CHAPTER 3: Alone in The Forest of Horrors

The sun was already high up in the morning sky, orange and bright, giving life to the browning forest which had looked like a nightmare at night but resembled a dream in the morning.

The tall trees stood majestically as sunlight accentuated their zebra-stripe barks and also accentuated the dew hanging from the tip of their branches and leaves, gleaming like prismatic jewels.

A pair of fawn rabbits hopped along the grass and came to a slow-flowing creek. There was a big one – female – and a genuinely smaller one, which made it male. The smaller one turned aside and spotted a figure lying with a hand sticking in the stream of water. Curious, they both carefully approached the person and twitched their noses at each other in communication. It was a young woman in blue, lying unconscious.

The girl groaned. She was alive and maybe…

She stirred awake suddenly, sitting upright and shrieking uproariously as if woken up from a horrendous nightmare. Her hands vigorously navigated her whole body before a trembling smile smeared across her face.

"Good Lord of mercy!" she shouted, trembling.

The rabbits flinched.

She noticed and turned to them.

"Rabbits! I'm alive… I'm alive, ha ha!"

The rabbits exchanged awestruck looks and slowly backed away from the possibly deranged girl.

Realizing that she was truly alive and not dreaming, April checked herself one more time and chuckled sheepishly.

"Holy smokes, I'm alive! I survived…"

But then the previous glimpse of the forest she saw yesterday matched the exact one she was in.

After a few seconds of expressionless staring, the rabbits finally warmed up and twitched their noses at her. They each placed a furry paw on her thigh and lowered their heads.

"Hey, where am I?" She asked them out of a whim. "... Linwood forest? Where is that…?" She pouted. "…What's a Xander?"

The rabbits turned bodily to the east as if showing her the direction and turned back to her. April had to be content with that information for the time being. Her body clock was being rejuvenated by the warm sunrays and she had noticed that the pain in her body from yesterday's happenings was partly gone. Curious, she asked the rabbits:

"Say, did you guys find me here alone?"

They nodded enthusiastically.

"Oh. I see."

She could see yesterday's happenings replaying as clear as day in her head and she knew that those visions she had glimpsed while Hiroko tried to rescue her from that horrendous vortex were depicting this forest. Somehow – magically, celestially, or however – she had just been snatched by a wormhole vortex and dumped into a forest in the middle of who-knew-where.

And the question still stood: where was Hiroko himself?

She glanced around for a few silent moments before:

"Wait, you guys understood me?!"

* * * *

Two or so hours had passed with her sitting by the stream accompanied by her 'bunny buddies'. She raised her head for the first time after all that time and winced at the brash light of the sun. Her face was drenched in tears and under her eyes, dark eyebags conveyed the message.

"I'm tired of crying…" She thought. "I've gotta do something…"

She scrambled to her sore feet.

"I've gotta look for Hiroko."

But as she looked around everything looked the same; the grass; the rocks; the stumps; the trees; the fallen trees! It was a jigsaw puzzle, and indeed puzzled, she picked a random direction and followed it. The rabbits, too, followed her, adding in numbers as she blindly bushwhacked across unknown territory, bitterly wiping her tears and walking forward with an antsy demeanor.

First vortexes, then giant white wolves, now talking rabbits. What next?

The sunlight brushed through the treetops in a diagonal line. Particles of dust were luminated by it, floating across the air. Atop the trees, bird songs competed. On the grass crickets chirped, and on the ground small critters skittered about, constantly stopping to stare at April before instantly disappearing away.

There were also what appeared to be morning fireflies. They clouded around April and quickly scattered when she swatted them away.

"Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew! Bugs, bugs, bugs!" She cringed.

Was that the same forest she experienced the night before? The one that left her absolutely immobile?

For a moment she forgot about looking for Hiroko – foolish endeavor anyway.

For another moment she started to believe in magic. The magic of nature was not what she had in mind. She was thinking more of dark magic. After all, how would one logically explain the blue vortex, the colossal wolf, and let alone the iridescent beauty of that forest emphasized by her ability to talk to animals?

"April, you're clearly hallucinating! This is some weird Jumanji heebie-jeebies, I am so not qualified!"

Not to mention the two planet-sized sibling moons. MAGIC.

And then it struck her in complete terror.

"I'm outside San Adelle… I... AM OUTSIDE SAN ADELLE!"

"Holy moly!"

She let out a hysterical scream and pulled at her hair. It had truly just dawned on her how truly abysmal the situation was. She didn't know where she was, she didn't know how to get back to the shelter and even though she was fond of nature, she was not! an outdoorsman. She brought her trembling hands to her mouth and clutched her palms over her lips to stop herself from making any more panicked noises. For all she knew, that gargantuan wolf might have not been the only monstrous creature around.

And what proof had she that it was not stalking her?

She whisked her head around, her heart pounding, anticipating to be attacked at any given second.

It might attack from the left, "Ah!" It might attack from the right, "Argh!" It might jump her from behind, "Eek!" Or it might even pounce her from the top! She dropped to the ground in a feeble cower, trembling.

"I'm small and invisible… small and invisible… small and invisible, nothing can touch me…" she chanted in her mind.

After a few moments of absolute silence around her, the subtle sounds of nature seeped into her whole being while she lay curled motionless on the grass. Her eyelids slowly covered her eyes. And then she was asleep…

* * * *

She had thought the explosions were in her dreams but the last one rattled her awake, scaring the rabbits away in the process. With it, a voice thundered:

"Do that again, and say goodbye to your heads!"

There was another explosion, and more voices burst into laughter before the same masculine voice roared out, "That's it. You're all dead!"

April stood up and wasting no time, ran towards the noise telling herself, "People!"

But could she not have stopped to think about why those people were fraternizing around explosions? Well…

An argument broke out, and she heard random names being called out.

She ran faster, came to hide behind a tree, and peeked out.

They were people, all right. None of them looked like teenagers. There were five of them and four were surrounding a particular young man who angrily stomped his foot, brandishing a fist and shaking a bow in the other hand.

April's eyes squinted in suspicion at her dumbstruck realization that those were not ordinary people.

They all had long, flowing hair secured from their faces by simple braids at the sides, right above their ears. They wore boots, and robe-like coats for the boys, and dragging robes for the girls. They looked like some sort of costume players.

"Larpers?" April whispered under her breath as she silently observed them.

The angry young man, who wore a black sleeveless coat, and was white as snow, had long paper-white hair which was held back into a long ponytail. He was tall, narrow in the middle, and broad at the shoulders with all-around lean, muscular arms.

'Oh, my God!'

The fingers on his seemingly gray-colored left arm vigorously twitched. He was drop-dead gorgeous with blood-red lips.

'Lord, hey…'

"I thought this was supposed to be safe!" he barked in a terrible voice.

So, he was the one who was threatening to decapitate everyone!

"But Saka," said the tall blonde man in a blue coat. "You know you're the perfect candidate for this task."

"Oh, really?" Young man cried hoarsely. "Why don't you try standing in the line of blasts, huh? Let's see how you like it!"

"Calm down," a redheaded young woman in pink robes over green sleeves and trousers, chirped in a small voice.

She was, however, rudely butted off by the beautiful young man.

April closed her eyes and opened them again, staring hard at them. Besides their bohemian Harry Potter costumes and straight hair, they had long, pointy ears. Upon realizing that, she started having those visions again and realized they were the same… the same smiling people she had glimpsed… The only mythical forest creatures they resembled were… elves.

'Don't be stupid, April. There's no such thing as…'

Still caught up in her thoughts, April saw from the corner of her eye the figure of a brown serpent hovering next to her head. Naturally, she panicked and jumped away from it, squealing.

"Ahhh!"

She jumped from right behind the tree and froze. Then she blinked. She turned her head to the side and saw all five people staring at her.

Overwhelmed, April shot away from the tree and ran off. But she had gone no further than twenty meters when she ran into the porcelain young man's chest.

He stood there like a ramrod, glowering at her with cold, gray eyes. The question inside April's head was how he got ahead of her in such a timeless manner.

She swerved away from him, but he grabbed her arm with his gray hand. It pinched so bad! He pulled her like a small child into his firm chest as she squealed all pig-like.

"Going somewhere?"

Before she knew it, she was over his shoulder, kicking and screaming as he robotically marched back to his companions and dropped her on her behind.

He manhandled her up to her feet by her arm and shoved her in front of everyone to see. Her hair flowed down her neck and shoulders and masked her face.

A blonde young man in a green coat and black trousers stood alone to her left. In his hands was a long double-edged sword. A simple blade which he slowly ran his finger across its spine as he stared at April with his big, bright brown eyes. He had a somewhat unsettling smirk on his good-looking face.

At April's right, the redhead and a brunette woman in baggy white robes stood, beaming their icy blue eyes at her. The redhead had a twisted stick in her hand while the brunette held a long crooked and segmented staff clutching a sapphire at the top.

'A scepter?'

April held her breath. There was no way those five (including the blonde in blue perched up on a tree branch) were pretending to be elves just for the sheer feel of it. There was no doubt. They were some pretty incredible elf impersonators. Classic Lord of The Rings fanatic geeks!

The man up the tree jumped down and landed in front of April, stirring up leaves, and rose like a giant, to his full body length as his long coat dramatically billowed behind him. He looked April dead in the eye with his twinkling green eyes.

'Oh, he's so cute.' Was one of April's thoughts. 'And super… super tall…'

He was one of the long-haired people she Glimpsed. She instantly decided to call the whole vision thing 'Glimpsing'.

She blinked in dumbstruck awe.

He craned his neck back and looked down at her with an assessing and authoritative look.

He resembled a man much older than April, in his late twenties, at most. Slowly, he reached down to her head and removed the hair from her right side, despite her slight movement away from him. Surprisingly – and completely out of April's range of sight – a pointy earflap stuck out and the handsome man's stern look turned into a frown.

"You're an elf," he said in a soft but masculine voice. "What are you doing in this forest all by yourself?"

An elf? She gave him a blank expression and darted her face around the others.

'They are sure taking this whole roleplaying game seriously,' she thought sarcastically.

"That was not rhetorical, by the way." The blonde said to April's gawking and stepped away from her.

Strapped on his back was a large, single-edged, broad falchion sword, ending in a square tip, six rings piercing into the dull side of the blade.

"What are you doing in Linwood Forest, little elf?" The blonde man repeated, his voice neither soft nor harsh.

April was stuck in her 'visions'. She Glimpsed him sitting and smiling near an orange light in the dark, she glimpsed the pale elf glaring and even saw the rest of them too.

How unnatural. What was she, a psychic?

But in order to avoid further trouble, she tried to acknowledge the blonde's authority.

"..." she only gasped, now Glimpsing Hiroko staring at her blankly.

"Nobody gets lost in this forest and survives the night," the brown-eyed elf said, stepping up to the blonde in blue. "You can't be out here on your own." He grinned. "But I'm Semacoar if you were wondering."

Wondering was an understatement. April cautiously stepped away from him and darted her eyes around.

"What should we do with her?" The beautiful young brunette asked in a soft, motherly voice, staring almost right into April's soul.

The blonde man in blue tilted his head at April and stretchedhis hand at her. April, panicking at the many possibilities of what he might do to her, shook her head in retort. But the man's hand passed her face and grabbed something behind her.

April had thought she was okay when she felt a discomfort on her buttocks.

"Ow!" She winced and looked but immediately all the blood rushed from her face. Two snakes!

"She has tails?" The redhead's words shattered April's previous observation.