ARWIN

  The next day, Arwin enjoyed sightseeing, admiring the medieval setting and that most people were blue-skinned, something completely different from his world. Well, except for Smurfs. And the Blue Man Group. And Beast, Apocolypse, Nightcrawler, Mystique, and Archangel. Aladdin’s genie. They were probably all fictional, though. But there was that very real Fugate family from Kentucky, USA, with a genetic condition that made their skin bluish. Ok, so maybe blue skin wasn’t as uncommon as one might think.

  Trouble came Arwin’s way soon enough. He came to a stop in a random street and then turned around on a whim, only to find a viciously snarling man behind him, driving a dagger at his gut.

  “Whoa!” Arwin leapt backwards, barely avoiding the blade.

  The man spat, “You snake in the grass!” taking another stab. “You ruined everything!”

  Arwin let the knife miss again, then chopped his arm down on the attacker’s wrist before kicking him in the groin.

  The man’s eyes rolled back, and he fell to his knees, dropping the weapon to clutch his bruised testicles instead. A second kick to the head knocked him senseless onto the street.

  The action drew attention and a small crowd. Some were worried for his sake. Not all were sympathetic. One couple gave Arwin the stink eye and looked like they would have preferred it if Arwin had been the one on the ground.

  Someone sent for Jacque, the new first councillor, who came at a run. Luckily, it was clear what had happened and why. Witnesses spoke in Arwin’s defence. The crowd moved on relatively quickly, and the attacker hauled away.

  Jacque put a heavy hand on Arwin’s shoulder. The look on his face was regretful but knowing and said it all.

  Arwin looked at him. “Guess you were right.”

  “I’m sorry, Arwin. I am. You’re an easy target, being a foreigner and not blue-skinned. And you were the catalyst behind what’s happening. It’s not going to be safe here for a while until we get things settled into a new normal.” He genuinely looked apologetic. He sighed. “Maybe we could…” He trailed off, at a loss.

  Arwin wanted to stay and get to know these people better, his spirit yearning for new friendships. But he could see the logic to the idea of leaving for a while.

  Social change could be difficult, and not everyone was happy to go along with it. He didn’t relish being made the town scapegoat and the target of their hate. He’d gotten lucky just now. If he hadn’t randomly turned at the right moment, he could have died today.

  He tried to look for a silver lining. His recent success had restored some of his self-confidence and distracted him from his recent heartache over Kelli.

  Relationship struggles provide opportunities for us to re-evaluate ourselves and to choose who we want to be going forward. After a long period of grieving and depression, he was finally going through that process, moving on after his breakup. Maybe continuing to adventure in this new world on his own would be good for him.

  He spent another night in the village, then decided to hit the road. He waved goodbye to Bleu and Aoi and Jacque, promising to return and meaning it, and strode off down the main road alone.

  The dirt road was marred by wagon wheel ruts and clumps of weed and grass. The forest surrounded him, evergreen and everblue trees towering far overhead, reminiscent of Earth’s giant douglas firs, but many were far larger. Trunks stood as solid and wide as apartment buildings, wrapped in crackling brown bark, with needles in the branches above as long as his forearm.

  On a whim, he wandered off the road into the woods, though he tried to keep the road in sight. Looking up into the sky-high reaches of the trees, something strange caught his eye amidst the broken light and organic shapes of the branches. There was something almost uniform there. He stopped and squinted up. Yes, there was something unnatural up there. It had person-made regularity.

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  As he moved around to get a better look, he spotted similar dark shapes in other places. But they were broken up and inconsistent. Was that a ladder? A bridge? Were those frayed ropes dangling over there? Or was it all just shadows and his imagination? Unfortunately, they were too high, and the light too dim to clearly make things out. He continued on his way and immediately tripped over something on the ground.

  Picking himself up off the prickly, brown ground, Arwin looked back to see what caught his foot. His eyebrows rose in surprise. He’d uncovered a few old and very worn wooden planks, mostly buried under the forest floor. Sweeping off some of the dirt and debris covering them, he could see that they would have been held together with rope at one time. Now, they were falling apart from rot. He glanced back upwards. Those really were some kind of manmade bridges or something up above. Perhaps an elaborate tree house. Or tree village, given the size. It looked like it had been a very long time since anyone had used it, though.

  He continued on, keeping an eye out for anything unusual. Pretty much everything was. He saw two bellhops hopping through the woods, each bell making a distinctive ring at the top of their bounce.

  Disturbed by Arwin’s passage, a cat of nine tails jumped out from some bushes, startling him, and lashed him vigorously with all nine soft and velvety tentacles. Satisfied that justice had been done, the cat haughtily sauntered a short way off before sitting down and studying Arwin from a safe vantage point. Arwin had the odd sensation that the feline giving him the cat scan was cataloguing him and was maybe on the point of catechizing him, perhaps before realizing that it couldn't speak human. Then, the creature vanished once again into the underbrush.

  Arwin shook his head. He'd certainly been catapulted into a strange world.

  Eventually, the great coniferous trees thinned, and more leafy types worked their way into the forest. He came to a fork in the road.

  Which way should he go? Neither looked more used, so taking the less travelled one simply wasn’t an option (sorry, Robert Frost). With nothing to indicate that either way was better, he chose at random and ambled off, heading south.

  He noticed the sun passing its zenith overhead. Growling in his stomach reminded him that adventuring through the woods builds an appetite and that he hadn’t brought lunch with him, nor had he made plans about spending the night. In fact, he’d left the village with nothing, entirely unprepared for anything.

  “Hmm. It appears that I’m quite the rookie at adventuring,” he chided himself. He grew a little worried and wondered if he should turn around and head back to the Blue Region. He had no map or destination, no provisions; what had he been thinking?

  But all this instantly swept from his mind when he turned a corner in the road and saw what lay before him.

  It was a skeleton picking his butt! Her butt? He couldn’t tell gender just from the bones. The figure was down on one hand and both knees, the other limb lodged deep in their backside. The bones were bleached white from the sun, entirely free of flesh, and somewhat shone under the clear blue sky. Incongruously, around the skeleton’s knees were a pair of red boxers with white hearts. It was as if someone had stripped a person of all their clothes and flesh but left them with their underwear.

  A male voice grumbled and worked the back hand around rigorously. Well, that cleared the gender up. Probably.

  Arwin's eyes widened. He pulled up to the skeleton on the path, only to see the skeleton go into a growling fury while trying to extricate its hand from its backside. "Uh, hi.” Arwin mock-defensively raised his hands. “Sorry, is this an inappropriate time?”

  The skull twisted around to look up at him from the ground. He grumbled, “Oh, of all the rotten times to be caught with one's pants down.”

  Arwin’s jaw dropped. "You can talk!”

  The skeleton rolled his head in exasperation. "Ah, you're a simpleton. For a moment, I was worried that you might be someone dangerous."

  Arwin’s gaze levelled. "And apparently, you're rude."

  The skeleton let out a whoosh of air, which was impressive, given that he had no lungs. "Don't just stand there. Give me a hand!"

  Backing away slowly, Arwin replied, “I think you've already got one. I’ll just leave you to whatever it is you're doing. No judgment here.”

  The skeleton snarled, “Oh, don't be a nincompoop. I don't care what you think I'm doing, but this isn't what it looks like. I ran afoul of a troll with a sense of humour who shoved my bones into place like this, and now they're stuck. Better than running across an ogre and having them ground into dust, but still, it's rather undignified, and the sooner the situation is rectified, the sooner I'll stop being the butt of your jokes."

  Arwin snickered. "Don't you mean when the situation is 'rectumfied'?"

  The skeleton glared at him.

  Arwin shrugged apologetically and pointed a thumb over his shoulder. "I saw a bunch of puns earlier..."

  The skeleton shook his head as if he were listening to an idiot.

  Arwin smiled. "Dude, come on. Butt of your jokes? You didn't do that on purpose?"

  The skeleton’s cheeks seemed to turn a shade of reddish pink, though bone shouldn’t have been able to do so. "All right, enough! I think we've reached the end of this!”

  "Or, at least, you certainly have." Arwin snickered again.

  The skeleton shouted with frustration, "Are you going to help me out or stand there laughing at me all day long?"