02

Chapter One -- Not in Kansas anymore

The last thing she expected to feel waking up, obviously beside waking up at all, was warmth. Not just any warmth but the concentrated warmth of a fire close by and directed at her face and upper body.

Her problem with that realization was that she obviously failed to successfully kill herself, which was quite a bummer. Her ego really didn't need this. Feeling like a looser is never nice no matter the occasion. She was utterly sick of loosing, so thanks a bunch to whoever 'saved' her. It wasn't yet time for a full blown depression though -- again -- there were other things to consider.

She was naked -- well no surprise there and no biggie either, she was neither truly shy nor her problems quite at that harmless level of non-urgency. More troubling though, she most assuredly wasn't alone as she couldn't have dragged herself out of that lake, lit a fire big enough to make the soil beneath here snow-free, warm, dry and reasonable free of vegetation and then forget about it.

After hiking through Finland for multiple weeks this also seemed to be an decidedly non-Finnish kind of soil she was laying on, at least for November. Well perhaps she missed the border and was already in Russia but this was beside the point.

She also couldn't remember having any kind of blanket the likes of which her non-numb fingers and non-freezing skin told her she was covered with. So all being thought and felt: someone indeed must have 'rescued' her. So much for her maximal chances of success.

There was a slight problem with that theory turning into reality though. It just wasn't possible. The last thing her memories were able to produce was the image of some black sphere rushing at her beneath the ice of the frozen lake she took a final skinny dipping in. Worrisome perhaps, but she was no expert for sensory delusions on the brink of death from either suffocation or low body temperature and it didn't matter much anyway.

What mattered was that it took her half an hour with a professional ice axe to get through the frozen surface of the lake and create a hole big enough for her. No way could someone do this -- even if her body was stationary swimming on top -- in time to get her out, dry her off and raise her body temperature enough to prevent total and utter brain death.

No way someone could swim after her and drag her back through her own hole, without sharing her intended fate first. Even if that was possible, who would be daring enough to try such a risky feat for a stranger? Her senses told her she was alive though and memory as well as motor functions seemed to work perfectly fine, even if it is notoriously hard to diagnose brain damage on oneself.

This left only one course of action, namely opening her eyes, sitting up and asking whoever might be listening what was going on. Consequently she did just that.

Blinking at some old guy in hard to describe but decidedly strange clothing while wrapping the blanket around herself she didn't really get far with that plan though. "Wha..."

"Took you long enough to get up." He grunted now looking at her. "I don't th..." was as far as she got on her second try.

"Now just listen to me: we have some uphill hiking before us and not much time to waste so you just have to start doing things and ask your questions while doing them and please without slowing down. First on the list will be to put on some clothes or at least shoes while I clear the campsite. Your stuff is beneath your feet by the way. From experience I advise walking on the path to my right and in front of me before you start your interrogation or whatever is currently brewing in that head of yours."

Now she could be angry or something at such a rough treatment, but if there was a word to describe her current state of mind 'sad' was a good candidate with 'resigned' being the mayor spice of that to her well known dish. There was some 'bewildered' in there too somewhere but she was barely able to taste it below the far richer bouquet of the other two.

So she did as she was told and slipped into the mellow role of thwarted suicide case, which seemed to mollify the guy somewhat. The strange thing was though that 'her stuff' were actually her clothes, shoes, tools and complete backpack, all of which she buried at the shore of her nice little conifer-encircled winter lake.

All here but missing the not so unimportant dirt and grime they should absolutely be covered with. She cheeked her fingernails and there it was, brown and wet dirt that she positively smeared on her stuff in no small amount.

She looked at the guy again and no -- he certainly was no Mr. Clean. This stank in a most irritating way as there was no reasonable explanation for it. Or for me being alive, she reminded herself.

At least it meant he must have watched her at the lake. For this and other reasons she made no effort to hide her nudity while dressing herself, all the while sneaking glances at him from the corner of her eyes to gauge his reaction.

Troubling or not she wasn't sure, he did not look at her even once as far as she could tell. He also didn't seem to purposefully look away. Instead he was being anal about his work of seemingly making sure no traces of their presence were left behind, no small thing with an open campfire of this size.

She had a hard time concentrating on all this though and with good reason too. As soon as she was sitting up and looking at him there was something deeply troubling and totally wrong with the big picture around them.

For starters it wasn't winter. Now November nowadays wasn't always snowball-fights and freezing cold. Still, the white winter landscape in her most recent memory before waking up here didn't and could not anywhere -- at least on the northern hemisphere -- magically transform into some sort of northern California redwood forest in May, which her current surroundings deeply reminded her off.

That is the second problem right there: Finnish polar coniferous forests at any time of the year compared to the lush and imposing greenery around her like well ... it just wasn't possible. As were the 20° C her skin estimated the temperature to be around her. Her skin memory said her it should be closer to -15° C, as she managed to hit some particularly cold weather in the last two weeks of her journey.

Was she out long enough for him to fly her to southern Australia or some such place? It was also no late afternoon now as it should be, though that was a bit harder to tell. The light just didn't fit. She was at a less polar latitude now that was sure.

With her somewhat rising panic level she concentrated to be practical, which meant getting into her clothes, putting on her shoes, watching out for the guy and being prepared to use her very sharp ice axe in case of any sudden emergency.

While this answered nothing, at least it gave her some comfort and made her feel more secure in the presence of some stranger. Changing weight and concentrating herself on any strange signal her body might send her, she was also reasonable sure that she was not raped while being unconscious.

A more detailed check with her fingers for any strange fluids or lesions seemed unwise at the moment though with her pants already on, she should have checked first thing while still under her blanket.

Well or his blanket, the thing was certainly not hers and more importantly no longer where she left it in order to get dressed. At a place she was certain he was never close to as it was also very close to her and therefor ... was she already freaked out enough to miss someone or something snatch that blanket from practically right under her nose?

"Eh ... that blanked I was... you ... I mean...". Now he looked directly at her "It went back already, don't bother with it."

It went back? Like getting up and merrily walking home to tell his wife the story about that strange woman in the forest he covered for some time? She was fraying at the edges there she began to notice and couldn't suppress a nervous laugh.

"You will understand once we reach the plateau at the peak." He answered her nervously looking around, using his hand to casually point in the direction of the hillish mountain they were standing in front of, at least as far as she could tell with all these huge trees around her.

"It needs some seven hours of hiking but no actual climbing, so the pick you cling to with some rather white knuckles won't be of any use to you. I advise on searching yourself some sturdy stick, none too heavy mind you, in order to help you walking uphill and feel save from the robbers." He continued.

"There are robbers?" Her brain was fast losing any attempt of smart situational thinking and drifted more and more towards the 'roll with it' attitude. "No." His lips and eyes said he was genuinely joking, which at least in her book was a good sign. He also seemed relaxed.

"Why should I walk in front of you?" she wanted to ask casual too but it still came out with a distinct note of distrust. She was never good at this. At first he just shrugged, then he concentrated on her and spread his arms in a supposedly non-threatening manner.

"It helps. I tend to be a fast walker and talking to people about the strange and to most rather scary circumstances they find themselves in makes them stop a lot, which means they fall behind, which means they constantly leapfrog to catch up with me, which is tiring and the worst possible way to hike a mountain. That makes rests longer and more numerous, which costs time, which has all kinds of unnecessary consequences as traffic out of this part of the central axis is very limited until we are finished here. The last part will be clear to you once we reach the plateau by the way."

He then got closer to her and looked at her directly, his tone implying that he wanted to make a point. "Just to be clear about things: this here is in a way my job. I am not interested in you personally, neither am I a rapist, serial killer or whatever else you may have seen in the movies, or worse yet perhaps experienced personally."

"For the short part of your journey that leads you up that mountain I am to be your guide. My task is to answer all your questions honestly and to the best of my abilities. I am actually forbidden from lying to your kind by order of the Yaquay and the Council of Ten, both of which mean nothing to you right now but who hold quite about of leeway about one of your possible futures and more importantly right now, myself."

He then continued with a lighter air about him. "Oh and I also have no access to your personal file, so I know nothing about you but the place I took you from. A rather strange way to kill yourself by the way."

He shrugged like it was nothing to him. "It made things easier for me though, nothing much to repair about your body and I didn't even had to cloak myself, which is rather hard under water anyway."

Suddenly she remembered something: "That dark sphere ... that was you?" Again a shrug "Well not me as such as you can see. You can call the sphere my ship if you like, but your language really has no good word for it."

A short pause and a look ahead he continued. "Enough talking with your legs resting though, we have some way to go. You may walk wherever you like, just keep somewhat near if you want to talk with me and try not to fall back too much."

"You cannot be lost in these woods but I would prefer not to turn back in order to urge you to hurry, like if a was some dotting parent. Also, I recommend leaving your baggage behind, you won't need it. Well perhaps that backpack of yours could be useful if you have some water or food in it but please do not burden yourself too much."

With that he started walking up the path she had already noticed. "There is just one path that goes uphill to the plateau but other paths will terminate into it from both east and west. If you are too far behind to see me, just go upwards, but always and only upwards."

Just as he was about to leave the clearing their now nonexistent camp was in, he stretched his right arm to grab something from the ground that turned out to be the strangest walking stick or more like cane she had ever seen.

It was a little more then hip high for him and at its top there was a sphere of something that reminded her of amber. This sphere served as handhold and gave the whole thing an aristocratic vibe. The rest of him certainly didn't say gentleman though, peasant more like.

The cane though, before he reached it, it was sticking straight up in the ground. She walked over just to be sure and yes, this was solid rock. No fissure, no recess or holding mechanism. Normally she would think a free standing cane to be some sort of trick, especially one that seemed to have some fluid motion along the ever changing surface of its midnight black shaft. In her current situation though, she wasn't so sure.

She also wasn't sure whether she could trust all or even anything of what he just said, at least the parts that made some sense to her. She also couldn't say which of her roughly 2.000 questions she should ask, if any -- or if she should make a run for it.

Hell she wasn't sure if she was actually awake, which is why the most rational course of action she could think of right now was to slap her own face. According to that little empirical experiment she at least could answer one question.

All the others ... she needed him for, she thought, while starting to jog in order to keep up with him. Of course she had to turn back once to get her backpack, cursing herself for dumping her phone after she left the ferry in Helsinki.

She took care to carefully hide her axe in her backpack for future fast access but left her tent, most of her winter clothing and some other things behind. Going uphill with all that weight wouldn't be fun at all.

2. Chapter -- Stranger in a strange land

That cane was hypnotically.

She should watch him like a hawk, any expression, each and every wrinkle, smile, frown, the movement of his eyes, all the possible signs that could tell her something his words did not. While she was no interrogator by any stretch of the imagination her options were rather limited at the moment.

Walking closely behind him in order to see as much of his face and mannerism as possible she indeed stopped from time to time at his answers, simply unable to compute what he just said to her at times.

And then the cane, how many times did she berate herself after staring at the thing, whatever it truly was. And he noticed it she was sure.

Beside from his short monologue at the start he seldom took the initiative though, preferring to calmly wait for her to ask something that he tried to answer in a mostly straightforward manner with barely any elaboration, so she had to throw follow up question after follow up question like some little girl interviewing her father about the hills and the moon.

At first her priority was to find out more about this strange hiking trip of theirs in order to assuage her most pressing fears about her current situation and whereabouts. Strange how she could try to kill herself, wake up from it and then worry she ended up with some killer -- well or rapist or worse.

"There are others ... I mean you did this before,.. with someone like me?" He turned back to look at her for a short moment and then continued walking.

"Many over the centuries. Thousands certainly. It is not all I do though. I have other missions too and I am not the only one doing this particular one. And to answer the implied second part of your question: not all but most of them were suicide cases."

He was fucking with her mind and it wasn't funny. So he smuggled crazy bitches that killed themselves for a living? How did that work?

Was her little lonesome lake unknowingly to her advertised in the internet as a hot place to go for a serious offing? And he had other jobs like breeding dogs for illegal back-alley fighting rings or some such?

Well best go for the confusing details to draw him out a bit instead of quizzing him about the nice little bordello they were probably currently heading for.

"Centuries?" she croaked. "Lets just say I am older then I look and leave it at that." Asshole. "Where are we? What day is it?"

There it was, he could talk in riddles all day and she wouldn't care, her current surroundings and whole situation though was more then just idle crazy talk. It wasn't helping that she had lost track of time over the last weeks while hiking.

"We are near the south pole, which is our goal by the way, and currently hike up the southern apex mountain in the arboreal zone. During our flight that took around nine hours I kept you unconscious and slowly normalized your body temperature."

He then turned his head halfway in her direction, likely to see her reaction to what he said next. "I also repaired the most serious tissue damage you suffered from the cold. You will still be tender though for some days, especially around your hands and feet."

Looking forward again he continued. "After arriving here and making a fire I let you wake up naturally, which didn't take more then thirty minutes. So all told we left the lake of your near demise a little over ten hours ago."

While his geographic lesson was just some mumbo jumbo without head nor tail and his medical skills were to her mind dubious at best, at least she now had something to hold onto with that 'flight' of his.

So was this Australia and they were 'near' the southern pole, actually 'heading' for it? Whatever for? How could one get to the south pole by climbing a mountain? If there was an airfield up there why not land there instead of in a dense forest? How did one go about landing in a dense forest anyway?

If she believed him, well the parts anyway that had some basis in her reality, he was driving around in her Finnish lake in some sort of spherical black submersible looking for drowning people. Cool.

And he found a few thousands over the 'centuries'. Supercool for him.

He then proceeded to drug them unconscious and fly them to Australia in his superfast private plane, providing for their medical needs along the way and likely getting a first peekaboo and real feel-up while doing so.

Now what a multi-talented, resourceful guy and sooo considerate. This was beginning to scare her again and she once again chided herself for not checking closely for signs of rape. The guy admitted he drugged her for fucks sake!

What else was there? He seemed to have a deadline of sorts, stuff about some council and an axis or whatever and they were heading for a plateau with likely something on it.

All in all it sounded more like the hogwash some cultists may cook up instead of some hardened human trafficker. The latter would probably just hit her in the face and tell her to shut up, not that she frequented those circles much but you know ... movies and stuff.

Most likely she was inattentive while hiking with all the things going on in her head and he must have seen her and decided to follow. Hiding in the woods she could imagine him watching her preparations, which would explain how he got her stuff. Perhaps she misjudged how far away she got underwater from the hole she hacked into the ice and all he had to do was to walk right up to it and pull her out.

He then could lite a fire and warm her up sufficiently for him to be able to transport her to his ... intercontinental private super-jet complete with a washing machine and dryer... well there were some gaps still but it was looking already halfway explainable.

That sphere or his 'ship' as he called it was just an hallucination after all that was sure. It might be possible that an airfield was not that far from the place she woke up in, the forest was dense after all. Time to wrap things up.