You wake up to your alarm going off in your ear. You
really don't want to get out of bed, but you really need a piss, and you have to drive to work in an hour. You grab the alarm, bring it over your face and fumble with it until it turns off, then sling your legs across the edge of the bed, and put your feet down into last night's pizza. You lift your feet out of it, kick the pizza box to the side, get up and head towards the bathroom.
After you're done using the toilet, having a shower and getting dressed, you head to the kitchen and get yourself some breakfast. Nothing glamorous, just some toast and water, and proceed to spend the rest of your time before work eating the toast and watching TV. Nothing particularly major, just some stuff about why something's bad for you, someone streaking across the pitch in a tennis match you never cared to watch and some scientists doing something or other you don't give a damn about.
You leave for the supermarket you work in. Given it's a weekday, it shouldn't be too busy. You get there, start sweeping, making sure shelves are stocked, check dates and such. Not exactly riveting work. Still, could be worse. At least your family was friends with a landlord and you could actually get a job near a property they owned. You're able to live by yourself without much money to spare, but it'll do until you can get a better paying job. Preferably one you actually like.
The day goes by slowly, nothing much happening. Helping a few customers, herding some trolleys, trying to look as happy as you can whilst feeling bored out of your mind...
You're in the middle of helping a customer when there's a very sudden, very loud BANG, as if someone fired a gun right next to your ear and you land flat on your back. Taking a moment to recover and for your ears to stop ringing, you realise something's different. Very different.
Namely, you, and everyone else that was in the shop... aren't. You're in the middle of what looks to be a forest made of trees about three times wider than you are with your arms outstretched and about as tall as some skyscrapers you've seen, as well as being distant enough from one another to have a motorway between them. Everything is covered in moss and quite dark due to the impenetrable canopy above you in addition to the mist, and the air is cool and damp.
You have a few seconds of panic before realising this is a dream. It
must be a dream. The shop you're in doesn't suddenly disappear and get replaced by a forest of enormous trees. It doesn't. You've probably fainted for whatever reason and are going to be sent home and get a couple of days off.
You pinch yourself. Hit yourself. Try manipulating the dream, but to no avail. You don't wake up, you aren't suddenly able to fly or on a beach or anything. Nothing is happening.
Then you hear a loud, distant roar. Followed by a faint thumping noise that slowly gets louder. Whilst the logical part of your brain is refusing to believe this is real, the less logical part is telling you to dart somewhere concealed. Without realising it, you're running full-pelt towards a dense bush, and everyone else is either flipping out, hiding, running, or seemingly unconscious.
The thumping gets louder, and you realise several things at the same time. One, there's thumping coming from multiple directions. Two, some of the thumping is coming from the air. Three, you are pretty sure you can see a giant silhouette in between the trees. A silhouette of something you've never seen before.
Suddenly, you realise you've been holding your breath, and stop, trying to exhale and inhale as quietly as possible. The silhouette looks like it may arrive in the general area in a few seconds.
You sit there, too scared to even make a whimpering sound as what looks like a horribly twisted giant insect forms from the silhouette. It appears to lack any sort of proper legs, instead having four rather deadly looking scythe-like blades. From the looks of things, it's about the size of a trailer home, if one was flipped on its front so it was taller than it was wide, and has a brown body, mostly covered in similarly coloured exoskeleton with a large abdomen. As soon as it's completely visible, a number of people break from cover and run off, only for it to swat them with its legs and eat them. A few people escape, but judging by the distant screams, they don't seem to have gone far before something else got them. The insect-thing begins eating several unconscious people before another one arrives. There appears to be some kind of stand off between them before the newcomer retreats.
Eventually, the beating noise from another creature is so loud that it must also be incredibly close, but you can't tell where it's approaching from. You take your gaze off the insect and try to locate where the sound is coming from before realising it's coming from right behind you. You turn around in time to see a similar insectoid creature, this one red, slightly smaller and with what appears to be a stinger the size of a grown man on its abdomen. The brown creature turns to face it, and, after a similar stand off, they charge at each other.
There's a series of furious, loud clicking noises emanating from the two as they both try to get their mandibles around each other, and try to wound each other with their scythe-like legs. After a minute of tussling, the red insect gets its stinger into a soft spot of the brown one's armour, and the brown one begins to make a sort of screeching noise. The area around the sting swells up incredibly rapidly, before it explodes into goop and chitin, taking out a large chunk of the brown insect's thorax, ultimately killing it. The red insect begins dragging off the brown one when the thumping from above is accompanied by pressure spikes so bad you have to cover your ears. The red insect looks towards the canopy in time for a giant lizard to come down right on top of it. You can't see much of its body because of the sun shining through the hole it has left in the canopy blinding you, but as soon as it has the insect pinned to the ground, you realise it looks similar to what a dragon would look like. It has a few differences, though. Its wings are immense. Much longer than you'd ever expect wings to be on anything. Its front legs end in things that look more like scaly hands than feet, and its back legs are incredibly heavily muscled.
The two fight for a short period of time before the dragon-creature bites into the insect and cracks its exoskeleton with a loud
crunch. The insect begins screeching and, unusually, making a sort of squealing noise whilst flailing. After a while, the flailing stops and the only thing indicating it's still alive is the occasional twitch in one of its legs.
During the whole scene, a number of people lost their nerve and ran. Several were squashed by the fighting beasts, but this time, when people managed to escape, there weren't screams following them, leading you to assume that whatever was causing them has gone, or the people are being more careful and not running into ravines or something.
Whilst you were paying attention to that, the dragon creature started eating the red insect, and upon eating about half of it, began to leave. In order to fly off with the trees in the way, it partially opened its wings and leapt about halfway out of the canopy before fully opening its wings. It was then that you could finally work out how large the wings were. The body was a larger than the brown insect's, maybe the size of a small house, of and the tail being about as long as the body with a rudder-like shape on the tip, but its wings were about four times as long as its body each.
You try moving out of the bush, but your legs refuse to work. You try moving again, with the end result being you collapsing onto the ground in a pile of dead leaves. You spend a few minutes lying there, before someone else comes along and checks your pulse. You can't see them properly out the corner of your eye, however.
'Oh thank fuck!' you hear them say. The tone of their voice quite clearly suggests they're a woman. 'Come on, lets see if we can't get you up.'
She begins dragging you up, and your arms and legs start working again, albeit pretty badly.
You have a look around when you're standing up and notice that there's seven others in the group of people. Looking around, you see several bloody smears amongst all the other gore on the ground. People that had been squashed or killed and eaten.
Looking among the other people, you don't notice anything particularly interesting about any of them. One is currently dragging his hands through his hair and tearing out a number of them whilst swearing to himself, and another is covered in small cuts, but otherwise, everyone seems fine.
They all, however, look bewildered.
'Do you have any idea what the hell happened?' one of them asks you. Not trusting your voice, you simply shake your head. 'Fuck', they mutter.
The other survivors will have probably bolted at this point and either hurt themselves or run too far for you to be able to find them easily. It appears to be midday right now.
You try everything to make sure it's not a dream again, but have no such success. This seems to be real life.
You try to rack your brains to think of something to do.
That took me a good while to write.
This is basically a suggestion game. You say what to do, I try and do it.
So. situation:
There's seven other people with you
You're in a forest with giant trees
The only fauna you've seen has been incredibly nasty-looking and dangerous
The majority of the people have disappeared
Author
Topic: World of Giants (Updates are walls of text!) (Read 7072 times)