Before I knew it, years had gone by and I looked around twelve years old. I tried counting the passing days, months, and years but it was harder than I thought. There were no seasons so I had to try to just count the days. However, I could only try to keep track of the passing days in my head or through marks in the dirt under the tree. The marks in the dirt were constantly washed away by the consistent rains and I kept forgetting which day it was after a certain point. Originally, I was able to keep track of roughly how much time had passed but after my count passed fifty years and I still hadn't hit puberty I stopped even trying. Either, I was really bad at counting or elves take a really long time to grow up.

I passed my days training to be stealthy, telling stories to the termites, and doing everything I could think of to avoid boredom. I tried the red fruit growing on my tree but it was both foul tasting and apparently rather poisonous as I spent a few days sick as a dog after eating it. On the plus side, I heard the level up voice afterwards and I was fairly sure that my poison resistance had increased. I climbed all over my tree and found that the bugs seemed to live inside little holes in the tree. I decided they were termites. Termites live in wood so the bugs were termites. Look it made perfect sense at the time. The tree itself wasn't tall enough for me to get a good view of the area. All I could see from the top were the trees surrounding mine.

Despite not eating or drinking much since I was born, I was growing up into a very big boy. My height was not anything spectacular yet but puberty had yet to hit. Instead, no matter how I looked at it, I was fat. Really fat. In fact, I could probably become a sumo wrestler just with my weight if such a thing existed here. The monsters also started salivating at the sight of me before they collapsed when they came too close to the tree. I would have gone on a diet if I knew how but it wasn't like I could really eat less than I already was.

I told myself my ever growing weight was why my stealth skills were progressing so slowly. It was not that I was lacking in talent it was just that I was hindered by my large size. Having limbs of different lengths did not help either. It was a bit hard to learn to walk both quietly and with a limp.

My hair grew out nicely and I now kept my whole body covered with a layer of hair. I am sure it looked strange but at least it hid things like how fat I was, my deformed limbs, and my horribly scarred left side. I ended up parting my hair around my eyebrows so all one would see on looking at me was a pair of misshapen eyes. I have a uni brow with quite large eyebrows which made keeping the hair out of my eyes easy. I also started growing facial hair which became another layer of 'clothing' in the future.

I tried to teach the bugs games like tag but with limited success. They seemed to understand tag and started playing with one another but I was too slow to touch any of them or avoid them touching me so I was quickly left out. Or at least I think that is what happened. It was a lot better to think that was what happened rather than I was just going a bit crazy from the loneliness and boredom of sitting under a tree every day for decades.

As the years went by, I was able to start to differentiate between the individual termites that came to play with me. I could identify them as individuals. Fred had a slightly longer set of wings and his back left leg was a bit shorter than his other legs. Susan had a pretty discoloration on her side. All in all the colony had thousands of bugs in it so I wasn't able to get to know more than a tiny fraction of them. I had no idea if I got their genders right but I tried.

As time went on the original set of bugs stopped playing with me. I guess they were all grown up and had no more time to play. Sometimes they came out to play but it was very rare. The oldest of them stopped coming all together but I was never sure why. I like to think it was just that they were too mature for it. No more childish games for them. I very decidedly did not notice that they all seemed to have slowed down considerably and looked unsteady when moving before they stopped coming.

There were always new young ones that came out to play so it wasn't like I ever lacked playmates. I never stopped trying to talk to them but I knew deep down that there was virtually no chance they understood what I was saying.

Time seemed to start again in my dreary life on the fateful day I made my first real friend in this new world. As I was once again trying to teach the termites some of my words, I noticed a new termite sitting very still watching me make a fool of myself. I had not seen this one before. It did not look very healthy. Not only was it sitting still and not flying about like all the others but it also was a strange greenish brown colour and its wings looked malformed. Its legs looked fairly normal but any way I looked at it, it seemed rather sickly.

I immediately felt a sense of connection with it. Lets face it, I am hardly going to win any beauty contests. It wasn't like I was exactly a great example of physical fitness either given that I was both opposed to exercising more than I had to and was stuck living under this tree. I felt like I might have just met a kindred spirit.

When I went back to trying to teach vocabulary, I kept my eyes on this new termite. I noticed that when I went over a vocabulary word it would shake from side to side at first but after I repeated myself a few times it would instead start doing back flips. Unlike the other bugs, this one seemed to pay attention to me consistently as well. The others often seemed to get bored and would fly off during my lessons.

Given that I seemed to have a good student for the first time, I made the lesson more tailored to it. I decided that back flips meant that it had got it or it was bored with that word. Either way, when it started to do back flips, I would move on to the next vocabulary word.

All too soon it became dark and all the bugs went back into the tree. I decided my new student would be called Gregory.

The next day Gregory came out around midday. I noticed him after another spectacular failure to sneak away from the tree. You would think that I would eventually get used to having giant monsters jump out of nowhere and try to eat me. After the third time it happened, I decided I had enough stealth practice for the day. My insanely high heart rate was due to excitement about teaching George again. Definitely not to do with that enormous tentacle monster which almost ate me.

I started my vocabulary lessons again straight away. Having an attentive student was really invigorating. I finally felt like I might make some progress. I of course took time out to tell stories complete with different voices, pictures drawn in the dirt and lots of acting. Gregory seemed to like these a lot. He did back flips when things got exciting or funny and there were a few voices which had him swaying side to side.

I started to think his movements were a bit too regular. I knew I was probably going crazy as I had spent years with no company except for termites. The others flitted about playing and responded to my voice in various ways but it never felt like they were trying to learn to understand me or communicate with me. They didn't seem particularly intelligent no matter how much I tried to convince myself otherwise. Gregory seemed to be responding to what I said more than the other termites. His responses seemed to actually have a logic to them and to be trying to say something. Gregory seemed to pay attention to what I was doing and tried to understand it.

After my story was done, there was a brief pause before I tried asking him what had been on my mind for a while.

"Do you understand me?"

Gregory appeared to think about this for a while and then shook from side to side. I had unconsciously been taking this to mean no since yesterday. Still, he seemed to be responding to what I asked. This was a great sign.

Over the course of the following weeks and months, Gregory seemed to understand more and more of what I said. Likewise, I got a better grasp on what he tried to tell me. On most occasions, it was easiest to ask yes or no questions that he could respond to with a shake for no or a flip for yes. If there was something complicated to be conveyed, it generally did not work.

I tried to come up with a complicated signalling system based on Morse code but honestly I couldn't keep track of my own code. Gregory was willing to try for a while but in the end seemed to get frustrated with the whole thing and refused to try it anymore. This was probably for the best as I could not see his legs very well in the first place. Keep in mind, all of my bug companions were about the size of a grain of rice. Their legs were obviously much smaller. Add in the fact that Gregory moved at a speed that was basically impossible for my eyes to follow and it was a recipe for disaster.

On the plus side, I now had an audience I knew was listening. Gregory loved stories about Earth and gave me a lot of good criticism on my acting skills. He took to joining me in my attempts to sneak away from the tree. He would sit on the bangs I used to cover my face and when I made too much noise or made some other mistake would start shaking. He was a huge help. I felt like my skills progressed by leaps and bounds thanks to his assistance.

While we did all of this, there were a few things I noticed. The first was that the other termites seemed to avoid Gregory. It was nothing terribly obvious but I never saw him playing with any of the other bugs. Instead, he spent all of his time with me. This only made me empathize with him even more. Us loners have to stay together my friend. If the rest of the world does not want us, we can always have each other.

A very important oddity about Gregory was that he never seemed to grow up. All the other termites stopped playing with me after roughly six months or so. Gregory had been with me for much longer than this and yet a day never passed without him coming to play with me. Maybe because he was deformed, he was unable to get a job. I am sorry Gregory. We can be unemployed together. This is why I liked Gregory. We had a lot in common.

I also found out something very surprising one day when I was trying to sneak away. That day I got much closer to the edge of the area under my tree than I usually would before Gregory started shaking. When he did so I stopped but right next to me appeared a giant snake head sticking out of the grass. In a flash, I saw Gregory appear on the snakes head. Immediately, the snake started writhing on the ground in pain.

The shocking thing was that the snake had never come under the tree. All this time I had thought it was some effect made by the tree that was causing the animals coming for me to be in such pain. It was only now that I realized it wasn't some field released by the tree but my friends the termites. They must have been causing all the monsters that attacked me to fall down all this time. If they had not been protecting me, I do not know how many times over I would have died by now. Of course, they were probably also responsible for that horrible pain I felt when I first came to this world. Still I am alive now and either my pain or poison resistance seems to be high enough that I am not effected anymore.

Sweating a bit at realizing how much trouble I had been for them, I went back to the tree and repeatedly thanked Gregory. I tried to get him to thank the others as well but I was not sure how well I got that across. Gregory seemed not to understand me very well. I am sure his comprehension skills were at fault. It absolutely was not my fault. He likes to tell people it was because I was blubbering through my tears so badly that I would have made no sense to anyone but you know how he likes to make up stories. Seriously what kind of grown man would do that kind of thing. Ahem.