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Ark: Stranded


richvh

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Chapter 1

 

I was royally P.O.ed.

 

I couldn’t remember the details of my life that had been, not even my name. I was, though, sure as shooting that I was not supposed to be naked as a jaybird, on a beach in the middle of freaking nowhere. I had been somebody, I was sure. I had been supposed to be meeting someone important, somewhere that wasn’t here.

 

The beach was deserted, except for creatures that should have all been extinct, ranging from what appeared to be trilobites crawling out of the water onto the beach, through dinosaurs and pteradactyls, to what looked like dodos. Why could I remember these things, but not my prior life?

 

If I ever found out who had done this to me, they would pay dearly. Assuming I could survive long enough to find my way back to civilization. And to survive, I needed food, water, and shelter.

 

Taking stock of myself, I was a young woman, reasonably fit but no Olympic athlete. My only assets were my hands and brains. Though I wasn’t too sure about my brain, since I couldn’t remember my past.

 

Water… I dipped a double handful of water at the shore and tasted it. Surprisingly, it wasn’t salty. Could I be on the shore of some huge lake? Assuming I didn’t catch some terrible disease from drinking it, water shouldn’t be a problem.

 

Food… Well, there were a number of shrubs and herbs back from the shoreline. Most of them had some kind of berry on them. Thrusting my hands into a bush, I came up with a random assortment of berries and some lengths of fiber. These disappeared from my hands instantly while I heard “3 Mejoberries added to Inventory, 5 Fiber added to Inventory, 2 Narcoberries added to Inventory” in a feminine but somewhat mechanical voice, accompanied by a vibration near my left ear. I felt the area and found a bump under my scalp just above and behind my ear. Touching it brought up a listing of the items I’d gathered. Another selection in the implant listed items I could construct. At the moment, they were limited to a stone pick axe, and a torch. Holy hell, was I trapped in a sensory deprivation tank and being forced to play a VR video game?

 

I needed to hit something bad. Since I also needed wood and thatch for the tools, I took out my anger on the nearby palm trees. A few minutes spent beating my fists raw on the trunk gave me enough wood and thatch for a pick axe, when combined with a stone picked up on the beach. A few whacks at a boulder with the pick axe gave me the flint needed to make a torch. (One piece of wood plus one stone plus one shard of flint makes a torch, which lights itself when held aloft? Insanity!) This gave me enough “experience” for my puppetmasters to deign to allow me to learn how to make several other things, such as stone hatchets, spears, and eventually cloth garments woven from the fibers gathered from the bushes, a campfire, and thatch building sections – foundations, walls, rooves and doors.

 

After clothing myself and setting up a simple thatch hut with a campfire outside, I decided I needed some meat to supplement the many berries I’d gathered while getting the fiber for my clothes. I took a few spears and went hunting. The dodos proved to be easy prey, yielding some hide and raw meat. (The implant warned me not to eat this without cooking. Teach your grandma to suck eggs, why don’t you?) Roasting it in a lit campfire made it safe to eat, and slowed its spoiling.

 

All wasn’t sweetness and light, though. From time to time little bipedal dinosaurs the size of a crow would approach me. If there was just one, it was no threat, but it usually was just waiting for its friends to show up before the little ankle biters tried to swarm me. The implant called these “compys”, which was probably short for compsognathus. (Why could I remember this creature’s name, but not my own?) There was also the occasional dilophosaurus, nearly man size with frills on its neck that it spread before attacking. These could spit a blinding venom, making them even more challenging to beat off. For some reason, these reminded me of a movie theme park.

 

As the sun set on my first day here (wherever here is), lights in the sky that I had been vaguely aware of all day drew my attention as they became more obvious in the darkness. Descending vehicles of some sort would from time to time appear, and, after landing, mark their presence with a color coded strobe, which would, after a few minutes, disappear. There were also a few massive buildings of some sort in the distance. Taller than the tallest skyscraper I’d ever seen (why could I remember skyscrapers?), they were topped by strobes.

 

If there was any hope of escaping this place, surely these would be key in accomplishing that task.

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