Chapter 2: First Day High
"The real world is oftentimes different from what you expect it to be, what you think it to be, and what people might say it to be."
- Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
Joshua Renalia ogled the twin moons in the celestial curtain above him. Wonder still fluttered in his heart as he viewed their slow journey across the sky. He found zero familiarity in the twinkling stars, unable to recognize even a single constellation from back home.
All this indicated just how far away from home he was. Looking back at it days later, it astounded Joshua how he didn't figure out this also meant he had very little chances of returning home ever again. Almost nil, to be exact. Rather than thinking about the family he left behind—his doting mother, his overprotective father, and a pair of siblings looking up to him, the eldest—Joshua's thoughts still obsessed over the fact he was in the Dragon Realms.
He still couldn't get over it.
The two moons.
The unfamiliar sky.
The strange atmosphere.
How could he even move on from this surreal—no, this wonderful experience when the City of Dragons still rested in the horizon, no closer than it had been this morning? The only change to the scenery was the addition of the dam. Apparently, the,dam Spyro and Cynder destroyed to slow down the Destroyer.
From afar, it looked like the integrity of the structure had collapsed. A pile of rubble that, by itself, formed a natural dam over and through which hundreds of thousands of gallons of water permeated. So that places me after Dawn of the Dragon, mused Joshua. But by how long? If he recalled his Spyro lore right, a new generation of dragons was brought into the world every twelve years. Having seen a small but considerable number of dragons flying above Warfang, it was clear Malefor had been defeated for good sometime ago.
In other words, either two to three generations had already passed or his two favorite characters had done some exploring in the years that followed, recovering enough refugees to significantly increase Warfang's dragon population.
Joshua shifted in his spot, taking care not to dislodge himself from the precious balance he's attained since climbing up this tree. It was a fairly large one, to be sure, with branches no thinner than a telephone pole and enough leaves to shelter the stranded human from much of the wind and rain, if they ever came. He thanked Jesus Christ the temperatures weren't freezing at night, that the dirty sleepwear he still wore was sufficient for his needs.
It simply wouldn't do if he died of hypothermia long before he got a chance to meet the saviors of the Dragon Realms face to face.
Mother Nature was a harsh and fickle mistress, Joshua pondered. That did not change whether he was on Earth or, evidently, anywhere else in the universe. Truly, being in the Dragon Realms was far, far different from actually living in it. The human shuddered, recalling the few times he had nearly died today.
In retrospect, he blamed it on First Day High.
Ever since Joshua Renalia realized he was in the Dragon Realms, something inside him woke up. It stoked a blazing fire in him. A drive to reach the City of Dragons. A motivation fueled by the strong, insatiable desire to see a handful of people considered fictional back home. But instead of instilling caution, it impelled him into recklessness, encouraging impatience. He had to get to Warfang, ASAP. It was the only thing he could think of.
Joshua quickly descended the tree. He nearly fell off a branch in his haste, but caught himself at the right time. As soon as he felt the soil and berries below squishing under his bare feet, the teenager opened the makeshift bag of blue berries and popped a couple in his mouth. He had no plans of eating any more than that if even these proved poisonous for him.
While he waited for any ill effects, Joshua also reached down and placed a handful of red berries into the bag, intending to test them just as well. If he was lucky, the berries were only bad for the birds but not for other animals, like him. And as he promised himself earlier, he decided to make some footwear.
Some of the bushes around here had thick, wide leaves, comparable to the leaves of a banana tree. It took no time at all to pluck out a few, wrap them around his feet, and use the more delicate branches scattered across the ground to tie them up and turn the whole thing into a pair of makeshift flip-flops. It was better than nothing, really, but he at least had some grip and it did keep his feet clean and away from whatever hazards hid right under his nose.
The blue berries turned out to be just fine for him. The fruit was soft, as expected, but the meat inside was fibrous and faintly sweet. The sensations on his tongue reminded him little of the blueberries on Earth, but at least these things could be eaten.
Once he gulped down a few of the red berries, he noted how they tasted slightly sweet, their flavors yielding to something sour and horribly bitter. His teeth noticed the general firmness in the fruit. No wonder the birds preferred the blue ones.
Gratefully, during the twenty minutes Joshua spent traversing down the short woodland cliff to the only water source he encountered throughout his entire time in the forest thus far, nothing happened. No fever. No vomiting. No nausea. Nothing. Looks like they checked out too. Luckily, trees just like it were certainly common. He could recall—barely—how often he passed by one before arriving at this "cliff". A good thing, considering he already ate all the berries he had wrapped up in his makeshift bag.
"Making great progress over here," Joshua muttered to himself, chest swelling with pride as he took his first step after descending the cliff. If he kept this up, he would definitely make it to Warfang in a few Earth days. A couple of Earth weeks, at most.
He ogled the flowing stream. Its waters flowed rapidly, cool to the touch. No signs of animals upstream. The sight of fresh water reminded the human of his thirst. Oh man, was he parched! He knelt, cupped his hands, and gulped down God knew how much water, stopping only when he could no longer tolerate its repulsive, earthy taste.
Pity Joshua's luck ran out on him at that moment.
The sun had just passed its apex when agonizing stomach cramps assaulted the young man out of the blue. "Arrrggghhh!" Joshua buckled as he fell. Down on the ground, he clutched his stomach and rolled over. Once. Twice. What the hell—and there it is again! Another sledgehammer right on the gut, a thousand times over.
The comfortable air that infused the forest, nice and warm thanks to the midday sun, suddenly transmogrified into an unpleasant chill. Joshua Renalia shivered, and awfully so. Instinct guided the back of his palm to his neck, which was as a frying pan settled atop a burning stove.
Fever.
He felt intense fever.
How… how in God's name did he get sick like—
"Rrrrrr!" the teenager hissed, curling inward into a fetal position. This cramp felt like a truck speeding into his innards at 60 miles per hour. Joshua palpitated. He struggled to even prop himself on his knees, and the instant he moved he felt his asshole literally growl at him. His anus all but vocalized its demand to expel everything, to purge everything inside.
Joshua couldn't do anything but comply. He fled to the nearest tree, took off his trousers, and defecated. He was horrified to see pure liquid bursting out of his rear every fifteen seconds, like a miniature Old Faithful, rumbling and grumbling and gushing. Then another cramp came. "Oh shit not again!"
He refused to let this inopportune diarrhea stop him from reaching the City of Dragons. He had to keep going. Stubborn as ever, rather than figuring out how he got sick and what options he could take to resolve this new stumbling block, Joshua Renalia plucked plenty of leaves from the nearby shrubs and wiped off enough of the disgusting fecal matter to make a small, crumpled pile next to him…
Only for another figurative sledgehammer to pummel his solar plexus and literally force out more shit from his brown buttcheeks. To his horror, Joshua Renalia felt a bad headache coming along for the ride. He licked his lips, and noticed instantly how dry his mouth was.
His mind dredged one of the few survivalist lessons he's learned at random—probably read from a handbook inside a first aid kit or from a Wikipedia article—and at once the teenager pinched the back of his hand. Anxiety settled its heavy weight down on Joshua as he watched the skin of his hand slowly return to normal. A well-known sign of dehydration.
Water.
He had to get more water!
The teenager stranded in a supposedly fictional world grabbed another bunch of leaves and rubbed it all over his backside. He pulled up his trousers and rushed for the nearby stream. It was only when he knelt beside the flowing water for the second time today did he realize it was contaminated. He stopped.
"Knew something was gonna happen sooner or later," Joshua grumbled. A wave of dizziness washed over him, and he very nearly keeled over to the side. His vision wavered, and for a second, his green eyes barely held on to his focus.
Beggars can't be choosers.
He felt another cramp—another shitting–coming along, but Joshua once again found himself unable to consider anything else but bite the bullet. He drank from the stream again. Slurped up as much of the earthy water even if it risked worsening his sickness, if not perpetuating his current state of affairs. That was the difference between modern civilization and wilderness survival.
In modern life, a person could pull out whenever he wanted to. He could push the exit button at any time and, with a little more effort or a few more monetary resources, take in anything safe, wonderful, and high-quality.
But in the wilderness, this exit button did not exist. Once you were in it, you had to go all the way. You couldn't half-ass the trip and quit just as things toughened up in the middle of it.
Joshua had no pharmacies to go to in the Dragon Realms. No supermarkets. No hospitals. No internet to even research the basics of survival. Even if he had his smartphone on him, it was next to useless without a source of electricity and a signal tower. He was alone, and he had to deal with his situation by himself the best way he could or he would die. Use whatever resources Mother Nature gave him or die.
He followed the water downstream. He stuck close this time, and endured the constant cramps. Rather than doubling back to the tree earlier, he unloaded his bowels a few ways away from the stream. He always kept it in sight. He did not want to be dehydrated again. But eventually hunger announced its second coming for the day, and Joshua Renalia dreaded this moment, for the berry trees were tall and demanded a somewhat challenging climb. The bushes with the yellow berries were unfortunately poisonous; he had tested their edibility minutes ago and they were horribly acerbic. Made his tongue burn twenty seconds after contact.
Joshua's first priority became not food, not water, but recovery. A forest like this certainly would have more than just birds living here. If he remembered the games right, even the swamp Spyro grew up in heralded dangers that could easily kill a defenseless human being. The Bulb Spiders liked to camouflage themselves and ambush their prey. Grove Mites surprise their prey and overwhelm them in swarms, draining the blood out of its poor victims. And these creatures were definitely huge. Hunter wasn't that much larger than a human adult, Joshua figured, and even then, Spyro was probably as tall as one if the quadruped dragon stood on his hind legs.
He did not know what lived in this forest, but if he left wet piles of literal shit every fifty meters, he would definitely make easy prey later tonight. Only after the sun fell from its zenith—perhaps midway from completely disappearing into the horizon—did Joshua see something that stroked his curiosity: red crystals. A whole group of it across the stream. It stuck out of the earth as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
An ostensible reminder him he was lost in the Dragon Realms, not some godforsaken jungle in Africa.
They were not so much as spines from Dawn of the Dragon as they were balls of spikes from either A New Beginning or The Eternal Night. Cogitating over this later tonight, Joshua Renalia could not understand what convinced him—what compelled him to grab the nearest stick, rush out there no matter how much he wanted to curl up in the ground or take another nasty shit, and swing the crude weapon at it.
He half expected the stick to fall apart when it struck the crystals.
He did not expect the crystals to be so brittle as to literally crumble into glinting, radiant pieces before his eyes.
"Huh," he remarked with an offhand comment, recalling how strongly the dragons would strike the crystals in the video games. "Spyro and Cynder made it look hard. Didn't know it was this easy."
Joshua bent down and clutched the red crystals. He hoped it wasn't his sheer desperation making him act this way. The teenager's headcanon of the Legend of Spyro trilogy insisted only dragons had the ability to utilize the energy infused in the spirit gems. Most fanfiction ascribed to this theory since none of Spyro's enemies—even the wild animals that tried to eat him—ever used them to recover their own injuries. Then there was also the fact Ignitus himself explained their existence as a "gift that speaks across generations". The so-called life force of all dragonkind.
Given all that information, why would real life be any differ…ent...
He watched the radiant crimson fragments dull in his hands. The color faded into a lifeless gray, and the inert crystal literally dissolved into dust before his eyes. And to his amazement, he felt much better than ever before. The cramps vanished. The constant urge to defecate ceased. Even the weakness subjected to him by his intense fever concluded.
All illnesses and infirmity disappeared instantaneously.
Yet Joshua remained rooted to the spot, paralyzed not by some unforeseen toxin in the crystals but by the enormous gravity of all the new questions circling through his head. This shouldn't have happened. No way. He couldn't have absorbed the crystals. No f*cking way.
He had to try this again. This was supposed to be impossible.
Joshua spotted another cluster of Spirit Gems a couple yards off the health crystals. This one was blue, and it glowed, its very structure emanating power.
Much like the red crystals, these proved no less brittle after a couple strikes with the two-foot stick Joshua picked up at random. Clutching the fragments repeated what happened earlier, and a pair of viridian eyes widened at the way the azure hue dulled into gray and enfeebled the Spirit Gem so much it disintegrated. Rather than feeling his health return, Joshua experienced the sensation of something deep within him slightly growing, invoking the imagery of a wizened man jolting to life as clarity surged forth in his intelligent mind.
He tried again with a nearby cluster of green gems, and the same result. Only this time, the absorption process induced the feeling of strength, like a stimulant rippling inside his arms.
"Nah, this can't be right," he uttered. Joshua waved a hand across his rear. Afterwards, he ran it across his hair. He even turned his head around, moving his shoulders back and forth. And last, a close inspection of his skin revealed zilch.
No tail. No horns. No wings. No scales.
He wasn't turning into a dragon anytime soon. (Much to his indescribable relief.)
"Okaaaaayy," he mumbled to himself. "But then why can I absorb the XP and mana gems?" If not a dragon, then maybe he had a power of some sort? It would be cool if he did, Joshua had to admit. It was a fantasy he shared with many a fanwriter, as loathe as he was to keep this a secret from his friends back on Earth.
Expectantly, Joshua raised his hand and stared intently at it. He exerted all of his will, all of his mental faculties, at producing something. Anything! For all the effort he put into this exercise of curiosity, it proved fruitless. The human could have easily pretended or imagined tongues of fire billowing out of his palms and nothing would have happened anyway.
No elements, as far as he knew. In fact, he felt perfectly normal. Ordinary.
Joshua Renalia shook his head. "That makes absolutely no sense." The experience contrasted his knowledge of Spyro lore. It challenged what little he understood of the Dragon Realms, and this time, he didn't have the luxury of investigating this anomaly on a Spyro wiki. "I should at least, at least have something—
SNAP!
A twig splintered a ways away from him, and he heard rustling in the shrubs thriving all over the forest.
Joshua had company now, and the boy had no desire to initiate a struggle for survival with a wild animal anytime soon. He grabbed his stick and hid himself behind the cluster of mana gems. He peeked out, and eyed the wide clearing in the forest.
For a few seconds, nothing emerged.
For a few minutes, all remained quiet.
The temptation to relax and walk out into the open loomed. He was actually right about to take it when something that bore a strong resemblance to a wild boar, straight out of the original Spyro the Dragon trilogy, ambled into the middle.
Joshua Renalia held his breath. Jesus Christ. The original trilogy used the first-generation Sony Playstation as its platform. All its enemies were highly pixelated. The people at Insomniac Games couldn't have imagined how terrifying and intimidating this feral beast looked. Its tusks gleamed in the light, and its body was well-toned and muscular.
The human didn't like the way those teeth appeared. They seemed sharp enough to cut through skin and bone in one crunch. Joshua looked about. He had to get out of here. There was no way he'd survive with nothing but a stick and a body bred from a life of modernity and its innumerable conveniences.
Then the stupid stick happened to bump into the green crystals. F*ck me!
The predator turned in his direction immediately. Its hooves plodded slowly, deliberately towards the green Spirit Gems. Joshua ducked beneath the cluster and curled up into a ball as soon as he perceived its approach, licking its muzzle as it closed in.
Don't find me, he prayed. He embraced his stick, for all the good it could do for him in a life-threatening combat situation. Don't find me. Don't find me. For the love of God, please don't find me!
The human sensed the wild boar on the other side of the gem cluster. He couldn't explain it—it was downright impossible to explain it—but he knew, he knew for a fact that the animal now stood less than three feet from him. It snorted. It groused, sounding like a pig back on Earth. He heard it sniff the air, smacking its lips.
Was it trying to smell him out?
Was it trying to taste the air, to see where its prey hid?
The thought of being found by this hungry beast terrified Joshua out of his wits. He did not expect the home of Spyro the Dragon to be so harsh, to be so unforgiving and merciless. He raised a hand to his mouth and cupped it shut. Got to stay hidden.
He didn't trust himself enough to not scream or gasp with this goddamn animal so close. He tried to take deep breaths and calm his palpitating heart, but it couldn't stop the tingling panic creeping all over his skin. Got to stay hidden!
It took all of Joshua's resolve to stop himself from making a run for it after the tusks and the furry snout poked past the gem cluster. Don't look here, he begged, even if all logic contended he was as good as found. Don't look here!
Joshua's hands quivered. Don't look! He gripped the stick in his right hand and raised it, preparing to lash out with a backhand the instant the wild boar came into view and faced him. He hoped against hope the scant seconds this surprise attack would grant him was enough to escape an immediate and painful death. DON'T YOU F*CKING LOOK!
.
.
.
If Joshua did not truly and sincerely prayed to the Lord Jesus Christ before, he most certainly promised himself to go to Church and worship the Heavenly Father every other day after he stayed still and, despite his terror, watched the snout retreat back behind the bush of crystals. He heard the boar sniff the air again—once… twice… before it ventured off in another direction.
Another minute passed.
Then, and only then, did Joshua release his breath. He slumped down on the mana gems. Teardrops dripped out his eyes and he cupped his mouth again. Not to suppress his words, but to prevent what little food he had in his stomach from seeing the outside world again. "Holy shit," he said. His hands still shook. He couldn't get them to stop. "Holy shit, holy shit! Too close. That was just too close…"
Fortunately, the rest of the day went on uneventfully. The Holy Father must have loved to play tricks on him, as ever since Joshua narrowly eluded being eaten alive or succumbing to a waterborne disease, he no longer trusted his environment. The slightest noise startled him. The slightest movement coerced his walking stick up into a ready stance.
Every time he put something in his mouth to eat, to drink, the lost human did it only with a cluster of red crystals in sight. He whiled away the boredom by practicing some swipes and thrusts on the XP crystals. He sought quick stimuli from the mana gems, as much as he knew those would never replace actual nourishment.
Joshua never did figure out why he could absorb the Spirit Gems, but he wasn't going to look at a gift horse in the mouth. The cards were stacked against him, as though the City of Dragons did everything in its power to stop him, short of killing the young boy outright.
When night settled in, knowing predators like that boar were more likely to find and kill him, he took shelter up a tree, and thankfully, one with the blue and red berries. A few Spirit Gem clusters dotted the surrounding area, and from here he could glimpse—and hardly so—two locations he recognized from Dawn of the Dragon.
He was glad he survived, Joshua concluded. If he kept this up over the next several days, by the time he reached Warfang, he wouldn't be so surprised if he felt like he achieved 100% in the original Spyro trilogy on a blind playthrough all over again.
Of course, the circle of life was not one to back down from a challenge.
Joshua's reminiscing was interrupted by the sounds of yipping and yowling, coming from below. He stared down at the forest floor, his green eyes accustomed to the darkness and the light shone from the Spirit Gems and the twin moons above.
A pack of wolves meandered into view. Their eyes shone a frightening yellow and globs of purple saliva trickled from their large, strong jaws. He couldn't exactly recognize the color of their fur, but Joshua had been a fan of the Legend of Spyro trilogy long enough to identify what exactly these creatures were.
Death Hounds.
Four of them.
Joshua resisted the urge of pleading for mercy from the Heavens and instead clutched his stick. His only weapon. Surviving this on his own power would require—
A growl stopped the human from moving further. It was close.
Too close for comfort.
He gyrated. That sounded like it came from right beside him…
A fifth Death Hound, larger than the other four, glared at him hungrily from the branch of an adjacent tree. A cold chill ran down Joshua's spine, for these enemies had shown much better resourcefulness than they ever did in the video games. F*ck, my, life.
Anxiety grasped Joshua hard. He scrambled to move. Now!
The Alpha of the pack lunged at him with its claws primed and fangs prepped for the kill.
"AHHHHH!"
Author's notes:
Finally starting to get some of the fun parts, at last.
This is Joshua's first combat situation, and unfortunately, all he's got is a hard stick and not a shred of armor on him. If this was your typical Spyro Human-in-the-Dragon-Realms story, I'm pretty sure this is my cue to reveal that Joshua is a high-level black belt in Krav Maga with years of experience in practical combat. Or, well... something like that.
Hmmmm… Nope. Not gonna happen.
Not on my watch. :P