Book One

Chapter One:

Not... possible...

Now, she had some of those day dreams where one isn't in their own world, but somewhere else... Alright, so maybe a few times more than a few, yet who hasn't?

When dreaming, you can have an adventure, maybe a fantasy life and love, or whatever else one could think of. In the end though, it was still just a dream, one that you could wake up from and go back to your real life. Maybe you even can even write down that dream in the form of a short story, or a longer novel.

Yet despite it all, it would always supposed to just a dream. Nothing real...

Blue eyes blinked open and stared at the trees in front of the owner, as the hazy image refocused the trees seemed to be bending down. The young woman stared long and hard at the unfamiliar and somewhat thin forest around her from this angle. Perhaps 'forest' wasn't the right term for it, more of a light wood, almost like a park really.

The sky above was a bright sapphire blue, completely untainted by the air born pollutants of the twenty first century. It wasn't cold out, nor hot but in the level between where you could wear a sweatshirt and be perfectly fine. The air tasted crisp and new, even more so compared to the large city the woman was used to living in. The woman had come to a bluff where the landscape proved to be no park. The trees gradually became thicker the farther the miles sprawled out. Here and there rock formations covered in yellowed grass jutted up out of the cover of leaf filled branches. Though most of that wasn't seen by the human right now.

"What... the hell?" Tallen asked, lifting a hand to her head, squinting at the lighted sky above. Slowly, carefully she rolled over onto her right side, running into her backpack and automatically curled around it. Her head was throbbing and she felt like she was going to throw up.

Was she sick?

No, not sick-sick. The woman knew all too well that 'backed up' feeling in the gut when one had the flu. This was like the worst case of motion sickness, she knew the ground was sold under her, but the world still seemed like it was tilting back and forth. Like the rocking of a dive boat.

With one hand grasping her pack, the other curled into the grass in a subconscious effort to keep herself grounded. Waiting for the feeling to pass, and slipped into a healing sleep. It took a few hours for her body to adjust back to normal and when it did, waking up the second time later that day was easier. Being able to sit up was a big plus too.

Tallen worked her jaw and flexed inside to pop her ears. That was better.

If she was standing she wound be about five foot five, had an average build with some fluff, strawberry blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail and treaded through the back of a red and black baseball cap that had an Autobot insignia on the front. Faded green work paints had a verity of goodies in their many pockets and like the thick boots, they had some sawdust trapped in rolled up ends. She had on a gray sweatshirt that had been passed down from an older sibling years ago and had also once been white. A black cord ran from two headphones clipped to the front of the over shirt and ran down in the inside to a MP3 player hidden in a back pocket.

Her name was Tallen as said before and she was twenty five years old, almost twenty six in another few months. She worked two jobs (sort of), one at her family-owned Scuba diving shop and whatever odd thing she could pick up. Tallen primarily lived with her step father, several snakes and one iguana in a two bedroom apartment. Although she wasn't in collage at the time she was planning on going back within a few years.

At the moment, she was completely, and utterly lost as she looked around.

Not just in the physical sense of not knowing where you were but also confused. It was a sinking feeling you get in your heart, where your gut twists and clenches down before the stomach tries to drop a foot into the ground. It's obviously not the best of feelings because you just know that you are so very much screwed, and not in the good way. Yet at the same time... there wasn't a damn thing you can do other than stare at your situation for a few minutes in a weird, twisted sense of horrified wonder.

Tallen let go her backpack, careful not to harm the cargo inside. She looked around again, twisting in place and for once in a long, long time she felt truly helpless in the current of fate.

She closed her eyes and sank down until she was sitting cross-legged beside her pack. Tallen opened her eyes, gazing over the bluff to the sweeping woods beyond and forced almost all thoughts out of her mind. First things first: How did she get here?

Frowning, Tallen tried to remember her last memory before she had woken up here on the ground. Tallen came up with the clearest memory that she knew was from a week ago, when she had been working as a deck-hand on a charted boat. She remembered being upside down passing tools to her step father and another man- the skipper!- that were in a tight spot in the engine compartment of said dive bout.

Slowly, as she dropped her chin in the palm of one hand and picked at the grass under her with the other, Tallen worked through the rest of her scattered and fragmented bits of memories of the next few days. She was doing go up until Saturday night and nothing of Sunday.

Tallen knew that she had planned something with her best friend for Sunday night... She just couldn't grab onto what they had planned or did. Though Tallen and her friend tended to get lost and sometimes go off and do something else then what they planned at first, one of them always left a message with one set of parents or the other.

Yes, they were both over nineteen but they live in a big city. Vancouver was a good city and all, but it was common sense: Night time, two young women that are still new to clubbing (if you can call it that), it can spell trouble if you're not careful. Thus they were smart and give those the two trusted a heads up of where they planned to go and if there's any changes in those plans.

However, since Tallen was the one that normally drove, unless they took the Sky-Train, she didn't drink except at home, and that was a rum and coke. More often than not, Tallen would get sugar buzzed on Vanilla Cola or Dr. Pepper. Or rather just get hyper but it's kind of the same when they were out dancing. Either way the two still end up flopped over and sleeping through the next day just the same. The only time alcohol was really involved was when the two were safe at home.

The question now was: how did Tallen get from dancing with her best friend (or was she at work), to being out in the middle of some forest that she didn't know? This was far from the temperate rain forest climate Tallen knew and loved in her Northwest home. There were no ferns or cedar trees, no damp moss or two foot deep piles of pine needles...There was grass instead of clusters of sword fern and nettles covering the ground.

Tallen loved the woods as much as the next person, but she did not know this one. The woman shivered, she didn't like it. Not in the least. That sinking feeling came back and Tallen shivered again but it had nothing to do with the air temperature.

"Now what?" Tallen wondered aloud as she once again looked around for a clue as to where she was or what happened. As before like the last fifteen times there was no hint or clue.

Well, she couldn't just sit on the ground all day and have a fool's hope of being found before nightfall.

"Get your butt up," Tallen said as she stood and walked over to one of the nearer rocks to climb and scanned what she could see of the sloping land below. This time taking her time and studying one section of the odd forest at a time before moving her gaze and repeating the process. "There we go." She smiled as she saw a break in the tree line, not a clearing but a steady line that meandered through the woods.

Even if it wasn't a full of water there was a good chance that it was still a steam bed. It was as good as anything to go on and hopefully she could fallow it down stream to... well, some kind of civilization. Wither it be a village or town.

Now... how to get over there?

"Wait." Tallen said to herself, or if anyone asked why she was talking aloud to herself, Tallen would she was talking to her iguana despite be nowhere near the creature (it was just purely habit). The woman turned and reaching into her right thigh pocket pulled out a dive knife and stepped back to trees behind her. She stared at the knife for a moment, getting a flash of... something before carved her initials and an emblem into the thin bark on both sides of the tree. Grabbing up her back pack again she started back to the spot where she had woken up, marking the trees and keeping the initials in sight of each other. She had a feeling that she might have to find the place again, just in case. In honesty she wasn't sure why, but thought that maybe it was for any search and rescue people could fallow her path.

It took some time, but eventually Tallen found her way safely down the bluff, she still marked some trees so she didn't get turned around. The woman didn't rush either, knowing that if she did then she'd get lost even more. After the half an hour climb down and nearly an hour's walk later the sounds of running water was welcome indeed. Pulling shoes and socks off and rolling up her pants the woman put her feet in the cold water, wincing slightly but enjoying the break.

A not so distant explosion ripped through the relative quiet of the afternoon air and made the woman yelp and nearly fall into the stream while birds launched themselves up into the air.

"What the hell?!" Tallen scrambled up onto her feet, bouncing from one foot to the other to get her shoes and socks back on. Leaping the gap from her wide rock to the bank where her pack was. Grabbing it she hesitated before fallowing in the general direction of the explosion, a combination of mix feelings driving her. From her job in the dive store she was used to running to blown o-ring 'booms', but this had been bigger.

Someone could be hurt, and though not an expert Tallen did know some first aid, had to in order to be a dive master. Depending on the situation she could find out what way to go for more help.

On the way she hacked a rough 'X' into a few trees with the pocket knife, and as her dive knife bit into the next tree there was another and another, smaller, detonation. This time Tallen flinched, reflexively hunching into herself and looked around with wide eyes.

Was that propane tanks or something?

True the sounds helped guide the young woman but as Tallen got closer she could define gun shots and a few varied yells. She stopped far enough away that Tallen could sling her bag off and drop down before could see or be seen by whoever was fighting, though she could hear almost everything. Including alien words not foreign in the sense of like Spanish or Russian but literally alien in the multi layered tones.

Suddenly, Tallen didn't like the idea of getting any closer.