Unprepared Castaway Chapter 1: The First Day (Patreon)

So, we're finally here, at the point I promised to start posting An Unprepared Castaway, and I'm still rather unprepared. I have the backlog to get through November, but not December, which means if I start posting it now, I risk it going on hiatus.

So, I'm gonna hold a vote. There will be two chapters today, the first of both An Unprepared Castaway and An Unruly Summon. Unruly Summon has a much healthier backlog, and I have far more confidence that I can sustain it, but it's not the story I promised. Whichever one gets more likes will be the story I continue throughout November. Either way, December onwards is likely to be Unruly Summon on Tues/Fri, with irregular Monday posts of Unprepared Castaway/Erryn's world RPG/whatever random other stuff I have.

Since one chapter isn't really enough to know what the story is about, there'll be a short description at the bottom of each one. It won't be spoilerish, but if you'd rather read completely blind, you might want to skip it.

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In the depths of the Void, crushing silence reigned. Lacking such niceties as light and darkness, or air, or even the basic laws of physics, it was a mystery why the resident Creatures had so many eyes. Possibly it was lacking in the basic laws of biology, too.

Several of those eyes were fixed on one universe out of the countless infinity that drifted through the Void, watching as it hurtled towards a cluster of other universes, like the opening shot of the cue ball in some majestic game of divine billiards. Not that it wasn't anything they hadn't seen before, nor was there anything at all divine about the consequences of a pair of universes crashing into each other; the results tended to be rather messy. Nevertheless, it was something to point their eyes at, and so they did.

Meanwhile, within one of the universes that was about to play a starring role in the collision, on a little blue planet called Earth, Greg was sighing at the news.

"Why do they keep wittering on about this new volcano, saying the same things over and over, when everyone knows the government is covering up something huge," he complained.

"Please don't tell me you believe all those silly stories of that city turning into some sort of real life video game," answered his sister Ruth from the kitchen. "I don't want my brother to turn into a conspiracy nut."

"No, but that was different. This time, there are videos of people disintegrating! They may not show them on the news, but they're all over the internet."

"So? All AI generated."

Greg sighed again, shutting off the TV and grabbing his coat. "You said we were out of carrots? Anything else you want? I'll do a run to the grocery store."

"Yes, marshmallows!"

Greg tactfully didn't mention the fact that he'd bought two bags the day before, let alone question where they had both gone, and silently stepped out of the door instead.

It was an unfortunate fact of life that reality often turned out to be stranger than fiction, which made picking and choosing what to believe very tough indeed. What sort of person would believe that the sudden appearance of a new volcano well away from any fault lines had been due to something that was, effectively, a weaponised toilet? And so Greg wasn't sure what was going on. He also didn't much care, taking a fairly relaxed approach to life. After all, did it really matter what had happened? Did it affect where his next meal was coming from, or where he would sleep that night? Let better-dressed people with bigger pay-cheques deal with that sort of thing. He'd deal with the simpler things, like buying marshmallows.

And so he plodded down the street in the winter's darkness, towards the nearby convenience store.

Which was, of course, an opportune moment for two universes to collide.

The sky lit up in shimmering reds, great waves washing from one horizon to the other, and where they passed, things changed. Stars moved or shifted in colour. Foreign constellations flickered, visible only briefly. An alien nebula glowed in greens and oranges, strobing in and out of existence as the waves passed. There was no noise, or if there was, the frequencies involved were well beyond human comprehension.

Greg, as might be expected, abruptly stopped walking, giving his full attention to the sky while his mouth dangled open.

"What the..." he muttered, just before his attention was grabbed by his own shadow. Given the lack of functional street-lights on the road, a shadow wasn't really something he should've had.

When someone walking along a pavement suddenly stops walking, it's not a significant issue. When someone driving a truck suddenly finds their attention stolen, things get a lot more serious. And so Greg spun around and stared directly into the headlights of an oncoming vehicle, with no time to dodge.

There was just enough time to say a rude word before it hit.

There was also enough time for one of the waves to wash through him—a great drip of shimmering otherness falling from the sky like the world's largest raindrop—impacting the surface of Earth, bulging as it struck, but passing straight through regardless. And then it was gone.

The truck vanished, its bumper a mere inch from Greg's knees. So did sizeable chunks of the houses that lined the street, and having random sections of wall removed did not in any way aid their structural integrity. There was just enough time for another rude word before the thunderous crashing started, a dozen mangled buildings collapsing into rubble as the ground itself heaved and tilted below them. A couple of brief screams were audible above the noise.

Greg said a third rude word, then sprinted towards the nearest sound, stumbling as the ground continued to shake violently beneath him. "Can you hear me?!" he yelled, but elicited no response. He listened, but once the echoes of the collapsing structures ceased, there was nothing but silence. Even the ground ended its roiling, giving one final lurch that left the devastated street at a slight incline, then falling still. Nevertheless, he started digging. The street had been lined with bungalows, and only parts of them were here, so the debris wasn't deep, and taking immediate action saved him from having to think.

Thinking was not something he wanted to do, with the red, cloudless and sunless sky above him, a green nebula occupying a full third of it. Two pale blue moons, each larger than Earth's, hung in front of it, their mere existence proclaiming the message: 'this is not your home'. Stopping to think about his situation would lead to a panic attack, and panicking would not be helpful to the current situation.

It took him only ten minutes to find his first corpse. Or rather, half a corpse. It was cut off at the chest and both forearms, with no sign of the bottom parts anywhere. There was more damage from the falling roof, but that hadn't caused the death. Obviously, the victim had been standing up, and everything below liver height had been teleported away, while everything above had not. They'd had just enough air in their lungs for a second of screaming before their life ran out, almost literally, as their heart pumped precious blood into non-existent legs.

Or more accurately, the top half had been teleported away. Upon seeing the sky, Greg had made the instant realisation that the truck hadn't vanished, but rather he had. There were patches of asphalt road littering the ground, but between them was a slightly spongy surface of indeterminate colour, given the subdued red and green lighting. The lack of sun or white lighting made even the ruins from Earth look strange.

Still unwilling to think about what had just happened, he continued digging through the rubble, letting himself operate on a sort of autopilot while his mind shut down in shock. There hadn't been a single voice since the initial screaming, but there was the occasional sound of bricks shifting or tiles falling as the ruins settled. Or was it from someone struggling beneath? He ran from noise to noise, operating out of inertia rather than any sort of hope. Probably for hours, until signals from his stomach forced him to slow down and seriously consider his situation.

In that time, he'd found other corpses, or large enough sections of bodies to assume that there was a corpse somewhere back on Earth. There were also lesser parts; a foot or a hand. A leg, or a clump of hair. Small enough that maybe the owners had survived, or at least still had all their major organs in the same universe.

There were also fridges and freezers, or cross-sections thereof, albeit no longer with an electrical supply. Cupboards of tins and packets. Baskets of bread and fruit. The section of shifted street hadn't quite reached up to the convenience store, being approximately an oval forty or fifty metres long and twenty wide, but there was still enough food around to last awhile. The bigger issue was water. Just like electrics were no longer connected to anything, neither were water pipes. He found bottles of mineral water, along with substitutes, like fruit juice and lemonade, but it wouldn't last for long.

But how much difference would it make if he could survive a week or a year? What were the chances of help coming?

Outside of the oval, he couldn't see anything that looked like it came from Earth. The spongy ground continued for as far as he could see, which admittedly wasn't a huge distance in the dim light. A few silhouettes rose over the horizon, visible pillars of black against the red sky, but what they were, he had no idea. The rugged nature of that horizon suggested hills or mountains, but again, it was difficult to tell. There was no sign of ground-level lighting, or structures, or any other hints of civilization. Nothing moved.

Tempted as he was to start on a bottle of brandy—miraculously surviving the devastation despite being made of glass—he took a bottle of water instead, then made himself a ham sandwich. Best to start with the cooked meats; with the power off, they would be among the first to spoil. Next up was collecting together anything usable. Roof trusses would make usable firewood, if he could get them to light. A few intact freezers were shoved together and loaded full with food. So were a couple of fridges, mostly to keep the food out of the open air rather than much hope of preservation.

After all, he had no idea what sort of wildlife was in the area.

Which raised another point. There was a garage that had been shifted mostly intact. There was a salvageable single bed. Should he move the bed to the garage, or the open air? What were the chances of the garage collapsing while he slept? What were the chances of being eaten if sleeping outside? He hadn't seen any signs of life while searching for other survivors, but having half a street materialise on top of them may well have scared away any locals. There was no telling when they might come back to investigate.

How did a simple marshmallow trip end up with worries about being eaten? As much as he wanted to file that under 'too big for a little person like me to be involved', the situation very much impacted his next meal. If he wasn't careful, he could be the next meal.

With a sigh, he gazed up at the sky, taking his first proper look at it. The nebula hadn't moved, as far as he could tell, nor had the dull red light of the sky waxed or waned. How did that work? There was no sign of a sun, which, given the light, implied it had been in the process or rising or setting, yet nothing had changed. Was the world not spinning? Or spinning really slowly? But the sky didn't seem brighter on any particular side; it was simply a uniform red, dull enough to see moons through, but not any stars. Moons which had moved; no longer in front of the nebula, the pair had dipped towards the horizon. That was something of a relief; the previous positioning of the moons above a crescent-shaped fold in the nebula had made the construction look eerily like a face grinning down at him. Meanwhile, on the opposite horizon, a third moon had risen, this one a pale yellow. It was a beautiful sight. It was just a pity he seemed to be the only one around to see it.

He dragged his bed into the garage, along with the precious supplies of water he'd salvaged—deciding that potential wildlife was more dangerous than any potential combo attack by gravity and a slab of concrete—then dug out a notepad and pen he'd found. Busyness as a means of staving off panic was beginning to wane in effectiveness, and he hoped writing down his thoughts would help.

Leaning against the wall outside, since the dim light made it too dark to write inside even with the doors wide open, he started with what little he knew of survival, writing down 'rule of threes' and underlining it.

It was a simple set of rules, which was why he remembered it from some documentary or other despite having no training whatsoever for this sort of situation. He wrote 'three minutes without air', before taking a deep breath in and out, then adding a check to the end of the line. There was air, and it was breathable; he'd have been dead long ago otherwise. It had a strange taste to it, and caused his extremities to tingle oddly when he breathed deeply, but that was a future problem. Besides, there was nothing whatsoever he could do about it other than panic, and that was exactly what he was trying very hard not to do.

Next up was 'three hours without shelter', at which he paused. It wasn't supposed to be a shelter in the sense of a 'house', but shelter from extreme environments. He wasn't cold. If anything, he was feeling too hot, and had long since removed his coat, but that was likely to do with the manual labour he'd been doing. The air temperature was plenty warm enough to be survivable, and he could salvage a change of clothes if he needed to adapt. He added a second check.

The last two lines were 'three days without water' and 'three weeks without food'. With what he'd salvaged, he could up the timescales somewhat, but that didn't change the fact that his supplies were limited. At some point, they'd run out. How long? He thought back to his salvage, and perhaps there was still more to find, but even so... Maybe a fortnight before he started having problems?

He put a cross next to the water line. Water needed to be his next priority. He could set up some buckets in case it rained—maybe find an intact bit of roof with some guttering to increase the collection area to something useful—but he was yet to see a single cloud in the sky. Who knew if this place even had rain? Even if it did rain, why should that rain be water?

He tapped at the 'air' line again; he could breathe, which meant there was oxygen. If there was oxygen, then logically there must be plants, or at least photosynthesising microbes, since the lighting didn't seem strong enough to sustain more complex plants. He was fairly sure of that. Oxygen was unstable in a planet's atmosphere, and generally didn't form through normal chemical processes, so there weren't too many explanations beyond life. And if anything was photosynthesising, there must be water. Hopefully; knowledge of Earth biology could easily turn out to be inapplicable. He hadn't seen any signs of life, but oxygen was a damn good clue that somewhere out there should be something, whatever form it may take.

Although, speaking of alien biology, wasn't it likely that he'd die of the local equivalent of a cold before running out of water? Plenty of science fiction dealt with infectious diseases unleashed upon a population that had no resistance to them.

"Should I keep a diary, in case anyone ever finds my corpse?" he wondered aloud, before adding a final line and closing the book. 'Day 1: Looked for survivors. None. Looked for resources. Enough to survive a couple of weeks. Plans for tomorrow: exploration.'

Tucking his new diary under his pillow, then closing the doors and plunging the room into total darkness, he curled up for his first night in his new, alien world.

Still unwilling to panic, he permitted himself a small whimper instead.

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Truck-kun, shaking a wing mirror angrily: "That one was mine! Kill stealer!"

This is a story about a guy untidily teleported from one universe to another. The place he ends up is what I originally envisioned the Fetch Quest dungeon to be like; no humans, or humanoids. Utterly alien inhabitants, with whom he can't communicate and whose behaviour he can't understand. His focus is survival, with an eventual goal of getting back home. But, as he adapts to life on this alien world, he realises he's going to have issues reintegrating back on Earth.