Unprepared Castaway Chapter 2 (Patreon)

But it's half four on a Wednesday, I hear you cry. Not a scheduled time for my postings.

True, but having not written a single word more of Unprepared Castaway since last year, I think I'm going to need to accept it's dead. Despite managing Lonely Dungeon, which had an equal lack of character interaction, I've failed to pull it off here. That being the case, I might as well post the small bit that I have written.

So, here's chapter 2. There are 6 chapters in total. I'll dump one whenever I remember.

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Greg woke up in darkness, taking a moment to remember where he was.

He didn't actually know, beyond 'in someone else's garage', but he knew full well where he wasn't.

Having no idea of the time, or how long he'd slept, he took his phone out of his pocket and checked. Then felt like a complete idiot.

The time wasn't interesting, being a little past ten AM Earth time, which was reasonable given the time he'd gone to sleep. More important was the fact that he'd forgotten his phone. Or, more accurately, the existence of batteries.

He'd had it out yesterday, to check the time and to confirm that no, he did indeed not have any signal. But in his near-zombified state, he hadn't worked through what having a phone meant.

He had no way to recharge it, unless by complete fluke he managed to salvage a solar charger from the ruined street, and even then it would be unlikely to help much, unless a sun had shown up while he'd been asleep. That seemed unlikely, or it would be visible through the cracks around the garage door. The permanent red twilight was simply too dim for a solar panel to work effectively.

After a quick check if it had a GPS signal, which of course it didn't, he put it into aeroplane mode and turned on the battery saver, then turned it off completely. Knowing the time was useful, but not vital, while having a torch in his pocket could easily save his life. The camera function may prove handy, too.

How many other smartphones had been lying around in the debris? How many on the bodies?

The bodies...

He'd been worried about leaving food in the open, but weren't the corpses likely to be just as appetising to any potential locals? As tough as it was to think of fellow humans as meat, that was, in the end, all that was left of them.

Despite feeling that he'd kept his panic under control, it was obvious he'd missed some important details yesterday. But what was he supposed to do about them?

Despite his intent to explore, he instead spent the morning salvaging. Or at least, the first hours after waking; the moons had moved around again, the yellow one now overhead while a purple one had risen and the blue pair were gone, but otherwise the sky was unchanged. If the moons orbited regularly, and were neatly colour coded, perhaps they could be used to track time. He made a mental note to include the moon status in his diary entries.

As he scavenged, battery-powered electronics were collected and switched off. He even discovered an old analogue radio. As expected, it found no recognisable AM or FM broadcasts, but there was an interesting distortion in the static at the higher frequencies. Perhaps the source could be tracked down later, if it came from somewhere at ground level, by using the radio volume as a rough judge of distance. First, though, he needed water.

... Which introduced a new problem that he'd failed to consider. Yes, it was easy enough to go walking off to explore, but how was he supposed to find his way back? With the subdued lighting, he wouldn't need to go far to lose sight of the ruined street, and thanks to the springy, lifeless ground, he wouldn't be leaving tracks of his own.

Someone better prepared probably wouldn't need to find a water supply, and would whip up something to condense water out of the air from the available salvage. Not that Greg held any particular regrets over that; what sort of person expected to be spontaneously teleported to an alien planet? Survival skills in general were not a thing the average city dweller would consider.

He looked up at the sky once more. The nebula, hanging unchanged above, provided a point of reference. If he picked an obvious feature on it to walk towards, then theoretically, he could get back by walking directly away from it. But even the slightest inaccuracy could result in him drifting away from his base. Nevertheless, it was the best he could come up with.

Shouldering a backpack of snacks and water bottles, he pointed himself towards a particularly bright spot, almost directly downwards on the slightly sloped alien surface, and set off. As minutes passed, the alien world proved every bit as uninteresting as expected. The ground remained completely featureless, and nothing moved. There was no sign of life. Nothing flew in the sky, nor were there even any clouds.

What did the lack of clouds mean for his theories on water? Maybe it was just a clear day? Then again, a permanent twilight instead of day and night cycles would do really weird things to the weather. Did the world have a day side and a night side? Was it even a sphere? Maybe the oxygen in the air came from somewhere else?

He took another deep breath, feeling the odd tingling sensation in his fingers and toes as he did so. Was it worse than yesterday? Better? What the heck was in the air that could cause that? Was it slowly poisoning him?

Frankly, Greg thought he was going to die. Maybe from poisons in the air, maybe from thirst, maybe from being eaten. Maybe from something else entirely; for all he knew, the ground beneath his feet was radioactive. He didn't know how it would happen, but he was reasonably sure that within a month, this place would contain a hundred percent fewer Gregs.

That in no way meant he intended to give up.

As expected, the ruins quickly vanished behind him, but their silhouette remained visible against the sky, despite the collapsed structures having little height. That was a pleasant surprise, and seemed to be due to a gentle curvature of the ground; it was growing steeper as he walked. It seemed he'd been lucky enough to arrive towards the top of a hill.

That was the only bit of good luck, as the landscape remained a veritable desert. The same uniform dark surface surrounded him on all sides. The place was completely silent, Greg's ears throbbing in that strange way ears did when they found themselves unable to perform their designated function. Even his footfalls made barely any noise on the spongy surface.

And then, with no prior warning, the ground cracked beneath him. Instead of stepping on dense sponge, his foot had landed on a hard but brittle surface, instantly shattering it and sinking ankle deep into a jelly-like substance beneath.

The sudden loss of balance sent him sprawling forwards, landing face-first on the glassy substance, which cracked beneath him. With the slope having grown steeper as he walked, he tumbled, rolling down the hill uncontrollably, bringing in his arms and legs to protect himself as best he could. The patch of glass soon ended, returning to the original, soft surface, and he wasn't rolling long before he landed in something even bouncier, the hill ending abruptly.

"Ouch," he muttered, lying still for a moment as he waited for the adrenaline to fade.

It spiked again when he felt a sharp pain in his hand.

Jerking away, he felt a brief burst of resistance, trying to tie his hand in place, before something snapped. He shuffled quickly back up the hill, clutching at his hand and feeling a lump that shouldn't be there. But the pain had dulled, and nothing was moving. In the dim light, it looked like some sort of green leech had latched on, and down below, at the base of the hill, were... vines? A plant of some description?

Didn't pulling leeches off do more damage than leaving them? But that was Earth leeches. Unwilling to risk doing anything without being able to see properly, Greg turned his phone on, becoming aware of a quiet rustling as he waited for it to boot. Leaves blowing in the wind? But there was no wind, and he could see no leaves.

The phone boot-up complete, he turned on the torch, and beheld a river of vines. 'River' was a surprisingly apt description; at the base of the hill, the ground changed, switching abruptly from black and smooth to blue and grassy. But where he'd fallen, a flattened bundle of vines snaked across the grassy field, out of range of his light, growing out from the hill. No... not growing out; growing in. The bundle divided into more, thinner vines as it approached, which spread out, increasing the area into which it was plugged into the hill.

And one of the vines was plugged into his hand, the tip having broken through his skin. In alarm, he ripped it out, tossing it back below.

The wound wasn't bad, and didn't even need bandaging, but even so... did the thing lay seeds inside him? Were there poisons or disease?

He expended a few minutes of torchlight on watching, his alarm increasing as he realised the vines were growing quickly enough to be visible. Not fast, not by any reasonable definition, but certainly faster than plants had any right to grow. In the few minutes, he'd watched new branches sprouting off, the area of vines in contact with the hill increasing, and the existing vines thickening. And the hill was... shrinking? It seemed to be pulling back, away from the vines, and the surface rucked and wrinkled.

Were they eating it? Absorbing it?

Daring to draw a little closer, he could see pulses travelling backward up the vines, away from the hill. Slight bulges, moving at a walking pace away from him. They were absorbing the hill and sending it elsewhere.

... He kept calling this thing a 'hill', but he was starting to suspect he'd been mistaken.

Putting his phone away, but leaving it switched on for the moment, he climbed back up the slope, finding the point where he'd fallen, carefully feeling out for the hard, glassy surface. Upon finding it, he switched on his torch and stared deep into a humongous eye. The pupil was slitted horizontally, the iris sky-red, and the structure was double his own height, but it was undoubtedly an eye.

"I was worried about wildlife, when I was on the back of one the entire time," he muttered, before remembering the lurching as he arrived. And the way the wave had washed through the ground. "I wonder how many bits of it ended up on Earth? Or did chunks of our sewers end up in its stomach? Either way, the results were fatal, apparently."

A creature large enough that he couldn't see from one end to the other, and now some plant life was eating it. That sounded concerning, but it was already dead. The vines seemed to simply be scavengers. As long as he didn't make the mistake of lying down in a bed of them again, he was probably safe.

Maybe. The thought of them eating the entire creature, surrounding him with a forest of carnivorous plant life while his base was still on top of it, was a nightmare he'd be certain to have the next time he slept. Perhaps this was their adaptation to the lack of light; using photosynthesis for some nutrients, but supplementing it with meat.

Still, it was a comfort in a way. He'd hoped that oxygen meant plants, and that plants meant water. The first step of that had been proven—albeit the grass was blue and the vines carnivorous—and now he only needed to prove the second. If he followed the vines, what would he find at the other end?

Hopefully, not another monster the same size as the one he currently stood on.