ARC 1: Arrival

Chapter 1.03: Wild Moss

The time passes easily and another couple of hours flies by. My unease gives way to confusion as after the first hour, I feel the exact same as before. My stomach seems mostly fine, a little hungry and definitely thirsty. My muscles don’t even start to ache and I worry that maybe the information I felt was correct about the bulbs was all just wrong. The more I thought about it, the more my brain seemed to insist that it was true. I resisted tasting any more plants just yet, worried of more poisoning.

I passed the time almost entirely wordlessly, the only sounds I made were gentle ones. Gasps, sighs, and investigative hums as I scratched visual observations into my journal. I took a few tentative swigs from my dwindling water supply, still moving in the same direction. I hadn’t heard any water in my time out here yet, but I had been moving pretty slowly. I might have made more ground in the couple of hours if I hadn’t taken several breaks to investigate the mysterious flora that are interspersed throughout these woods.

In looking around at all the nearby greenery though, I notice something that my mind almost ignores completely. My eyes snap back to the plant and my eyes lock onto it. The growth is fluffy clumps of moss.

I steer myself over to the clumped growths, eyes roving over the surroundings.The moss is gathered and partially dangling off of the side of one of the trees. I reach my hand up to grab at a clump fixed on the wall and the touch of the moss chills my skin as I touch it. This moss is nearly filled with moisture. Judging by the dewy drops condensed on it, it almost seems as if it had rained recently, but the rest of the forest was mostly dry. This moss was very good at holding water, that’s for sure.

Reaching deeper into the moss to rip a portion of it directly off the side of the tree, I eventually pull away with a heavy moss clump. I drag the moss over my mouth and gently wring it out into my mouth. The water is cool and earthy, but refreshing for my parched mouth. I’m surprised about just how much water I get from the moss, seizing another clump gently and wringing out another large gulp. My hands are covered in water and small amounts of dirt and tree bark from the tree. I wipe my hands with the clumps of moss and it does a respectable job of drying them.

The moss is soft, gentle, and porous; it was kind of like using a sponge. Looking at the mostly wrung out clumps of moss, I hold them in one hand and pull a jar out of my bag. Normally I didn’t have much use for moss in my studies, but their utility couldn’t be ignored in this case. I stuffed the drained moss roughly into a container, none of the gentleness I’d afforded the last two gathered plants.

I pull my water bottle out, pulling more clumps off of the tree to wring water into the bottle. With every drained piece of moss, I press it deep into the jar, as much as I can fill it. Eventually I fill my water bottle completely, the jar of moss almost filled. Screwing the water bottle back shut, I pull off a couple more cups and wring them out over the jar of drained moss. The water trickles through the pressed moss, filling up the small amount of air still left within the moss. Stuffing the last bits of moss into the jar and sealing it.

I likely wouldn’t be wanting for moss anytime soon, but I felt myself wanting to be prepared. To have them on hand, just in case. They were probably good as a sponge too, and having a bunch of sponges on hand isn’t an awful idea. With my newly filled water bottle and quenched thirst, I continue in the same direction as before.

Now though, the amount of new sights settles. Most of the plants are starting to look familiar as I note the various areas I see them in as I go. I start to notice certain behaviors of the plants, such as a tendency to grow in darker and damper spots for some, or a tendency to grow in between cracks of rocky sections in others. For whatever reason that the fauna of the area are avoiding me, I was grateful. I was likely too enveloped in looking at the plants around me to even notice a charging deer if I needed to.

As my mind stopped dancing around me at all the strange plants though, I was forced to focus on other things. Things like my surroundings. This strange world that seemed so much like earth, but I could tell it wasn’t. Some of the things the flora around me displayed was almost surreal sometimes. It kind of felt like I was walking through a fantasy novel at times. I found myself often struck by the beauty of it all as I watched my surroundings.

The colors and shapes were something I couldn’t have imagined in all of my dreams, not to mention that some of the colors were more vibrant than any other plants I’d ever seen. Some plants almost seemed to glow; they were so bright. It struck me as extremely odd while I was crouching over and looking at another vibrant flower, but the excited brushing of my grey tail against the forest floor as I crouched there sobered the thought.

That was another thing I was avoiding thinking about. No real reason to be doing so, other than my own confusion at the appendage. I didn’t really mind the tail, it was just weird having one. Same with the ears. They seemed to move out of instinct, and I had noticed that certain sounds seemed crisper and clearer. My hearing was definitely much better, but in the quiet forest that ended up amounting to me hearing squirrel chatter from a couple yards away, or the rustling of leaves before a breeze flows through.

It was an odd sensation, the flicking of the ears. It was so subtle though, that it seemed natural. When my ear flicked to the sound of rustling leaves, I wasn’t startled, it just seemed like a reflex. If I really focused, I could flick my ear the same way again if I tried. The response didn’t feel alien, it just felt like my body was reacting to something. The flicking of the tail was like that too. The tail is also very sensitive. I could tell every time it brushed against a rock or the floor while I was crouched down. The tickle of my tail against my legs was felt more through the tail than it was through my legs. It was a weird feeling, but I was adapting to it quickly.

It helped that I had a lot of amazing plants to focus my attention on, instead of fussing over my new tail. It kept me grounded in a way. Plants had always been an escape for me in a way.

I had grown up interested in medicine and healing. There was something magical about life, I’d always tried my best to preserve it. It was while I was young, unable to learn more about pharmaceutical medicine, that I cultivated my interest in herbs. It helped that my grandma had encouraged me with her own wisdom about the art. There was something fascinating in the raw and unprocessed medicine that grew in nature. Before we had pills, we made tinctures and tonics; it was unrefined and it was beautiful.

Mom had called it a fixation, dad called it an obsession. When I became a surgeon though, they couldn’t really complain about my interest in herbalism. Hard to judge a girl who makes more money than you after all.

My thoughts are interrupted as my ear flicks to the side, hearing a loud roar. My head turns towards the roar, a little shaken at its intensity. It had been far away, but not that far. The gentle twitch of my ear at a smaller, almost imperceptible sound. In fact, without these ears, I likely would have missed it. Coming from the same direction as the horrible roar was in, I can hear several vitriol filled war-cries.

It sounds like people.

Before I even notice myself moving, I’m running full sprint towards the action, my bag hanging off my body and trailing behind me.