“Damn it, damn it, damn it!! How long does this fucking jungle go on for, anyway!?” Martin yelled at the top of his lungs, letting the birds and the bugs know just how displeased he was with his current predicament. First he got that weird note saying to put on some ridiculous loincloth and come to the storage shed, and somehow he ended up in the middle of the rainforest with nothing but the clothes on his back? At least he hadn’t been stupid enough to strip down to nothing and put on the silly loincloth. No, he had just stuffed it into his pocket before running off to investigate his secret admirer, but apparently even that had been enough to activate whatever magic was in the loincloth that had zapped him off to this strange and foreign jungle.
He wiped the dew from his glasses for the tenth time in a minute, his clothes drenched with sweat in the insufferable heat of this place. He didn’t consider himself out of shape, but being just an average high school senior he was panting and wheezing with exhaustion just trying to navigate the endless sea of trees and bushes that surrounded him.
“At least I haven’t run into any hungry animals… Or angry natives,” Martin sighed as he leaned against a nearby tree to catch his breath. “...Knock on wood, of course.”
Right on cue, he heard a rusting in the tree above him, and before he could turn his head to look a pair of figures dropped down to the forest floor with a thump right in front of him, making Martin nearly leap out of his skin with surprise.
“Jesus, what the hell is- Oh? It’s just a couple of kids…” he said with relief, although his heard was beating a thousand beats per minute. He looked at the two brown-skinned children, each of them clad in nothing but a spotted fur loincloth and with long, dark hair that looked like it had never been cut in their entire lives. One’s hair was left to grow in wild waves that tumbled down their back while the other’s was delicately braided and decorated with feathers, and although it was hard to tell from their skinny bodies and long hair, Martin was pretty sure they were both boys. Their dirty, calloused feet and bright, clever-looking eyes made it pretty clear to him that whoever they were, they were native to this area, and since he was running out of options he knew he’d have to get their help somehow.
“Uhh… Hi there, boys?” he started awkwardly as they looked at him with their big, curious eyes. Something about those eyes seemed a bit odd to him. One boy’s eyes were blue and the others were green, which seemed peculiar when paired with their dark brown hair and reddish-brown skin. “Can you help? Umm… English? Speak English?”
Both native boys burst into big smiles and dashed over to get a better look at Martin.
“Be waya muni wama’a ke, Chad!” the wavy-haired one chirped happily, pointing to the loincloth sticking out of Martin's pocket with a look of excitement. An odd look passed over his face when he finished speaking, but that moment quickly passed and his bright smile quickly reappeared.
“Ne joba? Wet’yapoque Maa’ti buwamishpa tekala’a?” the braided boy replied, an inquisitive tone in his voice as he looked up at Martin expectantly. Both native kids were quiet for a moment, as if waiting for a response, but the stream of foreign language pouring from their lips completely baffled Martin.
“Uhh… Sorry, I don’t understand? Okay, how about this? Shelter? Sheeeelter…” he said slowly, doing a mime of a roof over his head before miming putting something into his mouth. “Foooood?”
Complete silence from the two kids, who looked at him like he was either stupid or making fun of them before finally replying in a pouty tone.
“Baat’lupapa, Rob. Feyaqui wenapaymi, po?”
“Faifai, Chad. Ima p’weman.”
“Something tells me that doesn’t mean, ‘Sure, your high school is right over there behind that bush. And here’s a sandwich…’” Martin thought to himself. “Well, if there’s kids here, that at least means there’s probably a village with adults nearby…”
He turned back to the two kids, who were glaring at him with childish annoyance on their faces. “What? I don’t understand, okay? Don’t get mad at me... Brats…” he growled, making the two kids take a step back. Martin was always terrible with kids anyway, even the ones that spoke the same language as he did. “Well, okay. It was nice meeting you, but I’m gonna try to find your village on my own, okay? Go play in the mud or climb a tree or whatever the hell it is you do for fun. Bye!”
He turned around and started to slowly walk back into the jungle, since clearly these kids weren’t interested in or capable of helping him out. As soon as he had taken a few steps, however, the wavy-haired boy started chattering wildly in his language, agitated by something. Martin was alarmed by the kid’s sudden outburst and picked up the pace, moving quickly away from the two kids.
Out of the corner of his eye, Martin spotted the wavy-haired boy snatch a wooden tube from the other one before reaching into a pouch tied to his loincloth. The boy ran after Martin, moving unbelievably quick for such a young kid and caught up to him easily. Taking a deep breath, the wavy-haired boy brought the wooden tube to his lips and expelled a cloud of green dust from it that engulfed Martin in an instant. A sharp, vegetal scent filled Martin’s sinuses before his whole body fell numb, and in a few short moments he had fallen unconscious in a heap on the jungle floor. In his last few seconds of awareness, he could sense the bare footsteps of the two jungle boys approaching him, muttering under their breath in their odd language as they looked over his prone body…
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“What the hell did you do that for, Rob!? He was acting like a asshole, sure, but you didn’t need to kill him!” Chad exclaimed frantically, poking Martin’s unconscious form with a stick. “...He’s from our school right? Marty or Michael or something, right? Kinda a loser, but I’d rather have him around than not...”
“Oh, calm down, Chad. I didn’t kill him, that was just a little mam’ya powder that I grabbed from the old medicine man. He’ll be out for a couple hours, no problem at all...” Rob replied. “The medicine man really needs to keep a close eye on his stuff, to be honest…”
“You’re doing it again, damn it! You’re not a jungle boy, Ruut. I mean, ‘Rob’. Shit, now I’m doing it too…”
“Anyway, I had to stop him from going that way… He’d be dead in less than an hour if he went too far that way, and you know why…” Rob explained easily, once again making Chad a bit uncomfortable with how easily he was slipping into the jungle kid mindset.
“No, I don’t know why he-… Oh. Yeah,” Chad said quietly, a sense of dread filling him as he looked down into the dark, steamy river valley Martin had been heading toward. “The Forbidden Land… The elders always said that only a fearless warrior can go in there and escape unscathed…”
Both jungle boys shivered, remembering the tales they’d been told by the older boys in the tribe of all the fearsome creatures that lived there, and Chad understood immediately why Rob had stopped Martin from entering it. Deep down, he knew it wasn’t really his memories, but the fear was strong enough that he wasn’t going to argue with it.
“Well… M-maybe we should get back to the village, okay?” Rob finally said fearfully, looking down at Martin’s unconscious body. “It’s not too far, I think we can carry him if we work together…”
Chad nodded and grabbed Martin’s ankles, while Rob hefted him up by the underarms, and with a little grunt they raised him up from the ground and slowly began making their way back through the jungle toward the village they’d spotted earlier, with the loincloth Martin had found still sticking out of his back pocket. However, in the back of each of their minds, they wondered why Martin had responded so aggressively to them earlier when they'd just been trying to explain what had happened to them...