Episode 002: Face, Meet Dirt

It looked like dusk by the time I woke up again, clutching my head with one hand and rubbing my funny bone in the other. Having fallen in a heap, I was just glad I didn’t give myself a concussion; the pain was definitely more of the migraine variety. Judging by the amount of daylight, I’d been out for at least an hour.

Preferring concrete jungles over natural ones, I was just relieved nothing found me while I was helplessly sprawled on the ground.

Glancing around, I found my phone undamaged and breathed a sigh of relief. A frown made itself onto my face when I realized the power was off and internally prayed that I did not just run out of batteries in the middle of nowhere.

Pressing the power button, I exhaled again, previously tensed shoulders slumped at the sight of the screen lighting up. Scrambling up slowly so I wasn’t sitting on dirt and who-knows-what anymore, I brushed my dark clothes off before checking my phone screen again.

“Halt,” a bell-like voice sternly came from behind me.

I barely managed to glimpse at the weird welcome screen before spinning around and quickly find myself going cross-eyed while focusing on the tip of an arrowhead aimed right at me.

“Do not move!”

Gaze slowly following the arrow along the shaft to hands, arm, and a torso, what I saw caused a furrow between my eyebrows. LARPer?

Well, at least it was a human and I was no longer lost. They probably thought I was part of their group and would stop as soon as they saw the zippers on my clothes.

But, of course, I was wrong.

Not that they would stop, I mean. It was my conclusion they were human.

I would find out those pointy ears weren’t really well-done prosthetics when I got surrounded by what I would come to realize were elves in about five minutes after meeting them.

Or, really, let’s just admit it: they found me.

Guess I was wrong about nothing finding me when I was knocked out too.

As to how I came to realize I might just be in a situation that was even more complicated than being dumped in the middle of nowhere because of dumb college antics…

Well, I don’t think humans can hop around trees like they weighed as much as feathers. There were no wires and I was still sporting enough of a migraine that I was fairly sure I wasn’t dreaming, considering the pain. It was a bit too “real” to be a hallucination, and I felt mostly sober, but I would have more important concerns than Middle-Earth elves surrounding me at arrow-point if I were hallucinating.

Admittedly, it was a bit of a Twilight Zone moment. I ended up following them without protest, mostly since my mind had blanked out from witnessing something that broke my perception of physics. Who knew that after everything I’ve been through, it would be Lord of the Rings extras lookalikes that would get me to BSOD?