Pure total darkness obscured what Dan could see, and it hid away his memories. 'What was I just doing?; he questioned to himself, unsure if there was an answer to it. He could not move, feel, see, hear, or do anything. Dan felt formless and fuzzy like a ball of cotton, gently held into the air by a constant, tiny breeze.
'I think I was on an island...' he thought absentmindedly, knowing that such thoughts served no purpose but to satiate his boredom. Dan was not sure how long he had been floating through this claustrophobic emptiness, but he felt like a considerable amount of time had passed him. 'Did I die? Then where am I?'
Then a sudden flash of white blotted out the darkness, and Dan could see a rapidly scrolling roll of film depicting his life before him. In one of the reels was a young man in his early twenties, with medium-length brown hair, amber-colored eyes, and a thin build.
The youth in another one of the reels is shown working at a dead-end job, getting scolded by someone obscured in shadow. In another reel, the young man is shown pulling a meager paycheck from his mailbox with a rundown-looking apartment behind him.
'Right. There was nothing worth living for in that place. I worked for pennies on the dime, wasted countless hours of time, and all I got was a meaningless struggle to march forward because that was what society demanded of me.' Dan thought to himself, his voice slightly distorting.
The youth is then shown in multiple reels practicing various survival skills, reading about different cultures, and learning how to survive in various environments. In another reel, the young man is shown emptying his bank account and buying survival gear, seeds, hand-used farming tools, and other basic materials, along with a boat. Then, in another reel, he is on a ship traveling towards an island hidden between several larger islands.
'I grew tired of the meaningless everyday grind. I didn't benefit from doing work for others, so I went where there were no others. To the island, an oasis of nature, away from people. I wanted to escape humanity.' Dan's voice continued to distort, becoming more guttural even though he was speaking in his mind.
Ten years' worth of images quickly passed by, showing the youth slowly growing into a long-haired, bearded man living off the island's bounty. These years saw bags pile under his eyes, his skin take on an olive hue, and his face become more stoic yet somber. Then, in another reel, the man left on his now rusty ship back to the mainland, where, even before getting to the shores, one could tell how different it was from afar, even though only a decade had passed.
'Despite wanting to escape humans altogether, I couldn't flee from my own humanity; the isolation ate away at my mind, and I grew weak, far too weak. So, I went back like a dog with its tail between its legs and trodded through the disgustingly inorganic landscape of a place entirely unnatural. It was artificial and suffocating, a lifeless husk of synthetic material, metal, and concrete.' Dan bitterly thought to himself as his speech became less human.
The now thirty-year-old man is shown in multiple reels being surprised by technologies that were beyond the imagination of what people could have conceived a decade before his leave. These things were normalized, even mundane to those who remained within human society, but not to him. As a result, he was seen as a modern barbarian by anyone who saw or interacted with him. Curious about what it was, the man approached an odd glass-like tube that emitted a low whistling sound, reminding him of the bird songs he heard on his island. This would become his final and most deadly mistake, as the sensor of the tube, essentially a garbage chute, would suck him in, mistaking him for trash.
"'Right, I remember now. I'm dead. Crushed by the garbage compactor, and my body was incinerated after. Yet...I can't remember how it felt. I guess that's lucky.' Dan thought to himself one last time in the darkness as his voice became distorted into a fully guttural and inhuman-sounding tone.
_____
Slowly, a dim world comes into Dan's view. 'A light?' he growled in his mind. 'No, it's still dark...But I can see just fine?' he questioned to himself as his senses groggily came back to him like they were sleeping.
Dan placed his palms on the rocky ground beneath him and pushed himself up onto his knees. The stone was cold and wet, making it slippery, yet his skin seemed to have good traction, so he did not fall. Looking around, Dan noticed what appeared to be small orbicular boulders surrounding him, about thirty-five in total.
'I died...and this is obviously not the trash compactor, so where am I?' Dan thought to himself as he pushed himself fully onto his feet, patting down all of the bits of dust and moisture that got onto his...hide? "Gruh?" A tiny, rough growl escaped his mouth in his confusion.
'I have a hide?' Upon closer inspection, Dan noticed he had a rough, hard grey hide that covers his entire body and a noticeably rounded belly. 'Last time I checked, I was not this round...I was actually quite fit before.' Dan almost teared up thinking about the lost physique he had gained back on his little island from surviving there for so long.
Dan gently poked his belly with his tiny yet surprisingly strong finger, and to his shock, despite looking like blubber, his 'fat' was actually highly condensed muscle. "Gruh?" was all Dan was able to mutter at this discovery.
'Okay, so I am fit...in fact, I think I'm far stronger than I was in my past life...also, it seems I can only say "Gruh" for some reason. It's sort of cute, but it feels weird since I'm thirty...well, no, I was thirty, I don't actually know my age now.' Dan thought to himself as he walked to one of the cave's walls.
He looked up to the ceiling of the cave, where he saw many stalactites. A determined 'Gruh' escaped his toothy maw as he clenched a crevice in the wall, planning to climb up it with his full grip strength. CRUNCH. The stone he grasped with his full might exploded into tiny shards everywhere.
'Huh?' Dan just blankly looked at his pebble and dust-covered hands. 'What the fuck am I?' Shaking those thoughts out of his mind and using far less of his grip strength this time, Dan quickly managed to scale the stone wall and 'gently' broke the largest stalactite he could find before slowly climbing his way back down from the cave's roof.
'I can't ask complicated questions until I'm certain of my survival. I'll keep everything interesting noted in the back of my mind and focus on the necessities. Food, water, and finding out where I'm at.' Dan thought to himself as he wielded the sturdy stalactite like a club.
'I heard some rippling further into the cave a while ago; there might be a puddle of water that formed from the stalactites there.' Dan thought to himself as he fulfilled his curiosity, tested his new body, and armed himself throughout the entire time, the sound of dripping water droplets had ceaselessly assaulted his ears.
Slowly tiptoing his way through the cave until he reached a split path into two different directions, the one to his left going further down, and the one to his right shooting straight forward with a bend to the left going up. Dan slowly got into a bear crawl stance and placed his left ear on the cave floor. 'It seems like the vibrations are softer down the left path, so I should go right to find the water.'
Standing back on his feet, Dan starts to speedwalk up the right path until he reaches a wide open area where a large underground pond has a massive crystalline stalactite that continuously drips clear, practically mystically pure water into the pond. The water looks almost like the crystal stalactite in liquid form because of this seemingly mystical property.
'Does all water in this world look like this, or is this pond special somehow?' Dan questioned before quickly shaking his head. 'No, I don't have time to ponder this. I'll drink some and then head back the way I came. The exit out of here is probably that way, most likely.'
Dan scavenged around the wide open area for a stalacmite that he then pulled out from the cave's floor. Afterwards, he sat down and slowly carved out its bottom using the pointy end of his stalactite club to turn it into a rugged cone cup. Then Dan dipped it in the pond, filling it with the crystal water, and started drinking from it. A crystal and brown haze lightly steamed from Dan's body as he drank the water, and he felt himself slightly changing in some way.
"Gruh?!" he groaned out in confusion. 'What did that do? Why did I give off a mist like a smoked BBQ?' Dan patted his body with his hands all over, seeing if there were any other changes, before taking a deep breath and then sighing to calm himself down.
'Okay, understood, that is not regular water. Though I'm still alive, so I guess it's safe? Actually, I feel less lethargic after consuming it. I think this world has some magic or mystical properties then. So it's a fantasy world, I guess...at least it's not sci-fi, I think.' Dan rapidly thought in his mind, though with his surprise, he accidentally used too much of his grip strength and broke his cone cup.
"Gruh," he exasperated, annoyed at the outcome of his discovery and surprise. 'Too much of something is a problem; I don't know how to keep in check this monstrous strength of mine entirely.' he somberly said in his mind.
Taking his stalactite club with him, Dan backtracked to the thirty boulders that he saw when he first woke up in the world. "Gruh?" he questioned aloud. 'Weren't there thirty-six boulders? Did the other ones grow legs or something?'
As if to respond to his curiosity, a loud yelping 'Grah' echoed throughout the cave in the direction he believed the exit was. 'What the? There's more of...well, "me" here? And there's something able to hurt a species as strong as us!?' Dan panickly thought as he forced himself to hold back his grip on his makeshift club.
'Damnit, I can't let another of whatever I am die, I might be able to learn something from them, at least figure out what I am exactly.' With that thought in mind, Dan rushed as quickly as he could down the rocky path until he saw a scene that could only be described as nightmare fuel.
A lizard-looking creature with a keratin scale-covered body, forked tongue, ivory horns that protrude from the top of its star-shaped snout & continue to do so from the top of its head to the back of its tail, bat-like ears, mole-like whiskers, and hoofs shaped like what pigs have.
The most terrifying aspects of this creature are the razor-sharp teeth in its jaws, gleaming as if they were diamonds, the acidic saliva dripping down its chin, making the ground below it sizzle & hiss. Still, even worse than that was a four-foot-tall grey hide creature profusely bleeding from its stomach punctured on one of the foul beast's ivory horns.
"Gruh?!" Dan exclaimed aloud, not able to keep his shock contained at the sight of such a monstrous and dangerous amalgamation. 'What perverse being thought whatever the hell I'm looking at was good to exist in the food chain? It looks like a miniature kaiju!"
The monstrosity of nature's cat-like eyes quickly snapped to Dan due to his loud outburst, throwing the other being off its horn and making a mad dash towards its next victim. 'Oh hell no, I am not a cheesy horror movie protagonist!' Dan exclaimed with revulsion in his mind as he gripped his makeshift weapon, got into a batting stance, and slammed the vile creature's chin with the end of the stalactite club.
This attack caused half of Dan's weapon to crumble upon impact with the creature, but it left the monster stunned and on its side. Taking advantage of this, he jumped onto its head to keep it pinned down and rammed the pointy end of his stalactite into its unfocused eye.
The creature tried to shake and buck him off, but due to Dan's weight and muscle mass, it couldn't even budge. "Gruh!" Dan bellowed out his cute, albeit creepy, battle cry as he punched the broken end of his makeshift weapon deeper into the beast's eye, digging it into the monster's brain and killing it.
After making sure the horrific mistake of nature was eliminated, Dan fell onto his ass panting. 'What. THe. HELl. IS. WITH. THIS PLACE?!' Dan screamed in his mind as he looked at his blood-covered body, the very much dead beast, and the even more dead cousin of his splattered against the cave wall.