Dungeons & Disappointment

Chapter 4: Body Swap?

I slowly awoke, keeping my eyes closed as my brain returned to the land of the living. Weirdly enough, there was a nice, cold breeze that passed over my face and body, causing me to curl up in my bed. Although, as I curled up, I noticed that the surface underneath me wasn't nice, pillowy, and soft like my bed. Instead, it was rocky and soft like dirt, with little pebbles and rocks that were poking into my face. Multiple blades of grass poked me in the face, which drove me to finally open my eyes. Instead of my bed, just like I thought, I was laying on the ground, half of my face pressed against the coolness of the dirt while the rest of my face was chilled by the cold breeze. I looked up, trying to figure out why I was on the ground, outside, but for the moment, I had quite a few different, more pressing issues. The first was that I couldn't see my house, or even hear the noises of the surrounding cities. As far as I could hear, there was only the sound of the forest around me, with birds chirping high in the trees, the small breeze blowing through the air, and the rustling of the leaves as they shuddered in the breeze.

And the next issue was the trees themselves. They stretched high into the air, unlike most of the trees back at home. They were large, thick pine trees that towered over me, and every single one of them had large branches that nearly intersected with each other. The branches all rustled in the breeze that was blowing calmly through the forest, and as I looked around, I saw that, populating the forest floor were lush plants, covering the entirety of the ground, and truthfully, it was very, very beautiful.

"Whoa," I said, staring up at the treetops. "Where the hell am I?"

The birds chirped up in the trees as if answering my question, but so far, there seemed to be no other living creatures around me. It was just me, alone in a forest, standing up and trying to see if there were any landmarks around me, and so far, to the north, south, east, and west, there was nothing around me.

"Wow, okay this is weird," I said. "Did I get drunk last night?"

I took a step off to my side, running my fingers through my hair, and that's when I realized that something was majorly wrong. My hair was mostly gone, being reduced from a nice, thick head of hair down to a tiny bit of hair that covered the top of my head. And, on the sides of my face, where there used to be a small amount of a beard (more like peach fuzz) that donned the sides and underside of my face, I felt absolutely nothing there. I took my hand away from my face, and when I stared at my arm, I knew that something was wrong.

I wasn't even in my body!! I stood way, way taller than I had before, at about six feet tall, and I had bulging muscles that stretched the fabric of my shirt and jean pants. Thankfully, my jeans were somehow still long enough to cover my legs and ankles, and my shirt was still big enough to cover my belly and parts of my arms.

"Jesus, what the hell am I?" I said aloud, flexing my now gigantic muscles. "My god, would you look at the size of that thing? Wait a minute."

I grabbed the rim of my pants and pulled them away from my waist, and I peeked inside.

"Well, that's an upgrade." I muttered.

I was talking to no one as I was checking myself out, but for the moment, I was absorbed in the fact that I was crazy bigger than I was back home. I felt at my thighs and quads, trying to get a feel of the new muscles that I had been graced with, and as I felt over my shorts, I felt two things. First of all, strapped to my waist was the ancestral knife, safely encased in its sheath and ready to be drawn and wielded in a second. And, in my other pocket, I felt the weight of my phone resting against my thigh. Excited that I might have a means of communication, I grabbed my phone and took it out of my pocket, and I noticed two amazing things. First of all, my phone had 95% battery, despite not being charged last night, and I had three bars of service, even though I was deep in a forest, with seemingly no sign of human civilization around me.