at least three quarters of the rock. 

“Perhaps just a little bit” Syl agreed.

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We pushed most of the sticks down off the sides of the rock, Piling the rest up in a corner. We would have plenty of firewood for a while now, all we had to do was climb down and grab a few handfuls from the bottom of our rock if our pile ran out.

Once we had that finished, we built up a fire, and laid down to sleep. We still didn’t have any food, so tomorrow would be another day of searching for anything we could recognize as safe to eat. Life would be so much easier if we recognized any of the plants native to this world.

When I woke up in the morning, it was still early in the morning, so much so that you couldn’t even see a hint of the sun poking through the canopy. Me and Syl were entwined, yet again, but as the days went on, I was minding it less and less. I would never admit this to anyone, but I think I was actually starting to like it.

Not wanting to wake her, I decided to just lay there, eyes tracing the gentle lines of her face. I’m not sure how long I lay there, but eventually, she was opening her eyes.

“Morning” I mumbled.

“Morning” she agreed.

We rolled away from each other, and after a few minutes, Climbed down from on top of the top of the rock, and made our way down to the stream. Much like the last two days, we stripped down, and washed our clothes, before laying them out to dry and making our way into the stream to wash ourselves off. When we were done, we laid out on some rocks, and let the sun dry us off. Eventually, we decided we were good enough, and put our (mostly) dry clothes on. 

We set off, this time going downstream, instead of up. We reasoned that since we had already searched for good ways upstream, we would have to make our way past the already explored area before we had a chance of finding anything. Unless we wanted to camp higher up the stream, we wouldn’t get much done. If we went downstream, the entire area was unexplored, so we would have much better chances of finding something.

For the first half of the day, it progressed much as before. We mostly found stuff that we had no way of identifying, and the things we did recognize were all out of season, or picked clean by the other residents of the forest. I was hungry, and tired of seeing more and more of the useless stuff we had seen so far. The frustration just kept building up, until I lost it.

“WHY!!!” I screamed at our latest find. It was another strawberry bush, and like the rest we had found, it had the audacity to not have any strawberries on it. I was done with these stupid plants.

“WHY!!! WHY… WHY can’t you JUST have STRAWBERRIES?!!! I want TO EAT!!! I WANT FOOD!!!” As I screamed at the bush, I felt all my frustration, the rage at that stupid bush, coursing through me, awakening something else. It felt primal, instinctual, a mass of energy I didn’t know I had. It all flowed out of me, in one big burst, and I passed out.

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