‘If you are reading this, if you are from my homeland, you may bring destruction to the world one day.’

Cool. An ancient text on the wall was making fun of me.

There wasn’t much to go off of, but I was pretty sure the ‘homeland’ part referred to Earth. Who else would be able to read English other than a person from earth?

What annoyed me were the contents. Yet another party who insisted I be a menace and destroy the world or whatever! What was this conspiracy?!

I didn’t like being treated like a kid, always told what to do! Screw you, both elves and ancient text! I was in my rebellious age, so I refused to destroy the world! Bleh!

I kept going down the hallway while continuing to scan the walls. Apparently, the pictures and scribbles were also text, because I also found some text in Elvish. What it read confirmed what I’d already expected. An otherworlder was destined to destroy the world one day.

Great.

Well, I had no idea how many people from Earth were here. I could be the only one, or I could be one of millions. If it was the latter, the prophecy text thing might as well have said that a random person might one day be responsible for destroying the world.

Heck, what did it even mean to destroy the world? Would the entire planet blow up? Or would the favorite plushie of whoever wrote those texts be lost and never found?

Probably the latter. After all, losing your favorite plushie could certainly be classified as the end of the world.

Satisfied with my conclusion, I kept going. I soon realized that the floor was inclined. I was going down.

Well, I’d heard that the underground tended to be warmer. So that was good. If I gathered enough food to last me the season, I could triumphantly stand and laugh at winter’s pathetic attempts to defeat me.

Now I just needed to check out where this tunnel led. If there was a nest of mutated super spiders, then I miiight want to ask a different real estate agency for help.

Luckily, as I went deeper, I didn’t happen to bump heads with any mutated super spiders. Instead, the tunnel led me to an enormous open area with something quite peculiar in the middle. A cylinder-shaped pink crystal of sorts extending from the floor all the way to the ceiling. Its glow illuminated the entire room.

“Wait…”

But once I stepped into the giant room and took a closer look, I noticed a strange black fog dancing inside the crystal.

“Yep, that looks totally normal and safe. Not ominous at all,” I said to myself sarcastically.

I circled around the crystal, making note of everything in the room while keeping an eye on the thing to make sure no sealed ancient demons were suddenly released from it.

There were the same old cringy texts on the walls, two other tunnels leading out of this place, as well as… what seemed to be a camping site… and a farm.

What.

An actual bed, some cookware and cutlery, and even a table and a chair!

Even more mind-boggling was the patch of dirt that had green stems sprouting out of it. How the heck did that even work? The rest of the floor was solid stone. Had someone dug a piece of the floor out and then tossed dirt into it? And how were they growing without sunlight, anyway? Did the glowing crystal count as sunlight somehow?

I shook my head and looked around for the possible owner of this little camp, but it seemed they had left.

Well, that changed things. I highly doubted mutated super spiders would be this sophisticated, but at the same time, whoever was camping here might be even more dangerous.

If they were friendly? Great! But if they weren’t, I didn’t have much to defend myself with other than my storage. And I didn’t feel like it would be much of use against someone actually intelligent.

Well, the smart thing would have been to turn around and forget this place existed. But that option also had the crippling disadvantage of being awfully lame. After all, this person probably wasn’t an elf, and I really craved meeting a person who wasn’t made of stone after so long. And thus the decision was made for me, I would look for the camper and ask whether they accepted tenants. Hopefully, they wouldn’t want rent payments in swords-inside-my-gut.

Since I had come from one of the tunnels, there were two other possibilities the landlord might have left through. A fifty-fifty chance to run into them. Argh! Just when I needed a coin, I didn’t have one!

“Can you believe it, Chad?” I asked my companion, who had appeared beside me. “Everytime you just need that one single coin, but you look into your pockets, your bag, your pocket dimension, and they are all empty!”

As always, Chad agreed via his stoic silence.

After my stony friend returned to my bubble, I decided to snoop around the camp for a little longer. There were books and papers on the table, along with a quill and some ink. 

Well, it would probably be considered quite rude to read someone else’s diary, but it was most likely written in a language I didn’t know, so I decided to look into it anyway.

As soon as I opened one of the books, my eyes went wide once again.

English.

Alright, this was getting very weird. Had the camp owner written the ancient texts telling me I would destroy the world? Had this campsite been abandoned for centuries? Was this entire place suspended in time? Or had it all been created only recently?

So many questions.

Well, now I was determined to meet this mysterious person and have a chat with them.

Lacking a coin to flip to decide which way to go, I had the brilliant idea of using one of the bowls as a substitute. I just really wanted to flip a coin, okay? It felt wrong to make a binary decision on my own when coin flips were such an elegant way to avoid having to make a choice.

I grabbed one of the bowls, inspected it, took a dramatic stance, and then flipped it into the air.

I watched as it spun and then landed on its non-existent-soup-side down with a loud crash.

“Mmmm, that way then!” I pointed at one of the tunnels, completely disregarding the fact that I’d forgotten to set up any rules for this coin toss beforehand.

I marched into the tunnel, still holding my torch.

It didn’t take long until I heard hurried footsteps coming from the other side. I stopped in my tracks, ready to book it if the approaching person told me to get off their lawn with a flaming pitchfork in their hand.

I did not expect this person to be a goblin. Or, at least, that’s what… she… looked like. Green skin, pointy ears… the only typical goblin feature missing was an ugly face. Her face was the exact opposite of ugly. Were goblin girls somehow pardoned from the curse of ugliness?

To add to my whiplash, she was clad in leather armor and wielded a sword, pointing it at me. Very unlike the dumb unsophisticated goblins I’d heard about.

She was also frowning and growling in my direction. Great.

Well, I had a few options to go with. In this case, I felt like I knew exactly what to do to keep my gut from being stabbed.

“Hello?” I asked.

A full second passed in silence before her eyes widened and her sword partially lowered.

“English?” she asked rhetorically.

Bingo.

BottledChaos

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