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Wheeler clings to the trunk of a rainforest tree like her very life depends on it.
“Well, that’ll teach me for eating things I’ve never eaten before, huh?” She says aloud to nobody in particular.
Wheeler has always been open-minded. She’s always gone with the philosophy that you can (and should) try anything once. Don’t knock it ‘till you try it, or something like that.
Enter tubers. Sure, they smell a little funny, but once they’re cooked you hardly notice it. They looked edible, and they tasted like they could be, too.
They were not.
As she empties the contents of her stomach for the third time today, she wonders how she could have possibly come to that conclusion. She spits on the ground and wipes her mouth on her wrist.
How adventurous am I feeling today? She’d said before eating the tuber.
A little too adventurous, it seems.
Doesn’t cooking things remove the poison? That’s how it usually works. Not today, apparently.
I just have to make it back to the Hamlet, back to my cot, she thinks, standing upright with a wobble. How hard could it be?
She takes the first few steps away from the tree and immediately regrets letting go of it. A sudden and intense feeling of dizziness overtakes her; it feels as if she’s doing loop-de-loops in her hot air balloon. The thought should be concerning to her, maybe, seeing as it’s not possible to do such a thing.
Wheeler straightens her back, takes a deep breath, and closes her eyes. She’s an adventurer. She’s fought and won against dozens of gorilla-spider abominations, trudged through foggy jungles without being able to see a foot in front of her, ran through toxic gas with nothing but her jacket covering her face, killed a giant ant queen the size of a mansion, defeated a basilisk with the face of a dog.. The list goes on and on and on. A little poisonous plant can’t stop her.
Right?
As she continues back through the jungle towards the Hamlet, she gets the feeling that she might just be wrong. Wheeler stops and leans against every other tree she passes. She feels like she’s spinning in circles even though she’s almost sure her feet are perfectly still.
At least I know the way back home, she thinks bitterly. She’s lucky she thought to bring a compass, or else she’d have spun herself in a circle with the way her vision spins. She checks her compass again.
Southeast, she thinks. Just keep going. Almost there. Probably.
Her Navigadget is of no use in this situation. Earnestly, she tried to figure something out, but to no avail; how could she find a cure for the poison when all she can find around here is the poison itself?
She trudges on, barely hanging on, until her boot catches on a stray root and she nearly faceplants into the dirt, saved at the last second by throwing her arms out to catch herself.
Wheeler’s wrist twists and cracks in a non-comforting way, and she cries out.
She crawls back over to the stump of a tree, leaning against it and clutching her wrist tenderly.
“Okay. New plan. No more walking until I can walk straight,” she mumbles.
She leans onto her knees with her forehead. Nausea rises in her stomach again, but with no real threat. There’s nothing left to vomit, anyway.
She takes a look at her surroundings. The dense canopy of trees covers most of the skyline, but she can tell by the shadows that it’s evening. There’s no way she’ll make it back to the Hamlet before nightfall.
She starts a fire, made difficult by the clumsiness that comes with being unable to see straight mixed with a twisted wrist. Wheeler looks in her backpack to see what she might have to eat to settle her stomach and finds more of those damn tubers and not a whole lot of anything else.
“Swell,” she mumbles, tossing the tubers haphazardly away from the fire.
Wheeler’s stomach grumbles uncomfortably, and she continues to mull over what to do. Behind her, something rustles in a thicket of leaves. She turns her head abruptly to find a parrot picking at some seeds on the ground.
She gets an unfortunate idea.
“Sorry, birdy,” she says quietly, taking her Pew-Matic from her bag as noiselessly as she can. She loads a piece of flint into it and readies, aims, and fires at what’s supposed to be her next meal.
She misses.
She.. misses?
The bird is, obviously, startled and flies away. She scratches the side of her head.
Huh. She doesn’t usually miss.
Wheeler sighs. She can’t walk straight, see straight, or even shoot straight. And her head hurts. And her wrist hurts. And she’s nauseous. And hungry. And.. ugh.
She grumbles to herself miserably as she puts her Pew-Matic away.
Wheeler then notices the pile of seeds where the bird was and decides that yes, she really is that desperate.
“This is what I get for being open-minded,” she laments aloud through a mouthful of lukewarm seeds. “I hate tubers.”