Wandering

Marty's Misfortune

Entry #4

1st of July

Location: Changeling camp, at the foot of Jägarfjället (Presumably somewhere around  67˚20'N, longitude unknown)

Unclaimed territory in the Icemarks, north of Equestria

The familiar sensations of cold wind, and the heat of bodies curling up against me to shield themselves from it, met me as I woke up. I shivered slightly and decided, as my first conscious thought, to go back to sleep and wait for the weather to calm down. The cold air would not cease buffeting me awake,  however, and my efforts to prolong my rest were very soon rendered null and void.

For a few moments as I came to, I lay there pondering why the hell the tent flap was open wide enough to let this much wind in. Or for that part, who the bloody idiot getting up at this hour was. This swiftly became a reflection on the fact that I'd been up late last night, which then turned to an actual recollection of what had happened. Fumbling my hands out of my sleeping bag, I tore off my impromptu blindfold and jolted up, staring at the scene around me.

My backpack was, thankfully, in its normal spot, and didn't seem to have suffered any nightly disaster while I was snoozing. On the opposite side, however, was a changeling. Chrysalis. There were hivelings most everywhere as well, but the entire camp was silent except for the wind. Changelings, it seemed, did not rise early.

Chrysalis was still fast asleep, all stretched out like a dog with her back against me. One of her wings was flared out over my legs, and her hooves were pawing at the ground in rhythm with her breathing. Her horn was fuming slightly, small green sparks shooting off every other second, and the ground was distinctly warmer where she lay, with a hint of green light coming from underneath the jacket I'd used for a sleeping mat.

I was getting quite envious of that horn of hers by this point.

As I stretched my hand out to nudge her awake, I was stopped by another. Or, well, the hoof of another, at least. “The queen needs rest, hunter. You must not wake her.” I recognized the creaky voice as that of the same changeling that had spoken briefly to me yesterday, and I turned to face her.

Recognizing her features was a bit difficult, I admit. There's a bit of difference in facial features and markings, as well as their individual bite marks, but changelings in general are pretty homogenous on the outside. At least to my eyes. In any case she seemed to be the only one else awake in the entire camp, aside from me.

“Uh...” I didn't have much of a clue of the situation at this point, so I just sat and stared at her for a few seconds, eyes wandering to Chrysalis and the surrounding hivelings, then going back to her a few times before settling on the one thing around me that I was familiar with; my backpack. There was, after all, a morning to be made. “Right. I'll just, eat breakfast, then.”

I began rummaging through my pack for a change of clothes, and noticed her staring intently at me. I raised a questioning eyebrow at her as I withdrew my spare nylons from one of the side pockets, and began changing inside the sleeping bag to prevent the heat from escaping. Finally I couldn't help but ask.

“What? What's with the stare?”

She perked her ears up and, to my surprise, blinked. Or rather, opened her eyes. For a second the pale blue sheet raised itself to reveal a sparkling green iris, glowing with life and intelligence. Her fangs clicked as she opened her mouth to speak, and her wings fluttered for a moment, raising her from the ground briefly. “I'm...not sure. Your anatomy. It is fascinating. I think.”

I snorted as I finished changing, shaking my head at her. “Says you. You're a member of a species that, in accordance with all the laws of physics I've studied so far, and those are quite a few, should not be able to exist. I'm just a human. Oh, wait! Maybe that's rare around these parts. Conforming to the laws of physics, pah, that isso 2005,” I finished, adopting my best attempt at a hipster voice before packing up my trousers and jumping out of the sack, struggling to get my legs inside as fast as possible. Blood and hell, it was cold!

Behind me I heard the changeling stifling a laughter; probably at my ungainly attempts at getting dressed. I grumbled as I finally got my gear into place, and bent down to retrieve my shirts – both the lighter one in bamboo, and the thick, bright red one in fleece I usually reserved for skiing. Today was definitely a day when I needed both, and a jacket.

“You've got it easy,” I went on as I straightened up to pull them on, and started buttoning them. “What the hell are you made of, anyway? You don't even seem to feel this bloody wind. Why don't you try out being in my suit before you start laughing at me, yeah?” Shaking my head, I unfastened one of the side packs and untied the straps holding the trangia and its fuel bottle in place.

As I rose to look for a spot to set it up, I heard a sound behind me. It was much like the sound you get when you put a lighter over a lit candle, except significantly louder and deeper. My first worry was that the changeling had somehow found the portable speaker in my pack and done something weird to it, but that idea was swiftly blown away when I saw her.

“Vad i-”

Or, rather, what had been her a few seconds ago. In her place was, well, me.

“HELVETE-”

I was, however, having obvious problems keeping off the ground. My curse dwindled in my mouth as I gaped and stared atmyself, somehow managing to tanglemyself inmy shirts asI yelped, fell down and buriedmy face in the folds of the backpack.

For a few seconds I stood there just gaping, unable to do anything but make ten thousand random guesses on what the hell was going on. Then I heard the sound again, andI was enveloped in a cloud of green flames for a moment, before returning to the shape of the changeling I'd expected to see there from the beginning.

“Ow. Your balance point is weird,” she mumbled through my jacket, which had ended up draped over her snout as she fell. Her wings fluttered to life and propelled her up into the air, and she brushed the jacket off with a hoof, letting it fall down to the ground again.

“I get your point. It does feel cold. You're outside your habitat zone. Aren't you?”

She touched down on the ground again, and cocked her head a bit.

I still couldn't get any words out, and my head was still much too busy wrapping itself around the sheer impossibilities of what had just happened. With the rest of my body out of commission, my stomach promptly took charge.

I let out a loud groan and turned on my heels, storming off with the trangia and my food pack clattering as I stomped my way through the camp. Fortunately the ground wasn't entirely swarmed by the swarm, so I didn't need to step on any hivelings. Half a minute of irate walking later, I sat down on a small rock and began setting up the trangia.

Some minute later the burner was hot, and I was just about ready to put the oats and berries in for the porridge, when I realized I'd made a fatal miscalculation.

I had no water.

Since Sarek was a veritable checkerboard of crisscrossing jokks and reservoirs, all clear as day, there was never any need to carry more than what you needed at the moment – a fact that took a great deal of weight off your shoulders on any hike, literally. Elsewhere, clean water had a tendency to become a major issue when traveling outside the boundaries of civilization.

This was pretty much the definition of 'elsewhere', and I didn't have a single drop – I'd emptied my water bag crossing the Guhkesvágge, thinking to refill it wherever we made camp. While I'd seen a lot of things since coming down the mountain, running water was definitely not one of them.

For an instant I panicked, my eyes darting around as I looked for a source of water. Then I stopped, and slapped myself in the face, remembering my trip down the mountain yesterday. Most of it had been done on snow.

I turned around to face the slope, but to my dismay it was a fair distance off. The pass I'd came out of was well on the other side of the camp, and there weren't any offshoots of meltwater running down from it as far as I could see. What I did see, however, was the changeling that had been haunting me all morning, standing behind me and looking curiously at me as I stressed around my tiny wilderness kitchen.

She had wings. I decided it was well time for me to start using the perks of these aliens to my advantage. If they were going to use me as a food source, in however odd a way it might be, I'd be damned if I wasn't entitled to some help with my own sustenance in return.

“You.” I grabbed one of the pots, and pointed it at her. She put a hoof to her chin, questioning. “Yes, you. Why are you even asking? I mean, do you see anyone else around here up and walking? Just, look. Can you fly across the camp with this,” I waved the pot around a bit to ensure she knew what I was talking about, “over to the slopes, and fill it up with snow? Pack it a bit if you can, and make sure it's well over the rim. Ait?”

She made a few confused gestures before looking around herself to see what I was talking about, and nodding. “I can,” she replied, and walked up to me, eying the somewhat buckled aluminum pot curiously as I handed it to her.

“There's a good lass,” I said, ruffling her ears a bit when she kept standing there, staring at the pot and the stove it was part of. “Now chop chop, I'd really prefer not to be starving when Chrysalis wakes up. Makes me all grumpy.” At the mention of her queen's name her ears perked up straight and stiff, while I was ruffling them. She nodded again, and drew away from me a bit before taking off.

I have to admit, the speed she got up without any visible exertion at all was pretty impressive. Well above what I can run during any extended period of time, probably in the class of an elite sprinter from what I could discern. I shook my head at yet another of this world's impossibilities, and put the sizzle cap on the burner to save fuel.

Not a minute later I spotted her taking off from the far side of the camp, and she cleared the half-odd kilometer or so in just over half a minute. Quick math gave me an average speed of 60km/h, and seeing the leisure she carried herself (and the pot) with in the air as she flew, it was probably well below her limit. I shivered slightly at the ideas that cropped up in my head as she touched down beside me, and handed me the now snow-filled pot.

Melting the snow took a while, but before long it was thawed enough to start working with. Bits of clumped-up snow still floated around in the pot when I put the oatmeal in, along with some blueberry soup powder for some flavor aside from the salt. Soon enough it was becoming a brown-and-purple bubbling ooze, and I lidded on the burner again to let the porridge set.

While I was cooking the changeling watched eagerly, her eyes all open with the irises glowing green in the morning light. It was fairly hard not to miss, despite my focus on getting my food right – she was standing on the other end of the trangia, and her eyes only let go of it to look at me instead. Finally, she spoke up when I'd finished adjusting the burner.

“What are you doing?”

I snorted in amusement at the obvious answer. “Cooking. I'm making breakfast, like I said.”

She cocked her head, before bowing down and putting her nose to the simmering pot, whiffing it. “Is this...martin food?”

I frowned a bit. “It's porridge. Oatmeal porridge. With blueberries in it. And I think you meant human food, in which case, yes it is.”

She raised her head again and gave me a confused look. “Human? I thought you said you were Martin?”

I gave her a wide-eyed look before I burst into laughter for a second, shaking my head as I stirred the pot with a spoon. “No, no. That's myname. You're a changeling, I'm a human. My name is Martin.” I looked up at her in askance. “What's yours?” I pondered the question for a few moments, looking back at the swarm for a bit, and realized that it might have been slightly improper. “I mean, you do have names, right? It's not just the queen who gets one, is it?”

The changeling opened and closed her mouth a few times, staring at me with those glimmering green eyes. Finally, she looked away slightly and, to my surprise, blushed.

A few moments of awkward silence passed with me hoping I hadn't broken some sort of secret changeling rule, before she spoke up. “I...of course we do. It's just...they're personal, is all.” She cast her eyes about for a few seconds before shaking her head and looking back at me again. “It's fine, M-Martin. M-my name is Elytra,” she blurted out, immediately looking away after with an intensified blush covering most of her normally black head.

My eyes remained on her for several seconds, before I sighed and leaned down to grab my cup from the pack. “Well, Elytra. I think the porridge is done. Would you like some?”

Obviously grateful for the change of topic, she nodded profusely and sat down beside me as I prepared to share a meal with an alien for the first time in my life. Probably for the first time in history as well. Think what you may of oatmeal porridge being the ambassador of human food, but in all fairness, it could have been something a lot worse.

Like pickles...