Morning all. I hope everyone had a great weekend. I cot a lot of chores knocked out this weekend. It was one of those weirdly productive weekends. I had my normal list of things to do but then I just managed to get several long term projects competed so it felt way more productive than I planned. I still watched several Star Trek episodes in my ongoing marathon, but I was still quite productive. Hopefully the streak lasts the week. Let’s start off with the prompt and see where we end up. Timers at the ready…
I like this one, I have been toying with this idea for a while and it has cropped up in various prompts before. It is a story idea that I have pieces to but no firm grip on the actual structure of it. I suspect it will pop up periodically until a lightbulb goes off and then I will start the story in earnest. For now I like that it is still pinging around in my brain.
Monday, September 11th: He walked into camp.
He walked into camp. He was filthy and bedraggled but still, he walked into camp on his own steam. He took a great deal of pleasure in that. Austin managed to set up his tent for the night and get everything inside it. He thought about getting his ration pack out but decided he was more tired than hungry.
Jared had the fire going by that point and he collapsed by the side of it more for the soul deep comfort the fire brought him in the middle of the woods than for any need for warmth. Jared looked at him across the dancing flames. His face was set into disapproving lines.
“Don’t do anything to the fire,” he said.
Austin dimly wondered if Jared thought he would put the fire out or cause it to burn the woods down, even as he nodded. He had to admit both were possibilities. Thus far on this trip he inadvertently caused several minor calamities.
His version of hiking was an hour long walk on a well marked path. And even that he preferred to take on sidewalks rather than dirt paths. This was not his natural environment. He felt distinctly at odds with the wilderness and it seemed the wilderness did not care much for him either. This morning when they set out for their first day of hiking he managed to disturb a wasps nest and had several stings to prove it. He had also managed to slide down a hill, trip over a log and fall flat on his face and take a tumble into a stream.
‘Luckily the stream was early enough in the day that the sun dried everything,’ he thought looking at the positives. It was scant comfort.
In addition to the calamities, his body was not used to this sort of thing. He may walk a lot but it was on flat ground and generally moving from building to building. Taking the stairs twice a day had not prepared him for this. His body was protesting the rise and fall of the landscape and begging for far more rest breaks than the others seemed to need.
In the end he was left to straggle behind, making it into camp about an hour after everyone else. There was only one path and he remembered Derick telling him to stay on it so he wouldn’t get lost as he took longer to rise from their last rest.
‘Though they were probably hoping I would get lost,’ he thought. He tried not to feel resentful. He hadn’t wanted to go on this trip in the first place, but it was considered a bonding experience and he was outvoted. He heard the others moving around and wondered what sort of bonding they were going to do.
‘Maybe that comes when we actually do things now that we’ve reached camp,’ He thought. Austin was not optimistic. ‘But I promised I’d try.’ Deciding that he would help out by relieving Jared of the stress of fire damage, Austin hauled himself to his feet and made his way back to his tent.
“I should change and wash off,’ he thought. Instead, he lay down on top of his sleeping bag and was unconscious in seconds.
Ten til Midnight 