DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
A Sexual Adventure in a Fantasy World
Chapter VIII -- Trouble with Fairies
They had traveled well beyond their encounter with the nymphs and were becoming accustomed to the unusual life around them. The nymphs were right in that they were not cold, their bare feet were holding up, and they all felt well, good, actually. Sleeping on the bare ground even came easily other than the daylight and night hours being off. The biggest issue was food, despite the nymphs' assurances. Nothing they tried made them sick, but not enough was palatable. The flavors were off, and almost everything they tried was tough and chewy. They often went hungry because they could only choke down part of what they collected. Things improved when Alan found a piece of pyrite in a streambed. He was able to get a good spark, striking it against another hard rock, and after several attempts, they had fire. With fire, they had cooking.
Cooking made some of what they found easier to eat, and the extra nutrition upped their moods. If they had a pot and could boil their food as well as roost it, they would have even more options. As it was, they were resourceful enough to have wove a couple of crude sacks to carry a few things they had collected.
On the sixth day since they left the cave, one strange sight stood out above the others. They were cresting a ridge with Alan walking in front of Nicolet. The other two were a hundred or so feet back. Nicolet was looking down at the multi-hued soil on the path when she looked up and almost ran into the back of Alan, who had stopped abruptly.
"Ugh, I almost ran into you. What's up?"
"Look." He pointed into the valley laid out below them. In the center, to their right, was a depression with only a low-growing, very green grass and scattered tree-sized spikes. At first glance, it looked as if there had been a large number of trees cut off tens of feet above the ground. It wasn't uniform, however. The tops were of various heights.
"Okay, I give," said Nicolet, "What are we looking at?"
"I'm not sure. Look, one is producing a brown cloud. Others are on the ground like they were deflated."
"I saw an illustration like this in a geology class. I think it was paleontology, actually. It might have had something to do with plants moving onto the land, but they weren't plants."
"You're talking about Prototaxites. Those were fungi from 400 million years ago on Earth."
"Okay," she said skeptically. "Even for here, that's weird. They really grew that tall?"
"Yeah. I believe the fossils were almost 30 feet tall, and that one with the brown smoke around it. I bet those are spores. It probably releases them, then deflates. It's not the only giant fungi we've seen here."
"But the others were in the forest, not out in the open, on what? Is this savannah? They're just weird looking."
"I don't disagree."
"What are you guys looking at?" asked Scarlet, walking up.
Nicolet pointed, and Scarlet said, "Okay, tell me all about them, as we give them a wide berth." She continued walking, followed by Sean.
Nicolet gave credit to Sean finding the next unusal, but useful, thing. They had walked well into late evening, and were duscussing where to bed down for the night. She watched as Sean disappear into a tree. What he had found was a tree that formed a kind of tent with dense, low-hanging branches forming a hollow space near the trunk. Soft needles had fallen from the tree made the interior beneath the branches rival the best beds. It would have not been difficult to make a suitable living space for four people beneath the protective branches. When she woke late in the morning, she thanked Sean. That night everyone had slept very comfortably. From that night on, they would now look for a tent tree every evening.
Along with the tent tree--the best name they could come up with at the time-- the overall character of the landscape had changed, and Nicolet could see why the forest nymphs disliked the place. Now--according to Scarlet--the sparse but large trees more closely resembled savannah trees, except these were scattered amongst the extraordinary landscape's unusual grasses, shrubs, and prolific pastel flowers. Nicolet added that from a distance, the most dominant trees resembled the live oaks of the American Gulf Coast. Except up close, they were giants with trunks as big around as a suburban house. Not being crowded, the tree canopies spread outward as much upward. Beneath these trees, she felt like an ant, and a small village could be protected by just one of the behemoths. Occasional groves of much smaller fruiting trees were present between the giants. One, in particular, had softball-sized fruit that looked delicious. The fruit, however, had a flavor they recognized--sour, very sour. She was a fan of lemonade, but these fruits would have made lemonade XL. The consensus was that they needed more time to ripen.
As they gathered up the few things they could carry with them in the morning, Sean said, "Hold on, guys. As I was falling asleep last night it occurred to me it was time to access our situation again. We should discuss this place rationally now that we've traveled for a few days. You people seem to be accepting this magical land too easily."
"What do you mean, Sean?" asked Scarlet. "It is what it is, and we must deal with it. I don't understand it, but what else can we do?"
"I guess I'm just saying that if we understand it better, maybe we'll find an easier way out. Is what we're experiencing real? We're marching off to where and for what reason?"
"Okay, Sean has a point," said Alan. "I want to better understand this place, too, even though I don't think we can with the current data. But let's talk it through. Just maybe there is something we are missing. Here are my thoughts. First of all, magic is usually just science that people don't understand. I don't know how that helps us, but it's said. Second, the evidence says we are in another world. Is this possible? Well, I'm glad I'm a geologist, not a theoretical physicist. If I was a physicist, this place would probably have caused my brain to explode. At least I haven't come across any talking rocks. That would be a geologist's nightmare after having pounded so many into pieces with my rock hammer. Anyway, parallel universes have been a hot topic in physics. Could there be two universes so close together that they intersect occasionally and allow for matter to pass between them? Thoughts?"
"I don't think this is a parallel world, Dr. Janssen," said Sean.
"Okay. I agree. If it were a parallel universe and another version of Earth, it seems that it would have the same sun, and the length of the day would be the same. And the other night, when I got up to pee, I saw a large bright moon, which also didn't look right. When I went out in the morning, there was a moon in almost the same spot, but it was smaller. I think there are two moons. I agree; this isn't a parallel Earth."
"What then?" Nicolet asked.
"Another world, but I don't think the physics we know explains any of this, especially how we got here. A wormhole? That wasn't what I imagined a wormhole would look like. Nothing close to that. Whatever brought us here is beyond our science."
"Magic?" she asked.
"Science we don't understand," Alan replied.
"I think there is evidence that the connection from here to our world is not a one-off thing," said Scarlet. "We appear to have common ancestors but have evolved differently. I think the humans here are connected to our world and probably didn't evolve here in isolation. Another bizarre thing is that this place helps validate my grandfather's theories."
"We still haven't seen any of the humans of this world," noted Alan. "Perhaps we need to meet some before we make an assessment."
"You have a point, but the nymphs think we are alike."
"Yes. It seems that we must be similar. What about elves?" Alan asked.
"Elves, if they are like us but not quite, may have evolved from earlier humans. Other hominids here may have come from our world much earlier and evolved further here. The nymphs mentioned dwarfs; might they have evolved from Neanderthals? Neanderthals were signifcantly shorter than us, but stockier and likely much stronger. That kind of sounds like dwarfs in most fairy tales. Or maybe it was the other way around; the beings on our planet evolved from those here, or most likely, it is a two-way exchange. The remarkable thing is that we know of these beings in the mythology of our world. The nymphs parallel closely what I know of Greek mythology--not the artist's interpretations, but the written descriptions. Either they traveled to our world at some time in the past, or stories of their existence came to our world from here."
"Why don't we have nymphs, elves, and some of these other beings in our world?" Nicolet asked.
"Maybe we did. We know other hominids existed along with Homo sapiens, but they all went extinct," said Scarlet. "Sapiens, us, became the dominant hominid in our world, and that apparently didn't happen here."
"Didn't humans cause the Neanderthals and other species to go extinct? We seem to be good at that kind of genocide," said Sean.
"That's a controversial theory, but it's possible," answered Scarlet.
"Maybe that's why the elves dislike us so much," said Sean.
"That would be a good reason, but we don't have any evidence for that. However, it's a hypothesis to keep in mind."
"Could the elves know something of our world?" Alan asked.
"Okay. How does any of this help us?" asked Nicolet. "I'm still hungry and mightily tired of being naked. I want a cheeseburger and my sweats."
"I don't know that it does for us right now," said Alan, "but understanding is ultimately going to help us solve the problem. Unfortunately, Scarlet's observations make me think that the connections between the two worlds happen but rarely. Otherwise, this world and ours would be more similar, but on the flip side, if our coming here is not a one-time event and this place has made it into Earth's mythology, it means there is probably a way home. Right now, we need to collect more data, and we can't do that sitting here."
"Hold on," said Sean. "We don't seem to be getting anywhere, and we are getting farther and farther from the portal we know exists, at least periodically. I'm not convinced we should keep going into the unknown. Might we be better off turning around and going back to where we came through if these connections are rare? We know that was a connection point. Granted, we might have to live there for a while before it opens, but we know it is there. We would just have to figure out how to deal with the elves."
"It sounds like these elves could make our lives pretty uncomfortable," said Alan.
"So says the Nymphs, if that's what they were. Maybe they wanted us out of their territory and were trying to scare us."
"Makes sense," said Nicolet.
"If the portal opens up again in our lifetime, if it even opens again in the same place, if the elves don't capture us, if when we went through, could we even get ourselves out of the cave on the other side?" said Scarlet. "If we had gotten back through quickly, rescuers might have been there. If we have to wait too long to go through, and no one is there, there is no way we could get ourselves back up through that system of shafts. Remember what we said about the ropes rotting? Even if we had all our gear, some of those climbs are only done with a top rope or technical climbing gear. Remember, repelling into open space off the overhang. Even an aid climb with bolts might not be possible. That cave is one hell of a hole. We could end up trapped on our side, dying in the dark. Someday, someone would find our bones. I'd rather be here and find a portal that opens to someplace more hospitable. In the meantime, it's crazy interesting here, if nothing else."
"Fuck," said Sean, "sorry. It is just that this is .... fucked. It seems pretty hopeless, and it feels like we are completely screwed. Heading off into the unknown is nerve-racking. And I'd really like to see my parents and brothers again."
"It's scary, I get it, Sean," said Scarlet, "but I feel like there is more hope if we find other humans, humans that just maybe know something more of these portals. And in many ways, it's no different than when the first explorers ventured into the interior of the Americas. They saw things no one else had ever seen before. I like that kind of exploration. Opportunities like this don't exist in our world anymore except in very inhospitable places like the deep ocean."
"Yeah, okay, onward to find other humans and avoid elves, I guess."
