Mitchel's throat felt dry, and his skin felt hot; he felt like he just fell off his bunk into a bonfire. Slowly starting to return to consciousness his eyes would snap open as his last memory surfaced. Him being in the tent with his back against a table full of enough holes to make Swiss cheese jealous.
Quickly trying to sit up, he felt heavy, his legs wouldn't move and he couldn't lift his arms no matter how hard he tried. Slowly he started to turn his head and trying to focus enough to get rid of the blurriness covering his eyes.
While adjusting to the light, he could make out the light peaking through the trees overhead, but the soft crackling nearby made him try to turn his head enough to look towards the noise. His first thought; he must have been restrained and kept barely alive for interrogation.
However, as he finally shifted his stiff neck down towards the crackling, he would be greeted by a patch of grass burning beside his head, and as he quickly shifted, his body listened enough for him to roll back away from the fire that was likely next to his head.
Starting to look around once more, he found that when he looked down, to check his wounds. Instead of a uniform covered in blood and holes his chest was now covered in fur, and many openings spread across his body that released small bolts of fire in time with his heartbeat that was now going a mile a minute. His mind went into overdrive as he couldn't stop trying to understand what was happening and what was going on, before he started to calm down and assess his surroundings.
"Alright, one thing at a time. First things first, equipment check...I have nothing but the skin on my back."
Stopping and looking around, he saw that the area he was laying on was actually burnt to ash and had spread to a few feet past where he was before. Looking around once more, this time he started listening and thinking about what he needed to survive.
"Alright, remember the 3's of survival. Three minutes without oxygen, three hours without shelter, three days without water, three weeks without food. I need to find some water soon since I already feel like I have cotton mouth."
Trying to take a step, Mitchel found himself almost immediately stumbling around until he slowed down and started to focus on how he was walking on all fours now. Spending a few minutes adjusting to and figuring out how to walk on all fours was a ordeal in and of itself. Getting the mental control needed he started to walk in the direction of the rising sun.
While walking, Mitchel started to figure out how his legs worked and started to pick up the pace as he continued in a straight line, towards the east. After an hour of walking, he abruptly stopped as he turned his head towards a subtle sound of rushing water, picking up his pace further into a run, making his way towards the source of the sound to find a long stretch of river going down a series of rapids.
Following the rapids down to the bottom of the hill, he could only stop and put his face into the water nearly drowning himself as he drank from the river. Pulling his head up from the water, Mitchel turned back around, now having found a source of water.
"That's water satisfied, now onto food and shelter."
Remembering the landmarks around the river, he turned to the nearby bushes and trees beside the stream and reached up to swipe at the tree, leaving a set of claw marks seared into the bark of the trunk. Moving back into the forest, he continued marking trees along the way until finding something unexpected.
Tents, four of them, that only barely reached the bottom of his jaw. Being wary, Mitchel started to shift into the forestry around the clearing to be farther away from the encampment, while also less exposed to anyone inside the camp. During his move around the camp, he found his ears twitching towards a sound in the distance, echoing from the northern side of the camp.
Starting to stalk through the trees, he became more alert while moving towards the indistinct noises he was hearing. A few minutes later discovering a cave of some kind, and the sound he was hearing was now much louder and distinct, sounding like the clash of metal and yelling in some language that wasn't English.
Moving into the cave, it felt like he had walked into a sauna as the air around him felt heavy and warm, but the feeling felt wonderful, as though being here was wrapping him in a comfortable blanket. Continuing deeper he started to see strange looking animals, to him, bats that were half the size of those tents from before, and covered in ice. A massive looking bear, bigger than him by a few sizes, and a series of dog like creatures with six legs each.
Progressing further into the cavern, shouting started to echo up the tunnel towards him. Reaching the room that had the source of the noises he had heard, he found something he never would have thought about, nothing he was seeing should have existed.
He saw a group of people in armor dating back to the medieval times, fighting against what could only be described as an oversized snake. Whether it was because the people are small, or because he and the snake were simply much larger, the extreme size difference was noticeable either way.
These people were somehow fighting the massive snake and it didn't make sense until he saw the lightly armored man in the rear of the group point towards the snake while glowing circles appeared around his hands to shoot out a flurry of projectiles towards the serpent's eyes.
None of this made sense, and the strangeness was starting to catch up to him as Mitchel could only stare at the situation in front of him in complete bewilderment.