Meeting
Who: Helena and Bazzer Where: The Field When: Dawn on Year 1, Day 4 What: Another Arrival Rating: G
Helena had actually fallen into a deep sleep that even the Laughers couldn't deprive her of. For the first time since she had arrived in this strange place, she hadn't slept alone. Rowan had snored and mumbled in her own sling, apparently unbothered by the mad animals in the woods around them. The night was warm but the humidity dropped and dew collected on the Climber tree, slipping musically from one broad fleshy leaf to another. The first of the songbirds woke her and the last of the Laughers mocked it. Her bladder pushed her to climb down but she delayed as long as possibly until the last of the night monsters gave up his mirth and went to bed. As the light grayed, she peered over at Rowan. The pregnant woman seemed to still be firmly in her blanket sling, which Helena was grateful for. It was one thing for her to monkey around this giant stupid tree. In a couple of weeks they may find that the tree sling was no longer a safe option for Rowan. How on earth would she ever climb the tree if she got any heavier? They would have to cross that bridge when they got there.
Light as another born woodland creature, Helena lit to the floor and had her morning pee well into the bushes away from the tree, now that there was someone to see her. After coming back and rebraiding her greasy black hair into their pigtail braids, she sipped water from the creek beside the tree and peered out into the field. There was a light mist this morning, the air damp but not unpleasantly cool. She stepped out into the white grass, intent on looking for any others before Rowan woke up and they went about gathering food. The wet grass slapped gainst her bare calves, the purple stalks bending out her path. All the while her black eyes sliced back and forth, searching for any new sleeping arrivals.
Bazzer snored softly in the tall grasses, oblivious to the shift in location until he got too warm. It was cold in Kansas City where he lived and even though he had good heat in his apartment, this was a little much. Waking with a snort, he screamed. Yelped more like really. A manly yelp even. He was not in his apartment. He was not even indoors. Blinking rapidly at the sea of greeny-purple around him, he automatically reached for his nightstand for his glasses and the nightstand of course wasn't there. That was okay though, he reached up and felt his glasses on his head instead and pulled them down onto his nose. The grass was not supposed to be purpleish.
Was he Dorothy or Alice? Quickly he took a bit of skin on his arm and pinched himself hard. It hurt! "I am mad," he whispered, stricken. He was crazy!
The yelp was enough to get Helena's attention and she moved that way as quickly as possible. It was still misty but the impossibly bright sun was cresting the horizon and casting it's light on the field, lighting up the purple hues and muting the greens. She spotted him about twenty yards away. "Hey!" she called out, surprised. He wasn't under a blanket, and he seemed to be wearing normal clothes. "Excuse me!" she called out as she stepped over her own fallen fellwood, still scattered all over the field from when the Laughers destroyed her bonfire. She must be a sight, a tiny Asian woman in nothing but a blue t-shirt and tiny little sleepware boxers, grass stained knees and liberally covered in mud, sweat and various other things that she'd rubbed up against over the past four days since she had been here.
Randomly, Bazzer picked up the book that he had been reading when he fell asleep. It looked normal enough still. He turned when he heard a girl speak and was surprised. She looked normal too, if a bit worse for wear. "Are you real?" he asked suspiciously. She looked nothing like his sister and that worried him. His voices had always been of his older sister. And he had never seen her, only heard her voice. This was perhaps more disconcerting than the purplish foliage.
That gave Helena a bit of a pause but she brushed it aside. This place and this experience was unreal, which made his comment perfectly understandable. "I'm afraid so. My name's Helena, who are you?" She was starting to get the idea. People went to bed and they woke up in this field. Not all people though, just herself, Rowan and now this fellow. She looked him over where he sat. Tall, thin, fully clothed. Glasses, pale face. He had a book in his hand and she wondered if maybe this person had fallen asleep reading. That deviated from the asleep in bed pattern she was formulating, but still fit with the asleep part.
"Bazzer," he replied absently, climbing to his feet. He wasn't wearing shoes, but he had on corduroy pants and a white sweatshirt that said "COLUMBIA" on it in large blue letters. Looking Helena up and down he cocked his head to one side, "You're real?" he repeated suspiciously. Taking a step forward, he pinched her too. Just in case. She felt solid to him. Were hallucinations solid? He wasn't sure. None of the ones he had before had been solid, but he hadn't really been in a proper frame of mind to rationalize all this out at the time.
"Ouch!" Helena frowned and slapped his hand away from her upper arm. "Don't pinch strangers!" she said in her best 'I'm the boss' voice, the one that worked particularly well on children under five. Shaking her head she heaved a sigh and her dark look melted away. "I'm real, listen to me. You fell asleep somewhere and woke up here, right? Just like I did, just like Rowan did." She gestured back at the massive climber tree, the vast canopy spread out almost as far out from it's trunk as it was tall. Beneath the canopy there were two colourful slings. One was empty and sporting a red, orange and pink geometric pattern. The other was a dark green and it bulged, Rowan's dirty socks with the pom-poms on the ankles sticking out of the back of it. "She showed up yesterday," she said as she turned to look way up at the new arrival. "And now you're here too."
Bazzers mouth opened and moved, but nothing came out and he took in the tree and the land around them more. Finally he managed something coherant, "Where is 'here?'" he asked. "And...why?" Why him, why them? Why anything? "And how? All the interrogatives really," he gestured with his book then looked at if as if seeing it for the first time. It was the autobiography of Stephen Hawking.
Helena was pretty prepared for these sorts of questions, the same that she had tried to answer for herself when she had first realized just how lost she was. "Ok, so who? Well I told you my name is Helena. I'm Helena Chu from New York City. Back there is Rowan MacKenna, she's Canadian. Where? We aren't sure. No place we're familiar with. Rowan is a botanist and..." She bent down to pluck up a handful of the nearly knee high purple tinged grass. "She said she's never even heard of grass like this before. Or trees like these. When? Well, the night I fell asleep at home it was January 18th. I've been here for four days. Does that match up with what you know?" She looked up at him, curious if time was moving correctly.
"It was January 21 when I fell asleep..." Bazzer trailed off distracted, "What do you do then?" A botonist sounded useful, given this place? Eating something bad would be well...bad. "I'm a librarian. Well, archivist. But most people just understand librarian," he was a specialized sort of librarian. He specialized in the preservation of old documents and photographs and helped people find what they needed in those documents. Anything less than a 100 years old and he didn't work with it usually unless there were special circumstances. For the moment he was going to take what she said at face value then decide for himself when he had more data.
"I teach pre school." She smiled, more than aware that her rather sweet occupation didn't recommend her for survival in the wild, let along an alien forest. And yet...she had. For four whole days. She was starting to feel awful from a diet of berries but at least she hadn't starved to death. She hadn't let the Laughers catch her either. So far she thought she was ahead of the game. Looking back at the tree she heaved a sigh. "At this point I wish I'd become an engineer or an architect or something." She shook her head. "If we don't get rescued any time soon, we're going to have a real shelter crisis."
"Yeah?" For a hallucination she wasn't very useful. "Why?" Granted, he wasn't too keen on the idea of sleeping on the ground and who knew what was out there, but she made it sound very dire. He wasn't an architect either. Or an engineer. He just read a lot.
She heaved a sigh. "Two things. We can't sleep on the ground because there are predators here that only come out at night. They run all over this place and into the jungle. The second this is that time is running out for Rowan to be able to climb that tree." She lifted her dark eyes to Bazzer's face and gave him a humorless smile. "She had the absolutely mindblowing good fortune to wake up here while she is seven months pregnant. A couple more weeks and she just won't be able to make the climb." It was a serious concern. The last thing that she wanted to happen was for Rowen to fall or even stumble belly first into a branch. It was just too dangerous for the baby.
Oh. Yes, that would do it. Ask a question, get an answer. "I see..." he nodded, "Well. Then. Let me make sure I have this straight. We don't know where we are or how to get back. Or how to get rescued. There are creatures that might eat us at night. I'm a librarian, you're a preschool teacher and the other girl is a 7 months pregnant botanist. And everything is slightly purple. That everything?" He was taking this surprisingly well, but he still wasn't sure this wasn't a hallucination. If it was, it wasn't like any he'd ever had before.
Helena followed along and nodded. "Yes, that's about everything. We found some berries along that side if the field yesterday." She pointed. "I was going to go and pick a bunch for breakfast but now that there are three and a half of us rather than two and a half, I could use a hand." She looked up at him. "If you'd rather have a look around and try your luck in finding help or civilization I won't stop you. If the natives are friendly, please send them back for us. If you don't find anything, make sure you get up into a tree by the time the sun sets. Stay quiet and the Laughers won't find you." She used to rather silly, she thought to herself. She used to be full of rubbery faces and grins to light the day. Why had this experience made her feel so grim. Wasn't it an adventure? Some day she'd go back to her classroom and at storytime she could tell her own version of Where The Wild Things Are.
"The Laughters?" it was obviously a noun, but he had no idea of what. "I think..." he looked around at the distinct lack of everything resembling civilization, "I think that there is safety in numbers right now. And is there water?" Water was important. "And fire?" Fire was too. He might not be a caveman, but he knew those two things were Good Things. He sighed, it was already getting too warm for his sweatshirt, where ever they were, it was not the same winter as what he was going through in Missouri, "Lead on, MacDuff."
"Not laughters," she corrected him. "Laughers. Like 'things that laugh'." She tilted a curious look at him for calling her MacDuff but she did head off in the direction in question. "There's water, a clean stream running back alongside the tree Rowan's sleeping in. Are you thirsty? We could go back for a drink of water." She said so but she didn't stop, pushing forward toward food. Her belly had cramped up badly the night before but there was just no other option for food just yet. "These berries are good. They're sweet, hardly tart at all. I'm calling them roseberries." She flashed him a quick smile. "They're the exact same shade of pink as the roses in my mother's garden and the patch of bushes sort of has a rose smell to it."
"Ah, I see," that was an important distinction and much less 'Langoliers' in the meaning. Maybe he had read too much Stephen King as a teenager. Then again, he would read anything he could get his hands on and...Bazzer stopped following Helena suddenly. "There're no books here!" what was he going to do? He might have to interact with people now!? Shit! The realization that there were no books here of any sort except the one in his hand was more traumatizing than being who knows where lost like this. Though it was less traumatizing than thinking he was insane.
Helena stopped and gave him a wide eyed look. "No...um, not that we've found so far," she offered, hoping it might give him a little bit of hope. "Who knows what might be here though, right?" She certainly didn't. That first day she'd been in such a daze of terror she hadn't really noticed what she had passed. For all she knew, she could have passed the lost mine of Solomon and never noticed. "Try not to worry too much just yet," she said with a pat on his arm. The bushes were right there in front of them and Helena bent to pick up a drying climber tree leaf. It was dry but instead of becoming brittle they seemed to become harder when they dried out. They curled slightly more around the edges and formed a decent bowl. Peering into the bushes, Helena began the careful work of pinching the fruit from their stems and depositing the pink berries into the leaf-bowl. "Worry about things like food," she suggested.
Bazzer began picking the strange berries from higher up where Helena couldn't reach dropping the berries into her leafy basket. "Fire would be good," he said sort of talking to himself, "maybe it will scare the Laughers. And boiling water. And cooking food," not the berries per se, but if they found other things, "I have no idea. But fire is a good thing." He picked up his own leaf and began filling it once hers was almost done. "How many of these do we need?" the oblong shaped berries were large so the leaves were filled quickly.
"Umm..." Helena worried her lower lip between her teeth as she studied the amount that they had. "This is probably good for now." Cradling the leaf to support it as he deposited the last few berries into his bowl, she smiled. "This is all that we've decided it ok to eat. We haven't really foraged for anything else yet but maybe we can do that if Rowan is still sleeping by the time we get back. I'll climb up the tree and get my pillow case. We can use that to bring back anything that might be ok. We shouldn't actually eat anything until we've all had a look at it, ok?" She looked up at him and quirked a smile. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound condescending or anything. I'm just used to explaining things to little kids all day." She was sure he was probably a lot smarter than a group of toddlers.
With a nod, Bazzer took the two leafy bowls. "These leaves are useful anyways," he acknowledged. They looked interesting. Odd, but not bad. And not eating things without letting the botanist look at it made sense. Maybe she'd be wrong, but at least they had a better chance of not being wrong. In theory anyways. "Is it winter here?" he asked. It didn't feel like winter, he was sweating thanks to the humidity and his sweatshirt was getting sticky. He was dressed for much cooler weather, but he was loathe to take anything off.
Helena let him take the leaf from her. She shook her head. "I don't know. It was winter in New York, obviously, but it's really not here, is it?" She flashed him a smile. "I guess that's a boon. If we'd arrived in nothing but what we're wearing in the middle of winter we certainly wouldn't have made it this long. Well, I wouldn't have." She was slightly built, even without the near-starvation of the past few days. Small animals scurried away from them in the tall grass, obscurred by the thickness of the growth. "There is certainly a lot living here," she told him. "All kinds of critters, none of which I've ever seen before and I used to watch the Discovery channel all the time." She heaved a sigh. "As for fire, maybe it would scare away the Laughers. It's just that there are so many of them, I never wanted to attact their attention. You're right about boiling the water though. I should have thought about that, for Rowan's sake." The last thing the preggo needed was a parasite or something.
That made sense, but wouldn't the Laughers get barbequed in the fire? "Hold on," he said, handing her the bowls and pulling is shirt off and tying the sleeves around his waist. He wasn't well built, almost scrawny, but he wasn't concerned about that now, "Okay. Wouldn't the fire maybe cook the Laughers?" he asked. Meat had to be a start and if it was cooked, so much the better. "I like the Discovery Channel too. And the History channel," something was telling him he should have paid more attention to those survivalism shows though. "but this is...not quite what they had in mind, I don't think."
Helena shook her head. "No, I don't think so." She heaved a sigh. "If this was like...the Rocky Mountains or something, sure, we'd be in trouble but at least we know that if we saw a deer or a raccoon or even a squirrel we could probably eat it and light a fire and know that we were going to be ok." She shot another glance at him and for a moment it was full of the terror that she was fighting to hide as she patiently waited next to what? The dropping point? The landing zone? In the hopes that one of these days she could hitch a ride the other way. She shook her head and shoved those feelings back in their box for the time being. "We don't know that here. I guess I've been too scared to really experiment. I think you're right, we should try the fire."
"Exactly," he nodded, taking the bowls back again. "That you're not sick from the water is good though. Just don't pee in it," that he did remember. Do not pee or otherwise contaminate the clean drinking water. He was beginning to think a nervous breakdown would be good anytime now. He was trying not to though, if he was crazy, then he didn't need to broadcast it to everyone. And if he wasn't...well...nothing really changed as far as he could tell. "Fire is warm, it can potentially protect us and we can use it for lots of things. The question right now is, 'can we make it?' I don't suppose you smoke?" he asked, already assuming the pregnant girl didn't.
Helena shook her head, her mouth pursed together and looked up at him, thinking hard. There was something...and then it dawned. She pointed at his face. "You have glasses." Didn't they work just like a magnifying glass in a pinch. "Can't you use glasses to pinpoint the sun and start a fire?" She glanced around them. "If we have something dry to work like tinder, I mean?"
"Never tried. I'm pretty much blind without them," as evidenced by his seeing the sea of purpley and getting rather confused. Then again, even with his glasses he was rather confused by the sight. That was a bad example. "But I think so. Or you could. Not me," being that he would rather need them to see where he was pinpointing the light. Once they had fire started though, maintaining it shouldn't be too difficult. People had done it for thousands of years. More even.
Helena nodded. "Well, I'll give it a try if you would like to let me. Let's see if we can find some rocks to build a bit of a fire pit. Or some dry wood and something to use as tinder." She glanced around and sighed. "Everything is kind of damp right now with the dew, but I found a lot of dry fellwood deeper into the treeline the other day. Want to come and look?" She didn't like venturing too far from the tree and certainly not alone. She hated to feel glad that this had happened to other people other than herself but she was. She probably would have utterly caved in to fear and loneliness if Rowan hadn't arrived yesterday.
As a kid playing 'hide the glasses' had been a favourite past time of his older sister and various other kids. He'd switched to contacts for a while for that reason and now flip flopped between them as needed. Usually he wore contacts during the day and his glasses at nights or on the weekends. It was a good thing too he reflected, tucking his book in the waistband of his pants. If he had been asleep without his glasses he would be screwed right now. Really, really screwed. "Let's leave the berries and then go look?" he suggested. He was hungry, but he wasn't sure he wanted to eat anything just yet. He wasn't sure he trusted things.
Helena nodded and took the leaf bowls from him, leaving them on a rock near the stream. "The Pesks might get at them, but they get into everything," she told him. Helena had been one of those people who couldn't sleep with socks on and she certainly didn't wear shoes to bed. Sadly, that meant she had to move slowly and cautiously through the woods. She liked to follow the stream because the thick carpeting of purple moss was gentle on her bare feet. "There's got to be something..." The underbrush wasn't too thick. The wide canopies of the Climber trees and other tall jungle plants seemed to keep the floor relatively clear.
"The Pesks?" he inquired, following along in his socked feet. They weren't slipper socks or anything, just regular white ones with grey toes and heels. It seemed that Helena had a name for everything. That was sort of cute actually. Eying a tree he looked back at Helena for a moment. "Give me a moment?" he asked, ducking behind one. Being a guy was easy sometimes. He had no idea how girls would manage especially since htey had...oh he did not even want to think about that. Not at all. Once business was taken care of he reappeared and continued on. It felt strange not to wash his hands.
Helena had noticed, when he turned around the tree, an unexpectedly elaborate tattoo. She was actually pretty surprised since he didn't seem like the type of guy to have even a little tattoo, let alone a gigantic one that covered most of his back and even so, disappeared below the waistline of his shirt. How far down did it go, she wondered? And why did a librarian who was rather awkward need such an extensive piece of art? When he came back around she blushed and looked up the creek. She decided she wouldn't ask him about it just yet. Maybe if they got to know each other better. "Pesks are these little animals that live in the trees here." She looked up toward the branches and pointed. "There, see? That one just moved. They're sort of like half chameleon, half flying squirrel. They blend in with their surroundings and they glide. They're also absolutely unafraid of humans and they will come and investigate things if you leave them around."
Bazzer noticed her blush and wondered why, assuming it was from him doing his business. Everyone had to and around here, it was going to be in the open unfortunantely. Following her gaze upward he saw what she was talking about after a minute, "Ah. Then they should learn fear," as far as he was concerned, animals were for eating right now. Especially if they had names like 'Laughers' and 'Pesks.' Pulling off a sock, he dipped one pale foot into the water to test it. The water was cool without being cold. Shrugging, he pulled the other sock off and shoved them both in his pocket. "I have money?" he suggested, just thinking of it. Reaching under his sweatshirt he pulled a wallet out of his back pocket, "Receipts...$38 dollars..." he looked up from rifling through it, "Not much."
Helena raised both brows and smiled. "You've been here for all of an hour and are offering to burn your money?" She smiled, gently teasing. "Hold on to it a little bit longer. We might get out of here and that money might come in handy again." She wasn't quite ready to give up hope of being rescued. Not yet. "Look, there's a good branch." It was bare of leaves and when she lifted it, it was light. "Dry," she said with a smile. She planted her foot on it and yanked, snapping the branch in half and then doing it again, breaking it into smaller, easier to carry lengths that would be useful for building a fire.
Bazzer shrugged, he wasn't hurting. His parents had a trust fund set up for both him and sister, they both worked because they enjoyed it, not because they had to. That wasn't really the point though, "I have credit cards if I need large sums," he replied pulling on a branch of his own. He was not burning his credit cards! He rarely had much cash on him though, there was little need. He didn't see anything wrong with burning a little money though if he needed to. It was just paper. "Think this is enough?" he asked, holding his own wood. They ddin't need a lot, not yet anyways, not that he thought. Then again, he wasn't sure, maybe they did?
Helena nodded. "Yeah, I think this will do alright." She turned and headed back toward the tree, following the stream. "So what did you say you did again? You're a librarian?" she clarified. "Where did you live, if I can ask?" They might as well get to know each other a little bit better. She made an annoyed sound at a pair of Pesks as they peered into the bowls of berries on the rock. "You get away from there." She toed a pebble in their direction and they creatures danced away with annoyed chitters.
Nodding, he took a few more branches, just in case. "Archivist. Preservation and salvage of old documents. Or location of old documents, if you needed an original or special copy or something," but yes, he was a librarian. "It's a specialized part of being a librarian. Just like you went to school to teach kindergarten and not high school, right?" because the two, while still being teachers, were not the same at all. It was the same for him. He was a librarian, but he specialized in old documents, not new things. Librarians could specialize in juvenile literature or university, law or medical texts, or public libraries.
Helena nodded. "I see. So...you possibly have read quite a bit in your day," she said as she set her bundle of dry wood down at the base of the tree. She glanced upward to see Helena through the lacing of the net that Helena had woven with the climber tree vines beneath her. The pregnant woman seemed to have barely moved in the time since they had first come by. She bent and popped a few more berries into her mouth, spitting the bitter seeds out. Once she was straightened again, she peered around the packed down earth beneath the wide canopy. "Ok, now comes the dilema." She kept her voice low as she talked to Bazzer. "It doesn't seem safe to build the fire pit too close to the tree and yet, we'll have to figure out a way to tend the fire all night and not be in danger from the Laughers. Just in case it doesn't deter them." Chewing on her lower lip, she looked back and forth.
"Rocks. Or..." the ground was pretty bare, "Read yes. Camping though? Not so much. But I think we can dig a fire pit? Or rocks aren't flammable...I don't think...how sad is it that we're capable, mostly competent adults and we're being thwarted by things neanderthals could do?" he asked rhetorically. He took his glasses off and blinked before handing them out to Helena. When he did this she went from being sharp and clear to a pink and blueish blob with a dark spot on top for her hair. He hated being without glasses or contacts. He hadn't been more than an arms length from them since he had been in the hospital as a teenager. He didn't trust Helena per se, but he didn't know what else to do.
In surprise, Helena took the glasses from him carefully. The last thing she wanted to happen was to drop them accidentally. "Ok, have a careful seat here, Bazzer. I'll dig a fire pit and get us a fire started over at the edge of the canopy here." She hooked the arm of his glasses into the neck of her t-shirt. "We'll have fire going before you know it." She gave him a smile that was much more confident about that statement than she really felt. She turned to look at the early morning sun. It was creeping above the trees and soon it would be hot and warm, directly over head. The sun here was different than it was at home. It looked like it burned hotter, the light seemed much more white than it did golden.
He was suddenly really glad he had the thin lenses for his glasses. They were still thick, but not as much as they would be the other way. His face felt strange without them, which was nothing new. He always felt like that when he switched from his glasses to contacts too. Sitting down, he nodded, "Just try to be quick," he requested. It took some effort, but Bazzer didn't add anything about being careful with them or giving them back after. In his experience, those two things would lead to glasses that would never be returned to him in on piece.
Helena smiled, unsure if he could see her well or not. She set one of the bowls of berries on his knee. "Here, eat some breakfast while I take care of this part." She turned away and circled until she found a spot that was soft enough to scrape a hole in with her sharp stone, the only tool she had here. Once she managed to scrape a bowl into the earth she went and fished some of the flat rocks from the bottom of the stream, always careful not to lose his glasses when she bent over. The rocks were wet but she thought they would dry up soon enough. She lined the bowl and built up the sides a little bit. With the sun rising and the heat growing, Helena could feel sweat sliding down over her ribs. "Whew!" The surviving was hard work!