Libby opened her eyes and saw green. Leaves, she realized after a moment. She was looking up at a canopy of leaves high above her. It was a pretty sight, to be sure, thin strands of sunlight filtering through the thickly layered leaves to pierce the purplish gloom underneath, but it made no sense for her to be seeing it.
The last thing she remembered was sitting at her desk, halfheartedly working on a few daily quests in World of Warcraft. She couldn't think of a logical way for that to lead her here, laying on the ground in what seemed to be a forest. She must be dreaming, she decided after a moment's thought. She'd fallen asleep at her desk and now she was dreaming. Hopefully she hadn't run her character off a cliff or something.
Sitting up slowly, she took a moment to look around. She was sitting at the base of an enormous tree, far bigger than anything she'd seen before. Craning her head to look around it, she thought she couldn't reach even a quarter of the way around it with her arms fully outstretched. Similarly sized trees surrounded her in every direction, smaller trees and bushes filling the spaces in between them. It was very realistic for a dream. Libby could feel a small rock digging into the palm of one hand, and bits of cool dirt stuck to her hands when she lifted them up. She could even smell the scent of the forest around her, a mixture of damp earth and leaf mulch. She'd never smelled things in a dream before.
When she stood up, she found that she was wearing the same clothes she had been when she fell asleep - shorts and a t-shirt, both covered by an oversized purple hoodie that hung halfway to her knees. And, most pressingly, no shoes. If her brain was going to stick her into some weird forest, why couldn't it have seen fit to give her shoes? Luckily the ground was fairly soft, covered by a springy mix of grass and moss, but there were still sticks and rocks underneath that, as taking a few steps away from the tree proved.
Now what? There didn't seem to be much point to this dream; normally her dreams were more interesting and a good deal less coherent. She couldn't see anyone else, and the only sounds were the rustle of wind through branches and distant birdsong. Not sure what else to do, she picked a direction and started walking.
As she walked, Libby became increasingly aware that all the sensations she wouldn't have been able to feel in a dream were very present - a stab of pain in her foot from a particularly sharp rock, the texture of clothes against her skin, the sweet scent of a flower that didn't look like anything she'd seen before. Either this was an unnaturally realistic dream, or she was actually somehow in this strange forest full of enormous trees.
The thought made her nervous. If she was actually in a forest there could be wild animals, or something else dangerous. Bugs? Libby wasn't sure what kind of dangers could be found in a forest; the most experience she had with nature was the time her mom signed her up for a week long summer camp at the local park, and that hadn't been a forest so much as a collection of small trees for them to camp in surrounded by neatly trimmed grass. She hadn't seen any animals so far, but she had heard rustles in the bushes as things passed by her. Nothing sounded large enough to be a predator, but she still looked around in worry every time it happened.
She wasn't sure how long she walked, but her feet were starting to get tired and her stomach was grumbling loudly to remind her that the last thing she'd eaten was a bowl of cereal. That had been about three hours before she'd...passed out? Been transported? Whatever had happened to her. Add that to however long she'd been in this forest, and she came to the conclusion that she hadn't eaten for a long while.
There were supposed to be edible plants and things in forests, right? People in books were always eating roots or berries or whatever when they traveled through the woods. She hadn't seen anything that looked like a berry so far, and wasn't sure how to figure out which roots were edible. Just grabbing and eating a random plant seemed like a bad idea. Maybe she'd come across other people soon, and she could ask them for food and figure out where she was.
The sky was slowly darkening above her, the thin shafts of sunlight disappearing and plunging her into a deep gloom. The thick leaf canopy meant that very little light reached her from the moon she assumed must be rising soon. She wasn't sure when it happened, but eventually she realized that she could hardly see her hand in front of her face and stopped walking abruptly. While she didn't actually have a destination in mind, she wouldn't get anywhere if she walked in circles in the dark. Not to mention she had no idea what the terrain was like here, and she didn't want to stumble into a river or off a cliff. The terrain had been even enough so far, sloping gently downward, but that didn't mean it wouldn't change.
Everything around her looked pretty much the same: big trees, small trees, bushes. Nothing that seemed like it would make a good shelter, but it wasn't too cold here; it felt like a mild spring day. Hopefully that wouldn't change as the night drew on. Moving carefully to avoid running into anything in the dark, she made her way close to the nearest tree, reasoning that the branches would probably keep water off her if it started to rain. The roots of the tree, thicker than both her arms held together, protruded from the ground to form small arches. She wiggled between two of them, finding a space against the tree that would fit her and hopefully keep her hidden from any nasty animals that wandered by.
It wasn't the most comfortable place she'd ever slept. Something always seemed to be digging into her back no matter how she positioned herself, and she wasn't sure if the occasional tickles on her skin were actually bugs or figments of her imagination. Eventually, though, she managed to drift off, comforting herself with the thought that she would probably wake up at her desk and realize that this had all been a really weird dream.
Unfortunately, that turned out to be wrong. She woke up exactly where she'd fallen asleep, muscles stiff from sleeping on the hard ground and stomach grumbling loudly enough that she feared everything for miles around must be able to hear it. Any remaining hope that this was a particularly vivid dream quickly faded. She scrambled out of her little sleeping hollow and stretched, wincing a little at the series of pops and cracks made by various joints as she did so.
She looked around, trying to orient herself, and decided to continue walking downhill. Water was supposed to gather in downhill places, right? That sounded like something she'd learned at some point. Her mouth felt drier than a desert, and she knew that without water she wouldn't last long out here. If she found water, she might also be able to follow it to somewhere with people who could help her get home.
Her continuing walk was even more uncomfortable than yesterday. Her bare feet ached from the exercise and stung from stepping on rocks and sticks, and her spine was making its disapproval of her makeshift sleeping place quite obvious. She passed the time trying to figure out where she was based on the type of trees, but she'd never heard of such large trees that weren't redwoods.
Maybe an hour later, she spotted a slight gap in the canopy ahead. Peering through the underbrush in that area, she saw something she thought might be a path. Relieved, she hurried forward, pushing past a clump of branches that blocked her view of the area - and nearly bumped into someone.
She backed up a few steps and felt her mind short out as she tried to figure out what she was looking at. Green skin, mail armor covered by a red tabard, fierce looking tusks protruding from a snarling mouth. She'd play enough WoW to recognize those characteristics, but they were even more impossible than waking up in a random forest after falling asleep at her desk.
Libby was standing face to face with an orc.