Chapter Text
Five hours in, and he is already out of water.
Now, in Mumbo’s defense, that patch of flowers he’d encountered two hours back had looked so sad and withered, and he couldn’t help giving them a good watering. Those flowers deserve life too!
But. It is 4:20 pm, according to his phone - which is also on 13% battery and increasingly dwindling. And he really doesn’t have an excuse for the amount of Candy Crush he had played on the car ride to the mountains.
Oh well. Worst case scenario… actually, worst case scenario, some unfortunate hiker finds his starving, dehydrated, broken body at the base of some cliffs somewhere in a few weeks.
...Mumbo is just great at cheering himself up, isn’t he?
His phone’s already on airplane mode, with the brightness turned way down. He just has to hope he manages to find a power outlet before he’s completely stranded.
With a resolute nod that Mumbo absolutely is not feeling internally, he shoves his phone back into the pocket of his jacket and continues down the empty stretch of path before him. And slowly, the foliage of the wilderness swallows him up once more.
~*~
Mumbo isn’t quite sure what he’s looking at.
It’s the little things - the tiny purple mushrooms that grow unnaturally fast among forest roots, long and windy stems that are always wrapped around his feet once he wakes even though he swears he had cleared the sleeping area of such things before crawling into his sleep bag.
The stream he had finally found, with water to boil and drink, water a freezing temperature too cold for the weather around it, and the way the fish there sparkle with rainbow scales beneath glinting sunlight - he had thought it is just a trick of the sunlight hitting water, but with a net he had packed Mumbo had managed to catch one.
Nope. Definitely rainbow scales, wavy and glinting and shimmering, like a prismatic museum piece.
He fillets, grills, and eats that fish over a cooking fire. It tastes normal enough, with hints of trout and salmon - though there’s a bit of a fizzy feeling when it hits the back of his throat, like a can of soda opening.
Mumbo is especially weirded out by the tiny blue rocks. Pebbles. Glass beads. Whatever they’re supposed to be. They glow azure, luminescent in the nighttime, and are smooth and cool to touch. Mumbo carries a few in his pockets, now, having picked them up after first seeing them - oddly enough, he feels his steps spring faster with them, though their presence kind of freaks him out on some deep, instinctual level.
He keeps them, though, if nothing else than for the simple reason that he can’t be rid of them anyway.
Every time Mumbo goes to sleep in what is supposed to be a perfectly normal, completely ordinary section of the woods, he wakes with purple mushrooms around his legs and shiny blue rocks littered in a circle around his camp.
He knows he should, probably, be rather freaked out by this. Normal people would see that something is terribly wrong and try to find human civilization immediately. Nothing good ever happened to those who wander deep into the wilderness where the rules of logic doesn’t work quite right.
But normal people also don’t go hiking a 2 thousand mile, 3200 kilometer trail through vast stretches of near complete isolation alone, and with supplies some would call far less practical. Mumbo’s in this a little too deep to try and pull out now, even though he has a feeling that if he tried, it wouldn’t be too late for him.
It’s on the beginning of the 3rd week - with one pit stop at a rest stop to charge his phone - and less than a hundred miles down the trail (he tends to wander a lot, whether deliberately or because he’s actually lost), that Mumbo encounters someone who isn’t a fellow hiker or a tour guide.
He’s sitting on a tree stump, surprisingly sturdy and still resistant to rot and definitely man-made - or at least deliberately made - from the flatness of its diameter. It’s been 3 hours of near straight walking, and he thinks he deserves a little break at this point - and so, he’s hunched into himself while slowly eating a packet of skittles.
It’s Mumbo’s last pack. He's trying to savor it, let each tiny pebble of flavor swish around his tongue, slowly melt into warm, drippy sugar water. He’s barely halfway through when someone large and feathery and definitely not human lands in front of him.
Well. Presumably, he tries to land in front of Mumbo. In reality, it’s more like a dive-bomb crash that sends the person sprawled into a tangle of limbs and leaves, which he then rights into a posture that clearly pretends that had all been intentional.
“Nice landing,” Mumbo says.
“Oh, shut up,” the person with wings scowls back.
“You got leaves all over my hair,” Mumbo observes, plucking the biggest one - that’s dangling over an eye - out.
“Well - listen. Small accident. They happen.” Person-with-wings - and wow, are they big wings now that he’s stretched them out, twice the length of Mumbo’s width from hand to hand and dappled with the golden-brown of a sunlit autumn forest. Russet streaks pattern down the lower primaries, the same as the deepest shade of red maple.
Camouflage, perhaps? Does this creature shed his wing feathers to match the seasons?
Mumbo contemplates while he pops another skittle into his mouth.
Wing-person frowns, snapping his wings back close and leaning forward. “Hey.”
Mumbo blinks. “Yeah?”
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” he demands. “Ask anything.”
“Oh.” What is he supposed to say? Mumbo’s brain scrambles around like a lost chicken for a moment, before coming up with the embarrassingly simple answer. “Uh - what’s your name?”
Wing-person recoils back again, now looking extremely offended.
Hey! In his defense, it’s been a while since Mumbo’s had to do this whole social interaction thing. But then again, he wasn’t the one who had crashed from the trees in front of a stranger, and then proceeded to question said stranger. Mumbo’s pretty sure that’s not high on the list of normal social protocols.
“My name’s Grian,” wing-person - Grian - finally says. “Don’t let the fae catch you asking that question to them, though. I really thought I’d got you there?”
“You thought… that I thought you were a fae?” Mumbo asks. “You don’t match any descriptors at all. Except for a propensity to be cryptic and annoying, I suppose.”
Grian ruffles his feathers again, but his mouth is set in a pout.
“That’s what people who usually wander this place looking like idiots come to see,” he mutters. “It’s always ‘ooh, where’s the faries? ’ and ‘I wanna find a circle-thingy! No thought for any of the rest of us.”
“You do seem like the attention-seeking type,” Mumbo says. Another skittle.
Grian full out squawcks this time. “Mumbo Jumbo. You are awful. I don’t know why I bothered following you for 3 days thinking you’d be good prey-”
“Oh, that’s because I deliberately acted like dumb prey in front of you,” Mumbo says.
“What?”
“In my defense, it was either let the creepy stalker keep following me for however long, or lure whoever it is out so I can finally get a good night’s sleep,” Mumbo says. He narrows his eyes. “You… aren’t going to murder me in my sleep, right?”
“Nah,” Grian says, stretching out a wing again. “You’re way too interesting to eat.”
“Explains why you bothered to figure out my name,” Mumbo says. “What did you do? Read my mind? Siphon my memories?”
Grian snorts. “I’m magic, but not that kind of magic. I just snuck into your tent and looked through your phone one night.”
“What?” Now Mumbo feels betrayed. Snooped around his phone? Was it really something so simple?
“I would have felt better if you’d read my mind,” he mumbles. “At least that’s full of mostly empty air, instead of…”
“Trust me, I’ve seen far worse search histories,” Grian says.
“You looked through my search history?”
~*~
“So what do you want, Mumbo Jumbolio?” Grian asks.
“What do you want?” Mumbo shoots back, pausing briefly to shift a pack strap back over his shoulders before continuing down the forest path.
“I’m bored,” Grian says.
“Well, that makes two of us.”
He spots another stream a little ways from the trail, with a bed of cattails around it. It reminds him that he’s low on food again - always a constant issue. Cattails are mostly edible, but he’s really not looking forward to cooking those up.
Too bad his hunting skills are absolutely terrible.
~*~
“Are you going to bed without food?” Grian asks, actually sounding scandalized. Even after being caught snooping, he still refuses to leave the tent.
Mumbo shrugs as he fluffs up his sleeping bag. “Nothing to eat. I’ll see if I can find something tomorrow.”
“How,” Grian sighs, “in the worlds did you survive the - you said past three weeks?”
“Nearly four,” Mumbo says. “I’ll probably be hiking this trail for a good few years.”
A disbelieving snort.
Then, the feathers around Grian’s ears and over his head, a flowy covering in place of hair, spike up. He raises the taloned ends of a wing - somewhere along the way, Mumbo had noticed Grian has no arms. Or, more accurately, his upper appendages are wings instead of arms, and the top bend of wing bone juts out into four sharp, dark red talons.
“I’ll find food for you,” Grian declares. “There’s still light, so you’re not falling asleep without eating something. I have no idea how you’ve managed this long.”
“I survived you, didn’t I?” Mumbo says. Then the weight of what Grian has offered hits him. “Um-”
“This is on the house,” Grian says, and Mumbo’s decently sure that’s not how that phrase should be used. “We can negotiate something for further food supplies if you want. But you are absolutely not fainting from exhaustion and cracking you head on a rock sometime.”
“That would be a rather stupid way to die,” Mumbo says. Apparently, Grian takes that as agreement, because he’s swooping out of the tent a moment later.
Mumbo stares at the still fluttering flaps for a long, long few minutes before finally turning back to his sleeping bag. He’s not sure what the arrival of Grian heralds - safety, or danger, or perhaps a mix of both, depending on how he looks at it.
One thing’s for sure, though. This trip has, evidently, just gotten a lot more interesting.