(Written for the April Fools Day Fandom Bodyswap, even though my tardiness means it’s no longer April Fool’s Day at the time I’m posting this.)
His last thought as he collapsed to the snow was if I hadn't tried to fight them all at once, I wouldn't be in this mess. If he'd brought more armor, if he'd taken the time to build an extra effigy; he'd been so careless. It was almost a relief when the blowdart wounds overtook his grip on consciousness.
Like every time before it, he woke disoriented but intact, standing in front of the wooden portal an afternoon's walk from his camp. There was an uneaten sack lunch in his backpack, and he had only a day's growth of stubble instead of the enormous all-enveloping beard he'd grown to keep out the chill of eternal winter. (And, honestly, because there was no point to shaving it off when there was no one to impress except walruses and tallbirds.)
Like every time before it, it was as if he'd never left at all. Everything he'd gained had been wiped out in mere minutes, because he thought he could take on six MacTusk parties in a row - two at the same time, even - without making any more preparations than wooden armor and a couple of boomerangs. Months of effort wasted. He’d survived the bone-chilling cold, the impossibility of farming any food in forty-below temperatures, the cold dark nights, the nightmares formed into solid shapes, the twig shortage, and the Deerclops, only to die from his own impatient recklessness and a gang of aristocratic Scottish walruses with blowguns. Maxwell must be delirious with glee.
Wilson scowled. He wasn't going to stand around feeling sorry for himself this time, and he certainly wasn't going to go back to the base. What for? There were no preparations you could make for opening the portal. This wasn't going to keep him down any more than the time he'd tried to rescue Chester from the Deerclops only for it to smash him against the frozen ground like an overenthusiastic chef cracking an egg. (Twice. His meat effigy had ultimately done him no favors.) He could do it all again. He didn’t need a break. He reached out for the control lever and yanked it into place.
For a moment, nothing happened; then a familiar stab of terror shot through him as his own shadow deepened and reached up out of the ground, grabbing at his flailing hands and instinctively pedaling feet. The shadows melted together into a single huge fist, pulling him down into darkness as the ground closed over his head. He could feel knowledge being ripped from his mind as he plunged through the void, tearing away every scrap of practical skill he'd learned from his science machines. It was impossible to tell whether he was awake or asleep, clutched in the grip of a pitch-black nightmare.
After what could have been either a few seconds or a small eternity, he found himself lying on the ground, dazed and chilly with a fog hanging over his awareness. Maxwell was looming over him, issuing taunts in his prototypical radio-broadcaster's voice with his equally prototypical lethally-concentrated smugness. It took a moment before Wilson could focus enough to make out the words.
"...you'd think you would have learned your lesson by now."
By the time he could sit up to glare at Maxwell, standing there in a toasty warm coat and gloating when Wilson couldn't even remember how to flintknap a shovel, the magician had vanished in a puff of smoke.
That was when another empirical observation occurred to Wilson: It was very, very cold. He'd been deposited in a ring of burning trees, but the warmth of the flames didn't stop an icy breeze from blowing straight through his waistcoat. He had mere minutes before the fires ran out of fuel and he froze to death. He'd been here before.
There, a few feet away: the skeletal remains of a previous challenger, with their belongings scattered on the ground and a still-intact woven backpack. Wilson wrestled it off the skeleton and checked the contents; a thermal stone, a large bundle of grass, a half-burned torch, a rolled-up blueprint, a full armload of firewood, and three living logs that stared back at him from the bottom of the bag. Next he picked up the dead adventurer's axe (still in decent condition) and a second blueprint that had apparently slipped out of the backpack, and then, finally, grabbed the Divining Rod beneath its wholly unnecessary spikes and lifted it from its wooden stand. It let out a faint buzzing noise.
Once he’d built a campfire, he spared a moment to read the blueprints. One instructed him on how to turn a pair of rabbits into a pair of earmuffs; the other was a set of schematics for a Telelocator Focus, which could not possibly have been more useless. He surveyed the snowy field he'd arrived in; he couldn't see any rabbit holes, either, not even in the savannah off in the distance. He'd have to trust the heat stone to keep him warm.
“Don’t think throwing me back here can stop me,” he muttered, nudging the stone closer to the fire. “This just means I can get this frozen wasteland out of the way first.”
My chances of being killed by clockworks are probably about the same, at least. But there’s a reason I came here, and it doesn’t sound much nicer over there anyway.
Well, perhaps not nothing, but it does a better job of illuminating my immediate surroundings than the path ahead of me. Even considering that I somehow managed to produce a lens with no glass on hand, the basic laws of optics should prevent it from illuminating the area behind me as brightly as the direction I’m facing.
Now, if you’ll excuse me for a momeGO FOR THE EYES!
((apologies for the sudden unannounced dropoff in updates; summer basically did this to me
but I’m better now and things will pick up again, though most of the immediately upcoming updates are harder to draw than average and so will take slightly longer than otherwise))
@firefliesandmaxwellslights
don’t you insult my beard
The legendary Bighair™ has been spotted roaming the woods and leaving a trail of science behind it. It’s believed to be a relative of the Bigfoot and is most known for its super long and matted and gross beard that it sports. If approached by the Bighair™ offer it an electrical doodad or something to appease it.
It’s not so much the number of clockworks in the immediate vicinity as whether there are more waiting a short distance away to swoop in after their comrades, to be perfectly honest. However, I find that the limit for ‘too many’ increases much faster with bishops and rooks than with knights.
I’ll inform you of a scientific discovery I’ve made, as well: The greenish lamps dotted around this place turn themselves off when I sleep, as well as when I move away from them. They do not re-light themselves on their own when I wake up.
Also, if one should happen to fall asleep still wearing one’s miner hat, it is entirely possible for the fireflies inside to expire before the time when morning would arrive if there was sunlight here. Luckily I was able to shove a handful of new fireflies into the lens chamber before the monster in the darkness could do anything except hiss unnervingly at me.
turnnoffyourmind
areudirty
jacobvanloon
