"Why did you eat me?" said the ghost of the cat.
"I was hungry," I said.
"Is that a good reason?" it asked.
"As good as any," I replied.
As I was talking to the ghost of the cat, a bear appeared. It was a scary bear. Terrifying with its strong body and sharp claws. It wanted to eat me. I just knew it.
"Prepare to be eaten," said the bear.
"I will do no such thing," I said.
"Then be eaten anyway," it said.
Right then, a flaming sword fell from the sky. I poured a bucket of water on the sword because I did not want to burn my hand. Then I grasped the sheath and swung. I hit air.
"You missed," said the bear.
"I disagree," I said. "I actually have a vendetta against the carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere and was showing it who was boss."
"I see" said the bear.
I cut off the bear's head. And ate it.
What the hell was wrong with me? I knew what my immediate problem was, but why was I giving myself such digestive issues? No time for intense self-discovery, however, with such a pressing matter at hand. Or, more accurately, several inches to the side of each hand.
No restroom was in sight or even an outhouse. The presence of a proper ditch also eluded me. Just a big bloody open field with the remains of my victims making the first half of this sentence a literal statement. Trees lined the perimeter, but I knew that there was no time to get there. Luckily, I kicked the bucket before soiling myself.
The bucket had been right behind me ever since I used it to douse the sword's flames, but I had understandably gotten distracted and forgotten all about it. Now that I once again recalled its existence, I quickly relieved myself without even bothering to cover myself.
As I was shitting the bear's brains out, or perhaps it was the cat's at that point, a child appeared out of thin air. It was a stocky boy, no more than a dozen years of age, with a jaundiced complexion yet without a sickly demeanor. He pointed, chortled at my misfortune, and ran off. I was glad of that, because if he hadn't run away I probably would have ended up eating his possibly diseased head.
With my intestines feeling better, I started pondering my newfound compulsion for eating heads. Having no formal education after my thirteenth year made obtaining results difficult. What happened next proved an even greater obstacle.
A spaceship landed a few feet away from me. The door opened, and a sphinx appeared.
"I shall ask you a riddle," said the sphinx, "and if you answer correctly then you will be free to go. You don't want to know what will happen if you do not answer correctly."
"Bring it on," I said.
"What has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three at night?"
This was an easy one. Oldest riddle in the book. Old enough that I had time to commit the question and answer to memory before I left school to make a name for myself as a heroic adventurer. I formed the words in my brain and wanted to say them, but an overpowering mental force overtook me and I said "Your mother."
It was a good thing that I cleared my system out in the bucket minutes earlier, so I merely produced a small wet spot in the front of my pants before steadying myself and readying myself for battle. I looked up and saw that the sphinx gave no signs of an imminent attack.
"Do you mean my biological mother or my surrogate mother?" it said.
"The second one," I replied. Don't know why I said that, since I wasn't really sure what either meant at the time, but it worked. The sphinx said something about having been gestated in a human uterus and got back into the ship.
My problems, however, did not leave with it. A rabbit streaked across the field and then stopped near me. Most people wouldn't have been alarmed, especially while standing as I was near a patch of wild carrots, but my combined experience watching quest-related movies and living in this bizarre forested area made it clear to me that this was no ordinary rabbit and I should fear for my life. Especially since I didn't have any explosive weapons to throw at the animal.
It was an ordinary rabbit. This became obvious when a bear arrived and ate it.
"I'm not full yet," said the bear.
"I'll pump you full of hot lead," I said.
"I would like to see you try," said the scowling animal.
I didn't even know what I meant. Hot lead? What's that? I tried figuring out what that could possibly be when the rush of an eagle's wings almost knocked me down. In its talons, the eagle carried what I now know is called a shotgun. The bear laughed evilly.
"I see a pot of honey over there," I said.
"Where?" said the bear.
"Over by that giant tree that is so much bigger than all of the other trees. The one that is so big that it can't eat the sunlight so it needs honey too. You’d better hurry before it eats it all."
The bear must've understood me better than I did because it went bounding off towards the oversized tree, which actually did have a huge honey pot by the base of its trunk. I ran after it in spite of myself.
Once there, the obvious choice was to decapitate the beast as it lapped up the sugary goodness. Once the neck had been severed, I ate the head. Dammit!
How I managed to get the thing down was at least as much of an enigma to me at the time as why I continued to do things that I knew were bad for me.
How I managed to keep the thing down would have been a bigger mystery if it had happened. Unsurprisingly, it didn't. The entirely unnecessary meal exited via both ends and I was grateful to have been in the forest so I could act like what I ate instead of embarrassing myself in front of random children.
Then the trees started falling.
Seriously? Trees falling for no apparent reason? Maybe that was a sign that I should become more religious, but there wasn't any time for prayer.
"Death to he who disturbs the natural order of this habitat," bellowed a tree. I couldn't recall doing anything more unnatural than talking trees on a kamikaze mission, which was partially because there was no time to think. Burning with a fiery will to live, I ran a few steps and stopped. Knowing that would not be nearly enough, I proceeded to drop and roll. Into a troll.
"I'm here to help," said the troll, looking about as surprised to be saying that as I was to be witnessing good intentions from such a notoriously bad-tempered sort of creature. Nevertheless, it held the sequoia away from my head and made no attempt to injure me.
I ran. Really fast. For meters and meters and meters. Didn't really look where I was going, and when I stopped I was in a cave.
This cave was home to bears. I was sure of it. If they were so prevalent that they wandered off into forest clearings, such an obvious bear hideout could not possibly be devoid of them. I looked around for a combat weapon. I found icicles.
A few of the pieces of ice on the ground looked sharp enough. I picked up two, not particularly bothered by their coldness because I was already freezing from standing deep in a cave, and began hunting to avoid being hunted.
After a few minutes, I found what I was looking for, or at least what remained of them. Bear bones. An immense feeling of relief swept over me as I realized that they wouldn't try to eat me and I wouldn't eat them. The feeling was about as temporary as a broom stroke in a sand storm.
Ominous music started playing in the background. A sinister classical score that sounded straight out of a horror movie. I wheeled around and saw a symphony orchestra directly behind me. They were not there before.
I turned 180 degrees and saw a foreboding lake in front of me. No surprise there, since I remembered it from five minutes ago, but it wasn't as foreboding back then. Something besides the music increased the fear factor, but I couldn't place what it was.
The lake bubbled. The bubbles weren't there before. Neither were the crossbow and battle axe that had just appeared on the floor. Might as well drop the ice and pick those up.
Armed with two weapons that I had never used before, I watched my foe ascend from the watery deep.
I couldn't believe it.
It was a gigantic bear. With gills.
"You cannot defeat me," it said while appearing to walk on water. Then it threw a large fish at my face with such velocity that I almost fell on my axe. Quickly tossing the weapon several feet just before I slammed in the ground probably saved my life, and I doubt that I would have been able to throw it at all had I not started moving my arm just as the fish left the villain's hand.
"You're a dead bear," I said as I struggled to my feet. My body ached terribly, but I still managed to successfully string my bow and put an arrow in my enemy's shoulder.
It removed the tip without any sign of pain and hurled another fish at my head. I dodged it, barely, and ended up hitting the floor again in the process. At least getting up was easier this time.
Once up, I heard a faint clinking sound that turned out to be the arrival of a small bottle of poison, complete with skull & crossbones and the word "poison". I dipped an arrow in the brown liquid, shot at my target, and hoped for the best. The best is not what happened.
The arrow shattered from colliding with yet another oversized fish and fell relatively harmlessly into the water. I felt a slight twinge of remorse about the effect that the poison might have on the fish in the water, but this was no time to get all weepy about the environment. No time to think about much of anything lately.
The next arrow didn't hit a fish or anything else. Then I got the bear in the neck. It stumbled slightly, revealing sturdy metal stilts underneath its feet, then growled at me as it regained its balance.
"You underestimate my constitution," it said. "I can withstand ten of those before succumbing to the effects of the toxic chemicals."
Can't say I knew what the first half of the statement had to do with the rest of it, but it was good to know exactly what I needed to do in order to vanquish this ridiculous creature. I dipped another arrow in poison and dodged an incoming fish. Then I brought the arrow up to the bowstring and tried to get my weapon properly loaded. And tried. And tried again, but to no avail. I suddenly had no idea how to do what I had done mere minutes beforehand, yet I kept trying until a fish hit me in the ear. With a pounding headache, I hurried as fast as I could to a rock that I could safely hide behind as long as my assailant didn't leave the water.
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