I woke up with the most horrid headache I’d ever had. It was somewhat comparable to the feeling of having a bass drum mallet hitting the side of my head with the rhythm of my pulse and a mix of sinus pressure. In addition to my head, my whole body felt like it had just gone through a fight with an 18 wheeler being bounced from one lane to the next only to wind up strapped to the front of a belly-flopping giant.

I could barely open my eyes; they were so crusted shut that I had to peel the junk out of them, and when I was able to open them, they acted just like all the other times I had a hangover. But then, they snapped shut again because of the cold awful truth of daylight.

It wasn’t that I’d a ton of experience drinking; however, my memory being what it was, tended to let me keep up with each and every one of those. Add into the fact that even when drunk, I could clearly remember what I did the next day. So I ended up having both the physical reminder of the hangover and the emotional reminder that I couldn’t dance to help keep me from excess.

However, this time, I couldn’t remember a thing about how I ended up where I was. The only time I came close to this was in college when I ended up in someone else’s dorm room. It took me a good three minutes to realize that I wasn’t in my own as they all looked the same, and then I remembered that I had taken a ride from someone I’d met “back to school.” It turned out that school wasn’t mine and not in the same state, but that was the way things sometimes worked out.

I could hear the birds, and as my senses returned to me, I could tell that I’d not made it to my bed or indoors. This, for me, was rather disturbing as I’d stopped going to music festivals a few years ago; other than that, I wouldn’t be drinking outside.

I clawed my fingers through my hair and pulled out leaves and clumps of something else. My eyes still refused to open, but I knew I needed to scratch my head and arms. I moaned and scratched and picked with my eyes closed for a few moments, and I moved myself into a seated position. I itched all over. I was hoping that I didn’t get into poison ivy again.

When I got my eyes to accept that the light, while at first painful, wasn’t, in fact, going to kill me, I was able to look around. I was in the middle of a temperate forest with a mix of both coniferous and deciduous trees. The ground sloped upwards not far from where I was on an ever so slight pitch.

Most of the bushes and vines of the underbrush were leafless, but this area still had a number of yew-like bushes that provided some green. Enough that I could tell there was a rise but not enough that it appeared I’d have to climb to move in that direction. The underbrush appeared to be mostly small bushes with tall grass between. Much like I’d expect to see in any wooded area I once hiked.

The spot where I chose to spend the night seemed to be next to a rather large pine tree, and my bed appeared to be several years of needles. The cool temperature and buds on the deciduous trees seemed to mess with my sense of reason as well.

Yesterday was the first day of real summer. I remember because my AC on my car went out on my way to work, and we were slated to hit over 100 degrees. This meant that the spring I was looking at couldn’t be anywhere. Even if I’d been drugged and shipped down to Australia, they wouldn’t be in spring.

I had somehow lost three seasons of my life and ended up in spring and in the middle of the woods without the memories of how I got here. Now the most likely thing was that I’d some sort of trauma that ended up with me forgetting several months at least of my life. Most of the time, this should’ve been physical trauma of some sort. However, for me, it could also, I guess, have been emotional. In fact, there were several relationships that I’d which I wish I could forget, but they seemed to still be intact in my vice-like memory.

I was taking in my surroundings. I was trying to piece together what had happened to me. The last I remembered, I was speaking to one of the managers in the call center I worked in. He wasn’t bad, but he also lacked the ambition to change things either because he never had it or because it had been beaten out of him like it had the rest of us. Then I remember seeing a bright flash of light and a large amount of pain.

I suppose that I could be looking at that time for physical trauma. I didn’t recall losing body control and falling down, so the light and pain could’ve been external. The pain that I felt wasn’t localized like an injury but rather all over. If it was sudden pain, then it would have to have been an attack of some sort as I was in good health, per the doctor. Perhaps I was drugged; I’d been reluctant to do anything harder than liquor, so I didn’t know the effects other things would have on me personally. So it could’ve been that I was drugged for some reason while at work, and then I was here at least nine months later.

To say that I didn’t have people who hated me wouldn’t be true. However, since most of them were customers from the cable company I worked for, I doubted that any of the death threats I’d gotten, because their bill went up by 2 cents or because the cable was out because of a storm, would have the resources or the true reason to disappear me for a few months and wipe my memory to boot. I did have a lingering feeling that I knew what happened but couldn’t put my mind on it.

After a few more moments, I started to climb to my feet. It was as I gained my feet that my gaze first landed on myself. I was shocked to see that all I appeared to have on was a fur tunic and some fur wraps on my legs bound with a leather cord. I could see my arms had bright red lines where I had been scratching. There were little green flakes of something all over me.

I felt up at my face and found a several-month-old beard, and my normally shaved head was now also with months of growth. When I looked at my hands, they seemed different than I remembered. While I’d always had large hands, these were thicker, like I’d been doing real work for years and not typing and talking.

When I ran my hands through my hair, I felt my scalp had clumps like bad dandruff. So I picked for a moment and pulled out a chuck of dandruff that looked like a green scale with holes in it for hair to run through. As I ran my hands over my body and through my beard and hair, I found several more of these scales.

My whole body, or at least that which I could examine, seemed to be the same body I was used to yet different. The difference was that there was working muscle all over and none of the office fat. I wasn’t built up with show muscle, but rather I filled out my skin with muscle built from labor.

My body ache and headache were gone by now, either because the effects weren’t long-lasting or because of the shock I was seeing. I was someplace which I’d no idea where was in a much fitter body than I remembered ever having, and I had no memory of how it happened.

To say that I was a little worried and confused would be putting things mildly. Add into what was a normal experience of nothing making sense and ending up in the woods all the loose scales I found on my body and the pile of them on the ground where I slept. I was incredibly concerned about all of it, yet what could I do about the past?

I put my back up against the pine tree I’d just stood up from and slid back down to the ground. I then spent the next several minutes having a panic attack. It wasn’t what most would think of one, but it was what I’d do in this type of situation. Not that I’d ever been dumped somewhere before, but rather that I’d in the past been put in situations that looked untenable.

I first started to regulate my breathing to have oxygen where I needed it.

After that, I closed my eyes to have fewer external stimuli.

Then I’d think through everything that was going on and categorize my issues.

That was what always messed me up. I was great at sorting through problems based on info that I had, but I also had to stop collecting it to figure out what was going on. If I didn’t sit down and shut up and think, then I’d go into a normal person panic attack. However, if I took the time to think, then I could figure out what was going on. This was one of those times that I almost went into a normal person panic attack before I was able to pull myself into problem-solving.

I thought through the issues that I was facing. First, I had no idea where I was or how I got here. Making the assumption that I wasn’t out here because I asked to be dropped in the woods with a FUR TUNIC on and my memories messed with that meant that I came here on my own dressed this way and then had some sort of trauma or someone either put me here on purpose or I escaped.

I threw out the first options of the trauma, I held felt my head, and the only odd thing was the scales. That left the other two options; since I was in shape and with working muscles, I could only also assume that I was in some sort of labor camp. That meant the idea that I was put here was smaller, and the idea that I escaped was greater. So that meant that I needed to figure out where I was and find people who could help me get away.

Of course, the flip side was the hangover feeling; the fact that I couldn’t remember yesterday and how I got here would lead to the idea that I was dropped off here. Either way, the way forward was the same.

I needed to find a road and then find someone who could help me so that I could get my life back or get protected from whoever was messing with me.

Resolved that I now had a way forward, I stood up and took in my surrounding once again. The first time I looked around, I missed the pile of furs on the ground just a few feet from where I was standing. They were the same color as the pine needles, and I was interrupted in my scan of the immediate area by the discovery of my fur tunic. Next to the fur pile was a long stick with one end sharpened and hardened into a spear.

I walked over to the furs and started to move them around to discover that they were, in fact, a pack. It was a wooden frame with one large fur pouch attached with leather binding and had a flap that closed in on top of it and tied from the flap to the base of the pack. The straps were fur and appeared that they could only adjust by tying them tighter where they connected.

As I knelt to open the fur back.

I heard a twig break behind me.