I awoke the next day covered in dirt, sweat, and grime. I decided it was bath time. Heading down to the stream which was where everyone went to bathe, memories of my previous life flitted through my mind. It was gone. I told myself I had to move on and embrace the now.

  The stream was divided into three separate points with separate trails. Upriver was for fetching clean water. Mid river was for bathing and due to a clever bend in the river was separated into girls and boys. Down river was for cleaning objects and dumping murky water. I took the lower path being particularly dirty.

  The water was warm and quite comfortable. Luxuriating in the freshwater I sat down on a smooth stone and relaxed. Yeah this was a huge mistake. A low growl caused me to snap my eyes open and splash in the river. Matted fur, yellow eyes, and sharp blood stained teeth stared me down, it was a wolf. At this moment I’d like to point out that had the previous attack of the large wolves not happened I wouldn’t have been scared at all. Wolves generally speaking don’t usually attack humans unprovoked. That said to these giants we must have looked like easy meals.

  “Bogus,” I mumbled to myself as the wolf lowered it’s body in a move I’d seen all too recently. Just then a screech from the sky tore my attention from this assumed apex predator. The largest bat I’d ever seen descended from the sky. It was Deus Ex Batta as this giant creature tore into the area around the wolf's neck. I did the only sensible thing, I ran. I didn’t run back onto the trail and back to camp. No that would have been smart instead I ran upstream cause I was a panicked lunatic.

  At the time I figured surely one of the guys should be bathing. I was wrong. No one was there so I continued my upstream run. At the time my thought was that If I got around the river bend I’d be safe. I never had the chance as the giant bat splashed down in front of me, its face covered in blood and gore. It let out a loud screech. Out of the woods popped Helen and the armored figure whose name I still didn’t know.

  “Halt, there are people bathing upstream,” Helen declared, ignoring the giant bloody bat.

  “Bat…,” I stammered, turning toward her.

  “Oh,” she blinked when the realization hit her. “Oh, you don’t know. That’s Alice, she can transform into a bat.”

  “That was terrifying!”

  “I’d imagine,” Helen said, smiling slightly. That’s when I realized I was naked. I hadn’t grabbed my clothes or my hammer. Suddenly I was holding my hammer.

  “Woah,” I stated looking at my hammer.

  “Your hammer acts like a bound weapon yet you can’t fight with it,” the muffled voice of the armored figure said. It was hard to understand someone when they talked while looking away from you. It was even harder when they did that wearing a helmet. I still didn’t know this person’s name even though they had clearly saved me.

  “Yeah, thanks dude for other day. That was a most righteous save,” I commented. The armored hero shrugged and shifted their armor making an audible response for them. They then turned their head back at me.

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  “Put some clothes on pervert,” they said. My clothes then materialized around my body as if triggered by sudden vain panic.

  “Guess the shows over,” Helen stated. “Alice, can you make sure he gets back to camp?” The bat took to the air and I took to the trail.

  Back at camp I set to building some bed frames. Turns out I couldn’t. I needed to build some crafting stations in order to build anything smaller than a door. This world totally operated like a weird and perplexing cross between a video game and the real world. For example I could build a bed on what was labeled as the drafting table. No sawing, hammering, or whatever. Just a little bit of magic, some wood, and boom a bed frame. Depending on the type of wood I used depended on how the frame looked I quickly discovered. What kinda messed up system just made furniture like that. I even got the feeling that with greater control I could sculpt the wood how I wanted.

  So given I had the ability I spent an afternoon creating furniture. Big excitement I’m telling you. To my surprise the furniture was rough and not great. So there was some level of realism I guess. This moment made me seem like a manic cause I laughed out loud as I placed the sixth bed.

  “You holding,” Timothy asked from behind standing in the doorway.

  “This just doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

  “Sit,” Timothy stated, offered, and instructed all at the same time. It was the perfect inflection like it was trained in him. Who was this guy I thought to myself. I sat down on one of the benches I had built. Timothy sat next to me but didn’t look at me.

  “So much of this world doesn’t add up,” I started without prompting. “It’s like a video game…but…”

  “It’s not. I never felt the term SNAFU applied to anything until I got here,” Timothy said.

  “Huh.”

  “It’s an American saying situation normal all fucked up. This place embodies it perfectly,” Timothy explained.

  “Yeah. There is so much about this place that just bothers me. That hill for instance is the first time I have ever encountered the uncanny valley effect in nature. Disregarding the ever burning flame and the cots that hill is super unnatural. Its slope is perfectly even. I’m not one hundred percent sure but it seems perfectly round. I’d bet quite a lot that it is. Which means that it’s not a natural hill. This of course opens a huge and disturbing can of worms.”

  “Fuck,” Timothy mumbled seeing where I was going.

  “On top of that not all of us entered this world as humans. Which raises a list of questions ranging from which race controls everything to how reproduction works here. We also have the possibility that we are standing above long lost ruins and there are no sentient species left. So the short is we know nothing, we don’t really know much about our new selves, and we are low on resources,” I commented.

  “Sun Tzu would say we are fucked,” Timothy stated.

  “Knowing is half the battle…”

  “And we know nothing,” Timothy reflected.

  “Yeah dude. All I know is moral won’t hold if we don’t come up with answers and make this place more livable,” I said.

  “You're making progress. I had hoped for a miracle but I think this second life is the miracle,” Timothy said.

  “Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it was built. I’ve got the power to build. So I will build. I still think it’s bogus, and I’m bogus. So I will do what I can,” I declared.

  “That’s all anyone can ask for. That you do what you can.”

  I built some more beds and other furniture until the world swayed around me. I then took the long walk up the grassy hill to where dinner was being served. I listened but I can’t remember all of what was being said. Exhausted, I finished eating and went back down to the formerly large empty building which was now a spartanly furnished bunkhouse. I was making improvements but they were painfully slow.

  “Goodnight people of bogus,” I whispered aloud as I slowly drifted off to sleep. In a pallet bed an improvement over the floor.