Face first into the trees

[Roger Smith]

The disgruntled young Heir of Time plowed through the gate from the Nexus, immediately losing his orientation as he went. If it was this bad without having to worry about standing, he had a pretty good idea he would be hating life if he had to make a trip through on his feet.

......well, hating life more.

As things stood, he made his way through the gate and promptly lost all sense of direction. The momentum which had been carrying him straight forward kept him going, but his attempt to remain going forward sent him straight down, where he earned a face full of dirt and all manner of fallen plant matter.

He just layed there, face down in the dirt, while one hand patted the ground aimlessly about him, as if trying to find something by touch alone. He was unsuccessful, and when he finally realized he wasn't going to find whatever he was groping around for, he merely slowly clenched his hand into a fist, gathering up a handful of loose leaves, dirt and probably something else he would have rather not noticed, he pounced the earth with his closed fist.

It was somewhere between a pathetic outlet of rage and a pitiful admission of defeat.

Slowly, ever so slowly, Adam lifted his head to rest his chin, rather than his face, on the ground. "I have gone beyond simply hating everything this place has to offer, and come completely around to emerge on the other side. This place is shitty. But it's still not as shitty as the shithole I came from before I was here. I don't hate it here. I don't even mildly dislike it here. Naaaaaah, this place is alright."

It was almost entirely a lie, but past experience had taught Adam that the best way to calm himself down when he was on the verge of flipping the fuck out was to let his building rage out through prodigious application of bullshit. And claiming this place was better than where he'd come from...it wasn't a complete lie, but it was still pretty high on the BS-o-meter.

"Okay.....okay....I'm good...." With a heave, Adam got his hands under himself and pushed himself up to his hands and knees. "I'm fine....I'm cool...." He got his crutch, and hauled himself up to his feet, rising slowly but surely back to his feet to stand up. He brushed himself off as best he could with his free hand, before finally fishing about for his lost glasses. It took him a moment, but he finally found them, covered in dirt and leaves, but otherwise whole and still in the same relative condition as they always had been.

A quick spin about one hand, and in short order Adam had rewound his glasses to their undirtied condition from before they had been flung through the portal to this extremely humid tree-filled place that was not the Nexus. He put them back in their proper place on his face, fidgeted with them for almost a full thirty seconds, before he shook his head in irritation. The damn things never did fit quite right.

He turned around to set off anywhere that wasn't the gate, and promptly plowed face-first into a rather large tree.

[Roger Smith]

It briefly occurred to Adam, as he slowly and painfully slid down the tree to rejoin his unwanted union with the ground, that he had never really...been around trees for just about all of his life. His early years out in the middle of fucking nowhere hadn't exactly had many trees around. Or really any at all. There had been that one tree kind of off in the distance...but it was pretty much dead from day one in Adam's memory. And that didn't really count anyway.

Even once he'd been roped into his whole SBURB session there had just...never been any trees. It was an incredibly minor thing, and to have the realization suddenly dawn on him only after having literally run face-first into a tree...the implications were not lost on him. They were entirely, completely ignored, but they were not lost on him. He didn't even stop to ponder over why there had never been any trees in the places he'd been to. He had been to a rather remarkable number of places, over a dozen planets, in fact....and never really seen any trees, unless you counted in the distance and off on the horizon somewhere every now and then.

That may have accounted for the fact of how he was more focused on just how unpleasant having his face slide over the rough bark of a tree felt more than just about anything else.

"Note to self....pay attention when among trees from now on...."

He didn't really have any intention to see if a second collision would be less painful than the first.

[Roger Smith]

Righting himself from his second meeting with the ground in the short timespan he had spent in this tree-filled 'verse, Adam brushed the dirt and various detritus from himself as best he could. Even with the supernatural cleanliness-retaining properties of the amazingly comfortable -- if not quite 'stylish' -- action pajamas of a God Tier player, it was surely dirt that was his greatest nemesis. Dirt, or perhaps wet sand. They were most definitely in league with each other in some strange...unholy union of minor annoyance.

He finally turned his attention back to his surroundings, alighting on the ground to get an Adam's eye view of the area, and try and get a general idea of where to go. His lack of anything approaching wilderness experience quickly showed itself as he grew more and more confused and frustrated. He assumed it would be easy enough to pick out some kind of trail or semi-worn path, what with the general idea being that people who came here generally went in common enough directions to leave some manner of trail.

He didn't find one, perhaps not realizing that there were just as liable to be as many trails as people who came through the gate.

Giving up on finding any sort of more easily-followed trail, he resolved to simply pick out a direction at random, and head that way, and see what he might find. Whatever it was, it was most certainly going to be less terrible than what he had seen so far. He would just need to remember to be careful, and not...run into any more trees.

[Roger Smith]

Progress wasn't exactly....slow, so much as it was impossible to measure. Without any sense of where he was going, and only a vague idea, by now, of how to get back to where he'd started, Adam had no way to really measure whether he was any closer to his destination -- a thing he was still trying to figure out, as it so happened -- than he was when he started. The only things he knew for certain were how long he'd been traveling among the trees, and how many times he had not run into them again.

Tempted as he was with the easy distraction of diving into the dataverse again, he was more preoccupied with not getting lost among the trees, or worse yet, getting distracted and ending up in some extremely unpleasant situation.

Oh, and he was suddenly beginning to realize something else that hadn't really occurred to him for a while. Ever since he rose to God Tier, really... It wasn't as if it didn't bother him even then, just being a God Tier player didn't really make you a god. Just sort of...god esque...kind of like a god...sort of. You'd live forever, and it was hard as just about anything to kill you, which was always nice. But you didn't really get all of that phenomenal cosmic power gods had. Most of them. Even First Guardians were, on the whole, more powerful than an average God Tier player.

The right Class and Aspect combination might give them an edge...or maybe the right extraneous circumstances or the right training or enough experience, maybe...

But the whole point was that, end of the day, God Tier did not mean Actual Literal God. Except in the metaphorical sense. Technically, you could survive in space, or without air or whatever for a really long time. And technically you could probably survive without food and water for just as long. But the problem with that whole thing was...well...

"Good fucking god, I have probably never been more hungry in my life than I am at this exact moment in time." The sudden realization was enough to bring Adam to a halt, one hand clamped firmly over his gut as it let out a rumbling growl of protest, declaring its emptiness in the most obnoxious, impossible to ignore way possible. Inserting itself rudely into Adam's finely-honed, tree-dodging mental processes.

".....when was the last time I ate? Now that I really think about it..." Adam counted off the days in his head, tilting his head back to the mostly-shrouded sky above as he did. When he reached the double digits, he stopped counting. "....okay, too damn long ago, that's how long. Why I'm just realizing this now might be the more pressing question."

He didn't want to admit that it might have something to do with his sudden arrival in this strange new place. That the Omniverse might have some bearing on his god tier awesomeness beyond the apparent stealing of almost all his powers. That he was probably just as vulnerable to dying from not getting anything to eat or drink as he'd been before he became a God Tier player. That he was probably really, really fucking freaked out somewhere in the back of his mind.

.....or, more likely, none of that really crossed his mind because he was so focused on how hungry he was.

"Step one: delicious beverages. Step two: food. Step three: learn to stop voicing thought processes aloud." He settled down on the ground, back to a tree, setting his crutch aside. "....step four: continue random jungle adventure I seem to be in the middle of."

[Roger Smith]

Seated as comfortably as he could on the rather uncomfortable forest floor, Adam produced his laptop from wherever it was he kept it, and hoping that certain information he kept on it was still present even after the general strangeness of summoning it here in the first place. A few short moments later, a faint smile curved over his features. It was still there. Various sorts of recipes, ingredient lists, and item lists and procedural work for making all manner of crazy things, from food to many of the tools he had used in his session back home, all listed and organized in the most painstaking, time-consuming way possible.

It was most definitely efficient to have it all there and ready, and he really should have thanked Rhys for organizing it all for him. But unfortunately he'd never gotten the chance before....well, before this general chaos of arriving here had happened.

Putting that aside, he looked through his files for inspiration. And in short order, he had put his mind to the task of summoning, processes of making and preparing both food and acquiring the aforementioned delicious beverages. And in a matter of minutes, he had at least one of them. And the entire bottle of the most delicious Generic SBURB brand Cola was soon gone, as quickly as it had come. Adam really should learn to take the time to enjoy his food and drink one of these days. But probably not today. Or any time in the next foreseeable large number of them.

For now, he was busy hastily -- and rather messily, it might be said -- absolutely devouring the very over-large burger he had summoned alongside his delicious beverage. And all too soon, he was finished, and looking remarkably more content and less on the verge of punching something -- or everything within reach, as the case may have been -- than he had just moments before.

"It really is remarkable what a bit of food can do for your mood...

[Roger Smith]

His bad mood mostly alleviated, if only for the immediate moment, and his rather suddenly-remembered hunger handled for now, Adam had delved once more into the Dataverse on his laptop, and found mostly nothing of interest, save for a way to pass the time. He had a brief back and forth with someone asking way too many questions, who he promptly gave as few answers and general responses to as possible, before choosing to ignore them in favor of being Adam.

His boredom wavering on the verge of being sated, he chose to return to his aimless tree-roaming exploits, such as they were. He had long since given up on trying to get back to the gate, having lost all sense of where it was in relation to wherever he was at that particular moment in time. Rather, he had, at some point difficult to determine with any accuracy, decided to simply continue his aimless wandering in the hopes he would eventually find something that offered a better alternative than simply trees.

It really was remarkable, even now, just how many trees there actually were. Going from the middle of nowhere in a borderline desert, to a planet made entirely of barren mountains and storms and hate, to empty fucking space...yeah, he had never really given much thought to trees at all. Much less how much they hurt to run into.

For that matter, he hadn't really given much thought to why he was so generally clumsy and had been so...off since he'd gotten here. It wasn't as if he was paying any less attention to things, and he was pretty sure he was still just as aware of his surroundings as his general five senses had ever been, and there...there was...

Wait.

The fact that he almost just glossed over 'five senses' entirely in his head brought him up short, with a rather startling realization. He only had his basic five senses again. He couldn't...do the weird Time-y thing where he could sense things before they happened anymore. That...that would actually explain a lot, if he actually thought about it. Why he'd been so distracted and making so many mistakes and being generally...completely unaware of simple things since he'd arrived here to begin with.

"Just when I was starting to think this place might not be so bad...I make this kind of realization..." His open palm met his face in a light smack, his features set in a deep grimace. "I need to start thinking more thoroughly more often....I might realize these things sooner."

In his current and rather sudden state of disgruntled distress and disappointment, he completely failed to notice the soft scurrying of of scaled feet trailing after him. He even managed to miss the faint cry of "NAK." as he let out a particularly heavy sigh.

God dammit, Adam.

[Roger Smith]

The realization of his loss of even more of his crazy Time powers than he had at first assumed was, indeed, a rather jarring one. It left him shaken up, preoccupied with frantically thinking over just what other powers he might be missing. That...Omni or whatever had said that death wasn't permanent or something. Death hadn't really been permanent for hm as it was -- dying still sucked, but it was a minor inconvenience for a God Tier player, really -- but it looked like even if he'd lost that particular power, it was still mostly the same rules.

.....hopefully. New rules were a pain.

He'd never really focused on it, or even really considered it until just that precise moment, but now that he thought about it and tried to do.....Time things.....he was rapidly finding out that an alarming portion of his repertoire, so to speak, was just....lost to him. Like he just couldn't access most of his power, let alone the specific applications he had picked out and practiced during his session. It was rather depressing and upsetting, to have all that work be snatched from him.

Of course, it was even more depressing that it had taken him as long as it had to even think of checking on his powers, so to speak.

It should speak volumes on the level of distracted Adam was that at some point in the past several minutes, he had acquired a small red crocodile which had taken up perch on his shoulder. And the small reptile let out a singular, point-blank "NAK." in his ear to finally alert him to its presence.

For his part, Adam merely turned his head to look at the little creature with a blank look. "Oh. You're back. Where'd you run off to?"

"NAK NAK NAK."

".......you're not allowed to go anywhere on your own again." Adam shook his head, trying his best to look disappointed while hiding the growing smirk on his face. "Where did you even get forty-seven pool noodles...?"

[Roger Smith]

It did not take overly long, at least by Adam's standard of keeping track of time, before he began to notice something. Well, something aside from the profoundness of how thoroughly he had gotten himself lost. It was faint, and among all the other general sounds of the forest....jungle....fucking mass of trees and wildlife associated with them that he almost missed it entirely. It was only a figurative lifetime -- and a literal decade or two -- of paranoia and always expecting the worst that even brought it to his attention at all.

It was enough to bring him to a halt, staring off into the trees blankly. "Y'know....if I didn't know better, I'd almost say we found something aside from trees."

"NAK."

"Yeah, seems kind of far-fetched, but there's gotta be something living out here."

"NAK."

"Yeah, it could be violent."

"NAK."

"And carnivorous."

"NAK."

".....and very big."

"NAK."

"Look, okay, I don't wanna get eaten either. But I'd also rather not find out if it's literally possible to die of boredom. Or from over-exposure to trees."

"NAK."

"Yes, I promise if I am about to be eaten I will use the last of my strength to throw you as far away from whatever ravening hellbeast is chomping on me. Now please be quiet."

Moving as quietly and smoothly as he could, given he was....well, floating, Adam continued forward, through the trees, and toward the steadily-increasing sounds of what he recognized all too soon as some manner of confrontation. Probably a physical one. And a violent one. And from the sounds of it, most definitely an aggressive one.

"NAK."

"Yeah. It doesn't sound like a ravening hellbeast. But there might still be someone getting eaten."

"NAK."

"I'm the one that can fly. Remember that."