Mew. Mew. "Miranda! Would you feed the cat already!" Mew. Mew. The creaking of a swing set in the distance. Distant yelling. Everything is distant. I don't want to be here. They hate me. Mew. Mew. The white cat looks up at me swishing its tail expectantly. There was something different, its eyes are purple.
My eyes open slowly, blinking into the soft rising sun. "Mew." I hear again. Confused, I look around. However, all I see is a pink tail disappear out of sight into the forest. Not wanting to stick around and figure out what it is, I stood up and started walking towards that outcropping again. My stomach rumbled with hunger, but I pushed it aside and kept walking. The sun rose steadily over the ocean and strange sounds floated out of the forest. I stopped when I found a shallow pool of water that was swarming with the shells of clams. I laid on my stomach and started sifting through the sand to find a big one. I grabbed hold of one the size of a large rock and pulled it up. This clam was much larger than any of the ones I have ever seen before. As it came out of the water it started shouting, "SHELLDER! SHELLDER! SHELL SHELL SHELL SHELL SHELLDER!" I immediately dropped it onto the sand. "Shellder! Shel shell shell shellder shell shellder. Shell shell shell shellder she shell shellder, shell shell shell shell shell shellder!"
"Uh-I'm sorry? I'm just really hungry." I said flabbergasted that this animal was quite inexplicably yelling at me. Then the animal moved off back into its pool without another sound. I sat dumbfounded for a couple of minutes, when a rumble in my stomach caused me to get up. I started walking again when something whacked me in the back of the head. I looked back to see three of the strange creatures on the edge of their pool and they had thrown three fish at me. Normal fish. "Thank you!" I called waving at them. "Shellder." They said in unison and went back into their pool. I continued walking until I found a bank full of sharp rocks and sat down on one of the few sandy part and used the rock to fillet the fish the shell things had given me. I began to think about what may have happened that those creatures came into being.
I wonder what this place is. Obviously some sort of science experiment went on here, those shell creatures don't exist anywhere else. You'd think other countries would have at least heard of them. They seem a lot more intelligent than the animals in the rest of the world. What if it's some sort of mutation from a nuclear bomb that hit somewhere here? No, there would be other evidence of that. There wouldn't be a dense green forest here, it would all be wasteland. Interesting. If it isn't some form of mutation from an accident, and if it's not a science project that has been forgotten, then how in the world can this place exist untouched by humans?
I munched on my fish and thought. The sun was still high in the sky so I stood up and carried the rest of my fish onward towards the outcropping. My spirits were lifted now that I had some food in my stomach. I found a tree with some fruit on it and big thick leaves. I took one of the leaves off and used it to make a type of bag. I took another leaf and wrapped my fish up added some of the fruit and tied it over my shoulder like a messenger bag. I was terribly thirsty though. I dared not enter the forest quite yet to find fresh water, and obviously the ocean water is unsafe to drink. "Spearow!" A small bird flew out of the forest and quickly darted back in, heading towards the ground very fast. The bird used his wings and then a worm creature jumped out of the grass and the bird caught it. The bird then swallowed it whole. The bird looked at me although judging whether or not I was a threat to it. "Spear-ow!" It called out. I looked away and kept walking, albeit a bit faster than I was originally going.
I walked for hours without slowing down. I heard a lot of new sounds come out of the forest, but I kept my head down. I did not want one of them to become angry at me. The sun slowly came down out of the sky and I saw that I had come quite a distance since the beginning of the day. Now the outcropping became a lot taller than it had seemed earlier. There were very steep cliffs and small outcroppings where trees grew tall and sideways. I heard similar calls from the bird creatures I saw earlier. They must nest in the trees here. I tried to spot a way to easily climb up to the top, however no magical staircase decided to show itself. The height from the top would be a great vantage point to figure out where to go next. Perhaps there would be water at the top. Birds wouldn't normally nest where everything they needed wasn't close at hand. Although these are a different kind of creature than the normal birds. A yawn escaped me as I settled down into a sheltered rock and a copse of thick bushes. I munched on a fruit before finally falling asleep.
