In every direction is woodland for as far as the eye can see. Grass, bushes, and trees untouched by human hands dominate the landscape. The verdant green color and cool breeze rustling the trees wakes Julian up near instantly. He stands unsteadily and blinks, but after rubbing his eyes, the landscape stays unchanged.
"The hell?" He mutters to himself. "This is a little far for a prank. Pick on the poor network guy, eh? We'll see how you like having your everything throttled..." He pulls his phone from his strangely loose pants and looks at it only to pause.
NO SERVICE
"Huh..." Julian takes a moment to reboot his phone, but gets the same result. "Fine then." He looks up, but the sun is difficult to see through the trees, which makes orienting himself a pain. He scratches his face with a sigh then freezes.
His stubble is missing. Not just missing, gone entirely. Julian rubs his face, only to find it smoother than it has been in years. No hair, no little acne scars, nothing.
Taking out his phone again, the confused man turns on the forward-facing camera and gapes at what he sees.
A much younger Julian, one who barely looks fourteen years old, gapes back at him. His face is youthful and angular, lacking the lines carved by adult stress. Looking down, he sees the thin and reedy form of his teen-years, not the slightly overweight adult built by years of white-collar work. His clothes, now several sizes too large, hang off his frame as if he were a child who raided his father's wardrobe.
"What the hell were they working on downstairs?" Julian touches his face in wonder. He looks even better than he did when he was actually fourteen. "They weren't making a time-machine or something... were they? Jesus, was there even a forest here years ago? That building was built in the 80s I thought..." Again he looks at this phone, and still, it reads NO SERVICE, making annoyance flare in the man-turned-teen. "Swell."
He turns to pick a direction and begins walking, but stumbles when he steps on something round that nearly makes him trip.
Lifting his shoe and looking down, he blinks in confusion.
Partially embedded into the dirt after he stepped on it, a beautiful rainbow-colored marble stares back at him. In its center sits a curious design, almost like a cutout from a double-helix. It glitters when a thin shaft of sunlight waves past its surface, and if Julian was more superstitious, he'd even say the marble is glowing. Regardless, he leans down, picking up the captivating bauble and rolling it in his hand.
"The design always faces me?" He turns the rainbow-colored orb around and around, yet the design in the center dutifully remains facing him. "Trippy. Did one of DARPA's toys end up here too? No? Where have I seen this design before..?"
Julian isn't sure how long he walks for, as he's too busy entertaining himself by rolling the marble around in his fingers. He inspects it every which way, yet the little glass bauble refuses to show him how it does its party trick. After his too-large shoes almost slip free for the tenth time, he stops and frowns. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he shouts; "Hey! Anyone there!?"
His voice rolls through the trees, and no answer is heard back.
Undaunted, Julian slips the marble into his pocket and keeps walking. He glances at the sky again, and judging from how the sun has moved, he must be heading south.
As the day drags on, the man-turned-teen feels his ire grow when he encounters nothing but more forest. In his mis-sized shoes, his feet begin to hurt, and his unfed stomach begins to growl and chew on itself in hunger.
"Pin?"
Julian pauses when a curious noise comes from above him in a tree. Expecting a bird of some type, he looks up into the tree branches and freezes in place.
Sitting in a glistening spider web large enough to capture an eagle, a bulbous, green spider of horrifying size stares down at him with beady black eyes and blood-red fangs bared. Its yellow legs are banded with black, and a black pattern on its green abdomen resembles a simple smiley face that looks grossly out of place.
Slowly, the spider lowers itself down at him in a strand of thin silk, its tiny eyes trained on the human below it.
Julian turns and runs like hell is on his heels.
"What the fuck was that thing!?" He cries to himself. In the back of his mind, the spider somehow seems familiar, much like the marble he found underfoot, but his panicked mind can't seem to place where exactly he's seen such a monstrous arachnid before.
'In a nightmare, maybe. Jesus fuckin' Christ. I didn't get sent to a jungle where everything and its venomous grandma are out to get me, did I?'
He continues running, crashing through several bushes. After a minute of solid sprinting, Julian dares to look back and sees no spider in pursuit. "Thank you, God!" He praises aloud, dropping out of his sprint to a shaky walk. Turning and leaning against a tree, he puts his hands on his knees and takes deep, lung filling breaths of cool air. Slowly, the adrenaline drains out of his limbs and leaves the man-turned-teen simply frustrated and tired. "I've about had it with this shit," he growls to himself. He looks up at the sky with his arms spread wide. "Okay! I don't know what kind of demented joke this is, but I'm not laughing! Something please start making sense!"
Several birds fly out of the trees, startled by the yelling human below them, but other than that the sound of the wind is Julian's only answer.
The blonde teen crosses his arms with a huff, glancing down at them as he does so. Across his arms are several little cuts and scrapes from where he ran into the bushes earlier. He pokes one and winces at the sting. 'Probably not a dream, then.'
Then without warning, something drops out of the tree above him and lands with a quiet thud.
Julian yelps and jumps away, whirling his arms when his too-large shoes nearly make him trip again. "Who the hell are-" he stops, his jaw dropping.