The Reincarnated King (ManxManxMan)

Chapter Eleven: A Normal Horse

~Chapter Eleven: A Normal Horse~

Two men and a mug teleport into a forest, they - the two men, not the mug - talk, and one man disappears.

It sounds like the build up to some really weird but hopefully funny joke, but in reality, there is nothing funny about the situation because I am alone. In a forest. Who knows how far from civilization. And I only have my muddy, colorfully-bagged mug for comfort.

And I can barely even think beyond the fact that he teleported. Again.

He's just...gone, my mind stutters, trying to bend around this new information that I almost wish I could forget like Tom apparently did, according to the teleporting man. If the stranger teleports back, I am pretty sure my mind might break. Like 'poof'.

However, minutes pass - or seconds, or maybe even hours - and he does not return, and when I look up, the sun seems lower in the sky than I think it should be, but I also have no idea where I am or how to guess the time based on the sun. When I pull out my phone, though, it looks like only a couple of minutes have passed, which feels wrong, but when I try to enter my password, the screen glitches halfway through, freezing and then flickering in a weird mess of colors, before it suddenly turns dark.

That's not good...

When I try to turn the screen on again, it lights up for a couple of seconds before going black and then showing the restart screen. To my great frustration, it settles into a loop of on-and-off again restarting until I finally just take off the outer casing and pull the battery out.

"Perfect time for a malfunction," I comment dryly, slipping the battery back once the phone has had a second to relax. I count backwards from sixty once the casing is back in place before restarting my phone.

This is apparently a pointless action since it just continues back into the hopeless cycle of being broken. It was likely the result of the teleportation since I doubt teleporting is good for technology, but guessing that does not make my phone suddenly start working. So, I just take out the battery again, and when I put it back in, I leave the phone off. Until I'm either out of the forest or know my phone is going to be okay, it will stay off because the battery will just die faster by constantly restarting, and in the off chance that I can use it later, it would be better to leave it as charged as possible.

Would still be nice to know if I'm in range for an emergency call or something.

Since dwelling on that thought will get me precisely nowhere, I take a good look at the sun - or, really, the general area near the sun because I don't need temporary blindness on top of everything - and pick the direction that I believe to be south. I have no idea where I am in relation to Cardiff, but so long as I am heading south, I should, at the very least, eventually encounter the ocean, if not a town or city. If I can find the ocean, then I should be able to follow the shore to the nearest form of civilization.

Wales is part of an island, after all. I just kind of have to hope that the teleportation was...limited by distance or something because if I am all the way in, like, Germany or somewhere in South America right now, I am going to be in some serious trouble.

Thinking like that will also get me nowhere, though, so I try to put it aside and just start walking. And I keep walking, and walking, and walking. I take a bathroom break at one point, and I take another break later to reluctantly drink some water from a running stream, but I never stop for longer than a couple of minutes because the sun is slowly creeping lower in the sky, and if I stop to ease the growing ache in my feet, I doubt I will be as willing to get back up again before dark.

I'm tired, hungry, and this is definitely not how I thought today would go.

What must be at least two hours into walking, I pull out my phone to see if it is still broken in the event that some higher being has decided I deserve a little luck, but a flash of something white falling from my pocket gives me pause. There wasn't anything in my pocket last I checked - aside from my phone, anyway.